The Hill of the Ravens Page 7

  “My God, in 2001 the United States was almost brought to a standstill by four crashing aircraft hijacked with box cutters!” commented Don. “How could anyone claim it was impossible to bring down the Beast? Nineteen young Arabs damned near did it on their own!”

  “When white men in the Northwest finally screwed our courage to the sticking point, we largely followed the Provos’ example. Hell, we even stole their rebel songs!” added Morgan with a smile. “You’ll recall that I commanded my own column out in the boonies of the Olympic for almost three years, and I can tell you that the Feds’ much-vaunted super-duper spy satellites and their drone aircraft were never all that accurate. Kind of like the Zeppelins during World War One. A technological advance that was supposed to be decisive, but it fizzled in practice. It was all in the interpretation, and the people they had analyzing all that satellite data were more often than not affirmative action bozos and bitches who didn’t have a clue what the hell they were looking at. I’ve often said, we didn’t win the war against ZOG, their own diversity lost it for them. So many of their people were incompetents who were where they were and doing the jobs they were doing because of the color of their skin, or because they had tits on ‘em. Hell, as long ago as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, Bush II’s idiots used to order in massive bombing raids on wedding parties and school buses because they had no idea who was who. Why do you think the Afghans finally rebelled en masse against the American occupation and the American puppet government in Kabul? ZOG couldn’t even find their real enemies on barren mountainsides or in wide open deserts, never mind mountains covered with trees. The fact was that during the war, as far as our open country active service units were concerned, the Feds never learned to distinguish between our people and ordinary travelers, hunters, logging crews, park rangers, firefighters, local residents, sheep and cattle, wild animals, their own military convoys, whatever. The Eye in the Sky was a danger, to be sure, like a hundred others we faced, but we eventually learned to evade it the same way the Iraqis and the Serbs and every other smaller power ZOG attacked learned to evade it. Simple camouflage. Hide in plain sight. Blend in with crowds. Dummy vehicles and Quaker guns, you name it. It was just one more problem we had to deal with, and we dealt with it. Faking out the satellites eventually became second nature and we got on with the business of killing ZOG. Actually, it was a lot more dangerous for a Volunteer to be assigned to an active service unit in one of the cities, where you might be ratted out by some pale-skinned traitor who wanted the OHS reward money. Other than that one incident at Ravenhill Ranch, they never succeeded in completely destroying any other Flying Column. The Olympic Flying Column was betrayed by an informer, Don.”

  “With all due respect, sir, how do we know that?” asked Redmond.

  “Well, for one thing, we have the testimony of a FATPO defector who came over to us right after Ravenhill,” said Morgan. “Arthur McBride, his name is. Brought two more FATPOs in from the cold with him. They’re both dead, but McBride is still alive. Rose to Command Sergeant Major in the army after the war, then went into the Labor Service. He’s retired now, a widower. Married a female Volunteer, Brooke Arnold. Little chubby blonde girl with the heart of a lion, who as far as I am concerned was up to Melanie Young standards, but that’s just my personal opinion. Brooke never had any songs written about her, Melanie did. Guess that’s the way it plays out in history sometimes. McBride lives up in Bremerton. He was there when that nigger major took the call from the rat, or from someone who was in contact with the rat. Took the call on his personal cell phone, not an official or a military phone or computer. That’s important. The Ravenhill ambush was not something that came down from the FBI or the Office of Homeland Security. It was something set up between that monkoid Coleman and a stukach he was working himself. McBride was questioned very seriously at the time, you better believe it. I grilled him myself, but he swore he didn’t know who the informant was. It rang true at the time and I still think McBride was telling the truth, that he honestly didn’t know who the traitor was, but I ain’t anywhere near perfect and for all I know, maybe I missed something. McBride might be a good starting point for your investigation, Don.”

  “Noted, sir. But this McBride guy aside, what about all those FBI and FATPO records we captured during the final assault on the cities, sir? What did they say about Ravenhill Ranch?”

  “Damned little,” growled Morgan. “Which is odd. That in itself tells me something. Hit war one of their greatest victories against us, yet there was almost nothing in their own records about it. They kept that incident well under wraps, even from their own people. There was something heavy moving in the shade there.”

  Don spoke bluntly. “Mr. President, let me be absolutely clear on precisely what my orders are from you in this matter. In view of the possible return of Trudy Greiner, you want me to investigate and ascertain the true facts regarding what happened to the Olympic Flying Column almost forty years ago? An incident that occurred before the majority of the population of this country was even born? And you want me to do this in a matter of just a few days, before Gertrude Greiner rocks up at the I-5 crossing and embarrasses the hell out of the Republic with her demand for a public trial? A public trial at which, after an entire generation of hate propaganda and accusation, we might not after all be able to produce any real evidence that might satisfy the world that she’s guilty?”

  “That would be accurate, Colonel, yes,” returned President Morgan.

  “Why?” demanded Redmond bluntly. “Don’t get me wrong, John. You know I’m fascinated with that part of our history and I’d love nothing better than an excuse to jaw-jack with old NVA vets about the past and get paid for it. But this cuts a wee bit too close to the bone for me to enjoy it as part of my hobby. Is there any particular reason you are asking me to undo three decades of anti-Trudy Greiner propaganda at this point in our national life? Why not just grab her when she walks across the border, take her off somewhere, shoot her in the head and grind her up into fertilizer like we did with all the scum during the Cleanup? Like we still do on occasion when circumstances seem to demand it?”

  “Moral dimension, son,” sighed Morgan. “That accursed moral dimension that the Old Man taught us to exalt above all things, damn his decrepit hyper-ethical ass! Shit, why couldn’t he have been a cynical opportunist like all the rest of his Movement generation? You know the Old Man’s rap. What makes us different from them and all that happy horse shit. There are…certain inconvenient facts.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” asked Redmond. “Certain inconvenient facts? What facts might those be?”

  “Like the fact that I don’t think she did it,” replied Morgan softly, looking out the window down at the slim blue line of the South Sound, gleaming through the firs. “Because, God damn her, Trudy Greiner may in fact be innocent. If she had any real respect at all for what we have achieved, she’d stay the hell away and stay the hell guilty. But it doesn’t look like we’re going to have that luxury, son.”

  Redmond was silent for a few moments. “She may be innocent?” he said, his voice filled with quiet horror. “She may be innocent? And you have done nothing about that in all the time you have been our head of state?”

  “That would be correct,” replied Morgan.

  “Mr. President, coming from you, that is a statement so breath-taking that I will not at this stage comment upon it,” said Redmond evenly, recovering himself. “What I am hearing here is that we might have lied to our own countrymen for almost forty years. You have just denied and negated a primary nation-building legend from the crucial first generation of this country’s existence, but we’ll leave that for the time being. So we’re practicing a little historical revisionism here today? May I ask why you don’t think she did it?”

  “She was a good soldier, Don,” said Morgan, not looking at him.

  “You said that before, sir,” pointed out Redmond.

  “I have always thought that,” continued Morgan, ignorin
g him. “She was a good soldier. There was steel in her soul, Don, the right stuff, the real stuff, the true stuff. After a time you got to recognize it, and if I ever was deceived, hit war the only time with her. But I think she was a brave and noble woman who somehow ended up being terribly victimized, and I will go to my grave believing that.”

  Redmond understood he was getting involved in something extremely deep. “How well did you know her, Mr. President?” he asked. Morgan looked at him. “Sarah’s mother has been dead for years, sir. I repeat that I know the context of the revolution and I have no intention of making moralizing judgments. I will also give you my word that anything you tell me will be kept in strictest confidentiality, meaning I won’t tell Sarah without your permission. But if you want me to look into this letter and re-examine the Ravenhill Ranch incident, then I need to know everything.”

  “I never slept with her, if that’s what you’re getting at,” said the president with a smile. “I was still married at the time I met Trudy, although the war had separated me from my wife for a long time. I was…very fond of Trudy. I had some dealings with her in the year before she was assigned to the Olympic Flying Column, and I met her on several occasions afterward. I admired her very much, and if you want to get Biblical about it, yeah, I suppose I committed adultery with her in my heart. A beautiful, fiery young woman who was just as dedicated as I was to the cause of securing the existence of our people and a future for white children…yeah, I was tempted. Damned tempted. Circumstances never played out to where I got the chance to do anything one way or the other about those thoughts, for which I will always thank God. I doubt Trude would have gone for it anyway. She viewed me as a comrade and nothing more, and I was always taught that a gentleman can take no for an answer. Besides, after a while it became pretty obvious that she only had eyes for Tom Murdock, and he was a better man than me. Yes he was, Don, and I was never jealous of him, for that or for any other reason. If he had lived, then Tom Murdock would be living in this house today and not me, and we’d all be the better off for it.”

  “Did Murdock have eyes for her?” asked Don.

  “My understanding is they were involved for a time, and then Murdock broke it off to go with Melanie Young,” said Morgan. “Which gives Trudy Greiner a far more urgent and human motive for betrayal than mere money, hell having no fury like a woman scorned,” said Redmond. “That aspect of it doesn’t seem to have made it into our history books.”

  “For obvious political reasons. As far as the official record goes, the Olympic Flying Column is a tale of pure and fearless heroism and noble sacrifice for our people, and I have to say that’s not all that damned far from the truth. The Olympic boys and girls were our finest and bravest partisans, Don. They never shirked danger and went for the soft targets like some, and they never went kill-crazy like Oglevy’s crew and others did. They fought their war with a courage and a gallantry that would have done credit to the Confederate Army. Tom Murdock and Melanie Young are our anointed revolutionary icons of manly courage and honor and female beauty and virtue, while Trudy Greiner is an icon of evil, which is what we needed and what we still need. Icons, mystique, a theology in black and white that will make sure a thousand years from now there are still people who look like us in the world. The War of Independence is the greatest saga of the Folk since our very creation of America itself. It must not be allowed to become a cheap soap opera.”

  “Be that as it may, I’d say that the romantic angle, as we’ll call it, makes it even more likely that she’s guilty,” said Redmond.

  “If Trudy had lost it and plugged Murdock or Melanie in some kind of jealous rage, yeah, I could see that happening, but I just can’t see her betraying the whole column and the very cause of independence and white survival itself!” cried Morgan in pain. “I’m not saying she’s not guilty, Don, I’m just saying I don’t think she is, and I admit I have no evidence to back up that conviction. The accusation against Trudy tore my guts out, son, but from the available evidence I had to accept that she had betrayed us, betrayed her country, and betrayed her race. Yet all these years I have secretly hoped to get a letter like the one you hold there. That’s why I’d like you to take this on yourself, Don. It means a lot, not just to history and the Republic, but to me. If she is coming back, then she’s not the beautiful and purposeful young woman I once knew, I know that.

  She’ll be old and gray and someone completely different from the girl I always see in my mind. But there will be a connection between that old lady and the young warrior maiden I knew. If she does come back, and if she can’t prove her innocence, then I’m the one who will have to sign the paper that sends her to her death. I’ll sign that paper if I have to, Don, but I have to know whether or not she’s guilty before I do.”

  Don shrugged and drew on his cigar. “Okay, let’s assume for the moment that I didn’t grow to manhood on the Trudy Greiner legend, that I haven’t seen any of the TV shows or the movies about the Olympic Flying Column wherein she is portrayed as the daughter of Satan. Let me do the old detective trick here, since technically I’m supposed to be one. In any crime, the guilty party has to have three things: motive, means, and opportunity. Trudy Greiner qualifies on motive because motive itself breaks down into three kinds: passion, profit, and protection, and all three might well apply to her. There was her rejection by Tom Murdock. There was the million dollars she was allegedly paid for her act of treachery. And there was the motive of protection, if she was a Federal spy and possibly someone had found her out. If that was the case, that might be why the whole column had to die. Murdock or whoever suspected her as a traitor might have told someone else and so any potential witnesses had to be eliminated. Now what about means and opportunity? Refresh my memory some more, Mr. President. Exactly what was the evidence against Gertrude Greiner? What led NVA intelligence to believe that she betrayed the column?”

  “Cutting through thirty years’ encrustation of hearsay, urban legend, and crap, hit war two things only,” said Morgan morosely. “The first being that Greiner was one of nine people who had means and opportunity, who could conceivably have tipped off the FATPOs about the unit’s movements. Only nine people survived, all of whom were somewhere else.”

  “Agreed,” said Don. “I think we can take it as a working proposition that like most people the informer was not suicidal, and so somehow arranged to be on detached duty rather than ride into the deadly ambush he or she had just set up.”

  “As you said earlier, Trude operated on her own in urban areas organizing supplies and logistics for the column, and so she had the opportunity to make contact with the Federal authorities or somehow directly with Monkey Meat Coleman. A much better opportunity than any of the others, although some like Volunteers Cord, Palmieri, and Saltovic did do supply runs and other missions on their own.”

  “Wasn’t it standard operating procedure to always send Volunteers on any mission in pairs?” recalled Redmond.

  “It wasn’t always practical to follow that rule, and also after a while the Feds picked up on it and started concentrating random traffic stops, searches, and harassment on pairs of white people they observed in public,” Morgan explained. “So yes, some of the other eight are known to have done occasional single tasks or trips into town for the column, and it is entirely likely that all of them did at one time or another. But more significantly, after the massacre at Ravenhill Ranch the first eight Volunteers stayed at their posts. Some of them have since held eminent and responsible positions in the Republic’s government, in the Party, and in society. Trudy Greiner went AWOL. She disappeared off the face of the earth. She broke contact with the NVA the morning of the ambush, and that letter you’re holding in your hand is the first solid lead we have had on her whereabouts in almost forty years. If she wasn’t guilty, Don, then why did she run?”

  “She may tell us when she gets here,” suggested Don.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. The second thing was that on the morning of July 31st,
the day before Ravenhill, a one million dollar deposit was made into a covert Party bank account at the Westlake branch of the Bank of America in Seattle. One of Trudy Greiner’s covert accounts. It was a wire transfer from a corporation in Hamilton, Bermuda, which corporation appeared and then disappeared forever, having performed that one single financial transaction. This deposit was made day before the column was slaughtered by the FATPOs, Don.”

  “Premeditation,” said Don, sending a curl of cigar smoke into the air. “Someone was setting it up. Someone knew what was coming.”

  “Yes. That million bucks did not come from any known Party or NVA source. Jesus, I don’t think the Party ever had a million dollars in the bank until some years after independence, never mind during the revolution itself. The day after the ambush, August the second, a young woman matching Trudy Greiner’s description, who had ID in that name and knew Trudy Greiner’s password and account details and who passed an electronic fingerprint scan, came into the bank and withdrew that entire amount in the form of a certified cashier’s check. The check was made out to Gertrude Greiner. After the war we were able to obtain an affidavit to that effect from the vice president of the bank who issued the draft along with the computer printouts for the transaction.”

  “Do we know for certain that Trudy Greiner was the woman who withdrew the money?” asked Don Redmond.

  “There were bank security camera videos, but they have long since disappeared. No, Colonel, we do not know for absolute certain that it was Trudy Greiner who took that money and fled. Even in those days fingerprinting could be forged; the Israeli Mossad made a practice of it. Nor were we ever able to trace the certified check. We have no idea on earth where it was ever cashed or deposited. By the time the Republic’s intelligence services were in any position to do any such thing the paper trail had become far too old and cold.”