Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  She was watching the fire through her tears, watching the yellow flames licking upwards, illuminating its own roiling cloud of smoke. The flashing blue and red lights of a police car were visible near the house now.

  “Ranya, this is crazy, we have to get away from here! Come up to the peninsula with me, stay with me on Guajira.”

  “You want me to stay with you until you get your sail, and you leave?”

  “No! I want you to go with me. Come with me, please, let’s get out of here before they find us! Please, come with me… I don’t want to say goodbye to you, I don’t want to leave you, I don’t want to lose you, but I’ve got to go, I’ve got to get out of here!” Brad was trying not to join her in crying, but it was a losing effort. “I’ve been threatened, I’ve been blackmailed, they said they’d put me in a cage with the terrorists. It’s not like it used to be, you don’t get lawyers anymore if you’re called a terrorist—you just disappear! Ranya, they’re not joking, they’re not kidding, they’re not playing games.”

  “You think I don’t know that? They killed my father! They burn people alive! They shot up a stadium and framed Jimmy Shifflett for it. But I’m still not going to run away! I don’t care, I’m not running away! Screw them, screw them all, I’ll kill all those bastards before I run away, I swear I will!” They were both crying now, holding one another, and the pent-up words poured out of her in a torrent. “You think I don’t want to sail away with you? Do you think I’m crazy? Of course I want to go sailing with you, you big moron! Of course I do. But I swear to God, I’m going to kill those bastards first…”

  They just stood in the cockpit sobbing together for a long time, watching the fire. There were more muffled sounds of explosions. Periodically flaming embers flew out from the fire almost like rockets or Roman candles.

  As the fire gradually diminished in intensity, Brad took a deep breath, and said, “All right. All right. Okay… If you can’t come with me now, then I’ll stay and help you. I’ll help you find George. And I’ll help you find out who sent him to your house.”

  She squeezed him even more tightly. “You don’t have to…you don’t have to…you’ve worked so hard to be ready to go…”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care, I won’t leave you. I won’t go if you can’t come with me.”

  “After we find George, after we find out what he knows…”

  “Ranya, after that, we can’t do any more. We just can’t. What ever we find out, who could we tell? Not the FBI. If the people who are doing it are inside the government, they’d find out about us. Maybe there’s a reporter we could tell, maybe TOP News would put it on television…and we could put it all on the internet and hope it gets out… But that’s all we can do! After George, will you come with me? Will that be enough?”

  She only hesitated a few seconds. “All right…I will. After we find George, after we deal with him and find out what he knows, I’ll come with you.”

  And all the while the Cowboy Junkies played on undeterred, their silky rhythms just as tight and hard driving as ever. The house fire was a horrible thing, but Brad still couldn’t help having the unforgivable thought that it was beautiful too, in a terrible way, illuminating its own rust-colored cloud on this moonless night, and reflecting a path of golden shards across the black water to Guajira.

  28

  Ranya parked Brad’s truck down the alley two blocks away from her low-rent East Ocean View apartment. She had circled the neighborhood once already looking for signs of surveillance, trying not to stare at every vagrant, delivery truck and parked van. Since watching the house burning, and becoming certain in the day’s new light that it was indeed the Edmond’s house, her paranoia had ratcheted up to stratospheric levels. It became a certainty in her mind that whoever was killing members of the Black Water Rod and Gun Club would sooner or later turn their attention to her, if they had not already. She already knew that the FBI would be moving mountains trying to discover the identity of the Attorney General’s assassin, and she was intelligent enough to realize that it was impossible that she had not left a single clue.

  They never went back to sleep after the fire, they stayed up and watched the hopeless efforts of the fire engines until the fire burned out, and they talked until after dawn. They decided that Ranya would take Brad’s truck to her apartment, and get the things she would need for a few days. Then they would rendezvous up in Poquoson on the other side of Hampton Roads, after Brad had anchored Guajira. It was windless and flat calm again in the early morning hours after they left the anchorage, and they brainstormed ideas for finding George on the two hour motor run back from the Nansemond anchorage to Portsmouth.

  Brad dropped her off at the boatyard, nosing up to the barge just close enough for her to jump off of Guajira’s bow. Then he put the diesel into reverse and backed away, turned, and motored up the Elizabeth River toward the bay again. She had her .45 pistol safely in her fanny pack for the leap ashore. The disassembled Tennyson was hidden in Guajira’s aft stateroom, in a locker under sheets and towels. Its existence was still a secret from Brad. She had dropped the thrift-store track suit, wool hat and wig overboard on the motor run back to Portsmouth, while he was down below. No fiber left behind at her sniper’s lair would be allowed to betray her.

  Ranya went straight to his truck, leaving her Yamaha parked out of sight behind the business office for the time being. After Brad found his new anchorage by the wildlife refuge, she would meet him ashore at a restaurant they both knew, and then they would drive back together in his truck for her to retrieve her Yamaha. That was the plan.

  Nobody had ever seen Ranya in the red Ford F-250, so if her apartment was under observation, she might have a chance of spotting them before they recognized her. On the other hand, they might have Brad’s license plate on a watch list already… There was no end to the spiral of paranoia. Her stomach was twisted into a hard knot, and she could feel that her mouth was so parched that if she had to speak she would not be able to do so without betraying her fear. All she could do was tug her ball cap down low over her sunglasses, keep her head down, and walk along the side of the alley toward the iron back gate of the Alcazar Apartments. It had already been unlocked for the day and she went right in through the breezeway.

  If they were lying in wait, if they were going to ambush her, it would be here. For the walk from the truck to her apartment her cocked and locked .45 was stuck inside her jeans on the left side, its butt toward her belt buckle, covered by her red sweatshirt. Two spare magazines were in the back left pocket of her blue jeans. On her way into Norfolk she had stopped and bought a fat Sunday newspaper out of a curbside coin box, now she held the paper over her waist with her left hand, covering the pistol; her right hand was under the paper, on the pistol’s grip, with her thumb resting on the safety.

  She had made the decision that if any plain-clothed men tried to grab her, she would draw and shoot, and shoot for the head since they would certainly be wearing kevlar. Her thinking had evolved over the past twenty-four hours since she had walked out of the neighborhood by the lake without her .45 pistol. Keeping the Jasper Mosbys of the world in mind, she had decided that she still would not shoot a uniformed local cop, but any other armed undercover agents who tried to stop her would be fair game. Watching the house burn last night, and imagining the Edmonds family trapped and burning, had pushed her toward these new personal “rules of engagement.” But she saw no one at all as she walked through the breezeway. She unlocked her door and slipped inside of the one bedroom apartment without incident.

  Once the door was locked and dead-bolted behind her she stripped down and enjoyed a much-needed shower and shampoo. She left her always-loaded .45 on top of the toilet tank within easy reach.

  On the drive from Portsmouth to Ocean View she’d tried to catch what radio news she could. The house fire in northern Suffolk County had not even rated a mention, and there was only follow-up reporting on the assassination of the Virginia Attorney General on the new
s at the top of the hour. She found it highly interesting that the police were pursuing a white man driving a black pickup truck.

  National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” spent only a minute on the Sanderson killing; it was sandwiched into a long feature story on “the militia movement and domestic terrorism.” The NPR special report was describing as established fact a vast right wing militia conspiracy theory. The plot ran from Shifflett and the Stadium Massacre, through the mosque shooting, to the attempted bombing of the Norfolk federal building, the sabotage of the Wilson Bridge, and the assassinations of Senator Randolph and Virginia Attorney General Eric Sanderson.

  For most of this lead story the NPR reporter was interviewing Rutherford Cavanaugh, a so-called expert on militia violence from some anti-gun left-wing think tank. Not even mentioned in their story were the gun store arson-murder attacks…par for the course for the left-tilting “Nationalized People’s Radio.” The conclusion of their “experts” was that the solution to the outbreak of right wing domestic terrorism would lie in much tighter restrictions on gun ownership by the general public, especially “sniper rifles,” and a harsh crackdown on fanatical “anti-government groups,” who took a dangerously literal view of the Bill of Rights.

  They just don’t get it, Ranya thought. They’re standing in a hole up to their necks, and their solution is to dig faster. They want to put out a raging fire with buckets of gasoline.

  After drying and brushing her hair and changing into a clean black t-shirt and black nylon running shorts, she fixed a breakfast of orange juice and cold cereal. Finally she spread the Sunday paper out on the small kitchen table. On the bottom of the front page there was a wide-angle overhead photograph of the lake by the golf course, and the 5th hole where Sanderson had been killed. An “X” was printed on a brushy spot several hundred yards north of her firing position at the end of the finger lake; a dotted line marked the presumed trajectory of the fatal bullet. The “X” was located on a public swale between the residential neighborhood and the Greenspring Country Club; it was where the “fisherman” had been seen by an eyewitness scurrying to the black pickup truck.

  The incorrectly identified sniper’s location pointed out an advantage to using a light high velocity hollow-point bullet like the one she had fired from her .223 Tennyson. Not enough of Sanderson’s head, or the fatal bullet, would be left sufficiently intact to accurately indicate the direction the shot had come from. With the bullet fragmented into tiny bits, the police would be hard pressed to even narrow down its caliber, much less recover a so-called “ballistic fingerprint.” The fact that the paper did not mention the caliber of the rifle which had killed Sanderson seemed to confirm her theory.

  With so little evidence to go on, most of the articles focused on the remarkable life and many achievements of the fast-rising Attorney General, who had been cut down in his prime, just when he was standing on the edge of greatness and ready to take his place on the national stage. Foremost among his recent accomplishments had been the enactment of the FIST program for highway firearms inspections; this was described as only the most recent effort of his lifelong crusade against gun violence.

  Nowhere in the article did it mention the phalanx of bodyguards armed to the teeth with high-capacity pistols and submachine guns which had surrounded him everywhere he went in public. Instead he was portrayed almost as a Gandhi-like figure, a proponent of peaceful conflict resolution, and a martyr who had bravely faced down gun-toting right wing terrorist gangs with the last breath of his life.

  A martyr my ass, Ranya thought. A “martyr” who had spoken approvingly of the murder of the “merchants of death,” gun dealers like her father. She closed the paper in disgust and pushed it aside, then turned on her little color television. It was time for the Sunday morning talking head shows.

  Shortly after ten she found “Face the Press” on CBA. The host was gently interviewing Art Mountjoy, the Department of Homeland Security “Czar” with the bull neck and the greasy black pompadour. Who gets that man ready for TV, Ranya wondered?

  ****

  “That’s right, Tom, we do see this as an organized conspiracy. There’s nothing at all ‘spontaneous’ about these killings.”

  “Then who is actually behind it, pulling the strings? Since the Stadium Massacre we’ve had a United States Senator assassinated, the Attorney General of Virginia was shot and killed yesterday, and last night Clarence Wilkerson, the Philadelphia police chief, was killed virtually on his own door step. Who’s behind these assassinations? Who’s giving the orders?”

  “Well, Tom, we all know that Senator Randolph was a long-time advocate of strong common-sense firearms laws, and she was murdered in cold blood last Tuesday only hours after the assault rifle law went into effect. Attorney General Sanderson was also very strong on gun-safety issues, and he was in Norfolk kicking off the new highway inspection program when he was murdered. And Chief Wilkerson was the driving force behind the ‘Philadelphia Anti-Gun Enforcement’ division, which was very successfully taking firearms out of the hands of individuals who had lost their right to possess them.”

  The homeland security czar failed to mention that the PAGE Team had been working in close partnership with the BATFE as part of a national pilot program together with ten other large cities. The PAGE Team and the ATF were culling through an extensive network of databases going back over thirty years, ferreting out firearms owners who had committed misdemeanors years or even decades earlier. Recently passed laws in Pennsylvania and other states stripped the right to keep and bear arms from broad categories of non-violent misdemeanor offenders, and the PAGE Team was pursuing them with a vengeance.

  Using convoluted and highly-parsed legalisms, the PAGE unit was systematically taking away the right of armed self-defense from thousands of law-abiding Philadelphians, many of whom lived in rough neighborhoods where nonexistent “police protection” was a bitter joke.

  The PAGE Teams did virtually nothing to disarm actual violent armed felons, who never bought firearms through legal channels, and who therefore never showed up on the PAGE Team’s databases of firearms owners. In the end the PAGE units had virtually no effect on actual rates of street crime, except to make it easier and safer for violent felons, who had less to worry about from their more and more frequently unarmed and defenseless victims.

  The homeland security czar also didn’t mention some other information that he was privy to, which had not been made public. On Friday, Senator Carly Weiner of Oregon had had her armored Lincoln Continental limousine drilled by a high powered rifle bullet, possibly from a fifty caliber sniper rifle. The bullet had pierced the inch-thick bullet-resistant Lexan pane of one side window, passed within inches of the homeliest female nose in the Senate, and exited out through the opposite window. This had happened at a red light on Fox Hall Road, in posh northwestern Washington DC, and the clear implication was that her schedule and route had been compromised in advance, by someone with inside knowledge.

  In addition, the Governor of New Jersey had had a brush with death Saturday afternoon in his helicopter, as it lifted off from the pad behind the Governor’s mansion. It was a hundred feet in the air when the tail rotor hub exploded. The Governor was seriously injured in the crash landing, and the pilot was killed. The cause of the “accident” was being kept a secret, but it was known within law enforcement that the “mechanical failure” had in fact been caused by a rifle bullet.

  And finally, the homeland security “czar” didn’t mention the countless reports pouring in of bullets shattering windows in federal office buildings in almost all fifty states, putting them practically under a state of siege, with nervous counter-sniper teams hunkered down on their rooftops behind hastily filled and stacked sand bags. These incidents, when they were reported at all, were still being treated as local events…but the homeland security boss knew that they were spreading like an epidemic.

  So far no arrests had been made in any of these shootings, although several untra
ceable junk rifles had been found a few-hundred yards from the scenes. Some of the rifles were left with highly disparaging and often obscene notes directed toward the federal government. Art Mountjoy didn’t mention any of this.

  The host pressed on: “But how are these shootings connected? Other than the obvious, that high profile advocates of gun control have been targeted?”

  “Well Tom, we’re working aggressively to nail down the answer to that question. We’ve directly linked the stadium sniper James Shifflett to both the Norfolk car bomb explosion and the Wilson Bridge sabotage, through what appears to be a secret militia group in Virginia.”

  “The two bombers were both Green Beret combat veterans, isn’t that true?”

  “That’s correct Tom.”

  “Are all of these domestic terrorists military veterans?”

  “Most of the ones that we’ve identified, yes.”

  “Is their motivation simply hatred for gun control laws? Didn’t Shifflett attempt to blame the Stadium Massacre on Muslim radicals? And of course, the mosque in Norfolk was attacked…”

  ****

  Ranya switched off the television. They were so far from the truth that they were living on another planet. Whoever was actually behind the attacks was artfully doing it in such a way that the so-called “militia movement” would be blamed, most likely to pave the way for a further government crackdown against gun owners. They had killed her father, a gun dealer, and they had killed several members of the Black Water Rod and Gun Club, a bunch of harmless old coots if there ever was one. It was obvious that the Black Water boys were now going to be painted as dangerous anti-government extremists, when they were simply convenient patsies like Jimmy Shifflett. This operation had already sideswiped both herself and Brad Fallon, and they could both be in extreme danger, as “loose ends” to be disposed of as the killers worked their way down their list. Not even to mention the efforts the FBI would be making to catch Sanderson’s killer…