It rang with an urgent double buzz from within the green nylon aviator’s helmet bag on the seat next to him. He had to dig out a tablet computer, binoculars, a digital camera, his SIG-Sauer 9mm pistol in a brown leather holster, night vision goggles in a green plastic case and other loose gear before he could get to the phone-in-a-box. If the gum-chewing pilot with his headphones and aviator sunglasses noticed the comedy taking place on the seat behind him, he didn’t give the slightest indication.
As he had been instructed, Malvone extended the thin silver whip antenna out two feet, then placed the urgently buzzing phone box on his lap and pushed a five digit code on its small touch pad. Mr. Emerson had explained that if he ever entered the access code incorrectly three times in a row, there would be nothing left inside the metal box but acid and melted electronics, so he had better remember the number, and not screw it up. He held the ungainly brick-sized phone to his ear, tilting it to the side so the antenna cleared the helicopter’s padded ceiling
“Mr. Brown, this is Mr. Green. Can you hear me all right?”
Malvone thought that the CSO’s idea of adding a layer of security with “Mr. Brown” and “Mr. Green” was rather silly, but he was willing to play along since “Mr. Green” was paying the bills.
“I can hear you just fine Mr. Green.” His voice was actually coming through like it was bubbling up out of a deep well, and it was warbling up and down in tone, but he was understandable.
“Mr. Brown, what is the status of your company, and how soon will they be ready for customers?”
Company? Customers? This was evidently more childish code-talk. Malvone imagined that the CSO was a fan of cheap espionage thrillers. “Well, Mr. Green, they’re unpacking at their new location right now, and they could be open for business any time.”
“I’m glad to hear it. The CEO is very, very upset by current events, and especially by this morning’s golfing accident. You don’t know how upset he is. We’ve really had a nasty couple of weeks, and now with what happened this morning…well the boss finds this totally unacceptable and intolerable. He wants you to put your business plan into effect immediately, right away if that’s at all possible. Do you have any of those types of jobs we discussed already lined up yet?”
“Well, sir, frankly we had expected to have a chance to get organized at our new location for a few days, sort of get the lay of the land, do some interfacing with our local affiliates…but if the boss wants us to move up our timetable…”
“Yes, he does. He urgently wishes to see results, tangible results. You might say that we need to visibly start taking market share away from our competition right away, do you understand me Mr. Brown?”
“Yes sir, loud and clear.”
“So I can tell the boss that he’s going to see results, say, inside of twenty-four hours? Or better yet, in time for… early Sunday morning?”
He knew at once what this meant: in time for the all-important Sunday morning network television talking-head shows. As things presently stood, the shadowy right wing terrorists were seemingly striking at will, and to a certain extent this was actually the truth: he had had nothing to do with the Wilson Bridge, Senator Randolph, or this new Sanderson shooting. Now it was being left up to his STU Team to dramatically alter the growing national perception that the government was powerless to stop or even identify the domestic terrorists responsible.
Malvone got into the spirit of the CSO’s childish code talk, knowing that the phone’s warbling encryption would not allow the man to hear him almost laughing out loud as he spoke. “Yes sir, you can inform the CEO that he’ll be seeing a sharp uptrend in our company market share within that time frame.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear, and that’s what I’m going to tell him.”
“Do you want me to submit a plan for your approval before we conduct the first transaction?”
“No! Just get it done, within the parameters we discussed, but get it done by morning!”
The connection broke after a series of clicks and whistles and hums in Malvone’s ear. The pilot in front of him was still chewing his gum, his hands steady on his yoke and cyclic controls, his headphones over his ball cap and sunglasses, guiding the Eurohelo over the green fields and coffee-colored tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
25
The morning spent in the boatyard had been exactly what Ranya needed. She was too busy helping Brad to get Guajira ready for sailing to do much futile brooding. There was no chance to watch television or listen to talk radio as they got the mainsail ready; instead Brad played music CDs on the boat’s stereo. But she didn’t need to hear the news to know what a hornet’s nest she had kicked open: the police sirens and helicopters converging on the golf course had told her that already. No official confirmation was necessary to be certain that Sanderson was dead. Ranya had known a second after her shot that she had center-punched the top of his head while he was leaning over his golf ball.
After they cast off from the barge they motored out of Crosby’s side-creek and north up the congested industrial sections of the Elizabeth River, past a mile of bulk cargo terminals and container handling facilities. They finally caught a fair breeze as they passed Craney Island on their left, but they continued motoring north until they were in sight of the world’s largest naval base off their starboard bow to the east. Security vessels patrolled back and forth in front of the long line of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and two aircraft carriers which were docked at the Norfolk Naval Operations Base.
Ranya was wearing a set of light green hospital scrubs which Brad had lent her, with the ankles rolled up around her calves. It felt nice wearing Brad’s clothes; the wind made the light cotton flutter around her legs and her waist. She was steering, standing in the back of the T-shaped cockpit behind the four-foot diameter silver wheel, while Brad moved around the decks getting the mainsail ready to hoist. The center of the wheel was attached to a white pedestal in the middle of the cockpit, on top of the pedestal there was a black compass floating in clear liquid beneath a glass dome. Sometimes Brad gave her a compass course to sail, such as “steer three fifty,” or 350 degrees, almost north. Sometimes he pointed to a distant landmark and asked her to aim for that point: “head for the smokestacks.”
When he was ready he said, “Okay Ranya, put her into the wind, and I’ll haul her up.”
Brad stood a few feet from her in the front of the cockpit, one hand on each side of the open companionway hatch which led below. She turned the wheel until Guajira’s bow was facing west, directly into the wind, and Brad began hauling in on the mainsail halyard line. This white-and-red-flecked rope led from the back of the cabin top, to the base of the mast and up inside of it, to the top of the mast and over a pulley sheave, and then back down the outside of the mast to the top corner of the mainsail. With each of Brad’s two-handed pulls back on the halyard line the entire mainsail slid a yard up the slot on the back of the mast. In half a minute it was all the way to the top and flapping furiously in the wind. He wound the rope around a soup-can-sized silver winch, and put a handle into the top of it to ratchet in the last few inches, and stretch the sail tightly up the mast.
She privately admired his physique from her position behind him at the wheel. He had a nice strong back and broad shoulders, his muscles were visibly rippling under his t-shirt as he hauled back on the line and then winched it in.
“All right, turn to starboard. Steer to the northwest until the sail fills.” Brad moved from side to side in the cockpit and used other winches to adjust the thicker white and blue lines, the main sheets, which pulled the aluminum boom at the bottom edge of the mainsail in and out. Guajira leaned over and increased speed as the triangular main sail stopped fluttering and suddenly took on a single smooth tight curve from bottom to top. The boat continued to pick up more speed under the press of the wind, and the faster they went, the more breeze Ranya felt against her face.
“Now we’re going to hear the sweetest sou
nd in the world, a sound I’ve never heard on Guajira.” he said, standing just in front of her and beaming, holding onto the front of the compass pedestal. They both had to bend one leg to stand upright as Guajira motor-sailed along to windward, heeled over under the force of the wind.
Ranya smiled back at him and asked, “What sound is that?”
“Just…listen.” He turned back toward the front of the cockpit, turned the engine key to “off,” and held down the kill button. The diesel motor, which had been steadily droning in the background since they had left the boat yard, coughed and died. Its persistent clatter was suddenly gone, replaced by the smooth hiss of the fiberglass hull being driven through salt water under wind power alone.
“That’s the sound, that’s the sweetest music there is,” he said. “Turn a little more to the north, steer about 330 degrees for now.” Brad climbed up onto the high side of the cabin top and stood leaning against the slanting mast, sighting up along it, checking that the new rigging wires were still holding it straight and true under the full weight of the wind. The white mast and main sail made a stunning picture against the blue sky, this was the very first sailing mile Brad was making of what could be a life time of ocean voyages aboard Guajira.
“See that mast and sail? It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me, because it means freedom. It means crossing whole oceans, and not asking for permission, or buying tickets, or standing in lines and getting questioned and searched. It’s tropical islands and warm clear water, and skin diving any time you feel like it. It’s staying as long as you like and leaving when you want, it’s the real freedom of choice, the choice to live where you want, just the way you want.” He paused, staring up the mast again as it swung against the sky.
“It’s all of that?” asked Ranya. She wasn’t sure but she thought she saw him turn and brush away a tear with the back of his hand, but maybe it was just the wind in his eyes.
“It’s all of that and much more. It’s days and weeks completely by yourself to think and read and write, if that’s what you feel like doing. Or time to spend with only your very best friends, if that’s what you feel like, getting to know them on a deeper level than you ever could anyplace else. It’s moonlight across the water, and trade winds pushing giant cotton ball clouds along, and whole tribes of porpoises that stay with you for days on end, playing around your boat. It’s all of that every time you hoist up your mainsail and catch the wind, because it’s the same wind that’ll carry you to any place you want to go.”
She just stood behind the wheel, watching him, the compass, and the sail. He was elated; his long years of planning and work were coming together in these last few minutes, and she was genuinely happy for him and wanted to let him savor his triumphant moment. She kept watching her compass course, the angle of the wind, and the shape of the mainsail. She noticed that when she steered a little more away from the wind, the boat gained a few tenths of a knot, according to the digital speedometer by the engine panel.
“Brad, we’re making almost seven knots under the mainsail alone. How much faster will she go when you have both sails?”
“I don’t know, nine I hope, maybe ten. But you don’t get this kind of a breeze all the time. She should make 150-mile days in the trade winds, that’s what I’m hoping for. That means crossing a thousand miles of ocean on a good week, averaging everything out.”
“When’s the new jib going to be ready?”
“Oh, it should have been ready weeks ago. Never, ever believe a sail maker. They’ll promise anything to get your business. Anyway, he swears it’ll be ready next week.”
“Is that the last thing you need before you take off?”
“That’s the last big thing. Are you getting tired of steering yet? You’re really a natural, you know it? You have a knack for keeping the sail full.”
“I’m just steering 330, like you asked me to.”
“No, it’s more than that. You’ve got a feel for it, I can tell. You must have salt water in your blood.”
****
The STU Team’s new forward operating base was located deep in rural Chesapeake County Virginia, south of Norfolk and only a few miles from the North Carolina border. Through a murky and undefined mechanism they had been given access to a small annex of the old South River Naval Auxiliary Landing Field, which had been abandoned a decade earlier during a round of base closings. The annex adjoined the primary airfield, and at some point in decades past it had been used in training Navy helicopter pilots.
Since the base closure, the landing field and the annex had been used periodically for military exercises and law enforcement training. Navy SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Special Forces, Delta and the Rangers, and certain law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the DEA had used it both as a staging area, and at other times as a target, in various training scenarios. At different times the base had pretended to be an Iraqi chemical weapons depot, a Taliban POW camp, an enemy airfield and barracks, and a Colombian FARC guerrilla cocaine factory.
The few civilians living within earshot were used to blacked-out C-130s roaring in as loud as freight locomotives for midnight landings and immediate spin-around takeoffs. They were nonplussed by off-target parachutists in camouflage uniforms dropping into their soybean fields by day or by night. They paid no mind to all types of helicopters that came and went without any discernable pattern, including many that were painted the military anti-infrared color, which to most civilians appeared to be black. (This had given rise to the much-derided “myth” of black helicopters, which of course actually did exist by the hundreds, flown by U.S. Army pilots.)
So the assorted STU vehicles coming in from several directions at different times passed without notice. The vehicles all fit into one of the two rusting and decrepit fifty-by-fifty-yard helicopter hangars on the landing field annex, with plenty of room left over for their gear.
Malvone had his pilot circle the old base at 1,000 feet in order to get a look at his team’s new home and the area around it. The Naval Auxiliary Landing Field was bordered on three sides by branches of the sluggish black water South River, and tidal marshland beyond that to the edges of dry farmland. A narrow canal off of one branch separated the annex to the south from the runway and most of the abandoned buildings of the landing field to the north. The two parts of the base were joined by a single one-lane vehicle bridge, which was semi-permanently barricaded by a row of refrigerator-sized concrete blocks. The entire base and its annex were surrounded by a rusty chain link perimeter fence.
Scrawny pine trees covered most of the higher ground which was interspersed through the marshland around the old Navy property, and covered most of what was not paved over on the base itself. The concrete runways and service roads and aircraft aprons were webbed with cracks from which grew weeds and bushes and even small determined trees.
The annex was located on the southern end of the base, a mile from the old control tower and the primary cluster of buildings which had supported the landing field operations. The annex had its own separate gates and service roads leading to the state roads. The base was as remote and private a place as was likely to be found only twenty miles from an east coast city as big as Norfolk Virginia.
Besides the two primary hangars, the annex contained several cinderblock workshops and offices, and some smaller metal-sided storage sheds. While he orbited the old base in a bank, Malvone spotted a couple of STU vehicles on a narrow black top state road heading in: a thirty-foot motor home and a blue conversion van. The convoy had, as planned, been arriving in staggered intervals to maintain a low profile. Finally he had the pilot set the Eurohelo down on a faded yellow-circled “H” landing spot in front of one of the large hangars. An old windsock which had once been orange swung from a rusty pole, and that was the extent of the working airport landing aids.
Blue and Gold Team leaders Tim Jaeger and Michael Shanks met him as he stepped down from the chopper. They were dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts and ball caps on
the warm day. Their pistols were worn holstered high on their belts on their right sides, concealment being unnecessary on their new base.
“Tim, Mike, how’d the move go? What’s the place like?”
Jaeger answered, “No problem, except it’s a bitch finding your way in here right at the end. The paper road maps don’t agree with our electronic maps, and neither ones match what’s really here. Some real morons made those maps, let me tell you. But we’re thinking that if we had a hard time finding the way in, so will anybody else.”
“Was the gate open? How did that work?”
Shanks had come down first with the advance team on Friday. He said, “No, it was chained shut. Some Navy guy in civvies was waiting for us in a white van. He unlocked it and got the power turned on, showed us around, and left. We’ve got our own lock on it now, and that’s it.”
“Did he ask who you were with?” It was essential that the presence of the STU Team leave no ripples upon the local waters.
“He asked if we were SEALs.”
“What did you say?”
“I gave him the old ‘I’d love to tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’ line. He laughed and then he took off, and that’s the last we’ve seen of anybody from the Navy—or anyone else, for that matter.”
The Navy’s long-haired and civilian-attired counter-terrorist SEAL team was based fifteen miles northeast of the auxiliary landing field on the Fleet Combat Training Center at Dam Neck, right on the Atlantic. This unit had been commissioned in 1980 as SEAL Team Six, and had been renamed the “Development Group” in the 1990s in a rather lame attempt to disguise its identity and its mission.
Many clandestine and covert units gave themselves generic-sounding bureaucratic names as camouflage, much as Malvone had done in naming the Special Training Unit. One of the STU’s commo techs had served with the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, which was later renamed a half dozen times in an attempt to hide between Pentagon cracks. In more recent years, even such nondescript bureaucratic names had given way to entirely classified nomenclature. These classified units, when they were known of at all by outsiders, were referred to by informal tags such as “Gray Wolf” and “Lincoln Gold.” When their true unit names made it into the press, their names were changed, and the very existence of the units was denied once again.
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 35
