A Mighty Fortress Page 7

  “Hey, they’re just worried about all the bombings,” he said to Kelly. “The school doesn’t want any of us hurt.” In a way, it was good that this part of his life was ending in a couple of months. The intermittent needling and hostility from Crabtree was increasing in frequency. It looked like that situation was building up again as Craig’s hold on Kelly, tenuous as it had become, slipped away and he looked around for someone to blame. Who but the handy Friar Lawrence? There had always been an element of jealousy there, as clearly non-eligible as Cody was in the competition department. Cody didn’t want a repeat of their one serious confrontation. The next time might escalate into something that would draw official attention to him.

  Craig Crabtree’s father had been the senior partner in one of Seattle’s most prestigious law firms, and a member of the Washington state legislature who never saw a piece of political correctness he didn’t like. Crabtree senior now lived in Atlanta, where he held some kind of big corporate vice presidency, which was a thinly veiled fig leaf to disguise the fact that he had fled the Northwest after being threatened by the NVA, leaving his family behind.

  Craig had the standard rich boy’s draft deferment and was heading for Dartmouth in September, then on to Harvard Law School and a six figure income before he was twenty-three. He was an obnoxious type, large and golden and groomed like a male model, dressed to the preppy nines and rumored already to have had some plastic surgery done. He was a football star, head of the debating team, student body president, and never let anyone forget it. That handsome head had almost nothing in it, and what little was up there was bad. He had been the on-again-off-again boyfriend of Kelly since junior high school, on-again-off-again largely due to his inability to stay faithful for two consecutive weeks. In addition to Kelly he had also had been known to diddle with Molly Bergstrom and virtually every other attractive girl in his class. With amazing maturity for her age, Kelly had confided to Cody that she was fully aware of Craig’s wandering eye but she kept him around “so I can have somebody, but I know it won’t ever get too serious.” She had also freely discussed the fact that the attraction was purely physical, with details, which was really what Cody needed to hear, but he had sighed to himself and held his piece.

  Cody had experienced a few minor run-ins with Craig when he first arrived on simple grounds of his poverty and working class background, since the kid was an arrogant ass. But since spring, when it became obvious that Kelly valued Cody’s friendship, Craig had gotten the idea that there was more going on between them than there was, and was prone to fits of sullen jealousy, which Kelly found amusing yet which made Cody wary. He had been told when he started by Bobby Bells that his attendance at Hillside was conditional on his keeping a low profile.

  The Crabtree situation had come to a head several months before, at a spring break pool party at Kelly’s house, when Crabtree had showed up drunk and obnoxious, gotten into Dr. Shipman’s liquor cabinet and gotten more drunk and obnoxious, and finally attempted to use his superior size and strength to shove Cody into the pool. Cody was small but wiry and powerful, and he had more than once been required to protect himself when he’d lived on the Seattle streets as a runaway. He twisted the bully’s arm viciously and sent Crabtree plunging into the water instead, which everyone had thought was great fun except Crabtree. Craig ended up circulating a version wherein “Brock knows kung fu or something” and he’d been sucker-punched. This wasn’t true. Cody had simply lived rough on the streets of an urban jungle for many months, and he had acquired certain survival skills, along with the will to use them without hesitation. Officially it was teen party horseplay, but the incident had left bad blood, and Cody had an uneasy feeling the re-match would be more serious.

  Just as the class was breaking up that afternoon, Cody Brock got a call on his cell phone “Take a walk on Boardwalk,” a male voice told him.

  “Should I pass go and collect $200?” asked Cody.

  “Yeah, go ahead.” That meant that the summons was immediate. Cursing to himself, Cody looked around, but he saw that Kelly and Molly had already left the auditorium. With regret, he called Kelly on her cell phone and caught her in the parking lot. “Look, Kel, I’m sorry, I won’t be able to make it to Molly’s party. Something’s come up at work and I have to go in,” he said apologetically. Cody maintained a no-show job at local grocery store, ostensibly as a stock boy, but the supervisor who handled his cards was a Party supporter and Cody was seldom to be seen around the storeroom in his apron.

  “Oh, that’s awful!” said Kelly. He was glad to hear a bit of disappointment in her voice, although not so glad to hear Craig Crabtree’s voice in the background.

  “Sorry, but they kind of count on me down there,” he said. “Happy birthday again, Kel.” Well, he thought, it probably wouldn’t have been much of a fun party anyway if I had to watch that asshole Crabtree hanging all over her and the both of them ending up snogging on Molly’s couch. Cody ran to the parking lot and got into his own car, a battered ten year-old Nissan which like most NVA wheels was souped up under the hood to NASCAR standards, carrying a few little extras like armor plating in the back seat and side doors. After a long and careful ride through Bellevue, during which he watched alertly to make certain he wasn’t followed, turned off to avoid known FATPO checkpoints and on one occasion to avoid a lumbering Stryker armored vehicle in U. S. military camouflage, Cody arrived at the current safe house which was used as a headquarters by Alpha Company. It was a private home in an upscale Bellevue suburb, with a neatly trimmed and landscaped lawn and the sprinklers turning merrily, from the outside quite possibly the home of the Brady Bunch. Cody drove by, parked a block down the street, then walked back to the house. He knocked a coded signal on the side door, which was opened by a big chunky man with iron-gray hair and a weatherbeaten face, a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun in one hand. “Hey there, Daddy,” he said to Farmer Brown, the man who occasionally played the role of his father when necessary for the school system. “What’s up? We going out tonight?”

  “Looks like. The boss wants to see you downstairs,” said Brown. “He’ll tell you about it.”

  In the basement Cody met with his commanding officer, NVA Lieutenant Robert DiBella, a grumpy and thickset man of about fifty. He had balding black hair flecked with iron gray, tobacco-stained yellow teeth and a blue-shaven chin. This afternoon, the man who was arguably the deadliest NVA gunman in Seattle was wearing a pair of greasy overalls and heavy work boots. He looked like any Joe Shmoe janitor or gas station attendant. As per usual, he had a large cheap cigar stuck in his mouth, glowing and spewing smelly white fumes.

  Robert DiBella had joined the NVA for the simplest and most personal of reasons: he couldn’t find anything else to do. After twenty years on the factory floor of the Connerly heavy diesel engine factory in Tukwila, he had been laid off from his job when the company packed up without warning and moved to Guatemala lock, stock, and barrel. In his mid-forties by that time, he had been unable to get another job since. He had lost his home and had to move into a two-bedroom trailer. Medical insurance had vanished. His wife, who was in poor health with a congenital liver disorder, had been forced back to work, and his children had been compelled to give up college and go to work as a construction hand and a word processing temp respectively. In DiBella’s simplistic world view, when one got fucked, one returned the favor with interest, and the NVA allowed him to shoot the people who had done him wrong.

  He had read Rockwell’s White Power once just to confirm what he already knew, and never cracked a racial theory book again. There had been no need to convert him to racial nationalism. A working man since he had left high school, a white male who had grown up with affirmative action, open borders and Third World immigration, DiBella already knew the economic and racial facts of life. To him the idea of revolution was simple common sense. When something broke down, you fixed it. If it was beyond repair, you threw it out and replaced it. America was clearly beyond repair, so it was time
to try something else. A new country for only white people seemed like just what the doctor ordered.

  “Sit down, kid. We got a tickle on tonight,” Bells told him. “It’s a hit. Two confirmed targets, maybe three. Some asshole rock and roll singer and his Jew dope pusher buddy, and as icing on the cake, maybe a Fed from Homeland Security as well. They’re cooking up some anti-racist rock concert shit, and we’re going to put some manners on ‘em. This one’s a bit of a rush job. I like more time to plan, but as Mick Jagger tells us, you can’t always get what you want, and this one ain’t complex. You keep sayin’ you wanna pull a trigger. Now’s your chance. You still all hot and bothered to kill somebody you don’t know from Adam’s house cat?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Cody, striving to keep his voice calm. “I’ve been ready to make my bones since the day I took the oath. I won’t let you down.”

  “Yeah, well, see that you don’t, because our information is that these two guys are packing, and the Fed will be for sure if he’s there, so if you flub it you might be the one who dies. I’m sorry in a way it’s a white man. A Volunteer should make his bones on a mud or a kike. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that this has pretty much boiled down to a civil war between whites. Tell you what, to pop your cherry we’ll let you take down the Jew, one Jacob ‘Kappy’ Kaplan, and we’ll let Jumping Jack Flash do the white guy. Assuming we don’t fuck up, this tickle shouldn’t be no trouble. Lefties are pussies, at least in this country. They’ve got some tough Reds in Europe, and in England where Jack comes from, but not in America. Once we had some Trotskyites try to take over Local 184 at the plant, before it shut down. Jews and feminist bitches. They showed up at the union hall with all kinds of Commie newspapers and literature. We tapped ‘em with a wrench a couple of times, and they all ran away. Before the war those street-corner Commie types used to give the Party trouble, showing up any time we had a rally or a public event and throwing shit at us, spitting on us, that kind of crap. But they always were pussies, even then, and after 10/22 when a few rounds popped off over their heads they scattered and ran like mice. Now, don’t bullshit me, kid, because once we get out there I can’t have you freezing on me when the time comes. You sure about this?”

  “I did alright when those Fatties jumped us downtown,” protested Cody.

  “Yeah, you did,” agreed Bells. “You kept your head good, you aimed when you fired and I think you hit one of ‘em. Nicked his body armor, anyway. But this ain’t gonna be a firefight, kid, it’s just a piece of work. Clipping a guy cold ain’t like defending yourself when you’re attacked and playing Rambo all over Spring Street. You’re going to have to point a pistol at another man and pull the trigger, and then shoot him again when he’s on the ground to make sure he’s dead, then walk away and not worry about it afterwards. I think you can do it. If I didn’t I wouldn’t even make the offer. Hell, if I didn’t think you had it in you, you wouldn’t be here at all. For all I know this Polack guy may have some little three year-old girl who thinks he’s Uncle fucking Wiggly. But that ain’t our department. The Party says he has to go, so he goes. Now, you want in?”

  Cody gave Commandant Winston Wayne’s famous answer from several years before, when in a rare media interview Wayne was berated by a television reporter for causing pain and suffering among survivors of the NVA’s attacks. “I will not be blackmailed by the tears of children into failing in my duty. Yes, sir, I want in.”

  “That’s what I figured you’d say, but I hadda ask,” replied DiBella with a nod, leaning back on the sofa and popping the top on a can of diet Dr. Pepper, which he then scowled at. “I know we can’t be doing this with drunks, and I understand the regulation against alcohol, but damn, I’ll be glad when we win this thing and I’ll be able to have a beer again!” He didn’t give Cody time to comment, but Cody probably wouldn’t have been a drinker even if the NVA hadn’t strictly banned booze among Volunteers. Booze was what had gotten Cody’s father sent to prison. Booze and tyranny was a bad combination.

  “Okay, here’s the spritz. We take two cars, as per usual, this time the Caddy and the Cherokee.” Bells was a big man, and he liked big roomy cars and SUVs. “You and me and Farmer Brown will be in one vehicle. Eddie Hagen, Thumper and Jumping Jack Flash will be in the second car. The limey kid gets to make his bones tonight as well as you. This one is about as basic as it gets.

  “The takedown is going to be in the parking lot behind the Eclectic Strawberry café on Broadway, just off the market square up in Capitol Hill. We wait for the targets to come out, we blast ‘em before they get in their cars, and we book. I know the spot. It’s set back from the street and boxed in nice and neat on either side, so it should be like shootin’ fish in a barrel. There are alleys on either side at the far corners of the lot by the restaurant itself, which they could possibly escape through, but they shouldn’t be able to get that far, because we’re going to nail ‘em quick and not let ‘em beat feet. Hopefully there won’t be too many cars in the lot that time of night for ‘em to dodge around and hide behind, since the Strawberry isn’t a bar, no liquor license, just vegetarian goulash and herbal tea and poetry readings and puppet shows and hippie-dippy crap like that. But we’ll get you guys good and close, so we don’t have to play hide and seek with these motherfuckers. They should be leaving any time after ten. If for any reason we miss ‘em at the Strawberry we have a probable secondary attack point, McGrory’s Pub on 15th Avenue, which is where Country Joe usually likes to wind up his evening. We should be able to confirm if he’s there from somebody we got on the inside, but I don’t want you two to have to go into a building on your first hit with no recon. Never do an indoor hit unless you’ve been in the joint first, you know where everything is, and you’ve seen all the exits and potential problems. They shouldn’t get that far, anyway. This should go down at the Strawberry. We’ll be in the area cruising, and I’ll get a code word text message when it looks like they’re about five minutes from the door, so that way we won’t have to hang around the parking lot loafing and looking conspicuous for any curious busybodies.”

  “Country Joe?” asked Cody.

  “Yeah, our targets for tonight are one Joseph Krajewski, a white male approximately age fifty with long hair and a goatee beard and assorted tats, and a Red Sea pedestrian named Jacob Kaplan, aka Kappy, short and fat and Semitic, who is also a penny-ante drug dealer. Our source tells us that both men are carrying licensed handguns, so the possibility of return fire exists. That means no fucking around. If we do our job right, no one should ever shoot back. We’re not out to play Wild Bill Hickock with anybody, we’re there to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. Here’s a picture of them both; they’re circled.” Bells handed Cody a flyer for the rock group Concussion, and he carefully looked at the faces of the two men he would be hunting tonight before handing it back. “That’s your target on the right. Make sure you can recognize him so you don’t plug the wrong guy, although how anyone could mistake a hose nose like that one, I got no idea. Remember, this is going to be in the dark, with only whatever lighting is on the street.”

  “Weapons?” asked Cody.

  “Weapons will be handguns for you two and longarms for Farmer Brown and Hagen, because they will be debusing the vehicles with you and they will take out the Homeland Security Fed or Feds, if they’re present, and anybody else who tries to be a hero and get involved. I’ll let you two root through what we got in the closet and you can choose your own gun, whatever you’re most comfortable with.”

  “No full auto?” asked Cody in some disappointment. “Jeez, I was hoping to hose down Broadway like you guys did last time to all those faggots and race-mixers.” Cody had been a driver during Operation Springtime for Hitler, and was still miffed that he had not been given an opportunity to pull a trigger.

  “No, too indiscriminate,” said Bobby Bells, shaking his head. “No mortars or crashing of airplanes either, worse luck. Because you see, just to make it interesting, we got a
little stipulation from Brigade. On this job, the night train is strictly stag. You might call it a surgical strike. We waste Krajewski and his Jew guru and any other males with them who get in the way, which will hopefully include a suit or two from the Department of Homeland Security, but there will most likely be a few chicks with the target group, and we have to make sure that we do not shoot any of the women. One of them’s ours.”

  “Ours?” asked Cody in puzzlement.

  “Yeah, I told you, we got somebody on the inside. She’s the informant who’s gonna put the finger on these characters for us. A Threesec op who calls herself Nightshade.”

  “How dramatic! A girl spy with a neat slinky code name,” laughed Cody. “What does Nightshade look like? All black leather and a black beret, no doubt? And sunglasses, even at night?”

  “Hell, for all I know she may have three tits,” replied Bells with a shrug. “We don’t know what she looks like. We never had no need to know before this. Just be a gentleman tonight and don’t clip any of the bimbos. I’m assuming this broad has sense enough to duck when the lead starts flying. Now, we’re going to have to leave early to get over into the city the long way, because according to Brigade intelligence it looks like Fattie has got checkpoints on I-90 and the 520 both laid on for tonight. Remember that if you have to end up having to E & E on your own for any reason—stay off the bridges.”

  Cody went upstairs and made himself a sandwich, which he ate, and then he and Jumping Jack Flash, an intense blond young Englishman with an upper-class Oxonian accent to go with his incongruous Cockney nickname, went back down into the basement where they were shown to a large metal arms locker and allowed to choose their armament for the evening. Cody was not allowed to carry a weapon unless he was actually out on duty, since wide-eyed golly-gee teenager or not, there was simply no way to talk his way out of getting caught with a gun. This had already proven to be a worthwhile precaution on several occasions when he had been stopped, frisked, and manhandled by FATPO patrols, not to mention his being unarmed the time he’d had his little set-to with Craig Crabtree, when he might have been tempted to use a weapon despite the trouble his own father had gotten into in a similar situation. In the normal course of his day he didn’t need one, anyway. But he had been with A Company long enough to have undergone extensive one-on-one training in firearms from men who had learned in the imperial military, and who were expert and lethal. He could handle and field-strip every weapon in the active service unit’s impressive arsenal. “We going to be dumping the pieces afterward, Lieutenant?” asked Cody.