Tim.
Taking in a breath and holding it, Curt squeezed the trigger.
The rifle recoiled but not enough for Curt to lose sight of his targets. The lead man went down like he'd been tripped. He didn't spin around or stagger as Curt had seen in the movies when people were shot.
One minute the man was walking, the next he was gone. The second man had stopped, frozen in his tracks as the sound of the rifle echoed around the dark, harsh landscape.
Curt felt an orgasmic rush of adrenaline and a tremendous sense of power. Without another thought, he drew a bead on the second man and smoothly pulled the trigger. The gun again jumped and the second man disappeared. Curt lowered the rifle. For a brief moment there was a refreshing smell of cordite in the air before the breeze dispersed it.
'Well? ' Tim asked expectantly.
'Both are down, ' Curt said.
'Fantastic! ' Tim said. He gave Curt a pat on the shoulder before reaching for the radio. He told the other teams that he and Curt were going out to dispose of a couple of targets. He told them not to fire on anything until they heard from him again.
'I don't want those crazy guys shooting at us, ' Tim said. He took the sniper rifle away from Curt, who gave it up without comment. Tim then got out a folding shovel and pick. 'Come on, ' he said to Curt.
'But keep your Glock handy in case you just winged the bastards. We might have to give them a coop de grass' or whatever the saying is.' Curt stumbled after Tim without saying a word. After the initial euphoria, he was flooded by self-doubt. Now that he'd actually shot someone, he didn't know how to deal with the idea that he might have killed another human being. The mental fog created by the many beers he'd consumed didn't help. The fact that Tim was acting as if he'd merely swatted two pesky flies didn't help, either.
'Come on, soldier! ' Tim called over his shoulder when he became aware Curt was lagging behind. Tim had gone ahead with the flashlight, moving over rocky terrain in a slow jog.
Curt pushed himself forward and squared his shoulders. He was embarrassed that Tim might suspect his 'candy ass' state of mind.
It took them almost half an hour to find the Mexicans since they had to crisscross the general area a number of times. As Tim's flashlight beam played over their bodies, he whistled in admiration. 'I'm impressed, ' he said. 'You drilled both of them through the head.' Curt looked down at the corpses.
He'd never seen a dead person before outside of a funeral home. Both bodies had small entrance holes on their foreheads but were missing large chunks of scalp in the back.
The ground in the area was sprinkled with bits and pieces of brain.
The man in the front still had his hand wrapped around the handle of his suitcase.
'Oh my God! ' Curt murmured.
Tim's head snapped up and he glared at his recruit. 'What's the matter?'
' he demanded.
'What did I do? '
'You killed a couple of wetback illegal aliens, ' Tim snapped. 'You did your country a favor.'
'Jesus, ' Curt mumbled as he shook his head. The Mexicans' eyes were still open, and they were staring at him. Curt swayed a little on rubbery legs.
Tim reacted swiftly. He stepped over to his partner for the evening and slapped him hard. Tim then swore at the pain and shook his hand as if it were wet.
Curt recoiled and for a moment he saw red. He touched his stinging face, then glanced at his fingers as if he expected to see blood. He glared at Tim.
'I'm right here, tough guy, ' Tim jeered. He gestured with his tingling hand for Curt to come and try to hit him back.
Curt stared off into the black night. He didn't want to fight with Tim because now that he'd had a moment to think, he knew why Tim had hit him.
'You were going soft on me, ' Tim explained.
Curt nodded. It was true.
'Listen, ' Tim said. 'Let me tell you something you don't know about me.
I was ordained just this year as a minister in the True Believers Christian Church, which happens to be a local branch of the much bigger Christian Identity Church. You ever hear of that? ' Curt shook his head.
'It's a church that has used the Bible to prove that we white Anglosaxons are the true descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. All the other races are, sgpawns of Satan or mud people, like these spics here.'
Tim nudged o, /e of the Mexicans with his black boot. 'That's why we have white skin and they have black, brown, yellow or whatever you want to call it.'
'You're a minister? ' Curt asked incredulously. The man had so many different sides it made Curt's head spin.
'Full-fledged, ' Tim said. 'So I know what I'm talking about. The key thing is that God's word in the Bible says that the means to bring about divine judgment is not limited to actions of the body politic.
It means that violence is not only okay, but it's necessary. The fact of the matter is that you've done God's work tonight, soldier. '!
'I've never heard anything about all this, ' Curt admitted.
'That's not surprising, ' Tim said. 'Nor is it your fault. The Zionist Occupied Government doesn't want you to know about it. They keep it out of the schools, out of the newspapers, and off the TV, all of which they control. The reason is that they want to neutralize us by diluting us genetically. It's just like in The Turnerdiaries.
Remember? '
'I'm not sure, ' Curt said. He was impressed with Tim's vehemence as much as his erudition.
'It was part of the Cohen Act, ' Tim said. 'It stipulated that the human relations councils it set up were to force Aryan whites to marry mud people. That kind of marriage is called miscegenation. Have you ever heard of that term? '
'No, ' Curt said.
'Then you get my point, ' Tim said. 'It's a ZOG conspiracy. They don't even want kids to learn the term because encouraging miscegenation is the most insidious sin of all that ZOG is guilty of.
And to God it's an abomination. It's Satan's attempt to do away with God's chosen people.
It's the Holocaust in reverse.'
'All right! ' Curt spat, returning from his brief rever
'What cards are you talking about? ' Yuri questioned. He could tell that his guests were livid, particularly Curt.
Curt rolled his eyes in frustration. 'It's an expression, for crissake.
It means explaining everything to everybody so there are no surprises.'
'Okay, ' Yuri said agreeably.
'I mean like you've shocked us tonight, ' Curt snapped. 'Not only are you married, but you're married to a nigger woman. Calling that a surprise is putting it mildly.'
'I needed a green card, ' Yuri explained.
'But you should not have married a black woman! ' Steve barked.
'What difference does it make? ' Yuri asked, although he thought he knew the answer. Over the four years he'd lived in the United States he'd become well aware of social prejudices.
Curt held his tongue despite the foolishness of Yuri's question. He thought for a moment of explaining the whole issue to Yuri the way Tim Melcher had explained it to him some twenty years earlier. But he decided against it, because looking at Yuri with a more critical eye, Curt couldn't decide if he was Aryan or not.
'Marrying between the races, particularly when one member is white, is against God's word, ' Steve said.
'I'd never heard that, ' Yuri said.
'What's done is done, ' Curt said with a wave of his hand. 'More important at the moment is the question of what we are going to do now.
Your wife knows you are screwing around with bacteria downstairs and she knows that you worked in the
