The Hill of the Ravens Page 6

  Yours truly,

  Volunteer Gertrude Greiner P. S. I am attaching something below that I have always been willing to give for the Homeland, even during all the years you were hunting for me.

  Below the PS was a brown thumbprint in blood. “Holy Christ!” muttered Don, stunned.

  “And here I thought you were a National Socialist?” asked Morgan with a grim smile.

  “I am. That means I can swear by Christ and the Aesir both with a clear conscience,” said Redmond. “Trudy Greiner, the last of the revolutionary traitors, is coming out of hiding after more than thirty years? She must have lost her mind!”

  “That would seem to be about the only way we might manage to catch her,” replied Morgan dryly. “No other target has been so successful in escaping our hunters. We hadn’t even caught a lingering scent of her for years. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the planet. BOSS and WPB had about come to the conclusion she was dead and buried secretly somewhere under a false name.”

  “How do you know it’s not a hoax?” asked Redmond. “I assume the bloody thumbprint was for identification purposes, but both DNA and fingerprints can be faked. The Office of Northwest Recovery and our own War Prevention people do it all the time. Or it might be the woman who wrote it is one of their damned genetically engineered doubles, like that clone of Bill Vitale they tried to slip past us.”

  “I know. Granted, it’s possible that this is some kind of stroke from the ONR. But the Bureau’s forensics lab gave the document a good going over, and the fact is that both thumbprint and DNA actually do match,” replied Morgan. “Are they sure?” asked Don.

  “Positive. The Greiner woman was fingerprinted and DNA-typed by the FBI in Oregon after she was arrested for felony hatecrime over forty years ago, when she was a teeny-bopper. As you may recall, when ZOG officially pulled out of Portland some of the local red-white-and-blue yay-hoos decided Longview didn’t mean them. We had to go in heavy and fight our way into the city street by street for three days before we cleaned them out. You remember the Battle of the Bridges?”

  “A historic moment,” recalled Don with a smile “The first artillery barrage fired from Nazi cannons and the first rumble of Nazi tanks since 1945.”

  “You got it. Damn, boy, that was a sweet sound to mah ears! Remember it all like it was yesterday! Anyhow, an SS Action Group, ironically enough led by a certain young lieutenant named Bill Vitale, captured the Portland FBI headquarters before they could destroy their files and hard drives, so we have Trudy Greiner’s DNA on record. My gut feeling is that the letter is legit. I can well imagine that she might eventually get so tired of looking over her shoulder for the hunters that she just wants it to be over.”

  “I’ve heard of her, of course,” mused Don. “Hell, so has every man, woman, and school child in the Republic. My kids grew up singing nasty nursery rhymes about Trudy Greiner, some of which made me wash out their mouths with soap when I overheard them. They use Trudy’s face on targets at junior high school riflery ranges. The ultimate stukach, the traitor bitch who sent Tom Murdock and Melanie Young and fifty others of the proudest and bravest partisan unit in the NVA to their deaths in the ambush at Ravenhill Ranch, for cold hard cash. Our own Wicked Witch of the Northwest. What was her particular hatecrime back in the old days in Portland, just out of curiosity?” asked Redmond.

  “Hatecrime most foul,” Morgan told him. “It was determined by the Zionist authorities that one Gertrude Greiner, aged seventeen, was responsible for inserting a politically incorrect joke into her high school annual. Something poking fun at female sexual perverts. Two double entendres punning the words ‘Beaverton’ and ‘liquor trade.’

  Inflicting mental anguish, insensitivity to alternative lifestyles, creating a negative and unsupportive environment, all that happy horse shit. You’re too young to remember, Don, but in those days a white person couldn’t sneeze without offending some little pissant minority and going to jail. You have no idea what it was like to have to weigh and measure every word, to be constantly looking over your shoulder and whisper, never knowing when some monkoid or some pale-skinned wretch would turn you in to the thought police for the slightest casual remark. The men and women of our race lived in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety, and anyone with a white skin who dared to stand up against the régime was punished with maniacal intensity. Especially if they used wit or humor. ZOG’s politically protected minorities could never stand being mocked, you know. Mockery undermined them more than anything else, they knew it, and they reacted to the slightest hint of disrespect with the ferocity of a wounded beast. Trudy’s little joke about lesbians made the whole high school annual prohibited hate literature under the Dees Act, so it had to be recalled and the offending humor removed. Trudy was convicted by a Human Rights tribunal and served eighteen months. Her family was fined and forced to pay for the cost of reprinting the annual, minus political incorrectness. Trudy joined an NVA cell while she was in women’s prison.”

  “Trudy?” put in Redmond curiously. “You knew her personally, sir?”

  “I did,” said Morgan. “Please let me proceed, Colonel.” Redmond sensed a raw nerve. “Certainly, sir. But if you might refresh my memory, Mr. President? When did she get hooked up with Tom Murdock and the Olympic Flying Column?”

  “I spent this morning reviewing her file, just to make sure my memory hasn’t gone soft on me after all these years,” said Morgan. “Trudy Greiner was still in the slammer on 10/22, but she got out a few months later, legally restricted to Portland on parole. The uprising had been suppressed, but the guerrilla war in the countryside and the cities was heating up by then. In view of the political nature of her offense Trudy had to do some really fast talking to get sprung. She told the parole board all about how she’d learned to renounce hate and turned her life around, how she’d undergone this wonderful spiritual awakening since she’d been inside, claimed she’d had a passionate lesbian relationship with a wonderful Hispanic inmate…no, don’t make that face, dammit, Don! We had to do those things in those days! Or at least say them! I took the Diversity Oath on four separate occasions myself, just so I could get a job running a forklift or stacking pallets in a warehouse alongside Filipinos and Somalis, because it was the only way I could feed my family, including that little lady you’re married to. Remind me to tell you one day about the time during the guerrilla days when I caught up with this one particularly nasty-ass Puerto Rican foreman…”

  “Er, you have, sir,” Redmond reminded him. “On more than one occasion. Including our last Christmas dinner. Kind of put me off cranberry sauce for a while.”

  “So I did,” agreed Morgan with a big rumbling laugh from deep inside his massive chest. “Well, it is one of my favorite stories. But you need to understand, hit war necessary to survive and fight on, and we all did things we weren’t too proud of later. I didn’t believe it about Trudy then, and I don’t believe it now. She said what she had to say to get out of that hellhole so she could join in the struggle. They may or may not have believed it, but they saw that she was burning the pinch of incense and making all the right noises, and so they let her go.”

  “I am aware of the historical context in which the revolution took place, sir. I wasn’t criticizing,” said Redmond neutrally.

  “We all had to burn the occasional pinch of incense on the altars of Zion’s false gods in order to survive,” sighed Morgan. “But it still rankles. A lot of us old timers still ain’t completely easy in our consciences about some of the choices we had to make in those days. Cindy El and Eva don’t even know what a lesbian is, do they?” asked Morgan in wonder. “Ain’t that a kicker? We grew up with all that filth being thrown in our faces every day, day after day and month after month and year after year until it became part of our whole lives and thought, and nowadays I bet my granddaughters don’t even know.”

  “No, sir,” said Redmond in genuine gratitude. “So far as I am aware, they don’t know what a lesbian is. That was what we we
re fighting for, remember? So that little girls can grow up to womanhood without ever hearing the word lesbian, among many other things. You and the men of your generation saw to it that my children grew up not just safe, but clean. Like I said, Mr. President, I am aware of the historical context.”

  “We saw to it, Don. You should remember some of it, too. You were there. You earned that green, white, and blue ribbon on your lapel, young ‘un. I should know. I pinned it on you.”

  “I remember some, but it was long ago. As for this medal, well, when I was twelve I wouldn’t have known a political idea if it walked up and kicked me in the ass. I knew I didn’t like the punk Mexican and Chinese kids who robbed my paper route money, and I remembered enough from back in Carolina to avoid anyone with a black skin, but that was about the sum of it. I was there largely for Sarah, sir,” concluded Redmond frankly.

  “I know, son, and I’ve always loved you for it. But hit war always better to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or well, maybe a different right reason in your case, than to do the wrong thing for any reason. Anyway, as I was saying before you got me off on an old man’s blather, because of her Dees Act conviction Trudy Greiner had to register with the FBI as a subversive and wear a tracking bracelet on her ankle, which she promptly cut off. She was too well known in Portland, so she went on the run. She made it to Seattle and made contact with the NVA. There she was assigned to a quartermaster team in Bremerton. That put her on the west side of the Sound and gave her familiarity with what would become the Olympic Flying Column’s operational area. She helped set up safe houses and apartments, she made false ID, she maintained arms caches, she handled money through various covert Party bank accounts, and she helped to run an underground printing press and distribute Party propaganda leaflets which would have gotten her life without parole. She was brave, she was a good soldier, she kept her cool and thought fast on her feet, and her teammates admired and respected her. Every assignment she was given went seamlessly and was never compromised. As far as anyone could see at the time, the FBI and the FATPOs never got a line on her. Trudy had the ideal undercover operative’s ability to become invisible in a crowd. Maybe that period of her life was where she acquired the skills she later used to evade our hunter squads. If she was always a rat for the Feds then she must have been really deep cover. My guess is that if she went bad, it must have happened later on.”

  “If she went bad?” asked Don, intrigued.

  “I’m getting there, son,” admonished Morgan. “After a year, in view of her proven expertise she was assigned to the Olympic Flying Column’s support crew. That meant she lived in town but she helped to obtain and transport weapons, ammunition, medical and other supplies and so on to the Column. It was complex and dangerous work. She had to do a lot of driving around the woods and the mountains of the Olympic peninsula in the dark, hauling a car or pickup truck full of contraband, going miles along rural highways and fire roads with no lights to avoid aerial surveillance. She had to talk her way past roadblocks using fake ID and travel permits with thirty thousand dollars, ten boxes of ammo and twenty pounds of C-4 hidden in her car, hoping to God our science nerds had packed them right to hide them from the sniffer dogs and Fattie sensor devices. A lot of our people in her job died at those checkpoints. But she was damned good at it. She carried out dozens of successful rendezvous without a hitch and transmitted vital supplies, weaponry, and money to Tom Murdock and his crew. Murdock trusted her absolutely. I know that because he told me so.”

  “You were in regular contact with the Column, sir?” asked Redmond.

  “Yes. Broadly speaking, Tom’s outfit worked the southern part of the Olympic down to Tacoma and us Port Townsend boys had our stomping grounds in the north, although there was a lot of overlap. Corey Nash was our liaison, carrying occasional messages we could no way risk on the phone, and we were even able to pull off some joint operations, like the attack on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy that led to the Americans pulling the U. S. Navy out of the Puget Sound and shutting down the Bremerton naval base. Plus Murdock and I met several times at various safe houses and other secure locations when it was necessary to take care of business and exchange intelligence.”

  “It also meant that Trudy Greiner was one of the few people who could communicate with the Column at need, and who would have some knowledge of where at least a few of them would be at any given time,” Redmond pointed out. “She was also one of the few Volunteers who operated on her own and was out of sight of the others for extended periods of time, during which she might have made contact with the enemy.”

  “That point didn’t escape us back then, son. Hit war one of the reasons she was suspected after Ravenhill Ranch.”

  “Now, if memory serves, on that day the Olympic Flying Column were on their way to attack the Kitsap County Courthouse in Port Orchard?” asked Redmond, searching his memory.

  “Yes,” Morgan confirmed. “The one that used to be on Division Street. The Special Criminal Court was sitting there that day. You know, the one ZOG tried to set up when the secret military tribunals became too much of a political embarrassment. The idea being to try and slap a purty civilian legal fig leaf on what was by then pretty much a military dictatorship in the United States. It was some kind of executive session or whatever that day, so none of our own prisoners were scheduled to be in the building. That made it a good time to hit the place and see if we could barbecue a few of the big pigs in the black robes, not to mention as many lawyers as we could send to hell.”

  “Four surviving members of the Column actually did take out the courthouse out that morning,” recalled Redmond.

  “Yes. Volunteers Frank Palmieri, Dragutin Saltovic, Edward McCanless and Brittany McCanless. The last members of the Column accomplished their mission even in the face of the disaster that overtook their unit at Ravenhill, which has added to the legend of that day, and deservedly so. The original plan was to use a mortar truck, iron pipes stacked on a flatbed trailer, each tube loaded with a charge and a home-made shell. An old Provisional IRA tactic we’d been wanting to try for a long time. A special hydraulic lift elevated the pipes into firing position, the driver set his timer, got out and ran like hell, and the mortars detonated. They destroyed the truck when they went off, but they also launched their shells into the air, that is if the damned things worked right. They weren’t very accurate, and you had to make really sure you positioned the vehicle correctly and got your elevation down pat. If your unit’s science nerd had miscalculated the ballistics or the strength of the barrel charges you’d get mortar bombs dropping all over everywhere in the neighborhood except the target. If everything went according to plan, some Federal position hiding behind razor wire, sandbags and concrete walls suddenly had about a ton of high explosive dropping down from the sky on top of ‘em. The trick was to position the truck just right and work out the elevation just right to make sure you didn’t miss and blow up Joe’s barber shop and the diner down the block.”

  “I remember the truck mortars, sir,” said Redmond.

  “Yeah, despite what happened at Ravenhill we didn’t give up, and we eventually got pretty good at making those little poppers. Got so we could rig up vans with false roofs that came off when the mortar barrels were unlimbered, white phosphorus shells, all kinds of tweaks and interesting features. If Murdock had succeeded in his mission, it would have been the first truck mortar attack. As things were, the four surviving Volunteers didn’t have time to mess with raising the barrels from the planned firing position, where they would have been without covering fire from the rest of the Column. They had to improvise, so they simply rammed the truck into the courthouse lobby and blew it. I remember we were able to get a van into Fort Lewis one night and level the officer’s mess from half a mile away,” recalled Morgan with a reminiscent chuckle.

  “Mmm, if memory serves, the truck was driven into Port Orchard separately from the bulk of the column,” pointed out Redmond. “That’s how the four survivors
were able to complete the mission. Why was that, Mr. President?”

  “Commandant Murdock ordered it done that way.” “Why?” asked Don.

  “No idea. So far as we have been able to determine, he didn’t explain to anyone at the time why he did so. We know he handpicked the four Volunteers who drove the truck, two in the cab and two in a scout car. Palmieri, Saltovic, and the McCanlesses are all still alive, as well as four more men who weren’t with the main body of the Column when it was ambushed. They may be able to answer that,” said Morgan.

  “I remember from an old Northwest Broadcasting Authority documentary show, I think it was called ‘Incident At Ravenhill’, that the Feds originally claimed the FATPO ambush that destroyed the column was a triumph for their spy satellite system,” said Redmond. “Infra-red heat and motion detectors, an evil racist white mouse couldn’t move on the ground without their knowing about it, so forth and so on.”

  “They tried to claim that, yeah, but it was crap,” growled the old warrior. “I’m old enough to remember before the rebellion. Some of the nervous Nellie nay-sayers in our own ranks claimed that white guerrilla warfare in North America was impossible because of orbital surveillance and other things in ZOG’s little bag of pyrotechnic tricks. Well, the Nervous Nellies were wrong. There was, in fact, a clear and applicable historical precedent, our weaklings just didn’t want to face up to it. From 1969 onward, the Provisional IRA fought a sustained guerrilla campaign in Northern Ireland, largely in an urban setting, against the wealth, manpower and technology of Great Britain. Yeah, I know they were Marxist scum, but the fact remained that the Provos showed it could be done, if we just had the guts and the dedication. Ordinary men were not powerless in the face of the New World Order. The bigger and more complex ZOG was, the more vulnerable they were to a few brave men with weapons in their hands and the courage to use them.”