The Turner Diaries: A Novel Page 4

  The way the network is set up, all communications requiring consultation or lengthy briefing or situation reports are done orally, face-to-face. Now that the telephone company maintains a computerized record of all local calls as well as long-distance calls, and with the political police monitoring so many conversations, telephones are ruled out for our use except in unusual emergencies.

  On the other hand, messages of a standard nature, which can be easily and briefly coded, are usually transmitted by radio. The Organization put a great deal of thought into developing a "dictionary" of nearly 800 different, standardized messages, each of which can be specified by a three-digit number.

  Thus, at a particular time, the number "2006" might specify the message: "The operation scheduled by Unit 6 is to be postponed until further notice." One person in each unit has memorized the entire message dictionary and is responsible for knowing what the current number coding of the dictionary is at all times. In our unit that person is George.

  Actually, it's not as hard as it sounds. The message dictionary is arranged in a very orderly way, and once one has memorized its basic structure it's not too difficult to memorize the whole thing. The number-coding of the messages is randomly shifted every few days, but that doesn't mean that George has to learn the dictionary all over again; he just needs to know the new numerical designation of a single message, and he can then work out the designations for all the others in his head.

  Using this coding system allows us to maintain radio contact with good security, using extremely simple and portable equipment. Because our radio transmissions never exceed a second in duration and occur very infrequently, the political police are not likely to get a directional fix on any transmitter or to be able to decode any intercepted message.

  Our receivers are even simpler than our transmitters and are a sort of cross between a transistorized pocket broadcast receiver and a pocket calculator. They remain "on" all the time, and if a numerical pulse with the right tone-coding is broadcast by any of our transmitters in the area they will pick it up and display and hold a numerical readout, whether they are being monitored at the moment or not.

  My major contribution to the Organization so far has been the development of this communications equipment-and, in fact, the actual manufacture of a good bit of it.

  The first series of messages broadcast by Washington Field Command to all units in this area was on Sunday. It gave instructions for each unit to send its contact man to a numerically specified location to receive a briefing and deliver a unit situation report.

  When George returned from Sunday's briefing he relayed the news to the rest of us. The gist of it was that, although there has been no trouble in the Washington area yet, WFC is worried by the reports which it has received from our informants with the political police.

  The System is going all-out to get us. Hundreds of persons who are suspected to have sympathies for the Organization or some remote affiliation with us have been arrested and interrogated. Among these are several of our "legals," but apparently the authorities haven't been able to pin anything definite on any of them yet and the interrogations haven't produced any real clues. Still, the System's reaction to last week's events in Chicago has been more widespread and more energetic than expected.

  One thing on which they are working is a computerized, universal, internal passport system. Every person 12 years or more of age will he issued a passport and will be required, under threat of severe penalties, to carry it at all times. Not only can a person be stopped on the street by any police agent and asked to show his passport, but they have worked out a plan to make the passports necessary for many everyday operations, such as purchasing an airline, bus, or train ticket, registering in a motel or hotel, and receiving any medical service in a hospital or clinic.

  All ticket counters, motels, physician's offices, and the like will be equipped with computer terminals linked by telephone lines to a huge, national data bank and computer center. A customer's magnetically coded passport number will routinely be fed into the computer whenever he buys a ticket, pays a bill, or registers for a service. If there is any irregularity, a warning light will go on in the nearest police precinct station, showing the location of the offending computer terminal-and the unfortunate customer

  They've been developing this internal passport system for several years now and have everything worked out in detail. The only reason it hasn't been put into operation has been squawks from civil-liberties groups, who see it as another big step toward a police state-which, of course, it is. But now the System is sure it can override the resistance of the libertarians by using us as an excuse. Anything is permitted in the fight against "racism"!

  It will take at least three months to install the necessary equipment and get the system operational, but they are going ahead with it as fast as they can, figuring to announce it as await accompli with full backing from the news media. Later, the system will gradually be expanded, with computer terminals eventually required in every retail establishment. No person will be able to eat a meal in a restaurant, pick up his laundry, or buy groceries without having his passport number magnetically read by a computer terminal beside the cash register.

  When things get to that point the System will really have a pretty tight grip on the citizenry. With the power of modern computers at their disposal, the political police will be able to pinpoint any person at any time and know just where he's been and what he's done. We'll have to do some hard thinking to get around this passport system.

  From what our informants have told us so far, it won't be a simple matter of just forging passports and making up phony numbers. If the central computer spots a phony number, a signal will automatically be sent to the nearest police station. The same thing will happen if John Jones, who lives in Spokane and is using his passport to buy groceries there, suddenly seems to be buying groceries in Dallas too. Or even if, when the computer has Bill Smith safely located in a bowling alley on Main Street, he simultaneously shows up at a dry-cleaning establishment on the other side of town

  All this is an awesome prospect for us-something which has been technically feasible for quite a while but which, until recently, we never would have dreamed the System would actually attempt.

  One piece of news George brought back from his briefing was a summons for me to make an immediate visit to Unit 2 to solve a technical problem they had. Ordinarily, neither George nor I would have known Unit 2's base location, and if it became necessary to meet someone from that unit the meeting would have taken place elsewhere. This problem required my going to their hideout, however, and George repeated to me the directions he had been given.

  They are up in Maryland, more than 30 miles from us, and, since I had to take all my tools with me anyway, I took the car.

  They have a nice place, a large farmhouse and several outbuildings on about 40 acres of meadow and woodland. There are eight members in their unit, somewhat more than in most, but apparently not one of them knows a volt from an ampere or which end of a screwdriver is which. That is unusual, because some care was supposed to have been taken when forming our units to distribute valuable skills sensibly.

  Unit 2 is reasonably close to two other units, but all three are inconveniently far from the other nine Washington-area units- and especially from Unit 9, which was the only unit with a transmitter for contacting WFC. Because of this, WFC had decided to give Unit 2 a transmitter, but they hadn't been able to make it work.

  The reason for their difficulty became obvious as soon as they ushered me into their kitchen, where their transmitter, an automobile storage battery, and some odds and ends of wire were spread out on a table. Despite the explicit instructions which I had prepared to go with each transmitter, and despite the plainly visible markings beside the terminals on the transmitter case, they had managed to connect the battery to the transmitter with the wrong polarity.

  I sighed and got a couple of their fellows to help me bring in my equipment from the car
. First I checked their battery and found it to be almost completely discharged. I told them to put the battery on the charger while I checked out the transmitter. Charger? What charger, they wanted to know? They didn't have one!

  Because of the uncertainty of the availability of electrical power from the lines these days, all our communications equipment is operated from storage batteries which are trickle-charged from the lines. This way we are not subject to the power blackouts and brownouts which have become a weekly, if not daily, phenomenon in recent years.

  Just as with most other public facilities in this country, the higher the price of electricity has zoomed, the less dependable it has become. In August of this year, for example, residential electrical service in the Washington area was out completely for an average total of four days, and the voltage was reduced by more than 15 per cent for an average total of 14 days.

  The government keeps holding hearings and conducting investigations and issuing reports about the problem, but it just keeps getting worse. None of the politicians are willing to face the real issues involved here, one of which is the disastrous effect Washington's Israel-dominated foreign policy during the last two decades has had on America's supply of foreign oil.

  I showed them how to hook up the battery to their truck for an emergency charge and then began looking into their transmitter to see what damage had been done. A charger for their battery would have to be found later.

  The most critical part of the transmitter, the coding unit which generates the digital signal from a pocket-calculator keyboard, seemed to be OK. It was protected by a diode from damage due to a polarity error. In the transmitter itself, however, three transistors had been blown.

  I was pretty sure WFC had at least one more spare transmitter in stock, but in order to find out I would have to get a message to them. That meant sending a courier over to Unit 9 to transmit a query and then arranging to have someone from WFC deliver the transmitter to us. I hesitated to bother WFC, in view of our policy of restricting radio transmissions from field units to messages of some urgency.

  Since Unit 2 needed a battery charger anyway, I decided to obtain the replacement transistors from a commercial supply house at the same time I picked up a charger, and install them myself. Locating the parts I needed turned out to be easier said than done, however, and it was after six in the evening when I finally got back to the farmhouse.

  The fuel gauge in the car was reading "empty" when I pulled into their driveway. Being afraid to risk using my gasoline ration card at a filling station and not knowing where to find black-market gasoline around there, I had to ask the people in Unit 2 to give me a few gallons of fuel to return home. Well, sir, not only did they have a grand total of about one gallon in their truck, but they didn't know where any black-market gas was to be had either.

  I wondered how such an inept and unresourceful group of people were going to survive as an underground unit. It seems that they were all people that the Organization decided would not be suited for guerrilla activities and had lumped together in one unit. Four of them are writers from the Organization's publications department, and they are carrying on their work at the farm, turning out copy for propaganda pamphlets and leaflets. The other four are acting only in a supporting role, keeping the place supplied with food and other needs.

  Since nobody in Unit 2 really needs automotive transportation, they hadn't worried much about fuel. Finally, one of them volunteered to go out later that night and siphon some gasoline from a vehicle at a neighboring farm. It was about that time that we had another power failure in the area, so I couldn't use my soldering iron. I called it quits for the day.

  It took me all of the next day and well into last night to finally get their transmitter working properly, because of several difficulties I hadn't anticipated. When the job was finally done, around midnight, I suggested that the transmitter be installed in a better location than the kitchen, preferably in the attic, or at least on the second floor of the house.

  We found a suitable location and carried everything upstairs. In the process I managed to drop the storage battery on my left foot. At first I was sure I had broken my foot. I couldn't wall: at all on it.

  The result was that I spent another night in the farmhouse. Despite their shortcomings, everyone in Unit 2 was really very kind to me, and they were properly appreciative of my efforts on their behalf.

  As had been promised, stolen fuel was provided for my return trip. Furthermore, they insisted on loading up the car with a great quantity of canned food for me to take back, of which they seemed to have an unlimited supply. I asked where they got it all, but the only reply I received was a smile and an assurance that they could get plenty more when they needed it. Perhaps they are more resourceful than I thought at first.

  It was 10 o'clock this morning when I got back to our building. George and Henry were both out, but Katherine greeted me as she opened the garage door for me to drive in. She asked if I had eaten breakfast yet.

  I told her I had eaten with Unit 2 and wasn't hungry, but that I was concerned about the condition of my foot, which was throbbing painfully and had swelled to nearly twice its normal size. She assisted me as I hobbled up the stairs to the living quarters, and then she brought me a large basin of cold water to soak my foot in.

  The cold water relieved the throbbing almost immediately, and I leaned back gratefully on the pillows which Katherine propped behind me on the couch. I explained how I had hurt my foot, and we exchanged other news on the events of the last two days.

  The three of them had spent all of yesterday putting up shelves, making minor repairs, and finishing the cleaning and painting which has kept us all busy for more than a week. With the odds and ends of furniture we picked up earlier for the place, it is really beginning to look livable. Quite an improvement from the bare, cold, and dirty machine shop it was when we moved in.

  Last night, Katherine informed me, George was summoned by radio to another meeting with a man from WFC. Then, early this morning, he and Henry left together, telling her only that they would be gone all day.

  I must have dozed off for a few minutes, and when I awakened I was alone and my footbath was no longer cold. My foot felt much better, though, and the swelling had subsided noticeably. I decided to take a shower.

  The shower is a makeshift, cold-water-only arrangement which Henry and I installed in a large closet last week. We did the plumbing and put in a light, and Katherine covered the walls and floor with a self-adhesive vinyl for waterproofing. The closet opens off the room which George, Henry, and I use for sleeping. Of the other two rooms over the shop, Katherine uses the smaller one for a bedroom, and the other is a common room which also serves as a kitchen and eating area.

  I undressed, got a towel, and opened the door to the shower. And there was Katherine, wet, naked, and lovely, standing under the bare light bulb and drying herself. She looked at me without surprise and said nothing.

  I stood there for a moment and then, instead of apologizing and closing the door again, I impulsively held out my arms to Katherine. Hesitantly, she stepped toward me. Nature took her course.

  We lay in bed for a long while afterward and talked. It was the first time I have really talked to Katherine, alone. She is an affectionate, sensitive, and very feminine girl beneath the cool, professional exterior she has always maintained in her work for the Organization.

  Four years ago, before the Gun Raids, she was a Congressman's secretary. She lived in a Washington apartment with another girl who also worked on Capitol Hill. One evening when Katherine came home from work she found her apartment mate's body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. She had been raped and killed by a Negro intruder.

  That's why Katherine bought a pistol and kept it even after the Cohen Act made gun ownership illegal. Then, along with nearly a million others, she was swept up in the Gun Raids of 1989. Although she had never had any previous contact with the Organization, she met George in the detention center they we
re both held in after being arrested.

  Katherine had been apolitical. If anyone had asked her, during the time she was working for the government or, before that, when she was a college student, she would have probably said she was a "liberal. " But she was liberal only in the mindless, automatic way that most people are. Without really thinking about it or trying to analyze it, she superficially accepted the unnatural ideology peddled by the mass media and the government. She had none of the bigotry, none of the guilt and self-hatred that it takes to make a really committed, full-time liberal.

  After the police released them, George gave her some books on race and history and some Organization publications to read. For the first time in her life she began thinking seriously about the important racial, social, and political issues at the root of the day's problems.

  She learned the truth about the System's "equality" hoax. She gained an understanding of the unique historical role of the Jews as the ferment of decomposition of races and civilizations. Most important, she began acquiring a sense of racial identity, overcoming a lifetime of brainwashing aimed at reducing her to an isolated human atom in a cosmopolitan chaos.

  She had lost her Congressional job as a consequence of her arrest, and, about two months later she went to work for the Organization as a typist in our publications department. She is smart and a hard worker, and she was soon advanced to proofreader and then to copy editor. She wrote a few articles of her own for Organization publications, mostly exploring women's roles in the movement and in the larger society, and just last month she was named editor of a new Organization quarterly directed specifically toward women.

  Her editorial career has now been shelved, of course, at least temporarily, and her most useful contribution to our present effort is her remarkable skill at makeup and disguise, something she developed in amateur-theater work as a student.