Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  She left a note for her roommate saying that she was sorry, but she had to go. She had family business to attend to in Suffolk after the death of her father (that was certainly true) and then she was going to do some traveling and think things out. She would be in touch.

  In less than an hour, Ranya was gone from the apartment that she had just moved into, with almost everything she owned in the world contained within her new-old Ford van. For now that suited her perfectly: she was anonymous, mobile, and armed. In another hour, most of her currently unneeded worldly possessions were packed in a five-by-eight mini storage unit, paid up in cash for the next six months.

  On her way out of Charlottesville she passed down University Avenue, and briefly pulled the van to the curb across from the Rotunda. In front of the Rotunda, a tall and imposing bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson stood silent guard over his “academical village.” UVA was unquestionably still Thomas Jefferson’s University; his unmistakable mark was left indelibly on every yard of “The Grounds.” Well, Ranya thought, hadn’t he said it all, two centuries earlier? Hadn’t Jefferson written, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God?” Hadn’t he also written, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants?”

  ****

  By 4:40 PM Ian Kelby was in his pre-selected sniper’s lair across a small valley from the back of Senator Geraldine Randolph’s home, located in rolling countryside near Potomac Maryland, a dozen miles south of Rockville. Kelby had put the U.S. Senator from Maryland on his personal “to do” list years before, because of her consistent and vocal support for every proposal that ever floated through Congress which served to diminish or deny freedom in America. There was not a gun control, “anti-terrorism,” “computer security” or “hate crime” bill which did not include her name near the top. She had just led the charge in the Senate for the passage of the President’s new “Universal Surveillance Act,” with its painfully insulting USA acronym. In short, any law which lessened liberty and freedom in America, Senator Geraldine Randolph strongly endorsed.

  When it came to firearms ownership, Senator Randolph was among the rankest of hypocrites. She was on the record saying she believed that only the police and the military needed handguns at all, and that she supported totally banning their possession by the general public.

  Yet she herself had one of Maryland’s extremely rare concealed pistol permits, which were given only to the power elite with the very best political connections. Not only did she have a concealed permit, it was well known that she carried a revolver in her purse at all times. She claimed she needed the Smith and Wesson .38 due to all of the threats she had received from angry gun owners, and she perceived absolutely no irony in her position. Marylanders who owned businesses in high-crime areas had virtually no chance of obtaining a concealed permit, but evidently Senator Randolph felt that her need was greater than theirs, even though she was escorted everywhere with her own detail of heavily armed bodyguards provided by the Secret Service.

  To Kelby’s way of thinking, all of this clearly made her one of the “domestic enemies” he had once sworn the military officer’s oath to defend the Constitution against. Today, now that the “shooting phase” had more or less officially begun with the sniper’s shot on the Mall, Kelby saw her as just a piece of low-hanging fruit which could be picked off with relative ease, before he moved on to more difficult targets.

  Notoriously unsociable, Senator Randolph could usually be depended upon to return home by six PM, unless an important vote was scheduled. She was independently wealthy, a multi-millionairess with her own family money, and she did not need to cruise the usual fund-raising receptions groveling for campaign contributions. She had inherited everything of value in her life. She had even inherited her Senate seat, taking it over when her husband had died in a plane wreck a decade earlier. Later she had used her vast inherited wealth to fund her easy reelection.

  Ian Kelby was aware of her personal schedule and habits, because he had come to this exact spot on “dry runs” without a weapon several times before, armed only with binoculars, a field guide to North American song birds for cover, and a pocket note pad. Most weekday afternoons and evenings in nice weather, Senator Randolph would spend some time reading or meeting with key assistants on the raised patio deck behind her angular brown-painted “ecologically harmonious” home, which Kelby, the real estate lawyer, considered a multi-million dollar eyesore. The deck did afford a magnificent view of her own little section of Glen Falls Park and the hardwood forest on the opposite slope. Some mornings, deer would even slip from the woods to graze in the valley beneath her house.

  Ian Kelby knew about the deer, because he had occasionally watched her place while appearing to take a break on completely plausible morning jogs, up the old fire trails on the other side of the state park from her house. Ian’s old buddy from the University of Maryland Law School, Roy Millard, had also taken a few turns surveilling her, but today Roy was handling the transportation and logistics end of the operation, because he had not had as much preparation time. His turn to shoot would come on another day. Together they had compiled an extensive list of “domestic enemies of the Constitution” in the capital region.

  For this operation Ian Kelby had selected from his seldom-entered garage attic an antique Russian bolt-action rifle, a Mosin-Nagant in 7.62 by 54mm, an obsolete rifle designed for the Czar’s army. The example which Ian owned had been manufactured before his similarly blond and blue-eyed grandfather had been born in Holland, and to a modern eye it was bizarre looking, with a wooden fore stock extending all the way out to the end of its thirty inch long barrel. Obsolete or not, Viet Cong snipers had been capable of hitting unlucky American sentries at well beyond 600 meters with them, and communist bloc shooting teams had always performed well in international target competitions with accurized versions.

  Ian had bought his Nagant for $75 cash, outside of a flea market that he’d stumbled across in West Virginia, while on a kayaking trip with Roy. He’d sensed its deadly potential, and had never shown it to anyone else but his best friend. Once he’d shot it a few times and discovered how uncannily accurate it was, he’d made the effort to put a cheap 3X9 variable magnification Bushnell scope on it. This cost another $175 cash, including a special Nagant scope mount. For $250, he had a rifle that could hit ten-inch-diameter paper plate targets, taped to cardboard boxes a paced-off 550 yards away. Every time—just as long as he was firing from a steady rest position.

  And a steady rest position is exactly what he had here, 550 yards across Glen Falls Park from Senator Randolph’s back deck. Ian’s antique Nagant was lying balanced across a rotten tree stump. Without his even touching the rifle it was aligned so that her house could be seen when he leaned over from his sitting position and looked through the bright ocular lens of the scope.

  Kelby had never attended a military sniper school, and he was not wearing a bushy burlap rag covered “ghillie suit.” He didn’t lie frozen in place in the prone-position ready to shoot for hours on end, perfectly disguised as a six foot long patch of weeds. He just sat behind a tree stump surrounded by bushes, wearing a faded green sweat suit, and waited for her to come home. Except for his skin-colored latex surgical gloves and the rifle, he could have just been a hiker or a bird watcher taking a rest.

  By 5:45 PM the sun was dropping low into the woods behind him, but it was still shining on the Senator’s deck when he saw the colorful flash of vehicles rushing up her private drive and disappearing out of his sight on the other side of her house. He put his binoculars and his water bottle back into his brown daypack, and hunched up close behind his rifle as his heart raced from sixty to well over a hundred beats a minute.

  He was sitting Indian-style with his shins against the base of the tree stump. The low wooden stock of the Nagant didn’t provide a good “cheek weld” to Ian’s face when he was looking through the scope, which was raised well above the original iron sights, but this kept
his skin, and his DNA, from being left on it. He squirmed his body into a tighter position behind the rifle and the Senator’s house leaped out through the light-grabbing ocular lens of the scope, which was already turned to its maximum 9X magnification. At that range and magnification, the Senator’s house filled the entire diameter of the lens from side to side. With the rifle so well supported along its length by the decayed stump, and his body position so steady, the crosshairs remained fixed and unmoving on her back doors.

  A sturdy-looking waist-high wooden railing prevented people from tumbling off the deck and fifteen feet down to the ground behind the Senator’s house. Kelby saw the railing as an obstacle which could potentially deflect his shot if she came out and sat down right away. It would be chancy to try for a shot over or through the rails if she were sitting, but it was doable as a last resort with the heavy 180-grain bullet he had in the chamber.

  Ten minutes after Senator Randolph’s party arrived home, Kelby saw the curtains move behind her large sliding glass doors, then they slid open and a man in a dark jacket and white shirt came out, holding his own pair of binoculars. He spent barely a minute scanning the valley and the distant woods, and Kelby had to stifle his laughter at the man’s feeble effort at counter-surveillance. His shooting position was in deep shadows and quite invisible from the house; while the Senator’s back deck was a floodlit stage in the late afternoon sun.

  At 6:05, the Senator herself finally came out, wearing blue slacks and a beige cardigan sweater. Her chin-length dyed auburn hair was as stiffly styled and coiffed as it always was, moving with her face like a medieval helmet. The Senator and a different man, this one in a gray suit, walked over to the railing. She was pointing with her arm to the stream with its little footbridge, and other features visible to her in the meadow.

  Kelby steadied the Bushnell’s thin black crosshairs on her left armpit to account for the slight cross breeze, and began squeezing the Nagant’s trigger while slowly exhaling. His heart was racing wildly, his blood was surging with such force that he could hear nothing but its whooshing in his ears, but the crosshairs remained steady while his right finger gently squeezed.

  Suddenly with a deafening BLAM the rifle’s hardwood stock launched itself back into his right shoulder, and the thin metal rim at the back of the scope struck him just above his right eye. He quickly reacquired the back deck through the scope for one last quick look: somebody was down, and there was a flurry of activity around his or her body. Randolph wasn’t visible, so logically it had to be her lying on the deck behind the railing.

  He retracted the bolt slowly to extract the single shell case by hand; he didn’t want to leave that particular piece of evidence behind. The empty brass shell went into his brown daypack, and then he gently tossed the rifle into a patch of thick ferns. It was just an untraceable single-use throwaway, and he had others. He peeled off his latex gloves and stuffed them into his pack.

  After a quick scan of the area for anything left behind, Kelby put on his pack, jogged a short distance to where a cheap mountain bike was stashed, and pedaled hard and fast down the fire trail to where his friend was waiting a mile away.

  Roy Millard popped the trunk from inside of his burgundy Chevy Malibu when he saw Ian pedal into view. He was parked behind an abandoned gas station on a bypassed and seldom-used rural blacktop behind the state park. Ian Kelby threw his bike inside the open trunk, slammed it shut, and got in on the passenger side. He high-fived his friend, who then handed him a cold bottle of Gatorade, started the engine and slowly drove off.

  “I heard it. You get her?”

  “Yeah.” Kelby guzzled half of the bottle of green liquid in one long drink. There had not been a molecule of moisture in his mouth since he had seen the cars arriving at her house.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive… I think. Yeah, I got her.”

  Roy was laughing. “Dude, you got scope eye, you got a cut there! What, did you get buck fever and crowd up on it?”

  “Damned rifle’s stock is too low for a scope. I should’ve taped a cheek pad onto it like you said. Is it bad? I’ve got court tomorrow.” Kelby screwed the top on the Gatorade bottle and set it on the seat.

  “Nah, no problem. I’ve done worse shaving, just not up that high. So who’s next on the hit parade, what do you think? Courtney or Silas? Or maybe Schuleman, if we can find him.”

  “Well Roy, it’s your shot, so I guess it’s your call.”

  “Yeah, okay. Anyway, we don’t have to decide right now. Hey, are you hungry after your big afternoon?”

  “Yeah man, let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  “Well I’m buying.” Roy turned north onto Falls Road, heading back to Rockville.

  Kelby wiped his temple with the back of his hand. “You know, I probably left some blood on the scope. Shit.”

  “DNA, you mean? You’re not in any database, are you?”

  “I don’t think so…but there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

  They drove in silence a few minutes, Ian Kelby staring vacantly out of his passenger window at the passing scenery. Then he got back on track with the plan, and took off his old sneakers and socks and peeled off his green sweats. He already had black dress shorts and a preppie red alligator shirt on underneath. His entire sniper suit, including his latex gloves, went into a garbage bag for disposal in a distant dumpster. He was not willing to have a single fiber or shoe print ever traced to him. He pulled a pair of brown Docksiders boat shoes from under the seat and slipped them on.

  “It’s finally started,” said Roy Millard.

  “Yeah, it sure has.” Kelby picked up the Gatorade bottle again. His hands were shaking and they slipped as he unscrewed the top.

  “Got the heebie-jeebies huh? Well who wouldn’t? There’s a pint of Rebel Yell in the glove box. Go on Ian, haul it out.”

  Kelby fumbled with the glove box latch, pulled the slim bottle of hundred-proof bourbon out, and twisted off the cap. He took a long pull, and passed it to his friend Roy, who looked across at him, lifted the bottle in a toast and said, “Sic semper tyrannis Ian,” before taking his own drink.

  “Yeah buddy, sic semper tyrannis. One down, and a bunch more to go.”

  17

  President Gilmore called an emergency meeting of the Homeland Security Team when he was informed of Senator Randolph’s assassination. The story was just breaking on the internet: the Sledge Report had a one-sentence headline announcing her killing with no other details. The cable news networks were just breaking into their programming to announce her shocking death. The team met as usual in the Situation Room beneath the Oval Office, where the President was pacing in front of the mahogany conference table, running his fingers through his thick gray hair.

  “Okay folks, we’re losing control of the situation. First the bridge, then that absolute fiasco on the Mall—they’re beating us like a drum in the media! That damned parachute guy’s pamphlet, now this ‘D.O.L.’ letter… The wrong side is setting the agenda. And now this! A United States Senator has been shot and killed. A United…States…Senator!”

  Copies of the Friedman mass-grave leaflet and the bridge bomber’s letter had been passed around the conference table where some of the Homeland Security Team now scanned them, as if searching for some hidden meaning missed on their first dozen readings. No one wanted to meet the President’s gaze. He was on a tear, veering toward heart attack territory.

  “Folks, we can’t have any more days like today. The bridge was bad enough, and then that parachute thing, but, but, killing a United States Senator? That is UNACCEPTABLE!” President Gilmore was practically screaming, his face scarlet. He spun his black leather recliner around and rested both hands on the headrest, closed his eyes and dropped his head, and attempted to slow his breathing and regain control.

  If Senator Randolph could be killed at home within hours of sharing that stage on the National Mall, any of them might be killed, except for possibly the President and Vice-President. Sena
tors received the same level of security as the rest of the Cabinet and other Homeland Security Team members seated around the conference table in the Situation Room.

  “Wayne, what’s the FBI got so far on her assassination?”

  “Mr. President, Senator Randolph was shot while standing on the patio behind her house near Potomac. She had just arrived home and was talking with an admin assistant when she was killed instantly by a single rifle shot. She was evidently shot through her heart and spine. The shooter’s rifle has been recovered; he fired from the woods opposite her house from 600 yards away.”

  The President looked at his FBI Director, shocked. “Damn! What’s 600 yards, about a third of a mile? Does that mean this was a professional job, like a trained military sniper? You said you have the rifle, have you picked up any suspects?”

  “No sir. The rifle was left behind, but we don’t have any leads on the shooter. We’re working with the Maryland State Police, we’re combing the area with dogs and helicopters, but it’s almost dark…and all we have is the rifle.”

  “Well, what kind of sniper rifle can hit someone in the heart from a third of a mile away? You said you have it, is it a military sniper rifle?”

  “No sir, not at all. It’s actually a Mosin-Nagant, a Russian rifle made around the First World War.”

  “It’s a what?”

  “A Mosin-Nagant. It was the standard-issue Russian shoulder arm from the 1890s until World War Two, sort of the Russian equivalent of our old Springfields. Did you ever see ‘Doctor Zhivago?’ No? Well, anyway it’s a bolt-action, the kind where you pull a bolt handle back and forth to load each bullet.” The FBI Director mimed pulling the handle of a bolt-action rifle.

  “Is it some kind of super-accurate rifle? Is it rare? Expensive?”