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  “Most banks have at least a skeleton staff remaining and they’re still open, although with limited hours, and most ATM machines are still working,” Ridgeway went on. “There have been some runs on some of these institutions, those that haven’t been frozen by their own home offices, but that seems to be leveling off now that the Cabinet has issued our assurance that everybody’s money is still theirs, and we’re not going to confiscate it all. One of the many rumors the American media is planting. I think that one comes from our old buddy Howard Weintraub.”

  “Doesn’t that make it easy for all these rats who are fleeing the Republic to take their money with them?” asked Morgan.

  “Well, it is their money, after all,” Ridgeway reminded him. “Yes, I know, it’s a terrible hemorrhage of funds, but it would be infinitely worse if we just shut down the banks and didn’t let anybody take their money out. The whole economy would grind to a halt, not to mention we’d probably face riots in the streets.”

  “How long do you think it will take for us to get a new currency into circulation, once we decide what it will be, marks or pounds or kwatloos or whatever?” asked Morehouse. “I don’t like the idea of using dollars. Dollars have too much connection with the old order.”

  “My recommendation is that we hold off for at least a year on that, and for the time being allow Federal Reserve notes to be the official legal tender,” said Ridgeway. “That may lead to a money shortage, but paradoxically that will help us as we ease into the substitution of the Republic’s own legal tender. We don’t want to rush into this, because there are still a lot of variables. For example, we don’t know how much gold and silver we’re going to have in reserve. We have to base our currency on something, at least until we can put together an economy based on Hjalmar Schacht’s productivity-based system, which is the way we need to go, not just print it at the touch of a computer function key like the Federal Reserve. Hell, maybe even platinum if we can get hold of enough of it.

  “A lot of that will depend on what we can seize from the enemy’s abandoned assets, Jewish and non-white property. Depending on how fast they bugged out, there is a whole treasure trove of real estate, bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, and goodies they’re leaving behind, anything they couldn’t carry with them in their rush to get the hell out of Dodge. Once we get a new currency accepted and designed, and we acquire the technical capacity and the special paper to print it, I recommend a period of transition of at least six months after that before the changeover is complete and the U.S. dollar officially becomes foreign exchange. Who’s that character heading the Convention’s currency committee?”

  “A guy named Brian Mackintosh, NVA man from Corvallis,” Barrow told him. “Fought with Billy Basquine’s Column. He’s a coin collector and very big on silver and gold. I know he wants a new coinage using actual precious metals, with only a minimal amount of paper money.”

  “Good idea in theory, but like I said, first we have to get hold of the gold and silver to coin with,” said Ridgeway. “If he’s a coin man, there are all kinds of places that have loads of precious metals to mint collector coins, and since most of them are run by people who have at least some degree of sympathy for the Republic, I would think some could be encouraged to move their operations here. We will need their expertise. Then there’s also the possibility of backing our new bank notes with precious gems, diamonds and emeralds and such, which the enemy may have left behind. Frank, first break tonight, could you hunt him up if he’s still in the building and introduce us? Or if he’s already left, could you track him down sometime tomorrow and ask him to get in touch with me so we can set up a meeting?”

  “Will do,” said Barrow.

  “Our main source of revenue during the first year, until we can figure out where we stand on currency and taxes, will have to be the spoils of war,” Ridgeway went on. “To the victor go the spoils, and fortunately for us we’re the victors. I have 32 people working for me now, and today I assigned over half of them to track down and identify potential assets of our former enemies to be nationalized, including corporate assets, which is a damned long list. Those lists we made up before Longview, during the war, are proving to be invaluable, but there’s a lot more out there. Basically, anything that was the property of Jews or Asians or certain large corporations can be assumed to be the proceeds of theft or deception or general criminal activity, in the sense that they came here to this land to take what was ours, and if they have it, now it’s ours again. If they left it behind, it goes into the Republic’s kitty. Houses, land, businesses, commercial premises and manufacturing plants—that ought to interest you, Gary—bank accounts, cash, jewelry we can melt down for Comrade Mackintosh’s new coinage, personal possessions, their goddamned furniture, everything.”

  “Race and Resettlement will want first dibs on the real estate,” said Brennan. “Have you seen the news footage on the interstates? We have as many people coming into the Republic as are leaving. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we actually ended up with a net population gain, and we’re going to need someplace to house new migrants.”

  “Yes, I understand that, Pat,” agreed Ridgeway. “You get first refusal on actual housing, but there will be plenty of commercial and undeveloped real estate that we can sell to the private sector, assuming the private sector has any money to buy it. We’ll probably end up land rich and cash poor. John, I’m going to need some muscle to do a little organized looting for the public good, more than the Ministry of Justice and our day-old Civil Guard can provide. Thousands of men in the long run, to track down every enemy asset and make sure it ends up in the Treasury and not in somebody’s sticky fingers. Once people in the Northwest realize there’s an Aladdin’s cave of former Unionist wealth lying around, everybody’s going to want to help themselves. Okay, if the local white people want to boost some absconded kike’s Lexus or clean out some dothead’s living room, or nick some fled FBI man’s power tools out of his garage, fair enough. These people were parasites, they stole their wealth from our Folk, and although as a rule I’m not comfortable countenancing theft, in a sense I can understand that kind of thing. Fog of war, and all that. But the Republic has dibs on the big ticket items like money, real property, jewelry and precious metals. We’re going to have to make it for a while on this serendipitous windfall, or inheritance, or whatever you want to call it, until we can get our own economy and monetary system up and running, and that may take time. We’re going to have to stretch this inheritance for quite a while.”

  “Send me an estimate of how many troops you’ll need and I’ll second them to Finance,” said Morgan. “We have still got thousands of trainees going through the depots in Centralia and Salem and Seattle. I can get you the manpower.”

  “Better check with me and Frank first on the manpower, John,” said Morehouse grimly. “There’s still fighting to be done, I’m sorry to say. Maybe we can add some of Ray’s organized looting sprees to the mission of Force 101.”

  “What’s Force 101?” asked Ridgeway.

  “We need to get into that now,” said Morehouse.

  John Corbett Morgan got up from his seat, went to the door and beckoned someone in from the hallway outside. A block-like young man with a fiery red beard and burning blue eyes walked in dressed in NDF tiger-striped camos. He stood to attention and saluted Morehouse and the Cabinet table in general. Morgan introduced him. “For those of you comrades who don’t know him, this is Commandant David Leach of the Ellensburg Flying column, now Colonel Leach of the NDF. Some of you may remember him as one of the few Volunteers from the Olympic Flying Column who survived the Ravenhill ambush. [See The Hill of the Ravens by the author.]

  “If I may, sir, I’d just like mention to Minister Bonnar that I had the honor of serving with your sister Anne when I was with the Olympic Column,” said Leach. “She was a brave soldier and a true comrade, ma’am.”

  “She was indeed,” agreed Fiona sadly. “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “Colonel Lea
ch will be commanding a special action group of around two thousand men,” Morgan continued. “They have been hand-picked in a large measure from NVA veterans of the revolt, but also some who have joined us since the July Days. Mostly men who lost wives and daughters to niggers or muds or ZOG, if you want to know the truth. Some of them will be drawn from O.C. Oglevy’s North Idaho Rangers partisan unit, an outfit that Comrade Leach also served with before he moved to Ellensburg and took over the Column there. This corps will be referred to as Force 101. Colonel Leach will be reporting directly to me, and we will both be working closely with General Barrow and the Third Section, or I guess the Bureau of State Security as it will be soon whenever things get formalized. I will not just be in nominal charge, I will be participating in Force 101’s operations myself, by way of accepting responsibility. I will not order men on a mission like this, and then stand back and try to keep my own hands clean.”

  “What mission is that?” asked Jennings.

  Red Morehouse answered him. “As you know, while almost all of the actual American military and administrative personnel have now been withdrawn from the Northwest, large sections of the country have yet to be occupied and assimilated into the Republic, which is a different and more complex process than simply chasing the American bureaucrats and the local Chamber of Commerce out. General Barrow, this is part of your Security portfolio, I believe? Can you bring us up to speed?”

  “Okay, here’s the sitch.” said Barrow “There are currently loyalist paramilitaries and vigilantes who have seized temporary control in a lot of places, mostly small towns east of the Cascades and over in Idaho and Montana. Wyoming especially is in free fall. We weren’t expecting to get that state at Longview, and we never had that many people down there to begin with, and so we’re really having to scramble. We have to move fast, and stomp on these Amurrican snakes before they can get organized and maybe provoke some kind of new intervention on the part of the United States, or even the goddamned United Nations. The Republic’s political control of the country is now more or less firmed up in the major cities, and also certain of our own liberated zones that the NVA established during the revolt, like the Oregon north shore, thanks to Zack Hatfield and his Wild Bunch boys. But the Northwest is a big place. There are whole huge swaths of territory that saw little or no action during the War of Independence, because they were so out of the way and ironically, also because they were so white. There was no point in the NVA going where there was nobody to shoot. A lot of the people in these little towns and rural areas are confused. They’re still infected with liberalism and in some cases with Zionism through their churches. They are ripe for deception and victimization by counterrevolutionary elements. We don’t want to allow any kind of Unionist reactionary campaign to develop in the countryside. Those can be very difficult to stop. Hell, the entire might of the United States of America couldn’t stop us under similar circumstances.”

  “So this Force 101 will be dealing with loyalist vigilantes and John Wayne wannabes?” asked Salvatore.

  “Not just them, sir,” Colonel Leach answered him. “Officially Force 101 is a rapid response team that will be used to put out brushfires in these small towns where a few idiots decide they don’t want to be ruled by Natsies who is agin’ the Bible, and they hoist up the Masonic dishrag again. That will certainly be part of our remit, yes. But only part of it. We will also be performing a quiet but thorough cleansing of the entire country.”

  “Cleansing?” asked Jennings.

  “We’re going to take out the last of the trash left over from the revolt and from all the years before, sir,” Leach told him.

  “You’re going to kill people,” said Fiona Bonnar accusingly.

  “Quite a few people, yes ma’am,” confirmed Leach. “Race-mixers, drug dealers, lefties and liberals of every conceivable stripe, bugger boys and dykes, American informers and collaborators from the past five years and before, Union sympathizers who gave concrete aid and comfort to the Americans and FATPO, the last dregs of Amurrica. Almost all of these kinds of people have had sense enough to get the hell out by now. You can see them running away when you flick on the TV. The interstates going out of the Republic are clogged with their cars as they flee from the people and the land they have betrayed. But there will be some who stay behind, either because they hope to continue to do harm to our new country, or they think the Americans will be coming back soon and they can cash in, or else because they think we’ve forgotten who they are and what they’ve done, and they can hide from us and resume some kind of normal lives as if nothing ever happened. But we haven’t forgotten. We will never forget, and we will never forgive. That much we’ve learned from the Jews. The Northwest Republic needs a clean start, comrades. No one who actively aided the tyrant gets to be in on that.”

  Ray Ridgeway, who was sitting next to Red Morehouse, made a note on the yellow legal pad in front of him. One of Oglevy’s maniacs? Morehouse glanced down at it and nodded. Ridgeway added on the pad, Why not use Oglevy himself? Sounds right up his alley.

  Morehouse reached over and scribbled, We want to kill the rats, not burn down the barn. He looked over at Public Health Minister Bonnar. “Fi, I know this sounds bad. It is bad, and I for one have no intention of trying to deny that fact or whitewash all this. We’re all going to be racking up some bad karma over Force 101. But Colonel Leach is right. We have to start with a completely clean slate. We can’t leave all these problem people from the old days lurking around below the surface or on the edges, where they may do harm. The Americans and world Jewry are going to be doing their level best to strangle our new nation in the cradle, and we have to deal with anyone who might help them, without hesitation and without mercy. We can’t risk erring on the side of clemency. Mercy to an enemy is cruelty to one’s own, and in this case, the very existence of the white race is at stake. We dare not turn away from our duty.”

  Barrow weighed in. “Fiona, we cannot allow a potential fifth column to remain in our midst out of misplaced compassion. We won’t be able to get all of those who secretly yearn for the old order that gave them such luxury and allowed them to wallow in such beastly pleasures in return for their souls, but by meting out condign punishment to a few, we can damned well send a message to the rest of them that the old days are gone and they’d bloody well better wake up and smell the coffee. In any event, are there any among us here whose hands are clean? I seem to recall that a few years ago, you delivered some packages for the NVA. Abortion clinics were your specialty, I believe?”

  “Yes,” replied Bonnar with a grim smile. “I haven’t forgotten, and I am willing to answer for what I did to God if He so demands of me when my time comes. That was necessary to save the lives of unborn children.”

  “And with all due respect, ma’am, this is necessary to save the life of our newly born nation,” said Leach briskly.

  “Frank, John, what guarantee can you give us that only the guilty will suffer in these coming purges or whatever you want to call them?” persisted Bonnar. “We can’t turn this into the French Revolution or the Stalin era, with white people being executed on the word of anonymous informers who may well be vindictive former spouses, or disgruntled employees, or people with personal grudges to settle.”

  “Absolute, one-hundred per cent cast-iron guarantee? None,” said Barrow. “I will say this much: Force 101 and the new Bureau of State Security will not act on simple denunciation. They have been provided with detailed lists of suspect persons that are the result of many years of work on the part of the Third Section, during the revolt and also in the old Party days before that. No one is on those lists without a reason, Fi.”

  Colonel Leach addressed her. “Madam Minister, I’ve looked over those lists and examined every name we’ve been given so far by Minister Barrow’s people, every one of which has been counterchecked and signed off on by Dan McGrew and Heather Redmond. If you know those two comrades, you know they would only list the really bad actors. There are tens of thousa
nds of names, and I know that sounds like a lot, but if it makes you feel any better, we probably won’t catch most of them. I suspect they’ll be like the Jews on the Eastern Front during the Second World War who hooked up and booked when they heard the SS was coming. The majority of the names on the lists are white people who are proven or reliably reported to us to have engaged in sexual relations with niggers, Jews or other non-whites, for which as far as I’m concerned there is no excuse. In someone like that, the liberal sickness has gone too far, and they are beyond cure or redemption. There are also a lot of faggots and dykes who would have to be crazy to stick around waiting for the axe to fall, and who probably won’t. Then there’s informers, or at least people whom we believe to a moral certainty were informers. It looks like the FBI and other retreating feds and cops destroyed their hard drives and as many of their records as they could, but Third Section wasn’t just sitting on their hands for the past five years, and they know who did what. Can I swear to you that innocent people haven’t ended up on those lists by accident or mistake? No, ma’am, I can’t. But I will tell you this: in any specific case that comes to my own attention, if there is any doubt in my mind at all, we will hold the person in question in custody and refer them to BOSS for further investigation, until their status can be cleared up. I’m afraid that’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  “Fiona, Dan and Heather can’t be here tonight because they’re taking care of some special work for us,” Morehouse told her kindly. “But they should be back in town in a couple of days. What say I arrange for you to sit down with them? This government as a whole has a heavy burden to shoulder in this matter. It is what it is. In order for you to do the kind of good things for our people I know you want to do in the field of health and medicine, you have to shoulder part of it, too. We’ll give you all the help and reassurance we can.”