Reign in Hell

by William Diehl

  “Your sons?” Vail asked, nodding toward the photograph.

  “Yes. The younger one on the left is Emilio. He’s about to graduate from Harvard Law with honors. Arnie, on the right, is the family maverick. He’s an archeologist. Right now he’s in Egypt, hot on the trail of Alexander the Great’s tomb or something.”

  Vail smiled and looked around the small office.

  “You people watch a lot of television?”

  “They ’re all interconnected, Mr. Vail. We can have a visual conference with just about anyone in the world or watch closed-circuit feeds of live events. The TVs are also tied into the computers in the ComOp. All coded and secure except for the normal cable and network channels.” She opened the door to the next compartment. “This is the ComOp, the heart and soul of AMOC.”

  The long, cell-like, dark compartment was a maze of electronic equipment: a computer-video system with six monitors, a satellite scan, secure phone and fax, a red alert phone direct to the White House, a live surveillance monitor, digital video cameras, DSS tape recorders, direct video to AWACS, and a cable/network satellite TV with still another thirty-five-inch monitor. Castaigne described the equipment, although she seemed a bit bemused by it all.

  “My electronics genius went into the terminal to get a local paper,” she said. “Actually, I think he likes to check out the girls in the airport.”

  “Are there girls in the airport at this hour?” Vail said sardonically.

  “Well, if there are, Jimmy will find them,” she answered. “Back there is another small conference room, with a computer and TV, and the commander’s private bedroom. Commander is a highfalutin title for whoever’s in charge of the aircraft. We have a crew of eight plus a flight crew of four, and space for twenty others.”

  “And my tax dollars pay for this?”

  “You’d be surprised how many hours I spend in this jet,” she said, a bit defensively. “In fact we have four AMOCS. They’re operational most of the time.”

  “I wasn’t complaining,” Vail said.

  “Why, I didn’t think you were, Mr. Vail,” she murmured as they walked back toward the front of the jet.

  Silverman appeared and announced that breakfast was ready. They went into the dining room, which was set out with sterling silverware and linen napkins. All the comforts of home.

  “So, any questions?” Castaigne asked when they had settled down to eat.

  “Yeah,” Vail said. “How come you know my dog’s name?”

  She laughed. “I confess I did my own private security check on you—read all Jack Connerman’s articles,” she answered. “Connerman seems to know more about you than anyone alive. Are you two friends?”

  “We occasionally have a drink together.”

  “I also have a transcript of the Grand County trial. I consider it the textbook on RICO. Brilliant job.”

  “Thanks. I figured you dragged me out of bed to lean on me about that.”

  “Why? Because you snatched the case out from under Pete Riker?”

  “I didn’t snatch it away from him, he lost his grip on it.”

  “It was a federal case, Mr. Vail.”

  “And I made it a state case, General.”

  “Why don’t you call me Marge? Everybody else does.”

  “All right, you can call me Martin or Marty or…” Vail paused and smiled. “… whatever Riker calls me.”

  She smiled back. “Not in polite conversation.”

  “Ahhh, that’s what this is then, polite conversation?”

  “I would hope so.”

  “Good. Then I can politely tell you that I didn’t snatch anything out from under Pete Riker. He waited too long. He didn’t have the link.”

  “The link?”

  “You know how complicated RICO is. Ultimately you have to find a link, something or someone that can tie all those cases together. I got lucky, I had the link, he never did. That’s why he was sitting on the case.”

  “You lucked out?”

  “I said I got lucky, General, I don’t luck out. Luck doesn’t win cases, but a little luck always helps.” He paused a moment and said, “Did you get the breakfast menu from Connerman, too?”

  “He put me on to your favorite diner. He also says you’re an edge runner, that you like taking chances.”

  “Well, Connerman doesn’t know everything. Right now I know three things I’m sure he doesn’t know.”

  “Oh? What are they?”

  “He doesn’t know you’re such a big fan of his, he doesn’t know I’m here, and he doesn’t know why.”

  She laughed. “Point for you.”

  “Are we ever going to get around to why?”

  “Maybe I just wanted to break bread with the guy who took down Tom Lacey and Harold Grossman.”

  Vail chuckled. “Sure. And I came to check out Paul’s world-famous hollandaise sauce.”

  She tapped her lips with her napkin and said, almost casually, “The President has a favor to ask.”

  Vail’s back stiffened. He sat up in his chair and put down his fork. He stared across the table at her for several seconds.

  “You play your trump card early in the game, don’t you?” he said finally.

  “Sometimes.”

  “That’s a pretty good one.”

  “I know.”

  “Is this going to be twenty questions?”

  “No,” she said with a laugh. “I thought we’d finish breakfast before we got serious.”

  “We’re going to get serious, then?” He put down his fork. “The breakfast was delicious and the hollandaise was unimpeachable. Now what’s on your mind?”

  She liked Vail. The arrogance and irreverence she had heard about were there, but he also was relaxed and had a playfully skewed sense of humor, and, as Connerman had told her, he was disarmingly blunt.

  “What do you know about the militia movement in this country?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “What I read in the papers, which isn’t much. I followed Waco and Oklahoma City. Bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads and religious fanatics. We always have that kind of nut fringe in our society.”

  “Do you consider them dangerous?”

  “I don’t consider them at all.”

  “I want to show you something,” she said. She got up, and Vail followed her back to the ComOp. A moment later her electronics whiz came in.

  “Martin, this is Jim Hines. Mr. Vail, Jimmy.”

  “Hi, Mr. Vail,” he said, and took his seat in front of the sprawling console. Hines was husky, his body obviously molded in the gym. He had flaming red hair, the pale skin and freckles that go with it, and a mischievous smile. He might have passed for a teenager. Vail estimated his age in the mid-to-late twenties.

  “We may be getting a live feed from Hardistan,” Hines said. “The reception is still bad but they’re working on it.”

  “Good. Bring up the H-file while we wait,” Castaigne said.

  “Right.”

  He closed out the file he was working on and switched back to the main screen of the computer.

  “What level?” he asked.

  “Alpha,” she said. “Let’s show Mr. Vail how it works.”

  Hines popped the cursor over an icon and a blank screen appeared, followed almost instantly by the words:

  “SECURITY CHECK: VOICE. PRINTS. VISUAL.”

  Castaigne placed her hand on a small pad with her fingers splayed out, looked straight ahead and said, “Margaret Castaigne, Attorney General.”

  All three of the boxes turned green almost instantly.

  “ACCESS APPROVED. ID NAME?”

  Hines typed in Castaigne’s code name, which appeared as six asterisks on the screen. The screen cleared briefly and the words, “PRIOAX ALPHA. FILE?” He typed in “HATE GROUPSINDEX,” and another menu appeared.

  “We have a lot of security checks on the network system,” the electronics whiz said. He pointed to the bank of monitors and recorders in front of him. “Ther
e’s a palm-size digital video camera right there. It sends the visual signal to the security force at the same time as the voice and hand prints go over the line. If they don’t crosscheck electronically, access to the computer is denied.”

  “Grab a seat, Martin,” Castaigne said. “I’m going to give you a fast briefing on hate groups in the United States.” The screen filled with an impossibly complex chart that traced the emergence of hate groups from England and Tennessee through a labyrinth of interconnected lines up to the present day. Proper names were in circles, organizations in rectangles. It looked like a molecular chart with each name exploding into other names and groups. As Castaigne spoke, Hines moved the cursor around the chart, tracing the evolution of hate groups in the U.S.

  As she described the start of the Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, which had burgeoned to half a million members within four years, photographs and movie clips appeared on the screen. They were dark and disturbing images from the past: hooded figures saluting a blazing cross; a man hanging from a tree limb while a crowd of men, some of them mere teenagers, gathered beneath it, smiling at the camera; a burned corpse, its arms death-frozen in a pleading posture; a church engulfed in fire while its black parishioners stared mutely and fearfully at the camera.

  “Then in the 1920s, a more ominous threat came from England,” Castaigne went on. “The Christian Unity Church, a white supremacy bunch that claimed that white Anglo-Saxons were the true Israelites and God’s chosen people, while Jews, blacks, and other nonwhites were ‘on a spiritual level with animals and have no soul.’ That’s a direct quote. They quickly found a soulmate in the Klan, and the ‘Invisible Empire’ awoke, more dangerous than ever, and not just confined to the South….” Now the photographs and videos were even more chilling. These were not images from history, they were current events. There was a video of the death of Gordon Kahl, the maniacal member of the Posse Comitatus who wore a small silver hangman’s noose pin on his collar. Kahl had killed two U.S. marshals and wounded two others, starting a manhunt that ended with Kahl, mortally wounded, screaming a mixture of biblical phrases and obscenities and firing his mini-14 from the burning farmhouse in the Ozarks that became his funeral pyre. “The Klan grew to four million members, including forty thousand ministers. The Christian Unity spawned the Aryan Brotherhood, the American Patriots, the Liberty Lobby, the Birch Society, the Minutemen, the National Christian Democracy Union, and more recently, the Aryan Nations, the Covenant of the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, the Sword of Christ ministry, the Posse Comitatus, and the Order.”

  Another photo flashed on the screen: two U.S. marshals lying dead on a Utah roadside. And then another of a black couple under sheets on a North Carolina street, gunned down by an Army skinhead as part of an “initiation.”

  “Kahl was martyred by the entire movement, the same as David Koresh and Randy Weaver would later be martyred,” Castaigne said. “The most violent of all the hate groups was the Order, a spin-off of the Aryans. I’ll get back to them in a minute. The point is, they were cloaking race hatred in Christianity, and then they added independence from the government. The Klan has a pamphlet called ‘The Bible Answers Racial Questions,’ which begins by quoting the First Amendment…”

  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” Vail said.

  “You know your Constitution,” Castaigne said, impressed.

  “A lot better than I know the Bible,” Vail answered.

  “They hide behind churches and the Constitution and condemn the government as the enemy of the people. They want government returned to the local level. Posse Comitatus, for instance, is Latin for ‘power of the county.’ The Minutemen’s Principles of Guerrilla Warfare preaches all-out revolution. Their answer is ‘raid, snipe, ambush, and sabotage….’ Another direct quote.

  “The primer for all these groups is a book called The Turner Diaries, which predicts a guerrilla war against the U.S. government and all minorities. It’s a textbook on guerrilla tactics, how to modify weapons, how to make bombs. The book describes how to make a high potential bomb with fuel oil and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and uses it in the story to blow up a federal building. The Turner Diaries was Timothy McVeigh’s favorite book.”

  A shot of the gutted Murrah Building in Oklahoma City flashed on the monitor, wires and conduits dangling from its gaping holes like entrails.

  “Point is, Martin, violence has been the trademark of the militia movement since long before Oklahoma City. In the early eighties the Order went on a felony spree. They didn’t miss a trick: counterfeiting, bank robberies, kidnapping, armored car heists, murder. They bombed synagogues, killed members they suspected had turned, assassinated talk show host Alan Berg…”

  Two more photographs flashed on the screen, a nightmare montage of violence: George Matthews, the founder of the brutal Order, dying in a barrage of FBI bullets on an island in the Puget Sound, and the bullet-torn corpse of talk show host Alan Berg, lying beside his car.

  “So in 1984 the FBI organized a task force and went after them. The Order’s response was to declare war on the United States. The Justice Department made a racketeering case against twenty-four members of the Order. Sixty-some counts of racketeering for counterfeiting, murder, and robbery. George Matthews wasn’t having any. He chose to die instead. Another martyr. The other twenty-three were convicted and the Order finally faded away. We suspect most of the members who weren’t indicted migrated to other groups.”

  “How big was the Order?” Vail asked.

  “We’re not sure, probably less than a hundred members.”

  “You think the public takes these crazies seriously?” Vail said. “Martin, the Anti-Defamation League estimates there may be as many as 75,000 active members of hate groups in this country. We say the figure could be as high as 750,000 if you include sympathizers who aren’t actively involved in the militia government. The figures went up after Waco and the Randy Weaver affair. We expected that. What shocked us is that the figures also rose sharply after Oklahoma City.” Where’s she going with this? Vail wondered. And what the hell am I doing here? When is she going to get to the point?

  “Jimmy, bring up the Sanctuary,” she said. And to Vail, “Ever hear of a group called the Church of the Sanctuary of the Lord and the Wrath of God, Martin?”

  He thought for a moment. “Isn’t some hotshot general from Desert Storm involved with them?”

  “Joshua Engstrom. But he was a colonel in Desert Storm, not a general. He didn’t make general until after he retired and became adjutant general of the Montana National Guard.”

  A shot of Engstrom appeared on the screen, a bald, husky, tall figure, a bit thick around the middle, wearing khaki camouflage fatigues with a pistol at his waist, an automatic rifle cradled in one arm and a Bible in the other, standing beside a tank in the desert surrounded by a dozen soldiers. Most of the men were smiling, but Engstrom’s face was a cold, expressionless mask.

  “That’s Engstrom in Desert Storm, 1990.”

  “I remember that picture,” Vail said, staring at Engstrom’s eyes. “He had a nickname….”

  “The Preacher.”

  “Right.”

  “Bring the other one up, Jimmy.”

  A second photograph was in sharp contrast to the first, a snapshot, fuzzy, faded, water-stained.

  “This is Vietnam, 1973,” Castaigne said.

  Engstrom was standing with six soldiers in the jungle. They stared with disdain, almost angrily, at the camera. Engstrom stood in the middle, a hard-bodied man with a buzz cut and a beard streaked with gray. All the men were shirtless and had bandannas tied around their foreheads. They all wore camouflage pants and boots, some with knives protruding from them. They had bandoliers crisscrossed on their bare chests and sidearms holstered low on the hip, and were holding a variety of different weapons: Uzis, AR-14s, M-1As, all mounted with telescopic sights. It was a harrowing photograph.

  Hi
nes zoomed in on Engstrom’s face. His gaze seemed fixed, his eyes fiery, almost maniacal, conjuring visions of other zealots: John Brown on the gallows; Jim Jones in Guyana; Vernon Howell, who would later change his name to David Koresh, outside Waco on the eve of his personal Armageddon.

  “The guy to Engstrom’s right is Robert Shrack,” Castaigne said. “His nickname was Black Bobby. Next to him is Dave Metzinger. Shrack is Engstrom’s deputy now, and Metzinger is the pastor of one of the four churches that make up the Sanctuary. The one on the right with the scar down the side of his face is Gary Jordan. The guy with the beard and sunglasses kneeling on the left is holding a 50-caliber with a Unertl sight. Sniper rifle, not government issued. He and the guy in the middle are either dead or we can’t ID them.”

  “Can’t you pull up their Army records?”

  “There aren’t any. Engstrom led a group called the Phantom Project. Black ops. Their mission was so dark all records of it and its members have been destroyed. It isn’t even mentioned in Engstrom’s service record. All it says is that he served with Military Intelligence in ’Nam from 1967 to 1975.”

  “That bad, huh?” Vail said.

  “Depends on your point of view, I guess,” Castaigne said. “Now look at the Desert Storm shot. The boys are smiling, all except Engstrom, whose expression hasn’t changed in twenty years; Shrack, who is standing just behind him; and the two guys kneeling in front of him. The one in front of him is Gary Jordan and the one kneeling next to Jordan is Karl Rentz. Both of them are Engstrom’s pastors, too.”

  “Pastors?” Vail said.

  “They are the pastors of the four churches under the Sanctuary umbrella.”

  “Metzinger, who you mentioned before, is the third pastor. Who’s the fourth?”

  “James Joseph Rainey, late of the Texas Knights of the White Camelia.”

  “The good general is playing the field.”

  “Jimmy, pair those up with a Desert Storm shot of the President.”

  “Sure,” the redhead said. A photograph appeared beside the other photos, this one of Lawrence Pennington standing in front of a map with a pointer in hand.