A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “Damned if it doesn’t look like they’re serious about it,” conceded Anderson reluctantly. “I got confirmation just before I left. They released the first prisoners from Auburn last night, and Carter Wingfield picked them up in Millersylvania Park this morning. Not only that, but the men he took with him got to be the first to show off our new uniforms, such as they are. We’ve got that Irishman up in Seattle and he’s pressing full speed ahead. Apparently the Feds want to get this show on the road, and soon.”

  “Where?” asked Barrow. “Where will the conference be held?”

  “At first they was talking about Geneva, or Jamaica, or Camp David, but we tole ‘em to hell with that,” rumbled Morgan. “We gone have it right here in the Homeland.” His speech was still redolent with the twang of the Kentucky mountains where he had been born.

  “And they didn’t argue for five months about the venue and the shape of the table and how many bathroom breaks each delegation got, and all that crap?” asked Barrow in surprise.

  “Nope. Looks like they really do mean it,” repeated Anderson, shaking his head in disbelief. “God, I wonder what the hell they’re up to? Why are they doing this?”

  “They’re doin’ it because we whupped their asses,” said Morgan, spitting a wad of tobacco on the grass.

  “I wish I could believe that,” said Anderson worriedly. “I’m sorry, I just don’t trust anything the Federal government of the United States does or says. In the past century the power structure in America has reached a state of almost pure corruption. These people always have the most sinister of ulterior motives for everything they do. Their minds are as twisted as corkscrews, and that’s how they think. It’s a lifelong habit with them.”

  “All right, then where in the Homeland will the conference be convened?” asked Barrow.

  “We’re proposing to hold it down in Longview,” said Morehouse. “We thought about this a lot. We don’t want it in the middle of a big urban area where our people could be surrounded, but we don’t want to have it so far out in the boondocks that you have to be Daniel Boone to find the conference site, either. We want this done out in the open, in plain view as much as possible. Transparency is our friend here, while secrecy serves the enemy. We’ve never made any secret about what we want, or what we’re fighting for, and we’re going to stand up and demand it now. We want the whole world watching, looking over our shoulder. We wanted something that was close in enough to a populated area so that we can conduct this jamboree in some kind of civilized surroundings, with such amenities as indoor plumbing for our guests from the world diplomatic community, and bars for the news media, who won’t appreciate any kind of dry environment. That sounds petty, but we’re going to have to try every little thing to cater to people we’ve been killing and terrorizing. So they get to drink, even if we can’t. We need to be able to get the media in close enough to us to make sure the Feds don’t control total access to outside communications, so we can make our case and let the rest of the world know what’s going on. None of this embedded crap for the reporters: we’re making it clear that free and uncensored media access is an iron-clad precondition, although in view of who controls the media I’m not sure how much good that will do us. Longview is close enough to Portland to make them feel comfortable, yet close enough to our own bandit country around here so that there’s at least some chance we can E & E if things go bad.”

  “Hell, down here we can just break for the woods and the first house we come to will most likely be sympathizers,” commented Morgan, taking a slug of Mountain Dew. “The local Party did a real slap-up job before 10/22 down here.”

  “They’re apparently sufficiently serious so they want to start the conference by the end of this month,” said Anderson. “July 30th or 31st.”

  “I haven’t heard any public announcements yet,” said Barrow. “It could be the Feds haven’t gotten the message about this telling whole world thing. Don’t they want to keep the negotiations secret, at least in the early phases?”

  “No, although they did ask that they be allowed to make the public announcement, which we conceded,” said Brennan. “That’s letting them put their own public relations slant on it right from the start, true, but it’s their party. A lot of this is going to involve our giving in on minor face-saving bumpf, even while we hold out for the substance. The trick is going to be making sure we can tell the difference.”

  “Might as well let them break the story, since no one would believe us if we called a press conference and asserted that we were negotiating independence from the United States,” agreed Anderson. “There will be a nationwide televised statement from the White House within a few days, as soon as we let them know through the UN guy that we agree and we’re ready to set a time and a place.”

  “Chelsea herself is going to make the statement?” demanded Morgan.

  “Looks like it,” replied Morehouse with a nod. “Of course, it’s pretty much an open secret that her mom still runs the country, insofar as anyone runs it any more.”

  “Tell me about it. That little girl has got no damned business being president of anything bigger than a PTA,” said Morgan. “She seems to be a sweet kid, leastways she don’t fuck everything with a pulse like her daddy did, but she’s dumb as a bag of hammers.”

  “I wonder if she knows that one of our heaviest hitters is her half-brother?” asked Anderson with a chuckle.

  “That Italian kid who was with Murdock’s column?” asked Morgan. “Matt Redmond mentioned him a couple of times. Yeah, I heard about him. I understand there’s quite a story there.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Vitale,” said Barrow. “He’s Jock Graham’s chief head-knocker over in Two Brigade. I’ve met him a couple of times. And you’re right, it’s a hell of a story. Chelsea Clinton isn’t actually going to be present at the negotiations with the American delegation, is she?”

  “No, apparently it’s going to be headed up on their side by Walter Stanhope, the Secretary of State,” said Anderson. “That’s another suspiciously favorable omen from our point of view. The Secretary of State, not the Attorney General or Director of Homeland Security. It shows that they’re treating the Northwest as a political problem now, instead of a criminal one.”

  “But Chelsea will be making the public television announcement?” asked Barrow again. “Where, exactly, does she fit into all this? I mean, after all, technically she is President of the United States. You’d think at some point she’d be involved in giving away three or four of the states.”

  “That’s what puzzles me most about this whole thing,” Anderson continued. “Who the hell’s idea was this conference anyway, and why? It’s one of the world’s biggest open secrets that Chelsea Clinton is a figurehead president with no will of her own. There’s a rumor that one day Chelsea was sitting in the Oval Office, the window was open, a leaf blew in and landed on her desk, and she signed it. Whatever crap she gets up on television and reads off the teleprompter, you know damned well that the Wicked Witch of the West made up for her. But why the hell is Hillary Clinton agreeing to do what no American president since Lincoln has agreed to do, divide up the American pie? Breaking up the country is hardly what anyone with dreams of imperial glory wants to go down in history as her legacy. Okay, John C., maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ve beaten the swine worse than we realize and the old bat has decided to cut their losses before the whole show collapses.”

  “Mmm…you know, if that is the case, we might actually be able to get a better deal if we just kept on fighting and let the damned American empire collapse,” said Brennan, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he sipped his Diet Pepsi. “Then grab everything we can out of the rubble.”

  “Thar’s those amongst the command structure as say we should do just that very thang,” growled Morgan. “I ain’t so sure myself it ain’t the way to go.”

  “I’ve had enough, John,” said Barrow quietly. “Until this peace possibility came up I didn’t realize just how much I’d had enough. I�
�d pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to make it, that sooner or later they’d get me and I’d end up bleeding my life out on a sidewalk or buried alive in Florence or someplace like it. If there’s a chance I can have another future, I want to take it. If we can talk our way into the Republic of three states and maybe a bit of Montana and California thrown in, I’m good with it. I’m looking forward to popping the top on a beer again and seeing if I really am a drunk, or if it was just being half a man that made me that way, as petty and personal as that sounds. Once we’ve won and I’m free in my own country, I’ve got no more excuses.”

  Morehouse spoke up. “That’s one of the many problems we’re going to face, the extremists on both sides who don’t want to stop fighting. God knows what we’re going to do with the wild-eyes like Oglevy. But if we can get the Republic now, without any more bloodshed and building up any more bad blood and bad karma, for Christ’s sake, we need to grab it!”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” asked Barrow.

  Morehouse nodded. “I think it could be possible, yes. I used to tell my kids in our little unofficial after-school classes that in a colonial war, it’s never the generals who surrender. It’s the accountants. They finally go to the occupying government and tell them that the colony is simply awash with red ink, it isn’t going to get any better, and it’s time to leave. Maybe that’s what is happening. The United States of America, the fount of all the money in the world, has finally been bled dry. If that is the case, if the people in power understand that if they don’t cut the Northwest loose then there is a chance they may lose it all, not to us but to the forces of the very chaos they have been creating for the past century—if they have sense enough to understand all that, then yes, it may well be possible for us to pull this off.”

  “So if enlightened self-interest is the criterion, why the hell has the United States never pulled out of the Middle East?” asked Brennan. “It was obvious after the first year in Iraq that civilizing the native chappies at the point of a gun simply wasn’t going to work.”

  “An interesting point,” agreed Morehouse. “Apparently the forbidden I word trumps common sense and enlightened self-interest where the United States government is concerned. When push comes to shove, it could be that Israel’s survival really does take priority over America’s.”

  “Okay, how can Third Brigade help?” asked Barrow, getting to the point. “Uh, don’t get me wrong, gentlemen, I’m flattered to be invited to a high-level meeting such as this, but I have to say I’m puzzled by the absence of the other Seattle brigade commanders, and I’m still uncertain in my own mind why I’m here. You want us to provide some men for security for the negotiators?”

  They all looked at him. “You can do a lot more than that for us, Frank,” Morehouse told him frankly. “The reason you’re here is that we have a special personal assignment that we want you to carry out. You’ll be turning command of your brigade over to Lieutenant Dortmunder—by the way, Joe, you’re a Commandant now. Frank, you’re a general.”

  “The NVA doesn’t have generals,” said Barrow, half unbelieving.

  “We do now,” said Brennan. “I’m one, or so I’m told.”

  “We’ll get you a pair of stars for your collar or something,” said Morehouse. “We’ll even provide you with a sharp-looking uniform to pin them on. Frank, we want you to go to Longview. We want you to head up the Northwest Republic provisional government’s negotiating team.”

  “What?” exclaimed Barrow in astonishment. “Have you lost your—Jesus, why me? What the hell to do I know about diplomacy and politics?”

  “What the hell do any of us know? So learn, and fast. This is a new field for all of us,” said Morehouse. “We need two things in the men we send to Longview, tongues and brains.”

  “Sure, I’ve got the tongue for it,” said Brennan. “I actually kissed the Blarney Stone, the real one at Blarney Castle down in Cork. The one ye have to hang over the edge of the castle wall and damned near break your neck to reach. That probably indicates I don’t qualify in the brains department.”

  Morehouse continued, “Frank, you have one of the best reputations in the NVA for tactical skill and intelligence and long-range planning. Statecraft isn’t too far a leap, and since no one else on our side has any experience in it, we have to play it by ear. We’re going to need men sitting around that table in Longview speaking for our new country who can think fast on their feet.”

  “And where are you going to be?” demanded Barrow. “You know damned well you ought to be the one leading our side, Red.”

  “I am going to be in contact, but not in reach, their reach. I am going to put this bluntly, Frank. This is the future of our country and our race we’re talking about here. We must have our best thinkers and talkers at this conference, but on the other hand those are the very people that we can’t risk losing. We still have to consider the possibility, maybe even the probability, that this whole peace conference thing is just some kind of Borgia-like ploy on the enemy’s part to lure our best people out into the open so they can be killed or captured. God knows nothing else has worked for them. They’re quite capable of that kind of treachery, and they may be getting desperate enough to try something like that. We can’t allow it to happen, but on the other hand we can’t just send a gaggle of expendable mediocrities to the conference to bring our new nation into being. We have to strike a balance. Please don’t be insulted when I say this, Frank, but what we’re going to do is send in our best second-stringers while our first string starts taking care of business. The real business of creating a new nation in North America, while you guys down in Longview are shucking and jiving and buying us time.”

  “Don’t worry, ah’m second-strang too, it looks like,” said Morgan, grinning in his beard. “I’ll be in there with you.”

  “John will be there as the hammer. He will represent to the enemy a credible threat of muscle,” said Brennan. “Expect him to be doing a lot of threatening and pounding on the table.”

  “I assume that you guys on the first string will be available for consultation?” asked Barrow.

  Morehouse nodded. “To some extent, yes, but part of the problem is that we ourselves have insisted that whoever both sides send to the conference shall have full plenipotentiary power, which means the authority to negotiate a deal then and there, sign it, and have it binding on our respective governments. We had to insist on that, because otherwise they would draw this business out forever and a day, by constantly running back to Washington D. C. for consultations, and blaming their own higher-ups for the lack of progress. It will become like those idiotic talks at Panmunjon which went on for fifty years after the end of the Korean War. We have the momentum now, and we don’t want false hope and endless niggling over a conference table to take the wind out of our sails. One of their ulterior motives for calling these talks may be simply to give themselves a breather. We’re not going to let them have that. Besides all these other considerations, we also need you there for balance on the team.”

  “Uh, balance?” asked Barrow. “What kind of balance?”

  “Tell me, Frank, what are your religious views?” asked Morehouse bluntly.

  “Uh, not sure I have any,” replied Barrow, taken aback. “I’m not Christian Identity or anything like that. Neither do I climb up on the roof during thunderstorms and bang two garbage can lids together calling on Odin to strike me with lightning and make me invincible.”

  “You’re NS, right?”

  “Mmm, more or less. I’m not sure if Heinrich Himmler would have invited me to his castle retreat for the mystical SS rituals, but I suppose you could say I’m a Rockwell man,” said Barrow. “The books I carry with me from place to place are White Power and This Time The World, if that helps pigeon-hole me. But why is it necessary to slap a label on me or any comrade at all? We’re all Volunteers and we’re fighting for a country, a Homeland for all white people the world over.”

  “That kind
of thinking is why we need you at the head of the team, Frank,” replied Morehouse somberly. “I agree, we shouldn’t be pigeon-holing our comrades or slapping labels on them, but the problem is that we’ve been slapping labels on ourselves for a long time. You came into the NVA after 10/22, right?”

  “That’s right,” replied Barrow.

  Morehouse nodded. “Then you weren’t with the Party during the years before the war, and you weren’t part of the deranged zoo that was the so-called white resistance movement in all the years before that. Our forty years of wandering in the wilderness, if you’ll forgive the Biblical allusion, only in our case it was over sixty years, depending on when you want to date the beginning of the Northwest Migration movement from. That’s another reason we urgently need a newer man like you in charge of this crucial mission. You weren’t ever in the old movement, and you haven’t picked up the bad habits and the baggage that people with pre-war movement backgrounds all seem to lug around with them. We’ve been able to subsume our internal differences since 10/22. We had to, because failure to do so meant death and prison. Much to everybody’s surprise, at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute and the last damned second, we were finally able to get our act together. When you’re sitting in a car in the rain waiting to kill somebody, or hiding in a safe house, or lying in an ambush out on the interstate waiting for a Federal convoy, then you have to be able to rely on your comrades completely. We were able to achieve that, and that’s why we’re now at the point where independence and white freedom is now in our grasp. But we could still blow it if we allow some of these stupid pre-Northwest Migration issues to re-surface. First and foremost among those issues is religion.”

  “There’s something else,” said Brennan. “We’ve reason to believe that the Feds have finally gotten the message and they’re going to be playing the religion card in a last-ditch attempt to split the rebellion and turn the whole thing into a Christian crusade against evil Nazi devil-worshippers. We are getting reports that they’re trying to create some kind of Christian vigilante group or death squad from the fundamentalist Judæo-Christian churches here in the Northwest, a kind of black ops thing they can use against us and against the new government of the Republic in the event that any kind of settlement looks imminent.”