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The Radical A fictional short story by Robert O'Neal The following narrative was originally written over two days for a journalism/creative writing class. This is a work of fiction, protected by U.S. copyright law. (The author was never a radical.) |
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Other fiction at this website: Day the Dinosaurs Died (novel) - Inherited Trait (novel) - The Time Traveler (short story). | |
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THE RADICAL Nine-seventeen p.m., September 10, 1968, marks the moment I began my flight from federal authorities. That time, according to my Mickey Mouse watch, was precisely 19 minutes after the Forum University’s four-story ROTC and defense research building collapsed amid a fiery orange ball. The edifice’s face fell forward into a roiling inferno as if it were a single slab. The other walls’ bricks fell straight down to a tempestuous expanse of black smoke. From my dorm’s window, our group that would become known as the Forum Four watched the conflagration light up the darkness across the Student Commons. Fire trucks arrived within four minutes, police vans and squad cars in five, followed ten minutes later by black vans emblazoned with FBI logos. Just three other students and I had concealed explosives at each of the massive brick structure’s buttressing columns and its edges. I hadn’t known until a month before that C-4 could be manufactured within our school’s chemistry lab where Susan and Phil had created that volatile, plasticized compound. Our fourth cohort Samuel, a sociology major, couldn’t have mixed water and salt had you given him both elements and a jar. But he followed my instructions to the letter in placing his portion of explosives. Samuel had dodged the draft for six months before we had laid our plan. Binding each of us were The War and our youthful antipathy toward what we considered a corrupt political system that had brought it about. A fifth conspirator Roger, whom we judged to be the most extreme of all, had recruited us into the Students for Real Democracy. He was at least 15 years older than I at the time and said he’d left his senior teaching post to attend Forum’s graduate school. We never learned Roger’s last name. And although we weren’t allowed to meet with any of the organization’s governing board, he assured us that the bombing assignment was a sanctioned SRD mission. We could identify 16 campus-based recruits Roger had urged into SRD, but we four would become the only federal fugitives. For the previous two years, our small cell had been, well, “anti-establishment,” as less-committed activist-wannabes called those opposed to our nation’s political and business leaders.
Ultimately, we would come to understand that the Olympian effort of transforming society is equivalent to emptying an ocean one teacup at a time. And, in truth, we didn’t have a clue as to what “society” should look like. We separated as planned, each scattering to a destination unknown to the others. I holstered the unregistered revolver provided by a fellow SRD operative and drove my ‘62 Chevy to Connecticut, where I lived for two months. I haven’t resided longer than that in any city since the day of the Blast. *** I lived in dark shadows of anonymity, changing names so often that I often forgot my own. Marta, a plastic surgeon and once a pre-med student at our university, altered my face two years following the Big Blast. A former SRD Sister, she now offered her home as a hostel for selected revolutionaries during missions or those, like me, on the run. I often wondered why I had ever accepted that revolver, a .38 Smith and Wesson short-barrel, from the SRD Sister. Although I had no intention of using it unless criminally assaulted, I carried it concealed beneath a bulky coat. The public-at-large is unaware of the extensive network for committed radicals. Suppliers and hosteliers in almost every city of at least 80,000 offer provisions and safe houses to us. We uncover these locations either by word-of-mouth or through coded personals published in underground magazines. Even if a hostel owner may never have met us before, we’re identified by hand signs and codes known only to our shadowed society of renegades and their helpers. Most accepted codes are original with the Brothers and Sisters, but others were borrowed from the nineteenth century Underground Railroad. Among these was “Drinking Gourd: The North Star,” because the Underground Railroaders knew they should follow the Drinking Gourd that led to the north and freedom; we used that phrase to let Brothers and Sisters know we wished to stay with them for no more than a night. Another was, “The wind blows from the South today,” which was understood to Underground Railroad workers to mean that fugitive slaves were in the area; we used that one if we happened to be traveling with another who stayed in the car or down the street while the point-man or point-woman verified the genuineness of the safe house. ***
On September 14, 1989, I
stood in the night rain at yet another radical’s hostel and knocked on
the log home’s door. That day was
I had found this coded address within the “Personals” section of the underground magazine, Barricade. Every other code ever devised can be broken with a computer. But the Brother-and-Sisterhood’s simple method is undecipherable without the source code. That source was then a common paperback book, changed every six months. We read a series of numbers, converted those to words or letters from pages and lines within the source-book and positioned those characters or words into readable fashion. It was time-consuming but safe, and had been developed in 1964 by a now-deceased Brother in Utah, a professor of physics. The only other home within sight was that of a cabin, a quarter-mile down the forested hill where the road twisted toward Seattle, some 20 miles away. Shivering in the cold, I flicked my cigarette into the brush and shoved my hands into my parka’s pockets. The door opened, spilling a shaft of light across the neatly cut lawn. Until that moment, I had never believed I would ever again encounter the man standing before me. He leaned on a cane and was wearing a beige turtleneck sweater and brown jeans. His hair was now white and thinning, his face lined with age. Yet, I knew him immediately. Bewildered, I said, “Roger?” He was the graduate student who in 1966 had recruited us into SRD. He greeted me with, “Can I help you?” but after a moment’s searching glare, added, “You’ve had a long and thorny journey.” He wasn’t spouting some obscure literary reference; those are code words, signifying that one of us has recognized a Sister or Brother, leaving no further reason to question one’s affiliation or identity. He waved me inside, offering a couple of days’ shelter. We talked late into the night, drank wine, reminisced about better days and listened to Jim Morrison and The Doors. I fell asleep on the couch. Roger walked upstairs to his bedroom. I awoke to a dark morning’s chill. Assuming that the heater had unexpectedly failed, I walked to the garage, searching for the switch box. Roger had left a light on in a small shed attached to the garage. He had left the door half-open. I reached around its door to turn off the light but noticed a thick file on the desk. Embossed atop the folder were red, boxed-in letters, reading, “Confidential.” Sounded like government material to me. You can’t be too careful in my life, no matter how solid your contact may seem. I walked into the room, sat at the desk and picked up the file. I read each stunning page before finding 17 more related folders in his desk. The documents laid out an incredible story. Roger had never been a graduate student, as we had believed. No organization named Students for Real Democracy existed except as a title on a few fliers the university’s Forum Four had received from Roger. Roger was the son of a wealthy attorney and builder whose company had offered to rebuild and remodel several structures on Forum University’s campus. The firm’s prize project in the $232.9 million venture was to be the ROTC and defense-research building. To the contractors’ distress, the school’s administrators decided that, along with a couple of smaller buildings, the grand ROTC building didn’t need re-erecting. Roger, at his father’s and the corporation’s directions, then rented out a condo across the street from the school and strolled around campus daily, pretending to be a graduate student, trolling for recruits into the non-existent SRD. The entire operation – the recruiting, the planning, the mission - had been a scam. We four idiots had been nothing more than a construction company’s demolition crew. I forgot about that heater and returned to the couch. I lay sleepless until dawn when Roger came downstairs and said, “I’m making eggs and sausage. Want breakfast?” Sitting up and pulling on my boots and coat, I said, “How could you have done that to us, Roger? Could helping your family become even wealthier be worth it?” He stared incredulously at the pile of confidential files I’d strewn about the floor. Roger collapsed into a corner’s chair. He attempted to croak out an answer but gave up, sitting silently until he broke out in sobs. “I have regretted that ever day since,” he admitted. “I’m so sorry, truly sorry.” He slumped further into his chair and watched me intently. “You don’t need to run anymore. I was going to tell you this morning. Your arrival is amazingly timely. My nephew is an FBI agent. He told me the Bureau would soon drop all charges against the Forum Four. The prosecutors determined all evidence to be insufficient for trial. With the emotion of the time of the crime, any jury would have convicted you on the thin evidence then available. Your long run worked in your favor.” Roger had irretrievably wrecked four young and impressionable lives back in ‘68. Not that we didn't have free choice. I was then in my last year of civil engineering, a minimal background that targeted me for recruitment and ultimately as planner. I had calculated just where to place the explosives for maximum effect. “I don’t think ‘sorry’ will ever be enough,” I said. Roger jumped from his chair and blurted, “If you’ll allow me, I can make sure that our family can furnish you with enough money for the rest of your life, just to forget all this.” His tears disappeared as quickly as they had materialized. He remained as great a liar as the day he recruited us. He said, “I’m thinking, two million, that okay?” “How about the others?” I said. “The others of the Forum Four, you mean? You’re dreaming. My family would never part with that much. Besides, none know anything about the plan.” Roger was offering a bribe for silence, not to assuage his conscience. He was sorry only that he could still face a mound of indictments. I didn’t want Roger’s money. I said, “We all pay for our sins, Roger. And I’ve mostly paid for mine.” I pulled the revolver from my parka. His bawling ended with a thunder of the Smith and Wesson to the side of his head. I wiped the prints and curled his dead fingers about the gun’s grip. Blood had splattered onto a couple of files, but more than enough remained for law enforcement’s conclusion that he died by suicide, borne of guilt. Two weeks later, newspapers and magazines nationwide reported that federal prosecutors had dropped all charges against the Forum Four. They were free to live their lives as they pleased. And a month following those headlines, others appeared proclaiming the release of the Chapman Corporation’s confidential files. After its stock tanked, the company filed for bankruptcy. Unfortunately for Roger’s father, that wasn’t the worst news. As the company melted down, indictments for more than two hundred accounts were handed down against Roger’s father, James Shugart Chapman, Esq. Then free, my three felonious associates filed a $10 million civil suit against the federal government for “slanderous” remarks two FBI agents had released to the press fifteen years earlier. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. And Me? Well, the three plaintiffs mailed me few of their ill-gotten-but-legally-obtained dollars and I returned to school to finish my engineering degree. ~ Fin ~ A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR Although this is a work of fiction, it should be noted that widespread subversion by radical groups is a fact. Beginning in the 1930s, radicalism has spread throughout the nation. Those who founded the major left-wing organizations during the Great Depression would, most likely, be surprised at the success of their efforts in the modern era. Their methods fall into three categories: (1) Establishing front groups and penetrating and manipulating existing political parties; (2) infiltrating the armed forces, the police, and other institutions of the state, particularly education for long-range propaganda beginning with the elementary schools or that equivalent on through college, as well as important non-state organizations; (3) and, generating civil unrest through demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. Radical and reactionary organizations, particularly since the 1960s, have continued all the above activities through this day. More individuals with leftist histories and ideologies now hold elected positions in local and federal governmental bodies than at any other time in modern history. Similar infiltration of many metropolitan police agencies is well documented. Their success with attaining substantive posts within the military is less clear, but the U.S. armed forces’ structure is far more difficult for covert groups to create any significant threat at this time. Most front groups are named in such a way as to disguise their motives. Others, like the American Communist Party, may be more obvious it their intent, but their activities at local levels are difficult to uncover. Law enforcement is generally forbidden to infiltrate these organizations as a result of federal laws passed in the wake of what many federal legislators unwisely considered to be past excesses for political purposes. Legislation popularly known as “The Patriot Act” was enacted to remove some of these barriers, but that law is scheduled to expire December 31, 1999. A substantial number of federal legislators oppose its continuance. The author – operating as a volunteer for a law enforcement agency - was denied an opportunity to infiltrate a potentially-subversive organization by that law enforcement agency. Two departmental supervisors concluded, upon short consideration, that such activity might open their agency to litigation, and perhaps criminal violations. The organization had invited him to join. RWOAll rights reserved. Protected by U.S. copyright law. For permission to reprint, contact the author, his agent or attorney. |
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the 21st anniversary of the
Big Blast and, improbable as it may seem, I had attained the age of 21
on the day of the bombing.