Compared to the ANWR oil fields, the small town of Highpoint was a tropical Club Med, with some very pretty local girls working at the Dairy Queen, Lester’s Diner, the auto parts store and a few other places. Brad always looked forward to some flirtatious banter with the Highpoint girls, it made him feel a little less like a forgotten marsh-dwelling hermit.
Realistically, he knew that a mastless sailboat on a nameless creek at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp was not going to attract girls like his purple bug zapper light attracted mosquitoes. Brad was a six-footer and he thought he was a reasonably good looking guy, the quick smiles and easy laughter of the local girls told him that. From time to time, out of nowhere, waitresses and cashiers told him that he had beautiful blue eyes. But Guajira’s current interior décor of paint cans, power tools, electric cords, tarps, bare plywood and a dozen epoxy products was not apt to appeal to any girls Brad could imagine being attracted to, so he had invited none to visit. Anyway, the pretty local girls were almost all too young, married, or spoken for.
The girls would enter the picture later, on his extended tropical voyage. By late September or October Brad planned to be ready to leave Virginia for Florida, and then the Bahamas and the Caribbean. If he didn’t find a girlfriend in Fort Lauderdale or Miami, he would find one in the islands.
Brad pulled his red Ford F-250 pickup onto the paved road for the quick spin into Highpoint. Lester’s Diner was between the Virginia National Bank and the A & J Auto Parts store, but today it was completely surrounded by television vans and trucks, with their microwave antenna dishes telescoping skyward. He knew at once that the Stadium Massacre must have had a local angle, very local, to draw such attention. Brad had seen on TV that the killer’s trailer was located in Suffolk County, but it must have been very close by to rate such a media blitz in Highpoint. He gave the circus at Lester’s a pass. He’d find out what was going on at Dixie Hardware and Lumber, where he had some items to purchase.
The media caravan had not yet aimed their lenses at Dixie Hardware, so there was plenty of parking on the gravel lot out front. Brad always felt at home inside the hardware store in the company of farmers, plumbers, welders and carpenters. The usual customers were men with sun-chapped faces and hard leathery hands who looked you straight in the eye when they talked to you. The owner of the place was a middle-aged cracker running to fat named Cecil Towers. He was holding court behind his counter as a half dozen locals drank free coffee and picked donuts from an open box.
“Help yourself Brad; it’s worth your life to go near Lester’s this morning. I was just telling Barney here how those news boys would all crap their pants if they knew that Jimmy Shifflett had swept this very floor not two months ago! Drank coffee from this very same pot! Hey Barney, you’re not going to try to sell this story to the tabloids are you? If anybody makes anything off this, it should be me! I must be the last employer Jimmy ever had, even if it was just sweeping and sorting for petty cash.”
“How do you even know he’s dead?” asked a short man in mechanic’s overalls. “That boy up in Maryland had his head blown clean off. Who’s to say it’s Shifflett?”
“Well Fred, they got his wallet, they got his ID and they got his fingerprints and I’m sure they got plenty of his DNA, so I’d say it was our Jimmy Shifflett,” replied Cecil Towers. “But I still can’t believe it. Jimmy’s old Toyota ain’t run in years, and don’t tell me he rode his bike up to Maryland. He always took the bus over to the veteran’s hospital in Hampton, or he got a van to pick him up. That Gulf War disease just tore that boy up. I mean, he could hardly hold a broom to sweep. Yeah, Uncle Sam really screwed him good, just chewed him up and spit him out. He lived like a dog on that little disability check they paid him, and he just wasn’t bright enough to work the system and get it raised up to anything decent.”
The mechanic said, “Yeah, I can see why he was pissed off. He never was too bright before he went into the Marines, but at least he was strong for his size, he played high school football even. Shit, the last time I saw him he couldn’t have weighed much over a hundred pounds. You’d think he had cancer or AIDS or something he was so skinny, but I think it was that Gulf War Syndrome thing that screwed him up.”
Brad asked, “So where’d he get all the guns they found in his trailer? How’d he get mixed up with all that white racist militia stuff?”
Another man entered the store, but no one paid him any attention as he pretended to shop. He was wearing dress pants, a dark windbreaker, and a ball cap which was fitted with a tiny pinhole video camera. The camera was transmitting to a plain white van parked outside. Where the man looked, the camera recorded. Today he was collecting faces all over Highpoint, faces which would become names when linked to the license plates he had already recorded outside. If any of the men’s faces being filmed were already in the criminal, military or DMV databases (and almost every face was) then digital face mapping technology would also provide rapid identifications. Jimmy Shifflett had been a right wing militia nut case, and the man with the video camera hidden in his hat was a local FBI Special Agent, who had been sent to find out which of the local rednecks were his militia buddies.
Cecil Towers said, “Bradley, you’re new around here, so maybe you haven’t figured this thing out. And anyway, you’re leaving soon on that sailboat of yours, and you’ll forget all about us anyway, but listen to me a minute. Jimmy Shifflett didn’t have a racist bone in his body. He’d split a beer or a cigarette with a black man or a Mex any day, and I seen it. And he couldn’t spell ‘militia’ or tell you what it meant. Shifflett had no politics at all. He just had lots of pain and lots of forgetful spells, and that’s all he had. He worked as an auto mechanic after the Marines, until he got too weak and tired and shaky all the time.”
“Yeah,” said the man with Fred embroidered on his coveralls, “and just how the hell did he pay for all those fancy rifles they found in his trailer? Shifflett couldn’t hardly afford to buy himself lunch at the Dairy Queen, much less all that firepower. And why would he use that piece of shit SKS instead of one of those nice rifles they showed on TV? It don’t make no sense at all.”
The man they had called Barney, a wiry older fellow with a trimmed gray beard and military style wire-rimmed glasses said, “I went hunting with Jimmy a couple times, a few years back before he got so bad. I had to lend him a rifle, all he had was a .22. And that boy would not climb a tree stand! He was scared to death of heights, afraid he’d get dizzy and lose his grip and fall. Now the TV has him climbing four stories of scaffolds to get up into a half-built office building, like he was some sort of Rambo, but it’s all a crock. He was just a mechanic and a truck driver in the Marines, not Rambo.”
“They said on TV he shot expert with the M-16, that he was the top gun in his boot camp company at Parris Island,” Brad said.
Cecil Towers replied, “maybe so, but that was what, fifteen years ago? Anyway, that boy was a Shifflett. They’re from Green County, and they grow up shooting down there. They all learn to shoot down there just like you and I learned to read. Him shooting expert in boot camp don’t mean nothing. I’ll lay odds his little sister could shoot expert her first try, and so could his momma. Anyway, you can’t hardly miss a stadium full of folks, can you? Not even from twelve-hundred yards, not if the scope’s been dialed in. And all those books they hauled out of his place? That’s another steaming load of bull crap too. I never seen Jimmy Shifflett read so much as a comic book in his entire life.”
“So what was all that stuff doing in his trailer?”
“You tell me Brad, you’re the smart one here, all ready to retire on a yacht and you’re still just a pup. You tell me, cause it makes no damn sense to us at all.”
****
The oldest of the network anchors had gotten his big break while covering a presidential visit to Dallas four decades earlier. Now in the waning twilight of his career he found an eerie symmetry in covering this latest epochal event in American history, which was also l
aunched from a former Marine’s rifle barrel.
For the past two days Pete Broker had been in front of a camera almost continuously, as he had been for a week after 9-11. This time he realized that he didn’t have any more reporting marathons left in him. He looked older than makeup or new hairstyles could cure, it showed, and he knew it. Besides producing his own nightly network news broadcast, he had been covering the congressional debates and the first of the hundreds of memorials and funerals which went on seemingly around the clock. In his gut he knew it was time to retire, but not just yet, at least not until after this story played out.
He had led the Tuesday nightly news with the congressional decision on the assault weapon ban, and then he cut to a funeral Mass for over fifty of the dead with the sermon presented by Cardinal O’Malley of the Washington Diocese. The Cardinal’s sermon centered on the need for all Americans to change their hearts, and the need for American Catholics to rid themselves of the sinful blight of gun lust. Pete Broker had selected these sound bites himself.
When the old news man brought the program back to his anchor desk, he read the results of the latest telephone poll commissioned by his network. “Our scientific poll conducted today shows that 62% of Americans strongly support the Schuleman-Montaine Firearms Act outlawing assault rifles, 19% support it with some reservations, and 15% oppose it.
“Perhaps most interesting in this poll was the answer to the question, ‘would you turn in a neighbor or acquaintance whom you knew to be concealing an illegal assault rifle?’ 59% said that yes, they would turn in neighbors or acquaintances for owning an illegal weapon. That must be a very sobering thought indeed, for the estimated ten to fifteen million Americans believed to currently own weapons which have been banned.
“We now take you to our reporter Juan Salazar in Virginia, at the Norfolk police headquarters, for a report on the progress of the rifle turn-in near the center of the storm. What can you tell us Juan?”
“Peter, I’m standing in front of police headquarters here in downtown Norfolk, not far from the home of stadium sniper Jimmy Shifflett. As you can see, a large truck-sized dumpster has been placed on the parking lot. I’m speaking now to Ms. Luanda Johnson of Norfolk. Ma’am, what are you turning in today, and why?”
Ms. Johnson was holding a cheap bolt-action .22 rifle by the barrel like a broom, flanked by a uniformed Norfolk police officer. “I have my ex-husband’s old rifle. I’m not sure if it’s on the list or not, but I’m not taking no chances, and anyway I don’t want no guns in my house around my childrens no more.”
“I see. Officer, how long has the dumpster been here, and how many semi-automatic rifles have been turned in so far?”
“Well, we’ve had the drop site up and running here since early this morning. So far there’s maybe about twenty banned rifles, and quite a few other guns that people just want to get rid of, and of course we’re encouraging that civic mindedness.”
“What kinds of records are being kept? Are you providing any type of receipt, or taking any information from people as they turn rifles in?”
“No Juan, that’s not covered by the law as it’s written. We’re taking any and all rifles, no questions asked, under general amnesty conditions. We just want to encourage the widest possible response.”
“So these weapons will not be tested for their ‘ballistic fingerprints’?”
“No, that’s not in the law, there are no provisions for any ballistic testing. We’re on a rigid schedule and a tight budget here. The aim is to get as many assault rifles off the street as possible by next Tuesday, and that’s what we’re doing.”
“This is Juan Salazar in Norfolk, back to you Peter.”
****
George Hammet was working on his neglected hedges with an electric trimmer when he felt the pager vibrate on his belt. It wasn’t the same pager that he was issued at work, but a separate one he had purchased prepaid with cash at a mall. After another ten-plus hour day at the office he didn’t much feel like yard work, but the unruly shoots sprouting from the top of the hedges made it look like he was white trash, something he could not abide. A neighbor passing by might have observed a similarity between Hammet’s flat topped hedges and his blond flat top haircut, but Hammet himself was not one to notice such parallels.
Dusk was settling over his Virginia Beach neighborhood and he needed to use the backlight to read the pager number. He went inside through his side door to the living room, where his wife and eleven-year-old daughter sat planted on the sofa in front of the television. An aerial view taken from a helicopter showed a long candlelight procession winding its way through Washington streets, led by police cars with blue flashing lights. No matter what channel you put on, you could not escape coverage of some aspect of the Stadium Massacre. George Hammet just avoided it as much as possible. Yard work was a welcome respite from his job, and the media deluge.
“Laura honey, I have to pick something up at Home Depot. I’ll be back in a little while.” He thought he detected a slight grunt from his wife, but she didn’t look up as he left the house.
Instead of driving to Home Depot, George Hammet pulled his red Jeep Cherokee into a small strip mall off Independence Boulevard in front of a convenience store. On a scrap of paper while waiting at a red light he had written down the seven digit number from his pager, and then added two to each digit, creating the actual number he needed to call. In this code eights became zeros, and nines became ones. The area code he had already memorized. George Hammet enjoyed this aspect of his new secret life, this “tradecraft,” as it had been explained to him.
He used an untraceable prepaid phone card, one of a pack he had been given, to pay for the call which was picked up on the second ring.
“Hello.”
“Hi boss, that you?”
“It’s me. I have new instructions, memorize them, and don’t write anything down. Got it?”
“Sure, no problem. Go ahead.”
“Okay, things are tracking well here. If anything, we’re ahead of schedule. I want you to execute the next phase this Friday night, the fourteenth, as close to midnight as you can, but not before ten PM. How many targets have you identified? And how many teams do you have ready?”
“I’ve got eleven targets, and three teams. I’ve got one primary contact. He used to be an informant, he’s perfect for this, he’s recruiting all the muscle. He’s good for ten or twelve men, easy. Yeah, Friday night is good.”
“Fine. Use the cash to get what you need for the job. Make sure the drivers aren’t assholes; make sure they keep their speeds down in and out. Do it exactly like we discussed. You can do all this, right?
“No problem boss, I’ll get it done. In fact, it’ll be a pleasure.”
“I’m depending on you, big guy. After Friday everything’s going to really take off, and you’re going right to the top with me. I know you’ll work it right.”
“Yeah I will, but, umm…one thing...”
“What?”
“Did you figure it would be…so many? It’s just a lot more than I ever thought it would be.”
There was no reply for a moment. “Yeah, well, I must admit the number kind of took me by surprise. But what’s done is done, and if anything, it’s helped to accelerate the timetable.”
“Uh huh, right, that’s about how I feel too. What’s done is done. In the long run, it’ll work out best all around.”
****
Brad was down below on Guajira, hiding behind his hatch screens from the mosquitoes and no-see-ums that ruled the Tidewater twilight. He switched off his portable TV after the national news finished. More massacre coverage continued on every channel, but he couldn’t stand to see another funeral with scores of sobbing wives and husbands and children. As he had flipped between his four broadcast channels he’d had to adjust his rabbit ears antenna each time. He’d gotten the gist of what little hard news was presented. Jimmy Shifflett was an ex-Marine, and an expert marksman who was a psycho, a white racist, and a ri
ght wing gun fanatic. The clips of the SWAT team carrying assault rifles out of his trailer were played over and over again.
Short segments of lengthy hand-scrawled letters from Shifflett threatening violence against the directors of the Hampton Virginia Veterans Administration hospital were shown and discussed. The expert consensus was that he had been a desperate man veering toward losing control for a very long time. It was hinted that other letters existed in which Shifflett threatened various other politicians concerning their neglect of his alleged “Gulf War Syndrome” caused illnesses. These letters seemed to provide a solid background for his rage.
Nothing that Brad saw on the network news squared with what he had heard earlier in Highpoint at the hardware store. The Jimmy Shifflett the locals knew did not sound like the same man the networks were so convincingly portraying as a hate-filled loser venting his rage with an assault rifle, while conspiring with shadowy others to lay the blame at the feet of the Muslim American community. One network even sandwiched Shifflett’s haunting photo between pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Whitman, Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Mohammed, describing them all as military-trained sharpshooters who had gone over the edge. Why hadn’t the networks found a single person in Highpoint who really knew Shifflett to interview? All of their TV trucks had been there.
Brad knew who to call to ask about this mystery. He picked up his cell phone and called his mom in Fort Lauderdale Florida. He knew that she was an internet news junky, and she would be up on the very latest inside scoop. She answered on the fifth ring. “Mom? Yes it’s me. I’m fine, are you online? Are you following the Stadium Massacre story?”
“Is the Pope Catholic? I’ve hardly been out of this chair since Sunday! Your father says he’s going to buy me a porta-potty and just slide it under me. Can you believe it? I haven’t seen anything like it since 9-11. And you’re right in Suffolk County. Right where he came from!”
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 4
