The Hill of the Ravens Page 11
“Hey, now, Sarah’s a looker, that I’ll grant you, but she’s got some competition! Reckon I can still kick up my heels a bit with some of these young studs!” cackled Cassie Kowalski, a lean and weatherbeaten old crone in a chic blue velvet brocade evening gown.
Her once red hair was now dyed blue, a cigarette dangled from her lips, and her liver-spotted knuckles as they curled around the tumbler of straight whiskey were swollen with arthritis. It was hard to believe that in the time of struggle she had been a statuesque hooker so stunning that her code name had been “Lorelei”, and that her beauty had lured over a dozen Federal bureaucrats, politicians, and senior media executives to their deaths. She once took out a United States Senator herself, with an icepick through his left ear.
Over three hundred elderly men thronged the room, along with a few matronly and gray-haired women and a small army of younger relatives. Across the banquet hall Don saw a dignified old couple in evening dress, Ed and Brittany McCanless, two survivors of the Olympic Flying Column that he would have to interview. He raised his stein to them in greeting. Before he could go over and speak to them he was intercepted. “Hi, Don, Sarah! Have you met my eldest grandson Jeff?” said an old woman whom Don vaguely knew but whose name for the moment escaped him. She glowed with the pride of a long lifetime as she introduced a bashful young giant in full SS dress black, the SWASTIKA armband gleaming crimson white and black on his left bicep. “He just graduated from Sandpoint in June and he’s already gotten his first lieutenant’s bars!” the old woman crowed. “Jeff, this is Colonel Donald Redmond from BOSS. Redmond, got it? As in Matt Redmond?”
“It’s an honor to meet you, sir!” shouted the young soldier, bracing to stiff attention, in an obvious agony of social discomfort at meeting the most legendary name in the Republic after the Old Man himself.
“Hey, at ease tonight, troop!” laughed Redmond, slapping him on the shoulder. “These gigs are completely informal and eclectic, I promise you. Now go get drunk like we all came here for. That’s an order, troop!”
“Yes sir! I will get drunk, sir! Thank you sir!” shouted the young SS man.
“And make sure your grandmother gets drunk as well,” Redmond admonished him. “I want her completely pistus newtus before the night is over.”
“Yes sir!”
Here was a retired dentist who had printed over fifty million dollars in counterfeit U. S. currency and four million in postage stamps on an underground printing press in his basement. There was a senior official of the Northwest Reserve Bank who had once huddled in the bottom of a porta-potty for eight hours, and then given a United States Marine Corps general a .44-caliber enema. He was talking to an assistant Minister of Finance and also to Cindy’s ultimate boss, the head of the Republic’s Labor Service. The assistant Minister of Finance had begun his fiscal career when he led an NVA team that kidnapped the daughter of Seattle’s chief rabbi and successfully collected a two million dollar ransom, afterwards returning her unharmed and unviolated, as he had given his word would be done if the ransom was paid. He had shot one of his own men in the kneecap who had attempted to kill the Jewish girl anyway after the ransom was paid. The Volunteer whom the assistant Minister had shot had become an SS officer who later died a hero at Chilliwack while earning his third Iron Cross. They had never been reconciled, and that was the assistant Minister’s deepest regret in life, a failure that haunted him through sleepless nights. Cindy’s boss, the Minister of Labor, had been brought into an FBI interrogation center with three bullets in his body, and with his wounds yet bleeding he had still managed to strangle his first interrogator with his bare hands. Over there in another corner was a Luftwaffe general who presently commanded a space shuttle. In the battle of Portland he had been a pilot who made over fifty low-level bombing runs dropping home-made explosives onto the Federal positions from whatever small aircraft he could get to fly, in several cases microlights of canvas and aluminum tubing, and in another a ancient Boeing 737 he and his crew converted to a bomber. Each time he had returned to his airstrip, his plane shredded with bullets. He had once landed a stolen helicopter in the main yard at the Florence Federal Prison in Colorado to extract five NVA prisoners.
At the far end of the hall sat an elderly automobile mechanic, eating from a plate of fried chicken and potato salad and guzzling from a tall tumbler. Kenneth McGrath had long ago blocked out the memory of the horror, the years in prison, the beatings and electric shock to his genitals. All he knew was that this was an occasion once a year when he got free food and top-notch hootch. Ken had never been a Party member and he was never into all that political shit. He never understood why these people had given him an Iron Cross for that one particular incident. Old Kenny wore it on these nights because he figured it was kind of expected of him, in exchange for the food and the booze, but privately he thought it was a bit silly. He wasn’t even German. Some white people were in trouble with some niggers and he had helped them. Seemed like the thing to do at the time. So what? The whole episode was exaggerated. Everybody knew that niggers were never anywhere near as tough as they were cracked up to be, and they’d run like scalded dogs from any white man who stood up them. Even niggers with badges. Whoop-de-doo. And the shooting bit was highly exaggerated as well. His dad had made better shots hunting buck and moose lots of times. Wasn’t like he’d done anything special. Hey, if these people wanted to give him free food and liquor every year because of some stupid shit that happened when he was twenty-three years old, who was he to argue? Politics weren’t important to Ken McGrath. Alcohol-burning V-8 engines and methane turbine generators were important. Start up a good engine and you saw God’s plan for the universe.
At one table sat a fifth-generation Washington farmer who every year grew acres of wheat and sorghum over the graves of six FBI agents he and his team had killed in a night ambush and buried on his ancestral land. At another sat a man who made cuckoo clocks in his garage, their cunning and accurate mechanisms based on the bomb timing devices he had made in his youth. There was a woman with sixteen grandchildren knocking back Singapore Slings, who had been a young police despatcher in Seattle and kept the NVA apprised of every move the cops made. Beside her was her husband, whose lumpy fingers were missing their fingernails. The nails had been torn out and the cuticles soldered in an FBI torture chamber when he refused to inform on his wife. Down the bar was little old Eddie Cartrett, a nonentity who now held the official position of town drunk in Shelton, Washington. Oddly enough, Eddie was almost the only one drinking ginger ale. On this one night of all nights, he stayed sober and served as designated driver for a busload of his former comrades in arms. It was a tradition within his unit, one he honored as an almost religious obligation. He had also stayed sober, admittedly with some effort, on the long ago night when he drove a rental truck full of explosives up to the front gate of the Federal Detention Facility in Auburn and detonated it. Eddie made it away, although just barely. Over two hundred NVA prisoners had also made it out of the concentration camp, and the sudden return infusion of so many hardened guerrillas had given the embattled NVA a new lease on life.
The evening’s big attraction was a display along one of the walls of the banquet room, a series of big blown-up U. S. government posters from the revolution, of the kind that had once adorned every wall and hoarding in the Northwest states. “WANTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY FOR ACTS OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM!” shrieked the posters. Rewards Up To One Million Dollars For The Apprehension Of These Individuals!” Below the heavy black type on each placard were rows of sixteen or twenty photographs of NVA men and women, mostly old mug shots, but a few fuzzy FBI surveillance photos as well. Little groups of guests were gathered before the posters, chuckling and pointing out old friends and comrades to their companions, in some cases pointing out their own mug shots. “You looked like Frankenstein with that shaven head!” one elderly woman chided her husband merrily.
“I was a monster, all right,” returned the man quietly. “You wouldn’t ha
ve wanted to know me in those days, Liz. Trust me. You wouldn’t have.”
“There you go, that’s Jerry Wallace!” said another old man, pointing to a picture. “He always used to call himself the original Jerry Reb. Died last year, brain tumor. That’s Willis McCoy. He’s retired and living down in Astoria now. He said he’d try to make it tonight if he could get his daughter to drive him up here. Hope they come. Willis is a boring old fart, but that daughter of his is still mighty easy on the eyeballs for a gal of fifty. That’s Lee Donner. He was killed in the street fighting when we moved into Tacoma, during the assault on the Federal building. I was there.”
“That’s Brigadier Jimmy Wilson,” said another codger, lean and unshaven, the first drunk of the evening, his suit hanging on him like a scarecrow’s rags. “Hot damn, I remember Jimmy! I was in his brigade for a while before me and Charlie Randall shot that TV fag from Channel Five. Jimmy sent us on that one personal. The fag had been talking some real shit on the air but not no more after me and Charlie looked him up. Charlie had a forty-five Peacemaker and that bugger boy’s fucking head busted open like a watermelon! Candyass fudge-packer son of a bitch! Charlie stuck it right in his mouth and said ‘Suck on this, faggot!’ then pop goes the weasel! Charlie and me had to go on the run and the Party sent me over to Number Two Boise on an E & E. Thass escape and evasion.”
“Yeah, like none of us remember what E & E was, Kev?” muttered another surly old man who was listening, his accent still of the Mississippi delta after all these years.
“Jimmy won the first Iron Cross the Republic ever issued,” old Kev rambled on, oblivious. “Brought down two Apaches outside Wenatchee, with nothing but a bolt-action rifle. It was a post-humorous award. Fattie murdered him in prison the very day before we took it over. He used to fart a lot. Kept eating them damned refried burritos. I useta ask him, ‘Jimmy, what kind of white man eats Messican food?’ and he just useta say ‘Messican shit, I just like burritos, so does that make me some kind of goddamned race traitor?’ They kilt him in prison. The very day before we came in. Fattie motherfucker bastards. I found Jimmy in his cell in the Pullman camp, where they’d left him after they ran away. They shot him about twenny times, shot him in the balls, a couple in the gut so they could watch him die slow, fuck Longview, Longview said they wasn’t supposed to murder our people no more, but they did it anyway…goddamned fucking American motherfucking American bastards. We should’ve kept on fighting! Kept on until we conquered Washington DC and Jew York and killed them all! We should have tuck all our country back, tuck all Amurrica back, it was all of it ours, our people made Amurrica, we shoulda took it all back when we had the chance…” The old man began to weep. A young man with him, possibly a grandson, led him away.
Like all nations, the Republic had developed its own ruling élite, for such is the nature of human society. But on this one night all were comrades once again, for every man and more than a few of the elderly and middle-aged women wore the green, white and blue ribbon on their lapel. That experience gentled their conditions indeed. All of them had been there on St. Crispin’s Day. On many St. Crispin’s days during the War of Independence, when the impossible had suddenly become not only possible, but inevitable. The time when white men and women rose up in arms against the Beast, the Federal government of the United States, fought it, and defeated it. These were the aging, fading ghosts of that incredible time, the ones who had done what no one had ever believed could be done. The time to which Don Redmond was now compelled by duty to return.
Don stopped before one of the wanted posters. “Look, there’s John Corbett!” he said, pointing out the old police mug shot of Sarah’s father to her, possibly even the one taken after he had been arrested for pulverizing her second grade sex education teacher. In the photo Morgan’s mighty beard was black as the Harlan County coal instead of its present patriarchal white. The powerful burning blue eyes sizzled out of the photo, searing the soul of the viewer. Then as now, one could imagine him as a Biblical prophet on a hilltop calling down divine retribution on a sinful nation, which in a sense he had indeed done. “That was back in his Million Dollar Man days.” Morgan had been the second NVA commander to reach the coveted million-dollar reward status. Commandant Tom Murdock had been the first.
“I remember him like that,” said Sarah softly, gripping her husband’s arm.
“So do I,” whispered back Don. “That was how I first saw him.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “I can see him like that in my mind’s eye,
like it was yesterday. That is how he will always be in my heart, in my mind. Never an old man, but John Corbett By God Morgan! Even as a child I could see that his very name struck terror into all of the people around me, at least the others, those who were not of the Party. And so it should have done. Tall and overwhelming, unbelievably strong and powerful, the muscles of his chest and his arms nearly splitting his t-shirt. That was Dad. The Green Man of the Wood, the God personified, just as my mother was the Goddess. There was hate and love in him that awed me, little girl though I was, because I sensed that it was something magical, something primal. Love for me and my mother, and terrible hate against those who would hurt us. When I was little I was always so afraid for my father when he was out in the mountains, knowing that the whole world was trying to destroy him, to take him from me. But somehow I always felt he was there with me, watching over me. I feel it still. Now he watches over us all.”
There was another face on one of the posters, a thickset red-haired man with a flat face and cold green eyes like ice. Everyone saw the mug shot on the poster. No one commented on it, but it gave Don pause. “Hmmm,” said Don, casting a careful eye over the gathering.
“What?” asked Sarah.
“I don’t see any Hayden Lake Flying Column men here,” said Don. “There are at least five I know of, here in town and in Tacoma, who have just as much right to be here as the rest of us. Then there’s Admiral David Leach. He’s not here either. I wonder if Oglevy’s people are having their own reunion? As usual?”
“They’re probably in a trailer park wherever the local meth lab is,” said Sarah dryly. “I know it’s legal now for the few who still feel the need, but I hear that little subculture of the Republic’s population still likes the traditional home brew.”
“Now, now, Snoops, racial unity and all that,” chided Don. “I’m sorry, Don, but those guys scared me back then and they scare me even today,” admitted Sarah. “I know more than most that the Aryan race is capable of the most extreme violence of all the many human species, however we seemed to lose the knack for a few generations back. But when it gets real and up close I still freeze. I’m always afraid that Eva will bring home some boy whose father or grandfather rode with Oglevy. She’d be attracted to that kind. The strength and power, the rage and violence that so fascinates women.”
“Oglevy mostly recruited from the native Northwesters. That was one of the reasons he was so valuable to the revolution. We called them woodchucks. Back in the South they used to be called buckra men,” said Don soberly. “The lean, mean poor whites who rode the slave patrols at night and kept racial order. Nowadays those who were born here call themselves woodchucks with pride, Cindy did tonight, but it used to be a derogatory and contemptuous term, I’m sorry to say. Oglevy redeemed that term. He was born in this land and he brought to his side those who were born here, and that was why he was so useful to us and so terrifying to ZOG. They scared ZOG then, and their descendants scare ZOG even today,” said Don soberly. “I wish we didn’t still need men like that, Snoops. Maybe one day we won’t. But until the world changes and accepts the right of our people and our nation to be here on this earth, there will always be work for the guys and the gals with the tattoos who come out of those trailer parks.”
“These who are with us here tonight are the best from that time,” said Sarah.
“Oh, jeez, Snoops, I don’t want to mess it up for them!” whispered Don dismally to Sarah. “Suppose I find out
that the Olympic Flying Column legend isn’t true?”
“Don, do you remember one of the Old Man’s axioms that they teach our kids in school?” replied Sarah. “The one about truth being an absolute value? That what is true must always, in the long run, be good? And what is not true can never in the end be good?”
“I remember,” said Don. “Snoops, one day many years from now, you and I will come to one of these gigs and we will be the only ones here. We were the youngest. That means that we may well be the last to depart. The last to enter the Hall of Valhalla. How will we bear it?”
“We will bear it because that is the Destiny that the gods have given us,” said his wife. “Don, tomorrow you will do your duty to this country and this people, as you have done all your life. Tonight, don’t worry about it.” Don felt a tap on his shoulder.
“G’day, mate!” said Charlie Randall, grinning and shaking Don’s hand. Randall was a tall and weatherbeaten looking man of sixty-something. Even on a cool Northwest autumn night he still affected an Australian safari suit.
“Hey there, Charlie. Snoops, I need to natter with Charlie a bit,” said Don. “Can I trust you with this horde of ancient satyrs? Just dancing? I’m not going to come back out here and catch you in flagrante delicto, now? You know the Republic’s law gives me the right to plug you both if I do?”
“Hey, you won’t have to,” laughed Sarah. “If I even offered and flashed them a bit of this alabaster bosom they’d drop dead of a heart attack!”
“I’ll make a note of that, Sarah, in case we ever needs to whack one of these geezers for reasons of state,” replied Charlie with a grin. “Quiet, clean, and untraceable.”
After some preliminary socializing Randall and Don Redmond got together in a closed-off private room next to the main reception area. Outside increasingly drunken old vets of the NVA were whooping it up. The band called themselves The Domestic Terrorists, and they specialized in Northwest rebel songs, the ones based on old bluegrass and Appalachian ballads and also on Irish songs from the Provo period and earlier. There were six musicians with various combos of banjo, guitar, fiddle, slap bass, bass mandola and tin whistle. Their audience’s enthusiasm was fueled by copious quantities of Red Hook, Henry Weinhard ale, and the Olympic Club’s famous microbrew, along with generous shots of Old Log Cabin bourbon. The air was blue with tobacco both smuggled and domestic product of the hydroponic gardens of the state monopoly. “So what can I help you with, Don?” asked Randall.