Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Ranya took the black ball cap out of her daypack and put it on, pulling her ponytail through the hole in the back. She was wearing her black Colt Arms t-shirt; with her black daypack and fanny pack and blue jeans she didn’t have much camouflage for a sunlit day in a world of soft greens and browns, so she walked two rows inside the edge of the cornfield.

  The going was easy in the corn, and she could observe the fence line two-hundred yards away as she went. The dry corn was eight feet tall to its waving tassels; it was only weeks from harvesting and it rasped as she walked through, brushing aside their crisp leaves. As she walked she pulled off some smaller ears, shucked them and ate the kernels raw. It was only feed corn, as most corn in Tidewater was, but the smaller ears were still succulent and juicy inside. In another few weeks, instead of providing perfect cover for her approach and a snack on the go, the same fields would just be ankle high stubble and dirt.

  After walking a few hundred yards north, parallel to the fence, the corn field terminated in one final corner. After considering her route, she got down on all fours and low-crawled across a soybean field between rows of the leafy vegetable, until she reached a north-south tree line that ran along an irrigation ditch. As a child Ranya had played hide and seek in all kinds of crop fields, and she knew how to pass through them undetected when they were in season.

  She used the cover of the narrow wind-break tree line for her next path, and walked in the intermittent shade among the tall weeds that grew there unchecked, still moving roughly parallel to the fence line. Between the irrigation ditch and the chain link fence lay several hundred yards of marsh, cut with listlessly meandering black water streams. She knew from experience the futility of attempting to walk across such a morass, the black mud between the tussocks of saw grass would suck her legs down until she was waist deep and trapped. At the very least she would lose her running shoes in the gluey muck.

  The irrigation ditch ended at a small cement dike, on the other side, according to her map, was the end of the east-west finger of the South River which bisected the base below the main runway. The stream ran in a shallow V-shaped canal. Ranya belly-crawled in the thick weeds onto the top of the slope and considered her options for approaching the base, and then decided to go straight up the water channel, directly toward the fence at a ninety degree angle. Being a ruler-straight man-made canal, it would have a fairly hard bottom, unlike the gelatinous ooze of the natural pluff-mud in the surrounding marshes.

  The almost stagnant water at the bottom was only eight or ten feet across, with an abundance of water hyacinths, lily pads and fetid yellow-brown scum on top. On the plus side, the canal’s water produced a thick covering of vegetation on both banks, and the water level was several feet lower than the surrounding land, so she would be well hidden. She put her sunglasses into her fanny pack so that she would not lose them, and slid and wriggled down the bank through prickly brambles and spider webs, across a yard of black mud, and into the sun-warmed water.

  It stunk of rotten eggs and worse things; sulfurous bubbles were released when her passage churned up something particularly putrid. The bottom was uneven, and the water varied from knee to chest deep, with occasional slimy submerged logs and rocks to climb over. (At least she hoped they were only logs and rocks.)

  Mosquitoes were stirred to flight by her passage and hovered around her face, stabbing her skin when she could not smash them quickly enough. At times she was able to walk crouched over, and at other times she crawled on all fours with only her head out of the water, always keeping herself hidden below the twin reed-covered berms on either side of the canal.

  Frogs observed her indifferently; a blue heron watched her approach and calmly strode ahead of her, then finally lifted its wings and softly flapped in a circle and landed again a hundred feet behind her, as if humans crawled up the channel every day. Water moccasins she simply refused to think about, and she did not see any, although she did see a brown water snake disappear ahead of her into the wild plants at water’s edge.

  Finally she reached the government fence. Where the stream passed beneath it a half-hearted attempt had been made many decades earlier to block the opening with a grid of sloppily welded iron bars, but the bars had rusted away long ago above the present water level, so she slid underneath, and was on the base.

  Twenty yards inside the fence the stream was funneled into a five foot diameter concrete pipe where it passed beneath a road; the inside of the pipe was choked with silt, rotting wood and dense vegetation. Rather than attempt to fit through it, she crawled up the side of the canal beside the pipe and looked over the bank. The road was ancient broken asphalt, with several feet of it undercut and eroded away where it passed over the canal. On the other side of the road lay thick scrub-pine woods. Ranya decided she had had enough of the canal. She watched carefully for any human activity, raised herself to a crouch, and dashed across the road and into cover.

  Once she was hidden among the trees and bushes she pulled her fanny pack around to the front and withdrew her .45, it was soaking wet but still clean and functional. She stuck it inside her pants on the left side of her waist, its grip towards her right hand for a cross draw. She had no idea what to expect, but she had no intention of being captured, arrested, detained or whatever it was they did on this base to trespassers. She knew that she couldn’t help Brad if she was seen and forced to shoot, but shoot she would rather than being taken prisoner.

  She kept the canal which bisected the base on her left side and confirmed her direction with her compass as she walked eastward. More signs of abandoned human activity appeared the further she penetrated into the base. She came to a small one room concrete building with broken windows and no door, its flat roof was as high as the tops of the new pine growth around her. A rusty iron ladder was lag-bolted to the wall by the doorway. She climbed the ladder for a look around her, and again she saw the flat tops of the two large structures that she had originally seen from the other side of the base.

  Five minutes later she guessed that she was just a quarter mile north of the two buildings, and she turned south and cautiously stalked her way toward them. The base had obviously been abandoned and neglected for years, everywhere that it was not paved the land had reverted to Christmas tree sized pines sprinkled with hardwood saplings. The new trees were not tall or thick enough to choke out the underbrush, so Ranya was always able to remain in thick cover, pausing to listen and then taking a few more deliberate footsteps. The ground litter was dry on top, and she had to plan each step to avoid making noise.

  Gradually she was able to detect the sound of music, and then voices. All around her now there was evidence of old base activity, such as racks of steel and PVC pipes, overgrown with weeds, and a clearing full of empty steel drums. There was a row of rusty engines, still on pallets with vines encircling them, and a line of flatbed utility trailers with bushes and small trees growing through their decayed wooden decks.

  She crawled through the brush under a thirty-foot trailer, beyond it was a concrete apron the size of a half dozen football fields, and on the opposite side were two large aircraft hangars. She sat Indian-style among the dusty weeds in the shade beneath the trailer and pulled off her daypack, put it between her knees and took out her bottle of PowerAde. She drank it in small sips, grateful to clear the taste of the canal water from her mouth.

  She could only imagine the virulent germs which were now swimming in her stomach, in her ears, her eyes, her many new scratches and everywhere else, and she knew she’d have to go on antibiotics when and if she ever got out of this place. She had managed to never completely submerge her face and head in the canal, but there had been plenty of unavoidable splashes.

  Her jeans and t-shirt were still sodden but warm from her walk in the mostly sunny scrub woods, the dark fabrics were encrusted with brown and black mud and green scum. She pulled the small pair of binoculars from her pack, and found they were still dry and clear inside. With her naked eyes she could see that the
hangars, about two-hundred yards away to her south, were the centers of activity with small groups of people walking around inside and outside of them. The hangar doors were open all the way to the sides, she looked through the 8X20 binos and could see that they were rusted and broken like the rest of what she had seen so far on this abandoned base.

  A dozen or more vehicles of all sizes and types were parked inside the hangar on the right side. There were the de rigueur black Chevy Suburbans like the ones she had seen at Boat America, and a blue van also like the one she had seen. There were other vans and a variety of utility trucks and some sedans…and one red pickup truck. It was Brad’s truck for certain, with the little antenna jutting out of the roof. Outside of the vehicle hangar, off to the side by itself, was an RV almost as long as a bus. Its roof was jammed with air conditioner units and an assortment of antennas.

  She studied the people she could see: they were all men, all military age, but some of them had longish hair, which probably ruled out their being military. All of them carried pistols holstered on their belts; some wore shirts concealing them but most did not, probably feeling relaxed and at ease here in the seclusion of their home base. A few carried submachine guns slung over their backs, she recognized them as MP-5s…

  Despite the heat of the day, her blood ran cold at the sight of the weapons, the type of weapon used to murder her father. Part of her wished that she had brought her Tennyson Champion sniper pistol: at this range she would be able to easily pick off a few of them before they could all get to cover and begin to return fire.

  Ranya kept the binos to her eyes, searching for any sign of Brad, and in the other hangar she saw the reddish-haired ape who had driven his truck coming out of a trailer. There were five white mobile-home sized trailers in the hangar arranged side by side, their ends facing the open hangar doors. These were probably where the goon squads who had burned the gun stores and killed her father lived and worked…

  Next to the hangar on the left side were two smaller cement or cinder block buildings. She watched a man walk out of the closest hangar and into the first cement building through its front door. Among the hangars and the buildings there was no sign of Brad. If he was here, hopefully he was still alive… It was purely and simply because of her that Brad was now a prisoner of…whoever these people were.

  If Brad was there, she was going to get him out, somehow.

  Ranya had seen at least a dozen different men moving about the vehicles and between the hangars and buildings and trailers. Some of them were cleaning or working on weapons, on a table set up between two of the trailers. In an open area of the vehicle hangar a few men were taking turns spotting for each other, while doing presses on a weight bench.

  A new aircraft engine noise intruded, but unlike others she had heard during her infiltration this one was not passing in the distance. This noise was growing steadily; she could hear the shrill whine of a turbine over the beating of rotor blades. The machine passed directly over her, coming from the north, and the brush around her trailer was whipped and blown flat by rotor wash. Wearing her black shirt and blue jeans she could have been spotted if she had not been concealed beneath the trailer, and she was grateful for having made a lucky choice in hiding places.

  The dark blue helicopter gleamed in the sunlight as it flared out and landed in front of the building next to the trailer-filled hangar, sending dust and leaves and bits of trash swirling outward. A door on the chopper slid open and a bald Caucasian man wearing dark pants and a white long-sleeved shirt stepped out. He crouched over beneath the spinning blades and was met by four other casually dressed men who had hurried over from the buildings and hangars. The man from the helicopter and his greeters went into the building next to the hangar, and its front door closed behind them as the helicopter’s rotor began to wind down.

  After the blades came to a complete stop a small tanker truck emerged from the vehicle hangar and parked next to the helicopter, the pilot and the driver of the truck went about unreeling the hose and refueling the helicopter. By using their own fuel supply, this group’s helicopter could be ready at any time, and they could avoid leaving a paper trail at local airports. Ranya was beginning to appreciate the thoroughness of their operation.

  She could only guess the range of this type of small corporate helicopter, probably a few hundred miles. If it needed refueling after a long one-way trip, that could possibly put its origin in Washington DC, two-hundred miles away. The bald man who had gotten out was wearing suit pants and a tie and was carrying a briefcase. He’d have to be checked out; he could be their boss, or the go-between to their higher ups. Ranya had gotten a good look at him through the binos when he first climbed out of the chopper, before he had turned his back to her, and she knew she would not forget the bald man with the mustache.

  Clearly, this was no local outfit operating on their own. Ranya found a pencil stub in an outside pocket of her pack and copied the helicopter’s tail number onto the inside of her ball cap. Everything else she had was still too sodden to write on.

  If they had a weakness it seemed to be a lack of concern about their own security: her arriving on foot undetected some two-hundred yards from their front doors was proof enough of that. The ape man who had driven Brad’s truck had not run any counter-surveillance at all, but to the contrary he was confident enough to stop and visit a porno shop and a liquor store on his way down. The gate to the base was unguarded; it was simply secured with a chain and lock. And she’d seen no one out patrolling or on sentry duty either on her way in, or after she had arrived in her hiding place under the trailer.

  Someone right here with a scoped AR-15 could kill half of them before they would know what hit them, she thought. But that would not get Brad out.

  Judging by their slack security posture, they were exceedingly confident about their unit’s secrecy. With their presumably busy night time schedule of burning and killing, finding Brad and getting him out might just be possible, especially if she could get some help. Certainly it would be suicidal to attempt a rescue alone in daylight, with Brad’s location unknown, and 15 or more armed men crawling about the place.

  ****

  A spirit of celebration and self-congratulation surrounded Wally Malvone and his STU Team supervisors and team leaders as they filed into their office.

  “So where is he? Where’s our sniper?” asked Malvone.

  Bob Bullard answered, “Next door, in the interrogation center.”

  Malvone’s face darkened. “You haven’t started on him have you? I don’t want him marked up, I told you…”

  “Take it easy Wally, he’s fine,” said Bullard. “We haven’t laid a hand on him, except maybe when they picked him up.”

  “Yeah? Well, okay. It’s important that we keep him in good shape, he’s got to be presentable…I’ve got plans for him. What about the other guy, Sorrento? Is he still in one piece?”

  “Uh, Tim, you haven’t messed up Victor too badly, have you?” asked Bullard.

  “Me? No way. Well I mean, not too bad…maybe some electrode burns and rope marks, nothing serious,” replied Jaeger.

  “Tim, why don’t you and Mike go and get Fallon and bring him over here. He might be ready to talk without needing any of the rough stuff.”

  Jaeger and Shanks left the room. Malvone put his slim leather briefcase on the table and picked a steel government surplus chair with green vinyl padding. Bullard, Silvari and Hammet took their seats after him.

  Malvone asked them, “How’s Edmonds holding up?”

  “He’s alive,” replied Bullard. “Semi-catatonic, but he’s breathing.”

  “Did he give us any useful information?”

  “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, he served his purpose. Let me tell you, ‘Timeline’ was a big hit in Washington. They’re glad to see somebody striking back…off the record of course. I’ve been making the rounds, we’re getting noticed where it counts. Been getting a lot of win
ks and nods from on high, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” said Bullard, who had resorted to extreme measures to permanently close a few of ATF’s most problematic cases during his long and storied career. He had gotten his own share of back-channel winks and nods over the years, even while Headquarters pretended public disdain for his tactics.

  “Look at these,” said Malvone, unsnapping his briefcase. From a pocket inside the case he withdrew a handful of colorful laminated access badges, each with a spring clip for attaching to one’s jacket, or a silver chain for hanging around the neck. “This one’s for the Old Executive Office Building, it gets me almost everywhere, this one’s for the Hoover Building; all the way to the top. I’ve got one for Justice, one for Homeland Security, and next week they want me for a closed briefing at Langley. Yes sir, the Special Training Unit is the hot ticket in DC. Everybody in counter-terrorism wants a piece of us now, but our juice comes straight from the top, so piss on all of ‘em!”

  He leaned back on his chair and put his black wingtips up on the table, his fingers laced behind the back of his shaved bullet head. “It’s great having all those Justice Department supergrades sucking up to me for a change. That Timeline story really put us over the top. They’re all wondering if the Edmonds fire was us, but I just gave ‘em the old Malvone poker face. I won’t give ‘em the satisfaction! Let ‘em wonder.”

  The door opened, Jaeger and Shanks half marched and half dragged Brad Fallon into the room, one on each of his arms. Fallon’s head was bent over at an acute angle, and he had cuts and scrapes on his face.

  “What the HELL did you DO to him?” shouted Malvone, nearly jumping from his chair. “Bob, you know I told you not to get started before I got here!”

  Jaeger replied first. “I’m sorry boss, it’s my fault. We stuck him in a locker for some preconditioning, just like we did with Edmonds and Sorrento, but he’s taller than them, and I guess it was kind of a tight fit.”