Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  “It’s open, come…”

  The door erupted, it exploded inward, it flew past his astonished face, and his friend Tim Jaeger burst past him into the room as if the hounds of hell were hot on his heels.

  Shanks was reaching instinctively for the pistol holstered inside his jeans on the right side when another figure ran into the room, a weapon shouldered, putting a light in his face and blinding him.

  “What the fu…” was the last partial thought to flare across his synapses before they were blown into bloody brain confetti.

  ****

  Tony charged into the room, angling obliquely to the left behind Brad. The doorway was wide open for him, but somebody was standing right in front of him, which was not unexpected, reaching for a gun, also not unexpected. Tony’s gun light was already on; he put the beam on the man’s amazed face and squeezed the trigger twice at the range of bare inches. At point-blank range, the gun light’s beam was three inches under the muzzle, so the shots hit the man high in the forehead. Tony’s momentum carried him straight into the still-standing instant corpse and they both went over in a heap, crashing over chairs onto a round table. The green-shaded light hanging above the upended poker table was sent swinging crazily.

  ****

  Joe Silvari was twenty feet away on the far side of the couch, slid down and half asleep, when the door flew open and people stormed into the room yelling, “FBI! Freeze!” He reached for his SIG pistol on the sofa cushion beside him and dived onto the floor. Someone dressed in black was tackling Michael, driving him backwards onto the poker table. Nothing made sense. He saw blood spraying across the poker table under the hanging light. He tracked a black-clad figure with his pistol and began firing, but after the first shot his SIG wouldn’t shoot! The magazine! The loaded magazine was still over on the table!

  ****

  Bob Bullard was halfway up the stairwell when he heard the basement’s outside door bang open, heard yells of “FBI!” and “Search Warrant!” and heard the sounds of suppressed weapons fire and one loud pistol shot. He made his instant decision and ran up the stairs, closing the door at the top behind him when he reached the kitchen. The FBI? Was that possible? It was possible. Anything was possible. He darted into the closest hiding place, the pantry, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  ****

  Phil Carson followed Tony on their stacked charge into the room; he was heading all the way to the left. Out of his peripheral vision he could see that Tony was taking down the man who had unlocked the door. To the far left, his primary sector, he saw a man on the ground by a black sofa, holding a pistol. Carson put the center of the Thompson’s gun light on the man’s moving center and fired a full automatic burst, killing the man instantly. He came to rest crumpled against the bottom of some shelves beneath a giant television, with CDs falling on him.

  Above the dead man, a very attractive full-lipped blond female reporter was mouthing silent words on the screen, while Jim Morrison sang about a caravan taking him away. The man under the television was no longer a threat, so Carson turned back, his weapon still shouldered, sweeping the room with his light. Tony was screaming in pain in the center of the room, lying on top of another dead man in a tangle of toppled wooden chairs beneath the broken poker table.

  Carson continued his weapon’s traverse across the room, lifting his barrel when he saw Ranya at the bottom of the stairwell. She was using its interior wall for cover, her MAC-10 aimed up the stairs toward the kitchen exactly according to the plan. All the way to the right side of the room, Brad had the dead sentry’s MP-5 shouldered, its gun light pinning someone to the wall ten feet away. The man’s hands were held stiffly straight up in the air, his eyes were tightly closed, his head was turned to the side. He was bald, fiftyish, and he had a thick brushy mustache. He was wearing a white Polo shirt splashed with blood and brain tissue.

  It was Wally Malvone, in the flesh.

  Tony was screaming and rolling, struggling to disentangle himself from the chairs and the body beneath him.

  “Keep Malvone right there—don’t let him move!” Carson knelt over Tony, pulling a chair off of him, and setting his Tommy gun on the floor. “Easy, boy, easy. Let’s see what we’ve got.” Carson’s extra magazines were kept in the vertical pouches of his chest rig; on its sides were small hand-sewn pouches and loops. He reached into a pouch and pulled out black-handled trauma scissors, and slit Tony’s black warm-up pants from the ankle to the hip, exposing the wound. Tony had been shot a few inches below the left knee, and the tibia was shattered. The wound was fountaining blood in arterial spurts, staining the beige carpet almost purple. Like all of his team, Carson had short pieces of dock line looped over his fanny pack belt in the back; he pulled one free and tied a fast tourniquet just above Tony’s knee.

  “God, God, oh GOD!” Tony was screaming and thrashing while Carson tried to work on him. He’d already lost too much blood, and they had no medic, they had no plasma, they had none of the morphine styrettes Carson had once been so familiar with to inject into his thigh. Ranya had lots of lifeguard first aid training. She’d seen propeller wounds and shark bites, so she would be able to help.

  “Robin, get me a spoon, a stick, something to tighten this thing with.” Carson was trying to tighten the tourniquet by hand but the blood just kept flowing. Ranya dashed to the bar and grabbed a silver ice mallet.

  “Will this work?”

  “Here, toss it!” Carson caught it one handed and stuck the handle under the rope and began twisting it, rotating the line into a spiral knot. The bleeding abruptly stopped. “How ya doing, Tony?” he asked.

  Tony was already extremely pale; Ranya came over and lifted his good leg onto a chair to send more blood to where it was needed most.

  “It hurts, Phil, it hurts! Man, it hurts! Do I still have my leg?”

  “Yeah Tony, you’ve still got both of your legs. You’ll be fine. We’ll get you out of here real fast. You’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

  Ranya took a small black throw pillow from the sofa and placed it under Tony’s head. Then she hit the “power” button on the stereo, stopping the music, and retrieved Silvari’s pistol from the floor. She quickly showed it to Carson, holding it butt upward. “Look, it’s empty—there’s no magazine.”

  Carson gave it a look, and said to her, “Stay with Tony, okay?” With Tony momentarily stabilized, he turned back to Brad and his captive, casually pointing his Thompson at him. “Okay, Wally, you can come on out from there now. Don’t do anything stupid, or we’ll kill you. One more dead fed won’t mean a thing to us.”

  Malvone’s eyes were closed tightly against Brad’s gun light. “I can’t see shit—how about getting the light out of my face?”

  “Put it on his stomach, Brad. Okay, turn around now and come on out from there, and get down on the ground.”

  Malvone kept his hands straight up, and walked slowly out from behind the far end of the wet bar. Both of their weapons were trained carefully on him; it was his house and he could have a gun hidden anywhere. In an open area by the bottom of the steps, Carson said, “Turn around, kneel down, lay spread eagle. You know the drill, now do it.”

  Malvone complied without resistance. Carson knelt by his side and tightened a doubled pair of flex-cuffs around his wrists. Then, he looped an already-tied noose of thin white parachute cord around Malvone’s neck and snugged it down. He tied the parachute cord from his neck to the flex-cuffs with no slack in between; the trailing six feet of line with a loop in the end would be Malvone’s leash. Malvone would have to keep his hands high up his back and obey every instruction, in order to continue breathing. Phil Carson had learned a lot of things in Vietnam, including the most effective ways to handle prisoners in enemy territory.

  In his earpiece, Carson heard, “Spooky, this is Night Watchman. What’s happening in there, over?” Barney Wheeler was calling from his post outside, concealed in the tree line on the side of the backyard.

  Carson answered, holding the but
ton down on the small Wal-Mart walkie-talkie which was duct-taped to a strap on his chest rig. There was a slender stalk microphone attached to his earpiece. “We’ve got the situation contained, but Tony’s got a real bad problem. One of those Purple Heart problems, over.”

  “How bad is he?”

  “Pretty bad. Wait one, Rev—we’re kind of busy here.”

  Carson paced in a tight circle, cradling his Thompson, considering Tony’s wound, his blood loss, and the time it would take to properly search the house for evidence. They were already a man down, and it was uncertain if anyone else was still upstairs.

  His eyes fell upon a double-stack pistol magazine lying among the cards on the floor by the collapsed poker table. The magazine was full of 9mm bullets, and this suddenly connected with the empty pistol fired one time by the man he’d killed. Carson almost laughed out loud. The stupid shit had gotten off only one shot, because he’d taken the magazine out of his pistol and neglected to put it back in! But even so, he’d still managed to get off one lucky shot... He looked down at Tony. Ranya was kneeling over him, holding his hand, touching his face. Next to Tony was the dead door-opener. Ranya had draped a bar towel over the corpse’s face. The carpet was a sticky black lake beneath the two of them, Tony and the man Tony had shot in the head.

  ****

  Upstairs, Bob Bullard was still hiding in the pantry with the door just cracked open, where he could watch the basement door across the kitchen. He switched his pistol to his left hand and felt for his cell phone, but then he remembered: he had dropped it in the stairwell on the carpeted steps when he had first reached for his gun!

  If this was actually an FBI raid, they’d be coming in from every direction. The place would be swarming with SWAT guys. But the only sounds still came from the basement. If it was really an FBI raid, then there was no point in going to look for them. They’d find him here soon enough. He’d show them his ATF creds, and that would at least keep them from shooting him…he hoped.

  But if they weren’t the FBI, then who were they?

  ****

  Carson decided on a new plan. “Okay, Tony, we’re getting you out of here. We’ll leave you on the marina dock at Fort Belvoir, and call 911. We’ll take you straight there in the Zodiac; that’s the best we can do. They’ve got a good hospital there, DeWitt Army Hospital. I’ve been there, Tony, it’s a good place. I’m sorry, but that’s all we can do. That’s the fastest way to get you to a hospital. The Army docs will take care of your leg; they’ll patch you up good.”

  “But I don’t want to go there! We’ll all be arrested!”

  Carson crouched by him across from Ranya and looked directly into his eyes, touching his arm. “Tony, I’ll be honest. You might not make it if we wait too long. We can get you over to Fort Belvoir a lot faster than an ambulance could get you here.”

  Tony clutched Carson’s arm in return, his eyes wide open and focused. “I’ll make it, Phil; I know I’ll make it! Please take me with you. Just don’t leave me!”

  Ranya asked quietly, “Phil, what about at least searching Malvone’s office?” She felt sorry for Tony, but they had come all this way for a reason.

  “No time, there’s no time. Tony comes first. Ranya, can you get the boat, and bring it here? Can you do it by yourself?”

  “I can do it.”

  “Good girl! Bring it right up to the beach here.” The further Tony had to be carried, the longer it would take, the more his leg would be shaken around, and the worse his chances for survival would be.

  “I’ll go get the boat,” responded Ranya, springing up.

  “Okay, wait a second,” said Carson. “Watchman; Spooky, over.”

  “Night Watchman here.”

  “One coming out. One coming out. We’re moving the minivan.”

  “Roger, I copy one friendly coming out.”

  Carson looked up to Ranya and said, “Okay, go get the boat.”

  She gave Brad a quick one-armed hug as she brushed by him and then she went out the back door at a run, with her MAC-10 held across her chest.

  ****

  Malvone was sitting up now, Indian style, with his hands cuffed behind him. “There’s nothing upstairs, anyway. Really, I’m not stupid, I wouldn’t leave evidence around. You don’t need to waste valuable time looking. Save Tony here. Or should I say, Victor Sorrento?”

  “I’m glad you remembered us,” said Brad, busy breaking up a chair to make splints to stabilize Tony’s shattered leg. He had stripped off the dead sentry’s bloody camouflage BDU blouse, and was back in all black, but with his helmet and black ski vest off.

  “I never forget a face, Mr. Fallon. And, I’ve got to admit, I’m extremely impressed. I knew we’d meet again some day soon, but I never saw this coming. Who are your friends? Is the young lady Ranya Bardiwell? Impressive. Very, very impressive. Who told you where to find us? George Hammet?”

  They stared at him. Malvone seemed anything but terrified. He could have been chatting with old pals in a corner tavern, despite the thin white noose around his neck. Phil Carson replied first. “Hammet told us everything. The stadium, how he found Jimmy Shifflett…everything.”

  “You know, I should thank you. You saved me the trouble of killing him.”

  “We figured that,” Carson replied off-handedly.

  “You did a better job of it than Clay Garfield, anyway. And I suppose you’re going to kill me, too.” Malvone sighed, but he was still faintly smiling, seemingly at ease with the situation.

  “It’s a possibility, but you could still save yourself,” said Carson. “You could talk to the right people. They might want to finish this up quietly, and keep it out of the news. They might make a deal with you.” He was busy binding Tony’s leg, wrapping the wound tightly with a towel.

  “Nice try, but I don’t think so. They’d never make a deal. And that whole perp-walk thing, the jacket over the handcuffs… No, forget it.”

  “Then, we’ll talk to you ourselves, and just make another video tape,” said Carson.

  “Hmm…I imagine that won’t be very…pleasant.”

  “No, it won’t be. Not pleasant at all.” Carson began wrapping Tony’s thick towel-bandages and splints with duct tape.

  “How did Hammet do?”

  “George? He cried like a baby. Sang like a canary. He thanked us for being so nice to him.”

  “That’s what I’d have expected,” said Malvone. “I didn’t pick him for his sterling character.”

  Carson asked, “There’s just one thing I want to know. How did you get all of your shots right in the stadium? There’s no ballistic table on earth for the SKS at that range. So how did you compute the drop so accurately? That’s had me stumped.”

  Malvone smiled, proud of his cleverness. “That was my idea. Loch Haven Dam, up in Maryland. It’s the same height as the top of the stadium. I shot at the face of the dam from exactly the same range. I set up a shooting bench in a van and fired out the back, the same van we took Shifflett up to the stadium in. I just guessed the elevation at first, and I watched the sparks where the bullets hit the concrete. I did it when it was just getting dark. Those steel-cored bullets made nice little sparks, very easy to see. I kept cranking down the scope mount until the bullets were just barely clearing the top. That’s it; it was a piece of cake.”

  Carson hid his disgust at Malvone’s proud recounting of how he had sighted in the SKS for the Stadium Massacre. He wanted Malvone to keep talking. Frequently prisoners were talkative on their first contact, and clammed up later. He said, “Well, you really hosed the football season, that’s for sure.”

  Malvone chuckled. “Yeah, I sure did! But if I hadn’t have done it first, some damn rag head would have figured out the trick sooner or later.” The entire NFL football season had been put on hold. It was impossible to secure all of the stadiums against extreme-range indirect-fire sniping, now that the method was well known. Large outdoor sporting events, where the fans were packed into stands like sardines, were out
of the question for the time being.

  “So tell me something, Wally. Why’d you do it?” Carson endeavored to appear nonjudgmental, simply curious in an academic way.

  “Why?” Malvone appeared somewhat taken aback by the question. “Why...why do people do anything? Why did you come here tonight? Why? I think…just to see if I could pull it off. Do it, and get away with it. Something that big. Didn’t you ever want to leave a real mark on history? Something lasting? Something that couldn’t be erased?”

  Carson stared at him, and shook his head slowly. “Well, I hope you enjoyed your little history game, because you’re not going to enjoy what’s coming next.”

  Malvone looked up and sighed loudly. “Ah, what the hell. Life’s a bitch, and then you die, and that’s all there is to it. In the end, we’re all just worm food. Like the man said, ‘No one here gets out alive.’ But how many people change the course of history, single handed?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Malvone: any sick mental case can kill people; you just killed more than most of them. And you didn’t change history, not really, because we’re going to fix what you’ve done.” Carson was tempted to show him the micro-recorder in its plastic baggie, in the top left pocket on his chest rig, but he held back. The author of the Stadium Massacre still might say something worthwhile.

  Malvone laughed, “Fix it? Oh, I don’t think so. It doesn’t work that way. That bell’s already been rung. There’s a civil war on now, and you can’t stop it. That genie’s out of the bottle, and you can’t put it back.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But we can sure make it bad for you. You know, there are lots of worse things than what we did to Hammet. We just wanted him to talk, and we had to leave him in one piece. But you, you’re going to be trying as hard as you can to help us put that genie back in the bottle, before we’re finished with you.”