Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  “Well George, I’m real glad to have you aboard too,” Malvone lied. In fact, Malvone had no intention of ever letting Hammet lead a STU Team. George Hammet was the only other person alive who knew everything about what had happened at the stadium. Promising to reward him with a STU Team position was simply the carrot he had been using to string Hammet along, and ensure his faithful obedience and continuing loyalty.

  This promise had so far induced Hammet to locate an ideal patsy, and carry him up into the empty building 1200 yards east of the stadium. The promise also motivated him to organize the gun store arsons and pull the mosque attack. But Hammet knew far too much, and he would present a mortal danger to Malvone as long as he was alive, which was why he planned to keep him very close and buy his happiness with false promises. For a little while longer at least.

  Fortunately for Wally Malvone, George Hammet worked at a very dangerous occupation, where job related fatalities happened frequently in the line of duty.

  23

  Ranya was sitting on a flattened cardboard box, her arms wrapped around her knees for warmth. Even wearing several layers of clothing which were topped by a gray track suit, she was chilled through and sometimes shivering after sitting nearly motionless for over three hours. She was stiff and sore, peering through the vertical gap where she had pulled out a wooden slat in the trash can enclosure that concealed her. Since three AM the six-foot square cypress-wood box had been her hunting blind, open to the stars above on the unseasonably cold night. There had been no moon at all, and no wind. After occasionally nodding off, she was watching the first hints of dawn seeping through the black forest wall across the lake, until branch by branch the individual trees emerged from the gloom into a new day.

  Ranya had picked the back of this two-story brick home on the street lined with luxury sedans and SUVs after seeing two newspapers lying by the front door, and no lights on inside, during her scouting trip Friday night. She strolled up and rang the doorbell several times, noticing at the same time a half dozen pizza delivery and carpet service fliers jammed inside the screen door. After hearing the loud doorbell chime inside the house she walked quickly away to observe from a distance: there was no reaction within and she was certain the house was unoccupied.

  When she returned at three in the morning, dressed and equipped for her mission, she settled into the trash bin storage area on the back side of the house. It was an ideal hiding place, with an unobstructed view across the lake. The upscale red brick home she had selected was directly across a finger lake from the fifth hole of the Greenspring Country Club, in the southwestern corner of the county-sized and mostly rural city of Virginia Beach. The water hazard ran north to south for hundreds of yards in each direction from her position, forming the western border of the golf course’s front nine.

  At 6:20 an early morning jogger ran down the cinder golf cart path near the water’s edge, and Ranya could hear his footsteps crunching across the still water from two-hundred yards away. Mallards paddled by in a line, moving to their morning feeding grounds, leaving a series of V-shaped wakes. Ugly Moscovy ducks with their deformed-looking red bills wandered on the grassy lawn near the water’s edge, unaware of Ranya’s presence only twenty yards away. A little breeze from the north riffled the treetops and set tiny wavelets into motion down the lake, causing the mallards to change their course in formation.

  At 6:35, the first golf cart of the day drove down the path. The cart’s passenger was holding a cell phone or a walkie-talkie, and had a pair of binoculars hanging on a strap around his neck. The two men in the cart were wearing dark suit jackets and ties, not golfing attire. The golf cart stopped in the open near the fourth hole’s putting green, and the passenger stepped out and scanned through 360 degrees with his binos, then he climbed back in and they drove further down the cinder path and repeated the process in the middle of the fifth hole.

  They had to be Sanderson’s advance team making a security sweep. This was a very positive sign to Ranya, strong evidence that her information had been correct, and the Virginia Attorney General was indeed on his way. She had been hopeful that Sanderson and his powerful friends would use their VIP clout to move their party into the first tee time, and this security check was the first evidence that her assumption was correct.

  She took up her final shooting position, sitting with her back against the wooden boards across from her vertical firing slit, and pulled her shooting platform into position in front of her. This was a small two foot high black rubber garbage bin, turned upside down to make a steady shooting table to rest her Tennyson Champion across. She placed an old telephone book from the blue recycling bin in the middle of her ‘table’ to support the barrel and sound suppressor of her scoped target pistol. Her Champion was already loaded with its single .223 caliber hollow-point cartridge.

  Ranya placed the insides of her feet against the upside-down black plastic bin, with her knees bent sharply upwards. Her elbows rested on the tops of her knees, both of her gloved hands were wrapped around the carved wooden pistol grip. The bottoms of her fists rested on the curved edge of the trash bin, with the weight of the Champion on the old telephone book.

  With her face a foot behind the pistol, she scanned across the lake through the scope. Even in the early light the vivid emerald-hued clarity of the short-cropped turf around the fifth tee leaped out through the ocular lens. At 7X magnification, looking across the trash enclosure through the slot where she had pulled out the board, Ranya only had a narrow sliver of a view of the country club, just covering all of the area around the fifth tee. A golf cart zipped quickly past her field of view from left to right, just a blur. Perhaps more security, or country club course wardens.

  Another cart rolled into her sight and stopped, she was looking over the scope now, watching with both of her eyes. Two men climbed out, and then one more cart parked partly behind the first. There were four middle-aged white men, old frat brothers perhaps, or former law partners, or possibly campaign contributing corporate lobbyists. To Ranya it didn’t matter which: it only mattered that Eric Sanderson was one of them.

  Ranya lowered her head to scan through the scope again, checking faces, and there he was! Sanderson appeared to be standing only a hundred feet away when she peered through her seven power scope. He looked the same as he did on television, with his youthful black hair trimmed with distinguished gray at the temples. Today he was wearing tacky lime-colored pants and a yellow V-neck sweater. Ranya never could understand men and their bizarre tastes in golfing outfits, but she quickly banished her extraneous thoughts.

  The decision had already been made; the time for doubt and emotion was in the past, now was the time for only a stable body position, proper breathing technique, and precise trigger control. She squirmed her bottom into a better place further back, the small of her back against the rough cypress boards. Then she welded her elbows into her knees, stretched out her fingers and remade her grip. Finally she thumbed the sharply-checkered hammer all the way back, and both felt and heard its metallic treble-click as it locked to the rear.

  An overweight gray-haired man in a pale-blue sweater went first, facing her shooting blind 220 yards across the finger lake. Magnified, he appeared to look directly at Ranya from only a hundred feet away for long seconds, sending a chill through her. Then he bent over and planted the ball on its tee in one smooth motion. He stretched and twisted his torso with his arms straight up, his driver held between both hands, and then he slowly and with exaggerated flourishes assumed the position over the tee and took a practice swing. Finally he settled his twitching club head down near the teed-up ball, and as he bent over Ranya laid the thin black crosshairs on the top of his head. It’s not your day you fat jerk, it’s not your day, she thought. But you’ll never forget this day for as long as you live, I guarantee it.

  The chubby older man swung, the ball was smacked beyond her view. The foursome all stared after it, their clubs resting lightly over their shoulders, loose and relaxed. Their
unintelligible words and laughter floated across the still water as murmurs. The first to tee-off had sliced his ball into the lake, judging by their amused reactions.

  Then Eric Sanderson stepped up and planted his own ball on its tee. Ranya sucked in a deep breath and watched him through the scope as he stepped back and took a practice swing. Next he dug his spikes in, shifting his weight around, his lime-green legs shoulder width apart, his arms in a rigid “V,” his face down with the top of his head pointing directly at her.

  Ranya slowly exhaled while putting light pressure on the Champion’s trigger with the pad on the end of her right index finger. The thin black crosshairs danced ever so slightly in rhythm with her pulse as they quartered the top of Sanderson’s head, while he stared straight down at his waiting golf ball. Sanderson was as motionless as a marble statue at the moment that the Tennyson Champion spat out its muffled shot.

  The fifty grain lead and copper projectile was the weight of a dime, and the size and shape of the first half-inch of a ball point pen. It left the barrel and the suppressor at almost 3,000 feet-per-second and covered the distance to Sanderson in one-fifth of a second, hitting him very near the center of the crown of his head while he was bent over. The high velocity hollow-point slug pierced his skull, mushroomed open and shredded into pieces, releasing as much energy as a .45 caliber fired point blank, literally exploding his head as his cranial vault failed to contain the overpressure from the supersonic shockwaves.

  The slight sound of the suppressed muzzle blast arrived a half second after Sanderson’s head exploded. His three golf partners and the security detail never heard it; their minds were overloaded with the sudden sound and images of flying blood, brain, flesh, hair and bone. The snap of the supersonic bullet passing over the lake was as loud as a bullwhip’s crack and it startled the mallards into sudden flight, but neither this sound nor the flight of the ducks was noticed by the other men, as they just stared, slack jawed, at what had been the Attorney General’s head.

  The fat golfer’s heart went into instant tachycardia as they watched Sanderson’s body, headless above the exposed jawbone and fountaining blood, crumple forward and bounce once off of the smoothly manicured turf. One of the other men golfing that day, who had served in combat in Vietnam, hit the ground only a second later, his old survival reactions coming to the fore after lying dormant during three decades of peace.

  The other two men stood frozen in their places, their eyes wide and their mouths agape, their clothes splattered with blood and tissue. One of them had a dark stain spreading down the front of his khaki trousers. After more long seconds of shock the Attorney General’s two-man bodyguard team jumped from their own cart and pulled the two golfers who were still standing transfixed down to the ground between their golf carts, like cowboys seeking the protection of circled wagons during an Indian attack. Only then did they begin babbling semi-coherently into their cell phones and walkie-talkies, staying well hidden to avoid the next bullet from the unseen sniper.

  ****

  After Ranya’s utterly quiet three-hour wait in her sniper’s lair, the echoing sonic crack of her shot seemed certain to wake up any neighbors who were sleeping in on the weekend morning, and sure to attract the attention of those already up for the day. But she could not pause to worry about that, and immediately went into the escape plan she had thought out and mentally run through over and over while waiting for daybreak and Sanderson’s arrival.

  Still sitting, she broke her Tennyson Champion into its three components: the suppressor, the barrel with its mounted scope, and the grip and trigger assembly. She withdrew the empty brass shell case and dropped it into the unzipped black fanny pack lying on the cement next to her. The suppressor and grip went into the fanny pack next. The fourteen inch barrel she slid up under her t-shirt and layers of clothing and beneath her sports bra, where its smooth blued-steel came to rest snuggly between her breasts. The chamber end of the barrel and the scope she pushed down inside her track pants and the blue jeans she was wearing underneath. She then snapped on the fanny pack and pulled it around in front of her, where it would cover the lumpy bulge under her layers of clothing.

  Ranya wore a cheap blond wig under a pink and gray knitted wool Icelandic cap, pulled down so that six inches of golden hair fell on her shoulders. The track suit, knit cap, wig and fanny pack had cost her less than ten dollars at the Salvation Army thrift store in Norfolk.

  She turned the small trash can she had used for a shooter’s bench back upright, and as she pushed the missing cypress wood slat back into its place she heard a police car’s siren across the lake. She took one more look around the trash can enclosure for any items left behind, saw none, took a deep breath, stood and reached over the boards to unlatch the gate and she stepped out.

  Just under one minute had passed since her muffled shot, enough time, she hoped, for anyone already up at this hour to look out a kitchen window, and then return to their newspaper or television. Her goal was to be clear of the neighborhood in less than two minutes. Her fear was a police cruiser that might already be in place, blocking the way out to Greenspring Avenue. Her .45 pistol was locked under the seat of her motorcycle where she had left it. She had not declared war on society at large and would not shoot a local cop like Jasper Mosby in order to escape.

  Ranya didn’t hesitate. She strode purposefully back up the path beside the brick home, her face turned away from the neighbor’s house a hundred feet away across a dividing hedge. While she walked her thin beige driving gloves went into her fanny pack, and she brought out and slipped on the large pair of orange-tinted glasses she had worn in the library, back when she had begun her search for Eric Sanderson. When she reached the street she turned right on the sidewalk and began “power walking,” her arms pumping, just another slightly overweight young suburban housewife burning up the calories while the children were still asleep. A block further on she passed an elderly man across the street, but he was intent on his cocker spaniel’s bowels and didn’t even look at her.

  Ranya turned left at the stop sign, and then walked two more blocks out of the tree-lined subdivision and crossed the four-lane avenue at the traffic light. She continued past the Quick N’ Go convenience store, and ducked into the strip shopping center’s 24-hour laundromat and went straight through the rows of washing machines to the narrow corridor in back.

  In the bathroom of the laundromat, with the door bolted shut behind her, Ranya unzipped her fanny pack and dug out of it a blue baseball cap and a carefully folded department store shopping bag. She pulled off her itchy synthetic blond wig and stretch cap and dropped them into the bag, along with her orange glasses and the fanny pack. She unzipped and removed her gray warm-up jacket, then slid out the barrel and scope from against her body, wrapped it in the jacket, and placed it in the bag. Her gray warm-up pants had zippers at their ankles so that she could pull them off over her running shoes standing up.

  With the gray suit peeled away Ranya was dressed in blue jeans and a red long-sleeve sweat shirt. Her brown hair was already in a pony tail, she twisted it and piled it on top and pulled the blue ball cap down over it. After a quick look in the mirror she picked up her shopping bag, stepped out of the bathroom, and left the laundromat through the glass rear exit door to the alley which ran behind the row of shops.

  Police sirens were screaming down Greenspring Avenue from both directions, just on the other side of the shopping center, while she walked down the alley with her heart pounding furiously. Two blocks down the alley and partly around the corner her faithful red white and blue Yamaha FZR was waiting for her. It was half-concealed by a green dumpster alongside a cinder block wall, outside the back entrance of a closed tavern. As she strapped down her shopping bag under the black bungee net on the back of the bike she could hear more than one helicopter. She didn’t look up until she had removed the cable locking her black helmet to the bike’s frame, and pulled it down over her head.

  She kept to her planned route, usi
ng only secondary streets through suburban neighborhoods, until she was clear of the immediate area. She heard many more police sirens. Less than seven minutes after the fatal shot, she was on I-64 heading west at sixty miles per hour in the slow lane. She desperately wanted to twist the throttle wide open and eat up the asphalt pavement in front of her, but she forced herself to remain as inconspicuous as a twenty-one year old female assassin on a motorcycle could be. She felt certain that her guilt was flashing like a beacon, that her disassembled sniper pistol was glowing within the bag behind her, that her obvious guilt would immediately be noticed by any passing policeman on the highway or up in a helicopter.

  As she covered the miles with no destination, she saw Eric Sanderson on the 5th tee of the Greenspring Country Club again, his club across his shoulder, smiling and relaxed, laughing with old friends, enjoying his perfect life which was one continuous ascending arc of personal success and political victory. He had not minded if his latest political victory was gained over her father’s charred body. In fact he had publicly, gratefully welcomed her father’s death. Joe Bardiwell’s dead body was just a convenient stepping stone placed before him to advance his career, a minor help in establishing his national reputation.

  Whether Sanderson had personally sent the killers to the gun stores and to her house or not, he had certainly been using the murders to advance his political fortunes, which in Ranya’s mind made him a legitimate target. Someone had to pay for her father’s murder, and Sanderson was a good place to start, at least until she could find George, and hopefully learn from him who was actually giving the orders. Anyway, Ranya knew that whoever was actually behind the Stadium Massacre and the arson murders and all the rest of it was now clearly on notice. In a country where the people are armed, politicians who employ or benefit from government killer squads, well they too can be killed.