A Mighty Fortress Read online

Morehouse pulled a paper out of the stack on the clipboard and handed it to Barrow. “They call themselves the Fifth Monarchy Tendency. You see, since we are a unitary political movement, we can’t have separate parties. There’s only one Party, of course. We just have so-called tendencies within that Party, which is another word for factions and cliques and claques and all the other tag ends of democratic chaos. These guys actually showed a little finesse, unlike Comrade Fetterman and his dopey leaflets falling from the sky. They claim with a certain logic that the best way to counter the threat of pro-Zionist evangelical militias and resistance to the new Republic is to out-Christian and out-Scripture them. This is their position paper. They are demanding that it be one of our featured presentations at the conference and they want one of their people assigned to the delegation at the last minute. He’s standing by in town now and waiting for our call. One Reverend Gareth Burns. Interestingly, he has never been an NVA or Party member, although he did some pretty valuable support work up in B. C. Captain Chenault may know him.”

  “Never been a Volunteer yet he wants in on the kill and the cut?” snorted Morgan. “He’s got some damned nerve.”

  “Third Section is running a full profile on him now,” reported McGrew, “But apparently his bona fides are good. He’s done prison time under Canada’s hate law for preaching racial separation, You got to respect anyone who made it alive out of Kingston, and understand if he’s maybe a little funny in the head. That place is supposed to be worse than Florence or Auburn or the women’s camp at Pullman.”

  “Fifth Monarchy?” mused Barrow, glancing at the document in front of him. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “I know them,” said McCausland. “They’re an interesting blast from the past, actually, if you’re into obscure religious movements. That was the name of the most extreme of the Puritans who fought under Oliver Cromwell. That’s about where they are, too, theologically speaking. Back in the seventeenth century. They do not consider Christian Identity to be true Christians, but a mere fly-by-night modern fad from the nineteenth century. John Calvin was wishy-washy, John Knox is more to their taste, and to them the last great mind in theology was Cotton Mather. The passengers on the Mayflower would have hailed them in fellowship.”

  “So I see,” said Barrow. “According to this, that’s about how far we’re going back in time. The Northwest Homeland is to be a Christian state, and the Bible is to be the basis of the new society. Every law that is passed has to have a Scriptural cite, chapter and verse. The new youth must not be raised in frivolity, whatever that is. Oh, and we are to have a king.”

  “Well, I could go for that, so long as I get to be king,” said Robert Gair.

  “No, actually, we are to be ruled by King Jesus, according to this. Oh, I can just see it all now! We get up at the press conference this afternoon and tell everyone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please set your watches back three hundred years.’ Dear God in Heaven, no pun intended! We are on the verge of securing the existence of our people and a future for white children, and these blubber-brained jackasses want to sit there and tell Howard Weintraub and Walter Stanhope all about frivolous youth and King Jesus?”

  “What do you want us to do, Frank?” asked Morehouse.

  “First off, call Reverend Burns and tell him to stay the hell away from this airport, because if I see him I will probably strangle him with my bare hands,” said Barrow. He handed the paper back to Morehouse. “Secondly, tell these people that they can take this nonsense and shove it up their asses, and I see no need for any diplomatic re-wording.”

  “The Political Bureau will,” said Stepanov.

  “Red, will the Army Council and the Political Bureau be able to keep these yammerheads out of the media and out of our hair at the conference? How much support do you think they’re going to get from the rank and file?”

  “I can tell you how much resistance they’re going to get from the rank and file,” said Captain Gair with a scowl.

  “Yeah, and that terrifies me. Red, we must not have any kind of conflict breaking out between Party factions while these negotiations are going on!” pleaded Barrow. “Please, please, tell these assholes like Burns and Fetterman whatever you have to, lock their asses away if you have to, but in the name of all that is holy, make them shut up!”

  “Carter?” asked Red. “You know I mean no offense to your own faith, but can you give me some idea of how much support this faction is likely to get within the Party and the NVA?”

  Wingfield sighed, “I don’t know, and I don’t think that’s how the question needs to be phrased. Let’s see if we can avoid the whole concept of factionalism. Anybody who knows me knows I was saved long ago by a good preacher and a good woman. You also know I had a daughter killed a while back, and a son-in-law I long ago came to regard as my own blood who was lucky to make it out of Auburn. I want this new country more than I can say, and I want it to be a righteous land that walks in God’s ways. But this,” he gestured towards the Fifth Monarchy document, “This isn’t the way to go about it. Look, let me talk to these people. I speak the language, so to speak.”

  “Thank you, Carter,” said Morehouse with audible relief in his voice.

  Barrow turned to them all. “And now I suppose I have to do something I was hoping to avoid. I have to ask you guys point blank: am I going to have to fight against this crap as well as the Federals when we get down to Longview? I mean, we know that the Americans are attempting to use religion to divide and conquer here. Have they succeeded? Have they penetrated this very delegation with this religious horse shit? Are you guys going to fall out and start going at one another with Bibles and hammers right in front of the media and hollering who’s a dead Jew on a stick? I can’t call off the conference, but I’d like to know. I’d also like to know why in the name of all sanity you people, both groups of you, cannot lay this aside for the common good of our people? Why in the name of God or gods or the Great Pumpkin am I even having to waste time on this, on today of all days, one hour before we confront the enemy of all mankind and try to save our people from extinction? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Barrow raved. “The ship is burning and sinking with our entire race on it, and you won’t let us in the lifeboat until we decide how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Damn you!”

  “All Southerners ain’t necessarily got religion,” said Morgan bleakly. “What I want to know is where was God when the FBI butchered my wife in the King County jail? Never mind. This stuff these Fifth Monarchy whosits are doin’ is stupid and verges on goddamned treason, and that damned fool down in Corvallis needs to be dropped out of his own airplane.”

  “I am National Socialist,” said Stepanov with a shrug. “I have no opinion.”

  “All right, that leaves you two,” said Barrow, looking at McCausland and Robert Gair.

  “Our Movement has been avoiding the issue for fifty years, sir,” explained Gair patiently. “Always we get told not now, not now, later, later, later. We’ve been patient, but exactly when is later? When do we talk about this and make a collective decision for our race to make a new departure? I’m sorry, but to some of us, to a lot of us, a new spiritual path for the white man is important. Damned important. I have never understood how we are supposed to fight a deadly dangerous enemy who threatens our very being, while at the same time worshipping that enemy as a god. We all know how Christianity has been used against our race as a weapon of corruption and genocide, and Colonel McGrew’s daily intelligence briefings are full of incidents where these Bible-thumping dumb-asses are being incited by their preachers to attack us on the ground because they think Jews are some kind of divine messengers or whatever. Captain Chenault is right on with what she said in there in the briefing yesterday. We can’t just fight with guns any more, we have to fight with ideas, and it’s more crucial now than ever before that we take on the most poisonous and dangerous ideological weapon in the enemy’s arsenal, and that’s Christianity!”

  “And why exactly
do you self-proclaimed pagans and atheists persistently refuse to recognize the patently obvious truth, which is that the so-called Christianity taught by these greasy thieving televangelists for the past fifty years is not Christianity at all?” asked McCausland in exasperation. “What part of it isn’t simply a money swindle is Zionism wrapped in a quasi-Scriptural disguise that’s as phony as a three dollar bill! These damned TV preachers with their private Lear jets and their two thousand dollar suits and their so-called prosperity theology are nothing but con men working for the Jews! They’re part of the overall Zionist agenda to co-opt and destroy Western civilization just as much as the Federal Reserve and the United Nations and the Patriot Act ever were! Okay, fine, no argument. Let’s string ‘em all up. I’ll pull on the rope myself. But anyone with the slightest knowledge of history can tell you that this so-called Christianity practiced by the major denominations for the past century is a vile mutation, an abomination that has no more to do with the original faith than it does with time travel! And may I ask, Captain, how many times in the past five years has your life been saved by Christian comrades of the Northwest Volunteer Army? How many Christian families have sheltered you when you were on the run? How many Christians have been tortured in the FATPO barracks and the Federal prisons, sometimes beyond all human comprehension like that poor woman Cathy Frost?”

  “Many,” said Gair. “No argument there at all from me, sir. Look, nobody I know, nobody sane anyway, wants to ban Christianity or persecute you. Fetterman and his kind are kooks. It’s rather the reverse we’re worried about. You see what these Fifth Monarchy people are trying to do already, turn the Republic into a theocracy! Yes, I am familiar with the history of Europe under Christianity and a lot of good came from it. I’ll give you that hands down. But you can’t be trusted with state power, because it’s also a historical fact every time you wind up in a position of power you start burning people at the stake! I don’t want to take your faith away from you, but I damned sure am not going to tolerate any attempt by a bunch of ignorant tub-thumping boneheads to take my faith away from me!”

  Barrow waved his hands helplessly in the air. “Gentlemen, you do understand, don’t you, that if any discussion like this occurs at the Longview conference within range of the Federal listening devices and they pick up on it, we might as well pack the whole thing in and come back empty-handed? If we can’t present a united front, they’re going to eat us alive. Captain Gair, you ask when will be the time to discuss all this fascinating and vitally important stuff? I can’t tell you. I don’t know. I can only tell you one thing. It is not…now!” he concluded, slamming his fist on the airport manager’s desk for emphasis.

  “I think, General, that it would be of some help if we knew exactly where you stand on the religious issue,” said Rev. McCausland. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have to agree with Captain Gair about one thing. The undeniable fact is that it is important to many of the people who have laid their lives on the line for the cause of this new country, and it simply cannot be dodged forever in the name of temporary expediency. When does that temporary expediency end? You say not now. But it seems to be stretching out for a very long time. Don’t worry, I am not one of these fanatics who thinks that it would be better to remain in Babylon rather than to leave it under a cloud of doctrinal impurity. That’s just dumb. But if I am going to go in there today and negotiate a country away from those Jews and their pet swine, then I want to know what kind of country it will be. God forbid I should compare myself with a Scriptural prophet, but am I leading my people into the Promised Land, or is it going to be forty years in the wilderness?”

  “You mean you didn’t catch the golden calf provision in the draft treaty?” needled Gair.

  Barrow clenched his fists together and did his best to avoid cursing, shouting, and turning over the desk in his rage. “Very well, I am going to say some things now which I most likely shouldn’t say,” he said evenly. “It’s not my desire or my intention to offend any of you comrades, but I can’t overemphasize how important it is that we get this settled before we go in there into the presence of the enemy, so we can present a united front and win our Homeland. I am familiar with history, and I have the greatest personal respect for the good aspects of Christianity. Even if this weren’t the major issue it’s becoming, I would never dream of offending any of our Christian comrades or calling Jesus a dead Jew on a stick. That kind of behavior is childish and stupid and rude, and there’s no excuse for it no matter what one’s personal beliefs on the subject. As to my own views, of course there is a God. All you need to do is look at the way the human body works, or the way the ecological systems of the earth balance, or the structure of a snowflake or a leaf, to know that there is intelligent design in the universe.

  “What God is like I do not pretend to know, and I frankly believe that for human beings, He is unknowable in any real sense, no more than an amoeba can comprehend a galaxy. I do believe that we can discern His intent sometimes if we look hard enough, and that He does occasionally manifest Himself in human affairs in the person of certain very extraordinary men of the degree of Marcus Aurelius, or William Shakespeare, or Adolf Hitler. But this has nothing to do with securing the existence of our people and a future for white children, at least not in the immediate sense. So I repeat. Not now!

  “All this having been said, I believe that it is possible and maybe even desirable that many years from now, once we have obtained state power and created an all-white society, and done the thousand and one things that are necessary for us to do in order to insure our racial survival, we might want to address this. Once we have our own stable and prosperous all-white nation, and we can allocate the time on the racial agenda for this issue, and can debate it in an atmosphere of calm and security, then perhaps we should agree to all sit down and examine the role of religion in our people’s lives as it pertains to the coming centuries, in the light of scientific knowledge and the expanded consciences which we now have. I do not believe that it is blasphemy to try and perceive God through reason and not just through faith or holy texts. My personal guess would be that when that time comes, we will most likely come to a consensus among ourselves that while the Christian faith is a glorious and indelible part of our past, it is something we have outgrown, as a child outgrows his clothes, and it is time for us to move on.

  “But that is not our concern here, today. We are simply too busy to fuck with this mare’s nest right now. The only way that we can or should ever attempt something like that that is as mature adults, in a nation of our own, where we hold state power. We cannot, dare not, must not ignore all the urgent and life-threatening immediate things we have to do in order to stop and have a religious debate. Once again, comrades, I must ask you to lay this aside for the greater good.” Barrow sighed and spread his hands. “And that’s about the only thing I can say to you without breaking down and shouting myself. The whole issue is basically insoluble but since we’re all going to die, we’re all going to find out what if anything happens after death. Why, exactly, do we have to sit down and figure this out now, with our debut as a nation onto the world stage forty-five minutes away?”

  “You’re a bit more long-winded than you think, Frank,” said Morehouse. “Our nation’s debut onto the world stage is now only about half an hour away.”

  There was a knock on the door of the office and a young man in uniform stuck his head inside. “Sirs, Captain Chernilov says we need to start boarding now.”

  Barrow stood up. “Later, gentlemen,” he said. “Much later. Now we’ve got a job to do. Let’s go do it.” They all stood up and filed out the door. Barrow hung back, his hand on McGrew’s arm, and they walked out of the office and across the tarmac together. The delegates were loading the luggage onto the helicopter through the rear door that descended down into a ramp. “I believe you’ve got a name for me, Colonel?”

  Cody and Nightshade were standing outside the hangar on the tarmac, next to Colonel Wingfield’s Humvee, and the you
ng Volunteer who had been at the Bellevue church and carried the antique British revolver was with them, his Webley in a holster at his side. A small intense-looking girl with dark brown hair was adjusting Nightshade’s uniform, her neckpiece and crossbelt and beret. Barrow recognized the girl Volunteer as Wingfield’s driver. “Crossbelt always left waist to right shoulder,” she was saying. “Don’t put it on backwards, unless you’re left-handed, because it’s meant to hold up the weight of the gun and holster and stop your belt from sagging. And the insignia on the beret goes over your left eye.” She stopped and stood to attention and saluted Barrow smartly. “Good morning, General,” she said.

  “Morning, C.,” replied Barrow, returning the salute. “I heard you were becoming our official female uniform fashionista.”

  “China’s giving me tips on how to wear these duds, sir,” said Nightshade. “Especially how to get this dickey or doily thing on over my head without messing up my hair.” Barrow noticed that both China and the young man were wearing NDF tabs on their collars.

  “You’re not SS yet, Shane?” he asked. “I thought you and C. would have gotten in on the ground floor through Carter.”

  “He offered, yes sir, both of us,” said Shane. “But we started out with a pretty tight crew down in Dundee. Been with the same company since 10/22, so we decided we wanted to finish with ‘em.”

  Barrow turned to Cody and Nightshade. “Right, you two get on board. Time we got this show on the road.” The two of them walked toward the copter, which was beginning to rev the rotors.

  Morehouse strode up to him. “McGrew give you what you needed?”

  “Yeah,” said Barrow. “Dammit, Red, I wish you were coming!”

  “I wish I was, too. Well, it’s not as if I’ll be on the moon,” said Morehouse. “I’ll be only a cell phone call away, so you can hear my dulcet tones any time you want. It’s just we’ll have to assume we’re being listened to, so don’t be surprised if I launch into a long historical lecture about Andrew Jackson and the central bank. But for now, all I have to say is give ‘em hell, Frank! Good luck!” The two men shook hands, Barrow boarded the copter, the rear ramp raised, and the hopes of an entire people across the globe rose slowly into the clear blue Northwest sky. “Good luck,” whispered Morehouse again, watching the copter disappear to the south.