Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  “A preliminary examination of the human remains recovered so far leads investigators to believe that Burgess Edmonds was not in the house when it burned to the ground. Off the record, ATF officials are calling Edmonds a quote ‘militia paymaster and kingpin’ unquote. They believe that he is at large and consider him to be very well armed, possibly with a fifty caliber sniper rifle, and extremely dangerous.”

  The screen briefly cut from Mentiroso on location to a black and white photo of Burgess Edmonds, showing a tired-looking white man about sixty years old, with short gray hair and glasses, and wearing a jacket and tie.

  “ATF officials say that in the past ten years Edmonds has purchased large quantities of gunpowder, which is frequently used by domestic militia terrorists to manufacture deadly pipe bombs. They theorize that Edmonds may have been constructing pipe bombs when the fire broke out, causing him to flee from the house before the gunpowder exploded, saving himself and leaving his family to perish in the flames.

  “Or, ATF officials say, Edmonds may have been psychologically disturbed, and he may have set the fires deliberately, cutting all of his ties to the past prior to going underground in the militia terror war. In either case, federal officials say that he is not under any circumstances to be approached if he is seen, not even by local law enforcement officers, but instead the FBI or ATF should be called immediately.

  “This is Rich Mentiroso in Suffolk Virginia, reporting for CBA News. Back to you Pete.”

  ****

  Up in Maryland, standing in front of his big screen TV, Wally Malvone was grinning as he sipped his gin and tonic. He always knew he could depend on Pete Broker and CBA News to handle the story the way he had scripted it, and they had. Perfectly.

  ****

  Down in the hangars at STUville, on the closed Naval Auxiliary Landing Field, the operators paused in their pre-operation preparations to watch CBA news, as George Hammet had suggested. They stopped pushing bullets into magazines and fresh batteries into their Sure-Flash lights and tactical radios to see what had become of the Edmonds mansion, and when they saw the yellow backhoe dragging burnt timbers out of the ground they erupted into hooting and cheering and high-fives. Wally Malvone was a genius! Malvone was playing the media like a piano. “Hey, I wonder if Edmonds knows he’s gone underground?” shouted one comedian.

  So far Edmonds had provided no useful information that they didn’t already know, but it hardly mattered. The CBA report alone made the raid on his house worth it, and it helped to make up for the death of STU Team member Robbie Coleman.

  ****

  Forty miles north of STUville aboard Guajira, Brad and Ranya sat close together in stunned silence. Ranya wiped away tears and said, “Valerie was a nice girl, she was just a student for God’s sake… and her little brother was such a nice kid, a really great kid, why’d they have to kill them? Why?”

  Brad sighed. “Because they’re trying to start a civil war. Your friend Phil Carson was right; he was right all along. I can see it now, it’s all clear to me now. It’s all been an act, from the stadium on. It’s all being staged. We saw it last night, we saw it ourselves.”

  Ranya didn’t challenge him about everything being an act, being staged. But she knew different. Most of the recent events might have been done by the people who killed her father, but the killing of Eric Sanderson…that was not an act. That had been very real.

  Brad went on. “Now just watch, the sheeple are going to demand that the government crack down on ‘right wing terrorists.’ The sheeple won’t care if they wind up living in a barbed-wire police state, they’ll be begging for it! And for the government, it’s going to mean total power. Between the war on Islamic terror and the war on domestic terror and the war on drugs, they’ll have the country in a vise. Anybody that questions the ‘war on terror’ might get their house burned down, and afterwards they’ll be called a terrorist.”

  After a little while Ranya responded, quietly. “Well, then we’ve got to stop them.”

  “We? Stop them? The whole federal government?”

  “Brad, think about it: there’s no way in hell the ‘whole federal government’ or even the whole FBI or BATF could be in on this thing. They couldn’t keep something like this a secret for two days, much less two weeks! It’s got to be a smaller group, a splinter group, something like that.”

  “That sounds like a movie. That’s not how it works in the real world.”

  Ranya asked him, “Have you got a better explanation? What’s been happening is real, we know it, we’ve seen it. My father’s dead, the Edmonds are dead, the people in the stadium are dead.... And somebody’s doing it, somebody that’s going to a lot of trouble to make it all look like ‘militia terrorism.’ We know that’s crap, so who would want to make it look like ‘militias’? Who hates the ‘militias’ that much?”

  “Remember,” Brad replied, “this all started with guns. This all started with Shifflett and the Stadium Massacre, and banning the semi-automatics. So who does that sound like? Who benefits from a crackdown on guns?”

  She said, “The BATF, or some part of it, it’s got to be them. They’ll just get bigger and bigger after what’s been going on, with all the new gun laws. They’ll have job security until the end of time.”

  He added, “And they’ll need lots more BATF agents, and lots more money.”

  “Bingo. It’s got to be the BATF. And that takes us right back to our own G-man, ‘George the Fed.’ He’s the key; he’s our door into this thing.”

  “Okay, we’ll stay and find George. Somehow, we’ll find him. But after we’re finished with him, that’s it. We’re finished, and then we’re gone, all right?”

  “All right,” agreed Ranya. “After we’re finished with George, we’ll sail out of here, and we won’t look back.”

  32

  A light drizzle, little more than a mist, was falling across the Tidewater night. There was one customer left at the far end of the bar in the Side Pocket Lounge, contemplating both the bottom of his glass of beer, and the Miller Lite clock’s minute hand, which was rising steadily toward midnight.

  Victor Sorrento was a week away from thrity-five years old, and wondering again if his life was already over. The bills were piling up faster than he could pay them down working as a plumber, and he was coming to the realization that not only was he never going to be taken into management at AAABest Plumbing, he’d also never get far enough ahead in his savings to strike out on his own as an independent.

  This might have been tolerable if he had a wife that he could look forward to coming home to, but his Nell had gained at least 50 pounds since he’d married her five years before, ten pounds for each year, and if she had been “voluptuous” when they were dating, she was just plain fat today. He was a hard worker and a steady provider, and he was still in good shape and not too bad looking, in sort of a rugged Bruce Willis way.

  So what had he done to deserve such a fat wife at his age? Even drinking a bit too much, as he was lately, he was keeping his weight under 180 pounds, which was not much more than when he had mustered out of the Marines a decade ago. He knew he was still fairly attractive to women; the bar maids still smiled warmly and sparkled their eyes at him, so he knew he was not too far over the hill.

  But he’d kept his hands off of them, even Darla, the cute blonde waitress at the Night Owl who was always making eyes at him, even as his Nell’s weight had soared past his own. Simply addressing her “eating disorder” (which was in reality a “stuffing your face disorder”) caused her to collapse into a pitiful blob of tears and self-loathing, so Victor spent his nights at the Side Pocket and the Night Owl, hoping that she would be sound asleep by the time he got home.

  And now, on top of the bummer which was his personal and professional life, the one area which had provided him with a measure of enjoyment and pride had unexpectedly boomeranged into a complete and total nightmare. Victor Sorrento was a shooting sports enthusiast who enjoyed trap and skeet, practical pistol compe
tition, and all types of hunting, but now his informal affiliation with the Black Water Rod and Gun Club was keeping him in a perpetual state of fear and dread.

  First Jimmy Shifflett, a war vet but a messed up loser just the same, turned up dead near the stadium in Maryland with an SKS, blamed for the massacre. That had only been the beginning of the terrifying times. Next the gun stores were burned, Joe Bardiwell was killed, and Mark Denton and his boy were blown up in his jeep. Those improbable killings had already been enough to make him jump from his own shadow, but now Burgess Edmonds, the big man himself, who owned half of the land the rod and gun club hunted on, had his house burned down and his family wiped out! Wiped out! And then, to top it all, Edmonds was being called a terrorist on TV! Victor Sorrento could see where this was leading.

  Pete Broker on CBA News had said that Edmonds was a “militia kingpin and paymaster,” whatever that was. So what did that make him? None of it made any sense, but it sure looked like somebody was picking off members of the rod and gun club one at a time. And the television people were talking about a ‘secret shadow militia’, whatever that meant. If the rod and gun club was a secret militia, nobody had ever told Victor Sorrento! Different guys from the club got together a couple of times a month for some shooting or hunting, and sometimes some fishing, and that’s all they did as far as he knew. A secret shadow militia? It made no sense; he’d never heard of such a thing.

  The clock over the bar was clear enough though, five minutes before twelve, and in seven hours he’d have to be out the door for work, so he decided to forego a final beer and head for home. Hopefully Nell would be sound asleep, and he could slip into bed without waking her up, or maybe he’d just crash on the couch again. And one of these nights maybe he just wouldn’t go home at all… He quaffed the last dregs of his beer and slid off the bar stool.

  “G’night Joe, Later…”

  “See ya tomorrow Vic.”

  “Yeah, see ya.”

  ****

  In the poorly lit corner booth near the front door of the Side Pocket Lounge, a thirtyish fellow, military perhaps, seemed to mumble something to his pal across the table as Sorrento said goodbye to the bartender. Actually he was speaking in order to be heard by the throat microphone concealed under his black turtleneck sweater.

  “Okay, he’s leaving. Get set people, here he comes.”

  Outside the tavern in a nondescript shopping center off of Independence Boulevard in Virginia Beach, nothing appeared out of the ordinary, but in fact a complex and well-oiled machine was operating unseen. Tonight the STU’s Blue Team was running their first real world snatch, an “old buddy” operation, and Blue Team leader Tim “Hollywood” Jaeger was playing the lead role.

  The key to a successful old buddy operation was having good biographical data on the target, and tonight they had an abundance of it. It also helped that Sorrento had consumed eight draft beers in two bars in the last couple hours, and wouldn’t be exactly razor sharp.

  Sorrento’s green Ford Ranger pickup was parked along the shopping center sidewalk, about forty yards from the front door of the Side Pocket Lounge. The Blue Team had parallel-parked the STU’s blue Dodge conversion van along the same sidewalk, between Sorrento’s truck and the bar.

  Tim Jaeger heard the inside team announce Sorrento’s imminent departure, and he took his position on the sidewalk 100 feet from the door, outside of a closed beauty parlor. When he saw the tavern door swing open, he began his walk.

  “Okay, folks, here he comes, get ready,” Jaeger said through his throat mike to the rest of the hidden team. In a moment both men were facing one another, and closing the distance between them. At thirty feet from Sorrento, Jaeger made solid eye contact with him. At fifteen feet he smiled broadly in counterfeit recognition and said “Hey! Vic! Vic Sorrento? Long time no see, buddy!”

  The two STU men from inside the bar were now padding up silently behind the suddenly off-guard Sorrento, who was looking puzzled, searching his murky memory for the name of this apparently forgotten old friend.

  “Hey Vic, I’m Bob Michaels, remember me? We were in Echo Company at Camp Lejeune in ’91, remember? Semper Fi, buddy!” Jaeger put out his hand for a friendly shake and Sorrento, his mind stirring through a sudden whirl of old memories of his Marine Corps days, put out his own hand in return and Jaeger took it. Sorrento smiled weakly, he still couldn’t quite place the name or face of this old acquaintance from the Marines, but…

  Jaeger, still smiling broadly and holding eye contact (in order not to look at his two team mates coming up from behind) gripped Sorrento’s right hand tightly in both of his. He did this so that in the event that Sorrento was armed, he would not be able to draw with his strong-side hand. But there was not much risk that he was armed; his rotating watchers in the bars had observed him closely, and had not seen a pistol “printing” through his clothes, or seen Sorrento make any tell-tale touching motions, checking the position of a concealed weapon. Even though Sorrento had a Virginia concealed carry permit, he was evidently a law abiding type who would not “carry” illegally into a bar.

  The side door of the STU Team van quietly rolled open just as the two operators from inside the bar seized Sorrento’s arms and shoulders from behind and shoved him violently toward the black opening. A jolt of electricity from the two silver prongs of a pocket-sized cattle prod zapped him in the back of the neck as more strong hands reached out for him from within the van, seizing him by the front of his gray wind breaker jacket. The middle bench seat of the van had been removed, providing a clear space for the snatch team to work unimpeded. Victor Sorrento was both pushed and pulled inside before he could so much as formulate a thought. The door slid shut again, and the van pulled away.

  No one had happened by on the sidewalk in either direction in the light drizzle to see the chance meeting of old friends. The van itself blocked the view of the abduction from the parking lot and street side, and so the disappearance of Victor Sorrento passed unnoticed by the world.

  In seconds Sorrento was face down on the carpeted floor of the van, handcuffed behind his back and shackled around his ankles, with a black cloth sack pulled down over his head and tied around his neck.

  He was rolled onto his side and his car keys were pulled from his front blue jeans pocket, and dropped casually out of the front passenger window of the moving van. A few moments later another Blue Team man on foot picked them up and walked to Sorrento’s Ford Ranger, unlocked it and climbed in and drove off. In a minute the blue Dodge conversion van was heading south on rain-slick Independence Boulevard, followed by a pair of black Chevy Suburbans and a green Ford Ranger.

  ****

  Four-hundred miles northeast, in the small bedroom community of Wilton Connecticut, a semi-retired computer network consultant sat in his living room, watching a video replay of the CBA newsmagazine Timeline. Mark Fitzgibbon had seen the preview of the Suffolk arson fire story while watching the nightly news with Pete Broker, and decided to tape the Timeline segment for further study.

  He was no fan of CBA News or Pete Broker, but he forced himself to endure a certain amount of it in order to keep abreast of the latest government propaganda and disinformation. Since the Stadium Massacre he had recognized that CBA, even more than the other networks, was being fed a steady stream of lies which they flipped around and reported as the truth. By analyzing the various mistruths, and fact checking them on the internet, Fitzgibbon was able to ascertain something of the reality behind the recent “outbreak” of so-called “militia terrorism.”

  When the Timeline segment (luridly titled “Terror in Tidewater”) finished playing, he turned off his television and walked to his office, passing his open bedroom door where his wife was sleeping. Sitting at his computer desk, he switched on his flat screen, and clicked to his favorite internet news forum, FreeAmericans. Newspaper, magazine and internet-derived articles and columns were posted about all of the recent acts of terrorism, from the Stadium Massacre to the recent crossfire fia
sco at the FIST checkpoint. Much of what was posted on FreeAmericans was garbage, because any tinfoil beanie-wearing kook could post just about any far out conspiracy theory on the open forum. But among the trash could be found much treasure; one merely had to pick up the solid nuggets while ignoring the fool’s gold.

  He scrolled down the “latest articles” page until he found a small story from the online edition of the Norfolk newspaper about the deadly Suffolk house fire, and the wealthy owner’s alleged connection to a mysterious covert militia group. As he expected, the article’s author only referenced the same unnamed “official sources” that had been mentioned by the CBA News reporter Rich Mentiroso. Mentiroso could have written the newspaper piece; it did not vary from the Timeline version in any significant way.

  Any real information, he knew, would be found in the replies posted by individual “FreeAmericans” below the article. Most of the replies were simply the opinions of observers from all over America, mainly observations that the Edmonds family had been the victim of yet another “accidental” fire...of the Waco variety. Cynics posted gallows humor about the adverse health effects of being a gun collector in Tidewater Virginia, ever since the obviously staged Stadium Massacre.

  Fitz found what he was looking for down at reply #27. A FreeAmerican whose screen name was Virginia Peanut claimed to have been to the actual scene of the fire and listed the following points: #1: There were numerous fresh tire tracks left by several large vehicles which did not belong to the Edmonds. #2: The Edmonds’ two Doberman watchdogs were missing, but blood trails were found leading to the driveway. A Doberman had also been shot at the scene of a gun store arson attack a week before, where the owner had been killed. #3: Fired ten millimeter brass had been found at both arson attacks. #4: The first Feds to arrive on the scene at midday had immediately asserted federal control, and evicted the local law enforcement officers, claiming that a terrorism-related federal investigation was already underway. #5: Shortly after the first Feds arrived and took over, a convoy of vehicles arrived, which included a backhoe excavator on a tractor trailer, along with a CBA network television crew.