Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Carson continued, “George, you said you knew important things. George! Now would be a good time to tell us!”

  Hammet was staring down at the water, stuttering. Someone tossed a partially eaten chicken breast toward his feet, and the water exploded again in a mad tangle of ravenous catfish.

  “You said you knew important things, George! Make it worthwhile—those fish are hungry!”

  “I…I…I…” Hammet gasped for air and tried to speak.

  “Send him back down.” The electric motor hummed again, and this time George was lowered straight into the water. His pale white body glowed beneath their lights, obscured where the thrashing brown catfish were trying to get a hold of anything they could tear off.

  “Back up, and stop him halfway.”

  Hammet emerged up to his shoulders; catfish were still attacking his fingers and toes and were clustered between his legs.

  He caught a breath and shouted out in desperation, “The stadium! I know who did the stadium! I was there! I was there!”

  After a moment Carson said “That’s a good start George, that’s a real good start.” He leaned out from the dock with a boat hook and caught the back of the chair and pulled him near. The two mosquito head-netted men grabbed the strap and hauled him by the chair back up onto the dock.

  “You’re doing great George, just great. We’ve got dry towels and bug spray, and some blankets and clothes.” He pulled out a pocket knife and flicked it open with one hand, and used the silver blade to slice off the lines which bound Hammet’s right arm. “Somebody get George a beer.”

  Then he turned around and quietly said to Ranya, “There’s a video camera on the Whaler; it’s in the red gym bag under the console. Let’s get all this on tape.”

  45

  After a twenty-minute drive through the darkness, the pickup truck bumped and crunched across a rutted field of newly harvested stubble corn, made several tight turns and then backed up for a short distance. When it stopped, Brad pushed up the rear window of the camper shell, dropped the tailgate, and they climbed out. The pickup was parked only a few yards from a wooden barn or shed; then its running lights went out and once again they had to work by flashlight.

  Phil Carson handed Hammet’s rope leash over to Brad, then he unlocked and dragged open the two cracked timber doors of the barn, revealing the back of a red Jeep Cherokee. Carson walked to the driver’s window of the pickup and spoke a few hushed phrases and, when he returned, he was putting on a pair of leather work gloves. Hammet was sitting on the tailgate with his hands tied securely in front, an extra six feet of line served as his leash to control and guide him. He was dressed in his white boxer shorts and undershirt.

  “All right, George, here’s your ride home,” said Carson. “But not until tomorrow morning, okay buddy? Face it: you’re in no shape to drive. So let’s get in the back seat, and you can sleep for a few hours. That’s a pretty good deal, huh?”

  Hammet was badly slurring his words, and he spoke in a sing-songy voice. “You’re all priddy nize guys, do you know that? Y’know, I don’t know…maybe we should call Wally. Why don’ we jus’ go to my house now and call Wally? He can figure everything out so nobody gets in any trouble. He’s a really, really smart man.” Hammet was stinking drunk, and he remained seated upright on the tailgate only with difficulty.

  Carson unlocked the Cherokee; the interior light came on and he opened the rear passenger side door. Then he helped Brad to get Hammet onto his feet and walk him into the barn, and they guided him inside onto the rear bench seat. Carson was the only one of them to touch the Jeep, and only with his gloves. Ranya wiped off a half-full bottle of Jim Beam bourbon whisky with a rag and handed it to Carson, holding it by its neck with her sleeve pulled over her hand. Carson climbed inside next to Hammet and set the bottle on the seat between them. Ranya returned with the rest of Hammet’s clothes and put them into the foot well of the front passenger seat.

  Carson said, “Hey Georgie, now that we’re pals, I’m going to untie you, okay buddy? Let’s drink a little more whiskey, and then you can sleep right here until morning.” After he untied Hammet’s wrists he dropped the dock line out the open door and Ranya retrieved it. Carson unscrewed the cap and gave the whiskey bottle to Hammet, who was sitting up unsteadily with his eyes only half open.

  “Come on, Georgie boy, drink it down one more inch, and then you can take a nice long nap. In the morning, you can drive home to good old Albacore Road.”

  Hammet held the bottle in both hands and studied the label under the Cherokee’s interior light, and then he tipped it up and gulped down more of the burning brown intoxicant, spilling half of it down his white shirt. After his experiences under the boat house, he had learned to obey Carson’s instructions and, with a half a bottle of bourbon inside him, any thought of resistance had evaporated. “Ahhh! Oh yeah, jus’ like back in college, good ole’ Boston College, yessiree!”

  “You’re the man, Georgie! You’re going to win the chugalug contest for sure. One more big chugalug for good old Boston College!”

  But there wasn’t another chugalug in George Hammet, big or otherwise, and he fell sideways until his face hit the left door and came to rest on the seat. The open whiskey bottle dropped from his hands onto the floor of the Jeep.

  Carson went around to the driver’s seat and backed Hammet’s SUV out of the barn, as the pickup pulled away. He followed behind the truck back across the rutted fields and dirt roads to the pavement, and then a succession of deserted county roads.

  Brad and Ranya rode in the back of the truck under the camper shell; he held a flashlight while she stripped off her shoes, her jeans and her gray sweatshirt. She was already wearing a dark blue one-piece tank suit under her clothes, taken from the river house where Hammet had bared his black soul and revealed his darkest secrets.

  Brad asked, “You’re sure you want to do this? I can do it if you don’t want to…”

  “I’m going to do it; it’s settled.” Ranya pulled on white scuba diving gloves with black rubber dots on the palms and fingers, and black neoprene reef shoes which were also taken from the well-stocked river house. She twisted her ponytail up into a loose bun and tugged a white swim cap on, concealing all of her hair underneath. “I’m ready, don’t worry. I’m ready.” Her face was grim and unsmiling; when she was finished with her preparations they both sat Indian style facing each other, holding hands across their laps as they swayed and rocked on the bare steel floor of the truck.

  At last, the pickup pulled over and stopped on the shoulder of the two lane road they had been traveling on for some time, and the red Cherokee went around and parked in front of them. It was after midnight in a remote corner of Tidewater, and they had not passed another car for a long time. Both vehicles switched off their headlights, but left their engines running. Then Brad flipped up the pickup’s rear window and Ranya climbed over the tailgate, and met Phil Carson by the back of the red SUV.

  “He’s dead drunk, he’s out cold,” he told her. “You know where we are, right? You know this intersection; you’ve seen the canal?”

  “I’ve been here before,” she replied. Her arms were folded beneath her breasts, her white gloves and bathing cap glowed dimly in the light of the flashing red signal at the end of the road.

  “You want to do a dry run, drive up and check it out first?”

  “No need, Phil. Let’s get it over with.” Ranya climbed into the Cherokee’s driver’s seat and shut the door. The seat was adjusted too far back for her to drive comfortably, but she didn’t move it forward. She found the electric window buttons and rolled her side window down almost all the way, examined the gap carefully, and then put it back up to only half-closed.

  She turned and looked into the back seat. George Hammet was lying in his dirty underwear with the side of his face pressed against the seat, snoring and stinking of vomit and stale whisky breath; it was almost enough to make her throw up. She pulled the seatbelt across and buckled herself in, an
d then she unbuckled and refastened it several times with her eyes closed.

  Ranya switched on the headlights, slid forward on the seat so that she could reach the pedals, put the Cherokee into gear, and pulled out. A quarter mile down the road she approached the T-intersection where a single flashing red light warned her to stop. Straight across the intersection there was a twenty foot section of steel guardrail sprouting a half dozen reflective highway signs. Route numbers and arrows pointed to the north and south.

  Toward the end of the straightaway, Ranya put the pedal to the floor and the red Cherokee blew through the intersection under the flashing lights at sixty miles per hour. It made a slight right turn, bounced once on the far shoulder and the grassy verge just missing the barricades, flew out over the bank and hit the water of the Dismal Swamp Canal much harder than she expected.

  The airbag exploded in her face, and the Cherokee immediately began to settle onto its right side as cold river water came gurgling in from underneath. Ranya grabbed the buckle but couldn’t find the release button; she fumbled with it and was just beginning to panic when it popped open. She cleared the seatbelt and the airbag away from in front of her as the cold water rose to her waist. She turned sideways in her seat with her back toward the door and felt for the open window, grasping for the roof to pull herself through.

  Somehow, the overhead interior light had come on even as the headlights had died under the water. She put her feet on the center console between the front seats to push herself out, and saw George Hammet sitting up on the slanting back seat; his eyes wide open in stunned disbelief with water up to his chest.

  “You bitch! You goddamn bitch! Who the hell are you?” he howled in the car’s rapidly disappearing air pocket. The Cherokee began to roll faster onto its right side. Ranya grabbed the outside of the roof with both hands and pushed off with her legs and began to slide through. She got her head and then her arms and shoulders and finally her chest out into the night air as her window sank to the river level. Then her legs were slammed together against the door and she was pulled back hard. The SUV was sinking faster now; her head and arms were still above the surface when the Cherokee finally submerged with a loud rush of bubbles. She took one last gulp of air and was pulled down into inky blackness.

  The electric windows and door locks had all shorted out and had frozen in place when the Cherokee hit the brackish water. The suddenly very conscious George Hammet floated and pulled himself between the two bucket seats into the front and tackled Ranya around her waist and hips. By pinning her inside, he was sealing off his only exit, but his drunk and enraged reptilian brain was set only on preventing her escape.

  In her desperation to break free, Ranya was a strong and slippery adversary, and she thrashed her legs wildly to break her mortal enemy’s embrace. She dragged a foot up far enough to shove against his gut and groin, won enough space to land a kick with her knee against what felt like his face, and then was able to get her other foot to his throat and break his grip. Still kicking madly at him she pulled herself the rest of the way through the half-open window, pushed off of the door or perhaps the roof and swam for the surface but, in her blind rush, she drove herself straight into invisible jello-like pluff-mud up to her shoulder and face.

  She tucked and turned and tried to push off of the bottom but, instead, she only sank both of her feet into the sticky ooze up to her knees. Breast stroking hard with her arms and alternately yanking and kicking her legs in sheer terror she finally broke free from the gluey muck. Long since out of oxygen, in a nightmare of blind vertigo, she was hoping desperately that she was swimming upward and not sideways or down. In a few strokes her face unexpectedly broke the surface and she sucked in an enormous lung-full of life-giving air, while the stars above her exploded as brightly as any fireworks ever could.

  Immediately exhausted, she was slowly treading water, catching her breath and regaining her orientation. She turned and saw Brad splashing toward her, free-styling with his head up to watch her in case she went under again.

  “Are you okay?”

  Ranya couldn’t answer yet; she couldn’t form coherent thoughts much less words. Her lungs still burned as she heaved fresh cool air in and out.

  “Here, just hold on.” Brad took her hands and turned so that she could rest against his back while he breast-stroked for the shore. They crawled through black mud at the water’s edge, and he helped her up the sharply angled slope of the bank. In the flashing red and yellow lights of the T intersection, he noticed that she had lost one of her reef shoes, but otherwise she seemed all right.

  The pickup truck was waiting there on the side of Route 17 by the canal, and they tumbled into the back again. They were soaking wet, muddy, cold, and ecstatic to be alive. Phil Carson lifted the tailgate and dropped the rear window, then went around and climbed into the cab’s passenger side. The truck pulled out and they returned the way they had come. Brad and Ranya sat together with their backs against the front of the truck bed, watching as the flashing red light marking the intersection by the canal gradually diminished in the distance.

  After a little while, Ranya began rubbing her right leg. “God this hurts!” Brad found a flashlight and shined it on the front of her upper thigh; they saw a pair of bleeding red semicircles the size of a plumb. “Oh, that bastard bit me! That freaking bastard bit me!”

  “I thought he was dead drunk in the back seat?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. I guess the water sobered him up quick enough.”

  “You had to fight him off?”

  “Going out the window, yeah, I had to fight him off.” Ranya was using her dry t-shirt as a towel to wipe off the wound. “That freak bit me, but I got out, and he didn’t.”

  ****

  A few hours later Brad was lying on his side, snuggled tightly against Ranya’s back under warm blankets, but the circumstances were anything but romantic. They were both trying to sleep on a single narrow berth in the cramped forward cabin of the work boat which was taking them up the Chesapeake Bay. He was in a borrowed set of mechanic’s coveralls; she was back in her jeans and gray sweater. The wooden work boat had to have passed within only a few miles of Guajira, but instead of spending the night sailing out to the open Atlantic, he was aboard a stranger’s boat as it motored north toward Washington, pondering how he had been talked into taking part in this new operation.

  He knew how the plan had been hatched, around the kitchen table upstairs at the boat house. After George Hammet’s complete breakdown and stunning confession, they had climbed the stairs to the kitchen, to decide what to do with the information their prisoner had revealed to them. They agreed that the media would do nothing with the revelation. It would be totally ignored or, at best, immediately relegated to “black helicopter” conspiracy theory fantasy land, and summarily dismissed to the outer fringes of the internet tin-foil-hat chat rooms.

  Certainly, it was not an option to take what they had learned to the FBI or the Justice Department. Federal agents were the source of the current troubles; it was a given that the federal government would never take meaningful public action against some of their own who were involved in such a high level debacle. Certain especially ruthless factions within the government would, undoubtedly, act on Hammet’s information by killing the messengers, and posthumously destroying their reputations.

  One of the men at the kitchen meeting was Barney Wheeler; the older man Brad had passed the note to at Lester’s Diner what seemed like years ago. Tonight Phil Carson was calling him “Rev,” as he was using aliases for all of them.

  Wheeler brought up the example of TWA Flight 800, and how over two-hundred eyewitnesses had clearly and unquestionably seen a surface-to-air missile rising to strike it. The federal government had had no trouble dismissing all of the eyewitnesses, including other professional pilots, in favor of the theory that a mysterious fuel tank spark had been responsible for the 747 crashing off of Long Island.

  Dismissing the far-out conspirac
y theories of a gang of right-wing kooks, and the coerced testimony of a kidnapped federal agent, would be a far easier task than turning a heat-seeking missile seen by two-hundred witnesses into the first and only fuel tank spark to ever bring down a passenger jet. In the case of the Stadium Massacre, the lie had been made even simpler for the government and the media, because they had already been provided with the dead culprit, the infamous hate-mongering racist militia activist Jimmy Shifflett.

  After much discussion and debate over several pots of coffee, their group decision was to drive a knife straight into the belly of the beast, since they alone knew precisely where and when and how to strike. So only a day after being rescued from the torture chamber by this unlikely team, Brad found himself being swept along with them, unwilling to detach himself from Ranya, and unable to bow out of their plan. “Thanks for saving my life guys, but I’ve got to go now. See you later,” was simply not a viable option, as much as he wished it could have been.

  After they deep-sixed Hammet, the blue pickup truck had driven for another half hour and deposited the three of them, Brad, Ranya and Phil Carson, by abandoned railroad tracks in a forgotten coal yard overrun by weeds. Barney Wheeler met them there and led them down to a series of rotting industrial wharfs and piers using a flashlight. There was no way to determine where they were. Brad could only tell that whatever river they were on was about a half mile wide, judging by the scattering of lights on the opposite shore.

  Tied up at the end of a partially-collapsed ancient commercial dock was a white Chesapeake Bay “dead-rise” workboat about thirty five feet long. It was built in the classic style, which meant it could have been five or fifty years old. Like all Chesapeake Bay dead-rise boats, she had been constructed from local wood “by eye” without written plans, and her only beauty lay in her utility at harvesting crabs and oysters safely and economically in all seasons.