A DISTANT THUNDER Read online

  I’m sorry, ma’am. I know that’s a terrible thing to say and I didn’t mean to upset you, but you do know that’s what they called it back then, don’t you? And still do in the United States? That it’s their term, not mine? You’re asking me how could any human woman on earth murder her own child and not go mad? They did go mad, ma’am. Mad as March hares. They just didn’t realize it, because all the world around them was mad and they had no point of reference by which to discern sanity. There’s nothing wrong with being judgmental when judgment is called for. If human beings aren’t supposed to make moral judgments then what the hell is the difference between a man and an animal? That’s what happened in the Garden when Adam and Eve chomped down on the forbidden fruit. They came to know sin when they saw it. I mentioned that scrape thing in case anyone who watches this is inclined to bitch at me and the NVA for our colorful use of the language. I always thought those media reptiles had a hell of a gall to call us murderers while every day those people were literally throwing baby parts into dumpsters. Jesus Christ on a raft! Still makes me killing mad every time I think of it. I exult in every one of those sons of bitches whose head I busted open with a bullet. You want brutality, ma’am? You’ll get plenty of it if you want to keep on with this project. We Jerry Rebs were plain mad dog mean, but it was the righteous brutality of God against those unspeakably evil people and their wicked government, who broke asunder the very temple of life, and I glory in every minute of it I can remember. At least I never killed babies. I waited until they were grown-up people and in the full flower of their evil before sending them to hell.

  No, ma’am, I’m not a Christian. Not sure why not. I lived around them most of my life, but for some reason it never took. That was Rooney and China and Ma Wingfield talking through me, but theology aside, they were right. There was evil abroad in the world in them days, and you didn’t have to be a Christian to understand that. Our battle against the United States was a battle against Satan, against the principle of evil that is hateful and destructive of all human life, in a time when it sat enthroned and triumphant over all the world. We had Christians and Odinists and National Socialists and atheists and agnostics and Wiccans and neo-Druids, all of whom understood that. Yeah, we were cruel. We had to be to survive, never mind win. But the empire we fought against was cruel on a scale never before known in human history. ZOG didn’t just kill. ZOG kept people alive and miserable, like some monstrous snot-nosed mongoloid idiot pulling wings off flies. Those American sons of bitches had every bit of what we gave ‘em coming, and then some. Never mind abortion, even. Any American cluster bomb on Baghdad or nerve gas warhead in the Gaza Strip killed more people than my whole crew took out during the War of Independence.

  I know, I’m wandering again. You okay now, ma’am? Again, I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you. Then listen, my children, and you shall hear. This is how that baby-killing bastard Sammy Rothstein got his.

  * * *

  At the time of the Rothstein hit I was with Tank Thompson’s crew, here in Dundee. We were one of several active service units working out of Lewis County. Washington’s own Rebel County, as we call ourselves to this day. It’s a proud tradition and I’m glad I was a part of it. Officially Tank’s boys and girls were called Company E, South Sound Brigade, Northwest Volunteer Army. At any given time there were maybe twenty or thirty of us on active service with Company E, but so many came in for a couple of tickles and then went, for whatever reason, that I couldn’t even begin to give you any kind of numbers for any given month, never mind the whole War of

  Independence. A hundred or a hundred and twenty total? More? If you’re curious, ma’am, you can try looking up the official brigade history with the Old NVA Association. I’m sure it’s in the library somewhere. I never bothered.

  The first South Sound brigadier was Dick Warner, who was arrested three months after 10/22 and wasn’t released until after Longview. He later became a Member of Parliament and after that he was the director of the NAR Wildlife Conservation Trust. In my day the brigadier was Brian Kovacs. I think I met him five, maybe six times during the entire war, when I was riding shotgun for Red Morehouse who was the Army Council’s Political Officer for our sector. Kovacs was killed in the street fighting in Tacoma after the Longview accords, when some of the Federal troops at Fort Lewis decided the treaty didn’t mean them and we had to correct that little misapprehension. He won a posthumous Iron Cross. Our third Brigadier for about six weeks before the NVA transmuted into the NDF and the organizational table changed was Franz Ulrich Molitor, who later took command of the Second SS Panzer Division, the allGerman outfit that racked up all those victories and decorations during Operation Strikeout.

  NVA Lieutenant Dorsey “Tank” Thompson got his handle from when he was a tank commander in Iraq and Syria, and later on during the abortive American invasion of Egypt. He got his tank blown out from under him. Thompson was pretty badly burned, including the left side of his face, which gave him a very distinctive appearance and one the Feds were always on the lookout for. He practically had to turn into a vampire for the whole war, moving only by night and staying in the shadows so no one would recognize him. We referred to our outfit as our guys, or our crew, or just Dundee. Some of the companies in our brigade had snazzy names, like B Company in Tacoma, that had so many Russian immigrants in it they were called the Don Cossacks. There were other outfits that had such names, like the Barbary Pirates, the Montana Regulators, and the Butcher Boys up in north Seattle. We once kicked around the idea of picking a name for ourselves, the Dundee Destroyers or something juvenile of the kind, but Tank vetoed it. “You let the media pick up on something like that and it draws unwanted attention from ZOG,” he said. “We get high profile and Centcom in Washington is going to move us to the top of their hit list and send in more heat than we need or can handle. Sorels and his goons are enough for us to deal with. We want to stay off their radar screen as much as we can while still being effective. With any luck they’ll think we’re imports from Seattle or Vancouver, although Sorels isn’t as dumb as he looks.” (It would be impossible for anyone to be as dumb as Sorels looked.) “I think he knows we’re right here in town and I’m sure he remembers some of us from his previous incarnation as village constable.”

  One warm spring day in May, with the cherry blossoms come and blown, and the green leaves newly on the hardwoods, I was lying on a mattress in a back room in a safe house in Dundee, trying to get some sleep, when Johnny Pill came in and told me we had a tickle on. One thing you learn when you’re doing the resurrection shuffle—sorry, me lapsing into old fighters’ gab again, and no, I got no idea where that one came from—one thing you learn when you’re on the run is that you sleep whenever you get the opportunity, even if it’s only a cat nap, because you never know when you’ll have to spend the next two days out on a tickle and then make a fast break and gopher hole it. Yeah, I can say ishkabibble and twenty-three skiddoo, too. Anyway, Johnny Pill, that’s John Pilafski, a big grumpy middle-aged Polack who rented the safe house, came in and told me we had this major tickle shaping up in Olympia and the CO wanted us to meet him at the old swimming hole ASAP. The old swimming hole was our code name for a state government warehouse on Airdustrial Way in Tumwater. There was nothing even remotely connected to swimming about it, the idea being if the Feebs were to overhear some reference to it they’d think water and look elsewhere than a one-story corrugated iron hangar full of steel shelves stacked with outdated state documents and forms and misprinted calendars from 1999. All the paper was supposed to be recycled, but one of our girls in the state offices had gotten into the computers and deleted the whole building from the database. Thus far no one in the government even appeared to remember the place existed. The lieutenant had a key and we rendezvoused there occasionally.

  The previous evening I had been out on a minor tickle, what we called a Come to Jesus session, no offense to any of our Christian comrades. Actually, our Christian comrades called it a Come to Je
sus session as well. Some old fart whose name I forget had been going around Dundee wearing a white construction hard hat with a large Amurrican flag on the front and an equally prominent Israeli flag with a blue Star of David on the back accompanied by some obscure Bible verse or other. He drove a battered old white Nissan covered with assorted bumper stickers from various religious right churches and pro-Israel committees, etc. He’d stop on the street or in a shopping mall, pass out those stupid tiny little Christian comic books and babble to anyone who would listen about how the Lord of Hosts would soon come down from the sky and vaporize all evil Muslims in the name of Jeeee-zus, as opposed to Jesus, and God would smite hip and thigh on anybody else (like us evildoers of the NVA) who dared to lay hands on the Apple of God’s Eye, the Joosh pipples who were the Chosen Ones blah blah blah ishkabibble. Oh, Walter. Yeah, Walter was this geezer’s name. He was crazy as hell and he had the papers to prove it, since he lived on some kind of government nut check. We had ignored old Walter for months, figuring that if anything he was helping us. The village idiot was not exactly the best advertisement in the world for truth, justice, and the Zionist way. That’s one of the more subtle revolutionary skills, by the by, figuring out who among your enemies are such incompetent nincompoops that they are actually doing more harm to the régime and more good to the revolution by remaining where they are.

  But then one evening Walter was in Fulton’s Market, and the checkout girl, who was not a Volunteer but knew how to get word to us, overheard some snippets of suspect conversation between Walter and our local red-white-and-blue headache, Washington State Patrol sergeant Leon “Dummy-Dummy” Sorels, of whom you may be sure I will have more to say at a later date. Walter was just a kook, but Sorels was definitely on our crew’s to do list. He had already survived one bomb under his patrol car and one .30-06 slug through his living room window. After these bashful tokens of our affection, he adopted a lifestyle distinctly nomadic. We were thinking in terms of setting up a major full-force ambush and whupping a spot of Shock and Awe on Dummy-Dummy’s steroid-pumped ass when time and place should serve, but he was a cagey bastard, always varying his movements, always surrounding himself with his fellow gun thugs, never sleeping in the same place twice in a row, and then just after the Walter incident... never mind, that’s for later. Anyway, to make a long story short, old man Walter might have been crazy but he wasn’t stupid. He was up on all the latest poop and propaganda from the Department of Homeland Security, he had all the DHS wanted posters up on his wall (we later saw) and he was evidently not averse to collecting some reward money for the apprehension of us domestic terrorist evildoer-type dudes. I guess he saw no reason why doing the Lord’s work shouldn’t put a few shekels in his pocket. The girl at Fulton’s told us that Walter was telling Sorels some spritz about how he’d allegedly seen Carter Wingfield and one of his sons riding down Second Street in a gray pick-up truck with such and such a license number.

  Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. Our crew used a whole motor pool of different vehicles which we had stashed all over Lewis County, and for all I know one of them might have been a gray pickup truck, but whether or not Walter was telling the truth or just trying to weasel his way into Sorels’ good graces to get on his snitch pad wasn’t the point. Riding around town in a foolish car plastered with stupid Amurrican bumper stickers and babbling like a loon about Israel being the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy was one thing. This was informing, and informing of any kind was something the NVA could not, dare not ignore. Besides, I was field-married to Rooney Wingfield, the finest long, tall drink of redneck honey ever to come out of the South Carolina Low Country, so Carter Wingfield was my father-in-law and his sons were family. Yeah, I’ll tell you about that later on as well. But for that reason, I took a personal interest. All of a sudden Walter was very much on my own to do list as well as the crew’s. We got the okay from the lieutenant, and the night before some of the boys and I went to the old geezer’s cluttered, sad little house and chastised his sorry, crazy, snitching ass. We tied Walter into a chair in the kitchen while he screamed Bible verses at us, then we took his hard hat with the Masonic dishrag on it, clapped in onto his bald mottled noggin and nailed it into his skull. Nice big tenpenny nails. Then we sewed his lips together with fishing line for good measure so that everyone would know why we had done what we did. I assume Walter was dead by the time someone eventually found him, but by then I was really hot from the Rothstein hit and I had to ease my young ass on down the road a bit until I cooled off, so I lost track.

  Did we have to be so cruel to the old man? Yes, ma’am. As a matter of fact, we did. The United States had more men, more money, more weapons, more gear, more informers, more courts, more electronic spying equipment, more prisons, more instruments of torture, and more resources of every single kind than we did. Not to mention total control of all the newspapers, all the television networks, the full backing of Hollywood, and except for the activities of a few of our cyber-guerrillas, the government controlled almost all of the internet. We had to even the odds in one of the few ways we could. Through pure, raw fear. Why do you think it’s called terrorism? Shock and Awe didn’t just apply to actual combat. When we sent a message we needed to bellow it from the rooftops and let everybody know in no uncertain terms that we were very, very serious about this new white nation business. We needed to make damned sure that a little light bulb came on over everybody’s head as they realized that opposing the Northwest Volunteer Army’s agenda was not a good life decision. Kind of like that old movie where the Jew movie producer wakes up with a horse’s head in his bed. In fact, I think we actually did that once to some rich bitch who was part of the horsey set. The result was her husband resigned from his Federal judgeship and didn’t send any more of our people into the living hell of ZOG’s Third World prisons, and others of his kind suddenly discovered they had serious health issues that required them to lay aside their judicial duties for the duration. They were right. Staying on the bench wearing those black robes could be very unhealthy.

  Terrorism is the weapon of the weak against the strong.

  That afternoon I went up to Oly with Johnny Pill. Johnny drove one of our legitimate i.e. non-stolen vehicles, a delivery truck from an organic bakery. Dundee was blue-collar working class, when there was any work available that hadn’t been stolen by Mexicans. Oly, on the other hand, was hoity-toity liberal, lattés and birkenstocks and granola, bicycle paths, and women who hyphenated their last names, so the truck fit right in. Believe it or not, there were plenty of right-wing health nuts, and one of them owned the bakery and gave Johnny a front job under a false name, and the use of the panel truck. I stayed hidden, crouched in the back amongst the sourdough loaves and bran muffins with my .455 Webley Carter had given me as a first shoot-out present, and a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. When we got to the warehouse on Airdustrial Drive, somebody opened a roll-up door and

  Johnny pulled the truck inside. “You got any doughnuts in there?” I heard somebody ask.

  “Naw, just goddamned bran muffins and bagels,” said Johnny. I clambered out.

  “The muffins are pretty good,” I commented, having eaten one on the way up.

  “Right, all the bods I sent for are here,” called the CO from over in one corner of the large shelved hangar piled high with dusty boxes of obsolete paper. The burned side of his face always flushed red a bit when he was intent on something. “Pull up a pew, guys, and let’s get started.” Our whole crew wasn’t there. I don’t recall a single occasion during the entire war when every man and woman we could muster from the Dundee area were ever in a single place. It wasn’t a good idea. If something went bad, we didn’t want it to go all the way bad. But this afternoon there were about a dozen Volunteers present, which for us at that time was a lot of bods to go out on a tickle, so we knew that this one was something heavy. Most of my comrades present I knew by their noms de guerre. Protocol was strict. You never asked a Volunteer his or her real name, and the informatio
n was seldom offered. There was Tank himself, of course, lean and mean in slacks and a black t-shirt, reddish hair hanging down over what was left of one side of his face. There was Echo Company’s quartermaster and armorer, Smackwater Jack. Smack was a shaggy, hulking, white-bearded old sinner covered with prison tattoos. He looked like an evil Santa Claus. I either never knew what his real name was or else if I did, I long ago forgot. The quartermaster of an NVA unit was arguably the most important officer in the crew, in some ways more so than the CO or XO, because he had charge of the three things that made us capable of fighting at all: the guns, the vehicles and the safe houses. Smack always wore a very old denim vest with an insignia of some kind on the back, which had been defaced by almost two generations of sweat. We always figured it was some biker gang’s colors, but we never knew which one.

  Our executive officer, Tank’s wife Pam, wasn’t there. The XO was the liaison contact with the rest of the NVA, but also the money man or woman in a Northwest Volunteer Army unit. We seldom saw Pam unless we were doing something that needed cash or we had done a revex—sorry, revolutionary expropriation, which is a fancy word for an armed robbery—in which case we gave the cash to her, less commission. Yes, the Party allowed us commission on stickups. This was a completely pragmatic concession to human nature. They figured if they let us keep twenty cents on the dollar we would avoid the embarrassing sitch of stealing from the revolution. The laborer is worthy of his hire, as Carter Wingfield would have put it in his scriptural way. Revexes were popular tickles, as you can guess. Some of us showed a real flair for it and became real John Dillinger types. And you know? Because we were allowed that commission, I don’t think any of us ever skimmed off any more than that from our take. It was a point of honor. We weren’t common gangsters, you know. We were political gangsters, madam.