Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Two more weeks, three at the most, and Brad Fallon was sure that he’d be gone, right over that blue horizon, leaving America to work out its latest agonies without him. He had $75,000 banked after his last six-month contract working in the Alaskan ANWR oil fields, a bought and paid for boat, and a mast and engine just waiting to be installed. If domestic events now unfolded the way he suspected they might, he guessed that he had picked an opportune time to leave the States for a few years of cruising the world’s tropical oceans and islands.

  The networks broke simultaneously for an impromptu press briefing. The Governor of Maryland, the mayor of Washington, and many recognizable national politicians stood behind the local chief of police, taking the opportunity to get their deeply concerned faces on national television. The uniformed police chief was handed a wallet by a helmeted SWAT officer wearing black tactical gear, cameras jerked as the press pushed forward. Microphones cut in and out and the grandstanding Chief of Police, making the most of his fifteen minutes of national fame, began a short statement.

  “This wallet was just taken from the sniper’s body and brought directly to me by the commander of our tactical unit.” He slipped on reading glasses, and then he opened the shiny black wallet, oblivious to his contaminating possible evidence. He examined it for a moment, and then he turned it around to the cameras, which zoomed in on the ID cards behind two clear plastic windows. He cleared his throat and said “James R. Shifflett. The ID found on the sniper is in the name of one James R. Shifflett, of Norfolk Virginia.” Fallon’s TV picture zoomed in on the ID cards; a Virginia driver’s license and a military card of some sort. The tiny photos were too blurry to make out anything other than that Shifflett was a white man with light brown colored hair and a stringy mustache. Most of the printed information was too small and grainy to read.

  It was a sign of the deep cynicism Fallon felt that he was not surprised that they put the sniper’s name and photo on national television right away: he seemed to be a garden-variety Caucasian male. When an act of terrorism occurred and the suspect was from the Middle East or had a Muslim name, that fact was usually concealed for days, in order to dampen anti-Muslim anger. The way that the broadcast television networks strived to “protect” their viewers from politically-incorrect news was one reason Fallon’s TV set usually stayed buried in a locker. He mostly listened to AM news-talk radio to find out what was really going on.

  Brad Fallon had hoped that he would get his new 80-horsepower Perkins turbo diesel aboard Guajira today, or at least from the dock over onto her deck, but as the afternoon wore on he resigned himself to waiting until Monday. The news that the sniper was from Norfolk gave him a sense of unease, drawing the day’s horrific events uncomfortably close.

  ****

  The Suffolk Virginia police department needed less than thirty minutes to discover James Shifflett’s last domicile, a dilapidated thirty-foot camper trailer located at the end of a long dirt driveway. The trailer was tucked back among pine trees and was almost invisible from the paved state road, where the first TV vans were sending up their microwave antennas. The hundred-yard-long driveway and dusty weed-choked yard was already packed tightly with marked and unmarked police cars, a SWAT truck, and mobile crime scene vans.

  The SWAT team and bomb disposal technicians quickly examined the trailer for booby traps; one of the local TV crews with a lucky camera angle captured the sight of SWAT officers carrying out rifles in each of their hands. This damning evidence was laid on top of the hood of a police cruiser as a temporary exhibit, and camera crews were permitted in to film them. By two PM the entire world knew that James “Jimmy” Shifflett was a fanatical gun nut, who had lived in a trailer containing an “arsenal” of five rifles and shotguns and over two thousand rounds of ammunition. His small library contained books on sniping, bomb construction, and white supremacist hate literature.

  ****

  Even as millions of TV viewers were still watching and rewatching video clips of the day’s bloodbath in the stadium, and while the residents of southeastern Virginia were absorbing the fact that a local man had gone berserk and caused it all, the never-stopping gears of the federal government were turning out reactions, responses, and contingency plans. The new and untested president, in office only eight months, called an emergency meeting of the Homeland Security Team in the White House Situation Room beneath the Oval Office. One of their first decisions was to ask the national television networks for a prime time slot to give a brief presidential address to the country at nine PM eastern time.

  ****

  All afternoon millions of families sat quietly in front of their televisions as the toll of dead and injured mounted. They watched as the triage of victims continued on the stadium parking lots. They saw an unending stream of departing ambulances, and helicopters flicking in and out. In several areas around the stadium the steadily increasing ranks of the dead were laid side by side covered with blankets and sheets. Over and over Americans watched replays of the fateful moments after the kickoff when something strange began to happen in the western end zone upper deck, which in two minutes became a life and death stampede for 6,000 desperate fans.

  That false rush to nonexistent safety ended cruelly as the lowest fans were pushed ever downward by the sheer weight of the fleeing crowds above them, until their broken bodies collapsed the railings at the bottom. At last they tumbled over the edge in linked clusters, falling nine stories down onto the disbelieving fans below them. This horror show then triggered a general panic throughout the stadium, and even though the sniper had fired only a limited number of bullets into one section, the entire stadium dissolved into a nightmarish bedlam with hundreds and thousands of trapped fans jamming every exit tunnel. The stronger behind climbed up over the weaker ahead until every way out was plugged with choking and groaning masses of crushed and suffocating humanity.

  The video clips of the hundreds of fans tumbling from the upper deck to their deaths before the unblinking television cameras became the indelible image of the day, even though far more victims died trampled and asphyxiated and unseen in the exit tunnels.

  ****

  “Get me the gun! I want to have the gun during the address,” President Gilmore told his Assistant Chief of Staff.

  “Mr. President, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think we can emphasize the enormity of the tragedy without resorting to any… theatrics which may detract…”

  “I said get me the damn gun! Where is it? Put it on a chopper, do what it takes, I want that damn gun here by nine PM, is that clear enough?”

  ****

  President Edward Gilmore sat behind his Oval Office desk in a black suit and a charcoal tie, the lights hot on his makeup-caked face. It was funeral director’s attire, he thought, his eyes on the teleprompter, and a funeral director is what I am tonight. The clock ticked down to nine PM.

  “Good evening my fellow Americans. I come to you tonight with a heavy heart, a broken heart. As of my latest information, over 1,000 of our fellow citizens have died since today’s catastrophic events. Thousands more lie in almost a hundred hospitals up and down the coast, many near death or on life support, as our wonderful doctors and nurses work into the night to save them. My prayers go out to all of the victims and their families, and to our heroic medical staffs who are working so hard to save lives even as I speak.

  “I have received over one hundred telegrams and letters and calls of condolence from leaders around the world on this terrible day, and it is difficult for me to find the words with which to answer them. Difficult because this was not a natural disaster which befell us today, nor was it an accident, nor even an act of war by a hostile power or a foreign terrorist group.

  “No, my fellow Americans, this was an act of sheer malice, a calculated act of evil springing from the darkest pit of our own national heart. This was an act made possible only because of a peculiar sickness in our American culture. Today’s tragic event resulted from our inexplicable national love
affair with firearms and weapons of war, like the assault rifle which was used today to mow down our friends and neighbors.”

  Jimmy Shifflett’s murder weapon had been placed upright against a wall, at a sufficient distance from the President that the camera would not place it with him in the same view. President Gilmore pointed toward the rifle and another camera cut briefly to it. Across America and around the world viewers saw the ugly black and brown rifle, with its long menacing home made silencer, and its curved banana clip magazine. It had a telescopic sight mounted on the left side and pointed down at the exact angle which would raise the barrel just enough to loft its bullets over the stadium walls from 1,250 yards away. As ugly as it was, the obsolete Russian-surplus military rifle exuded menace. It had been cheaply but effectively customized into a long-range crowd killer. It was clearly the product of a cunningly evil mind.

  “I am told that this is an SKS assault rifle, manufactured decades ago in the former Soviet Union, and legally sold in any gun store in America for about one hundred dollars. It was built to hold ten bullets at a time inside it, but it has been modified to accept thirty round magazines. It can fire the thirty bullets automatically, as fast as the trigger can be pulled. Three of those magazines, ninety bullets, created today’s massacre.

  “Apparently, Mr. Shifflett was a former Marine, and served his nation with honor in 1991 during the first Iraq war. Since then, he has been beset by numerous health problems, including mental health problems, and he had been hospitalized for both physical and psychiatric reasons many times. Yet in spite of that troubled personal history, Mr. Shifflett was able to acquire a virtual armory of assault rifles, including the one responsible for today’s carnage.

  “Something is very deeply wrong in our country, when a long-time mental patient is able to obtain a private arsenal of assault rifles. Something is very, very deeply wrong, and now it is time to correct that wrong.

  “So I have asked the leaders of both parties, many of whom witnessed the horrific Stadium Massacre today in person, to take up this issue without delay. It is long past time to acknowledge that our gun laws, which utterly failed to keep assault rifles out of the hands of a dangerous psychotic, are not sufficient to provide for the safety of our people. It is long past time that the United States of America addressed its unholy love affair with weapons of war and death. We must join the ranks of all other sane and civilized nations in keeping these awful instruments of death away from criminals and the unbalanced. Let Congress address this cancer eating at our soul without delay, so that there will be no more assault rifle massacres.

  “Good evening, and may God bless and have mercy on the United States of America.”

  2

  That Monday morning Washington was appropriately overcast and gloomy, with an intermittent drizzle just keeping the streets and sidewalks slick. Cynthia McFadden was the National Firearms Organization’s chief Capitol Hill lobbyist, and although she dreaded today like no other in her memory, she squared her shoulders and walked through the metal detectors, had her purse and briefcase checked by the armed security guards, and entered the atrium of the Hart Senate office building. She had no real prospect of turning the tide threatening to sweep most of the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights today, but she hoped to at least stiffen a few backbones and prevent a complete rout.

  Congress was meeting in an extraordinary emergency session, and a radical new gun control bill was to be introduced, debated, and possibly voted on this very day. With a little luck she thought she might encourage a handful of stalwart Republican Congressmen and Senators to pull a tricky rules maneuver, and have the final vote delayed until the heat and anger resulting from yesterday’s events had time to cool.

  Her first objective was Congressman Wilson Packard of Utah, the minority chair of the House Rules Committee. Although she had no appointment (and none of her calls had been returned) she hoped to lean on their old friendship for a moment or two of his time. Anyway, hopeless or not, lobbying Congress was what she was paid to do.

  Mrs. McFadden walked up the marble steps to the second floor; the offices were all on balcony corridors overlooking the central atrium. On all of the floors grim-faced staffers hurried from office to office, bearing hastily-written gun control bills she imagined. The offices were allotted on the basis of seniority, Republicans were intermingled with Democrats. Halfway down the balcony corridor she passed a group of five or six young staffers, with possibly a freshman Congressman among them. She couldn’t put a name to all of them but she knew most of the key players by sight. This group was all wearing dark suits with black armbands.

  “Excuse me,” she heard behind her, and she turned around. “You’re Cynthia McFadden from the NFO, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on TV,” said a twenty-something blond female in a black pants suit.

  “Yes, I am” said Cynthia, extending her right hand.

  The young lady recoiled as from a rattlesnake, her face turning into a mask of rage. “What are you here for you NFO whore, paying off your bounties? Paying your blood money for all those people you killed? You put that machine gun in Jimmy Shifflett’s hands! You might as well have aimed it and pulled the trigger. I just wish that some day all you gun whores would be shot, instead of innocent people!”

  Cynthia McFadden knew from long experience that it was counter-productive to debate with hysterics, so she smiled gamely and turned around again to continue her walk toward Congressman Packard’s office.

  “Don’t you DARE turn your back on me, you murdering bitch!” the young woman shrieked, launching herself and grabbing Cynthia from behind, raking her neck with long red fingernails. A score of faces leaned suddenly out of office doors, people up and down the corridors turned to watch the angry outburst.

  Cynthia McFadden was not only an ardent defender of every woman’s right to have the choice to defend herself against attack with firearms; she was also a dedicated martial artist who had earned her brown belt in Aikido. When the young blond jumped her from behind she reacted instinctively, grabbing her attacker’s wrists, bending at the waist, and throwing her headlong down the corridor. The blond landed on her back with a thud, the wind knocked out of her. Two uniformed Capitol Police bounded up the stairs. Oh crap, I’ve really done it now, McFadden thought. She had no doubt that a dozen witnesses would now swear that she had just launched an unprovoked assault upon the congressional staffer, who was now being helped up from the floor, livid with wrath and gasping for breath.

  “You bitch! I hope you die… After today, the NFO is finished! You’d better start packing for your compound in Idaho, you NFO whore!” The young woman then hocked and spit at Cynthia McFadden from a few yards away, missing her target but effectively ruining her case with the two uniformed policemen, who were now being joined by two more.

  “You ladies care to tell me what’s going on?” asked the police sergeant.

  “Officer, if I may…” said a distinguished looking older gentleman. “I’m Congressman Delante. I heard the altercation begin and I came out in time to witness this young lady attack Mrs. McFadden from behind, you can see the scratches on her neck. Mrs. McFadden was merely defending herself. No one can be expected to passively accept being choked and scratched from behind, even here in the Hart building. Mrs. McFadden, do you wish to press charges of aggravated assault and battery?”

  Cynthia was now shaking slightly, her mouth having gone cotton ball dry as she weighed her options. She shook her head slowly. The day was an unsalvageable disaster.

  “No? Then if we’re finished here I’ll walk you out, and we can all continue with our days, if that’s all right with you officers? Excellent.”

  Congressman Delante took Cynthia’s arm and guided her back to the steps; they were both of an age when such gentility was customary. “What a day my dear, what a day. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it in twelve terms, not even the impeachment, and it’s still only nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “It was a mistake
even coming down today. Now I know how Custer felt. James, what’s going on? Have you seen the proposals yet?”

  “Oh yes, indeed I have. We’re all looking at several bills, but Senator Schuleman has been the busiest. His bill will ban the possession of all semi-automatic rifles, right down to your grandson’s .22. We might be able to save the .22 rimfires, but it’s doubtful. Most of the ignoramuses around here are positively proud that they don’t know a rifle from a shotgun, so it’s pretty hard to educate them. They think .22s are what the Beltway Snipers used! They have no clue that there’s a difference between little bitty .22 rimfires and the .223s that an M-16 shoots. Anyway, I don’t see any lines of resistance anywhere; every last Democrat will sign anything today, and so will a lot of Republicans. They’re all just scared to death of voting against any bill that promises no more so-called assault rifles.”

  “Is there any chance of getting enough votes to send it to committee?”

  “None. Not a prayer."

  “What about you?” asked Cynthia. “What will you do?”

  “Oh, I’ll vote against it, if we vote today. I know what the good old boys in my district think: they think the Shifflett thing was a set up from the git-go. Even today my emails are three to one saying this was a put-up job, and they won’t accept any law passed in reaction to it.”

  “Thanks James, thanks for the heads up. And thanks for not getting stampeded with the rest of the herd.”

  “That’s what this whole thing was if you ask me, a stampede job. Fire some shots, and get the herd to run off the cliff, just like the Indians did with the buffalos. First in the stadium, and now here in Congress.”