Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  It was one of George Hammet’s recurring fantasies that someday he would be able to play the handshake trick on his Norfolk SAIC Kayla Coleridge. In her presence he often imagined pulverizing her tiny kitty-cat paw into little crunched-up girly bone fragments within his powerful hand grip, leaving her on her knees screaming in pain, while he just smiled pleasantly. Of course, this could never happen. In the ATF the real hard-ass operators had to treat the little princesses with complete PC deference, or they would run shrieking and boo-hooing to Human Resources to file an EEOC complaint. Then a good agent would be written up and charged with sexual harassment or even assault, and his career would be ruined for no damn reason at all. Hammet had seen it over and over again.

  Obviously, none of that PC bullshit applied here in the STU Team. Clearly the STU was composed of hard-cases only: pencil-necks, fairies and princesses need not apply! This was one of the reasons Hammet wanted to join the STU: to escape the ridiculous upside-down PC world in the rest of the ATF and federal law enforcement, where hundred-pound Miss Prissies pretended to be Special Agents. They were usually masters at office politics and sucked up most of the promotions, but they always hid way in the back on raids. Or they simply avoided the danger and hardship of raids altogether, with well-timed PMS sick days.

  Just about the only occasion when George enjoyed having the lady agents around was on the outdoor firing ranges. That’s when watching them getting knocked on their butts firing the 12-gauge shotguns was always good for a knee-slapping laugh riot by the male agents, and there was nothing the lady agents could do about it except turn beet-red and endure the humiliation of their exposed weakness.

  The lady agents weren’t much better when it came to firing the “MP-Five and Dimes,” the ten-millimeter version of the MP-5 submachine gun commonly used in federal law enforcement. Most of the female agents Hammet had seen handling the MP-5/10 flinched so badly burst-firing the powerful rounds that they were unable to hit the paper at twenty-five yards, and had to accept the snickering behind their backs.

  “So here’s the deal, George,” Malvone said. “The entire STU is moving out tomorrow. We’re setting up shop way down in Chesapeake on the old South River Naval Auxiliary Landing Field. It’s almost down to North Carolina. You know the place?”

  “I know where it is, but I’ve never been on it. Isn’t it closed? I thought they shut it down a few years ago.”

  “It is, but it’s going to be open for us. Anyway, we’re setting up down there this weekend, and we’re going to start operating right away. Then, next month, we’re going to bring aboard another dozen or so operators, mostly from ATF, but some FBI and DEA too. When we get them all we’re going to muster in another STU tactical team, the Red Team, and you’re going to be the Red Team leader. For now you’re going to be the assistant Blue Team leader and strap-hang with Tim here, just to learn our SOPs, and pick up how we operate. But this is going to have to be unofficial for a while…on paper you’ll still be the ASIC in Norfolk, until we get the Red Team pulled together. But you can come out and play with the STU at night.” Malvone winked at Hammet, and the men exchanged casual “high fives” all around.

  By now most of the STU Team members had gathered in Malvone’s backyard around the beer and the barbeque, taking guarded stock of the new guy who Malvone was going to bring in, untested, as a new team leader. Tim Jaeger said, “Well George, there’s one more tradition we need to take care of to formally welcome you into the STU.”

  George Hammet wasn’t sure what was coming, probably a beer chugging ritual or some other frat-boy type prank he thought, for about one second. He thought wrong.

  With no warning most of the fifteen or twenty STU Team members nearby lunged at him all at once, tackling and burying him under a dog pile of muscular bodies. Then he was hoisted roughly off the ground, face down, with three men pinning each leg under their arms, with others locking his elbows and wrists in painful jujitsu “come along” holds, and one more standing by his shoulder, with a powerfully-biceped arm around his neck in a choke hold. Before he could react, much less put up resistance, he was hauled through the backyard between the trees and shrubs toward the bay.

  Carried face down and head first, Hammet only saw the water coming when they got him to the end of the yard where it fell away in a steep bank. Most of his carriers had to peel away as they neared the edge to allow the others room to give him a proper heave-ho into the water, and Hammet literally seized this opportunity to turn the tables. Just when he was being thrown over he managed to seize hold of Wally Malvone’s belt, and his momentum and his grip sent them both over together. Instead of flying out into the water, the two men tumbled down the eroded dirt slope into the shallow water at the bottom.

  The two soaking-wet slime-covered men rolled around, yelling and swearing, and then they stood up in the knee-deep water at the bottom. With great difficulty and much back-sliding they both climbed up the crumbling seven or eight foot high mini-cliff to Malvone’s backyard, while the rest of the STU operators above them whistled and howled and poured beer down upon them.

  Once they were back on top, they were both presented with fresh bottles of beer and back-slaps all around. Hammet and Malvone, dripping bay water and covered in black river mud, casually rejoined the party by the barbecue as if nothing at all unusual had just happened. The macho rite of passage had been successfully accomplished. The new guy had been baptized into the STU, and Malvone had been reconfirmed as their boss.

  After that the music was cranked up even louder, and then the serious drinking began. Wives and girlfriends were specifically excluded from this STU Team pre-deployment party, and anyway a man would have been insane to bring a lady anywhere near this joyful mob of foul-mouthed knuckle-dragging drunken good-old-boys.

  ****

  Two-hundred miles south, Brad Fallon was also celebrating with a cold beer in his hand, a can of Miller Genuine Draft from his 12-volt refrigerator. In the dying light he was walking slowly beside his mast, which was lying horizontally across five wooden sawhorses on the flat-decked steel barge that Guajira was tied alongside. The gleaming white-painted sixty-foot long aluminum tube was finished from the tip of its VHF whip antenna on the masthead, to its hollow oval base.

  The masthead, which was now within casual reach at Brad’s waist level, sprouted a collection of antennas, a combination red green and white running light, wind speed and direction instruments, and other devices required for safe and efficient ocean sailing. Each item was machine-screwed to the mast, into holes Brad had drilled and tapped and threaded into the raw aluminum. After tomorrow morning, if Brad wanted to inspect his masthead or replace a part, he would need to sit in a bosun’s chair and haul himself sixty feet above the water with a five-part block and tackle.

  Two pairs of white-painted aluminum spreader bars stood five feet out from the mast like outstretched arms, one third and two thirds of the way along its sixty foot length. Ten stainless steel wires were ready to hold up the mast. Four were attached just below the masthead, and the others near the bases of the spreaders. Tonight the wires sagged loosely along the spar and between the spreader tips, but when the mast was raised they would be securely fastened to Guajira’s decks at her sides, bow and stern until they were all bar-tight. The heavy stainless steel turnbuckles and end fittings of the ten wires were now tied together with yellow twine into a single bundle near the mast’s base, ready for the mast to be raised in the morning.

  There was nobody left in the small boatyard except the night watchman, who was watching television in the back of the business office. There was no one to share Brad’s pride in completing the mast, the last and most complex of the tasks he had undertaken in getting Guajira ready for sea, more difficult even than the engine installation. He walked along beside it, running his hand down its glowing “Matterhorn White” polyurethane paint finish.

  The oval aluminum mast section had been extruded in a factory in Connecticut horizontally, had its fixtures cut and wel
ded on while lying horizontally, and had been sanded and primed and painted and trucked to Virginia horizontally. Tonight was the last night that it would spend horizontally. In the morning the mast would be lifted to vertical by a crane, and lowered through a hole in the cabin top and over the mast step on the keel. The ten wire stays would be pinned to the deck chain plates, the ten turnbuckles would be screwed down tight, and Guajira would become a sailboat again. With luck, the mast would remain vertical for many years to come.

  In a few days he would leave the Chesapeake Bay and sail out onto the open Atlantic at last, a free man, free to set his own course and choose his next landfall.

  ****

  Later, Malvone and Hammet were standing on the open balcony deck which ran the width of his house overlooking Tanaccaway Creek, which was in fact a small bay in its own right, a mile long and a half mile across. The creek jabbed eastward off the Potomac where the river made its last dog-leg turn before running straight north into Washington. Malvone’s property descended downhill to the creek, so the first floor on the landward side was the second floor in the back. Maple and sycamore trees in his backyard partially screened his house from the water side. It was fully dark now and the backyard was lit by small floodlights mounted under the deck.

  Both men were in clean, dry, government-issue navy blue sweat suits while their clothes were in the dryer. They stood by the wooden railing watching other STU Team members below them who were engaged in a raucous game of ‘simunition’ quick draw with their pistols. This game being played by intoxicated federal agents broke every gun-safety rule in existence, but the men lived with their guns, and their guns were virtually extensions of their bodies, whether drunk or sober. The STU men literally did not walk out of their front doors without carrying their loaded Colts and Kimbers and Glocks and SIGs. To do so would have been as unthinkable as walking outside bare-ass naked, if not more so.

  They shot countless hundreds of rounds a week on ranges and in close-quarters-battle facilities at Quantico and elsewhere. They could fire right or left handed, they could fire hanging upside down from ropes, they could fire and reload and fire again with their eyes closed, so it was not entirely unexpected to see them playing quick draw with simunition after more than a few beers. When the operators got drunk they got rowdy, and they did what they wanted to do. To try to intervene with a Mickey Mouse gun safety lecture at this point would only have earned a team leader a quick trip to the water. Bullard, Silvari and Jaeger were wisely out of sight, inside the club room most likely, getting started on the scotch and the cigars and the cards.

  “Look at ‘em,” said Malvone. “Complete freakin’ animals. I love these guys.”

  “They’re all shit-faced. You let them engage in horseplay with guns when they’re drunk?”

  “Are you gonna tell ‘em to stop?” Malvone laughed, toasting his team with the tall glass in his hand.

  A pair of STU men below them were standing twenty feet from the cement and brick barbeque, using beer bottles placed on top of its chimney as targets. Their hands were at their sides, their pistols holstered and covered by their loose shirt tails while other team members watched, offering rude comments and free advice. A third man called out, “Ready—set—BLOW!” One of the duelists drew and fired and knocked over a beer bottle with his paint-filled plastic simunition bullet. The bottle fell from the barbecue and shattered on the cement patio, while the others hooted and jeered at him.

  One yelled, “Frank, man you really ‘blow’!”

  Frank quickly hand-loaded another simunition round into his SIG and without warning turned and fired it offhand at the kneecap of the man who had joshed him, causing him to grab his knee and hop around cursing in pain. They were really drunk, nearly out of control, and a simple mix-up between live ammunition and simunition could result in a serious or even fatal negligent shooting. Wally Malvone took a sip from his gin and tonic and said, “George, when they get like this, they’re an unstoppable force of nature. You just stay out of their way.”

  “I see your point. But will they be ready to go in the morning? How many vehicles are you—are we moving to Chesapeake?” In this case, Chesapeake referred to the name of the almost completely rural county stretching from Norfolk south to North Carolina.

  “We’re taking everything we’ve got George. Everybody’s driving something, even their own cars. The more vehicles we have down there, the better cover we’ll have on our ops. And don’t worry about them being ready; they’ll all be ready to roll when we muster at eight. Most of ‘em are ex-Marines, Rangers…they don’t need to sleep. They think sleep is for pussies that can’t hack operating. And right now they’re just about out of their skulls with the thought of busting caps on real, live terrorists. Just the thought of no more simunition training, no more cardboard terrorists and CQB houses…hell they’d run barefoot all the way to Norfolk for the chance to put live rounds into real terrorists! Kids train that long and that hard, by God they want to kill somebody! You can’t blame ‘em, you know how that is.

  “Anyway, they won’t be hanging around here too long tonight. They’re young studs, and they’ve got better places to be on their last night up here than hanging around with us. They’ll be drinking and screwing all night right up until muster time no matter what we tell them to do, but don’t worry, they’ll be standing tall at 0800. If they weren’t that good, they wouldn’t be in the STU.”

  “Wally, you said I’ll be paired with Jaeger to pick up your team SOPs. How long until you see us actually forming the Red Team? And how are you going to man the new team? Not with all new guys I hope.”

  “You’re all business, aren’t you? What I’m planning is to take four operators each from Blue and Gold, plus three more new guys besides you to make twelve for the Red Team. Then more new guys will backfill into Blue and Gold to bring them back up to twelve each. That’ll be next month if things go right, but first we have to operate with what we’ve got down in Tidewater.

  “We should start getting the new guys after about a month down there. Once we’ve got the Red Team on line, I want to bring all three tactical teams up to sixteen shooters and four support guys each. My basic idea is that these twenty-man teams should be able to travel and operate independently. They’ll go to the hotspots and stamp out the fires, all on their own, without having to be supported by the Field Offices. All covert, all deniable. Hell, we could have ten or fifteen new teams up and running this time next year, who knows?”

  “How are they taking all this up at Headquarters, and at Justice?”

  “Oh, we’re still flying under the radar, for the most part. We’re still just an inconsequential ‘training unit’ hardly anybody ever heard of. But George, we’re working directly for the National Command Authority now.” Meaning the White House. “So Headquarters doesn’t matter.”

  “Does he understand what we’re going to be doing?”

  “Who, the President? He knows some of it, I’m assuming, but he’s using a cutout. It’s not like he talked to me personally! He probably doesn’t want to know, that’s my guess. He just wants results, that’s what his contact said.”

  “You know if it goes sour, they’ll hang us out to dry in a microsecond.”

  Malvone laughed. “So what else is new? Hey, they might try, but I’m taking precautions, I’ve got some insurance… And they’re desperate! They’ve tried everything else, and nothing’s working. The Joint Task Force is going nowhere. So it’s been left up to us resolve it.”

  “You know, it’s kind of funny. We get to resolve it, after…you know. But the stadium thing seems to be holding up just the way you planned it. And everything else flowed out of that, just like you said it would. But Wally, does the rest of the team accept everything as…legit? On its face legit I mean, like it’s covered on TV?”

  “Oh hell yes, absolutely. 100% legit.”

  Senator Randolph’s assassination and the Wilson Bridge sabotage were indeed ‘legit.’ Malvone knew that they had nothing
to do with any STU operations, that they had occurred unexpectedly. These ‘legit’ attacks were quickly becoming the best possible camouflage for the stadium operation, and the other “pump priming” operations by Hammet and Bullard in southeastern Virginia. There were too many attacks coming now, one after the other, to afford law enforcement the manpower to minutely dig for the well-concealed truth about what had happened at the stadium. When a Senator is assassinated, even a Stadium Massacre can fade somewhat in importance, at least at the federal decision-making level.

  Events were now unfolding spontaneously, the way he had predicted. There was no longer a need for false acts of terrorism to be blamed on the right wing militias; the gun nuts were now fully provoked and taking actions on their own. Senator Randolph and the Wilson Bridge were proof of his basic concept. He had done it: like switching on a nuclear power plant, Malvone had initiated a continuous chain reaction.

  And the beauty of his concept, the sheer elegance of it, was that the more aggressively the STU and other federal law enforcement teams operated, the more new ‘domestic terrorists’ there would be to fight, and the more STU Teams they would need to bring on line to do the fighting! He had created a positive feedback loop, a working perpetual motion machine. His unique genius was that he understood both mindsets across the great ideological divide, the yin of gung-ho federal law enforcement agencies and their supporters, and the yang of the Constitution fanatics. The engine of action and reaction was speeding up, and he was harnessing that limitless energy to ride into the Senior Executive Service and far beyond.

  “Wally, I’m just glad to be aboard, I’m proud that you chose me to be a team leader. Now we’ll finally get to operate against these assholes without our hands tied behind our backs!”