A DISTANT THUNDER Read online

  There was a big muscle man in a tank-top with a blond buzz cut whom we all knew as Teddy the Bear. He usually carried our crew’s one prized belt-fed M-60 machine gun. We’re talking Rambo here. The Bear could drive nails with that gun at a hundred yards. There was our field medic called Bones—what else? He was a damned good medic actually, who’d served in Iraq and Saudi and had already saved a couple of our lives. For shooters we had me and Johnny Pill, Ray Hamilton, Tommy Connors, Mack the Knife, a kid with a green Mohawk called Spiderman and Susie Q., his equally punked-up girlfriend with a purple pageboy who sported a diamond in her nose. For special weapons there was a tall skinny guy with vacant eyes we called Lurch, whom I remembered from my childhood as living with his mother in Dundee in a big house full of a couple of dozen cats. Lurch’s Mom owed money to the IRS which she refused to pay, or so they said. Dummy-Dummy Sorels and some Feebs had come to their house one night while Lurch was at work. They claimed Lurch’s mother fired a .22 at them, which maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. She was pretty gaga, but whatever the case was, Dummy-Dummy went berserk. Mother and cats all died when the house burned to the ground. Lurch was now in the process of returning the favor with interest. He had been in Iraq and Saudi as well, before he was kicked out of the military on a Section Eight. His military speciality had been air defense, and he was a dab hand with Stingers and SAM antiaircraft missiles, not to mention Patriots if we ever managed to get hold of any, and so far he had brought down two ZOG helicopters, one with a Stinger and one with an RPG. Okay, one of those was a television news copter, but it was just as much an enemy aircraft as any Blackhawk or Apache. I might mention as a footnote that Lurch made it through the war. I heard he went off into the woods to some cabin and lived out the rest of his life with more cats, and everybody left him alone. A lot of us were fighting for just that, the right to be left alone. I don’t think ZOG ever quite figured that out.

  There were also a couple of Volunteers I hadn’t seen before, which was not an unusual thing. Sometimes somebody would show up for one major operation and you’d never see them again until years later, if ever. One of these new faces was a chain-smoking, dark-haired, hard-looking woman in blue jeans named Carol, who I later learned had come down from Tom Murdock’s Olympic Flying Column. The second was a heavy-set, blue-eyed and blue-chinned bruiser with black hair in a bicep-bulging polo shirt with an Irish accent, whom the CO called Paddy. Carol died with the Column at the Ravenhill ambush, and many years afterward Paddy became the Honorable Patrick Brennan, President of the Republic.

  The tickle was planned and organized by Brennan and Tank Thompson, and it was a big one indeed. “Right, evildoers, gather round and lend me your ears,” said Tank. “We’re going to take down a Burger King, a big one, an honest-to-God Elder of Zion. This is a nose we can mount on our wall. Chief Justice Sammy Rothstein of the Supremes” Tank held up an old cover torn from a magazine. I saw a round bald head with a frizzy aureole of gray hair, a bespectacled sheep face with thick lips and a proboscis of note. There were mutters of surprise and pleasant anticipation. “Among other crimes against God and man, Hizzoner the Chief Justice more or less destroyed the last vestiges of democracy in the two-party system by declaring primary elections unconstitutional, a maneuver designed specifically to keep politically incorrect candidates like us among others off the ballot. But that’s not why he was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year a few years ago, as you see here. That accolade he earned for enshrining forever in the Constitution of our beloved empire a woman’s right to choose not only to murder her child, but to do so up until and including the very moment of natural birth. Not even partial birth. Birth. A woman now has the right to choose her own damnation right up until the moment the doctor slaps her baby on the butt. All she has to do is say no and instead of getting the butt-slap the baby gets run through a skill saw once or twice, and the pieces get tossed in the dumpster. Unfortunately, Hizzoner Justice Rothstein’s mother did not make such a choice. We are going to correct that error of hers tomorrow.

  “Mister Rothstein seems to have had an attack of bravado. He’s gonna show the world that we aren’t so domestically terrifying after all. He is arriving in Olympia as a surprise speaker to address the graduating class of Evergreen College tomorrow afternoon. He will give them his Talmudic seal of approval and his benediction to go forth and become good little liberal yuppies thinking diverse thoughts, and no doubt he will offer a fatherly homily as well on how they need to stand fast against the dark and naughty forces of wicked racism, which is us. He doesn’t know it yet, but tomorrow this Moloch in a black robe will be the guest of honor at a kosher barbecue. His own. I want this hebe to burn, boys and girls. I want to hear him scream like all those babies ripped from their mother’s wombs screamed. I want to hear all that Philadelphia cream cheese sizzle, like his black soul will be sizzling in the fires of hell.”

  We cheered, already pumped. The boss had a way with words. “So what’s the plan, Tank?” asked the Bear.

  “The target arrives at Olympia airport tomorrow at eleven,” said the lieutenant. For all it was the state capital of Washington at the time, the city and surrounding environs of Olympia did not rate a major airport and had only a tiny little regional field with a couple of landing strips on it, maybe a mile from where we sat.

  “Not Sea-Tac?” asked Mack.

  “No,” replied Thompson. “The plutocracy’s big knobs who have business in Oly usually fly into Sea-Tac, but that would give him too much time on the ground and too far to travel, and his security people don’t like that. They have sense enough to be nervous even if Rothstein himself doesn’t. We considered the idea of trying to nail Rothstein’s government Lear jet with our one Stinger missile or with an RPG up the engine intake as he lands. That way we know damned well he’s in there. But the Feebs aren’t fools. They know they’re dangling a tempting goodie beneath our noses by bringing him here, and we have to assume they’re going to be all over that airport with satellite surveillance, lookout posts, infra-red, you name it. This morning through our field glasses we saw their bulldozers and cranes installing concrete Bremer walls around the terminal building, so they’re anticipating trouble. I don’t fancy the idea of an attack against a static position when we don’t know with one hundred percent certainty who we’ll be going up against, how many, how they’re armed, and where they will be disposed.”

  “What’s his security?” asked somebody.

  “Feeps,” said Tank. I should explain that in these pre-FATPO days the Federal Protective Service was top dog in the Zionist kennel, a mutation that grew out of an unholy mating between the FBI and Secret Service and BATF. Feep was one of those purely reactive things that ZOG dreamed up after an especially wet piece of work O.C. Oglevy did on the senior senator from Idaho. Locking the barn door after the horse was already slaughtered. That was always ZOG’s way. Once we seized the initiative the United States government never really gained it back, and they were always reacting rather than acting. Federal Protective Service didn’t last more than a year or two, largely due to their failure to prevent very many of our hits, and they were eventually sent back to the FBI and Secret Service and their budget was absorbed by FATPO, but at the time we took down Burger King they were still in the saddle viz. VIP protection. “The chatter we’re picking up from their side of the fence seems to confirm they’re worried,” Thompson went on. “The speech is being kept very much under wraps. All the students at Evergreen know is that there will be a special commencement speaker, which was what alerted us that someone major was coming. We got curious so we asked the birdies, and one of our contacts in La Cesspool Grande was able to tell us who the surprise guest was. The target will be transported from the airport to the Evergreen campus in a limo convoy. I wish it was a copter, because then our Stinger could zap him with no muss or fuss, but they’re not that careless. Three, possibly four vehicles, and as a further bit of good news the convoy will be covered from the air by at least one helicopter gunship, mo
st likely a Blackhawk out of Fort Lewis. Once Rothstein arrives on campus there will be a special power luncheon for the chief justice in the staff dining room, attended by all manner of local Zoggish wheels from the governor and both U.S. senators on down. This seems to be where they’re concentrating most of their preventive measures. They’re worried we’ll try to hit all of the bastards at the banquet, and I wish to hell we could get more people together and do just that, but we didn’t get sufficient advance notice to work out the manpower and the logistics. They’re not going to let Hizzoner spend the night here lest something go boom. After Rothstein’s speech to the kiddies in the afternoon he goes scuttling right back to the airport in the same limos, then back onto his Lear jet and back to D.C. The limos will be Bremerized, armored and bomb-proofed, special mine-proofed tires and undercarriage, super-powered engines, and equipped with full automatic fire capability from a swivel-mounted M-60 through the sun roof. As part of their SOP, they will try to avoid us knowing which vehicle en route actually contains Hizzoner Chief Justice Rothstein. We hope to get a tip, but it may turn out to be a shell game. Find the kosher pea under the tin cup. The hit is going to have to go down on the ground, on his way either to or from the airport. We haven’t got anybody on the inside at the airport terminal, worse luck,” Tank continued, “The one bod we had who was willing to try couldn’t have passed the security screening because in his youth he made the mistake of attending an Aryan Nations rally, so he’s in their system. We do have someone on the inside on the Evergreen campus, and he or she will attempt to let us know which vehicle is transporting the target if it turns out we have to make the attempt on his return journey.”

  Lurch raised his hand. “Uh, lieutenant, I know the airport is going to be infested with ZOG, but if we have that Stinger then I still say, why not let me take a crack at noseboy in the air? No need to overcomplicate things. We spot the plane coming in, you put me on the back of a pickup with the launcher and then we bust through the fence and onto the field. At a descending altitude I’d only need a stop of about five seconds to sight and lock in, maybe a hundred yards short of the runway, and then I could let fly and we’d be on our way. You’d only be risking me and the driver instead of a whole crew, Tank. Jeez, I’d love to add a Lear to my two choppers!”

  “I’ll drive,” volunteered Spiderman.

  “We’ll drive,” said Susie Q. “You’ll need a shooter for covering fire as well.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, with any luck you’ll get your third whirlybird tomorrow,” said Tank with a grin. “No reflection at all on your courage, comrades, but in the first place you’d have to cover maybe as much as a half mile of open ground and back, with a clear field of fire for the Feds in the terminal or patrolling the airstrip. You could run into anything from land mines to TOW rockets and they may even bring in a tank or two from Fort Lewis, plus that helicopter gunship will probably be hovering around in the air. Let’s just hope it’s only one. Your chances would be dicey at best. Secondly, these new Federal VIP jets have all kinds of high-tech radar scramblers, heat shells and infrared decoy imaging. This Stinger is Afghan war surplus, still a fine weapon, but it’s a much older model and even at short range and low air speed it might get faked out by all the new gadgetry on the Lear and go spinning off target or even get distracted by the chopper. It cost us a lot to get hold of it, it’s the last one we’re likely to get for a while, and we want to make sure it counts and makes something fall out of the sky. This is a target we can’t afford to miss, boys and girls. We want Mr. Rothstein’s briefs turning red, not just brown. So we’re going to have to chomp down on our Burger King on the ground.”

  “On the ground where?” I called out.

  Tank moved up an overhead projector on wheels, called for the lights to be turned off (the blinds were already drawn on the windows, for obvious reasons) and then he switched on the projector and shot an image onto one wall, a street map of Olympia. “Paddy? You did the recon on this,” he said.

  “Right,” took up the Irishman, who if I caught the accent right appeared to be from Belfast, “Here’s where it gets a bit dodgey, because we’re having to assume some things and second guess the mind of an enemy. The contact in Washington D.C. informs us that the Feep in charge is Special Agent Donald R. Shelley, late of the United States Secret Service, so he knows his shite. I happen to know that Shelley did a similar quick in-and-out through Olympia Regional Airport this January, escorting the director of the National Security Agency who wanted to have a high level meet with the governors of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho in town here. That one was totally hush-hush on their part, no publicity. We tried an impromptu ambush, and I recognize a couple of your faces who were with me on that one, but it was aborted. We missed the bastard both coming and going. But I noticed something that I think might be relevant tomorrow. The quickest way to get from the airport to the governor’s mansion where the NSA meet was held is obviously this way, hang a left on

  Airdustrial and out onto Interstate 5 North, get off at Exit 105 and you’re there in five minutes.

  “But Shelley’s a good paranoid player, and he doesn’t like the freeway. Understandable, in view of the various cowboy exploits the NVA has pulled off on interstates. He likes to take the scenic route through town. More little cross streets that he can use to vary his target’s route, more scope to run and hide if he gets ambushed, more things and people he can use for cover and interference against pursuit. On an open freeway, once you’re boxed in by a determined assault there’s really nowhere to go. On the NSA chief’s trip into town, we were waiting here in this building we’re in now, and we were in place at a couple of other points up and down Airdustrial, but yer man gets real cute and the three-limo motorcade just rolls right on down Capitol Boulevard into the city. I had thought of that possibility, but we simply didn’t have enough people to lay two adequate ambushes along both routes, nor will we tomorrow. So we went to plan B. When we got word the convoy was coming back about seven at night, in the dark, we moved into position on the corner of Airdustrial and Capitol. If he takes the same way back or if he comes back down I-5 and gets off at Airdustrial, either way we figure he runs into our welcome wagon.”

  “Why didn’t you take up that position when the target landed, sir?” asked Carol, Marlboro dangling from her lips.

  “Too congested in the daytime, too much chance of being observed in daylight and ratted out by some tout with a cell phone who wants to pick up some quick cash,” replied Brennan. “There’s a big telemarketing company on the corner here, with hundreds of employees going in and out all the time and not enough parking for them, so there were cars parked all up and down the shoulder, plus a petrol station on the other corner, here. We would have had to take over the buildings and use them as firing positions, which means detaining hundreds of telemarketers and the petrol station staff. Impractical with the numbers we had. All it would take would be for one rat with a cell phone to dial 911.”

  “What happened when the NSA guy came back to the airport last January?” asked someone.

  “Because it was a pitch black Northwest winter night, we were able to assume some temporary positions near the intersection, sitting in the Cascade Teleservices parking lot and parking on the verge in our vehicles along with the telemarketers’ motors,” Brennan replied. “We were able to cover all four corners of the intersection. But what does yer man do? He comes back up Capitol Boulevard, but while still in town he cuts the motorcade across on Cleveland Boulevard and then down into the Old Yelm Highway, here,”—Brennan was using a laser pointer—”And he slides right up to the airport down Henderson Boulevard, a quick left and then a right, and the limos were in under the sheltering guns from the terminal. Any attempt to mount an attack on our part at that point, in the dark against an enemy unknown in strength or disposition, would have been pointless and suicidal. Either on a map or from scouting out the ground personally, Shelley knew about that back way. I think he’s going to use it again tomorrow wi
th Rothstein. Either going in or coming back. He’s not going into downtown Olympia this time, true, and he’ll have to at least cross over the interstate where it branches off into Highway 101 in order to get up to Evergreen College here in the northwest corner of our map. But he’ll be heading in the same general direction, and you can do that by simply reversing the route he used before. My guess is that since he used this back way in January on his return trip to avoid us, he’ll get cute again and this time go that route into town before he cuts over towards Black Lake.”

  “So we set up along Henderson?” asked Tommy Connors.

  “Aye. Last time we just had RPGs and a 90-millimeter recoilless rifle. This time our opening salute will be high explosive, your basic Baghdad banger, a roadside bomb. What can I say? I have a weakness for the classics. We’ve about seventy pounds of gelignite and some Semtex, both factory construction-grade, not one of our homemade concoctions made up in the kitchen sink. Small enough to be easily rigged and concealed. Assuming they take this back way on either the in-bound or the return trip from the campus, we’ve got two fairly good choices for the actual takedown point. First, right here,” (pointer) “At the intersection where the Old Yelm Highway runs into Henderson Boulevard. Second, where Henderson Boulevard runs into Old Highway 99 by Olympia Regional Airport. The Yelm Highway-Henderson site offers better terrain. It’s a wide open intersection, six lanes on Yelm Highway crossing two on Henderson. Very open ground which gives us good visibility and a clear field of fire, but there’s enough cover in surrounding buildings to where we can conceal ourselves and our vehicles. A good range of options for E & E after the fireworks, and you’d better believe they’ll be after us like the hounds of hell once we lay hands on this particular Apple of God’s Eye, no offense to any Identity folk present. The target’s motorcade will have to slow down in order to make the right turn onto Old Yelm going in, or the left turn onto Henderson coming back as may be, and there’s a derelict petrol station right on the corner there. We can conceal the HE charge in one of the old petrol pumps, and if we can get the nod and the wink on which vehicle Burger King is in, we can blow it when he’s within ten to twenty feet, depending on coming or going and therefore what lane he’s in. Pack the lot in Teflon pellets, roofing nails and some white phosphorus for luck and that should do it, if we have the right vehicle. One good way we’ve found to get around the Bremerizing is to use that particular anchovy combination. The teflon and roofing nails can put at least a few puncture wounds in the skin of most armored vehicles at the weak points, window joints, door handles, plexiglass that’s been weakened by the explosion or vehicle roll. A blast of sufficient force will actually drive the burning phosphorus through those pinpoint punctures and into the interior of the vehicle, thus giving us that kosher barbecue effect your company commander so desires.” Laughter. “The rest of us will be waiting with RPGs and our one anti-tank rocket and we give Burger King the maddest of Mad Minutes, then we pop the smoke and beat feet out of there.