The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  36

  I turned the corner into my driveway and saw Laila and Langley waving from the front porch.

  Putting my truck in park and killing the engine, I leapt out in time to catch Langley as she barreled toward me. I hoisted her into the air and spun a circle to the sound of her delighted giggles, then pulled her into a tight hug and looked up to see Laila approach with a smile.

  Laila and I kissed, and I started to carry Langley inside.

  Then my wife said, “You want to get your bags?”

  I turned as if looking at my truck. But my gaze fell to the street beyond, where I reassessed what I’d seen before pulling into my driveway: two nondescript SUVs parked with mutually supporting views of my house, Duchess’s protective detail in action. Or what I could see of them, anyway. Probably FBI, and definitely not asleep at the shift.

  “No,” I replied to Laila, “they’ll be fine. I’ll get the bags later.”

  Then we turned to enter the house.

  After that, everything was smooth sailing with Langley—she didn’t seem to mind that I’d been gone, only that I was now home. She wanted to play, sit in my lap, and read books together. For the first hour of my return, I was like the center of her universe, and nothing made me feel more fulfilled.

  But Laila was more distant, coming and going at irregular intervals. At one point I heard the sound of dishes clinking in the kitchen, and hesitantly entered to find her over the sink.

  I said, “I thought we were going out to dinner?”

  “We are. I’m just doing the dishes.”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “No, go play with Langley. She’s been waiting all day for you.”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re saying ‘nothing,’” I acknowledged, “but what I’m hearing is, ‘I’m bottling something inside and it’s going to explode later.’”

  “Well,” she said playfully, “wait and see.”

  Then she kissed my cheek and moved off to continue the dishes.

  I left the kitchen warily, feeling that armed confrontation with ISIS fighters was the safer play for me at present.

  Returning to Langley’s room, I found her busy making preparations at her play kitchen.

  “Daddy,” she announced, “what do you want for dinner?”

  I considered the question. “Your world-famous pizza, obviously.”

  “Supreme?”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  She began sticking toy pepperoni and mushrooms to their Velcro attachment points.

  I asked, “Have you been good for Mommy?”

  “Yeah. We have fun.”

  “How has Mom been?”

  “Good.”

  “Anything I should be doing to help her out?”

  “Yeah,” Langley said matter-of-factly, “make sure you let her sleep. She’s been real tired after work.”

  I considered Langley’s comment later that night, after we’d returned from dinner and put her to bed. After Laila and I made love, I expected her to pass out in my arms—instead, she began the inquisition.

  “How is the contract?” she asked.

  “Good. Great, everything’s fine.”

  “Yeah? What happened to the contractor?”

  “What contractor?”

  “The one who had the disagreement with the Jordanian captain. The whole reason you had to go over there, David.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said quickly. “Sorry, all of our guys are contractors so I didn’t know who you meant at first. Guy named Tom, good dude, and he was entirely in the right. But the contract takes priority, so we had to rotate him back home and replace him with a new hire, a young eager kid.”

  “Maybe you should start pissing off your host nation counterparts, too,” she noted. “We’d certainly see more of you around here.”

  “Sure, all the way up until Jenio Solutions fires me.”

  “That’s my point.”

  I looked over at her in the darkness of our bedroom. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m about to finish residency. I’ve got student loans, sure, but so does everyone else I work with. And none of them are exactly living in squalor while they’re paying them back. You don’t need to be running all over the world anymore. You could find something local.”

  The idea repulsed me.

  “Well as much as I’d love to work for your parents, they sold the metalworking business so that’s out. Last I checked, UVA wasn’t giving tenure to people with an undergrad degree, so that pretty much leaves me slinging ice cream at Chaps. Think I saw a ‘now hiring’ sign last time we went.”

  Laila wasn’t amused. “I’m serious, David.”

  Frowning, I said, “I just don’t know, Laila. I’m not cut out for most jobs, and I...I really like the gig I’ve got going now.”

  What I couldn’t tell her, of course, was that I felt a paradoxical discomfort not about deploying to foreign lands—that part came naturally—but about coming home. Because strangely, suburban life tended to make me uneasy.

  Things made sense to me in combat. The decisions were split-second and instinctive, and the bond between me and my teammates was absolute. It didn’t matter that the enemy we fought believed in their cause as much as we believed in ours; we were simply two sides in the greatest game of all, the second oldest profession continuing a proud and gruesome lineage.

  By contrast, it was the return to America that always confounded me.

  The realities of peacetime existence were muddled; there was none of the adrenaline of combat, and none of the clarity. Talking heads were always screaming on the news. Everyone was seemingly in a competition to be the most offended or outraged by some political scandal or social issue, and the debates raged amid the billboards and commercials of a trillion-dollar advertising industry hawking designer clothes, fast food, and pharmaceuticals. People seemed to conflate the identity of themselves and others with their respective social media presence.

  The refuge from this maelstrom was Laila’s circle of friends, but they too stretched the bounds of my understanding. Social encounters seemed politely plasticine versions of reality, anything meaningful in my professional existence compartmentalized to my teammates, who were probably enduring equally awkward domestic existences elsewhere. Absent any relevant commonalities with the social circle of Charlottesville, Virginia, dinner party conversations were limited to banal and inoffensive topics that would be unbearable save the drink in my hand.

  Then there was my family.

  I loved Laila and Langley unconditionally. For Langley, this was enough; she needed the constant presence and playfulness, and that was my natural state with her. If I was brooding over something, she’d know immediately and cheer me up at once.

  But Laila was vexing.

  On the outside, everything was fine—we rarely argued, and seemed to get along well enough. But I sometimes got the feeling that we were each playing the role of spouse, and she was the only one holding up her end of the bargain. She’d describe her workday, venting as necessary, and I’d listen compassionately—then lie about my own job.

  And it wasn’t entirely because my security classification required it. I wasn’t concerned about Laila accidentally divulging any secrets to a foreign agent.

  The bigger issue was this: what was I supposed to tell her? That I was essentially a new breed of government contract killer? There was no gentleman’s pistol-duel-at-sunrise aspect to what my team had been designed to do. There were threats to our country, and we were one small and extraordinarily violent cog in the machinery of national defense. We existed on the legal fringe of sanctioned paramilitary action, and when we were employed, it was to kill a designated terrorist efficiently, covertly, and ruthlessly.

  What was Laila supposed to do with that information, even if I told her? Judge it against the backdrop of her upper-middle-
class existence? Or do what I feared most, and leave me?

  I didn’t know, and had no intention of finding out. After all, my goal here was a happy marriage for myself and Laila, and a happy childhood for Langley. Neither of them needed to deal with my issues.

  So I hid the obvious facts. Outside of combat, I wasn’t even like a fish on land—I was like a fish catapulting through the sky. I’d spent so much of my adult life at war of one kind or another that the bucolic sanctum of peacetime felt like an alien realm. Everything was muted, strange to me, and I struggled to play my part as a normal member of society.

  Finally I said to Laila, “You know what? Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow.”

  It was no use—she was already asleep, breathing softly against my shoulder.

  37

  Chief Petty Officer Barry Steele steadied himself on the deck, watching the ocean view pitch beyond the bow of his twenty-eight-foot craft.

  Squinting behind the shaded lenses of his shooting glasses, he felt the choppy Atlantic sea spray hitting his face as he tried to acquire visual of his target vessel. He could make out the distant orange specks of the circling helicopters, but the short waves obscured his view of the vessel to their front.

  Then he heard the voice of an aerial gunner squawking over his radio mic.

  “Crew of the Scyllis, crew of the Scyllis, stop your vessel, stop your vessel. This is the US Coast Guard on channel one-six.”

  Turning to face the three Coast Guardsmen behind him, Steele shouted over the sound of the surf.

  “There’s the call.”

  The trio of men shot him a thumbs-up, each attired as he was in tactical gear with weapons slung. He looked forward, listening over the internal frequency as the gunner broadcasted, “Vessel is compliant, cutting power. Two pax visible on deck, both unarmed.”

  Steele had personally led over a dozen boarding events in his nine years of service in HITRON. He’d since been promoted out of that job, reluctantly assuming more administrative and leadership positions as the next generations of Coast Guardsmen filled the ranks behind him.

  But today was no ordinary interdiction.

  His first sign that today would proceed like no other came at 5:00 a.m. that morning, when they’d received the tasking for a pre-planned interdiction of a vessel inbound for the World Ocean Superyacht Marina in Jacksonville. Their mission was to stop the craft, then board and search it for narcotics.

  To Steele, there was just one small complication: that wasn’t their job.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true—as a unit, HITRON was born and bred to stop smuggling vessels inbound for the US coastline. To that end, they worked extensively with US and foreign agencies that provided intelligence on the shipping corridors and departure times, much of it obtained by agents embedded in South America.

  However, that was where the similarities with today’s mission ended.

  Legally, HITRON could pursue a vessel only under very specific conditions: it had to be a “go fast” boat, or a high-speed open-hull craft in international waters, suspected of drug smuggling and without any visible indication of nationality. Nowhere in that job description, nor in Steele’s years of experience, had a yacht ever been involved.

  Especially not one flagged as a Chinese vessel.

  Just the same, the mission was authorized straight from the top, the operations order having been signed by the commandant himself. Steele had never seen that happen, and it was far from the strangest thing about today’s interdiction.

  An older black lady had been ferried to his Coast Guard cutter by helicopter. She had DEA credentials, along with authority to monitor the boarding effort from the cutter’s operations center. To Steele, that alone was a red flag—DEA agents never met a cutter at sea, mainly because they didn’t have to. HITRON would deliver all captured drugs to DEA custody at the transfer point in Cecil Field, and there was absolutely nothing one of those agents could tell the Coast Guard about how to stop and board a boat at sea.

  Then, of course, there was the whole matter of the SEAL platoon.

  That was what bothered Steele the most. The Navy SEALs had forward deployed to the HITRON base, along with their contingent of Seahawk helicopters. They were currently airborne, orbiting just beyond the HITRON flight paths, ready to storm the yacht—but only if needed. In the event of enemy fire, Steele had orders to abort the boarding attempt and let the SEALs take the yacht by force.

  Reasonable enough, he thought, except for the fact that HITRON was already armed to the teeth and fully capable of dealing with shooters. His gunners aboard the helicopters were armed with M240 machineguns for warning shots, Barrett M107 sniper rifles for disabling engine blocks, and modified M14 EBRs as a backup weapon. The tactical boarding team members, himself included, carried .40 caliber sidearms, M16 rifles, and shotguns with two separate loads—one with sabot slugs, the other with less-than-lethal bean bag rounds.

  With all that armament, Steele thought the DEA should have either let HITRON do its job, or just punt the entire interdiction to the SEALs. He could only find one explanation for this half-measure of letting HITRON stop the yacht and board, while keeping the SEALs out of sight: unlike the other military service branches, the Coast Guard operated under the Department of Homeland Security. That gave them unique legal authorities in the waters off the US coast, and Steele suspected those authorities were being exploited by someone who desperately wanted to search the vessel he now approached.

  He captured his first glimpses of it through the waves and watched in awe as the yacht drew nearer. The Scyllis was a big bastard, a 140-footer, and as beautiful as anything Steele had ever seen on the water. White surfaces and jet-black windows gleamed as the yacht bobbed in the waves, remaining in the watchful eye of the two MH-65C Dolphin helicopters that circled overhead, allowing their gunners to survey the deck for threats to the tactical boarding team.

  Today, that boarding team was trailed by a second boat filled with Navy open-water divers. Their job was to search beneath the waterline, looking for a parasite, or torpedo-shaped storage container affixed to the hull. The alternative was a traditional torpedo setup, where the cargo pod was kept submerged by an internal ballast tank and towed by the overt surface ship. In the event the ship was stopped by authorities, the crew would simply detach the torpedo cable, abandoning the container to broadcast its location with a transmitter system until a new boat could recover it.

  That particular contingency was covered by a third Dolphin helicopter, which was currently flying the ship’s reverse azimuth along a two-mile zigzag pattern, searching for any sign of jettisoned cargo.

  And as if the SEALs, the divers, and the search helicopter weren’t enough, a third boat trailed behind them, this one loaded with a DEA search team complete with radar devices to check for hidden compartments aboard the vessel.

  His boat began slowing behind the yacht, the operator steering the small craft toward a silver ladder leading onto the rear deck.

  Steele was the first on the ladder, scrambling upward and setting foot on the deck to the near-immediate confrontation with a Chinese man in mirrored sunglasses and a white linen shirt.

  “What is the problem?” the man nearly shouted at Steele as the rest of his tactical boarding team spread out across the deck, establishing immediate security.

  Steele recognized the Chinese man at once—this was Wei Zhao, the yacht’s owner.

  “Sir, please have a seat and let us do our jobs.”

  “You have no business on my yacht.”

  “We have verified intelligence that there may be narcotics aboard this vessel, possibly being smuggled without your knowledge.”

  “Are you accusing my crew?”

  “We are not accusing anyone, sir. This is a targeted search, and the sooner we conduct it, the sooner you can be on the way to your destination.”

  Though to be honest, Steele was just as suspicious of the search team as this Chinese billionaire seemed to be.

&n
bsp; By now the divers were rolling backward off the side of their boat, entering the water to begin searching the hull as the search team from the third boat clambered up the ladder and onto the deck.

  Maybe they were DEA and maybe not, but there was no doubt they knew exactly what they were looking for. They immediately split into two-man elements, combing the ship with a synchronization indicating they’d already analyzed the blueprints and identified the most likely hiding spots. He watched an agent use what looked like a stud finder on steroids to scan a wall while his partner watched a video display for any abnormalities.

  Steele took a final look at the pair of sleek orange helicopters circling the ship, then entered the yacht’s interior through an open doorway.

  What he saw boggled the mind—every room of the yacht was like its own five-star hotel, filled with lavish furniture and fully stocked bars, gleaming marble floors and plush beds. For the staff on board, of course, this was a nightmare situation—luxury yacht crews were used to running around with a cloth, wiping down fingerprints on polished surfaces the moment the VIP had left a room.

  Now, the DEA inspectors were sweeping across the ship, entering every nook and leaving no cabinet unchecked in their meticulous search for—well, whatever the hell it was they were looking for, Steele thought. Because it didn’t look like a routine drug bust, and no billionaire in the world would risk his fortune by smuggling forbidden cargo in his personal yacht.

  But just the same, Steele knew he’d been directed to interdict the Scyllis for a reason.

  He looked forward to learning what that reason was, anticipating that he was about to have a role in some historic seizure for the Coast Guard.

  But in the space of fifteen minutes, those hopes evaporated: the divers found a clean hull, the search bird swept two nautical miles on reverse azimuth without any sign of jettisoned cargo, and the DEA team announced they’d completed their search with zero results.