Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  ****

  Dwight Granger lived in the Unaccompanied Personnel Quarters on Fort Campbell, not far from Gate One. A generation ago at the start of his former Air Force career, it would have been called the Bachelor Officers Quarters, but two of those three terms had fallen prey to political correctness. The sprawling three-story structure was built of reinforced concrete, and it had come through the earthquakes with no more than cracks. Granger occupied a single room, with a bed that converted into a sofa, a table, a desk, and a connecting bathroom that he shared with the next room. It was not much more than his own cell in the low-rise building, one of hundreds of identical cement-walled cubicles, but at least he had a key to the door. This bachelor’s room was a far cry from the three-bedroom home outside Las Vegas that he used to own. Own? That was not the correct word. In the end, the bank owned it. It always had, really.

  During his current employment contract with the Department of Homeland Security, it was a much better deal to live on the Army base than off it. At least his room in the UPQ had reliable electricity and heat, unlike most of the housing opportunities off base. Granger currently did not own an automobile, and gasoline was practically unobtainable anyway. The UPQ was within walking distance of the Post Exchange store, the food commissary, and the Cole Park Buffet, where he could pay for his meals with voucher cards. A free shuttle bus was usually available to take him to and from his job at UAV flight operations, but most of the time he walked instead of waiting for it.

  Tonight he lay on his sofa bed, staring up at the constellations of bumps and holes in his stucco plaster ceiling. The dots doubled and merged as he stared into and beyond the yellow paint. He was still unable to focus on anything beyond the Predator video he had captured today. He had the entire Mannville massacre recorded on several thumb-sized USB drives, but he was afraid to load the images onto his personal laptop computer. He didn’t need to view it on his computer screen: the massacre at the ravine in Radford County played itself in his mind over and over again.

  The flash drives containing the video files were fairly well hidden, taped to the back of a drawer, but in his mind’s eye, they glowed and pulsed like radioactive isotopes. His tiny room could be searched to its concrete walls, ceiling and floor in mere minutes. He wanted the drives out of his room, but he did not want the information contained on them to be lost. He considered hiding them in one of the UPQ’s common areas or laundry rooms, but even there they might inadvertently be discovered. Conversely, if something happened to him, the flash drives might lie unnoticed in the laundry room for years, or they might be thrown away in the trash unviewed.

  Regardless of where he temporarily hid the flash drives, what could he do with the information contained on them? He supposed he could take them and leave Fort Campbell. But to go where, without a car? He would have to leave Tennessee and Kentucky, but to do that he would need official authorization, and travel papers for boarding an interstate train or bus. He’d have to go to the national media centers in Washington or New York, he thought. He’d need to take the flash drives directly to one of the big television networks or newspapers.

  He quickly reconsidered that idea. In reality, there was no truly free press in America anymore, not during the long emergency. National security was invoked so freely that the First Amendment had become an empty promise. The major media outlets would never broadcast the Predator video, not without first running it past the Department of Homeland Security for approval and official clearance. Under the emergency laws, he would probably be arrested on charges of…well, something. They would secretly arrest him for conspiracy, sedition or the new catchall, “advocating violent radicalization against the government.” Then he’d disappear into a detention camp…or worse.

  He could make multiple copies, and try to mail them in the blind to various media outlets and hope for the best…but the mail was carefully scrutinized these days. Even small parcels required a trip to the Post Office, where he would be filmed. A flash drive would easily show up under an x-ray, the file could be opened by the security services, and then he would be arrested. Perhaps he could send it out to the so-called free states of the Pacific Northwest? He promptly dropped that idea. He had no contacts out West. When he lived in Nevada he was still on active duty in the Air Force, and he had no local friends outside of the military. When he left Nevada, that state’s presence upon him evaporated like the desert’s morning dew. To Dwight Granger it was no more than a hot and arid geographical location that he had occupied for a few years, and he had not put down the shallowest roots.

  Five years ago he could have simply uploaded the video onto the internet, but no more. There was no free, unmonitored internet as there had been even a few years earlier. It was impossible to anonymously upload videos onto the net. It would be simpler and quicker just to walk over to base security and confess his unauthorized copying of the Predator video than to try to disseminate it on the internet. The result would be the same: arrest. Trying to mail or merely to release the video images would be too dangerous. Perhaps he should just wait, and hope that someday the political situation in the United States would change enough for the video to be shown on broadcast television. Someday Americans will need to know what happened in Tennessee during the long emergency, he thought. The true and complete history of the past year will have to come out, eventually—not just the politically correct version preferred by the government and its allies in the media.

  It was part of the official history that hundreds of thousands of people died because of the twin earthquakes and their aftermath. We have all understood that, thought Dwight Granger. There was no denying the obvious. We have also been repeatedly told that the earthquakes and the fires that followed them were tragic events, but that they were unforeseeable and unpreventable acts of nature. The government even reluctantly admitted that thousands more were killed during the complete breakdown of civil order that followed the quakes. Many more froze to death or died from drinking foul water, or from disease or even in some cases from starvation.

  And of course, it was well known that thousands of black refugees were killed by white racists when they fled Memphis and other urban areas, seeking food and clean water in the countryside. He had seen the television news footage of helpless blacks shot down on the roads and in the fields. Entire documentary films had been produced about the racial killings. So who would have sympathy for the white racists in Western Tennessee if in turn a massacre had been perpetrated upon them? Everybody remembered the televised images of the African-American bodies piled up on the roads leading out of Memphis, where they had been shot dead by racist whites. White people like the ones who had in turn been shot in the ravine outside of Mannville. There was almost an eerie sym-metry to today’s massacre. Perhaps it put last year’s bloody events into some balance. Payback.

  Even so…even so…this thing that he witnessed today could not be excused, no matter what terrible racial crimes white Tennesseans might have committed following the earthquakes. Yesterday’s massacre was not committed during the weeks of starvation, anarchy and panic immediately following the earthquakes. This slaughter was done a year later, by foreign soldiers who had been sent in by our own government to “pacify” the region. This new mass murder was done in cold blood. This was the stuff of Hitler’s Nazis. No matter what some of these rural whites had done to the black earthquake refugees a year ago, the massacre he had witnessed today could not be justified or rationalized. But what could he do with the information he possessed? To whom could he show the video proof? How could he disseminate the truth in a way that would make any difference? No television network or newspaper would touch the video—that was a certainty. They would pass the video on to the Department of Homeland Security for vetting, and there it would stay. And then he would be arrested.

  So in practical terms, what could he do with the evidence? Every day that he kept the flash drives hidden in his room he risked their discovery, and then he would be arrested, and their infor
mation might be lost forever. Anytime he reported for duty at flight operations, his room could be covertly searched, and if that happened the flash drives would be found. What, then, could he do with them? What? He stared up through the blurring and merging dots on his ceiling, and found no answers there.

  13

  Jenny was too exhausted to feel much surprise, but entering a cave in the black of night promised to be a singular experience. The opening was no more than a yard wide. The bottom was not smooth or level, but more diagonal. Rocks protruded through the snow, where the man they called Doug had already crawled in. When Zack helped take off her backpack she became lightheaded, and she had to reach for his shoulder to steady herself. Zack aimed his little red light at the cave’s mouth, and she watched as her pack was dragged into the hole in the rocky hillside.

  Carson, the older one, asked, “Can you carry the baby inside where you have him, or do you want to slide him through like your pack?”

  “Her. She’s a girl,” replied Jenny.

  Doug’s face appeared from inside the cleft in the rock wall. He had dark wavy hair and a thin stubble beard. The night vision goggles he had worn on their hike to the cave were gone. Instead, he had a headlamp on his forehead, a row of white LED bulbs that illuminated the mouth of the cave from within.

  She asked him, “Does it get tighter than this?”

  “No, this is the narrowest spot right here. It gets higher and wider just a few feet inside.”

  “I’ll bring her in, then. She’s still sleeping, if you can believe it.” Jenny knelt in the slushy snow and ducked under the rocky opening, coming face to face with Doug.

  “Okay. Here, let me put this on you. You need these to see inside.” Doug slid an elastic strap over her fur hat. Her hat’s side and back flaps were already down, and the band fit snugly around the leather top. He depressed a button and the light came on. They were almost nose-to-nose, and he lingered just a moment to brush a loose strand of blond hair away from her face.

  Jenny lowered herself almost onto her belly in the snow, propping herself up with her left elbow. Her right forearm cradled the infant, who was still tucked against her chest within the nest of her parka. She twisted slightly onto her left side to accommodate the angle of the cave mouth, and wriggled her way through, hunching forward like a caterpillar. It was not completely dark inside as she had expected, but was lit by, of all things, a line of white and red miniature Christmas lights. Doug slid backward just in front of her, gliding over boulders and cracks like a snake, guiding her in. The floor of the cave was dry once she was inside.

  After a couple of yards, Doug stopped and said, “Okay, you can sit up here. Just move slowly, and watch your head.” Then he crawled past her, back toward the cave opening. “Okay, Zack, shove all the packs in now.” Doug hauled them in as they appeared. The teenage boy was the next to creep inside, followed by Phil Carson.

  When they were all sitting together inside the cave, Doug told them, “It’s not standing headroom yet, but you won’t have to crawl anymore. Just watch your heads. During some of the way in, you’ll have to hold onto a yellow rope. You’ll see it when we get there. The rope is already bolted along the wall in the places where you need a good handhold. Just watch what I do, and follow this string of lights. Take your time, and be careful where you put your feet. I’ll come back and collect the gear once we’re all the way in.”

  Through it all, the baby was sleeping against Jenny’s chest, the little bundle secure inside her parka. How could she sleep through such commotion? Was the baby tired, or weakened, or perhaps actually sleeping contentedly? Jenny rose carefully to her feet, until her fur hat touched the cave ceiling. The line of Christmas lights was attached to the right side of the cave at shoulder height, and disappeared upward and around a curve.

  ****

  Boone reached the bottom of the ravine by following Jenny’s electronic cookie crumb trail on her GPS, and her footprints in the snow. These were easily seen with his night vision goggles. The snow was turning to sleet. During his walk, he encountered a few other foot trails, softened at the edges and partly filled in by newly fallen snow.

  Jenny McClure was an interesting enigma, and he hoped that he would meet her again. He would, if this morning’s operation was successful, and he was able to sneak back to the cave undetected. She was only a teenager but she was already tough, both mentally and physically. She was a survivor. On the other hand, her rescuing the baby showed that she had a soft and human side as well. These days many people would see the orphaned infant as simply a liability. A baby was dead weight that required constant feeding, and might betray your location at any time by unstoppable crying. She was a survivor with a heart, a rare combination a year after the train of disasters that had befallen Western Tennessee.

  Boone understood the added danger he faced in traveling to the massacre site, but he felt that the stakes were high enough to risk his life once again. It was likely that the place would be under guard, or at least some kind of observation. Over the past six months that the foreign mercenaries had been operating in Tennessee, he had seen casual cruelty and random murder, but nothing like what the girl had described. This was something new, an elevation of their brutality by an order of magnitude. If he could collect irrefutable proof of the massacre before the bodies were removed or buried, it might make a real difference.

  It was darkest in the period between the moonset and dawn. Any hint of starlight was blanketed by unseen clouds. Even the NVGs gave only a dim image, but he was reluctant to turn on their IR illuminator. Foreign soldiers with night observation devices would see the infrared light as clearly as a white flashlight. Once he found Jenny’s path leading upward through a tight little canyon, he was in excellent cover. Small erosion channels rose chest high. Soldiers standing watch on top of the opposing bluffs would be sky-lighted by the coming dawn, and he would probably see them first, in time to hide himself.

  He was glad that he had come alone. Doug Dolan had become a fair soldier for a city-born Yankee, but he was no SF operator. He had his strengths, but stealthy night patrolling was not among them. Phil Carson was still an unknown quantity. He had been an operator, but that had been many decades ago in Vietnam. Even if they were gung-ho, old guys were too brittle and prone to injury, and carrying out an injured man was not always possible. You just didn’t start a mission by taking on that kind of added risk. Zack Tutweiler was probably the best of his motley band of recruits. His father had bragged about Zack’s ability to stalk deer with a compound bow. If you could sneak up on a deer close enough to use an arrow, humans were no problem. But Zack’s physical stamina was needed to help carry the extra food and gear from the car to the cave.

  No, it was best that he came alone tonight. By himself, there was no issue of communicating, either with hand signals or by whispering. By himself, there would be nobody falling down, coughing or noisily banging into things. If Boone could manage to hide his own considerable frame, then he had no worries about anyone else being left exposed to enemy observation, compromising them both. It took weeks of operating together for two men to be able to move fluidly and silently in tandem. It was even harder to learn how to disappear from observation in any terrain. Doug was getting there, he was improving, but tonight he was needed to guide the others to the cave.

  And there was one other undeniable reason why Boone felt it was best to go solo tonight: if he was killed, the others might still escape. There was no reason to risk more than one of their lives for a simple photo recon mission. In Iraq and Afghanistan, when he was operating with friendly forces in the area, and with a Quick Reaction Force on standby and Army helicopters above, it was always possible to slug it out in a firefight and wait for rescue. Even if heavily outnumbered, you might fight your way back to a friendly position, or hold out until the cavalry arrived. But this was not the case in Western Tennessee. Now the only cavalry belonged to the damned Cossacks, and all of the air assets were operated by traitors.

&n
bsp; If he was engaged in a shootout, he could expect no help, and would find no sanctuary. He would escape clean, or he would die. Having one or two extra shooters along would make little difference when going toe-to-toe against a platoon or more of Kazaks. If he were compromised, the only reinforcements arriving would be more enemy platoons, setting up cordons and sweeping the woods and trails. But one man might avoid detection where two or more might not. And one man could do a photo recon as well as a squad. Or do it even better, since one man left only a single set of tracks.

  He wormed his way up the gully, the main walls rising thirty feet above him on both sides. His next task was to find a hidden location to wait for the dawn. Taking pictures before daylight was out of the question. He might as well fire off parachute flares as take flash photographs.

  ****

  A persistent buzzing woke him up. Bob Bullard fumbled for the red secure phone on his bedside table, and finally grasped it. The glowing digital clock behind the telephone informed him it was 3:47 a.m.

  “Talk.”

  “Director Bullard? John Andretti. I’m the duty officer at Building 1405 tonight.”

  Andretti? Bullard vaguely recalled the man. Another new guy, Andretti had come over to rural pacification from Customs. For the purposes of paperwork, he was assigned to a non-existent planning commission within Homeland Security. Officially, there was no department of rural pacification. ‘Building 1405’ was their name for the rural pacification operations center, a name that appeared on no plaque or sign, nor in any directory. The buildings on Fort Campbell were all numbered, and they had taken over building 1405 when the phantom department had been commissioned. “Okay, John, what have you got?”