Whether Covington is a problematic character or not is a completely separate issue from the quality of his creative work. He is a powerful novelist and myth maker, as well as a capable radio host. The reality is that Covington has put out more inspiring and creative work in the last decade than anybody else.
Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.
Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.
By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”
Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:
One must mention the name of Harold A. Covington, a postmodern novelist whose works represent a good Bildungsroman for any White nationalist. Over several thousand pages, Covington uses the classic approach in the description of postmodern heroes who always try to surpass themselves—in the face of cosmic vagaries.
However, the plots of his best-known war novels are not situated in ancient Greece or Rome, but in a balkanized and dying America. Covington is also an author of several historical novels whose plots revolve around 15th- and 16th-century Europe. His war novels, therefore, may be the reason why his message may be closer and more comprehensible to a modern reader than Homer and the ancient classics.
♣
Let us leave aside the political plausibility or post-historical veracity of Covington’s novels dealing with the war of White independence at the beginning of the 21st century in the Pacific Northwest. What needs to be singled out in Covington’s prose is his language, his ability to construct both real and surreal plots, and above all his skill to administer a good dose of empathy with his diverse characters.
And indeed there is a whole gallery of diverse characters in his novels—from disfranchised poor Whites from the South who were once victims of positive discrimination and who have now landed in the embattled Northwest, to ritzy and sold-out WASP politicians in DC, vying to be more Jewish than the Jews themselves. Each of his numerous characters is carefully situated in his own timeframe, each carrying his own clusters of conflicting memories, often haunting him for the rest of his life.
Covington, as much as he dissects the mindset of his warring heroes does not just examine their self-proclaimed racial awareness, but focuses instead on their historical consciousness. The reader won’t find characters blaring “White power!” or sporting swastikas, or endlessly debating about the ominous Jews. The frequent monologues by his characters bear witness that their individual memories are seldom sweet. Even in a pristine environment of the Northwest Republic, residents are immersed in their own Shakespearean dilemmas of being vs. not being.
In most cases the racial awareness of Covington’s characters is coupled with their reminiscences of the haunting times of bygone eras. Thus, in his latest novel Freedom’s Sons depicting the nascent Northwest Republic, we come across a man who serves as one of the chiefs of the Northwest secret police. But this man has also a past; he is not just an empty White slate. His grandparents, back in the mid-20th century had fled communist Czechoslovakia and settled in the city of Chicago—only to discover another form of paleo-communist aka liberal insanity. Their progeny, the future settlers in the Northwest, realized that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they were not just subjects to the terror of affirmative action, but also victims of serial burglaries and rampant Black crime. Finally, after much procrastination they decided to move to the Northwest, encountering on their way both physical and psychological roadblocks which in many ways reflected the predicaments they had once encountered in communist Europe.
__________________________
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some indented excerpts of “The Hero as Artist,” the fifth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
In the Middle Ages men had been crushed by this [ancient Roman] gigantic scale. They said that these buildings must be the work of demons, or at best they treated them simply as natural phenomena—like mountains—and built their huts in them.
But by 1500 the Romans had begun to realise that they had been built by men. The lively and intelligent individuals who created the Renaissance, bursting with vitality and confidence, were not in a mood to be crushed by antiquity. They meant to absorb it, to equal it, to master it. They were going to produce their own race of giants and heroes.
In what is commonly described as the decadence of the papacy, the Popes were men of unusual ability who used their international contacts, their great civil service and their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation. Nicholas V, the friend of Alberti and the humanists, was the first man who saw that papal Rome could revive the grandeurs of pagan Rome.
Pius II, a poet, a lover of nature and of beauty in all its forms, yet gave up his life in an attempt to save Christendom from the Turks. Even Sixtus IV, who was as brutal and cunning as he looks in the wall-painting by Melozzo da Forlo, founded the Vatican library and made the great humanist, Platina, its first prefect. Pope Julius II was able by magnanimity and strength of will to inspire and bully three men of genius—Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. Without him Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine Ceiling, nor Raphael decorated the papal apartments, and so we should have been without two of the greatest visible expressions of spiritual power and humanist philosophy.
The above paragraphs remind me what Nietzsche said almost at the end of his Antichrist: that without the Reformation and Counter-Reformation these rather pagan popes would have brought Christianity down. Clark continues:
The old St Peter’s was one of the largest and most ancient churches in the western world, and certainly the most venerable. Julius decided to pull it down and put something far more splendid in its place. The first step in this visible alliance between Christianity and antiquity was taken when Julius decided to pull down the old basilica.
The men of fifteenth-century Florence had looked back eagerly to the civilisation of Greece and Rome. They sought for ancient authors and read them with passion, and wrote to each other in Latin. Their greatest source of pride was to write prose like Cicero. But the man who really assimilated antique art and recreated it, with all its expressive power made more vital and more intense, was Michelangelo.
Seen by itself the David’s body might be some unusually taut and vivid work of antiquity; it is only when we come to the head that we are aware of a spiritual force that the ancient world never knew. I suppose that this quality, which I may call heroic, is not part of most people’s idea of civilisation. It involves a contempt for convenience and a sacrifice of all those pleasures that contribute to what we call civilised life. It is the enemy of happiness.
And this of course can only remind me of Harold Covington’s extreme contempt for those so-called “nationalists” who watch TV while eating so tasty Nachos that only grow their bellies; always reluctant to come home and fight for the creation of a new nation. Clark continues:
And yet we recognise that to despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man’s supreme achievement; and since, in the end, civilisation depends of man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo as one of the great events in the history of western man.
[His drawing of Battle of Cascina] was the first authoritative statement that the human body—that body which, in Gothic times, had been the subject of shame and concealment, that body which Alberti has praised so extravagantly—could be made the means of expressing noble sentiments, life-giving energy and God-like perfection. It was an idea that was to have an incalculable influence on the human mind for four hundred years.
And this brings us back to Rome, and to the terrible Pope. Julius II was not only ambitious for the Catholic Church: he was ambitious for Julius II, and in his new temple he planned to erect the greatest tomb of any ruler since the time of Hadrian. It was a staggering example of superbia; and Michelangelo at that time was not without the same characteristic. I need not go into the question of why the tomb was never built. There was a quarrel—heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes. Nor does it matter to us what the tomb was going to look like. All that matters is that some of the figures made for it survive, and they add something new to the European spirit—something that neither antiquity nor the great civilisations of India and China had ever dreamed of. As a matter of fact the two most finished of them were derived from antiques, but Michelangelo has turned them from athletes to captives, one of them struggling to be free—freedom from mortality?—and the other sensuously resigned.
People sometimes wonder why the Renaissance Italians, with their intelligent curiosity, didn’t make more of a contribution to the history of thought. The reason is that the most profound thought of the time was not expressed in words, but in visual imagery.
For centuries writers on Michelangelo have criticised Julius for taking him off the tomb, on which he had set his heart, and putting him to work on the painting of the Sistine Ceiling, although he always said he hated the act of painting.
Michelangelo’s power of prophetic insight gives one the feeling that he belongs to every epoch, and most of all, perhaps, to the epoch of the great Romantics, of which we are still the most bankrupt heirs. It is the attribute that distinguishes him most sharply from his brilliant rival, Raphael. Michelangelo took no interest in the opposite sex; Leonardo thought of women solely as reproductive mechanisms. But Raphael loved girls as much as any Venetian.
The convention by which great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time—till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists—perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank—were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility; and led, as we now see, to a hideous reaction.
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some indented excerpts of “The Skin of our Teeth,” the first chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
I am standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris.
What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.
If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. But this doesn’t mean that the history of civilisation is the history of art—far from it. Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.
Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world—that is to say, from a world of our own imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful.
It is not my intention to insult white nationalists. But what they ignore is that, presently, with their rock music and media tastes they themselves, like the overwhelming majority of the white population are, spiritually, far closer to the Negro mask than to the Apollo of Belvedere. For Lord Clark it would have been unthinkable to consider civilised the popular forms of cultural expression such as heavy metal and the movies that today are watched even by white nationalists throughout the West.
As we saw in some of my latest entries, other self-destructing forms of cultural expression already occurred in the times of the fall of the Roman Empire. Clark said:
The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples—at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France.
What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear—fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence.
Unlike Gibbon and Nietzsche, before his TV audience Clark didn’t dare to point the finger at Christianity. But later in the program, Clark spoke about Islam:
In a miraculously short time—about fifty years—the classical world was overrun [by the Muslim conquests]. Only its bleached bones stood out against the Mediterranean sky. The old source of civilisation was sealed off, and if a new civilisation was to be born it would have to face the Atlantic.
But something very odd happened to Man’s self-image in the early medieval world facing the Atlantic in what today is Ireland. According to Clark:
The subject of Mediterranean man was man. Two hundred years have passed—perhaps a little more—and man has almost vanished.
Crude as this imago hominis may be when compared to the Apollo, presently some white nationalists advertise their blogs with soft-porn pics of semi-nude women: something far more degrading for the divine human figure than the image of 8th century insular art in the Echternach Gospels.
To my mind—and, like Clark, I must say that this is only my personal view—, the imago hominis only means a psychogenic regression in Man’s understanding of himself compared to the Greeks and the Romans. However, the white nationalists’ soft porn spits on the avatar of God, even if I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god.
After the above image chosen by Clark for the first episode of his program, in the following pages of the book version Clark mentions how St. Gregory destroyed entire libraries of the classical world (I quoted part of it in my recent antichristian series, here), and on the next page he states that even in those obscure days the Europeans fought strenuously against their enemies:
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war. The Romans were the best organised and most ruthless fighters in Latium. So it was with the Franks. Clovis and his successors not only conquered their enemies, but maintained themselves by cruelties and tortures remarkable even by the standards of the last thirty years.
Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never have existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigns we should never have had the notion of a united Europe.
Charlemagne was the first great man of action to emerge from the darkness since the collapse of the Roman world. The old idea that he saved civilisation isn’t far wrong. On the whole, our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.
If we compared ourselves with the franks, what could it be said about present-day nationalists? Many of them don’t even let our most serious fighter discuss in their forums (by “serious fighter” I mean someone who’s actively planning a revolution). Didn’t the Führer say that those who want to live, let them fight, and that those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live? Do whites and white nationalists deserve to live? If so, where are the Charles Martels in today’s islamized Europe, in America’s mexicanized states?
I am not proposing to do something stupid in a world which media is a hundred percent dominated by the Enemy. But at least be prepared for the tough, revolutionary times that are coming after the dollar crashes.
The Brigade excerpts, chapter VII
by Harold Covington
Someone Who Knows Who They Are
No ellipsis
added between
unquoted paragraphs:
“For almost a year now,” said Martínez, “there has been a full-blown armed insurrection against the United States going on here in the Northwest. Never mind the fact that those morons in Washington and our own bosses are too damned stupid to see it for what it is, or too blind and stubborn to admit the fact if they do!
“Where are they getting weapons and supplies and money? Who are their intelligence sources, their spies and agents, some of whom we both know damned well are in this very building with us as we speak?”
“Okay, and after tonight?” asked Jarvis. “We gonna be running a long term undercover like dis, Rawlinson will have to be brought in on it, and a lot of other people as well.”
“I know there will have to be others,” said Martínez, “We’ll need a whole task force. But we need to keep them to a minimum and compartmentalize everything, especially her identity. I don’t trust Rawlinson. He’s white and male and heterosexual, and by definition that means he’s politically unreliable. His definition of hatecrime has always been a little too lenient for my taste, especially when it comes to hatespeech. He doesn’t seem to understand that hatespeech is a dead giveaway for thoughts and attitudes that lead to hatecrime, and that once we know that hate is in a white male’s mind we need to nip him in the bud before he can act on those thoughts. It’s the only way to protect women and minorities. I don’t want him in on this, and I don’t want him knowing who Kicky is. And I don’t want Roscoe or any of your compadres in corruption knowing what’s going on, either. You just tell Roscoe it’s all taken care of and you leave it at that, got it? I’m going to move Ms. McGee into a conference room upstairs now, and get her paperwork on this murder charge off the computers and out of the system now, before it gets too complicated.”
* * *
“Kicky, look, you know as well as I do where you’ve been and what you’ve done,” said Lainie. “You know how to handle yourself on the streets and in prison. If you didn’t have some moves you wouldn’t have survived, you wouldn’t be here. And you won’t have to do anything proactive, no fishing for specific people or things, although needless to say, we’re very interested in Mr. Lockhart. You don’t have to ask leading questions or act overly curious. Just go with the flow and sound enthusiastic about their great racist revolution. We will be recording you every step of the way, and our intelligence people will be doing all the analysis and figuring out what the hell their scene is from the raw data you bring in. You’ll just be a fly on the wall, so to speak, a listening post. Do whatever they tell you to, convince them you’re just a bimbo, and of course use your sexual skills, which I’m sure you’ve picked up in your professional life.
“These men are brutes, granted, but like all men they’re nothing but dumb thugs who think with their cocks, and they’re not going to suspect a foxy bitch with neat tits who gives them good head.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRrTbeFPJw
The Brigade excerpts, chapter VI
by Harold Covington
The Mami and the Monkey
No ellipsis
added between
unquoted paragraphs:
“You back on the pipe, Kick?” “No, I’m not back on the pipe!” Kristin “Kicky” McGee snapped back. “I’m clean as a whistle, and I been clean for six months now!”
“Yeah, well, I guess I shouldn’t have called the cops on you. That wasn’t, like, playing the game,” muttered Lenny. “Then again, maybe if I wanted to jam you up I should have turned you in for hatecrime. I know you don’t like dark meat, but that’s prejudice, even in a whore.”
“The term is sex trade worker, thank you,” said Kicky primly. “And it’s not prejudice, it’s a preference. Being a sex trade worker, I am in a politically protected category, sort of anyway, and I’m allowed to have preferences. Remember, no means no. Even for hookers.”
While the two of them were haggling, a nondescript older model Ford Explorer pulled up outside Jupiter’s Den. It was a warm summer’s day, and the SUV’s two occupants had the windows rolled down. The driver was a tall and powerful man with a seamed boxer’s face, a shaved head and goatee beard. The pro wrestler look wasn’t Big Jim McCann’s personal choice, since he was a master electrician by profession, but he needed to alter his appearance because his face was on a few too many wanted posters, web sites, and television screens as of late. McCann was quartermaster of the NVA’s First Portland Brigade. His passenger was Jesse “Cat-Eyes” Lockhart, who after much debate amounting to a passionate argument between Tommy Coyle and Zack Hatfield, had been transferred from D Company to First Brigade A Company and put on sniper duty in the big city. As reluctant as Zack had been to let him go, and as reluctant as Lockhart himself had been to leave his old friends and comrades in Clatsop County, the fact was that Cat was running out of major targets in D Company’s area of operation, and he was too valuable a resource to waste out in the sticks plinking away at Mexican dock workers and the local Chamber of Commerce. In the short time he had been in Portland, the Jack of Diamonds had already bagged a city councilman, a U.S. Army colonel, the head of the African-American Democratic Club, another FBI agent, and several police officers. His presence in the city was known, and he was driving the local politically correct establishment into hysterics. “You want me to go in with you?” asked Lockhart.
“Naw,” said McCann. “Gillis is a nervous little cuss, and he might get spooked if he sees somebody he don’t know. I just need to find out from him where he’s got the stuff stashed, and set up a pickup so we can get the gear and pay him. Then we need to get you to the Mayflower Hotel.” It was time for Cat to change safe houses, and McCann had been the only transport available. McCann’s phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket and flipped it open. “Yeah?” He listened for a few moments. “Okay.” He closed the phone. “That was our escort vehicle. Van Gelder says there’s a patrol coming down Sandy Boulevard, two units and an armored car. Unmarked, probably Portland Rapid Response, but maybe BATFE or FBI. They’re cruising slow. The way they’re coming, looks like they’re gonna turn onto 82nd in about a minute.”
“I don’t think they’re looking for us specifically,” said Lockhart. “They’ve been doing that a lot lately, keeping goon squads on the street as rapid response teams, moving around, trying to cover the city so they can move in fast with a lot of firepower on any of our naughty shenanigans. Ace and me got chased by one of those crews last time out.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want them driving by and looking in here and recognizing you,” said McCann. “You’d better come inside after all. Just hang back at the bar while I have my chat with Lenny, and then we’ll move on after Van tells us they’ve passed.”
Kicky turned around and saw one of the men who looked like a wrestler or a biker walk forward to talk to Gillis. They met at the end of the bar nearest to where Kicky sat in the booth. Reading men was a vital survival skill in Kicky’s lines of work both legitimate and otherwise, and with these two she immediately read muscle of some kind, heavy muscle. There was just something about the way they carried themselves, not with a criminal swagger or thuggish biker lope, but controlled and fast and efficient, no wasted motion.
She got up and went to the ladies’ room, in a small corridor near the bar. After she finished she quietly slipped down to the door of the men’s room at the other end of the short hallway and studied the younger man in the long mirror behind the bar. The bartender brought him a diet soda in a can with a plastic cup, and when he turned to pour it Kicky saw his face and profile clearly. Damn, she thought, I know him from somewhere. Who is he? She ran over her long list of male personal and business acquaintances. No, not one of them. She rummaged through the past few years of her disorderly life. No, nothing. Was he on TV or something? Recognition suddenly slammed into her. Jesus H. Christ! she whistled to herself. It’s him! That sniper every cop and Feebie in the Northwest is looking for! Well, well! Lenny’s coming up in the world, looks like. What the fuck kind of business is he doing with the spuckies? Bet it’s guns.
Kicky left the club and returned to her battered single-wide mobile home in a rundown trailer park about two miles away. She didn’t have a car of her own, the cab company wouldn’t allow her to take her cab home, and the buses were full of Mexicans who always dirty-mouthed her in Spanish and pawed all over her, so she walked. She was so sick inside herself at what she was doing that it was all she could do to go home and not go out hunting the streets for some rock, but she knew full well that if she went back to the drugs as well as back to the sex trade, she would be dead or back in prison within a year, and her daughter would be scooped up by It Takes A Village like a barracuda snapping up a minnow.
The prospect of committing sexual acts with drunken and usually unhygienic strange men, even white men, filled her with such disgust that she wanted to vomit even at the thought, but she understood that she had reached the point in her life where her always limited range of choices had virtually disappeared. Kicky knew that America had one rule above all else. Get money. It didn’t matter how you did it, you got money, end of story, or else you ended up like the white-haired bag women Kicky saw pushing their possessions up and down 82nd Avenue and Sandy Boulevard in shopping carts. No welfare or affirmative action or diversity programs for poor white chicks. Poor white chicks either stole or put out, or they got left behind. If you had a white skin, you got money or you fell below the point of no return. Never mind all that crap you saw on TV, that lovely diverse, racially mixed society where there was still a middle class and still material things and all was jolly. That was television. It wasn’t real. 82nd Avenue was real.
“You goin’ back to whoring?” snorted the old lady.
Kicky didn’t attempt to evade the question. “I got to get money, Mom,” she said simply. “I have to get Ellie out of Oregon, out of Child Protective Services’ reach. Otherwise they’re going to take her and sell her to some rich bastards. I know she’d be better off with them…”
“Mommy!” shouted a small golden-haired personage of eighteen months, wearing nothing but a Pamper, who gallumphed into the room from the bedroom and hugged onto Kicky’s leg. “Up!” she demanded. “Up me!”
“Hi, baby girl,” said Kicky with a smile, picking up the child. “Ooh, pooh, baby made a boo-boo! You need a change! Come on, let’s fix that!” She snagged another Pamper from the torn bag on the cracked Formica kitchen table and headed for the bathroom, trying not to think of what she would be doing later on.
* * *
She was wearing short hot pants and gleaming vinyl boots with elevated although not quite high heels, a low-cut halter top with no bra (she knew a lot of her potential customers found her tattoos erotic), a wide leather belt, and carrying a shoulder bag purse containing such items as extra condom packs and sex toys. It also contained a canister of pepper spray in a special holster sleeve.
Kicky looked around for Lenny Gillis, but couldn’t see him anywhere on the floor. She shoved through a door marked “Employees Only”—well, she was kind of an employee now—and looked in his office, which was also empty. She slipped outside into the alley.
The shouting was coming from just on the other side of a dumpster. Kicky crept up and peeked around the side of the receptacle. Lenny Gillis was being held up against the wall by a large, black, uniformed Portland police officer. Shit! thought Kicky to herself in shock. It’s the Monkey!
Like any street girl, she had immediately recognized Detective Sergeant Jamal Jarvis of the Portland Police Bureau’s Hatecrime and Civil Disobedience Squad, the feared police unit that constituted the muscle arm of Portland’s ultra-liberal and politically correct establishment. The word on the street was clear and unambiguous: black, Mexican, and Asian hookers paid Jarvis off in money or sometimes in drugs, but white girls paid in trade. Kicky was not the only white working girl who still retained some vestige of decency and personal standards, and the fate of those who refused or evaded Jarvis’s demands was not encouraging. Such bigoted ladies of the evening tended to end up facing bogus charges and many years in prison, or getting a coffee cup full of acid in the face, or in some cases their dead and violated bodies were found floating in the Columbia River or jammed into a culvert. No one cared much about a few dead white skanks here and there, but there had eventually been such a rash of that kind of thing that even the politically correct Portland Police Bureau realized that they had to do something to avoid embarrassment.
Jarvis was in the process of assaulting Lenny with a heavy, flat, leather-wrapped implement about a foot long, known in police circles as a slapjack. It was just as heavy and painful, but the flat surface left less telltale bruising than a traditional blackjack. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny?” Jarvis droned on, slapping Gillis’ head back and forth with the cosh, each blow a dull and sickening thud that sprayed blood from Gillis’s mutilated and bleeding face, his broken nose and bleeding eyes. “Whutcha gonna do, Lenny? Gib Roscoe his money, fukkin cracka, gib Roscoe his money.”
“I haven’t got it!” screamed Lenny hysterically. “I can get it Friday! I can get it Friday! Jesus God!”
“Friday ain’t today, muthafukka!” rumbled Roscoe. “Gimme my props, muthafukka! Gimme my thousand!”
Kicky realized with horror that Jarvis was high, on drugs and on shedding white blood. He didn’t really care about the money. He just liked to beat white boys. She also realized that Lenny had suddenly stopped screaming.
“Aw, shit, Jamal, you a fool!” yelled Roscoe angrily. “We was takin’ a grand a month off this ofay mutthafukka!”
“So we finds us another piece of white trash to pin it on,” said Jarvis carelessly. In her hiding place behind the piled cardboard boxes of trash, Kicky McGee suddenly realized her own deadly peril. She tried to back away quietly, and needless to say she managed to back into another stack of piled boxes and knock it over, the glass and cans and junk inside cascading into the alley floor with a clatter.
Jarvis and Roscoe were calloused and brutal men, but their animal instincts were sharp and when need arose they could both move fast. They were on her before she could get ten feet down the alley in her sprint for the door.
* * *
Kicky was still unconscious when they brought her in. She didn’t even know for sure where she was. It might have been some station house, but most likely she was somewhere in the bowels of the downtown Portland Justice Center on Pioneer Courthouse Square.
Originally built as a modish complex of brick, glass, and concrete to adorn a stylish and politically correct power structure, decorated with murals and sculptures by trendy Portland artists, the Justice Center had taken on a much more grim and stark appearance and function since the Coeur d’Alene rebellion had broken out the previous autumn. Other areas had been slow to realize the danger and had accordingly suffered courthouses and police stations burned, bombed, and invaded by the NVA, who sometimes torched big stacks of legal and law enforcement papers and records on rural courthouse lawns. Not Portland. The multi-structured complex of the Justice Center’s several buildings containing the courtrooms both state and federal, offices, and the headquarters of the Portland Police Bureau, had immediately been transformed at great taxpayers’ expense into a fully fortified and secured Green Zone, based on plans drawn up by consultants from Israel and the United Kingdom.
But the Center had become a place of fear and nightmare not just in its outward appearance. Inside were the headquarters not just of the police, but of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. These agencies had considered their pre-10/22 offices too exposed, and they had taken over a large portion of the administrative floors of the federal courthouse and sealed it off. There were rumors of excavations being done in secret by specially imported construction crews of Asian and Mexican laborers as more offices, soundproofed interrogation cells, and holding cells were dug deep beneath the complex. Then there were the stories of the torture chambers deep beneath the earth or high in windowless rooms, padded to muffle the screams. It was known that more white prisoners entered the Justice Center than ever emerged. What happened to them no one knew, but it was rumored that there was a covert crematorium in one of the walled-off courtyards of the complex. The Justice Center cast a long shadow over the city of Portland, a warning to any who might dare think of rebelling against the United States, and a source of anger and hatred that glowed secretly in the recesses of men’s hearts and minds, burning steadily brighter as time went on and more and more white people’s family members disappeared into the Green Zone.
It was all gone. She was white, she was poor, and everything she knew from her very birth told her that no one on earth would lift a finger to help her. She had always held the bitter belief that she had nothing, but now that it was all gone she understood how much she’d really had before, the trailer where she could at least lay down her head at night alone if she chose, the sad drunken woman who had borne her but at least had not left her, and above all the little golden child she would never see again except maybe through the glass on visiting day. This couldn’t be happening. It was surely a nightmare. She had them sometimes. Surely she would wake up soon. She closed her eyes and desperately willed herself to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, she was still in the god-awful puce green room with the cloying and overpowering smell of fresh paint, a smell that was making her sick.
Outside, behind the two-way mirror, although Kicky could hear nothing through the soundproofed walls, Jamal Jarvis was having a spirited discussion with his partner, Detective Sergeant Elena Martinez. Lainie Martinez was the Mami half of the Portland detective team commonly known as the Mami and the Monkey. She was a tall, slim, thirty-something woman with clear olive skin, straight black hair, brown eyes and a figure that looked fine indeed in a bathing suit and turned many heads both male and lesbian in the indoor swimming pool in the police gym where she worked out every couple of days and swam 50 laps afterward. Unlike her quondam FBI counterpart, the late and rather unlamented Rabang Miller, Lainie was actually respected, if not liked, by her superiors and her fellow officers in the PB for her competence and her occasionally brilliant detective work. No one remembered ever having seen her smile.
She wasn’t smiling now. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jamal, how many of these messes do you think you can get away with making until Internal Affairs has finally had enough?” she snapped.
“Hey, it ain’t my fault a white boy’s candy ass is so fucking fragile he cain’t take a little beat-down,” muttered Jarvis defensively.
“Look, I know how the game is played,” said Lainie in irritation. “Until police salaries come up to something commensurate with the work we do, and the risks we take, especially now with a bunch of racist crazies gunning for us every time we step outside the door, then every officer with any initiative is going to have something going on the side.”
A Mexican uniformed officer came down the hall toward them, holding a larger manila file folder and handed it to Jarvis. (He had once made the mistake of addressing Sergeant Martinez in Spanish with a flippant “Hola, Mami!” and had almost found himself hauled up on sexual harassment charges.)
“Hey, Jamal, here’s the file on your puta blanca with the tattoos in there,” he said. “Lookin’ good, my man. Seems Lenny Gillis filed a complaint with us a few months back when she assaulted him, hit him in the head with a beer bottle. He dropped the charges, but it’s on record. She’s got priors for solicitation and holding, and she did fourteen months in Coffee Creek on a two to five for larceny and possession of stolen goods.”
Lainie was thoroughly Americanized, and she spoke Spanish only on these occasions when it was required in the line of work. Her one secret neurosis and obsession, not even admitted to the Bureau shrink during her periodic required evaluations, was that she wanted more than anything else to be white. Not just any white; Elena Martinez dreamed of herself as Nordic white, with creamy skin and golden hair. Like the girl in the interrogation room, only without the tattoos. Her unconscious longing had long ago sublimated itself into an almost insane hatred of white people in general, white racialists in particular, and blonde white women even more particularly.
Jamal Jarvis was sharp enough to realize that Lainie was smarter than he was, and he sensed that hers were good coattails for him to ride on, so he generally acted as the brawn of the team while she was the brains. It worked surprisingly well, and their high clearance rate and general rep for getting results in the form of confessions from suspected racists and other thought criminals had done them both good, departmentally speaking. But Jarvis sensed that Lainie was what the Hispanics referred to as a “cocoanut,” brown on the outside and white on the inside.
* * *
Kicky looked up as the door opened and the two detectives entered the room. Jarvis had a thick file in his hand that she presumed were her yellow sheets. She looked at Lainie, Levantine sleek and arrogant and dressed to the nines in a blue serge skirt and jacket like some kind of model in the Lady Cop Chic section of Vogue. She knew full well that any faint hope she had of ever getting out of this depended on her crawling and groveling like a whipped dog to these two, and yet something in her that she didn’t understand seemed to take on a perverse life of its own. “I see the Monkey, so I guess you must be the Mami,” she snarled at them.
Martinez leaned over the table, and like lightning she lashed out in a vicious slap across Kicky’s face, almost knocking her out of the chair. “Inmates in this Justice Center are prohibited from using racial or ethnic slurs, derogatory references to anyone based on race or sexual preference or national origin, or other hateful language, Ms. McGee,” she said. “It’s not only a violation of JC regulations, it’s a violation of the hatespeech section of the penal code. If you do so again you will be charged with felony hatespeech in addition to first degree murder. I suggest you take heed. You’re in trouble enough.”
“Watch yo’ mouf, bitch,” added Jarvis.
Martinez took the file and slammed it onto the desk in front of Kicky. “We’ve got you cold. Your previous assault on your pimp with a blunt instrument is the icing on the cake. You’re gone, girl. I’m offering you one chance for a deal. One only. You will plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Leonard Gillis and I can arrange it with the DA so you get twelve to twenty. As an added sweetener, since I’m feeling generous this morning, I can arrange for you to serve your sentence in a medium security facility so you won’t have to go back to Coffee Creek. This is as good as it’s going to get, Kristin. Take it or leave it.”
“They call me Kicky,” said the girl sullenly.
“Of course they do,” sighed Martinez.
Don’t I get a lawyer?” she demanded.
“Technically speaking, since 9/11 the state no longer has to provide you with one, depending on whether we want to file this as a security case under the Patriot Act, but in Portland the powers that be do like to keep up appearances. So yes, if you want I can get you a legal aid attorney,” explained Lainie. “Any such attorney will almost certainly be black, Hispanic, Jewish, gay, female, or some combination of the above, and probably will hold as little brief for white trailer trash crack whores like you as I do, and they will advise you to take the deal I’m offering.”
“I suppose the fact that I didn’t kill Lenny doesn’t have a damned thing to do with anything?” Kicky demanded bitterly.
“No, of course it doesn’t,” responded Lainie with another sigh.
“What about justice?” cried Kicky.
“This is a legal matter. Justice has nothing to do with it,” explained Lainie irritably, irked at the girl’s stubborn stupidity. “I can’t believe you’ve been on the streets as long as you have, and you still don’t know how it works.”
Kicky’s self-control finally snapped. “No!” she screamed in uncontrollable rage. “Fuck you! Fuck both of you! I didn’t do anything, God damn you both to hell! I didn’t do anything! I didn’t kill Lenny, that nigger standing there did! You know it! I didn’t do anything!”
Martinez stood up and slapped Kicky across the face again, but more or less pro forma, without anger or enthusiasm. “Suit yourself, you stupid little twist,” she said in disgust. “Don’t you ever say I didn’t try and help you. First degree murder and a life sentence it is. I suggest you watch your language in Judge Feinstein’s court. He’s not going to believe any wild stories you come up with about a respected and decorated police officer killing your pimp, and if you keep on using racial slurs and try to offer perjured testimony against an African American officer, you need to remember that hatecrime carries life without parole. So go ahead, jump up in court and yell out your stupid lies, and really fuck yourself over forever. Hell, maybe it’s for the best. Wealthy and decent couples all over the U.S.A are going to be lining up around the block for that little girl of yours. Maybe you’re doing the right thing after all by permanently taking yourself out of the picture.” She and Jarvis turned and opened the door to leave.
Kicky stared in horror. She knew that the door wasn’t just closing on the interrogation room. It was closing on her, her whole life, on her daughter. They were going to take Ellie now. She had lost. They were going to take Ellie.
As the door closed, Kicky jumped up and screamed at the top of her lungs, “I can give you the NVA! Fucking spic bitch, you hear me? I can give you NVA! I know where they are! I can give you that sniper, that guy they call the Cat! I can give you two the NVA, you bitch, you baboon! Just let me go! Please, God, I didn’t do anything, please let me go, please don’t take my baby!” She collapsed onto the table top, weeping hysterically.
The door opened.
Extracted from Harold Covington’s #5 Radio Free Northwest podcast.
The Brigade excerpts, chapter V
by Harold Covington
Hunting The Hunters
No ellipsis
added between
unquoted paragraphs:
On the morning of February 15th, Hatfield, Cat-Eyes Lockhart, Charlie Washburn, Tony Campisi, Len Ekstrom, and Lee Washburn met in a trailer out in the woods, which had used by their circle of friends as a hunting lodge in times past.
“Does Marie know?” asked Hatfield.
“She’s pretty sharp. She knows I’m up to something,” Tony admitted. “I just hope she doesn’t think I’m screwing around on her with another woman. I know you’re leery of bringing in married men because most white women can’t be trusted nowadays not to betray even their own husbands for money or to save their lifestyles, but don’t worry. They’re not all like that. Marie is one of the good ones.”
“I know she is,” said Hatfield with a nod. “And yes, I know they’re not all like that. It’s just that so many white women have become so damaged by life in this filthy society; we’ve got to tread very carefully. It’s a real problem and we have to be aware of it. And somehow we’re got to beat it, to bring white women around and show them that their future is with us. We can’t do this without our sisters at our side, gentlemen.”
After Tony left to stand watch, Charlie Washburn plunked down two newspapers. “Our little St. Valentine’s Day Massacre last night made the front page in both the Daily Astorian and the Oregonian.”
Hatfield looked at the screaming headlines. “Yeah, I bet if you count up the column inches and the minutes of television air time on this one, you’ll find that the Goldmans rate five times more than mere police officers. Dead Jews get the establishment’s attention. Well, hopefully today or tomorrow we can give them some more to jabber about. But this is going to be a lot tougher, gentlemen. Last night we took down two unarmed targets, hit the Beast in the soft underbelly like we’re supposed to. But this second act is going to be different. Now we have to attack armed targets who are trained in firefighting techniques and who will shoot back. Even more than the Goldmans, we need to make sure we have our shit together on this.”
“I drove by 39th Street on the way out here,” said Washburn. “The sun was barely up but all you could see was flashing lights. Those poor guys must have been out there all night. What the hell were they doing?”
“Probably they all trooped down there as soon as the sun rose to search the area in daylight,” said Hatfield. “That means they’re already doing CSI investigation. They probably have a state police crime lab team down from Portland or Salem. That means most likely the Feds won’t be bringing their own, which is good. Fewer FBI means more chance of cutting a couple away from the law enforcement herd when they go for pizza or something. Okay, here’s my educated guess. Two or more FBI agents are going to show up at the 39th Street pier late this morning or early this afternoon, even if the state and local boys have already done the work. The feebs will rock up at Rigoletto’s Beanery if only to show the flag and convince the local lefty establishment that they’re doing something. That’s where we need to wait for them, with Cat-Eyes in place and ready to fire.”
“Okay, Cat, I want us to get into position in the area so that we can get in there quick,” said Hatfield. “We’ll wait at the Maritime Museum on Marine Boulevard; there are always vehicles parked there, and anyone driving by will think we’re just tourists gawping at all the shippy stuff. As soon as we get word that the Feebs are in town, we drive to Columbia Prospect and park in front like we belong there. We go into the building through the lobby, with those boxes I showed you held up to shield our faces from the security cameras, just in case they’re operational. Are the boxes all scrubbed down?”
“With alcohol and with a Scotch pad, clean as a whistle,” said Lockhart.
“Good. Don’t touch them again without gloves. We’re going to be leaving them behind and I don’t want them to find a single fingerprint. “We have to hope the roof door isn’t alarmed,” said Hatfield. “I haven’t been able to actually get up there and take a look. It should be okay as a firing position, but if it isn’t we’ll have to go to Plan B.”
“Which is?” asked Charlie.
“If for any reason we can’t get up onto the apartment house roof, or the roof isn’t suitable, we’ll have to break into one of the third floor apartments on the north side of the building, with a view over the river, and fire from one of the windows,” said Hatfield. “That may involve hostage taking and restraint, if anybody’s home. Once we know they’re in town, if they haven’t showed at last night’s crime scene after a reasonable time, we’re going to have to clock them, improvise and take them on the wing somewhere. That’s why I want you guys in two other cars.”
“Now, on that subject, the brigade adjutant was able to give me some interesting info when I went up to Portland Sunday,” continued Hatfield. “The idea behind all the diversity is for them to be able to blend in to traffic and not be spotted as Fed, but they made one dumb-ass mistake which kind of defeats that whole purpose. The windows on these vehicles are all tinted so we can’t see inside, which is against the law. You can assume that any motor vehicle you see with fully tinted window is a federal car. Don’t ask me why they missed something so obvious.”
“Because they’re stupid,” said Ekstrom.
“Bingo, and that’s encouraging,” said Hatfield with a smile. “Any agency dumb enough to pull a boner like that isn’t smart enough to catch us, eh, guys? Now, on the armor. The windows and windshield are top-of-the-line bulletproof glass, which isn’t really glass. It’s what they call a polycarbonate compound, and don’t ask me what that is, but whatever this stuff is, it’s stopped whatever we’ve thrown at it thus far, and not just in Oregon. The gas tank is self-sealing and can allegedly stand a tracer hit. The tires are some kind of super-duper steel belted radial that’s supposed to be proof against caltrops and land mines and whatnot, and the underside of the vehicle is composed not of steel but these nylon-sheathed plates, so they’re not magnetic. The main thing is that when they’re in the vehicle, the FBI agents will be likely shielded from a single rifle bullet.”
“I’ve got a full magazine of standard USGI tungsten armor-piercing .308, if that helps,” said Lockhart.
“It might,” said Hatfield. “A lot of this so-called bullet-proof glass is quirky, and if you hit it at the right angle or velocity it breaches, as we found out on numerous occasions in Baghdad.
“One last little reminder, gentlemen,” Hatfield went on in a grim voice. “These are bad people and they’ve done very bad things. I for one think they still owe us for Sam and Vicky Weaver. There are times when vengeance is thoroughly justified, and this is one of them. But there’s more to it than that, much more. We’re not just sending a message to the FBI today, we’re sending our message to Joe Six-Pack. He has to understand that these people no longer rule the roost in the Northwest, that when he sees something he shouldn’t or he has some kind of problem with the NVA, the last damned thing on earth he wants to do is call the police or the FBI, because they can’t even protect themselves, much less him and his family. This is about destroying the occupation’s credible monopoly of armed force.”
GOT IT, LET ME KNOW WHEN replied Zack, and closed the phone. “Jeez,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Luck is with us. This couldn’t be better. Only two FBI agents, one white male and one Asian female, driving a green SUV. Let’s roll, boys!”
* * *
FBI Special Agent Rabang Miller practically pranced into the day room of the Clatsop County sheriff’s office. In ten years with the Bureau she had mastered what she saw as the necessary combination of brisk efficiency, no-nonsense assertiveness and a touch of arrogance.
She was a short, orange-ish woman with long black hair in a severe bun, dressed in a dark green pants suit with matching jacket to cover the 9-mm sidearm in a clip holster by her side, a Glock with a specially modified grip to fit the generally smaller hands of female agents. Rabang Miller was Filipino, the child of a Subic Bay bar girl and prostitute. Her father was an unknown American serviceman of undetermined identity or racial ancestry, but judging from her appearance, most likely a Hispanic of some kind. After entering her mother’s trade at 14, she had eventually achieved the ultimate life coup that all Filipino bar-girls dreamed of. She had fucked and sucked a dumb-ass alcoholic redneck Army sergeant from North Carolina into marrying her and bringing her to the Great Golden Paradise of the U.S.A. From then on it was up, up, up all the way for this strong and valiant womyn of color.
Rabang proceeded to ride every available affirmative action program out of Bragg, into Duke University and an eventual law degree, then into the United States Attorney’s office, whence she slid into the Bureau as a trade-off for not bringing formal charges of sexual harassment against the federal judge who was her boss. She kept Miller’s name because all of her original immigration documents were in that name, and she didn’t want to provoke any official examination of them through a legal change that might reveal certain discrepancies such as her age and the fact that her marriage to the sergeant was technically statutory rape. She was now married to another judge in Portland, with a twenty-room Colonial mansion in a wealthy gated suburb, a 13 year-old mulatto son who was already on the crack pipe, and her eye on bureau chief if she could find some way to finesse it. She was already throwing the present SAIC two-hour Subic Bay Specials in an assortment of motels around town, looking for his weaknesses, anything she could use to bring him down, but a good case clearance or two on her record certainly wouldn’t hurt. Cracking the Goldman murders and reeling in a gang of white racist domestic terrorists would be just the ticket.
Agent Miller’s partner was Special Agent Brian Pangborn. Pangborn was the kind of agent who would have gone far under the old régime of J. Edgar Hoover. He was tall and lean, with sandy hair and blue eyes, sharp from his freshly pressed suit and his spit-shined shores up to his buzz cut, and active member of Promise Keepers and the 700 Club.
Pangborn was Rabang Miller’s third partner in the two years since she had come to the Portland office. Her previous two had asked to be re-assigned, and he was about ready to do the same. Pangborn had come to admit to himself that he loathed the officious little Asian woman; being in her presence was like continually hearing nails drawn across a chalkboard. Pangborn had one serious drawback as an FBI agent—he suffered from occasional spurts of independent thought and initiative. Combined with his race and gender, Pangborn knew these character flaws were enough to blight him forever on the Bureau’s career track.
Rabang Miller stomped up to the nearest deputy behind a desk. “Where’s the sheriff?” she demanded. She whipped out her badge and ID with a practiced flourish. “Miller and Pangborn, FBI.”
The deputy was remarkably unimpressed. “I’ll see if he’s in.” He picked up the phone. “Ted, those people from the FBI are here.”
Another deputy came into the day room. “Hey, is anyone here driving a green Chrysler Aspen with completely illegal full-tinted windows, parked in my parking space in the garage?” he yelled across the room.
“That’s our vehicle,” Rabang called back. “What about it?”
“Well, I just gave you a $250 ticket!” snapped back the deputy. “Tinting is against the law, and taking my parking space damned well ought to be!”
“We are FBI agents!” hissed Rabang in a rage.
“So you don’t have to obey the law like everyone else?” demanded the deputy. “Oh, sorry, silly me! What a question!” At one end of the day room was a raised platform enclosed with three cubicle walls, which contained the combined law enforcement and emergency services 911 and dispatch radios, maps, and unit location board. No one noticed a slim blond girl in long sleeves and trousers [Christina Ekstrom], sitting at a computer with a radio headset on. The girl quietly leaned over, took a look, and then surreptitiously pulled out a cell phone and started texting a message.
Ted Lear came out of his office and extended his hand. He was a surprisingly young man of medium height and auburn hair, with a slim and strong physique. “Hi,” he said, forcing a polite smile and extending his hand. “Ted Lear, Clatsop County sheriff.”
“Miller and Pangborn, FBI,” replied Rabang in a clipped staccato voice like a drill sergeant, flashing her ID again. She ignored the sheriff’s outstretched hand and Pangborn reached over and shook it before the snub became obvious. “Brian Pangborn,” he said with genuine warmth. “Glad to meet you, sheriff.”
“There seem to be an awful lot of people hanging around in here fourteen hours after a major homicide,” said Rabang, looking around the day room disapprovingly. “I understand that your department doesn’t give priority to hatecrimes, sheriff. This is the second double murder you’ve had in three months, both incidents clearly motivated by hatred against sexual orientation in the first case and racial hatred in the second. Why aren’t all your people out there pounding the pavement, or better yet pounding your local racist inbreds and getting some answers as to who killed Jake and Irene Goldman?”
“We’re kind of old-fashioned here, Special Agent, ah, Miller,” said Ted mildly. “We like to ask the questions first, before we start beating on people. By the way, you said the homicide here last night was racially motivated?”
“Of course it was!” screeched Rabang. “Our information is that the fascist terrorists called in to your local newspaper and claimed credit!”
“Someone called the editor of the Astorian, yes,” said Lear in the same mild tone. “No, I was curious because you used the term racially motivated. I didn’t think Jews were a race.” Miller suddenly pulled up, realizing she had inadvertently made a potentially dangerous error in politically correct nomenclature that did not need to get back to her superiors. “Well, you know what I meant,” she explained lamely. “Persons of the Jewish faith are one of the officially recognized politically protected special victim categories. All offenses against Jews are hatecrimes under the law.”
“So they are,” agreed Lear. “Would you step into my office, please?”
Once inside Lear’s office with the door closed, Rabang launched herself at him again like a striking snake. “Alright, cut the bullshit, sheriff! You know damned well that you’ve had four hatecrime homicides on your turf plus the disappearance of a large number of privately held firearms, and the NVA claimed credit for the killings last night! Time for you to wake up and smell the coffee. You’ve got a racist death squad operating right here in your little tourist paradise, and we are here to make sure it gets crushed out of existence, and fast! The Portland office doesn’t want any of this disgraceful foot-dragging that occurred in the murders of Elizabeth King and Martha Proudfoot. If you don’t get some results within forty-eight hours, the U.S. Attorney in Portland is assuming jurisdiction over these cases under the Patriot Act as domestic terrorism, the Bureau will be taking over completely, and I will tell you right up front that these murders and that gun raid aren’t the only things that we will be investigating!”
Lear ignored the threat. He sat down behind his desk and replied calmly and rationally, like someone trying to explain something to a stubborn child. “As I have repeatedly briefed the U.S. Attorney, the Oregon Attorney General, and various people from your own office, there was no foot-dragging in the Liddy King and Martha Proudfoot murders,” he told them patiently. “The case is still active and I have detectives assigned to the ongoing investigation. The reason we haven’t arrested and charged anyone is simple. We have no idea who did it. It wasn’t the husband, because he was in jail here on a potential domestic violence preventive detention warrant and also pending an indictment for hatespeech. Whoever it was left us not a jot, not a smidgeon of forensic evidence. It’s true someone wrote the letters NVA on the wall, but that could have been a red herring to throw us off.”
“You know perfectly well that ever since 9/11, evidence isn’t necessary!” argued Miller. “The Patriot Act gives local as well as federal law enforcement broad proactive powers to protect lives and property and the security of the United States against both foreign and domestic terrorism! If you’ve got two brain cells to rub together as a law enforcement officer, you know or else you damned well should know every individual in your county who so much as harbors a racist thought!”
“I have to admit, I’ve never arrested anyone for their thoughts before,” confessed Lear.
“Well, with two murdered Jews on your doorstep, don’t you think it’s fucking well time you started?” shouted Rabang in anger. “You’ve got to know who these people are! It’s your business to know!”
“No, ma’am, I don’t know,” said Lear wearily. “Where do I start? Anyone who has ever complained about losing his job to an illegal alien or an affirmative action employee? Anyone who has ever had his son rejected by every college he applied to and then dragged away into the Army and killed in Bumfuckistan? Anyone who has ever had a child raped or murdered or mutilated or their brains fried like an egg on drugs in our Brave New World here? Anyone who has ever walked through a public park with their children and seen two Third Worlders copulating like dogs under a tree? Where do I start? No, I mean it, really. Since we’re just pulling names out of a hat, who would you like me to arrest first for unapproved thoughts?”
Pangborn and Lear both understood that this was terribly dangerous talk and if he kept it up, there was every chance he would leave his own office in handcuffs on a federal charge of hatespeech, but Lear couldn’t seem to help himself. Pangborn caught Lear’s eye and shook his head.
Lear picked up a torn sheet from a notepad from his desk and read, “At 8 p.m. on February 14th, an active service unit from D Company, First Portland Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army, carried out an enforcement action under General Order Number Four issued by the Army Council on November 24th of last year, ordering all non-whites including Jews to leave the territory of the Northwest American Republic forthwith. The NVA accordingly has shot dead Jacob and Irene Goldman for non-compliance with that General Order. All Jews and non-whites who are apprehended by the NVA will be similarly dealt with.” He put the paper down. “That’s it. I gather that’s pretty much their style?” he asked.
“That’s their racist fascist anti-Semitic jargon, yes,” snarled Rabang. “And do you still deny you have one of these racist murder gangs operating in your county, sheriff?”
“I never denied that we did,” protested Lear. “Maybe we do, God help us. But you will notice they said Portland Brigade. I think there’s a very good chance the shooters came down here from outside, from your bailiwick up in the city.”
Rabang was getting more and more steamed. “You need to get out of your denial phase really fast, sheriff, because I am starting to wonder about you.”
“We passed the crime scene on the way in here, and we saw the units there. Did the CSI team from the Oregon State Police get here yet?” interrupted Pangborn. He was used to trying to keep a leash on Rabang, but it was getting harder and more distasteful all the time.
“Yes, they’re out there now and I just came back from there when you arrived,” said Lear. “I was out there all night, if that improves your opinion of my professional zeal any, Agent Miller, but there was damn-all to find. The rain washed away any traces of anything and they must have used revolvers, because there were no cartridge casings found.”
“Or else if they were real pros, they policed up their brass,” said Pangborn.
“Maybe,” conceded Lear. “The medical examiner’s preliminary opinion was medium-heavy handgun rounds, either .357 or capped .38s, Devastators or something like that. Both of them shot once in the chest and twice in the head. Judging from the blood splatter patterns, they got hit in the head when they were down, to finish them off. That sounds pretty professional and pretty damned cold to me. Like the kind of thing we’re seeing in Portland or Seattle or Spokane.”
“We’ll take a look ourselves,” snarled Rabang, getting up.
“Knock yourselves out,” said Lear cheerfully, glad to be getting rid of them. “Agent Miller, if you guys can find anything out there I missed, I’ll buy you both dinner when Rigoletto’s re-opens.”
Rabang ignored his tentative peace offering. “Bullshit,” she said. “I told you. You get the cuffs on these racist motherfuckers within forty-eight hours or the U.S. Attorney is assuming jurisdiction and you can look forward to a career as a security guard at Mighty Mart.” She stalked out, followed by Pangborn, who turned at the office door and looked at Lear helplessly with a shrug. Lear gave him a friendly wave, the unspoken acknowledgement of helpless chagrin between white males in all strata of society that had been growing more and common over the years. When the door was closed, Lear picked up the intercom.
“Dispatch,” said a female voice.
“Hi, Chrissie,” said Lear in a weary voice. “Chrissie, could you radio Leo Galli out at Rigoletto’s, and tell him to tell the officers on the scene and those state forensics people that they are about to have the edifying experience of a visit from two charming folks from the FBI? They’re on they’re way now.”
“Sure, sheriff!” chirped Christina Ekstrom brightly. “I’ll let the guys know right away!”
* * *
“Hey, lieutenant, you know what they say,” responded Lockhart cheerfully. “No plan survives the first day of combat.”
“I don’t want the plan to survive, I want us to survive,” said Hatfield.
“Down,” ordered Zack. “They might be able to see us out here, especially if they’ve got binoculars.” The two of them low-crawled across the roof to a low brick parapet topped with an ornate iron railing, approximately twenty inches high, and Cat-Eyes looked around him.
“Uh, I don’t know about this, sir,” he said dubiously, shaking his head. Zack saw what he meant. From where they lay, they could see the 39th Street pier and the platform at the end of it whereon stood the yuppie restaurant and a series of smaller shops. There were at least eight police cars there or parked along the pier, blue and red lights flashing, and a large official-looking van that had to be a crime scene unit. Cops were standing in clumps, smoking and drinking coffee, or sitting in their cars, obviously waiting for something.”
Hatfield’s phone beeped. He took out his phone and saw I CAN TASTE THAT GREEN BEER NOW. “They’re coming,” he told Cat. He closed the phone and it beeped again almost right away. This time he read TWO DELIVERIES SHOULD BE THERE SOON. “Okay, Mr. Green is on them. Green SUV, fully tinted windows, remember.”
“They’ll have to exit the vehicle when they get out there on that pier,” said Lockhart confidently. “When they do, I’ll knock both their asses into the river!”
In the Chrysler Aspen, Rabang Miller had finally finished tearing the deputy’s citation into the tiniest possible shreds, and she rolled down the window and tossed the confetti out. Brian Pangborn, who was driving, looked over and said to her sharply, “Roll that window up! You know procedure!”
“Like these bumpkins are going to give me another ticket for littering?” Rabang sneered.
Rabang’s cell phone chimed with the first few bars of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” and she opened it. Pangborn drove along in silence and turned left onto 39th Street while Rabang engaged in a conversation with someone apparently from her son’s expensive private middle school in Portland. Sounds like Junior has dropped himself in the shit again, thought Pangborn. He drove past Columbia Prospect on his right, onto the pier, and toward the police cars and yellow crime scene tape on the platform.
“There they are,” said Hatfield, looking through a crack in the blinds.
“Got ’em,” replied Lockhart, sighting the rifle and slowly matching the Chrysler’s pace.
In the SUV Rabang closed her phone in a fit of irritation. “What’s Juan done now?” asked Pangborn, hoping to distract her from the previous conversation.
“The usual,” snapped Rabang. “Just a few rocks in his locker this time, but this is one time too many and they’re talking expulsion. If he gets kicked out of Westwood Academy that will be the second school this year! I told the principal I’d be in for a parent teacher conference at 1 o’clock.”
“That’s going to be cutting it pretty close,” said Pangborn as he slowed to a stop by the state police forensics van. “We’ll be at least half an hour here, then two hours minimum back to Portland, where we’ll run into lunch hour traffic. I don’t think you can make it. You better call him back and re-schedule.”
“Fuck it,” said Rabang. “I’m not going to risk throwing another eight thousand dollars down the tube because that little junkie can’t even finish a semester. Let’s go back now.”
“Back to Portland? Now?” asked Pangborn, stunned. A senior Clatsop County deputy was walking over to their vehicle. “Aren’t we supposed to be investigating a double homicide?”
“Screw that,” said Rabang. “You heard me tell Cletus back there that he’s got forty-eight hours to catch these racists, and since I doubt if he could catch a cold, in two days we’ll be back here with full authority and our own team, with a list of names from Homeland Security. We will shake every tree in this county, gather up all the apes who fall out, and use the Dershowitz Protocol to get the information we need, as well as all the confessions we need.” The deputy was knocking on the window. Pangborn rolled his window down and flashed his badge.
“FBI,” he said.
“Hey there,” said the deputy. “Sheriff said you guys would be coming out. We’ve been waiting on you.”
“Can you give us a minute, deputy?” asked Pangborn, and rolled up the power window again.
“Never mind that,” said Rabang. “Turn around and head back for Portland.
There was something else, a sixth sense left over from Pangborn’s own time in Iraq. The roof, all those windows. In Baghdad he and his men would never have gotten anywhere near a building like that until it was cleared and secured.
“Fine,” said Pangborn, backing the SUV around and driving slowly back off the pier and out onto 39th Street. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.” Behind them the deputies stared at one another in astonishment.
“What in the name of the devil? They’re leaving!” hissed Hatfield.
“They were tipped off somehow,” said Lockhart.
“I can’t believe it!”
“Do we abort, sir?” asked Lockhart.
Zack took a deep breath. “Like hell we do! Maybe they’ve been tipped, maybe they just got spooked, maybe they got called back, who knows? But I can see them, God damn it, and they’re not getting away from right under our noses! No matter what, we’re taking those bastards down today! Let’s go!”
They pelted down the hall and down the outside stairwell, and they were in the front seat of the Yukon, Cat’s rifle between his knees, and Zack was firing up the engine in twenty-eight seconds. Zack pulled onto 39th Street just in time to see the green SUV turn left onto Leif Erickson Drive. “Looks like they’re going back to Portland for some reason,” said Hatfield.
“Or luring us into a trap,” suggested Lockhart.
“If it was an ambush they would have either hit us in the apartment building or at least outside in the parking lot,” said Hatfield. “Feds always try to surround and contain. They never let their targets get mobile if they can help it. No, for some reason those two must have got spooked, and they’re trying to make it back to their nest. Roll up your mask,” he said, suiting the action to the word. “Don’t want people to see two masked men driving down the road, after last night.” After a little speeding Zack now had the Chrysler in sight. They were doing the speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour on the winding road out of Astoria. There was another vehicle between them. Zack took out his phone and hit the speed dial for Charlie Washburn’s phone. It rang and Charlie answered. “Praise Jesus!” he shouted.
“Sorry about the call, Reverend,” said Hatfield, “But I don’t see any other way to do this. You know we were all gonna gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river, but we got a couple of sinners here who done backslid and have turned their faces against salvation. They’re headed in your direction, ETA maybe ninety seconds, green Chrysler Aspen, fully tinted windows, which I can’t think of any way to say Scripturally. Could you please show them the error of their ways and await our second coming, that we may smite them with a rod of iron?”
“Verily, we shall vouchsafe unto them the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.”
“Uh, Reverend, that’s not the Bible. That’s Monty Python,” said Hatfield in exasperation.
“Just keep far enough back so you don’t go to your own heavenly reward. And always look on the bright side of life, my son.” Charlie hung up.
“I tell you, if that was recorded and played back in court, we could plead insanity,” said Hatfield. “They’re going to try and use their pipe to bomb blow the feds off the road at Tongue Point. As soon as their vehicle stops, we take them. Somehow.”
“I’ll get up on the roof and fire from there,” said Lockhart.
The funny feeling in the back of Brian Pangborn’s mind hadn’t gone away. He glanced in his rear view mirror and saw the car behind him turning off into a driveway. Behind that car came a battered OD green Yukon SUV. It was coming up a little too fast for his liking. He interrupted Rabang. “The witnesses in the restaurant said the shooters were two men who fled the scene in a dark colored SUV, right?”
“Yes,” said Rabang. “Why?”
“That’s a Yukon behind us,” he said. “There seem to be two men in it.”
Rabang twisted around to look back. “It could be anybody,” she said.
“See the way he speeds up a bit and then slows?” pointed out Pangborn. “He’s trying to keep a set distance between us, a bit too much distance, like he’s hanging back for some reason. On this winding road at thirty-five, if he’s a local yahoo he should be getting in closer. It’s just a feeling, but I don’t like it.” They passed the point where Lief Erickson drive transmuted into Highway 30, and the speed limit went up to forty-five. “See? I’m speeding up now, and so is he, but he’s still keeping about seventy yards between us.”
At Tongue Point Charlie Washburn had turned the black Toyota Camry around and pointed it into the highway. “We gonna ram ’em?” asked Lee. “Not unless we have to,” said Charlie. “I’ll hit them with the Uzi and you get ready to flick your Bic, light that fuse, and see if you can blow an axle off, and not endanger Zack and Cat who will be coming up behind them. God, I hope traffic stays this light and no one else comes driving along right into the middle of this! Masks on!”
In the Chrysler, Rabang Miller pulled out her pistol and jacked a round into the chamber. “Be careful with that!” snapped Pangborn, looking for a place to pull over so he could let the Yukon pass, or not as the case might be. He saw a possible pulling off spot right at the intersection of Tongue Point Road and Emerald Drive, and so he was actually slowing down and veering right when all of a sudden the Camry roared out of Tongue Point Road and stopped right beneath the blinking yellow light hanging over the intersection. Pangborn saw two men in ski masks leap out of the car. He heard the stuttering of the Uzi, saw the muzzle flash and heard the pop pop pop as the 9-mm slugs slammed into the windshield. The polycarbonate glass held, but big ugly white splotches blossomed on the windshield before him.
“It’s them!” screamed Rabang in terror. “Fuck the car behind us, you asshole! They’re in front of us!”
Pangborn decided to try for a right turn up onto Emerald Drive, but he briefly saw a black cylindrical sailing through the air toward him. It banged against the windshield, bounced off, and just as he yelled “Bomb!” the pipe bomb exploded in the air about four feet in front of the FBI agents, with a weird crushing sound rather like a cross between a crump! and a clink! The Chrysler’s armor still held, but the front bumper was ripped almost entirely off and flapped up onto the windshield, and the force of the explosion crumpled the front end and caused all kinds of hissing and steaming fluid leaks and electrical shorts within. Pangborn lost control and the Chrysler slid into the ditch. The Uzi was still pattering bullets against the armored body.
A mere 50 yards behind them, the Yukon rolled to a stop. Hatfield got out and covered down on the disabled FBI vehicle with his submachine gun, leaning over the Yukon’s hood, waiting for a target. Cat-Eyes Lockhart was out the other door and he slithered up onto the roof with the agility of a serpent, spreading himself prone and sighting the rifle. “If they don’t come out I’ll move in with our bomb. Get ready to cover me!” called out Hatfield.
Steam, smoke and the smell of burning began to fill the passenger compartment of the Chrysler through the vents from the damaged engine. “We’re on fire!” shrieked Special Agent Miller. She tore her door open and bailed out of the car.
“No, wait!” yelled Pangborn. Rabang had thrown down her gun and she was running up the embankment, screaming hysterically in pure fear. She was completely open to the Uzi and Pangborn jerked open his own door and leaped out, crouching behind it with his handgun at the ready, planning on using the armored panels as cover to fire at the Toyota and the Uzi gunner, make them keep their heads down so Rabang might have a chance to get down or into the woods. He was convinced that the two men in the Toyota were the killers of Jacob and Irene Goldman, and the simple fact was that he had completely forgotten about the green Yukon that had been following them.
Nor did Pangborn have any more time to remember. Lockhart’s first armor-piercing bullet entered the base of his skull from behind and decapitated him; he never even heard the shot.
One second later, Lockhart’s second shot snapped the fleeing Rabang Miller’s spine, tore through her heart and sternum, and sent her spinning to the ground as bleeding rag that twitched and kicked and scrambled and then lay still.
Cat-Eyes leaped down off the Yukon, ran up to the smoking Chrysler’s open driver’s door, leaned down and inserted a Jack of Diamonds from a Bicycle playing deck into the dead hand of Brian Pangborn. He snagged Pangborn’s piece and stuck it his back pocket, ran up the hill to where Rabang Miller lay with her dead face staring at the sky, and stuck a second Jack into her mouth. He then ran back to the Yukon. Hatfield waved off the Washburns, who got into the Toyota and pulled off down Highway 30 toward John Day. The Yukon followed. From the moment the Toyota pulled out into the road until both NVA vehicles left the scene, the elapsed time was thirty-four seconds.
Cat-Eyes Lockhart turned to Zack Hatfield. “That’s it?” he exclaimed in amazement. “That’s the big, bad FBI? The rough tough G-Men that we’ve all been so afraid of for seventy years? Jesus, I’ve shot rabbits that put up more of a fight!”
Hatfield chuckled. “I think they’ve always been scared of this,” he said. “Scared that one day we’d find out just how easy it is.”
