“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” rose from a hundred throats, but not from hers. No, she would not forgive, not now, and maybe not ever. If there was a hell, perhaps she would go there, but she would not forgive. If God wanted to forgive her, if there was indeed a God, forgiveness was going to be up to Him.
Anyway, hadn’t she earned some special consideration, some surplus of blessings to weigh against her sins? She rarely lied, drank practically no liquor for a University of Virginia Cavalier, did not do drugs, and most of all she had remained true to the pledge she had made to her dying mother, all those years before. Ranya Bardiwell, with the amber eyes and the swelling hips, almost a decade beyond puberty, was still a virgin. Beside her mother’s deathbed it did not seem like a difficult promise to make or to keep, not for a girl of twelve, to take no boy into her bed before marriage. “True love waits,” her mother said, and Ranya had made the promise and had waited all these long years.
She had become an expert at fending off the clumsy hands of horny boys, as well as detecting counterfeit promises of undying love. She had steeled herself to wait for the Right Man, and she was still waiting.
Now, a twenty-one year old virgin, she was plotting murder in church during Mass. She was going to kill a man, even before she had slept with one.
So be it. Sanderson had publicly and proudly spit on her father’s murdered body. Her father, who had been shot and burned by government agents. And now Sanderson was going to pay.
She guessed that she would never be able to get a long-range shot in Richmond anywhere near the capitol: Sanderson’s schedule would be confidential, and his precise path a mystery. She could stalk him, and get close enough to use her .45, but escape would then be impossible, and her plans didn’t end with the death of the Attorney General of Virginia.
On short notice, it would be impossible to find out where he lunched or clubbed or golfed or played tennis, not without making herself conspicuously nosy.
That left his home. Even the Commonwealth’s Attorney had to have a home where he went most nights, and he was likely to own a nice chunk of property that would have adequate hiding places within range of her scoped .223 caliber Tennyson Champion. If she could locate his house, she could get him. After three years of doing university undergrad research on the internet, she knew she could easily find his house. She made a mental list of the things she would need for the operation, and where she could obtain each item on a Sunday in Tidewater.
Ranya did not join the line to walk up to the altar to take Holy Communion, but she did wait until the end of Mass before leaving, so that she could speak to Father Alvarado as he greeted his flock outside of his church. She had to do it, to pretend, for the sake of ensuring her father’s proper burial in the family plot next to her mother. Her own belief in God was very much in doubt, but she could not extend that doubt to her father, who had been a devout Catholic to the end.
****
After returning to her motel room, Ranya changed into jogging clothes, pulled her hair into a pony tail with a colored band, and ran the mile down the gravel shoulder of State Road 32 to her property. As she approached she could see a man in a gray suit talking to a deputy who was leaning against his patrol car. Ranya was amused by their surprise when the female jogger they had been watching suddenly stopped in front of them. She held her hand out to the fortyish man in the suit, catching her breath. “I’m Ranya Bardiwell, Joseph Bardiwell’s daughter. Who are you?”
“Nice to meet you Miss Bardiwell. I’m Fred Pybus, from Atlantic Property and Casualty.” He handed her his business card. “We underwrote the store and the house, the whole place. I’m real sorry about what happened, to your father, everything…but you’ll be glad to know that he had excellent coverage with Atlantic. You’re the, uh, only living relative, correct?”
“That is correct. I’m the last, the bitter end.”
“Well that will certainly simplify things. I’ve been in touch with your father’s attorney… Say, you don’t happen to have a key for the burglar doors, do you?”
“No. They might be back there,” she pointed to the ashes and ruins of her house, “if you have a rake.”
“That’s okay. It’s better locked up. I was thinking about getting a dump truck tomorrow, and having the place cleaned out. The truck can yank the burglar doors off with a chain. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“What do you mean a dump truck? There’s a lot of valuable stuff in there, it can’t all be burned.”
“Well, Miss Bardiwell, we’d like to call it a total loss, and just write it off. It’s not worth it to try to assess the condition of each firearm. With the high temperatures a gun that seems okay might not be safe to shoot. They could never be sold; it’s a question of liability. We’ll inventory them as they go in the dump truck for the claim, but we’re going to clean the place out. It’s best for everybody.”
“All right, what time?”
“Say, make it ten?”
“I’ll be there Mr. Pybus.”
****
Ranya left them and walked around the store and across the big lawn, stopping at the scorched and blackened earth marked by the little yellow flags. Once again she was hit with a painfully vivid image of his burnt and ruined body, and she looked skyward beyond the clouds, deep into the blue and said, “It’s not over, Daddy. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to make them pay. I’ve got your guns now, and I’m going to go after them.”
She unlocked her little shed by the back fence, swung the two plywood doors open wide, and pulled the green canvas cover off of her two old motorcycles. Sometimes she would accept a ride in a car down from UVA, so she kept her spare street bike’s tag and registration current, to have transportation around Tidewater when her Yamaha FZR was back up in Charlottesville. Ranya admired her still-gleaming “black cherry,” her 1986 450cc Honda Nighthawk, which she had found unwanted and unridden in a Freedom Arms customer’s garage and bought for a song. It didn’t have the blinding speed of her 600cc café racer, but the Nighthawk was a perennial classic, a sweet ride, and a lovely all-around bike. It was the first street-legal bike she had ever owned, and she would never give it up.
The 250cc Enduro next to it was as ugly as the Nighthawk was beautiful, built up from parts, and painted in flat tan primer. It was a screamer that could run trails flat out and catch more air than anyone could handle, but despite its dirt-eating look it had been made street legal with a bolted-on light kit. When Ranya needed to cover any distance on the highways on it, she just switched the tag over from one of her other bikes, and she had never been pulled over or had any problems.
Ranya backed the Nighthawk out and locked the shed up again. She folded up the green cover and strapped it over the back of the saddle with her bungee cord net. She was taking the canvas cover because she already had a use for it in her steadily evolving plan. The black motorcycle had her extra helmet hanging from a handlebar. She checked it for spiders (she’d made the mistake of not looking carefully inside her stored helmet before), then twisted her ponytail up with her left hand and trapped it under the white plastic “brain bucket.” The Nighthawk’s motor caught as soon as she turned the key and pushed the start button, living up to its reputation as her “black cherry,” and immediately settled into a rhythmic purr.
While nowhere near as fast as her FZR at its top end, the Nighthawk was plenty fast enough for what Ranya had planned, and it had sufficient range in its gas tank. The FZR had an eye catching (and memorable) red white and blue “slash” paint job over its full fairing, but the black and chrome Nighthawk was handsome in a more classic, but rather generic and less memorable way. Finally, the Nighthawk had much higher ground clearance beneath it than the low-slung FZR, and if necessary it could be carefully ridden off of the pavement.
Ranya took an old trail through the woods to a small back road to return to her motel, because she didn’t want the cop to remember
seeing her on the black bike. She parked it behind the end of the Colonial’s twelve units away from the office.
****
“Danny, I think we’d better bring the Jeep off the street, and back it right up to the garage. We need to be extra careful today.”
“Can I do it Dad?”
“Do you think you can reverse it straight up the driveway without plowing into Mom’s rose bushes?”
“Aw Dad, that’s easy. I’ll get it.”
Mark Denton pushed the button inside the garage to roll the door up out of the way, while his son Danny went down to get their black Jeep CJ. His wife’s Lexus occupied one side of the two-car garage, while the other side had been surrendered years before to their eighteen-foot ski boat on its trailer, and a small mountain of recreational gear. Sixteen-year-old Danny Denton had a learner’s permit, and he reversed up the driveway slowly and carefully until the back of the jeep was flush with the open garage door.
If any of their neighbors on the adjoining half-acre properties had been watching very closely, they would only have seen a large igloo cooler, a few plastic storage crates, and a golf bag being loaded into the back of the Jeep. In reality, the boxes contained ammunition and cartridge magazines, and the golf bag contained four semi-automatic rifles.
“Dad, can I drive today, please?”
“Son, I’d say yes, but we can’t risk getting pulled over today, not with what we’re carrying.”
“Why not? The ban’s not until Tuesday.”
Mark Denton, gray haired at 57, but still an imposing figure with ever present military bearing, shot his son the withering “no way” look. “You ready? Let’s roll.”
“Will we be back in time for supper?”
“Nah, it’s eighty miles down, a couple of hours to bury this stuff, then eighty miles back. We’ll eat on the road. Just us men today kiddo, no split tails, so maybe we’ll eat at a real truck driver’s diner on the way home. The kind of place your mother hates.”
“That sounds cool dad.”
Mark Denton weaved his way out of his Virginia Beach subdivision and swung onto West 44, the Virginia Beach Expressway. They both knew every inch of the route which would take them down into North Carolina, where they had a cottage near Harvey Point along the Albemarle Sound.
Danny said, “At least they’re letting us keep our shotguns and bolt actions. We’ll still be able to go hunting this fall.”
Mark Denton stared at his son through his green-lensed aviator’s sunglasses. “Isn’t that special. They’re ‘letting’ us keep some of our guns. ‘Letting’ us. For how long? What ever happened to the second amendment? What ever happened to ‘shall not be infringed’? Danny, when I was twenty-two, just a few years older than you are now, the government handed me a fully-automatic M-16, and all the ammo I could carry, and sent me out to kill as many NVA as we could find. No tag limit, and no season!
“And now I can’t keep the semi-automatic AR-15 that I bought twenty years ago. Your grandpa Denton hauled an M1 Garand from Guam to Okinawa, and our own government sold me that surplus Garand in the golf bag for 250 bucks. Now they don’t trust me with it any more, and I’m supposed to just throw it in a police dumpster. Same thing with your M1 carbine: your Uncle Herbie brought it back from Korea, no problem. It was okay for Herbie to bring it back on a troop ship in ‘51, but now we can’t keep it any more. They don’t trust us any more, because of what one lunatic supposedly did up in Maryland. Supposedly. And now all of the semi-autos have to go. Danny, you do understand what’s happening, don’t you?”
“Well, at school they said it’s for everybody’s safety. It’s for the common good.”
“For the common good, my ass! Danny, it’s all about power: who’s got it, and who doesn’t. Just about the only weapons a SWAT team is afraid of are these semi-auto rifles. They’ll cut through Kevlar vests, and they put out plenty of firepower. Shotguns won’t penetrate their body armor, and bolt actions are too slow. With the semi-autos out of the way, the SWAT teams can go anywhere they want and pick up anybody with no trouble. No muss, no fuss. Anybody, anytime.”
“But only if you’re a criminal, dad. We don’t have to worry, because we don’t break the law.”
“Are you kidding? We’re getting ready to break it today! And the way things are going in this country now, anybody can be arrested for breaking one damn law or another just about any time. If you do your taxes wrong, or you step on a rare endangered cockroach, or if you fill in a puddle without the EPA’s permission, your ass will be hauled in front of a judge. And if you won’t go, they’ll send the SWAT boys to bring you in… or kill you.”
“Dad, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but…you know, you’re sounding kind of…paranoid. That’s what mom says.”
“Yeah? She does? Paranoid? Well maybe getting shot a couple of times in Vietnam and Laos will do that to you! Danny, I saw a lot of good men die, better men than me by a long shot, and I killed some folks too, and I learned something important: the big difference between coming home alive or in a tin box is firepower! Smooth talking lawyers and preachers and congressmen won’t save your ass when it gets down to brass tacks! When it’s really crunch time, when you’re right down in the mud and the blood, there’s only two kinds of people: the ones with the fire power, and the dead ones. Fancy words don’t mean crap when somebody’s pointing a gun at you!
“You know, when I was shot on my second tour, that’s the purple scar across my hip, we were almost out of ammo. We were hauling ass to a landing zone near the Laotian border, and I was down to just my .45. I was getting carried along by my buddies like you help your grandma. Now a .45’s a great handgun, but don’t let anybody kid you, AK-47’s will trump it every time. That is, until a friendly Huey with a pair of mini-guns shows up and trumps their sorry asses! Oh yeah!” Mark Denton smiled at the old memory of the sudden reversal of fortune, which had saved his life. “That’s what it always gets down to Danny, trump the chump. And if you’ve got no firepower, you’re the chump.”
“Then why are we going to bury these rifles?”
Mark Denton had to pause and think about that one. “Well, I guess I’m afraid one of our brainwashed commie neighbors might call the snitch line, and we can’t take the chance. We’d lose the house, I’d go to jail, hell, they might just shoot in the pyrotechnics and do a Waco on us, and burn us out. You know, when the SWAT boys find out they’ve got an old Special Forces guy holed up, they come in hot and heavy. They probably know about these rifles, at least the Garand. Hell, they sold it to me! I’m sure they have it all in a database somewhere. They might decide to pay us a visit, and maybe come in the hard way, at oh-dark-thirty. We can’t risk it.”
“But Dad, they can’t do that, that’s against the Fourth Amendment, right? No search and seizure without a good reason and all that?”
Mark Denton shook his head slowly. “Danny, you’ve got a lot to learn. That’s how it used to be, when the Bill of Rights used to mean something. But between the war on drugs and the war on terror, they can basically smash down anybody’s door and find a reason later. After Tuesday, they’ll have ‘probable cause’ to come charging into any gun owner’s house any time they want to, searching for illegal semi-autos.”
Their Jeep approached the I-264 cloverleaf interchange just after crossing into Norfolk, and Mark Denton signaled and moved to the right lane, slowed down and got ready to exit. A moment later there was a blinding flash and a fireball accompanied by a crashing thunderclap, and the Jeep, which had been traveling west at sixty miles an hour, was sent cart wheeling end over end down the highway in chunks. Pieces of the Jeep, pieces of Mark and Danny Denton, pieces of rifles, and thousands of bullets and ammunition fragments rained down and rolled along both sides of the highway for three-hundred yards.
Several other cars were destroyed or knocked out of control by the force of the blast, and a fifty-car pileup resulted in seconds. This happened on a warm September Sunday just before noon, when tens of thousands
of tourists were flocking to the beaches, and in minutes both major highways backed up in solid gridlock for miles, to the north, south, east and west.
****
“Hey boss, it’s me. I’m in Norfolk. It just went down.”
“Oh? All right. It’s sooner than I expected. Everything cool?”
“Very.”
“Which one?”
“Number two.”
Wally Malvone looked at a copy of the potential target list he had given Bob Bullard at his house, after the poker game broke up Friday night. “Number two” on the list meant Mark Denton, a fifty-seven year old corporate attorney who lived in Virginia Beach. Denton was an avid hunter and NRA match target shooter, who at one point several years ago had been associated with the Black Water Rod and Gun Club. It wasn’t a tight connection, but it would be enough to stick in the public mind. Most important of all, Denton was a combat veteran who had done two tours in Vietnam with the Army Special Forces. Mark Denton was a former Green Beret, and therefore, he was obviously an extremely dangerous “angry white man.”
“Any collaterals?”
“Oh yeah, big time. He was turning off the highway. He would have been heading away from downtown if I waited any longer. Traffic was kind of heavy, so it’s a mess. But on the plus side, we really lucked out and scored some major bonus points! You should see the crash site. There’s pieces of rifle ammo all over the place, and I saw a cop carrying half of an AR-15. It looks like Denton was moving weapons. I saw .223 and 30 caliber ammo, so you can bet he had more rifles in his car, and the cops are bound to find them.”
“Hey, well, that sounds great! Okay, get on back up here, oh, anytime tomorrow. Have a big night out on the card I gave you, just stay out of trouble. We’re really looking good on this one. Oh, and make sure you watch CBA News tonight. I think they’re about to get a major scoop.”
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 17
