Her other truth lay buried in an aluminum ordnance box, four feet long, hidden under the corner of a concrete slab in the Suffolk woods.
She owed it to Brad to settle at least one last score.
The first chapter of
Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista
the sequel to
Enemies Foreign And Domestic
follows the break.
Matt Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and graduated from the University of Virginia and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training in 1979. He is married, has two children, and lives in Florida. He is currently writing his second novel in the Dan Kilmer series, about a former Marine sniper trying to live as a free man in an unfree world.
There is s no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. We are a nation, not a hodge-podge of foreign nationalities. We are a people, and not a polyglot boarding house.
Theodore Roosevelt
Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista
1
Friday June 20
“Yo, Penny! What the hell you doing, girl? Get your scrawny butt back here!”
The woman was new—it was only her second day among the camp’s female detainees. She still had the boot camp buzz-cut that marked her as fresh from the “Tombs” in Illinois.
The D-Camp admin staff usually did this with pale-skinned girls: they put them straight out into the fields under the blast-furnace Oklahoma sun. The new prisoner had gamely attempted to keep up with the line of twenty women, weeding her row of knee-high corn with a hoe, but her hands were already cratered with broken blisters.
She walked back down the narrow file to where Big Kendra was waiting. Ranya anticipated what was going to happen next.
“Penny, are all the skinny white girls back in Maine as pitiful as you?”
Ranya kept moving her hoe, while glancing over her shoulder at the drama playing out behind the field crew. The new woman was half the size of Big Kendra, with her broad behind and ample chest straining against her khaki uniform.
“What is this here, woman? What do you see here?” Big Kendra was a “line pusher,” an unarmed guard who moved among the prisoners working the fields, telling them exactly what to do. She carried a long rake handle when she was on duty in the fields; now she was using it to point at the ground between the rows of immature corn.
The new detainee was shaking visibly, but Ranya couldn’t hear her reply. The woman turned and looked back up the line for the missed weed, leaning over to see where the guard had pointed. The guard moved up close behind, looming over her.
“Are you blind too? That’s a big ole’ weed—ain’t that what you’re here for?”
Ranya cringed as the guard booted the new woman down onto her face.
“Now get back on the line, and don’t let me catch you slacking off again!”
Big Kendra was one of the most offhandedly brutal guards in D-Camp. The six-foot Philadelphian took special delight in humiliating the new detainees, especially soft suburban housewives from the opposite end of the pigmentation spectrum.
After a few months of interrogation, they arrived at D-Camp in unmarked “moving vans” as pale as Pillsbury doughboys, and were immediately sent out to do field work beneath the unrelenting sun. No hats were provided, and their faces and shorn heads burned an agonizing lobster red. No gloves were supplied, and without calluses, their hands became painfully blistered working the short-handled hoes.
Ranya had seen the black Amazon called Big Kendra put the boot to many new detainees, as part of her own personal “breaking in” procedure.
The new prisoner stumbled back, and took her place among the women working their way up the lines of dusty plants. She was on the next row from Ranya, sobbing quietly. A trickle of blood seeped through the dirt embedded in the abrasion on her left temple.
“It’s not my fault, it’s a mistake—I shouldn’t even be here! It’s all a mistake! But nobody will listen. Nobody will listen!”
This was the usual lament of the new Article 14 detainees. It was always a mistake. An old song by an Australian band ran through Ranya’s mind. “It’s a mistake!” It was always the same heartrending tune. “It’s a mistake!”
“My husband disappeared last year, just disappeared. Went to work, and never came home. No word, not one word! Then last March the police came, and found guns in our attic. Assault weapons and sniper rifles, they said. I didn’t even know they were there! I swear to God, I had nothing to do with them! But nobody would listen. Now who’s taking care of my children? It’s all a mistake, but nobody will listen. And now I don’t even know where my children are…” Tears slid dirty tracks down her cheeks.
Children. The word stung Ranya like a slap. Who’s taking care of your children, lady? Well, who’s been taking care of my own baby for five long years? Her thoughts swept her back to the federal prison clinic in Maryland, her wrists and ankles shackled to the cold stainless steel table, and those precious minutes spent with her newborn baby boy. Even then, her wrists were not unchained: a sympathetic nurse held the baby boy to her chest, allowed her to kiss him, to inhale his newborn breath…and that was all of her time with him. Her baby was taken by a grim prison matron, and he disappeared behind a locked door, never to be seen by Ranya again. At least this new prisoner had been able to share a life with her children. Not just a few minutes!
Ranya wanted to say, “Do you think you’re the only mother here?” Instead, she answered, “Look, it’s not a mistake, your being here. Let me guess: you’re here for an Article 14: ‘conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism,’ right?”
The new prisoner nodded slowly, her face down, broken.
Ranya continued talking, while also looking down at her own work. “Lady, there are no mistakes here. And nobody in admin will listen to you anyway, so just forget it. That life you had is over, that life doesn’t exist— not while you’re in D-Camp. Hell, Delta Camp, detention camp, whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t even exist, haven’t you figured that out? Did you get your telephone call yet?” Ranya laughed bitterly. “Listen lady, if you ever want to see your children again, you have to at least make it in here. You have to survive. If you give up on yourself, you give up on any chance of seeing your kids again, ever.”
Ranya had tried to stay aloof in the camp, cold inside and hard outside. She avoided close friendships. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but feel sympathy for this innocent woman, thrown defenseless to the wolves, with her husband missing and her children taken away by the state.
“I’m sorry.” Ranya reached across, and touched her arm. “What’s your name?”
“Stephanie. Stephanie Pennington. I’m from Maine.”
“Stephanie, I’m Ranya Bardiwell. I’m from Virginia. Look, you really need to cover your head out here.” She paused, scarcely believing what she was about to offer to this stranger. “Here, take my hat.” She was giving up a prize possession, the brown ball cap she had found in the drainage ditch by the road, while being marched back to the barracks. A dingy gray rag was attached to the back like a vagabond’s version of a French Foreign Legion kepi. “I don’t need it so much any more—I’m way past getting sunburns. Don’t make a show of it, and the guards will let you wear it in the fields. Hide it in your bunk in camp. You won’t get another haircut out here in D-Camp, so in a few weeks you’ll have some more protection from the sun. I can’t help your hands though…I know how they hurt. I’ll try to get some of the weeds on your side, the ones that I can reach. You’ll be all right.”
The Latina woman working on the other side of Pennington ignored their hushed conversation. They worked their hoes in the red soil with their heads down, their backs to Big Kendra, who was trailing along behind them with her six-foot hardwood pole.
“Thank you, Ranya, thank you.” Pennington wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her blue prison shirt, leaving grimy smears across her
sun burnt face. “I just think about my children, and I don’t know how I can endure it…it’s like a nightmare that never ends.”
“How old are your kids?”
“Four and seven. Thomas and Michael.” The hint of a smile crossed her face and vanished. “Where do you think they are? Nobody will tell me anything!”
Ranya poked through the corn with her hoe: with her experienced eye and strong arms, she was able to weed most of the new woman’s line as well as her own. They were a hundred yards from the end, then they would move down twenty lines of corn and work their way back. They would do it until seven pm on this June day, with only a brief water break every two hours. Lunch had been stale peanut butter sandwiches, eaten an hour ago at noon, in the meager shade of a windbreak tree line.
Tree lines were what passed for scenery in this dead-flat part of Oklahoma. Sometimes, in the right light, Ranya would visualize in a distant tree line the fringe of palm trees that often marked a low-lying tropical island on the horizon, as seen from the deck of a sailboat. Sometimes the wind blowing in waves across the wheat fields played the same cruel trick, taking her back to those days of sailing aboard Guajira with Phil Carson. He had been her father’s friend, before her father had been killed. Then Carson had become her friend, protector and mentor during their months together on the run, hiding out along the coast of Colombia.
That time was now five years in the past, back when she had carried Brad’s baby. Brad Fallon, whom she had known so briefly, and loved so intensely, Brad, who had been shot by federal agents. Brad, who had then disappeared into the depths of the Potomac River, leaving Phil and Ranya to flee without him, on the boat he had prepared for his own getaway.
Ranya had returned from Colombia to the USA by herself. By the time she finally decided to come back she was seven months pregnant, and she thought she should not sail across the always windy and rough Caribbean. Instead, she had flown from Colombia to Honduras on her false Canadian passport as Diana Williams, and after a week of switching towns and hotels, she changed her identity back to Ranya Bardiwell for the onward flights to Guadalajara and Phoenix.
She should have risked the sea voyage with Phil Carson and returned to America secretly, off the official radar. Her passport had been flagged even as she reserved her flight to Mexico, and four grim-faced U.S. Marshals pulled her from the Customs line at Phoenix Sky Harbor. Her first day back in America had been her last day in freedom. The immunity deal they thought had been arranged proved to be a dangerous fantasy, nothing but bait to lure them back to the states, and arrest. Ranya had left Guajira and Colombia before Phil Carson, and she still had no idea where he was: abroad or in the states, free or a prisoner, or even if he was alive.
She should never have returned to America. Returning had only meant betrayal and imprisonment, and worst of all, losing her son…and Brad’s son. The most bitter irony was that the only reason she had returned to the United States, was to give her son a proper start in life as an American citizen. She did not want to risk ruining his life by beginning it as a baby fugitive, with his mother living under an alias in a foreign country. For attempting to bring her son into the world as an American, she had instead lost him, and lost five years of her life.
****
From over the eastern horizon a crop duster appeared, a buzzing yellow dot, lining up to fumigate a distant field.
“A-rab! Yo, A-rab! Come here, Bardy-well!”
It was Big Kendra. The black Philadelphian couldn’t quite grasp the concept of Christian Arabs, and frequently wondered aloud how an “Arab” had wound up in D-Camp, instead of in a separate camp for Muslim women. Ranya had never attempted to educate her. Big Kendra was hopelessly stupid; a perfect camp guard, a model employee of the Internal Security Agency. It was a standing joke among the detainees that if government employees were completely illiterate and lacked the people-skills required to work for the DMV, they were still more than qualified for the ISA, the bottom rung of the Department of Homeland Security.
Ranya turned and walked back nonchalantly. She wasn’t afraid of the guard, despite Kendra’s height and weight advantage. She could easily cleave the guard’s skull with the edge of her steel hoe, but after that moment of satisfaction, she’d be shot down by the two trailing riflemen, the so-called “gun guards.” Still, Ranya habitually fantasized doing it. She vividly pictured a full steel-edged swing to Kendra’s throat, the stark terror on Kendra’s open-mouthed and bug-eyed face, the scream that would never make it past the severed windpipe, the spouting arterial blood.
She regularly imagined rushing one stupefied gun guard, and wrestling his rifle away from him before he could unsling it and prepare it to fire. The question was: would the other rifleman fire at them both, rolling on the ground? And even if he didn’t open fire immediately, what then? Even if she managed somehow to kill Big Kendra and both gun guards, she couldn’t outrun their radios and helicopters. Not out here in the endless open fields of western Oklahoma.
Even so, she wanted to kill a guard, to kill all the guards. She wanted very badly to kill them. She endlessly daydreamed their sudden, painful, violent deaths. She just wasn’t quite ready to sacrifice her own life to that end. Not yet. The camp guards were only bottom feeders, they meant nothing in the greater scheme of things. The ones Ranya had a stronger desire to kill were much higher up the food chain. Ranya still valued her life too much to trade it away for the momentary satisfaction of cleaving Big Kendra’s empty skull.
After almost five years at D-Camp, Ranya knew all of the guards’ weaknesses. One of her infrequent victories had occurred the previous summer, when she had found a king snake in a soybean field. Growing up in rural Virginia, Ranya had no fear of non-poisonous king snakes, which mimicked the deadly coral snake with a similar color pattern. She had carefully pinned the banded red, black and yellow snake with her hoe and grabbed it behind the head, and when Kendra’s back was turned, she had flung the snake at her feet.
The guard had broken every Olympic record sprinting from the field, and then she split the back of her too-tight khaki pants climbing on top of the flatbed stake truck. The other guards, male and female, had mocked Big Kendra for weeks after the incident, baiting her with false snake alarms, and leaving rubber snakes in her lunch pail. Ranya’s original tossing of the live snake had never been suspected. If any other prisoners had witnessed her defiant act, they had kept their mouths shut.
“A-rab, what you doin’ giving that white girl you hat? Why you be doin’ that?”
“I don’t need it anymore. I’m almost as dark as you now.”
“Hah! That’ll be the day!” Kendra grinned, her single gold tooth gleaming in the sun. “I don’t understand why you is feeling all sorry for a no-good white bitch like that. What she do for you?”
It was pointless to try to explain normal human feelings to a line pusher, one of the bottom guards at D-Camp. Collecting a federal paycheck for following hapless prisoners across fields was about as low a living as Ranya could imagine. Obviously, Big Kendra considered the deeply tanned “A-rab” Ranya Bardiwell to be something other than “white,” and therefore she couldn’t fathom Ranya’s sympathy for the new pale-complexioned prisoner. Politically correct racial solidarity must have been drummed into Kendra’s pea-brain in government schools and institutions all of her life, Ranya mused. She ignored the guard’s question.
“That ain’t why I called you back, Bardy-well. Warden Linssen, she want you back by the tool truck. That little pickup truck over there, that be Warden Linssen. I don’t know why, but she just axed for you on my radio. Go drop your hoe in the tool bin, and see what she want.”
Without replying, Ranya marched back down the row of corn, between the two male guards with their Mini-14 rifles slung on their shoulders. These gun guards in their khaki uniforms regarded her carefully as she passed between them: they formed the back points of a wide triangle 50 yards behind Big Kendra. The two men tracked Ranya with their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, t
heir faces obscured by wide-brimmed tan desert hats.
No matter what direction a prisoner might try to run, one or both of the gun guards would have an easy shot. Their iron-sighted Mini-14s were crummy rifles, provided to prison guards solely because they were the cheapest of the available alternatives, but she knew that at these distances, even a gun guard with a Mini-14 would not miss.
She carried the hoe across her chest at military “port arms,” with her head up and eyes front. She wanted to shoulder the hoe like a rifle of her own, and aim down the “barrel” at them, but that type of rebellious gesture would only earn her another stint in D-Camp’s rusty iron “sweat box,” where one could neither stand up nor fully lay down.
Besides, she was consumed with curiosity about why Deputy Warden Linssen wanted her, and she would do nothing to jeopardize this meeting.
****
At the edge of the field was the tool truck, a mud-splashed white full-size GMC pickup. Ranya dropped her hoe into a plastic bin in the back, and the supervisor sitting in the cab made a notation in his ledger book. Beyond the tool truck, on the dirt road leading from the cornfield, was Warden Linssen’s black Ford Ranger. The power window on the driver’s side rolled down as she approached.
“Ranya? Get in. You’re done with the weed line for today. Maybe for forever.” The warden was wearing wire-rimmed aviator’s sunglasses, and she smiled warmly through the open window.
It was the first time Ranya had opened a vehicle door in five years. She had ridden in the backs of camp trucks on occasion, but never in the cab. The AC hit her with a forgotten alpine blast, pushing out the Oklahoma summer heat. As she settled into the spongy seat, Ranya suddenly remembered riding in another pickup truck that mad September in Virginia, six years before. Brad’s pickup truck.
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 81
