surprise you. Sometimes I think…aw, hell, never mind.”
He’d been about to say, “The country has gone crazy,” but Brognola knew that wasn’t true. If forced to guess, he would’ve said America harbored roughly the same percentage of bigots as ever, but economic hard times and the fear that money troubles spawned had a potential to inflate the ranks of the lunatic fringe.
“So, long story short?” Bolan prodded.
“Long grim story short, the militias are back,” Brognola said. “They’re growing again, feeding off of the tax protest movement, beating the drum over illegal immigration, and playing more race cards than last time around. You’ve likely heard some of it. ‘The President’s a Muslim,’ ‘he’s not a U.S. citizen,’ whatever crap their tiny brains can generate. It says something about the current atmosphere that millions take at least part of the nonsense seriously.”
“Not much I can do about it,” Bolan said. “You’ve got free speech and freedom of the press, implying freedom to believe some idiotic things. Last time I checked, there was still a Flat Earth Society, and people claiming we never set foot on the moon.”
“Agreed. But none of them intend to kill the President of the United States or spark a civil war.”
“You have someone specific in mind,” Bolan said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
“It’s like you know me,” the big Fed responded with a weary smile.
Bolan matched the smile and said, “I’m getting there.”
“Okay,” Brognola said. “Clay Halsey. He runs an outfit he calls the New Minuteman Militia out of Southern California. I’ve got the details for you on a CD-ROM. Bottom line, he’s running guns to other fringe groups in the States, and he has ties with neo-fascist groups in Europe.”
“They need guns from us?” Bolan sounded skeptical.
“Call it a mutual admiration society,” Brognola replied. “They’ve been playing the Nazi gig longer than our homegrown crazies. During the Great Depression, you may recall they seized a couple of governments. Final solutions ensued.”
“I know it’s cliché,” Bolan said, “but most people would tell you that can’t happen here.”
“Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. Do we sit back and let them try? Can we afford another murdered president? Another Oklahoma City? God forbid, a homegrown 9/11?”
“If you’ve got the evidence—”
“We don’t,” Brognola interrupted Bolan. “I’m told ATF had someone close to Halsey. An informant, not an agent. Anyway, he dropped some juicy hints and then went MIA. Off-roaders found what the coyotes left of him in the Mojave Desert.”
Bolan frowned. “So, if at first you don’t succeed…”
“Again, it’s like you know me.”
“You want something on this guy before we drop the hammer.”
“I need something on him,” Brognola replied. “To justify whatever happens for the guys upstairs.”
“Well, then,” Bolan replied, “I guess I’d better have a look at that CD.”
BOLAN TOOK THE CD to an internet café in Georgetown, found a carrel in a corner where no one could peer over his shoulder and used an earpiece for the sound track. The first file was titled Background. Bolan opened it and found himself embarking on a history lesson about “militia” subversion.
April 19, 1995, had been the wake-up call, with 168 dead and nearly 700 wounded in the blast that destroyed Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and 324 other structures within a 16-block radius. Since then, Bolan learned, various law-enforcement agencies had interrupted or prosecuted at least 75 right-wing terrorist conspiracies across America, from coast to coast and border to border.
The incidents read like a roster of delusional insanity.
Saboteurs calling themselves the Sons of Gestapo derail a train in Arizona, killing one passenger and injuring dozens more. A massive homemade bomb turns up at Reno’s IRS office, defused with minutes to spare. A so-called Aryan Republican Army robs twenty-two banks, then starts killing its own membership. Lone-wolf gunmen strike repeatedly—at schools, churches and synagogues, the Holocaust Museum and a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles. G-men arrest Klan members on the eve of their attempt to bomb a Texas natural gas refinery, risking the lives of thirty thousand local residents. A “pro-life” terrorist shoots doctors and mails alleged anthrax to dozens of women’s clinics.
The dreadful list went on and on, accompanied by grim-faced mug shots that revealed no hint of common decency, much less remorse. The terrorists who spoke to law enforcement inevitably cast their crimes in terms of patriotic zeal.
We’re taking back our country.
America for real Americans—the ones who look and think and pray like us.
Bolan grew weary of it, closed that file and opened the one titled NMM. As he’d anticipated, it contained a detailed rundown on the New Minuteman Militia, Clay Bertram Halsey commander in chief.
The soldier started with Halsey’s personal dossier, surprised to learn that the man held a doctorate in biochemistry and had taught his subject at a smallish California college until the early nineties, when he’d left the classroom in favor of zany far-right politics. There was no trigger incident on record, nothing to explain the break with academia and sanity. Halsey had drifted through various groups of that era, including a couple with racist leanings, but had reached the twenty-first century without compiling a rap sheet.
As for suspicion, his name had been linked to arms deals, civilian border-watch campaigns in the Southwest, and to a shipment of neo-Nazi pamphlets printed in the States that found their way to Germany, where the recipients were jailed under that nation’s postwar laws proscribing hate speech and denial of the Holocaust. No such statutes existed in the States, so he was free and clear.
Almost.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives—still ATF for short, despite the late addition to its title when it joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2002—had been watching when Halsey founded his New Minuteman Militia in 2008. The group had started small, expanding to an estimated fifteen hundred members concentrated in Southern California, with outposts in Arizona and Nevada.
Headquarters for the NMM was located near Victorville, on the western edge of the same Mojave Desert where the ATF’s informant had been left to feed the wasteland’s scavengers. According to the file Brognola had provided, the militia’s turn-coat had been Joseph Allen Gittes, twenty-six, a marginally employed auto mechanic who’d pulled himself back from the brink of methamphetamine addiction while serving time in state prison, then found Jesus, right-wing politics and the patriot militia movement in no particular order.
It was standard stuff, as Bolan understood extremist groups of both Right and Left. Damaged and disaffected individuals were drawn to militant cliques like iron filings to a magnet trawled through dirt. Some claimed to find new meaning for their lives in radical theory. Others simply tried to exorcise their private demons by attacking others—be the targets ethnic minorities, “traitors,” the System, or “The Man.”
Something,
