A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “No, it’s on the news talk shows. That’s why I watch the news, and I will keep on doing so,” she said primly. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping informed. Whatever you want to call it, either here or in the Middle East, it’s obviously not going to be over any time soon. Everybody needs to keep up with what’s going on in the world. You can’t let yourself be worried every time a bomb goes off over there. Or here.”

  “Well, at least this one’s not in downtown Seattle,” said Ed in disgust.

  “Not today, anyway,” said Kelly.

  “I swear to God, I think your mother and I are going to have a nervous breakdown!” complained Ed. “We worry ourselves sick about Jason getting killed by Muslim lunatics in Saudi Arabia, and you getting killed by the white racist lunatics here just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time! I’ll be glad when you can move down to L.A. and get the hell out of here, and that’s something I never thought you’d hear me say. Believe it or not, we left California twenty years ago partly because of all the violence, so you kids could have some kind of decent life.”

  “And also to get away from the Mexicans?” asked Kelly impishly.

  “Jesus, honey, don’t say that even in jest!” cried Ed in horror. “Kelly, do you know what could happen if you made a remark like that in public and—and somebody heard, and it was misconstrued…”

  “You mean if some informer called the Hatecrime Hotline and turned me in for the reward?” asked Kelly in a sour voice. “Yes, Daddy, I know. Jennifer Flagler in my biology class was ratted out to the Hatecrime Hotline, and Mark Jenot from the tennis team too because he told an African-American person joke. The Fatties came and took them away to be denazified and have their brains washed squeaky clean. So don’t worry, I promise I shall commit no inappropriate japery in public.”

  “I mean it, Kel! It could ruin any chance you ever have to make it in movies!” warned her father sternly. “A denazification course on your resumé won’t exactly impress all those Jewish producers and casting directors, never mind your Jewish agent, even if it is just over some careless offhand remark. I don’t want you to end up working in a grocery store checkout your whole life because of some inappropriate joke you made as a teenager! You’ve worked too long and hard and you’ve got too much talent for that!”

  “I know. Oh, Daddy, don’t worry!” she exclaimed, her mouth full of muesli now. “I grew up here, remember? The Trouble has been going on for five years now. Jeez, I know what to say and what not to say in public!”

  “And that goes for when you move to L.A. as well,” said Ed.

  “There aren’t any spuckies in Los Angeles,” said Kelly. “Down there it’s the crime, the Somali gang-bangers, and the junkies. I hardly got to go out at all when I was in Hollywood, except for a couple of daytime tours to Grauman’s Chinese theater to see all the stars’ names in the sidewalk. The studio surrounded us girls with armed guards like we were gem-encrusted. About all I saw of L.A. was through the windows of the shuttle bus between the cast condos and the sets. From what I smelled of the air, I didn’t miss much. At least the studios and condos had air conditioning and air filters. The security was tighter there than in the Federal building downtown, and they’re not fighting a revolution in Los Angeles. And you know, that’s at least one thing you can say for the goots. They ran all the gang-bangers and street trash out of Seattle. If you don’t get blown up in one of their bombs, they’ve actually made the city a lot safer.”

  “Now what did I just say about making silly statements like that?” snapped Dr. Shipman.

  “Kelly, please!” wailed her mother. “You mustn’t say such things! Don’t you know that under the latest executive order on speechcrime, now your father or I can be arrested as well if someone overhears you?”

  “Not to mention what the goots themselves might do if any of them overheard you calling them goots,” put in Ed, his voice urgent. “Kelly, please take this seriously and watch what you say out loud! These people are heartless murderers, and whatever you may think, they don’t just murder minorities! I know because we have to take overflow from the emergency rooms every time there’s a major bombing! At the very least, even if they didn’t kill you, these bastards might kneecap you with a gun or break your legs with a baseball bat if you said something they didn’t like, and the situation has gotten so out of hand that most likely nothing would be done about it if they did!”

  “Number one, Hillside High is a rich kids’ school and there aren’t any goots there,” Kelly responded. “Goots are all trailer trash who drop meth, and auto shop kids. Our shop kids at Hillside all practice on their parents’ Lexus. Number two, you two can’t be arrested, not after today, anyway. I’m eighteen and you’re no longer legally responsible for what goes on in my mind.” She looked up at the television. “Well, speak of the devil! That’s the Eastgate Mall! Turn it up!”

  She grabbed the remote and unmuted the small TV. The cable news program’s dramatic music and the well-known Terror on the Home Front logo in the background came on, the canned lead-in they always used for NVA activities. Terror on the Home Front was replaced by an unctuous middle-aged white man in a suit. For many years the station’s regular reader in this slot had been a Chinese woman, but she had suddenly disappeared from the television screen without explanation several months before. The newscaster spoke in the grimly solemn tones reserved for reporting rebel strikes. “Two members of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization were shot and killed last night at around 8 PM in the Eastgate Mall. A caller to Station KSTA news who identified himself with an authenticated code word stated that the action was carried out by members of B Company, Number Two Seattle Brigade of the Northwest Volunteer Army.”

  “Why don’t they call these racist bastards terrorists any more?” demanded Martha Shipman irritably. “Why isn’t there any sense of outrage like there used to be back when all this started?”

  “Because Jerry Reb will shoot the media people if they call them terrorists and make a big deal out of it,” said Kelly. “Everybody knows that. What do you think happened to Gloria Tang? They kidnapped Jeannie Vandenberg and tattooed swastikas on her butt, and ever since then the news media are too scared to say anything really bad about them. They just call it balance now.”

  “Jerry Reb?” groaned Ed. “Is that the latest you kids have come up with? Oh, beautiful! You’d think these racist murderers were some kind of heroes now!”

  The local news announcer went on to report that the two off-duty officers of the FATPO, a man and a woman in civilian clothes, had apparently been followed into the upscale Belvedere restaurant on the upper level of the Eastgate shopping mall in Kirkland by two unidentified White males, and had been shot dead at their table. There followed two artists’ photofits of the suspects, one a middle-aged man, smooth-shaven with dark hair. The second gunman was a younger man with long blond hair and a heard. The suspects had fled through a fire exit into the mall’s parking area and escaped. Then came police mug shots of a craggy-faced, red-headed man of about forty-five, scowling into the cameras. “The Number Two Seattle Brigade is believed to be commanded by this man, James R. Graham. Department of Homeland Security spokesman told KSTA News that in view of the latest racially motivated criminal activities of the NVA in Seattle, they are raising the Domestic Terrorist Bounty for Graham’s capture or termination to one million dollars.” Kelly noticed her parents had turned slightly green.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I think we’d better cancel our reservations at the Belvedere for tonight,” said Ed. “Marty, do you think we could order in something really nice and catered?”

  “My God, if my birthday had been one day earlier we might have gotten caught in the middle of an NVA hit!” said Kelly excitedly. “As it is I’ll probably just get waiters and waitresses singing Happy Birthday!”

  “You think all this horror is funny?” asked Dr. Shipman, annoyed.

  “Well, not if I was the one getting shot, I
wouldn’t,” said Kelly reasonably. “Everybody else thinks it’s exciting, though. When all the other girls down on the Cheerleader Love set heard I was from Seattle they all wanted to know what it was like living in a war zone. They were disappointed when I had to tell them I’d never actually seen a shooting or a bombing. Just a lot of black guys and bull dykes in body armor riding around in Humvees, and both of ‘em trying to look down my top at the checkpoints. But I did get some funny looks when I came to a cast conference wearing a blue, white and green pants suit.”

  “So that’s what we’re famous for now?” groaned Ed. “Terrorism?”

  “Well, what did the Northwest have to be famous for before the spuckies came along?” asked Kelly. “Rain and Sasquatch. At least there’s no question that Jerry Reb exists.”

  * * *

  Just as Kelly Shipman was rolling out of her driveway in Mercer Island, on the way to Hillside High and the tennis courts in her new Explorer, a black Ford sedan with tinted windows and Federal government license plates pulled into a grass-grown alley beside a dilapidated-looking two-story house with peeling paint in the north Seattle suburb of Ballard, just off 85th Street. The car slid into the back yard and turned around, ready to make a quick exit. A man got out. He was a tall and rangy individual wearing a rumpled blue pastel shirt and tie and a light sports jacket. The second man who emerged from an upstairs apartment in the house and came down the outside stairs to greet him was shorter and stockier, and nattily dressed in full Brooks Brothers ensemble. “Any problems coming in?” asked the man in the suit.

  “You were right, there’s a new Fattie checkpoint on the 520,” said the tall man. “Thanks for the heads up. I hate the thought of getting boxed in on a bridge. They got Tagger Thornton on a bridge.” In the bright morning sunlight they climbed back up the outer stairs and entered the upstairs apartment. The room had an air conditioner, a device increasingly common in Seattle. Due to global warming, the Puget Sound summers were becoming hot and muggy to the point of being genuinely uncomfortable. The air conditioner was suddenly switched on, although it wasn’t really that hot this early in the morning. But the electric motors of older window air conditioners could also interfere with shotgun mikes and bugging attempts.

  The house was one of the many floating headquarters of the Northwest Volunteer Army’s Number Three Seattle Brigade. The building was owned by a cranky old lady who lived on the first floor, and who appeared to be not only deaf but deranged whenever anyone attempted to speak to her. Mrs. Sweetzer wasn’t unbalanced, unless it was through hate and grief since her only daughter had been abducted from the convenience store where she worked, then raped and murdered by black gangstas many years before. Her house was now divided up into cheaply furnished apartments with plastic furniture, stained porcelain in the bathrooms, and cracked linoleum on the floor. Officially all the apartments were occupied by elderly people on pensions or private charity doles of various kinds (Social Security was long gone) as well other residents with Hispanic and Asian names that were listed on the doorbell. A truly diverse dwelling, if you looked at the mailboxes and doorbells. No one ever actually saw many other tenants in or around the building, diverse or otherwise, but the house was isolated by large green hedges on one side and the brick wall of a paint store on the other, and was the soul of nondescript, so few people ever actually looked. The boarding house was used as a transit point, arms dump, occasional field hospital, and conference and training facility by the Third Brigade. The blatantly governmental vehicle which had just parked in the back yard was a form of camouflage occasionally used by the brigadier and his executive officer. There were all kinds of spook cars rolling around Seattle these days, and the citizenry had learned to look the other way and pretend they didn’t see, which was the way the NVA wanted it.

  Commandant Frank Barrow, commanding officer of Number Three Brigade, was the tall and tired-looking man in his late thirties who had arrived in the black ZOGmobile. He took off his jacket and eased down into one of the plastic armchairs, in front of the air conditioner, removing a nine-millimeter Beretta pistol from the belt clip at the small of his back and setting in on a lamp table beside the chair. “Damn, I never can get used to it being hot in Seattle,” he grumbled, stretching back to catch the cool air from the air conditioner. “Goddamn corporate bastards and their pollution, creating this heat trap in the atmosphere! We never needed these damned electric boxes in our windows in the summertime when I was growing up.”

  Barrow’s dishwater hair already starting to turn gray. His face was seamed and his hair beginning to go prematurely gray from five years of tension and underground living, and before that from years on the bottle. The NVA’s strict regulation against drinking had probably saved his life even as it was endangered by his participation in the war. He struck one as a haunted cubicle denizen at some marginal computer company, or a burned-out used card salesman, tired and worn and defeated, but his demoralized appearance helped him in his job. In the America of the early twenty-first century, it didn’t pay for a white man to look too sharp. White males weren’t supposed to hold their heads up, especially in the Northwest, where some alert FBI agent or Fattie might wonder just what the hell a white boy was looking so chipper about. Like most men of his generation, the first generation to be forced into the army in large numbers due to a combination of unemployment and the draft, Barrow was a military veteran with a two-year extended tour in Iraq under his belt. Iraq had left him with a shrapnel tear in his calf, a frantic aversion to any temperature over seventy degrees, and a sick and visceral loathing for anything bearing the face of George W. Bush. In his drinking days he had gotten in trouble for screaming fits and wanton destruction of various advertisements, posters, memorials, book jackets, and television screens where in the jug-eared visage of the former President was displayed.

  Frank Barrow was a former police detective who had gotten royally screwed by the Seattle PD because he had successfully busted a high profile African-American city councilman on drug dealing charges. Barrow had found himself back in uniform so fast it made his head spin, and within the next year he had accumulated enough trumped-up disciplinaries and bad efficiency reports to wreck his career. He finally got the message and resigned from the force. It was then that he went on the bottle, paying for his booze with a series of dead end jobs. His wife had responded by engaging in a string of increasingly blatant affairs, then she finally left him, taking their two children and moving back to Wisconsin after cleaning out the remains of their joint checking account and making the mortgage check bounce, so Barrow lost the house. From that point on life had gotten worse and worse, until Barrow was seriously considering suicide. Then came the Coeur d’Alene uprising of October 22nd, and all of a sudden white men with guns in their hands were fighting back against the country and the society that had increasingly degraded and humiliated them for almost a century. At long last, someone was saying out loud the things that Frank Barrow had always known in his heart to be true. Barrow knew some people who were affiliated with the Party from his police days. He was able to track one of them down, and through that contact he joined the underground Northwest Volunteer Army. He had begun with one of the first Seattle crews in the bleak winter weeks after 10/22, when the life up the uprising had hung by a thread, and from then on he had used every ounce of the street smarts and knowledge of the city that he had gained as a cop to make Seattle dangerous for Federal employees and anyone with a dark skin. Bullets and betrayal brought down the men above him in the chain of command, and he had moved up through the brutal ladder of natural selection which is war.

  Lieutenant Joe Dortmunder, Barrow’s 2IC for Number Three Brigade, was a dapper man in his forties who was about twenty pounds overweight, but who was always flawlessly dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, with a fresh haircut and manicure, and who usually carried an expensive leather briefcase and palm pilot. He looked like an insurance salesman, and that was his cover. He actually represented a national brokerage and ma
de good money at it, in between supervising murders and bombings. On more than one occasion, he had pitched cops and Federal officers when he was stopped at various checkpoints, and so good was his patter that he had even sold a few life insurance policies to FATPOs. They needed it. The lifespan of a Federal officer of any kind in Seattle these days was likely to be nasty, brutish, and short.

  The two men met approximately once a week like this, always in a different hideout, with Barrow bringing Dortmunder up on everything going on in the command and the two of them assigning the coming week’s mayhem quota to the crews and individual Volunteers who comprised the hundred or so people in Three Brigade. Other than such meetings as this, they stayed apart so that the Federals could not take them out both at once. If Barrow died or was arrested, Dortmunder would be able to step in immediately and keep Three Brigade going without a hiccup. If Dortmunder bought it, then any one of half a dozen company commanders in the Brigade were capable of stepping into his shoes. Despite the danger, these personal conferences were a necessary evil. The NVA could of course communicate among its various elements by telephone and computer and sometimes had to, but all electronic communication in the empire was monitored by the Federals and analyzed for anything even remotely suspicious, and so phone conversations and e-mails necessarily had to be short, to the point, and in code. As risky as it was, there simply was no substitute for direct sit-down. Neither men carried or used any notes; if the Feds seized Dortmunder’s palm pilot they would find nothing but insurance.

  Barrow began by going over the various activity for the past week. “Right, let’s get the routine stuff out of the way,” he told Dortmunder “Next time you see Jock Graham, give him my compliments and my congratulations on his becoming a millionaire. Looks like those two Fatties his boys took out last in that yuppie fern bar last night pushed DHS over the edge.”