There was a high nearly-plumb vertical bow, a small slanting foredeck, and a substantial pilothouse with three square plexiglass windows along each of the sides and the front. A long cockpit with low gunnels for working oyster beds and crab traps took up almost half of the length of the vessel. Most of the cockpit from the rear of the pilothouse aft to the stern of the boat was protected from the sun and rain by a simple wooden ceiling supported at its back corners by wooden posts. In the center of the cockpit, a refrigerator-sized engine box stood by itself like a rectangular island; its cover served as both a seat and a work bench.
Ranya was assisted in climbing over the side into the cockpit by an elderly white-haired man, who turned out to be the captain and owner of the vessel named the “Molly M.” Once they were aboard, the boat was untied and they got underway. Brad was given a clean dry set of coveralls to change into in the pilothouse; Ranya had already changed back into her dry clothes in the truck during their ride from the canal. After he changed into the dry clothes, they sat on top of the engine box facing aft as they motored up the calm river. An ebb tide gave them an extra knot or two. Brad could see the current dragging against anchored navigation marker buoys, and after a while he guessed they were on the South Branch of the Elizabeth River.
Ranya began shivering; they were both chilled from their swim in the canal, so while they were motoring up an industrialized stretch of river lined with shipyards and factories they went inside the pilothouse, which was filled with cigarette and pipe smoke. By the dim light of the engine instruments, they could make out Carson and Wheeler sitting across a small dinette table on the port side; Carson’s face was visible in the orange glow of his cigarette. The aged captain was sitting atop what looked like a bolted-down bar stool behind the steering wheel on the starboard side, where he had a clear view of the navigation lights on the river ahead.
Ranya told them she was freezing. She was visibly shaking. The old skipper offered her his cabin, and reached over and unlatched the low double doors to the forward compartment. Ranya ducked below without another word, and fell onto the narrow berth which occupied the entire port side of the hull in the small triangular space.
Brad momentarily weighed the company of men, liquor and tobacco against Ranya’s warm and soft curves, and he slipped below after her without asking the captain’s permission, latching the doors behind him. He found a folded blanket, spread it over Ranya on the berth, and then slid underneath with her, kissing the back of her neck and snuggling against her, until she stopped shaking and gradually fell asleep.
The bunk was too narrow for them to change positions easily. Ranya was pressed against the wooden planks and frames of the hull; Brad was perched tenuously next to the bunk’s inner edge. He was only able to grab snatches of sleep while they left the calm waters of the Elizabeth River and entered the choppy bay and began to drive against its Maryland-born swells.
For hours the Molly M plunged up and over the waves, with spray periodically smacking across her forward deck above them, while her old hull creaked and groaned as plank worked against plank. All through the long night, her diesel engine thrummed on with a comforting cadence. After a time Brad also slept, with the dark waters of the Chesapeake Bay rushing along the hull, just on the other side of an inch of forty year old pinewood.
****
Guajira was the only yacht anchored in the lagoon of a palm-fringed atoll, floating twenty feet above a vibrant coral reef, her blue hull-bottom guarded by a school of black and yellow striped angelfish. Ranya was standing up on the small teak platform he had bolted onto the front of the stainless steel bow pulpit. She held her graceful arms straight out to each side, her wet skin glistened in the sunlight as she prepared to dive again. She was wearing only a narrow black French-cut bikini bottom, which framed her hips and slender waist to Brad’s utter satisfaction as he watched her from below. The tropical trade wind raised goose bumps on her skin; she had no tan lines remaining from her long-since forgotten bikini tops.
Ranya folded her long legs and bent into a crouch, and then she sprang far out over the glassy water in a classic swan dive. She brought her hands together in front when she pierced the surface; her hair streamed behind her shoulders amidst a cascade of trailing bubbles. He was below her holding onto Guajira’s anchor chain, watching her slide through the pale turquoise water. Ranya let her arms trail to her sides as she glided down toward him, her amber eyes locked onto his, a mermaid figurehead come beautifully to life.
****
Brad was awakened sharply when the old workboat’s bow was slammed hard by an oncoming wave. He was lying on his back now with Ranya pressed tightly against his side. Her cheek was warm against his shoulder; her loosely spilling hair was tickling his face and one of her legs was thrown over between his. The square deck hatch a few feet above them had a circular glass skylight, and it was just growing light outside. Every few minutes a wave slapped the hull in a way that sent spray across the foredeck, blurring his view of the sky as water ran off the glass.
Phil Carson was asleep on the opposite berth along the starboard side of the cramped forward compartment, his back to them beneath another gray army blanket. Phil Carson, the man who had convinced them to head up the bay to face more unknown dangers, instead of simply fleeing aboard Guajira to the safety of the wide Atlantic.
It was dawn, they had been powering along at the same engine RPM for over five hours, and Brad estimated they must be halfway up the Chesapeake. Their first destination was another anonymous safe house, where they would make the final preparations for their mission.
He was glad to be traveling with Ranya, and he was on the water, but he was heading in the wrong direction on the wrong boat. But there was no backing out. There was no way to extricate himself from the operation without losing Ranya, and being made to feel like a coward in the eyes of Phil Carson and Barney Wheeler. He was literally along for the ride now, a conscripted foot soldier in the new American “dirty war.”
And he had to admit that Carson made a strong case for going after Wally Malvone, the BATF official who had engineered the Stadium Massacre, and thrown America into bloody turmoil. With a good plan and the element of surprise, there was every reason to believe the new mission would go down just as smoothly as the one which had resulted in his own rescue. And that was the bottom line: they had rescued him when they did not have to, and now in return he owed them his temporary allegiance.
But what the hell, it only meant a delay of a few days, and then it would be over and behind them forever. In two weeks, Guajira would be safely anchored in a distant corner of the Bahamas Far Out Islands, and Ranya could begin to work on her all-over tan. Swimming, snorkeling and lovemaking would be the only items on their daily agenda in that sparkling azure and aquamarine world… They would spear lobster and grouper and eat better than any royalty, listening to Enya sing Caribbean Blue while sipping ice-cold Cuba Libres in Guajira’s cockpit. Some of that strong Jamaican cash crop might even drift their way, to deepen their pleasure…
Abraham’s Bay on remote Mayaguana Island would be ideal, and it would be a good jumping-off point for the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, the gateway to the Caribbean.
46
The Molly M was tied across the end of a fifty-foot-long wooden dock like the top of a capital letter T, the mid-day breeze sending ripples against her white hull. The dock extended from the navigable center of the tidal creek, across the shallows and marsh grass up onto dry land. The creek could have been any one of the hundreds of minor tributaries branching off of the James, the York, the Rappahannock or the Potomac Rivers. In fact, the Molly M was tied to a dock on a nameless creek just two bends and a short reach away from the Chesapeake Bay itself, near the mouth of a lesser river called the Piankatank, located halfway between Norfolk and Maryland.
Two-hundred feet inland on the highest point of ground nearby, all of six feet above the high tide line, stood an impressive modern two story stilt house which would not
have looked out of place along the beach front in Nag’s Head or on Nantucket. The only hint that the house might possibly be occupied on this Wednesday was the presence of the old crab boat tied up at the end of the dock. There were no people outside or cars visible around the property.
Inside the house it was lunch time, and the conspirators sat around the comfortable living room eating sandwiches while watching the George Hammet confession video. The camcorder used to produce the tape sat on the tan-colored carpet, wired directly to the television with dubbing cables. They watched and rewatched Hammet’s humiliating breakdown with no sense of triumph, no smugness or gloating, but with critical eyes, striving to draw out the elusive fact or the unmade connection.
The room was the largest in the house, with picture windows on two sides looking out over an expanse of dunes, marshland, meandering creeks and sparkling coves. Its furnishings matched the casual elegance of the exterior of the house; relaxed luxury in beiges and blues and light natural woods. Brad and Ranya shared a richly upholstered love seat, but the atmosphere in the room was deadly serious and they avoided making any public display of their affections.
Phil Carson and Barney Wheeler sat on opposite ends of a matching sofa facing the sixty-inch television, which occupied most of a wall-dominating sandalwood entertainment center. They were a pair of unremarkable gray-haired men somewhere past fifty, casually dressed in jeans and t-shirts, in keeping with the vacation setting of the waterfront home. Wheeler had a neatly trimmed beard and wore wire rimmed glasses, while Carson needed a shave and smoked incessantly. Road maps and nautical charts covered most of the glass-topped coffee table between the sofa and the TV.
Former STU Team detainee Victor Sorrento was in the kitchen, watching the replay of the video from the other side of the breakfast bar. He was now being called Tony. Carson was the only one of the group who knew his true name and the details of how he had come to join their group. He had not come up the bay on the Molly M. He had been dropped off at the house by the older couple who were now out on a shopping trip in their pickup truck, buying items the group would need to conduct their mission. Where “Tony” had gone before and after Hammet’s ordeal and interrogation was not discussed; the conspirators maintained a wide zone of personal confidentiality.
Their host at the waterfront house was easily the best dressed among them, wearing a light blue dress shirt, khaki slacks and tasseled loafers. “Chuck” was also the tallest of the men in the room, standing several inches over six feet. Like Carson and Wheeler, he was also late middle-aged, but seemingly in good shape, with a tan outdoorsy face and neatly groomed black hair sprinkled with gray. His cobalt-blue BMW 745 was parked out of sight beneath the house; the first floor was set ten feet above the sand in recognition of the fact that the sea level would occasionally exceed the height of the dune.
Chuck had already been at the house when the others arrived on the Molly M in the early morning; it was unclear if he was the owner of the place or merely had access to it. Brad guessed he was a realtor or a rental agent, and the house was a seasonal luxury rental. It was a two story contemporary beach style house, built on a secluded multi-acre property with its own private driveway and dock. Brad guessed the place would rent for several thousand dollars a week during the summer, but that it might be conveniently empty and available mid-week in late September.
This fit a well-established pattern which he was familiar with from his extensive reading about espionage, terrorism, and clandestine operations. He knew that realtors and other property managers were extremely valuable support assets to all types of underground organizations, because they could inconspicuously arrange short and long term safe houses and caches, and often without leaving a paper trail. This type of support activity was more widely understood these days, mainly as it related to Muslim-operated hotels and motels providing covert havens for members of Islamic terror cells.
The role which real estate agents could play was still less well known, but Brad had guessed at the arrangement as soon as he had seen the fully furnished yet isolated house, with only generic seascape art pieces on the walls, and no personal family touches. The bare exterior of the refrigerator, devoid of souvenir magnets and photos, was a dead giveaway.
Chuck was the only one of the conspirators that Brad just couldn’t figure out. Admittedly, he had only met him a few hours ago, and it was not the type of social environment which lent itself to sharing life stories. First-names-only was an unstated rule of the house, and it was assumed that all of the names were false. Chuck just seemed to enjoy too comfortable and affluent of a life, right down to his gold Rolex watch, to be consorting with an armed resistance cell. He also seemed nervous; he was in and out of the tan-colored leather recliner, frequently looking out the windows between the closed inner curtains.
But Phil Carson obviously trusted him enough to use the house, and Carson was the group’s single unifying linchpin, so that was that. Brad guessed that some old Army relationship was at work, perhaps some ancient debt from the long ago jungle war was being repaid. It seemed unlikely that Carson and Chuck moved in the same social circles these days, but then Phil Carson was a consistently surprising man.
Not present at the meeting was the Molly M’s skipper, who was sleeping aboard his crab boat down at the dock. At ninety-plus years old, no one begrudged Captain Sam his rest after navigating his boat up the bay half the night. Anyway, whatever role old Sam might play in the operation would be limited to driving the boat, and the less he knew about the details the better.
The video lasted twenty minutes, split between Carson and Wheeler asking questions off camera, and Hammet’s replies. Hammet was seen from the shoulders up, wearing a white t-shirt with a plain white sheet tacked up behind him. The lighting was terrible, the picture repeatedly flared and moved in and out of focus, but his words were completely understandable. The video ended abruptly and the screen went solid blue.
Carson asked, “Robin, can you transfer the camcorder video to a regular VHS one, but without our questions on it? I want a version with just George’s answers, and none of our voices.”
“No problem. Are blank tapes already on the shopping list? You don’t want to record over old tapes from here. I’m pretty sure they can recover the old stuff from under any new video, and you don’t want that.”
Chuck offered, “Look under the television, there might be some blank tapes down there.”
Ranya knelt on the plush carpet and began pulling open drawers. Among the DVDs and old movie cassettes she found a single blank VHS tape still in its wrapper. The men all gazed at her snug denim-clad figure admiringly, but privately.
“Once I make a new master, it’ll be easy to make lots of copies. There’s another VCR in the bedroom we’re in. I can bring it out here and hook them together. The more copies we make, the better. Put more blank tapes on the shopping list; Archie and Edith can pick them up anywhere on their next trip.”
“Why don’t you just call them up?” asked Chuck. “They can pick them up now.”
“We’re not using any phones here, remember?” said Carson. “No land lines, no cell phones, no two-way radios, all right?”
“Yeah, I remember. No problem.”
From the kitchen Tony asked, “Do you really think the television networks will ever play the video? I don’t think they’ll touch it with a ten foot pole. George doesn’t look too good, his face is all puffy, and now he’s, ahh, ‘missing.’ How are the networks ever going to play something like that? Especially now, with ‘heroic federal agents’ getting sniped at by ‘right wing terrorists’ every day?”
Brad offered, “What about TOP News? They might go for it. They might report some of what George said, or at least follow up on some of his information, and let the audience decide.”
“You’re dreaming, Bob,” said Barney Wheeler, using Brad’s current name of convenience. “That tape is radioactive. They won’t run it; they won’t even look at it. Not even TOP News.”
“What about the internet?” asked Ranya, settling down next to Brad on the love seat again. “It’ll probably edit down to about ten minutes when I‘m finished. We can release it on the net and just let it go from there.”
Carson let this discussion of the tape, the media, the internet and the “sheeple’s” probable reaction to it continue for another minute. “Okay, be that as it may, that’s all off in the future. Hammet is still ‘missing’ at this point, so let’s put the new tape aside for now and get back to Malvone. Robin can take care of making the new tapes. All I care about Hammet at this point is what he had to say about Malvone. The tape by itself just isn’t enough proof, and it was obviously made under some kind of duress.”
Standing by a window, Chuck asked, “Where is this guy, this George Hammet?”
“He’s not available,” replied Carson.
“Not available? Why not?”
“He’s just not. That’s all there is to it.” Carson didn’t feel the need to educate Chuck on the fact that ‘irregulars’ like themselves couldn’t afford to drag prisoners around, especially not with the ever present risk of highway checkpoints. Instead, he just stared hard at him for a moment from the sofa while he took a deep drag on his cigarette and then exhaled a plume of gray-blue smoke. “What we need to do now is decide on our exact goals for this operation, and then plan and proceed toward that goal.”
Wheeler said, “Well, just wasting Malvone won’t be enough. We need to snatch him, and pick up all the documents we can at the same time. We can rule out grabbing him at their new base in Waldorf; that place will be crawling with jackboots any time he’s there. Obviously, forget about Washington: it’s wall to wall with those digital face-scanning cameras, and there’s a checkpoint on every other block. So we’re back to his house on the river.”
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 67
