Chapter XXVI

  September 18, 1993. So much has happened, so much has been lost in these last two weeks, I can hardly force myself to begin writing about it. I am alive and in good health, yet there are moments when I envy the tens of millions who have died in recent days. My soul has dried up inside me; I am like a walking dead man.
  All that I have been able to think about-all that has been running through my mind, over and over again-is the single, overwhelming fact: Katherine is gone! Before today, when I was not absolutely certain of her fate, that fact tormented me and gave me no rest. Now that I know she is dead, however, the torment is gone, and I merely feel a great emptiness, an irreplaceable loss.

  There is important work for me to do, and I know that I must now put the past out of my mind and get on with it. But tonight I must record my memories, my thoughts. In the chaos of these days, millions perish without leaving a ripple behind-they will be forever unremembered, forever nameless-but I can at least commit to these flimsy pages my memory of Katherine and the events which she and our other comrades have helped to shape and hope that my diary outlives me. That, at least, we owe to our dead, to our martyrs: that we do not forget them or their deeds.

  It was September 7, a Wednesday, that I finished installing our third bomb. I and two other members of our bomb team picked it up Monday from the hiding place where the last warhead is still stashed, and we took it to Maryland. I had already pinpointed the location where I wanted to install it, but troop movements were so heavy that week throughout the Washington area that we had to wait in Maryland nearly three days for an opportunity to approach the target location.

  Civilian vehicular traffic has long been quite encumbered in the Washington area by roadblocks, restricted sections of many roads, inspection points, and so on, but that week it had become almost impossible. On the way back to our printing shop-headquarters, the roads were congested by long streams of civilian vehicles, all going in the opposite direction and piled high with household belongings lashed to doors, hoods, and roofs. Then, about half a mile from the shop, I ran into a new military roadblock, which hadn't been there when I left. Coils of barbed wire were strung across the road, and a tank was parked behind the barbed wire.
I turned around and tried another street; it was blocked also. I shouted across the barrier to a soldier, telling him where I was headed and asking him what unblocked street I could take to get there. "You can't go there at all," he shouted back. "This is a security area. Everyone was evacuated this morning. Any civilian spotted inside the perimeter will be shot on sight."
  I was stunned. What had happened to Katherine and the others?
  Apparently the military authorities had suddenly extended the radius of the security area around the Pentagon from its former two miles to three miles without warning. Our shop had been a safe halfmile outside the former perimeter, and it had never occurred to us that it would be extended. But it had been, evidently to keep the Organization from planting a nuclear bomb close enough to take out the Pentagon. Actually, I considered the former perimeter adequate protection from our 60-kiloton warheads, since the Pentagon was long ago equipped with blast shutters over all windows and surrounded by reinforced-concrete blast deflectors. I'd been trying without success to figure how to get a bomb inside that perimeter since I arrived back in Washington from California.
  I drove to our unit's emergency rendezvous point a few miles south of Alexandria, but there was no one there and no message for me. I had no way to contact Washington Field Command to find out where Katherine, Bill, and Carol were, because all our communications equipment was in the shop. But the fact they weren't at the rendezvous point made me almost certain that they had been arrested.
  It was already past midnight, but I immediately headed north again, toward the area where the evacuees I had passed earlier were bound. I thought I might find out from someone who had lived in the vicinity of our shop what had happened to my comrades. It was a foolishly dangerous thought, born of my sense of desperation, and I was probably fortunate that a military truck convoy had the highway so thoroughly blocked that I was finally obliged to pull off the road and sleep until morning.

  When I finally did reach the refugee area later that day, I soon realized that the chance of obtaining the information I sought was very slim. A sea of army tents had been erected in a huge, suburban supermarket parking lot and in an adjacent field. Around the edge of the encampment was a jam-packed mass of outdoor chemical toilets, civilian vehicles still piled high with household goods, refugees, and soldiers.
  I wandered through the milling throng for nearly three hours and saw no familiar faces. I tried questioning a few people at random, but I got nowhere. People were frightened and gave me only evasive answers or none at all. They were miserable and bewildered, but they wanted no more trouble than they already had, and questions about arrests they might have witnessed spelled trouble to them.
  As I passed one tent about twice as large as the others, I heard muffled screams and hysterical sobbing coming from inside, interspersed with loud, coarse, masculine laughter and banter. A dozen Black soldiers were lined up at the entrance.
  I stopped to find out what was happening, just as two grinning Black soldiers forced their way through the throng in front of the tent and went inside, dragging a terrified, sobbing White girl about 14 years old between them. The raping queue moved forward another space.
  I ran over to a White officer wearing a major's insignia who was standing only about 50 yards away. I began angrily protesting what was happening, but before I had finished my first sentence the officer turned shamefacedly away from me and hurried off in the opposite direction. Two White soldiers nearby cast their eyes downward and disappeared between two tents. No one wanted to be suspected of "racism." I fought down a nearly overpowering impulse to draw my pistol and begin shooting everyone in sight, and then left.
  I drove to the one place I was reasonably sure was still manned by Organization personnel: the old gift shop in Georgetown. It was just outside the new Pentagon security perimeter. I arrived there as dusk was falling and pulled the pickup truck around to the rear service entrance.
  I had just climbed out of the truck and stepped into the shadows at the rear of the building when the world around me suddenly lit up as bright as noon for a moment. First there was an intensely bright flash of light, then a weaker glow which cast moving shadows and changed from white to yellow to red in the course of a few seconds.
  I ran to the alley, so that I could have a more nearly unobstructed view of the sky. What I saw chilled my blood and caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. An enormous, bulbous, glowing thing, a splotchy ruby-red in color for the most part but shot through with dark streaks and also dappled with a shifting pattern of brighter orange and yellow areas, was rising into the northern sky and casting its ominous, blood-red light over the land below. It was truly a vision from hell.
As I watched, the gigantic fireball continued to expand and rise, and a dark column, like the stem of an immense toadstool, became visible beneath it. Bright, electric-blue tongues of fire could be seen flickering and dancing over the surface of the column. They were huge lightning bolts, but at their distance no thunder could be heard from them. When the noise finally came, it was a dull, muffled sound, yet still overwhelming: the sort of sound one might expect to hear if an inconceivably powerful earthquake rocked a huge city and caused a thousand 100-story skyscrapers to crumble into ruins simultaneously. g
  I realized that I was witnessing the annihilation of the city of Baltimore, 35 miles away, but I could not understand the enormous magnitude of the blast. Could one of our 60-kiloton bombs have done that? It seemed more like what one would expect from a megaton bomb.
  The government news reports that night and the next day claimed that the warhead which destroyed Baltimore, killing more than a million people, as well as the blasts which destroyed some two-dozen other major American cities the same day, had been set off by us. They also claimed that the government had counterattacked and destroyed the "nest of racist vipers" in California. As it turned out, both claims were false, but it was two days before I learned the full story of what had actually happened.
  Meanwhile, it was with a feeling of deepest despair that I and half-a-dozen others who were gathered around the television set in the darkened basement of the gift shop late that night heard a newscaster gloatingly announce the destruction of our liberated zone in California. He was a Jew, and he really let his emotions carry him away; I have never before heard or seen anything like it.
  After a solemn rundown of most of the cities which had been hit that day, with preliminary estimates of the death tolls (sample: ". . . and in Detroit, which the racist fiends struck with two of their missiles, they murdered over 1.4 million innocent American men, women, and children of all races . . ."), he came to New York. At that point tears actually appeared in his eyes and his voice broke.
  Between sobs he gasped out the news that 18 separate nuclear blasts had leveled Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs and suburbs out to a radius of approximately 20 miles, with an estimated 14 million killed outright and perhaps another five million expected to die of burns or radiation sickness within the next few days. Then he lapsed into Hebrew and began a strange, wailing chant, as tears streamed down his cheeks and his clenched fists pounded his breast.
  After a few seconds of this he recovered, and his demeanor changed completely. Anguish was replaced first by a burning hatred for those who had destroyed his beloved, Jewish New York City, then by an expression of grim satisfaction which gradually turned into an exultant gloating: "But we have taken our vengeance against our enemies, and they are no more. Time and again, throughout history, the nations have risen up against us and tried to expel us or kill us, lot we have always triumphed in the end. No one can resist us. All those who have tried-Egypt, Persia, Rome, Spain, Russia, Germany - have themselves been destroyed, and we have always emerged triumphant from the ruins. We have always survived and prospered. And now we have utterly crushed the latest of those who have raised their hands against us. Just as Moshe smote the Egyptian, so have we smitten the Organization."
  His tongue flickered wetly over his lips and his dark eyes gleamed balefully as he described the hail of nuclear annihilation which he said had been unleashed on California that very afternoon: "Their precious racial superiority did not help them a bit when we fired hundreds of nuclear missiles into the racist stronghold," the newscaster gloated. "The White vermin died like flies. We can only hope they realized in their last moments that many of the loyal soldiers who pressed the firing buttons for the missiles which killed them were Black or Chicano or Jewish. Yes, the Whites and their criminal racial pride have been wiped out in California, but now we must kill the racists everywhere else, so that racial harmony and brotherhood can be restored to America. We must kill them! Kill them! Kill! Kill! . . ."
  Then he lapsed into Hebrew again, and his voice became louder and harsher. He stood up and leaned into the camera, an incarnation of pure hatred, as he shrieked and gibbeted in his alien tongue, gobs of saliva flying from his mouth and dribbling down his chin.
  This extraordinary performance must have been embarrassing to some of his less emotional brethren, because he was suddenly cut off in mid-shriek and replaced by a Gentile, who continued to give out revised casualty estimates into the early hours of the morning.
  Gradually, during the next 48 hours, we learned the true story of that dreadful Thursday, both from later and more nearly accurate government newscasts and from our own sources. The first and most important news we received came early Friday morning, in a coded message from Revolutionary Command to all the Organization's units around the country: California had not been destroyed! Vandenberg had been annihilated, and two large missiles had struck the city of Los Angeles, causing widespread death and destruction, but at least 90 per cent of the people in the, liberated zone had survived, partly because they had been given a few minutes advance warning and had been able to take shelter.
  Unfortunately for the people in other parts of the country, there was no advance warning, and the total death toll - including those who have died of burns, other wounds, and radiation in the last 10 days-is approximately 60 million. The missiles which caused these deaths, however, were not ours - except in the case of New York City, which received a barrage first from Vandenberg and then from the Soviet Union.
  Baltimore, Detroit, and the other American cities which were hit-even Los Angeles-were all the victims of Soviet missiles. Vandenberg AFB was the only domestic target hit by the U.S. government. ?
  The cataclysmic chain of events began with an extrordinarily painful decision by Revolutionary Command. Reports being received by RC in the first week of this month indicated a gradual but steady shift of the balance of power from the military faction in the government, which wanted to avoid a nuclear showdown with us, to the Jewish faction, which demanded the immediate annihilation of California. The Jews feared that otherwise the existing stalemate between the liberated zone and the rest of the country might become permanent, which would mean an almost certain victory for us eventually.
  To prevent this they went to work behind the scenes in their customary manner, arguing, threatening, bribing, bringing pressure to bear on one of their opponents at a time. They had already succeeded in arranging the replacement of several top generals by their own creatures, and RC saw the last chance disappearing of avoiding a full-scale exchange of nuclear missiles with government forces.
  So we decided to preempt. We struck first, but not at the government's forces. We fired all our missiles from Vandenberg (except for half-a-dozen targeted on New York) at two targets: Israel and the Soviet Union. As soon as our missiles had been; launched, RC announced the news to the Pentagon via a direct telephone link. The Pentagon, of course, had immediate confirmation from its own radar screens, and it had no choice but to follow up our salvo with an immediate and full-scale nuclear attack of its own against the Soviet Union, in an attempt to knock out as much of the Soviet retaliatory potential as possible.
  The Soviet response was horrendous, but spotty. They fired everything they had left at us, but it simply wasn't enough. Several of the largest American cities, including Washington and Chicago, were spared.
  What the Organization accomplished by precipitating this fateful chain of events is fourfold: First, by hitting New York and Israel, we have completely knocked out two of world Jewry's principal nerve centers, and it should take them a while to establish a new chain of command and get their act back together.
  Second, by forcing them to take a decisive action, we pushed the balance of power in the U.S. government solidly back toward the military leaders. For all practical purposes, the country is now under a military government.
  Third, by provoking a Soviet counterattack, we did far more to disrupt the System in this country and break up the orderly pattern of life of the masses than we could have done by using our own weapons against domestic targets-and we still have most of our 60-kiloton warheads left! That will be of enormous advantage to us in the days ahead.
   Fourth, we have eliminated a major specter which had been hanging over our plans before: the specter of Soviet intervention after we and the System had fought it out with each other.
  We took an enormous chance, of course: first, that California I would be devastated in the Soviet counterattack- and second, that the U.S. military would lose its cool and use its nuclear weaponry on California even though, except for Vandenberg, there was no nuclear threat there to be knocked out. In both cases the fortunes of war have been at least moderately kind to us-although the threat from the U.S. military is by no means over.
  What we lost, however, is substantial: about an eighth of the Organization's members, and nearly a fifth of the White population of the country-not to mention an unknown number of millions of racial kinsmen in the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the heaviest death toll in this country has been in the largest cities, which are substantially non-White.
  All in all, the strategic situation of the Organization relative to the System is enormously improved, and that is what really counts. We are willing to take as many casualties as necessary- just so the System takes proportionately more. All that matters, in the long run, is that when the smoke has finally cleared the last battalion in the field is ours.
  Today I finally located Bill and found out what happened back in the print shop during the evacuation. He has also suffered a grievous personal loss, and his story was brief but poignant.
  The evacuation of the expanded Pentagon security area had been carried out with no warning whatever. At about eleven in the morning of September 7 tanks had suddenly appeared in the streets and soldiers had begun knocking on all doors, giving occupants only ten minutes to abandon their dwellings. They were very rough on anyone who did not move fast enough.
  Bill, Carol, and Katherine were running propaganda leaflets on the press when the tanks came, and they had just enough time to hide the incriminating evidence under a tarpaulin before four Black soldiers pushed their way into the shop. Since the troops weren't taking time to search buildings, presumably everything would have gone smoothly at the shop had not one of the Blacks made a suggestive remark to Katherine as she was hastily packing some of her clothing and other personal items.
  Katherine said nothing to the Black, but the icy look she gave him apparently injured his sense of "human dignity." He began the whining, "what's a matter, baby, don' you like Black people?" approach that Blacks have found works wonders with guilt-ridden, liberal White girls who are desperately afraid of being considered "racists" if they reject the unwelcome advances of rutting Black bucks. When Katherine tried to get out the shop door carrying two heavy suitcases, the amorous Black blocked her way and tried to run his hand under her dress.
  She jumped back and gave the Black a well-placed kick in the groin, which immediately cooled his ardor, but it was too late: he had felt Katherine's thigh holster. He shouted the warning to his companions, and both sides began shooting at the same time. While Katherine and Carol fired their pistols, Bill blazed away at the Black soldiers with a sawed-off, autoloading shotgun.
  All four Blacks were mortally wounded, but not before they had in turn wounded each of the three Whites. One of the Blacks staggered out of the shop before he collapsed, and Bill, who was least seriously hit, had only a moment to ascertain that Katherine was beyond all help before he and Carol were forced to flee out the rear of the shop.
  They holed up in the attic of an adjoining building, and searchers were unable to find them. Carol soon became so weak from her wounds that she was unable to move, and Bill was not in much better condition. The night of the following day he crept painfully from their hiding place and stealthily rounded up drinking water, food, and a few medical supplies from the empty buildings in the neighborhood before returning to his wife.
  Carol died on the fourth day, and it was another five days before Bill had regained sufficient strength to leave the attic again and make his way out of the security area.
  I know that Bill would never lie to me, and so I have at least the consolation of knowing that Katherine did not fall into the hands of the enemy alive. What I must do now is devote whatever time I have left to the task of insuring that she has not died in vain.