A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “Yeah, I saw that on the tube,” said Dortmunder. “He’s officially a million-dollar man now and they were running his picture again. The Feds sure do love to create these super-terrorist constructs. Like Bin Laden and Zarqawi in Iraq, and Hamed Burghash in Syria. Graham’s hot as bubbling cheese these days. Count yourself lucky ZOG doesn’t seem to know who you are yet.”

  “Jock seems to have the old rebel luck keeping his head down. Let’s hope it holds. Never mind Two Brigade. How are we doing this week?”

  Dortmunder sat back with a sigh. “The bad news first. We took two arrests in Bellevue,” he said. “Volunteer Charlie Burke and Volunteer Steve Swearingen. Tuesday night. They were clocking FATPO Captain Kyeshia Stancil, who as you know is the press officer for Fattie in Seattle, the negress everybody sees on TV flapping her bubble lips about how we gone get dese racist honky muthafukkas. They spotted her and another FATPO, a black male, going onto the beach at Lake Sammamish, dressed in jogging suits. They called it in and said it looked like the stupid Sheba was dumb enough to go jogging with only one man as an escort. They were strapped, they asked my permission to take them down, and I gave it.”

  “You think even a nigger is stupid enough to go jogging in public after what’s been happening in this city for the past five years?” asked Barrow sourly.

  “It happens,” said Dortmunder defensively. “I figured this might be one of the times when we got lucky. I also weighed the possible propaganda value of removing the public face of FATPO. The men were willing to take the chance…”

  “Joe, no need to apologize. You did what you had to do. We’re officers in an army at war. We have to take targets of opportunity, and we have to order young men to their deaths. At least these guys aren’t dead, although after a few interrogations in the FBI electric chair, they’ll wish they were. How did it happen?”

  “Not clear. I never heard back from them and we can’t find anyone who saw it go down. It may have been some kind of set-up with the Stancil woman as bait, either with or without her knowledge. It may have been our guys just plain flubbed it. We just know from our sources in the Federal system that Volunteer Burke and Volunteer Swearingen were signed in at Auburn FCI yesterday, so they got them somehow.”

  “They’re good men,” said Barrow sadly. “Well, we broke Auburn open once, we’ll break it again, and one day they’ll be free. Good news now. Tell me about those tickles in Green Lake and out on Highway 169.”

  “Those were ours,” confirmed Dortmunder with a grin.

  “Me like, me like!” exclaimed Barrow, clapping his hands.

  “Green Lake was Sammy Feet’s crew,” Dortmunder went on. “Targets were Colonel Allen Armbruster, U. S. Army Intelligence, and one James R. Spannhaus, Department of Homeland Security. Big ZOGknobs both. Nightshade spotted them in some after hours club up on Capitol Hill. One of them tried to pick her up, and she recognized Spannhaus from one of our web sites, so she stroked him and she was able to set the both of them up for A Company. Said she and a friend would meet them in the Pirates’ Lair in Green Lake the next night, and she’s good enough so they believed her.”

  “What exactly were they involved in?” asked Barrow.

  “Nobody seems to know quite what the hell they were doing up here, working with the FBI or what. God knows what all these Federal spooks do with their time here in the Northwest. There’s so damned many of them they must be tripping over each other’s shoelaces. But in any case, whatever they were up to, they’re not doing it any more. Sammy Feet and Georgie Brenner blew them both away in the Pirates’ Lair Sunday night, with the charming Miss Carla Sobic doing the honors behind the wheel of the getaway car. Textbook. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Nine mils at close range. Our guys walked into the bar, made the spooks, clipped them both, and walked out. Extraction neat and clean, finito.”

  “Great! Convey my congratulations to Samuel and his team on a job well done,” said Barrow with satisfaction.

  “The other major tickle out on Highway 169 it was a simple Baghdad banger in a recycle bin beside the road. Humvee blown off the asphalt just out of Maplewood Heights. Three dead Fatties. Pyrotechnics courtesy of Doctor Doom, some good old bathtub gelignite just like Mom used to make.”

  “Doctor Doom…that’s that kid who always has his nose stuck in a computer game, right?”

  “Yeah, if we can tear him away from his Nintendo for long enough, he makes a hell of a party favor,” Joe told him. “Other than the loss of the two Volunteers, things went well this week. The EO unit successfully detonated four other bombs besides the Baghdad banger, nothing that big, though. Three against economic targets run by non-whites or Jews, one at the police motor pool when they did the old Trojan horse trick and got the cops to tow an impounded Volvo that was wired up. The tow truck driver was killed as well. From now on, even at $800 a car, I think we can safely say that no private contractor in his right mind will be towing any more wheels in Seattle. Uncle Slime’s boys want a vehicle towed, they’re going to have to use their own tow trucks and their own personnel, which gives us more targets and cuts down on civilian co-operation with the occupation. Eight hundred bucks isn’t worth one’s life. We’ve got six snipers out hunting this week, and last I’d heard they got one kill and twelve hits.”

  “One kill? That’s all?” asked Barrow skeptically. “What are they doing, taking time off to go to the movies?”

  “No, it’s just that there is an increasing shortage of suitable targets,” explained the executive officer. “The white man’s enemies are finally learning to stay the hell off the streets. The snipers pop at Fatties whenever they can, but it’s hard to catch a Fattie without his body armor, hence all the wounded. I gotta say that damned new hardened nylon ensemble of theirs works, but we’re at least making the Fatties keep their heads down. Oh, and one major arson, Dickstein’s Bargain Shoe Barn, which was just about the last remaining openly Jewish-owned business in Seattle. Hallie Wainwright’s little brother did that one. I think he’s about thirteen. Not sworn in yet, although Hallie wants to give him his button. I know Corby Morgan swore in some twelve year-old a while back and sent him over to Jock when Corby went back up country to take over the Port Townsend Flying Column, but that’s still a little young for my taste.”

  “Hell, half our own brigade is just barely old enough to drive, but yeah, I agree, twelve and thirteen is too young. Speaking of which, how’s recruiting?” asked Barrow.

  “Recruiting is up. Every crew is working new assets and identifying the assets as possible candidates, and four new Volunteers were sworn in this week by company commanders, so despite the two seasoned men we lost, we not only replaced them but increased our numbers. And that’s our brigade alone; I understand that One and Two are doing even better. New weapons are in from the GHQ quartermaster, and we got our share. Took delivery Sunday. We now have enough AK-74s and Russian ammunition to choke a horse, which we can use to arm new men when it gets to the open fighting stage. They’re being distributed to company quartermasters for dispersal and storage, with 800 rounds per weapon. Also, the Agitprop unit sent out two million e-mail spams and was able to scatter two thousand leaflets in Bellevue Square. “

  “That’s kind of pre-10/22, isn’t it? Leaflets are much more dangerous than e-mail,” Barrow reminded him. “Are they sure they want to be taking that kind of risk just for a damned leaflet?”

  “Yeah, I know, but leaflets can be touched and are something physical, much more impressive to people than mere cyber-junk. It really rattles cages. They know that Jerry Reb was here. It’s almost as exciting to find a leaflet in your mailbox as it is to watch a hit on the news. I do have one major new thing for you,” said Dortmunder.

  “So do I,” said Barrow. “Me first. Mr. Chips is coming in tonight and wants to talk with both of us. You need to be back here at eight sharp.”

  “Any idea what he wants?” asked Dortmunder.

  “No, he wouldn’t say, but it’s something urgent. He didn’t want you at t
he meet at first, but I told him we were Siamese twins.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” replied Dortmunder.

  “I get cacked, you need to know everything I know. But this isn’t just his regular circuit for the Army Council. It’s something urgent. They’re probably going to launch some kind of new offensive strategy. They keep diddling with various new ideas they think might make a dent. Personally, I think we’re starting to get close now with Applesmash and Pigkill.”

  “You think they want us to try something like that here?” asked Dortmunder keenly. “Shut down Seattle?”

  “What for?” wondered Barrow aloud. “We’ve already damned near run all the non-whites out of town. The city is actually a better place to live for white people now, even with us fighting a war in the middle of it, than it was five years ago. Same in Portland. The buses and light rail are safe now, the traffic is a hell of a lot better with all those crazy Third World drivers off the freeway, and other than us, crime is damned near non-existent now we’ve run off all the crack addicts and Mexican gang-bangers.” Barrow did not know that Kelly Shipman even existed, but he would not have been surprised to learn that she had agreed with him at her breakfast table in the wealthy suburbs just a short time before. NVA intelligence confirmed that there was a high level of very quiet approval among the people of the city regarding the changes the ongoing revolt had wrought. One of the reasons that life in war-torn and locked-down Seattle was tolerable was the virtual disappearance of crime in the ordinary sense. One had to worry about getting stopped and harassed at FATPO checkpoints, and possibly caught in the vicinity when things went boom, but common street crime was a thing of the past, and the gabble of foreign voices and dark faces was gone. In addition, bottom-rung unemployment was now for all practical purposes non-existent. Employers couldn’t hire cheap Third World immigrant labor if there were no cheap Third World immigrants to hire. The most loyal of Americans had to concede, at least in the privacy of his own thoughts, that Jerry Reb did have his uses.

  Operations Applesmash and Pigkill were the guerrilla offensives undertaken by a series of highly trained and motivated NVA active service units, the most daring and resourceful men and women the revolutionaries had. Their purpose was to shut down two of the main American centers of power, New York City and Washington, D. C. Once it had become clear that the NVA and the Party now had a sufficient infrastructure to establish a government in the Northwest after independence had been won, the decision had been made by the Army Council to take the fight right into the belly of the Beast. The message was simple: there would be no business as usual until the Pacific Northwest was free and white. After months of preparation, the NVA had struck at America’s vitals. The decrepit United States régime had reeled under the onslaught, and the government was being driven mad with hysterical fear and hate.

  Explosive and poison gas bombs were detonated on subways and on key bridges and traffic points in New York and Washington, cutting off arterial transportation and disrupting the flow of the business which was these cities’ business. Getting in to work in either city had become a four-hour slog each way on jammed crosstown streets, as the New York expressways and the Capitol Beltway were cratered and rendered impassable, and overpasses blown to powder. The lily white suburbs and gated communities where the affluent had retreated were no longer safe, as NVA assassination teams homed in on the key corporate moguls, media magnates, politicians, military officers, law enforcement personnel, reporters and television producers, economic gurus, bureaucrats, intelligentsia, judges and district attorneys, celebrities, technocrats, and key people that kept the United States functioning, stalking them, cutting them down, causing untold chaos and paralysis at every nexus of power. Mints, banks, government offices, the postal system, television network headquarters, methadone clinics, anything to do with the welfare system that redistributed white wealth to non-whites, newspaper offices, the hydroelectric grid, trendy restaurants, yuppie fern bars and yacht clubs were bombed. Anywhere America’s ruling élite met to eat, plot, hobknob, seduce and be seduced, and network with one another was no longer safe. The obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post now read like Who’s Who.

  Over thirty members of Congress from both House and Senate were shot down or blown to pieces. The head of the Federal Reserve took a header out of a forty-story window on Wall Street, with an assist from two NVA Volunteers who died moments later under a hail of security bullets, but Nathan Morgenthau still had not been replaced, and the economy of the empire was in free fall. Specially designed computer viruses destroyed government and private databases and IT systems of every kind, causing untold loss and confusion and in many cases massive unemployment among the largely non-white and perverse populations who now comprised the majority of both cities.

  In New York, NVA black propaganda operatives skillfully incited tension and created incidents between the city’s huge Jewish population and the various minority groups, sometimes leading to riots and pogroms where Hasidic rabbis were hunted through the streets by black and Hispanic mobs. In Washington, D. C. the Capitol building was mortared and rocketed four times, and finally shut down as too insecure; what remained of Congress now met in undisclosed location. The White House itself was now the regular target of mortars and rockets every time President Chelsea Clinton was known to be in residence, and a White House dinner was penetrated with an exploding cigar that got blood on Clinton’s plate as well as her hands. The woman was so terrified that she fled the historic home of America’s chief executives and now lived hunkered down in a bunker at Camp David. The government was now on its fourth Director of Homeland Security in five years. The United States Attorney General was splattered all over the Ellipse by a bomb in his limousine, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was found dead in his private washroom in the Pentagon, sitting on the john with his throat cut. The Israeli ambassador was abducted and shipped back to Tel Aviv by air express in nine pieces, collect.

  These operations had been ongoing for almost eight months now. The carnage hadn’t been all one-sided. Dozens of Northwest Volunteers had died, and a batch of eight were now in the middle of a televised show trial in the Big Apple. The amount of damage done to the American economy was now estimated to be in the quadrillions of dollars, and that was over and above all the other expenses of fighting a counterinsurgency war in the Pacific Northwest and maintaining an tentative but iron grip on a huge oil empire in the Middle East, where America ruled hundreds of millions of sullen and turbulent Muslim peoples by the sword. Add to that the fact that one of the main targets of the NVA was the Internal Revenue Service and the tax collection system, records, computers, personnel, anything to choke off the flow of tax dollars to D.C. Tax revenue was dropping through the floor. It was a very poorly kept secret that essential Federal personnel such as FBI, military, and FATPO had not been paid in months, and were now receiving a kind of Monopoly money in the form of vouchers that businesses and merchants wouldn’t honor except at gunpoint. Off-duty Feds were being apprehended robbing banks and committing burglaries. Female FBI agents had been caught dancing in strip clubs and committing prostitution to feed their families.

  It was clear that something had to give. It was believed by the NVA’s Third Section intelligence monitors and analysts that the actual function of government in the United States was now at the point of collapse, and Barrow had received orders a month before to begin preparation for the possible implementation of the boldest NVA offensive yet, the seizure of certain sections of Seattle and the establishment of “no-go zones” where the NVA and the Party would establish a provisional government for the Homeland. “Why weren’t we doing Applesmash and Pigkill years ago?” complained Dortmunder.

  “For one thing, we didn’t have the resources or logistics to maintain that kind of highly active presence right up the Beast’s asshole,” replied Barrow. “Those are our best people who are bombing those subways and whacking those bureaucrats, there’s a lot of targets,
our losses are heavy, and they need a lot of support in terms of manpower, money, and supplies. The first couple of years after 10/22 it was all we could do to stay one jump ahead of the bastards and bite back every now and then. No way we could have mounted an offensive like this. But the main reason is that suppose we did bring ZOG to the table five years ago? What did we have to negotiate with? Now the Party has the infrastructure necessary to run our own country. We didn’t have that before. Anyway, we need to meet Mr. Chips here at eight tonight. I wanted to use the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but the Turtle tells me that some guys he didn’t know were sniffing around the place and I’m chilling it. Now what did you have for me?”

  Dortmunder scowled. “We may have to do another off-Broadway production, sir, as in offing somebody on Broadway. We’ve got a problem shaping up in Capitol Hill. Again.”

  “Okay, that problem being?”

  “Country Joe Krajewski,” replied city Joe Dortmunder.

  Capitol Hill was at one stage one of the most prestigious old neighborhoods in Seattle, sitting draped on a hillside to the east of downtown. It was founded during the city’s brawling early days as a pioneer port shipping lumber, furs, and fish. The northern part of the neighborhood near the arboretum was still a place of mansions and stately older homes, some of them still trying to operate as bed-and-breakfast inns in a city in the grip of a violent revolution. The campuses of Seattle Central Community College and Seattle University marked the southern edge while two commercial centers still managed to maintain a viable if reduced economic life: a small, fairly quiet strip along 15th Avenue and Broadway. The center of the district was the Broadway Market, once a thriving set of offbeat shops, boutiques, and alternative bookstores. Before the revolt it had been a Northwest version of the San Francisco’s Castro district or New York’s Soho. Broadway on Capitol Hill had been Seattle’s main drag for buggery and boogie-woogie for almost a generation now. The grunge rock scene of the 1990s had originated in Seattle and on Capitol Hill, and the district was renowned the world over for its large gay population and drug scene as much for its musical ambience. Seattle, rock and roll, far-left political causes, and alternative lifestyles had once gone together in the public mind like cheeseburgers, fries, and Coke, a natural combo.