A Song Called Youth (8 page)

Maybe, Smoke thought, these men want to kill us all, and turn us in for bounty. Or maybe they’re planning to locate Steinfeld’s black-market stuff. Kill us in our sleep, take the stuff.

Smoke wondered, but all he said was, “I saw a jumpjet. USAF, I think. Headed off east.”

Steinfeld frowned. Then he shrugged. “Can’t go running off every time the fox comes sniffing around, or it’ll catch us out of the henhouse . . . ” He smiled. “I heard that one from an American soldier from Oklahoma.”

Smoke moved to stand against the wall, across from Hard-Eyes.

“You’ve got an in at both the camps, Smoke,” Steinfeld was saying.

“The Russians treat me best,” Smoke said, mostly to the crow. The crow made a ratcheting sound. “It was a surprise to me, too.”

“You hear a lot about the SA. Let’s collate what we’ve got, for Hard-Eyes and Jenkins. The SAISC was founded by a man named Predinger. An extremely conservative American millionaire. Far right as you can get without being locked up in an asylum. He founded it sometime in 1984, fittingly.

“Initially, the Second Alliance was to be a sort of, um, global security outfit to be used by any international corporation or conglomerate who needed it—something like Xe or Halliburton Security but bigger and with more . . . agenda.” Steinfeld shrugged and went on: “It soon became obvious that the SA was in fact an ‘antiterrorist’ intelligence outfit. Privately owned, to be sure. This was, of course, at a time when terrorists were beginning to make concerted bombing strikes and kidnappings against big business, especially if it was rooted in the United States or in the allied nations . . . ” Steinfeld paused to sip from a cold cup of ersatz coffee. He grimaced and went on. “Not surprisingly, the Alliance concentrated on leftist underground political groups, and ignored the rightist variety. It placed a great many people under surveillance, anyone it suspected might have connections with Marxists and hard-core Jewish-rights activists. The SA ignored the anti-Israeli terrorists unless they were clearly anti-American Communists. After a period of surveillance they would take the ‘suspects’ in for ‘questioning’—something they’d do quite without legal authorization, but sometimes with sanction from the local authorities. About two-thirds of the ‘suspects’ were people with left-leaning tendencies but no actual connection with terrorists. Their inquisitors were always masked. Sometimes the suspects came out of it alive and only bruised, sometimes they disappeared entirely. But—the governments of the countries where the SA operated covered for them. The SA would claim it had fired some people who were ‘overzealous.’ The furor would die down and the SA would go back to its old activities . . . Radical activism continued to escalate, and in response the SA took to assassinating radical leaders it believed were aligned with activists. Most of the time it was assassinating the moderates who kept the extremists in check. It may have done this knowingly—knowing that when extremists filled the void, the frightened world would tend to tolerate—would
welcome
—the SA’s activities. It would grow in respectability and therefore in contacts; with contacts came power and influence. And, of course, all of this was augmented by Predinger’s judicious use of cold cash. Campaign contributions, soft money party donations, and some outright payoffs. Bribery was part of the SA’s ordinary, day-to-day operation. Once they almost went too far, even for their allies. Their Buenos Aires chief learned that two identified men on their kill list were in attendance at a leftist political rally in a Buenos Aires union hall. The SA simply blew up the hall. Two hundred people were killed. It was never proved against Predinger’s people. There is some evidence that the CIA and Argentina’s own secret police may have been of covert assistance—”

Hard-Eyes broke in, “This sounds like a lot of propaganda. Left-wing conspiracy-theory stuff. The SA is right-wing, sure—too far right to be running things. But you make it sound like . . . ” He shook his head. “You say there is some evidence, and then you don’t cite it. Same kinda talk from the Lyndon Larouche Memorial Society. Only, they talk the same way about leftist people.”

“In fact, the Larouche Society is one of the SA’s cover organizations—”

Hard-Eyes shook his head, chuckling. “Sure. Just like they claim the world is controlled by a secret conspiracy of the British Secret Service in league with Jewish bankers, right?”

Steinfeld smiled. “Coming from the States as you do, I can see how all this would seem like just so much more fringe political background noise . . . But the SA is what I say it is, and here in Amsterdam you will shortly be able to see the SA in operation . . . They’re moving in, setting up here. Wait, and you’ll see it confirmed. And remember: I’m not a leftist. Here we’re in favor of restoring only what existed before the war. Yes, the bad with the good. We are not revolutionaries. We are resistance—to what is shaping up to be a neo-fascist takeover. Spearheaded by the SAISC.”

“Why you going to so much trouble to convince us?” Jenkins asked.

“I need . . . ” Steinfeld hesitated, looking for the right words. “There are men who are like seeding crystals. You drop them into the solution, and other crystals form around them. I need such men. To form the . . . the core of a much stronger resistance cell. And Smoke here”—Steinfeld gestured helplessly—“he has an uncanny sense for finding such people. He found Voortoven, and Yukio. And he has recommended you.” Steinfeld shrugged.

“I’m not sure I should be flattered,” Hard-Eyes said.

Steinfeld said, “Do you want to hear the rest of the . . . propaganda?”

“Go ahead.”

When a man tells another man a story, much of the story is untold. That is, it’s not told out loud. The unspoken part is the freight of secondary meanings and resonances attached to the spoken thrust of the story. It’s a part of the story already understood by the two men. Part of their mutual context.

What follows is what Steinfeld told Hard-Eyes. And here we speak aloud what wasn’t spoken at all.

Smiling Rick Crandall. He was one of the youngest Fundamentalist ministers in the country. By the time he was twenty he had his own internationally syndicated program. He was exporting Christian Coalition beliefs and values to the rest of the world, and he was succeeding because he, and his associates, kept tying it in with wealth. Decline or not, America still had the rep for being the wealthiest country. And Crandall kept saying it was his religion and his way of life that made it that way. Predinger bought the station that ran Crandall’s show, tripled the man’s salary, and gave him a new assignment. He was to be a sort of SAISC goodwill ambassador to the governments of foreign nations, and to other groups who were not government but were sympathetic to the Second Alliance’s aims. That was Crandall’s job, ostensibly.

But the truth is, Crandall was a recruiter. He used his international fame, or simple bribery, to gain access to people high in governments, people on the fringe of governments, people in opposition to governments. And he recruited them into a new branch of the Alliance. This was called the AntiTerrorist Lobby. And it was a cover. It might have been more appropriately named SAISC Army Recruiting. Crandall was a recruiter for a new, multinational military and political machine. The men inducted into the machine used their influence to legislate a fund that would make their nation an official SA member. They would pay the SA to help them control their domestic terrorism—sometimes real terrorism, just as often it was mere dissent—and they agreed to contribute resources and manpower for the control of
international terrorism
 . . . 

Each “member nation” provided men—reassigned from the military—for indoctrination in the SA’s Worldview Camps. The first and imperative goal of the operators of the Worldview Camps was to instill an absolute and undying loyalty to the SA in all “processees.” The processees were taught—brainwashed—to regard the SA as their true father and mother, their sovereign nation, and, most importantly, their link to God Himself. There was to be no possibility of sending men out for Alliance “actions” who were not genuinely loyal to Alliance aims. The Second Alliance had a public credo and a private credo. The private credo was the core of its real identity. It comes in onion-layers. Those who were first-layer processees in the Second Alliance heard a kind of standard Christian Born Again rhetoric. But in the second layer, the Initiates hear a kind of Identity Church theology preached. It is, in fact, a more refined version of the Christian revisionism taught by the Kingdom Message organizers who declared themselves to the public about 1983. That’s about when they began to rob banks and armored cars to finance their acquisition of automatic weapons and the other toys of right-wing “survivalists.” They called themselves “the Church of Jesus Christ Christian” or “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord” or “the Aryan Nations” and they held that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, was in fact of Aryan descent; that Great Britain and the United States were the true promised land, the true Israel referred to in the Bible; that blacks and other minorities were mongrel peoples who had no souls and were of no greater spiritual worth than animals. And they maintained that Hitler has been unfairly vilified by the Jews; that the Holocaust never happened. In 1985 there were about 2,500 people in such organizations in the United States—chiefly in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Many of them were recruited out of prisons, always hotbeds of racism . . . Supposedly there were “several hundred-thousand” sympathizers scattered across the country. Some of the more enterprising members of the Identity Church realized that they looked like country yokels, which kept people who were otherwise sympathetic from taking them more seriously. So they formed a secret society, called the Secret Aryan Fraternity. They linked up with more public groups, like the Georgia-based Council of Conservative Citizens. Groups like these were paranoiacally cautious about publicity, and security. And, very carefully, the SAF and friends began to integrate their people into urban and suburban middle-class society; into colleges and country clubs and lodges and offices. They began to support political candidates, or mount their own candidacies—without ever honestly declaring their actual political stand. They played moderate or simple conservative—when in reality they were beyond merely “conservative.” They were social time-release capsules, moles, of sheer racial hatred. Predinger is believed by some to have been one of the SAF. It’s never been proven. It may be just coincidence that the SAF and the SAISC share the same first two initials. But it
has
been determined that Crandall’s father was a member of The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord . . . Summary: The SA’s general theological creed, its public creed, is ordinary Christian fundamentalism, with no overt racist tinge. Its Initiates are privy to the Identity Church’s Jesus-as-Aryan hardcore-racist variation. Initiates administer the general membership. The Initiates in turn are governed by the Second Circle.

The Second Circle, the inner ruling council of the SA, is reported to have a more intellectualized racist vision that doesn’t insist on a belief in Jesus’ Aryan heritage. Jesus, for the Second Circle, is simply an arbitrary symbol chosen to represent genetic purity. The DNA molecule itself, twisted into a circle, is the Lord’s halo . . . 

Politically, the SA’s private credo was, simply and bluntly: fascism.

And we are not talking fascist here as a left-wing dilettante calls a war-hawk “a fascist,” as an insulting term, a mere pejorative. We are talking about definitive fascism. Predinger and Crandall were both, privately, admirers of classic fascist and racist demagogues, including Mussolini and Hitler himself. They were anti-Semitic and anti-black . . . 

“Anti-black?” Hard-Eyes interrupted. “You said they recruited partly from third-world countries.”

Dreamily, almost offhandedly, Smoke said, “Actually, they deceived certain black African military dictatorships into providing money and other forms of support. But they kept them in the dark about the real SA political goals. And they didn’t recruit soldiers from black countries.”

Jenkins looked at Smoke in amazement, hearing Smoke’s pedantic side emerge. A scholar hidden in rags and grime.

“The third-world recruits—” Steinfeld began. Then he broke off, listening. Looking at the ceiling.

They all heard it. The rumble and drone of a jumpjet nearby. The Armies—searching for the NR, maybe . . . 

Smoke felt a thrill of fear and thought, I’m scared of dying. How long has it been since I felt that way? What’s happening to me?

The sound of the jumpjet, the rumble, the drone . . . died away.

Steinfeld looked at his hands. He took a deep breath, and went on. “The third world recruits were obtained mostly from right-wing dictators in Central and South America. And then certain factions of Indians, anti-Semitic Pakistanis, Eastern Europeans—there are a good many Nazi Serbs around . . . But the real core of the SA, its initiate administration, were American right-wing extremists—including sympathizers in the CIA—British, Dutch, and a great many Afrikaners. There are thousands of them . . . They’re a separate division of the Alliance, elite troops. The division has a German name which translates as ‘Men Chosen to Die First.’ The SA’s administration is uniformly white. Bravado, you see. Fanaticism. White South Africans from the elite are in charge of the lesser divisions. And the lesser divisions are made up of Spaniards, Italians, Guatemalans, anti-Communist Cuban nationalists . . . ”

“Perhaps this is the wedge,” Yukio said. Said it succinctly and at just the right moment, a fine and definitive brushstroke. So like him, Smoke thought.

Voortoven nodded and said, “We have men within the—”

Steinfeld cut him off with a glare—Hard-Eyes and Jenkins weren’t yet trusted.

Hard-Eyes and Jenkins glanced at one another.

Suddenly everyone in the room knew that if Steinfeld decided he could not trust Hard-Eyes and Jenkins, he would have them killed. And this would not have been the case before Voortoven had said, in that particular context,
We have men within
 . . .