Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  It would be so easy to forget about “George the Fed,” and take off with Brad… Just forget all of this insanity and head out into the Atlantic, sailing south for the tropics. So simple to hoist up Guajira’s sails and leave all this madness behind. So tempting, to spend years of days swimming and diving and sailing and making love with Brad Fallon under the warm tropical sun on Guajira...

  ****

  Guajira blended in with the usual weekend pleasure boat traffic, as she motor-sailed up the lower bay past Hampton. Under her full 500-square foot mainsail, and assisted by the Perkins turbo diesel, she was making over seven knots of boat speed through the water to the north-northeast on the ten to fifteen knot westerly breeze. It was a perfect mid-September day, combining warm air temperatures with just enough wind to form tiny whitecaps on the sun-lit green water. Random clouds left vast shadows dappling the bay, as they drifted away to the east. From the cockpit stereo speakers, the Counting Crows were singing about Mr. Jones and me…

  To the west, buildings on the paper-thin Hampton shoreline jutted like broken teeth above the horizon. To the north there was a clear horizon all the way up the bay, and on the eastern horizon Brad could just make out four black dashes. These dashes were the man-made rock islands of the twenty-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, where the causeways plunged into the tunnels under the two separate ship channels. The “bridge-tunnel” spanned the open mouth of the Chesapeake from Virginia Beach on the south to the Delmarva Peninsula on the north.

  Guajira’s sixty-foot-tall mast prevented her from being able to pass under the low causeway sections of the bridge-tunnel. When the time came Brad would have to escape from the confines of the bay through one of the two ship channels over the tunnels, or through the smaller North Channel under the high bridge section just below the Virginia Eastern Shore.

  These three choke points controlled access into and out of the Chesapeake Bay for any vessels higher than twenty feet above the water, and since 9-11 they were closely watched by the Coast Guard. Considering the alternatives, Brad wondered if it might not be wisest to wait until next Saturday to leave, when the largest number of boats would be moving in and out, and the Coast Guard would be their busiest. Guajira could hopefully leave inconspicuously on its one-way voyage mixed in with scores of day sailors…unless the feds had put Guajira on a watch list. He considered the pros and cons of painting a false name on her transom, which might improve his chances at binocular inspection distances. But if Guajira was nonetheless stopped and boarded for an inspection, a name which did not match his vessel documentation papers and hull identification numbers would be tantamount to an admission of guilt. This was yet another Catch-22, another aspect of the ever increasing dread he was feeling.

  As he motor-sailed up the bay under autopilot control he sat in the open companionway, his bare feet on the top step of the teak ladder, his arms resting on each side of the cabin top. This is where he would primarily keep his lookout at sea. When he was sailing solo he would come up here for a check every so often at night. He had a marine radar detector to tell him when Guajira was being painted by a ship’s radar; this would provide an extra measure of safety offshore at night. He also had a Furuno radar still in its box below, bought during one of his account-depleting shopping sprees. He intended to install it down-island when he would have the time. Given his time constraints he felt that the radar was a luxury, not a necessity, and it could wait.

  If Ranya came with him, they could take turns on watch, or just stay below together while the boat looked after herself…

  Guajira was close-reaching along, the wind just forward of her port beam, her mainsail eased out a bit on the starboard side to translate that wind into forward drive. For a few minutes Brad had been watching a big two-masted ketch running before the wind, sailing eastward for the open Atlantic. The ketch appeared to be about sixty-feet long, with a royal-blue hull. She had a traditional-looking shape, with a clipper bow and bowsprit up front, a low pilothouse on top, and a gray zodiac-type inflatable hanging from davits across her stern.

  Brad reached inside the companionway to the rack where he kept his binoculars and his hand-held VHF radio. His hand-held VHF and Guajira’s more powerful hard-wired VHF with its masthead antenna were one area where Brad considered older to be better: the newer models were all digital, and sent out an identification code every time the microphone was keyed, making anonymity an impossibility.

  He hailed the other vessel on channel 16. “Eastbound ketch off my port bow, this is the northbound sloop over.”

  A few moments later a female voice crackled from his hand held. “Northbound sloop, this is the sailing vessel Mariah, switch and answer on 71, over.”

  He punched in channel 71. “Mariah, this is…” Brad hesitated to name his vessel on the open radio waves, because he knew that any of the channels could be monitored by the Coast Guard. “Mariah, this is the northbound sloop. You’re looking mighty good, captain. I just wanted a radio check, over.”

  “We read you loud and clear skipper.”

  “Thanks Mariah…out.”

  The big ketch passed a quarter mile in front of Guajira’s bow. Looking through his Steiner binoculars, this was close enough for Brad to see a middle-aged couple in the center-cockpit between the masts, under a blue canvas Bimini-top awning. They exchanged arm waves in the distance, and the ketch kept sliding and rolling along to the east, sailing wing-and-wing with her mainsail out to port, her genoa jib poled out to starboard, and the mizzen sail on the smaller second mast down and furled on its boom.

  Part of Brad wished he were following her out onto the Atlantic, right now, today! He had full water and fuel tanks, and enough canned and boxed and refrigerated food on board to make it nonstop to South America, much less the Bahamas. There was nothing to stop him from easing out his main sheet and turning the wheel to starboard, and following Mariah out onto the ocean.

  Down below he had an old working jib which had come with the boat, a tan kevlar blade which would fit up Guajira’s roller furling jib’s slot, but it would only fill half of the fore triangle back to the mast. It would be an easy matter to bring it on deck after clearing the bay, and haul it up by himself while sailing downwind in these light conditions. It wouldn’t get him the 150-mile days he expected with his 600-square-foot mast-overlapping genoa, combined with the 500-square-foot main, but it would do, it was a viable option. The bridge-tunnel was just seven miles away, dead down wind to the south-southeast, and beyond it was the open Atlantic and freedom.

  Instead, he was sailing north to hide Guajira up a creek in Poquoson, to wait for his new genoa jib.

  But of course, the missing sail was hardly the primary reason he was sailing up the bay instead of out to sea: Ranya Bardiwell had changed everything. The red bikini she had worn yesterday was still hanging by a pair of clothespins from the top lifeline on the starboard side, between Brad and the open Atlantic. He laughed at the idea, he laughed at the frailty of his determination, that an ounce of shiny red spandex could so totally cloud his vision.

  The bikini had been dry since minutes after it had been hung up yesterday, but Brad would not take it down. It was a tangible reminder of Ranya’s presence on board Guajira, and now in his life. Looking at the miniscule patches of red fabric he could see and feel the soft skin which it had barely concealed on their swim, and after...

  He wanted her back on board. He wanted to see that red bikini stretched over her sexy curves again, he wanted her sitting in the cockpit touching-close to him, he wanted to see her standing behind the wheel with a smile on her face in the sunshine. He wanted her in his forward V-berth; he wanted to make love to her again under the open foredeck hatch, with gentle breezes pouring down to caress their tangled bodies...

  The two red triangles could also be interpreted as storm-warning pennants: Brad recognized the signs. He was falling for the girl; he was no longer thinking clearly, he was sailing toward danger. But danger was the price that she asked, and that
was the bargain he had struck.

  In another month that red bikini might have been stretched around an eager young Dutch or Danish tourist, or a raven-haired Colombian or Venezuelan beauty, and with no entangling snares or trip wires leading back to the USA.

  Well, that was done, and it no longer mattered. He’d found a girl who was gorgeous, smart, and tough enough to endure the frequently uncomfortable life aboard an ocean yacht; a girl who could match him in swimming and diving, who rode motorcycles, and was even a shooter. She was practically perfect for him in every way, except for that one small detail: she was determined to find and interrogate and in all likelihood kill a certain federal agent before she would go. And, incredibly, he had agreed to help her!

  Her red bikini fluttered on the breeze, pointing the way to the Atlantic. Now that he had enjoyed an afternoon and night with Ranya, he couldn’t imagine sailing away without her. He was thrilled inside just knowing that she would be waiting for him at their rendezvous point, he was going to crush her in his embrace, he could not wait to be kissing her again…but he could only hope that she would want him as much as he wanted her. “Morning-afters” could bring cold reevaluations, they could vex and surprise with mixed emotions, second thoughts, bitter regrets…

  Brad had no second thoughts, he was crazy about Ranya, and he wanted to see her again, to hold her, to swim with her in warm clear Caribbean water, to make love to her again and again beneath the sun and the stars on Guajira. He just hoped that she would still want him, the day after… Would she even show up in Poquoson? Brad knew from painful experience that a night filled with passion and promises could be followed by an unexplained no-show the next day.

  The blue-hulled ketch Mariah slid off to the east, sailing down wind through sun lit whitecaps. That should be Guajira he thought, and in another week it will be, but I won’t be sailing solo, I’ll have a lover and a partner to share the sea miles and the lagoons and the coral reefs. He nudged the silver throttle lever on the side of the steering pedestal forward until the tachometer read 3,000 RPMs.

  29

  Liddy Mosby’s husband Jasper pulled their Ford Expedition on to the shoulder, and they waited for the second and last fire truck to make the wide turn back onto the county road. When it was out of the way he proceeded up the Edmonds’ long curving drive. The Expedition was their own vehicle, but it had a department-issued police radio installed in the ceiling console above them, turned down so that the dispatcher’s voice was just barely audible.

  The off-duty Suffolk police lieutenant parked on the grass away from the mud-tracked parking circle overlooking the smoldering pit. A layer of wet ashes and mud covered the area around the pit for a hundred feet. A pair of soot-blackened chimneys standing ninety feet apart marked what had been a local landmark, on the bluffs where the Nansemond River spilled into the James.

  Liddy Mosby was a handsome woman with well-coiffed brunette hair who did not show all of her fifty years. She was wearing her yellow floral-print church dress with matching yellow high heels, and she had no desire to tramp around in the ashes and mud left behind by the fire fighters.

  She said, “I’ll just wait here honey. You take your time.” She was listening to AM talk radio out of Norfolk, with the windows up and the engine and the air conditioner still running. Once Jasper stepped out, she turned the volume up to a more comfortable level.

  Usually Sunday talk radio was a boring series of computer, gardening and quack herbal remedy shows, but because of the recent chain of events stretching back two weeks to the Stadium Massacre, the topic was still domestic terrorism. The Sunday garden show had been preempted again, and in its place the regular local weekday afternoon host was in the studio. He was beginning his third week of daily shows, which had started immediately after the Stadium Massacre had been connected to Tidewater, in the person of one Jimmy Shifflett. As they had been for two weeks without a break, the phone lines were jammed with callers pushing their pet theories and spreading rumors and half-truths.

  Liddy Mosby was an independent thinker with strong opinions, which is why she listened to talk radio, and never watched the network television news programs, (with the exception of TOP News). It was her belief that the liberal TV networks were controlled by closet Marxists, who in their secret hearts wanted to brainwash Americans into accepting a socialist government, controlled by the one-worlders at the UN.

  Other than her family and her church, the only things that Liddy Mosby enjoyed more than AM talk radio were her favorite conservative internet web sites, and above all of them she loved FreeAmericans. Writing under the name “Tin Lizzy” she was able to put forward her own theories on any subject, and mix it up in the ideological free-for-all with the best of them.

  Jasper still read the daily paper, the Norfolk Star, but Liddy hadn’t touched newsprint since she had discovered the internet years before. Why read one paper, when you can read them all on the web? She was too polite to ever say so, but she considered herself far better informed than anyone she knew in her personal life, because she was mentored by experts in every field on FreeAmericans. But the computer was at home, and she was in the Expedition, so she settled for listening to AM talk radio as the best substitute, while her husband went to do a little after-church police business.

  ****

  Jasper Mosby got out and walked over to see the North Region weekend shift supervisor, Sergeant Bob Price, who was talking with Suffolk’s arson investigator. “Good morning Bob, morning Henry. Anybody heard from the family yet?” There was a chance that they had been out of town when the fire struck.

  The uniformed sergeant answered, “Nope, afraid not Jasper. They have a daughter who goes to William and Mary, but her sorority says she was home for the weekend, right here. It’s looking like they were probably all inside: Burgess, his wife, and both kids.”

  “Damn… Fine family, fine people. Henry, are you going to be able to get down in there today?”

  “Hi Jasper, sorry about calling you on your weekend. No, it’s still too hot. It’s still smoldering down there, the whole house is right down in the cellar. That’s lot of lumber; and now it’s like a giant charcoal pit. The trucks brought what water they could; they contained it, but…”

  “Sweet ever-loving Jesus… Down in there… It must have been like hell itself.” Mosby asked, “So how come we’re treating it like a crime scene? You really think it’s arson already?” He gestured to the crime scene investigators who were lifting out white plaster tire-track molds.

  Sergeant Price said, “Let’s take a walk, Jasper.” He led them down the drive a hundred yards to where thick hedgerows crowded one side of the asphalt, and then he took them through a break in the hedges and pointed underneath. Small numbered plastic markers indicated where evidence had been recovered. “We found blood trails over on the slope, and drag marks leading to the driveway. And we found some fresh brass under here.”

  “The Edmonds had guard dogs didn’t they?” Mosby already knew the answer to this question. He knew that the Edmonds’ two Dobermans had come from the same bitch that had produced Joe Bardiwell’s dog. Mosby could already see where the evidence was leading, but he wanted to hear what Price had found on his own, and he didn’t want to reveal too much about his own friendly relationship with the Bardiwells and Burgess Edmonds, a relationship developed by being a long-time regular at Freedom Arms.

  “That’s what their neighbors say, two Dobermans. Nobody’s seen them. But we’ve got blood that’s probably from the dogs, and we’ve got the brass.”

  “Let me take a wild guess: ten millimeter?”

  “Good guess Jasper, how’d you know?”

  “Just a hunch.” Actually it was more than a hunch, because he already had his own ten millimeter shell case. Phil Carson had given it to him when he was leaving Freedom Arms Saturday a week ago, the day they had found Joe Bardiwell murdered and his house and his store burned.

  He had never logged the shell in as evidence. He knew what it meant, a
nd he knew that reporting the ammunition, which was used by the feds in their subguns, would have caused more problems than it would have solved.

  Price pointed across the grassy slope and said, “Judging from the blood, it looks like the dogs were shot over there and dragged to the road about here and carried away in a vehicle. Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to kill the dogs and take them away, but they left a lot of blood and they left their brass.”

  “So Lieutenant, you agree with us then, somebody shot the dogs and torched the house?” asked the arson investigator.

  “That’s as good of a working theory as any I can think of.”

  “But why’d they bother to take the dogs? If they weren’t trying to conceal the crime, why not leave the dogs out there? They left the blood and the brass, that’s almost as good, so why take the dogs?”

  “Good questions Bob, I don’t know. Maybe he was in a hurry, maybe he just made a mistake. Why did you say ‘they’?”

  “Tire tracks. We got a couple of castings where they went off the circle. Different vehicles; trucks or SUVs it looks like. Fresh from last night. So why would they take the dogs when there’s so much other evidence?”

  “Bob, maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they weren’t worried about the investigation. Maybe they have a reason not to worry about the investigation. You know, a lot of things don’t make sense any more.” Mosby was wondering how far he should go in sharing his own theory with Price.

  On the way back up the hill they were overtaken by a black Crown Victoria. The car pulled to a stop next to them and a rear window slid down. A slight blond female in the back seat asked Price, who was in uniform, “Hello, um, Sergeant? Can you tell me who’s in charge around here? Who’s the supervisor?” She spoke with a sing-songy Texas twang, like a lost Dixie Chick asking for directions.