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Enemies Foreign And Domestic

Page 42

by Matthew Bracken


  Price and Mosby looked at each other; Mosby was senior but he was technically off-duty. Lucky I’m still in my church suit, he thought. Some feds would sneer at him as a local hayseed cop if he was in his usual weekend boots and blue jeans, working an active crime scene.

  “I’m in charge. Lieutenant Mosby, Suffolk PD. What can I do for you?”

  Three of the doors opened and a lady and two men climbed out; the men wore jackets and ties, the lady a blue pants suit. Mosby guessed they were all in their late thirties. The woman was fairly attractive, if on the small side for a federal agent. Their driver stayed behind the wheel.

  The lady briefly flipped open her credentials, then snapped them shut. “Hi Lieutenant, I’m Kayla Coleridge.” Her voice went up on the last syllable, turning her sentence into a question like an air-headed southern sorority sister. “I’m the Special-Agent-In-Charge of Norfolk ATF. We’re asserting federal control over the Edmonds property.”

  Mosby was taken aback. “Now, why would that be?”

  “Sorry Lieutenant, but that’s protected information. It’s terrorism related. Suffice it to say it’s part of an ongoing federal investigation.” A muscular agent with short-cropped hair stood apart from Coleridge, leaning against the car with his arms folded.

  “Will you be needing our assistance then?”

  “No, we’ll be bringing in our own team. Turn over anything you have to Special Agent Hammet, he’s the ASIC, my assistant. If you have any questions, you can reach our office here.” She handed Mosby her business card, it had “ATF” and a thumb-print-sized gold representation of her badge embossed on it.

  “Okay then, Ma’am, we’ll pack up and clear out.” He handed her his own Suffolk PD business card in return, and she slid it into her waist pocket without looking at it.

  “All right then, Lieutenant, Sergeant; thanks for your cooperation.” The federal agents climbed back into the Crown Victoria and drove the rest of the way up the hill.

  “Jasper, why didn’t you tell them about the dogs, or the brass?”

  “Why? Screw the feds. They asserted federal control; let them do their own damn leg work. Let them find out about the dogs. You have the brass? Keep some of it. And don’t give them all of the tire molds.” The Feds would see the left over plaster on the dirt and grass, and would expect to take the track imprints, but there was no reason to give them everything.

  Price looked a little confused. “Why are we holding out, Jasper?”

  “Let’s just say that I have less than total faith in the ATF conducting a thorough investigation.”

  ****

  On the way back down the driveway Mosby had to pull his Expedition off the pavement onto the grass, to let a convoy of vehicles climb up the hill. Another pair of Crown Victorias and a dark green Ford Excursion were escorting a low-boy tractor trailer to the site of the fire. On the trailer was an enormous yellow backhoe excavator on caterpillar treads. Following the tractor trailer and bringing up the rear of the convoy was a Toyota Four Runner SUV, colorfully painted with the logos of Channel 14 Action News, the Norfolk affiliate of CBA.

  As they passed by Liddy Mosby blurted out, “Beware of the government-media complex. That’s what Michael Savage always says.”

  “What?” Jasper Mosby snapped back to the present, from being lost deep in his own thoughts. He had a new 10mm shell casing to compare to the one found at Joe Bardiwell’s. He knew who used 10mm cartridges in their submachine guns, often sound-suppressed submachine guns, with night vision scopes. He’s seen them. It was all leading him to some extremely disquieting conclusions.

  Liddy said, “They’re not wasting any time, are they? The Feds are bringing in a backhoe and a TV crew on a Sunday. They must have a really good idea of what they’re going to find down there.”

  “Yeah, a really good idea.” Jasper was thinking about the dead Dobermans, the 10mm brass, and the multiple large tire tracks. He mentioned them to Liddy, and they discussed their perceptions of the overall situation on their way home.

  ****

  Even while they were talking, internet news forum devotee Liddy Mosby was scheming and planning ways to post everything that she had just learned on FreeAmericans without compromising Jasper. Over fifty thousand “FreeAmericans” were reading the forum every day, posting every scrap of news about the recent outbreak of so-called domestic terrorism, and intensely debating its meaning.

  The consensus was that most of the incidents, and in particular the Stadium Massacre, were bogus and had been stage-managed for effect. This was seen as part of a planned effort to disarm all Americans, prior to a crackdown on civil liberties and constitutional rights, all in the name of fighting the ever-expanding “war on terror.”

  She knew that she had to be cautious and circumspect, and she could not directly post her original information about the Burgess Edmonds family arson-murders under her own “Tin Lizzy” screen name. By the time they arrived home, she knew exactly how she would do it, using several email contacts as insulation.

  ****

  Down in rural Chesapeake Virginia, not far from the North Carolina border, and cut off by meandering rivers and streams and miles of marshes and farmland, the Special Training Unit was relaxing on their temporary base after their first “real world” operation. The annex of the former Naval Auxiliary Landing Field was arranged around a dozen acres of cracked concrete; on the south side were two large hangars which concealed their vehicles and their habitation trailers. At mid-day some of the operators were cleaning weapons, some lifted weights, a few tossed a football and others went on conditioning runs around the perimeter roads.

  On the east side of the hangars, also fronting onto the concrete helipads, were a pair of one story cinderblock buildings, seventy feet on a side, that had at one time been painted white. The building closest to the hangars was divided into rough offices; the other had once been a workshop. A heavy steel door led from the tarmac into a large open room in this workshop building. The dirty cement floor was marked where the drill presses and lathes and milling machines had been removed when the landing field was closed. A long rusty workbench remained, which ran the length of the back wall of the room. In its center was an industrial-sized stainless steel sink.

  A pale Caucasian man in late middle age, wearing only boxer shorts, was lying on his back tied to a wooden door. The door had been placed on the workbench with a cinder block raising the end beneath his feet. The man’s head was at the lower end of the door next to the sink; his face was half covered with a piece of cloth, a dish towel or rag, which covered his eyes and nose but not his mouth. Pairs of large holes had been drilled through the solid door so that the man’s ankles, wrists and neck could be tied down securely with short lengths of rope.

  Tim Jaeger stood by the man’s head and refilled a plastic sports bottle with water from the sink. Bob Bullard, Mike Shanks and some other operators stood around him, watching. They were all dressed casually in shorts or blue jeans and t-shirts.

  “So, where’d you learn this trick?” asked Michael Shanks. With his weak chin and bulging eyes and nose, he looked right at home in the makeshift interrogation center. “I’ve heard about it, but never seen it.

  “Afghanistan. The locals did it, we just watched. Works like a charm; a few minutes on the water board, and good old Mohammed starts blabbing every time. And you don’t even need a door; you can do it on the ground just fine. It just works better with their feet up, for some reason. You’ll see.”

  Bob Bullard asked, “Did you ever try electricity? If this doesn’t work out, I’ll show you how to use an ordinary extension cord for electroshock therapy.”

  “Don’t worry, this’ll work.” Jaeger said, “Mr. Edmonds, can you hear me?”

  Burgess Edmonds, tied to the door at five points with his hands by his hips, nodded and sputtered out a weak “yes.” His lips were cut and swollen in several places; his body was scraped and bruised. Prisoners were not treated like fine china when they were brought in fo
r torture, not when they were going to be killed anyway, and especially not after a team member had been killed. Robbie Coleman, the dead STU operator, was already being out-processed by Malvone as the victim of a training accident, and the STU Team was not in a merciful mood.

  “My family? What happened to…”

  Jaeger pulled the towel completely over Edmonds’s face and poured a stream of water onto it from his open-topped plastic sports bottle. Edmonds’s body convulsed, jerking up from the table as he gasped for air through the water-saturated cloth. The water board torture gave the victim the actual physical sensation of drowning; the degree of water or air reaching his lungs could be closely controlled by the interrogator.

  Jaeger stopped pouring the water and pulled the cloth back from Edmonds’s mouth, but left it over his eyes and nose. Edmonds choked out water and gasped in air, his chest wracking up and down. Jaeger said, “You listen asshole: you don’t ask the questions here. You just answer the questions, do you understand me?”

  Burgess Edmonds caught his breath, still panting, and nodded as well as he could with his neck tied tightly to the door.

  “Mr. Edmonds, I have a list of names. We’re going to talk about some of them now, all right?”

  “…All right…”

  “And after we talk, we’ll take you back to your family, and then my friend won’t have to use his electrical wires, okay?”

  Edmonds was crying, choking, the rope marks were livid red around his throat from his convulsed movements. “But I don’t know…”

  The towel went back down over his mouth, completely covering his face. Jaeger poured some more water on the towel and Edmond’s body began to thrash spasmodically against the door, his wrists and ankles and neck rope-burned and raw where they held him down. He struggled to hold his breath and couldn’t, and in desperation tried to breathe through the cloth but he sucked in only a painful mixture of mostly water and a tiny bit of air instead.

  The STU Team leaders formed a semi-circle around Jaeger and Edmonds, watching the process with detached professional interest. Jaeger had learned this “field expedient” interrogation technique by watching friendly Afghans applying it to captured Al Queda and Taliban. Considering some of the other more fiendish tortures the Afghans regularly used, the water board seemed positively humane by comparison.

  Often the key to operational success was to extract information rapidly from new prisoners, in order to act on the intelligence while it was still very fresh, before the enemy could react and disperse or go to ground. American specops troops often conducted new missions only hours after a successful interrogation, so they tended to overlook the brutal methods sometimes used by the friendly Afghans to gain the critical information.

  Prisoners were frequently captured in remote regions far from the eyes of senior officers, and there was nothing to gain from passing them back to the rear echelons for a brief internment and then inevitable release. Prisoners were often squeezed and disposed of by friendly Afghans within a short time and distance of their capture, with no records kept of what transpired in the mud rooms and hidden ravines. Tim Jaeger hadn’t personally done the water board on anyone before today, but he had seen it done, and he had learned of the enormous benefits to be reaped from acting on extremely fresh intelligence, however it was gained.

  Today in STUville he was merely utilizing what he had learned in Afghanistan about the most effective ways to defeat terrorists. The only difference to him was that these terrorists were home-grown, and he didn’t have to fly 5,000 miles to find them.

  ****

  Brad Fallon was halfway through his second mug of draft beer, sitting on a bar stool in Lloyd’s Crab Shack and keeping an eye on the double doors which led to the parking lot. Lloyd’s was decorated in a funky rustic nautical style, with crab pots and oars and nets hanging from the ceilings and walls, but in this case they were not props purchased from a seafood restaurant warehouse. They were the genuine items.

  Some of the tables looked like they had been made from old wooden hatch covers, but they were topped with an inch of clear Lucite which covered an “undersea” landscape of sand, seashells, starfish, and authentic-looking “gold doubloons.” Each table was different, they were obviously hand made, and Brad admired the creativity and workmanship which had gone into building them.

  Sliding glass doors at the back of the dining room opened onto a wooden patio deck overlooking Lloyd’s Creek, a minor branch off of the Poquoson River between Yorktown and Hampton. In a corner of the patio deck a three piece band was belting out Jimmy Buffet and Bob Marley tunes, for an audience of a few dozen yachties and yuppies and hippies and college students. Guajira was only twenty-five miles up the bay from Portsmouth and Norfolk, but listening to Buffet at the bar in the Crab Shack, sitting between friendly drunks who were wearing loud Hawaiian shirts, Brad was beginning to feel as if he was already part way to the Caribbean.

  The twin front doors opened. Ranya walked into the restaurant and looked around, letting her eyes adjust to the relatively dim light. Brad saw her at once, but did a double-take. She was wearing her tight jeans again—she was going to go fetch her Yamaha after all—but this time she was wearing a very tight and sexy pink sleeveless top, with spaghetti straps and a scooped neckline. She was also wearing her black fanny pack, turned to ride on her right hip: Brad could guess what was in it. He didn’t want to push himself on her if she was having second thoughts, and he held back slightly as he went to greet her, but Ranya settled his doubts permanently by meeting him halfway across the room, wrapping her arms around his neck and shoulders and pulling him in close for a kiss.

  “I missed you,” she said, “I really missed you. Did you have a nice sail?”

  “I cheated, I motor-sailed. I was in a hurry to get here and see you. Are you hungry? They’ve got incredible crab cake sandwiches.”

  “No, not really. Where’s Guajira?”

  “She’s a couple miles from here, on a side creek.”

  Ranya pulled him more tightly against her, kissed him tenderly while looking into his eyes, pressing her soft body against him. “Why don’t we go back to the boat? We can get my bike later.”

  His hands were resting on the small of her back, just brushing over the swelling curvature of her hips with his fingertips. She was wearing perfume and makeup, and her hair was brushed down over her shoulders; she was truly more beautiful now than he had remembered. She certainly didn’t seem much like the tough ‘biker chick’ he was used to… “You sure you don’t want lunch?”

  “No sir. That’s not what I’m hungry for.”

  Brad left his unfinished beer on the bar and they walked out into the bright sunlight hip to hip, with their arms behind each other’s backs, both of them grinning at one another. She retrieved her black daypack and a small blue zipper-topped duffel bag from the front of Brad’s red pickup. She slung on the daypack, he carried her bag, and they walked holding hands around the side of the restaurant down to the creek.

  Brad’s brand new twelve foot gray Avon inflatable was tied to a floating pontoon dock next to the boat ramp. Teenage boys on the other side of the dock who were loading a ski boat for a day on the water all stopped their chores to gaze at the sexy brunette. Ranya stepped onto the Avon’s hard aluminum floorboards and sat down on the fat port-side tube. Brad tossed her bag down into the bow, hopped aboard and started the new twenty-five horsepower Yamaha outboard with his first pull on the cord. He sat on the starboard tube opposite Ranya where he could control the engine by holding its tiller, but with his right hand he reached over and held her hand across the boat.

  They left the boat ramp area at low speed, and after a minute they cleared Lloyd’s Creek and its marinas, restaurants, private docks and “no wake zone” signs. Brad twisted open the throttle and the Avon jumped up onto a fast plane, skimming over the smooth waters of the Poquoson River heading east along the shoreline. He had to almost shout to be heard above the motor. “Grab the bow line and stand up in
the middle!” She did as he suggested, holding the line tightly in her left hand for balance with her legs apart and her knees flexed, smiling deliriously like a surfer riding a never-ending wave.

  In a few more minutes he smoothly turned south onto the unnamed creek where he’d anchored his sailboat. Towering cypress and loblolly pines flew past them on both sides, cormorants disappeared under the tea-colored waters at their approach, mallards ran across the water and took wing to get out of their way. As they came around a final curve Brad slowed to an idle for the last hundred yards, admiring his yacht, enjoying the sight of her floating all alone in the natural setting. He did a complete circle around his sailboat to appreciate her from every angle.

  Ranya said, “She’s…so beautiful. Guajira looks fast even when she’s at anchor. You’ve really done a magnificent job getting her ready.” She was still standing, holding onto the bow line for balance.

  “Thanks, but she was a great boat to begin with. I didn’t have to do that much. I’ve always loved her lines; she looks like she’s trying to leap forward. I think the designer drew her sheer line perfectly, and he got all the angles just right. See how the angle of the bow matches the angle of the transom? That’s what gives her that fast ‘leaning forward’ look.”

  He nudged the gray Avon alongside Guajira’s hull by the cockpit and Ranya climbed aboard first, stepping onto the toe rail and climbing over the lifeline, where she tied the bow line off on a cleat. She looked all around the narrow creek, no more that 75 yards across, surrounded on all sides by tall pines so that the entrance behind them was not even visible.

  “I can’t believe we’ve only gone a couple of miles from the Crab Shack; we might as well be way up the Amazon here! I never knew there were places this secluded, this pristine, so close to the cities.”

 

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