Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  “Less than fifty people were hit by bullets,” Ranya said, “but it’s still called a gun massacre. They should blame it on penning up thousands of people like cattle in those upper decks. Anything could have caused that panic: tear gas, smoke grenades, anything! But every single victim gets blamed on the gun.” She switched it again, and on the next channel, it was also “backlash” night. A pretty Asian-American female anchor was introducing her next piece.

  ****

  “Today at the state capitol in Richmond, Commonwealth’s Attorney General Eric Sanderson held a news conference and fielded questions about the ‘night of rage’ against Tidewater gun stores.” The camera cut to a handsome man somewhere in his forties, with a luxurious growth of thick dark hair graying at the temples. He was standing at a podium in some formal briefing room, flanked by an American flag and the flag of Virginia.

  “While I regret the violence which swept through southeastern Virginia last night, I do understand the intense outrage felt by most of our citizens toward those gun dealers who have made a handsome living by selling the tools of murder and death. And although the mass murderer James Shifflett does not appear to have personally bought his deadly assault rifle at one of the gun stores which was destroyed last night, the sad truth is, any of those gun stores could just as easily have sold it to him, or a wide variety of other assault rifles which are every bit as deadly. And as incredible as it may sound, gun stores have continued to sell assault rifles, even after the Stadium Massacre, even up until today!

  “So I do wholeheartedly support the Schuleman-Montaine Firearms Safety Act, and all of its provisions. And I most seriously warn any persons in Virginia, anyone who might be tempted to hold onto an illegal assault rifle after next Tuesday, that the full force of the Commonwealth will be brought down upon you if you make that mistake! I will have zero tolerance for any other Jimmy Shiffletts lurking among our law-abiding population.

  “I have also been asked if I shall vigorously pursue and prosecute those criminals who participated in last night’s arson attacks, which resulted in the deaths of four gun dealers. My answer is that in Virginia, we already have dozens of open murder investigations under way, and most of those murders were committed with guns sold by gun dealers like the ones who were attacked last night. So no, I will not assign a higher priority to investigating last night’s attacks, than to all of the other unsolved murders caused by the firearms that these gun dealers sold! These dead gun dealers, these merchants of death, well, they’ll just have to get in line and wait their turn behind all of their dead victims, who were already killed by the guns they sold for blood money.”

  ****

  Ranya switched off the TV set. She had passed beyond angry to morosely reflective. “Blood money. A merchant of death. That piece of shit just called my father a merchant of death, just like the Muslim guy did. What’s his name, Eric Sanderson? He won’t even investigate. He just declared open season on all firearms dealers. He just drew a target on all of them. Shit.”

  “You want another rum and coke?”

  “Just hand me the damn bottle. This is the worst. Sanderson just called my father an enemy of the people, and practically praised his murderers. And did you hear what he said about next Tuesday and the full ‘force of the state’? It sounds like he’s getting ready to deal with a lot more enemies of the state. I guess that’s me too, I mean, I’m the daughter of a merchant of death.”

  Brad poured an inch of Captain Morgan’s into a fresh tumbler and handed it to her. She drained half of the dark spiced rum in a gulp, made a sour face, and coughed.

  He said, “This country is finished. The America we knew is gone, and now it’s time to get the hell out. It lasted for two good centuries, that’s something, but now it’s over.”

  “Maybe so, Brad Fallon, maybe so. But they killed my father and burned my house, and I’m not going to just let it go. I’m not! Somebody’s got to pay.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something. Find George, start there I guess.” She finished her rum and poured herself some more. Ranya was developing the germ of an idea, if not quite yet a plan. She wasn’t going to forget George, she’d still look for him, and through him try to find out who was really pulling the strings behind the Stadium Massacre and the arson murders. She was going to find George, but that might take a long time. In the meanwhile, she was going to make somebody pay for her father’s murder. Somebody who was making political hay from his death, somebody who didn’t think his death was worth investigating. Somebody who was glad he was dead.

  First she was going to kill Virginia Attorney General Eric Sanderson, the politician who had just put the government seal of approval on her father’s murder. A slight smile curled across her lips as a delicious irony occurred to her: instead of using one of those ee-vil semi-automatic assault rifles with their high-capacity magazines, she was going to kill him with a single shot target pistol. Oh yes, she had just the tool for the job.

  Now that she had decided on who, and she knew how, next it was just a matter of finding out where, and deciding when she would do it. And she would do it.

  Ranya slid down on her back on the sofa-like “settee” behind the dinette table. The low ceiling above her began spinning as the sailboat rolled gently at the dock, so she closed her eyes. She was still smiling as she contemplated Sanderson’s face in her crosshairs, with her right index finger increasing its pressure on the trigger one ounce at time.

  ****

  Brad pulled a soft blanket out of a locker and spread it over her, then untied her tan hiking boots and gently pulled them off without causing so much as a stir. Finally he placed a pillow next to her where she would find it if she rolled over. He studied her while she slept; she was at peace for the first time since he had met her. Ranya was attractive, but in a girl-next-door way; she had no fashion model’s angular features or swollen bee-stung lips. She did have stunning eyes. Even in her sadness and her anger they were beautiful, sometimes appearing amber, sometimes hazel or even pale green depending on the light. Asleep, he could see a touch of the orient in their cast, which recalled to him an old girlfriend he had loved to kiss, just to see her eyes closed in passion. Ranya’s eyebrows were not plucked into thin lines, but neither were they bushy, they were just perfect the way that God had made them. He hadn’t really seen her smiling, but he imagined that she would have a terrific smile on a happier day. She was taller than average, which appealed to Brad, with a nice figure that he had enjoyed seeing tonight after she had removed her jacket.

  She was pretty, yes, but she had more than her share of personal problems, to say the least. Even so, from their first meeting Brad had been unable to avoid considering her as a possible partner for his tropical sailing adventures. She was certainly more than sufficiently attractive and intelligent, and when she mentioned that she had been an ocean lifeguard, that had sealed it for him. For Brad, swimming, snorkeling and scuba diving were a large part of his enjoyment of the sailing lifestyle, and his ultimate dream was to find a spirited mermaid to share it with. He had little use for porcelain princesses or mere boat adornments.

  But he knew that it could never happen with Ranya, she was finishing college, and she had her father’s murder to deal with at the same time. To top it off she appeared to have a quixotic streak, and she planned to stay in America and tilt at windmills, while Brad was going to sail away far and fast.

  Well, it didn’t matter that she wasn’t the one. He knew that the Caribbean islands were full of pretty girls, tourists on holiday from Holland and Germany and Scandinavia, and further south he intended to discover the beauties of Venezuela and Colombia and Brazil.

  Brad closed the hatches, turned off the music and the lights, brushed his teeth and crawled into his triangular V-berth double bed which was all the way forward in the bow of the boat. He was trying to compare the qualities of the blond northern European girls to the raven-haired South American lo
velies, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the motorcycle-riding brunette lifeguard named Ranya Bardiwell, who was sleeping only fifteen feet behind him.

  ****

  George Hammet, the ASIC of the Norfolk Field Office of the BATFE, spent Saturday night drinking beer and swapping lies with visiting ATF and FBI colleagues at the Ship’s Bell. This was a bar-and-grill close to Norfolk’s Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, a place which was much favored by the local Navy SEALs. Some of the fifty or so out-of-town agents supplementing the Joint Task Force were staying at the amphib base’s Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, and a few had called old buddies who were still in the service. The Ship’s Bell had come highly recommended as a meeting place; it was tucked discreetly into the back corner of an obscure second-rate shopping center. By ten o’clock the parking lot was packed with dark full-sized SUVs; Suburbans and Excursions with discreet government bumper and windshield decals, known only to federal law enforcement insiders.

  George Hammet enjoyed the fact that his unpredictable work hours meant that he never had to explain his comings and goings or whereabouts to his wife Laura, and he was free to spend his night drinking with other agents and flirting with the waitresses and “frog hogs” or SEAL groupies who frequented the place. The jukebox was cranking, the beer was flowing, and the testosterone level was sky-high in the Ship’s Bell, with its walls covered with photographs and memorabilia of past Underwater Demolition Team and SEAL Team glory. More girls were arriving by the minute as the word went out by cell phones and instant messengers that a real live crowd was in town at the Bell.

  These impromptu parties and the easy women that gravitated to them were either a fringe benefit or an occupational hazard, depending on the outlooks of the federal agents who spent weeks at a time “in the field” on cases. Very frequently, their gold wedding bands were left behind in their motel rooms as they became “out of town bachelors,” and this propensity to play the field was reflected in sky-high divorce rates.

  George Hammet was a local though, and he had a strict policy of not fooling around in Tidewater: he wasn’t stupid. Tonight he was also limiting his alcohol intake, and he excused himself from his circle of new and old buddies just after midnight. As a local, he had his own personal vehicle, and was not dependent on anyone for a ride.

  He drove his red Jeep Cherokee across Norfolk, through the downtown tunnel and into Portsmouth, the location of Imam Sheik Ali bin Muhamed’s “Al Fuqra Mosque.” The mosque occupied several storefronts taking up an entire block along King Street. Hammet allowed himself one casual pass in front of it and saw that the lights were out and there was no activity around it to be seen. The rest of the neighborhood was zoned for commercial use, but all of the businesses were closed, and not a soul was to be seen walking around.

  He drove along the side streets across from the mosque south of King to establish his walking route in and out, and then two blocks away he found a dark and hidden place to park his Cherokee behind a shuttered laundromat. He pulled on thin black driving gloves and a dark ball cap, and exited the Jeep carrying a black gym bag. At this hour, no one was going to fool with a burly guy in a leather bomber jacket, even a white guy. Just in case, Hammet carried his Glock 19 in his shoulder holster rig with his jacket open. The ball cap was pulled low over his eyes, to make identifying him harder in case someone did happen to see him.

  He walked in the shadows in the alleys and foot paths on the way to his pre-selected position across King Street from the mosque. Crouching behind a hedge, against the cement wall of a discount shoe store, Hammet unzipped his gym bag and withdrew an ugly little Ingram MAC-11 machine pistol, the smaller .380 caliber version of the infamous MAC-10. He screwed a suppressor the size of an empty paper towel tube down onto the stubby barrel until it met the rectangular body of the gun. This MAC-11 was one of the “dirty tricks” guns Malvone had given him a month earlier when they had finalized their plans. A gun that had been seized from a member of one right wing group or another in Idaho or Montana or Arkansas, but never entered into any law enforcement log or registry. A trace on the MAC’s origins would quickly prove that the “militia movement” was a serious national security threat, with “militiamen” and weapons flowing freely from state to state.

  Hammet inserted a long thirty-round stick magazine into the pistol grip under the blocky weapon, then with his left hand he grasped the knob on the MAC’s flat top and pulled the bolt all the way to the rear until it caught. That’s all there was to it; the MACs were, as they said, “crude but effective.” The rough sights on top were a joke, and he ignored them as he raised the weapon above the waist high bushes. He sighted down the long suppressor at the big crescent moon painted in white on the plate glass front of the mosque. Hammet pulled the trigger and swept from right to left as he emptied the entire thirty-round mag in one three-second burst, holding the MAC down with his left hand gripping the suppressor. The sound suppressor on the MAC-11 was fairly effective, and the puny low velocity .380 caliber rounds were subsonic so there were no sonic cracks to deal with, but in any case the sound of his firing off the magazine in one burst was completely drowned out by the plate glass exploding and crashing down across the street.

  He dropped the warm MAC-11 machine pistol into the middle of the hedge, where it would soon be recovered as evidence. Then he reached into the gym bag again and withdrew a sheaf of a hundred pages, which he tossed over the hedge onto the sidewalk, to be scattered by the wind and found later by citizens, reporters, and police. His task complete, he crept along behind the hedge, until he reached the pathway that led to the alley and back to his hidden Jeep.

  In five minutes he was driving west at the speed limit on I-264. He did not want to have his Cherokee filmed going back through the tunnel right after the shooting. He was an experienced lawman, and he knew that the tunnel had cameras which recorded every vehicle passing under the Elizabeth River, so instead he took the long way home, circling around and returning to Virginia Beach on Military Highway. He banged on his steering wheel in time with the country music on his radio; it had been a great night’s work. The shooting had gone without a hitch, and the anxiety of operating in the danger zone dissolved into post-mission euphoria. He even felt good for the “imam,” because after tonight, Sheik Ali bin Muhamed was going to be as famous as Al Sharpton or Louie Farrakhan. He was actually doing the “sheik” a favor, as he saw it.

  ****

  Ranya was walking down a sodden forest trail between steep fir-covered slopes. She was following twenty feet behind a trail guide, or perhaps a ranger, who was dressed in green and brown with a pack on his back. Going around a bend in the trail the guide suddenly froze, then turned and ran, shucking his pack, and began climbing up a medium-sized larch just ahead of a pair of onrushing yearling brown bears. As soon as Ranya saw the bears she looked for her own tree, and in only moments she was twenty feet above the ground, looking directly across at the trail guide, as both grunting and huffing bears sniffed the air and raised up on their hind legs, and tested the trunk of his tree with swipes of their paws.

  The smaller of the bears then hugged the tree, and inch by improbable inch it lifted itself up until it was snapping and snarling only scant feet beneath the trail guide, who was attempting to climb ever higher up the swaying boughs, until under the weight of bear and man it began to bend. Finally the man could climb no higher, yet the bear kept hunching up the sagging tree, an inch at a time. The trail guide was trying to lift his feet and legs above the snapping maw of the yearling bear, holding them up with no branches left to support them, holding them up for dear life. At last he began to slide down the slender trunk, and the brown bear snatched his booted ankle as easily as a river-running salmon, then jerked him in one smooth motion out of the tree to the ground where he landed with a thud, and where the larger bear was waiting with open jaws.

  Ranya stared in rapt horror as the two bears then pulled at the man, thrashing him between them like two terriers playing bloody tug-of-war
with a broken squirrel, and when the man was ripped apart they began to loudly eat the pieces on the ground, holding them down and tearing the flesh into bloody strips with their great fangs, then bolting down the shredded meat, chewing and gnawing at his bones until no flesh remained, and then all at once they were finished and without a single look up the other tree at Ranya, they both turned and lumbered into the brush, leaving only cracked and scattered bloody bones.

  12

  Ranya Bardiwell was relieved that no one recognized her, sitting alone in the last pew of Saint Charles Catholic Church. She didn’t particularly want to be there, but felt obligated to make an appearance. She had awakened suddenly on Brad’s boat in the first light, with a cutting headache and vague nightmare images still rolling through her consciousness. She had to piece together where she was, and why she was there, and suddenly all of yesterday’s unimaginable events came flooding back in a rush.

  But she didn’t allow her grief to paralyze her. She dragged herself off the boat and onto her bike without waking up Brad, and didn’t come fully alive until she was under the shower in her motel room. She inhaled a McBreakfast in Suffolk, and made it to church in time for the eight o’clock mass wearing her jeans and denim jacket.

  Ranya sat, and stood, and kneeled with the rest of the congregation, her lips half-moving along automatically with long memorized prayers, but she did not hear the spoken words of the readings or the sermon.

  Instead, she sat in church behind a hundred dutiful and faithful parishioners and she plotted a murder. She schemed and figured and planned several of the ways that she might be able to sneak undetected within three-hundred yards of the highest law enforcement figure in Virginia, and snipe him from a hidden place.