The Hill of the Ravens Read online

  Spuckies – Derogatory and defamatory term used by local white people in the Northwest to denote racially conscious white settlers who came into the Homeland during pre-revolutionary times. Origin of this term unknown.

  SS – Special Service. The NAR and the Party’s élite military formation. Drawn from the top achievers of all the NDF branches, with naval, air, and space mobile wings. Highly trained and equipped with the most advanced equipment, the SS deliberately follows the traditions of its historic namesake of the Third Reich. The corps seeks to erase all differences and divisions of class, religion, and nationality, creating a true Aryan “Band of Brothers”. For this purpose, extensive political and racial education based on the principles of National Socialism is part and parcel of SS training and qualification.

  Stukach – A Russian term meaning informer, dating from the time of Stalin and the hideous purges of the 1930s. How exactly this term entered the lexicon of the Northwest American Republic is not certain. When applied to the family or person of a citizen, it is considered the ultimate insult, along with the words “whigger” and “attorney.” All three are considered to be killing words, i.e. prima facie casus belli under the law of the Republic for a duel to the death if the parties involved cannot be reconciled by formal procedures under the Code Duello.

  Take The Gap – Broadly speaking, to Come Home. To immigrate to the Northwest American Republic. In practice, to “take the gap” generally connotes an illegal entry into the Homeland from the United States, Aztlan, Canada, or sometimes by air. “Taking the gap” often involves physically running the border under Mexican or American gunfire and pursuit.

  Volunteer – A male or female soldier of the Northwest Volunteer Army.

  Whigger – “White nigger.” A defamatory term for whites during the pre-revolutionary time who aped the mannerisms and subculture of blacks. Considered to be a killing word in the NAR, i.e. sufficient casus belli for a duel to the death if no compromise can be reached between the parties involved.

  Woodchuck – Originally a term with defamatory and derogatory connotations used by Aryan settlers in the Homeland to denote those who were born in the Northwest, especially rural areas. Now transmuted and claimed as a proud and honorable designation by those born in the Homeland.

  WPB – The NAR’s War Prevention Bureau. A covert agency designed to prevent the necessary military, political, and psychological conditions from developing within the United States, Aztlan, or anywhere else that might lead to a serious military threat to the existence of the Northwest Republic, through the use of targeted assassination and other black ops. The WPB is also responsible for tracking down and liquidating spies and traitors to the Northwest Republic, including informers and traitors from the time of the War of the Independence. Their motto in German is Alles wird abgerechnet. “All accounts will be settled.”

  ZOG – Zionist Occupation Government. Term originally created by the obscure National Socialist writer Eric Thomson in the 1970s. Strictly construed, ZOG means the Federal government of the United States. In actual usage it is a much more all-embracing term meaning the System, the Establishment, the generic “them” used by oppressed peoples to denote the Federal tyrant.

  The Foggy Dew

  The Foggy Dew

  It was down the glen one autumn morn From Coeur d’Alene drove I. There arméd lines of marching men In squadrons passed me by.

  No pipe did hum, no battle drum Did sound its dread tattoo.

  But a lone ship’s bell on lake’s dark swell Rang out in the foggy dew.

  I.

  The rebels were all dead by six-thirty in the morning.

  The summer sun had just risen in the east over the distant, snow-capped mountains of Washington. Pockets of mist nestled in the low ground, and beaded droplets of moisture still clung to the blades of grass and the green leaves on the nearby forest floor. The long sloping hillside glistened with dazzling pinpoints of reflected light from the dewdrops. The echoes of the machine gun fire and the RPG explosions died away, leaving only the hanging reek of cordite and the metallic smell of hot brass from thousands of ejected cartridge casings. Black smoke rose into the still morning air from the burning vehicle hulks on the road, and when a soft breeze sprang up it carried the sizzling stench of burning rubber and charred flesh into the American firing positions. There was a long silence, and then the birds started to sing again.

  The commanding officer of the ambush scanned the kill zone with his field glasses. Major Woodrow Coleman of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization was a very black man with thick lips and a bristly, dirty-looking beard of short curly whiskers. He was immensely pleased with what he saw in his binoculars. He knew now that he had been right not to call in air support. The sight of a single helicopter, even high up, would have caused the enemy to abandon their vehicles, break up and head for the timber, where long experience had taught the Americans it was most unwise to pursue them. This way the surprise had been total. The guerrillas in the two vans had been roasted alive when the vehicles exploded from the rocket-propelled grenades and the mines, but the ones in the open truck had managed to roll out with amazing speed and discipline. The only retreat for the rebels from the road and the spitting Federal gun muzzles had been up the rocky slope pre-laid with radio-detonated Claymore mines, and their only cover had been a few scraggly pines. Falling into squads, they had moved swiftly up the hillside with their own weapons blazing, right into the strings of anti-personnel mines that cut them down. Caught off guard even as they had been, Jerry Reb had made a fight of it. From the radio chatter in his earphone the CO knew that some of his own men were down. Even under the sheets of automatic weapons fire and the shredding shrapnel, the partisans had proven to be cool heads and crack shots. “It’s those damned teflon-tipped bullets again, Major!” squawked his chief medic in his ear. “They go through kevlar like a hot knife through butter! Where the hell do they keep getting those damned teflon slugs?”

  Coleman didn’t answer. Right now he didn’t care, such was his savage joy at the carnage, at a lifetime of burning hatred at last fulfilled and slaked, his cup of revenge against the hated white man running over. It looked like the ambush had gotten them all. He could see dozens of the rebels who were down now, not moving, littering the hillside like crimson lumps of meat, twists of dirty laundry splattered in the dirt. “Alpha and Bravo teams, move in! Approach with caution,” he said into his radio mike dangling before his lips. “Stay spaced, don’t lump together, stay alert! Do not assume all of them are dead or disabled. Make sure! Blast anything that moves up there. Check out the kill zone and terminate any remaining wounded, but from where I sit I’d say that’s a wrap, boys and girls. We finally nailed these racist motherfuckers, and it’s about fucking time! So let’s all have ourselves a good look at what dead members of the Master Race look like, whaddya say?”

  Over a hundred and fifty FATPOs rose silently from their positions, heavy lumbering shapes in camouflage weighed down by kevlar and Bakelite body armor. They carried outlandish weapons bristling with odd scopes and plastic attachments, and their equipment creaked and rattled. They shambled up the hill in a waddling gait, hunched low to the ground, clanking and rattling like medieval knights, guns at the ready and nervous fingers on triggers. There was no motion on the hillside.

  One by one they surrounded and prodded and stared at the bodies of the rebels. Some of the corpses were big men in denim jeans and work shirts crossed with ammo belts, their jutting beards and glassy eyes thrusting into the sky, final snarls on their dead lips. Some were ordinary looking guys with blood-soaked baseball caps bespeaking a head wound from a sniper or one of the fragmentation mines that had been hidden in the trees and rocks of the slope and blown when the rebels began their fighting retreat uphill. A few were women, their hair blown from under their caps and now soggy with their own blood. The Jerries’ weapons were motley. There were some Uzis and Heckler-Koch submachineguns, and there were a good many M-16s captured from the Fe
deral forces, as well as hunting rifles and a few Kalashnikovs possibly smuggled home from Afghanistan or Iraq or Saudi Arabia by the rebels who were veterans of the U. S. military. There were homemade grenade launchers adapted from single-barrel shotguns, and stick grenades turned out in some secret workshop in Spokane or Tacoma. The FATPOs scuttled up to each body in turn, hesitantly, almost superstitiously, still afraid, still unable to believe that this time they had won. Time and again over the past fourteen months, the NVA had killed hundreds of their comrades. On more than one occasion this very crew had reduced them to a shameful, panic-stricken rout in carefully laid and ferociously fought ambushes and night attacks on their camps and barracks. But this time they were the ones who were caught. Caught and annihilated. In a single mad minute the FATPOs had cut loose with everything they had. They had pumped over twenty thousand rounds and dozens of rockets onto the hillside, not to mention the mines they’d planted. The body of every dead rebel was shredded and mangled.

  Finally the lumbering behemoths in the creaking body armor found the two corpses they wanted most to see dead. The man was powerfully built, with red hair and a heavy flowing moustache. His eyes and facial features had been obliterated, only the moustache rising slightly above a mess of goo. “He must have caught a 50-caliber right in the face,” muttered one of the Federal troopers. The big man’s slouch hat had been knocked twenty feet away where it lay on the ground. One of the police ripped open his shirt and jerked it off his bleeding body, exposing his arms. “Viking female tattoo on right bicep, Confederate flag and horseman on left forearm,” radioed another of the men. “This is Murdock. We got the bastard, sir.”

  “Out…fucking…STANDING!” growled the major, lumbering up beside them, unable to wait any longer to see it all for himself close up. “And what about that skank blondie ho’ of his?”

  “Her too.” The girl in camouflage fatigues lay on her side, her cornsilk hair trailing over her extended right arm. Her eyes were closed, and she looked almost like she was sleeping. The tip of her dead fingers just touched the grip of her AK-47. The Feds had to bend down and look closely to see where the back of her head had been blown away.

  “That’s Melanie Young,” said one of the officers, a young white man who took off his helmet to reveal a military buzz cut. “I recognize her from her file photos.” The black major laughed aloud in pure joy and viciously kicked the dead girl’s body, once, twice, three times. “Is that really necessary, sir?” demanded the young white trooper.

  “Got a problem with a brother dissin’ white women, Mac? Maybe you want I should tap dance and shuffle a bit for the poor dead missy? You want a little session with Internal Affairs down at the Homeland Security lockup in Bremerton, Mr. McBride?” snarled the major.

  “No sir,” replied McBride woodenly.

  “Then shut you mouf. I wanna kick this bitch in her dead racist ass, I kick the bitch. I wanna check out her titties, I’ll do that too. Got it?” Coleman suited his actions to his words, leaning down and slapping her face, ripping open her camo shirt to expose and leer at her blood-dripping breasts.

  “I got it, sir.” McBride looked away, up over the small valley that was now lighting up as the sun rose higher in the sky. He got it, all right. The fog and the dew were burning away in the sunlight, and so were the last of his doubts. McBride knew this was it. He’d put up with everything else. He’d put up with the torture in the interrogation centers, the mass deportations of whole communities, the bulldozing of family homes, the pass laws, the closures and checkpoints. He had put up with the suspension of habeas corpus and the secret military tribunals, the brutalization of people he considered to be fellow Americans. He’d looked the other way, pretended it was necessary to save lives, told himself that the people he helped to victimize were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, racists and Nazis, less than human. He had told himself time and again that the racial bond between himself and the people he daily victimized and beat down did not matter, did not even exist, even as his own heart told him it was a lie, that they were of his own blood. But this was it. Coleman’s kicking and violating the dead girl’s shattered body was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had been young, she had been beautiful, and she had been a passionate and dangerous enemy. McBride was perfectly well aware that she would have killed him without a moment’s hesitation had she ever gotten the chance, but now that he saw her dead he could not bring himself to feel hatred or triumph. She had been life, and he knew in his heart that his was the darkness. The desecration of her proud spirit and her mortal remains was more than he could bear.

  McBride looked up and saw one of the bullet-shattered trees. On its denuded branches perched a large black feathered form. The bird stared down at him, and McBride seemed to sense accusation in the obsidian eyes. He recalled from one of his maps that this stretch of hillside belonged to a property called Ravenhill Ranch, where no doubt some early settler had raised dairy or beef cattle. Somewhere he had read that ravens were long-lived birds. McBride irrelevantly wondered how old the bird was, what it had seen in its time. Be that as it may, he himself had seen and done enough.

  The Federals loaded up the bodies of their fallen enemies onto cargo helicopters that roared over the broken horizon on radioed command, then boarded the transport choppers. They were flown back to their temporary base camp in the empty town of Leland. By order of the United States Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, the town’s several hundred residents had been deported to a relocation center in the Nevada desert several months before on suspicion of terrorist sympathies. That suspicion arose from the fact that no one in town seemed able or willing to inform the FATPO intelligence officers of the whereabouts of the same group of rebels they had just annihilated that morning. At midnight, while most of his fellow officers were getting uproariously drunk in the mess hall on kegs of beer and bottles of champagne flown in for the occasion, and while Major Coleman was performing an impromptu karaoke rap song about the morning’s events, McBride slipped out of the camp. He was wearing civilian clothes, denim jeans, a plaid shirt and a windbreaker. He headed into the woods carrying his survival gear, his rifle, and as much ammunition as he had been able to hide away. About four hundred yards out he slid down an embankment and stealthily crossed a small stream under the starlight. It was a new moon, and the forest was cool and quiet.

  Just as he clambered up the opposite bank he heard to his left the sound of a round being jacked into the chamber of an M-16 and a quiet but deadly command, “Freeze! Right there!” A flashlight quickly flared from the two-man sentry post. Damn! thought McBride bitterly. I thought they were a click or two south. Well, it’s what I get for teaching them to vary their position on watch. Trained them too damned well for my own good, I guess. “Schumacher? Petoskey? Is that you?” he demanded of the men in the darkness.

  “Hey, lieutenant!” said one of the sentries as they moved forward. “What are you doing out here? Checking up on us? Thought you’d be in there with the rest of ‘em celebrating.”

  “I don’t feel very celebratory tonight,” he replied. “Besides, in case you missed it, things didn’t go all our way today. We lost eight guys ourselves. Besides that, Jerry Reb snuck into Port Orchard this morning while we were otherwise occupied and leveled the Kitsap County Special Criminal Court with a truck bomb. We didn’t get ‘em all. Not by a long sight. We ain’t never gonna get ‘em all.” McBride knew these men and he was sure he could talk his way out of the situation, but all of a sudden he no longer wanted to. He had been living with lies too long. “I’m leaving,” he told them bluntly.

  “Huh? Leaving for good? You mean you’re going AWOL?” replied Petoskey in surprise. “Is this one of them informal resignations Homeland Security keeps sending us the nasty threatening memos about, sir?” chuckled Schumacher.

  “No,” said McBride. “I’m not just cutting out like those other guys. I was going to resign, true, but that’s not enough any more. Not after this morning.
I’m headed west into the Olympic. From the latest intel posts I think I have a good idea where I can find the man I want to meet. Corby Morgan. He’ll be stepping up to fill the gap now we’ve taken out Murdock.” There was dead silence from the other two men for a long pause. “I’ve had enough, boys. I’m joining the rebels. Others have done it. If I can get close enough to talk to someone without getting my ass shot to hell, and if I can convince them I’m for real and I want to make it up to these people, to this new country they want to make, then I’m throwing in with the NVA.”

  “Yeah? And if Jerry Reb thinks you’re a spy he’ll put a bullet in your head,” Schumacher reminded him in a skeptical voice.

  “If that’s the way it plays out, so be it. Can you honestly say I wouldn’t deserve it? You know what we’ve been doing out here for the past year,” said McBride bleakly. “You have eyes and ears. We’re worse than they ever were. It’s evil, what we’re doing to these people. America has become an evil place. I’m not going to do evil any more.” There was a longer silence. “Well?” prodded McBride. “You guys want to play this by the book, now’s the time to start shooting.” His hands and arms tensed, ready to snap up the barrel of his rifle and fire.

  “I reckon we’ll be coming with you,” said Schumacher’s voice in the dark forest.

  Come All You Northwest

  Volunteers

  Come All You Northwest Volunteers

  Come all you Northwest volunteers, our victory is sure! In battle or internment camp, our courage will endure! They will never take our dignity, although they give us hell, In Zion’s concentration camps, in each dark prison cell!

  II.

  Olympia in October mellows the soul with a subdued gaudiness. Usually the winter clouds have not yet set in. The pink and white cherry blossoms of spring are long gone, but orange and red and green spangle the oaks and the maple trees. The fallen leaves on the grassy verges that line the residential streets and the malls paint the city’s floor in bright color, and over all lies the crystalline light of the northern lands. The neatly trimmed parks and lawns of the Northwest American Republic’s capital city become fragrant with the smell of late-blooming heather furze imported from Scotland. The air is clear without a single scent of pollution, and the streets hum softly from the electric engines of the city’s trolleys and occasional ground cars. The branches of the native evergreens can be heard whispering in the wind. There is not an electricity or telephone pole in sight; in the Northwest, the last of those unsightly gibbets that once disfigured every town in America for a century and a half are long gone. They were rendered obsolete by the broadcast rotational power grid that allows Northwesters to pluck their heat and light and sound out of the very air. There was no longer a live cable anywhere in the Republic, above ground or below it. Nor did the quiet whirr of electric motors intrude into the landscape; it was almost like the summer buzzing of bees in the background. Visitors to Olympia always come away remembering how quiet everything is.