The Hill of the Ravens
by
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Now what’s this other assignment you have for me?”
“It’s a ghost story,” said the president with a straight face,
“I beg your pardon, sir?” asked Redmond politely. “I thought you usually told us those at Halloween over the roasting hot dogs and marshmallows?”
“Actually, those are just old Manley Wade Wellman stories I ad lib,” Morgan confessed. “But this is a real one. A ghost from our past has come back to haunt us.”
“Does this ghost have a name?” asked Redmond.
“She does,” replied Morgan. “Trudy Greiner.”
“What?” roared Don, stunned, leaping to his feet in amazement, his cigar ash falling onto the carpet unnoticed.
“I said Trudy Greiner.” Morgan opened his desk drawer and handed Redmond a piece of paper encased in clear glassine plastic that he took from a folder. “This is a letter that my office received yesterday, supposedly from the Los Angeles metroplex, although there’s no way to tell where it actually originated.”
“There’s no mail service between the Republic and Aztlan,” pointed out Redmond, holding the encased letter up to the light. “From what I gather, there’s precious little mail service in Aztlan. God, this is crap paper! The eco-freaks down there must have recycled it six or eight times. It’s about to fall apart! Well, at least she’s still speaking English and not Spanglish. Proper Mexican Spanish, now that I can speak and read and write from my language training at Sandpoint, but I still haven’t quite mastered that shit half-language the Americans speak now, for all the stuff I have to read in it that comes across my desk. It’s even worse than Puerto Rican.”
“I know there’s no mail service from Aztlan,” responded Morgan. “This letter was carried by one of the private courier companies who specialize in smuggling mail into and out of the NAR. The Mexicans generally overlook it. They treat it as a kind of necessary evil and they have sense enough to know they can’t completely suppress all contact. As to the paper, she was probably lucky even to get that if she’s really living in L. A., with all the constant shortage of the basics down there.” Redmond read the paper out loud.
To the Honorable John
Corbett Morgan
State President,
Northwest American Republic
Longview House
Olympia, Washington
Mr. President:
You may be surprised
to hear from me after all this time the Republic has spent trying to hunt me
down and kill me. I am writing to tell you that you can stop looking.
I’m tired of living
among strangers. I’m tired of running and hiding all my life for a crime I did
not commit. I am going to put an end to it. It is my intention to exercise the
right that belongs to every other Aryan man and woman the world over. I am
Coming Home. I have gotten an exit visa from the Aztlan government, never mind
how. On October 22nd of this year, the anniversary of the Coeur
d’Alene uprising, I will walk into the Republic at the old Interstate Five
border crossing at Mountain Gate, California. If you want to shoot me down on
sight or hang me from the first tree on the white side of the border, then go
ahead. I don’t care any more. You’ll be murdering an innocent woman, but I
would rather die in the country I gave my youth and my heart to bring into
being than live in this mud-colored horror down here for one more day.
If you don’t kill me
outright, then I demand a public trial or court martial on the charges against
me. I did not betray the Olympic Flying Column. I would have given up my own
life for Tom Murdock, for Melanie Young, and for any one of my beloved comrades
without a moment’s hesitation. Even though forty years of hell have passed, I
still mourn them all every day. I can no longer live with this lie, this
terrible accusation. It is wrong. I don’t deserve this. I can’t stand it any
more. I swear to you by my immortal soul that I am innocent. As a soldier of the
Northwest Volunteer Army (I was never officially discharged) I demand the right
to live and to die by the laws of my beloved country, and to clear my name
should God in His infinite mercy grant me that deliverance. If not, then let
His will be done.
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?”
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About the Book
It is morning in America, many years in the future. As the 22nd century approaches, the United States and Canada have been shattered by war and upheaval and have broken up into separate ethnic, racial, and political enclaves. On the east coast a crumbling, bankrupt and tottering United States government still holds a weak and impotent sway over a ragged collection of tattered states and cities, but life is chaotic and plagued with poverty, violence, and desperation. The entire Southwest, beginning with Texas and extending westward to southern California and north as far as Utah, has become the Spanish-speaking Mexican state of Aztlan. And in the Pacific Northwest, from northern California on up to Alaska, a brutal fascist and white supremacist dictatorship rules the Northwest American Republic.
Colonel Donald Redmond of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) is one of the Northwest Republic’s most ruthless and skillful political policemen. Then on a bright October morning he is called into the office of the State President, where he is given a top-secret assignment. A skeleton from the bloody and treacherous days of the revolution against America is about to emerge from the closet, and one of the most carefully guarded and suppressed mysteries of that revolution may become public knowledge. That long hidden truth may undermine the very moral and political foundations of the white supremacist state. A woman’s life hangs in the balance, but possibly even the fate a of a continent as well, as Donald Redmond and his partner Sergeant Nel plunge into the past and seek for the answer: who betrayed the Olympic Flying Column, and why?
In The Hill of the Ravens, underground cult novelist H. A. Covington offers us a grim and chilling view of a future that may yet come to be.
About the Author
In this grim and impressive novel, H. A. Covington has created a chilling glimpse into a future America seventy years or so down the road, as the 22nd Century approaches. It is an America torn and riven by violence, fascism, racial and cultural division, and political Balkanization and fragmentation. In short, an America that yet could come to be. Covington has already attained a kind of underground cult status with his ten previous novels. (One of these, Vindictus: A Novel of History’s First Gunfighter, is available from 1stBooks.) The Hill of the Ravens may yet turn out to be Covington’s foreboding masterpiece of a future gone dark and terrifying.