Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  “Ranya, we can be crazy together, okay? You have to be crazy to cross oceans on sailboats, don’t you? Anyway, we’re already going to be blamed for killing and kidnapping federal agents, so what’s one more dead politician on top of that? You know what they say about killing?”

  “No, what?” she asked.

  “After the first, they’re all free.”

  She paused, staring hard at him. “They can only hang you once, is that it?”

  “That’s it,” he answered.

  “That’s not exactly a good thing, is it? Being hanged even once, I mean?”

  “No, but it sure does open up our options in the meantime.”

  “Yeah, I guess it does…” She sighed and turned onto her back, stretching. “Let’s go back to the cabin now,” she said. “I don’t want to miss our ride either.” She gave him one more kiss, rolled away and got up.

  Brad lay on his back, shielding his eyes from the sun with an arm, while watching Ranya collect her dry clothes. He loved her completely, more than he had ever loved anyone in his life. Somehow he even loved her mind and her spirit, even though she had just confessed that she was a killer. Well, some people just needed killing, and he understood her hatred after her father’s murder.

  As he looked up at her gathering her dry clothes, his mind drifted again and he decided that she had the sexiest legs that he had ever seen on a real girl, a girl who wasn’t dancing up on a stage. They were long and tan and slender, yet shapely and athletic, and her hips…her curvy hips and her narrow waist…

  Crazy or not, he wanted to keep her. And he had to be crazy too, to want to stay with someone like that. Maybe in an insane world, crazy was the right way to be.

  ****

  Mark Fitzgibbon, the semi-retired computer network consultant in Wilton Connecticut, had armed his already-created electronic bomb Sunday night in his study at home. He had launched it unnoticed from an empty cubicle in a branch office of a major health insurance corporation in Hartford during lunchtime on Monday. He had set the timer so that his bomb would explode soon after midnight Eastern Time, and all Tuesday morning he had been listening for echoes from the blast.

  He was in his study switching between several Maryland and Virginia AM radio news talk stations. He was also keeping an eye on the cable television news networks, and checking The Sledge Report and Free-Americans on the internet. During the twelve noon news cycle he heard a Maryland radio station report a new assassination: an official who worked for the BATFE at their Washington Headquarters had been shot and killed in his driveway while getting ready to leave for work. The radio talk host mentioned the ATF official’s name just one time, Fitzgibbon checked his own hard copy and found the listing for the GS-15 ATF supervisor who lived just south of Rockville Maryland.

  This was either an incredible coincidence, or someone had found his list on the internet and gotten busy, realizing that the information would be most effective if it was used immediately. Fitzgibbon felt terrible for the family of the ATF supervisor, he had probably had nothing to do with staging the Stadium Massacre, or the phony “militia” murders and bombings in Virginia. He just worked for a tainted agency.

  But this harsh measure was the only way that Mark Fitzgibbon could think of to send a sufficiently stark and direct warning to the decision makers in the federal government. Certainly he was far too old and out of shape to be blowing up bridges like Ben Mitchell, the retired Army Special Forces Sergeant Major, God rest his soul. Fitz just thought of himself as using a more modern brand of high explosive, against a different target.

  The decision makers would not be long in figuring out that the creator of the FEDLIST could just as easily burn the agents in the other 47 states, exponentially compounding what he knew must be an internal security nightmare. And they would also rapidly discern that he had cut off his list at GS-15, and not included members of the ultra-elite Senior Executive Service, those entrenched career bureaucrats, the “civilian generals” who were the real policy molders in the federal government.

  Fitz was absolutely certain that the SES would not want their names and home addresses to be listed for anyone with a rifle and an internet connection to see. Most of them lived in upper class digs, and they would hate the aggravation of having to move their trophy wives and spoiled children into hotels, while they went shopping for new unlisted luxury homes in secure gated communities. They would come to their senses, and collectively they would work to rein in whatever group was directing the death squads in Maryland and Virginia.

  Congress might also buy a clue, and reverse some of the newly enacted draconian gun laws which were at the root of most of the violence directed toward the government. In the meantime, all of the FBI and ATF agents in the three states would be forced to look after their own security, which would mean that for a while at least they would be too busy tending to their own affairs, to be conducting after-hours arson and murder raids.

  Mark Fitzgibbon had not killed anyone in forty years, and now he was directly responsible for the assassination of the ATF official in Maryland. The man left a widow, and this was painful to consider, but the entire agonizing national crisis had begun with their phony Stadium Massacre. The ATF or some other federal group wedded to them had started this murder ball rolling downhill, and they would have to bring it to a halt. Mark Fitzgibbon simply considered that he had provided them with a powerful incentive to do so.

  And if they could not or would not stop their state terror program, then the hell with them! A long time ago he had raised his right hand and sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and as far as he was concerned, that solemn oath had not come with an expiration date.

  If the feds kept up their state terror program and their false flag murder operations, he would burn them all, in all fifty states, and most of all he would burn the Senators and Congressmen and the almighty Senior Executive Service! He would send them all scurrying for cover like cockroaches, caught in the middle of the kitchen floor by a sudden light at midnight. He would put their names and addresses directly into the hands of millions of pissed-off American riflemen!

  44

  “Brad, I think our ride’s here.” Ranya was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, peering under the slightly opened front window shutter toward the dock. The plywood shutters had to stay down for the cabin to appear unoccupied from the river, they were propped open just enough to permit a flow of air through the screens. The late afternoon sun cast a single brilliant yellow line through the living room.

  Brad was sitting on the sofa sharpening an old hunting knife he had found in a tool box, stropping it back and forth on a rectangular block of white Arkansas stone. He slipped off the couch and crouched beside Ranya to look under the shutter; a gleaming ski boat had pulled up to the dock 75 yards away. The single occupant cleated it off after carefully adjusting the rubber fenders, and stepped off onto the rough planks. He turned and gave the cabin a long look, and then he walked a few steps to the deep water end of the dock, kneeled down, and began pulling up a rope hand over hand.

  She said, “He’s pulling up a trap. That’s him, let’s go.” They had both been ready to leave for several hours, taking turns keeping a watch on the dock, while listening to the old music cassettes. They kissed and held hands and talked about their mutual hopes and dreams for the rest of their lives, beginning with an endless Caribbean summer together on Guajira. Ranya was back in her blue jeans and the new gray sweatshirt, her hair was tied in a ponytail again and pulled through the back of her Ruger ball cap. Brad was wearing a faded pair of old nylon jungle camouflage pants, a hooded Navy blue sweatshirt, and an old pair of green canvas high-top sneakers. He’d assembled the outfit from a trunk full of mismatched castoffs; hunting and fishing clothes left behind by a long line of nameless predecessors. He had moved his khaki web belt from his shorts to the camo pants; he needed the belt to hold the sheath knife and the .22 pistol.

  He considered leaving his brown le
ather boat shoes as a fair trade for the clothes he was taking, but he thought it would be foolish to re-enter the world with only the funky green sneakers, not knowing when or if he’d have a chance to get another pair of street shoes. He had put his shorts and boat shoes into a green canvas Boy Scout backpack he found hanging on a nail on the back side of the house. The small pack had an old bird’s nest inside and was covered with cobwebs when he found it, but it was serviceable after being shaken out and adjusting the straps.

  The camo pants had drawstrings around the ankles. Between the high top sneakers, socks, long pants and the hooded sweatshirt, Brad felt ready to take on another night’s mosquitoes and no-see-ums. His face and hands he could protect with a can of bug spray which was in the pack; he was still scratching at bites from yesterday and he didn’t want any more.

  Both of them carried their pistols inside of their belts with the grips concealed under the bottoms of their sweatshirts. Brad had removed the suppressor from his .22 and put it into his pack; the gun was too bulky to conceal with the long aluminum tube over its barrel. They had discussed and Brad accepted the harsh reality that the diminutive .22 bullets would only be definitive man stoppers when applied to the cranium at close range.

  The cabin was already straightened up and put back the way they had found it. They swung on their backpacks and dropped the shutters and bolted them, and stepped out into the day’s last sunlight. Ranya locked the cabin’s front door and hid the key in a crack in the cinderblock steps, as called for by the checklist.

  “He looks like a kid,” she said, while they walked down the sandy path to the dock.

  “A rich kid; that’s an expensive boat,” Brad replied, resisting the impulse to mention that, at twenty-one, Ranya could hardly be much older than the young man on the dock.

  “I wonder if he knows what’s going on?” she asked.

  “Who does know what’s going on? I don’t.”

  Their boat captain was a skinny teenager, only fifteen or sixteen. He wore a gray long-sleeved t-shirt with a local surf shop’s logo on the back, and lime-green baggy trunks. His long wavy hair looked to be extra pale blond from a summer of sun, salt water and swimming pool chlorine.

  He’d hauled an enormous pyramid-shaped wire crab trap up on the dock, then he turned around and watched as Brad and Ranya approached. “Hi. I’m supposed to take you somewhere, all right?”

  “Right,” said Brad. No names were asked, or offered.

  “You want the crabs?” the kid asked. “Got some nice ones here.”

  “No, thanks,” said Ranya.

  “Okay then, back they go.” The ‘surfer dude’ teen flipped the triangular sides of the trap flat down onto the dock and the blue crabs immediately spread out, scuttling sideways, eyestalks peering at them with their claws open in defensive postures. One by one they skittered their way to the edge, dropped over into the water and paddled away. The kid picked up the wire trap by the rope, and swung it back out where it landed with a whooshing splash and sank out of sight.

  The boat was a 21-foot Sea-Knight with an inboard Mercruiser; it had a blue fiberglass hull and a creamy white interior. Skis, a kneeboard, towels and a cooler were casually stowed up in the forward seating area ahead of the windshield, which had a hinged section in its middle for access to the bow.

  “Hop on and sit in the back. When I say, untie the stern line, okay? Oh, and put this on.” He handed Brad a North Carolina Tar Heels ball cap; Ranya was already wearing her Ruger hat. “It’s supposed to make it harder to take good pictures of you, just in case. Tighten the hats up pretty good—we’ll be hauling ass, and if they fly off we’re not going back. And one more thing: you have to wear these sunglasses, too. My fath…my…well, you just have to wear them. Sorry, but you just have to.”

  He handed them each a pair of cheap wrap-around sunglasses; black electrical tape was layered over the lenses on the inside.

  “No problem,” said Brad. “We understand. Security.”

  “Right, that’s what my…um…exactly. Security. I’m glad you understand; I know it looks kind of dorky, but it’s better for everybody.”

  “Don’t worry about it; we’re fine, we understand,” said Ranya, smiling sweetly at him. “Come on, let’s go.”

  The boy blushed and beamed back at her and said, “I’m not supposed to ask you any questions…but I know what’s going on, more or less. Well, let’s go.” He sat in the white vinyl-padded seat behind the controls on the starboard side, and started the engine smoothly. “You can cast off now,” he said, and Brad untied the stern line from the dock cleat and pulled it aboard, and flipped the rubber fender in as well.

  They both sat in comfortably-upholstered U-shaped seats facing forward, holding hands across the padded engine box between them. Ranya shot one last smile at Brad, smirked and shook her head at his Tar Heels hat, with its little footprint logo. Then she slipped on her blacked-out sunglasses, and he did the same.

  Their young boat driver pulled in the forward fender, and then he expertly maneuvered away from the dock, reversing in a tight J-turn with the wheel hard over. When the bow was pointing out of the side creek toward the main channel of the river, he smoothly advanced the throttle lever, and the boat easily came up onto a plane. In sharp contrast to their loud and bone-jarring trip in the bottom of the aluminum hunting boat last night, the Sea-Knight had a quiet Cadillac ride while it gracefully sped down the river at what felt like almost thirty miles an hour, judging by the wind on their faces.

  Brad couldn’t recognize the river or even the area, the slivers of flat ‘low country’ he could see out of the sides of his glasses all looked the same: marshland punctuated with cypress, oaks and pines. He could tell that they were heading roughly southeast by the direction of the sun, which was sliding toward the horizon behind them. They entered a larger river; he could catch fractional glimpses of the distant shorelines as the powerful boat flew across the chop without any hint of pounding. Ranya squeezed his hand; their arms were lying comfortably across the padded top of the engine cover. They made up for the lack of visual stimulus by playing games with their fingers; intertwining them, weaving them, stroking each other’s palms, teasing with their nails.

  The boat made a wide turn and threaded its way into another creek and, after a series of long S-turns, it slowed down and dropped off step as if it was entering a no-wake speed zone. They proceeded in a straight line for several minutes. At one point Brad could hear the sound of automobiles crossing the steel grating of a highway draw bridge above them. In another minute their young driver said “here we go again,” and the boat accelerated back up onto a plane. Brad could see the green glowing face of his watch under the outside corner of his blinders, it was 6:25. They had been traveling for over a half hour, which he guessed meant they had covered ten or fifteen miles of water. This guess signified nothing, since he had no idea where their starting point had been. After five more minutes at high speed, the boat dropped gently off plane to an idle.

  “Okay guys, you can take off the glasses now. This is where you get off.” They were alongside a derelict half-sunken barge which was slightly tilted and awash at its lowest corner. The side of the barge they were next to was over eighty feet long; the far side was grounded in marshland which spread for miles to distant tree lines. In Tidewater barges frequently broke loose in storms and were driven ashore. Often they were not worth the cost of their salvage, and they remained forever where they had stranded.

  The only other manmade structure visible was a series of high tension line towers running from horizon to horizon, several miles behind them across the last pink band of the sunset sky. In every other direction there was only water, marshland, and scattered trees; the few clouds were already losing their rose color and turning gray for the night.

  “Okay guys, jump off. Somebody’s going to come along to pick you up in a little while, but I’m not supposed to call them on the radio until I’m away from here. Hey, do you guys have a flashlight? When
a boat comes along and puts a light on the barge, blink back at them three times. I saw that in a movie about British commandos once. That’s how you do it, right?”

  Brad laughed, “I guess so, it sounds fine to me.” They were standing in the back of the Sea-Knight now, getting their balance; the wind had died and the water was almost perfectly calm, but the boat still rolled under them.

  Now that they had stopped, the insects were finding them, and the young man asked, “Do you have any bug spray? The no-see-ums out here will kill you at sunset.”

  “Oh yeah, we know all about the ‘flying teeth.’ I’ve got a can of spray, we’ll be all right.” Brad tossed the borrowed Tar Heels hat onto the console behind the windshield.

  “One more thing, there’s something you need to take along: the cooler, the one in the bow. You’re supposed to take it with you, and give it to somebody tonight.”

  “Who?” asked Brad.

  “I don’t know who, nobody told me. Just take it with you is all I know.” The kid unlatched and flipped the center part of the windshield to the side, and Brad went forward to get the icebox. Standing behind the wheel, the teenager used small throttle and wheel movements to hold the boat precisely in place next to the barge without touching it, in spite of the fast-flowing tidal current. His two white rubber fenders were out, but unneeded, as he kept the twenty foot boat on station like an expert.

  Brad moved past him forward into the bow, and grabbed the big Igloo cooler by its two handles and strained to lift it up onto the ski boat’s gunnel. A wrapping of duct tape sealed its lid. It was heavier than he expected, as if it was completely full of ice and beverages or fish, but it wasn’t cold to the touch. Ranya tossed their packs onto the barge and hopped over from the stern of the Sea-Knight. Brad horsed the cooler across to the edge of the barge, and she dragged it securely back onto its rusty steel deck. Finally, Brad climbed onto the gunnel and jumped over, leaving the Sea-Knight wallowing. He turned back and reached far out over the boat, the young driver leaned across and shook his hand.