Randy drew out the radio and keyed it near his mouth.
“There’s nothing going on out here,” he said. Then: “Over.”
“Stay in position,” Axel responded.
Randy sighed and rolled his eyes. Rainwater pattered incessantly on his makeshift plastic raincoat.
* * *
—
After ten more minutes of nothing to report, Randy wiped his wet face clean with the cuff of his shirt and retreated back down Gum Wall alley. He wanted to get under the overhang and out of the rain. What could it hurt? He could still see most of the street.
The pounding of the rain hushed when he reentered the covered alley. He kept to the shadowed side of the right wall so that if Axel looked in his direction, he wouldn’t see his outline from the streetlights on the square. Randy didn’t want to invite Axel’s wrath.
The mouth of the alley provided an odd kind of acoustic anomaly. Even though Randy couldn’t see Axel and the Blade deep in the shadows near the cache, he could hear them very clearly.
Axel was holding court. And it sounded to Randy like Axel was talking about antifa.
“They really don’t have any realistic goals,” Axel said. “It’s all bullshit from trust-fund militants with daddy issues. They say they want to abolish the police. They say they want no government and no capitalism and they want to return the country to indigenous tribes. But they all have the newest iPhone. It’s all just fucking insane.”
The Blade laughed. He said, “But, man, they love you.”
“Yeah, they do. That’s how smart they are.”
Randy felt a chill run through him. He felt as if someone had punched him in the chest.
Axel said, “Remember those child soldiers in Myanmar? How fucking incompetent and fucked up they were? Well, compared to the antifa guys I’ve met, those boys were highly trained warriors.
“There really aren’t that many of them altogether,” Axel continued. “It’s a media myth. There are maybe just a couple hundred in the whole country at most. Most of them are concentrated in Portland. The reason people think antifa is a big deal is because they keep recirculating. They get arrested but not prosecuted, and they’re back on the street in hours. It’s a shell game.
“And they’re only good for one thing,” Axel said. “They’ll help us destabilize the status quo, even though they don’t know it. Them and the hard-core BLM guys. They’re a means to an end, as far as I’m concerned. Both groups are easy to manipulate if you press the right buttons. With BLM, of course, you need cops to confront them and injure or kill one on video. With antifa, you just turn them loose and don’t arrest them or prosecute them for anything. It emboldens them if they don’t get any pushback.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” the Blade said.
“Yeah. We can’t go at the leaders in D.C. directly for what they did to us. It’s impractical and they’re all hiding behind walls and fences. But we can light the cities on fire and expose them as weak and spineless. The media will be on our side. They always are.”
“So how’s this gonna work?” the Blade asked.
“We need to be in the right situation,” Axel said. “We need to be in the middle of a full-fledged riot. Fog-of-war conditions. That’s what all of this has been leading up to. We need a situation with absolute chaos. Cops fighting antifa or BLM. Or antifa just burning everything down.”
“Then what?”
“Then we light the fuse,” Axel said. “That’s why I’m dressed like this.”
“Like a golf pro or some such?” the Blade said, chuckling.
“Yeah. I need to look like a local white businessman who maybe found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally, I’ll choose to be on the side of the cops in their riot gear. I’ll keep my head down until the time is right. Then I’ll pull this,” he said.
Randy imagined Axel showing the Blade one of the guns they’d stolen earlier in the day. He imagined it to be one of the .40 Glock pistols Axel had claimed “were the weapon of choice” for law enforcement personnel across the country.
“You’ll be positioned in a window or on a roof with your sniper rifle,” Axel said to the Blade. “I’ll pop a couple antifa or BLM guys from within the crowd of cops. I’ll take down as many as I can without exposing myself. It’ll all get caught by people on the side with their phones and on police body cams. No one will know who did the shooting, but they’ll know it came from the cops.”