Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  FOREIGN ENEMIES

  a n d t r a i t o r s

  MATTHEW BRACKEN

  Steelcutter Publishing

  Orange Park, Florida

  Kindle Edition 2011

  This novel is a work of fiction. The events and characters

  described herein are products of the author’s imagination.

  Any similarities to actual persons are entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2009 by Matthew Bracken

  All Rights Reserved.

  This work, or any parts thereof, may not be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means; electronic, mechanical or otherwise without specific prior written permission from the author.

  ISBN 0-9728310-3-7

  Library of Congress Control Number

  2009903357

  www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com

  To Ellie, Brendan and Lauren, who are my world.

  Acknowledgements:

  Thank you to my brother, Joe Bracken, Jefferson Adams, Matt Bastian, Kasey Beltz, Dave Brown, Charlie Byrd, Beth Gunn, H.J. Halterman, Rob Henry, Arthur Hines, Kevin Knox, Jim Kononoff, Frank Parker, Robert Patty, Caylen Perry, Rita Samols, Joe Smith, Mark Spungin, Tim Ziegler and my sister Clare Strange for creating all of my cover art.

  Also by Matthew Bracken:

  Enemies Foreign And Domestic

  A novel about the true meaning of loyalty and the

  high cost of freedom in the age of terror. (2003)

  Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista

  A novel about the deconstruction of the American

  national identity and the loss of the Southwest. (2006)

  Castigo Cay

  The first Dan Kilmer novel, about a former Marine

  sniper trying to live free in an unfree world. (2011)

  Over 100 pages of each book may be read at

  www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer:

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

  Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

  Sir John Harrington, 1607

  Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

  Who shall guard the guards?

  1

  The sailor cranked the wheel from side to side, swerving the fifty-foot catamaran in time to match the waves. Lightning lit the ocean every few seconds. In between flashes, his world was a black void, with mountainous swells rushing at him unseen. The trick was to surf the waves at an angle, riding the biggest ones for as long as possible. The problem was he couldn’t see them in the dark. He’d surfed hundreds of waves in the last day and night, and had developed a finely tuned feel for the rhythm of their lift and rush, but in the end, his steering was intuition and guesswork.

  The greatest danger was stuffing the boat’s two knifelike bows into the bottom of a trough, then being lifted from behind by the next wave, flipping the boat stern over bow. Once over, she would be permanently capsized, her mast aiming at the sea floor, her cockpit submerged under salt water.

  The boat was running northward without a scrap of sail up, but even the bare mast and rigging presented too much resistance to the storm winds. His backlit digital speedometer was reading in the twenties, as it had been for more than a day. Since before Paulo had been lost overboard. Since before the autopilot had burned out and he’d been forced to hand-steer the big catamaran.

  Phil Carson was sailing in a nameless December hurricane, lost somewhere in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was wide enough to produce storm waves twenty feet and higher, and shallow enough to make their onrushing faces stand up vertically. Unlike in the open Atlantic, there was not enough sea room to sail out of danger before running into the land lurking over the unseen horizon. He had no idea how much Gulf he had left in front of him. GPS was a memory, a fondly recalled dream. Either the old global positioning satellites were down, or their information was encoded and unreadable by civilians. It didn’t matter which. GPS was finished as far as Phil Carson was concerned.

  In this ugly weather, old-fashioned celestial navigation was just as useless. He had not glimpsed the sun through the cloud cover in the two days since rounding Cuba, so he had no idea of his location. After three days of “dead reckoning” in storm winds, navigation was a wild-ass guess, give or take hundreds of miles in any direction. Now he was too fatigued to dedicate any mental energy to refining his guesswork. He was somewhere between Texas and Florida. He’d know where the land was only when he hit it—if he didn’t capsize and drown first.

  Since dawn, he’d been alone. At the 0600 change of watch he’d come up from the boat’s Spartan galley with a thermos of coffee, only to find no trace of his crewman. The boat was still running fast on the electric autopilot, leaving twin wakes of churning white water astern. Paulo wouldn’t wear a safety harness. Safety lines violated his fatalistic sense of Latin machismo. Well, too bad for him—there was no way possible to bring the cat around and sail back against the storm winds. By now Paulo was dead, drowned fighting the monster seas. After sixty-four years, Phil Carson had seen enough death to know that there were worse ways to check out. He was too numb from exhaustion to grieve for his crew.

  He’d picked up the young Brazilian as last-minute crew in Recife, when the Dutch kid and his Martiniquen girlfriend had jumped ship. He didn’t even know Paulo’s last name—or for that matter if Paulo was even his real name. He had no papers that Carson had seen, and smugglers weren’t much on sharing biographies—especially across a language divide. Only sailing skill, stamina and guts mattered for a smuggling voyage. Now with Paulo gone and the autopilot dead, he was unable to take his hands off the leather-covered stainless steel wheel, lest the catamaran swerve out of control and capsize amidst the wild waves.

  Lightning strikes crashed down to port and starboard like artillery, and his bare mast was a sixty-foot aluminum finger scratching the clouds. Then, without warning, green balls of light were rolling up and down his mast’s wire rigging—Saint Elmo’s fire. Phil Carson was out of adrenaline and incapable of greater fear or new amazement. When the crackling glow disappeared with a final upward flash, so did the comforting backlights of his speedometer, his depth sounder and his magnetic compass. His last remaining electronics had been fried. Now the only light came from the strobe-like flashes of lightning, illuminating the saltwater canyons.

  The catamaran climbed again, over the next wave, fifteen, twenty feet up and over. At the crest, a brighter flash far ahead left the flat line of the horizon clearly frozen for an instant. On the horizon, still printed on his rods and cones after the flaring millisecond view, was a line of ships. On the next wave top the ships became a row of buildings, which meant land dead ahead. They were no more than a mile away if they were small structures, maybe a few miles off if they were large towers.

  At over twenty knots of boat speed, he knew that it wouldn’t take long to get there. His teeth and his hands were clenched as salt spray hit his face like warm hailstones flying sideways. Another instantaneous view atop another lightning-lit crest, and the buildings were much closer. Beyond astonishment or fear, Phil Carson hung onto the wheel as the catamaran’s twin hulls flew between concrete towers. With the last of his energy, he braced for impact but none came. Past the line of buildin
gs, the waves diminished to less than ten feet in height for the first time in days. These mere ripples were no impediment to the catamaran. He thought he’d probably surfed right over a narrow barrier island, a coastal strip drowned under the storm surge, and into a bay.

  Then as swiftly as he’d passed between the condominium towers, the catamaran was sailing into a debris field. Lightning bolts strobe-lit a mad wilderness of trees, roofs, boats and cars. The yacht flew over and through the storm-driven trash.

  Then came the impact—and nothing after that.

  ****

  The wind awakened her. Not the wind per se, but the sound of trees blown about and jostled by the wind. Her newly constructed home was in a clearing surrounded on three sides by ponderosa pines as tall as a clipper ship’s mast. It took a strong breeze to start the Wyoming giants to groaning and creaking like this. Ranya’s bedroom was on the second floor, and with no close neighbors there was no need to shut the curtains. As the big pines swayed, between them she caught glimpses of the moon above the rim of Mount Baldy. That wasn’t the mountain’s real name, but the one that her eight-year-old son, Brian, had given it.

  Their home was surrounded by miles of pine forest, but its exterior was not built of wood. She had insisted on this. Instead, they had it custom built from granite stones, trucked up from a quarry near the Wind River and cemented together. The steeply pitched metal roof was guaranteed to be fireproof, also at her insistence. The gray rock home was their fortress and their refuge.

  The bedroom door slowly creaked open, and she sensed small feet padding across the floor. A warm wraith slid under the down comforter and nestled against her back. Ranya turned, wrapped Brian in her arms, and pulled him tightly to her.

  “I’ll protect you, Mommy,” he murmured sleepily, as she smiled and pressed his little face to her flannel pajama top.

  “I know you will,” she whispered back. Outside, the trees continued to growl and snap as the wind hissed and moaned through a million branches.

  “When is daddy coming home?”

  “Friday.”

  “Two weeks is a long time.”

  “I know,” she agreed. “Two weeks is a very long time.”

  Alex was in Spokane, Washington, training for the Wyoming State Militia. He was learning how to fire the new Korean shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. When his course was finished, he’d be qualified as an instructor. This meant that for two weeks, Ranya and Brian were alone on their two hundred acre estate, but she wasn’t worried. Ranya Bardiwell could take care of herself, and neighbors could be reached on the emergency radio net by day or night.

  Her neighbors (the closest were a half mile away), didn’t know her as Ranya Bardiwell. She was now Robin Douglas, thirty years old, the wife of Alan Douglas and the mother of Brian. This had been her identity for two years, and she had grown into it. She had become Robin Douglas, even if she could not forget her old life.

  Alex—Alan—had suggested their new last name. Garabanda and Bardiwell were far too unusual, glowing beacons for any identity-tracking program. A last name that was also a common first name was just the opposite: database camouflage. Alex became Alan, so that if anyone from his previous life as an FBI Special Agent recognized him in public and called out his old first name, it was similar enough to his alias, that the alias would not be betrayed to anyone in earshot. Brian kept his own first name. It was ordinary enough, and the child had been through too many wrenching changes already.

  Ranya chose Robin. This was not a common first name, but she had insisted. Robin was a nom de guerre from her old life, and she was comfortable with it. It was a private link to her secret past, a name given to her by Phil Carson during their month of high adventure and eventual tragedy in Virginia. She briefly thought of Carson and wondered where he was now, and if he was well. Years ago, he had said that she was the closest thing to family that he had in the world. Despite their thirty-year age difference and lack of blood connection, they were sibling orphans because of their shared experiences and losses.

  The last time she had seen Phil was when she left Colombia, to fly home to America. She had returned so that Brian could be born in the USA as an American citizen, instead of being raised on false papers as the child of an overseas fugitive. No good deed going unpunished, she had been arrested in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport upon her arrival in the States. Brian was born while she was in prison. Ranya lost the first five years of his life before escaping from the detention camp in Oklahoma. It seemed like a dream now, rediscovering Brian in New Mexico, then kidnapping him in San Diego with Alex’s help, and flying to Wyoming to begin new lives.

  And so, the freshly minted Douglas family had settled into the foothills of the Rockies after their escape from California. Their arrival had drawn no attention—they were one family among many thousands making a similar trek to freedom. The source of their wealth was never challenged, gold and silver coins being universally accepted in the American West. With gold coins offered in payment, signatures and identification were never an issue. Gold required no official stamp of government approval, no bureaucrat’s printed form nor any banker’s countersigned validation. Gold coins carried no history or baggage, but only unquestioned value based on their weight and purity, and nothing else. In the free states there were no more dollars and cents, only grams and ounces of gold and silver.

  Alex called it “God’s money,” because unlike paper dollars, only He could create gold. Ranya thought of their golden treasure as a measure of God’s mercy, after what she had endured before arriving in Wyoming with Brian and Alex.

  ****

  He sensed light, but his eyes were stuck closed. Phil Carson was lying on his back on a hard surface. His head ached, and it took a long time to regain full consciousness. His first memories were of the storm, and sailing between condominium towers. His fingertips touched the floor beside him and fanned out from his sides, and after a period of uncertainty, he determined that he was down below in one of the catamaran’s twin hulls. The boat was still. Perfectly still. It was the stillness of dry land, a foreign sensation after weeks of ceaseless motion. He was not sure if he was in the port or starboard hull. He felt around himself with a weak right hand and found the seat of his navigation station, and with grim determination he pulled himself up to a sitting position. The navigation station meant that he was in the starboard hull, and the head, the toilet compartment, was behind him.

  He made it up to a crouch and felt his way through the narrow bathroom door to the sink, found a tap and turned it, but no water came out. There was not even the sound of the electric pump. He was puzzled until he remembered the ball lightning, and the electronics going out. Probably his entire electrical system was shot. There was also a manual lever-operated backup water pump. He found the hand towel by feel, still hanging from its ring. He leaned against the sink, wet the towel with a dozen quick strokes of the hand pump, and gently swabbed his eyes. After a while, whatever dried gunk had stuck them together released its grip, and he tentatively opened them one at a time.

  Well Phil, you’ve looked better, he thought. The face staring back at him from the mirror was a mess. Both eyes were encircled by raccoon rings, and his skin was encrusted with dried blood. His nose was cut and broken again. Worse, he had a horizontal gash at the top of his forehead, just below his hairline. The wound was as long and wide as a finger, still oozing blood. His pale blue eyes were bloodshot, and his stubble of gray hair was matted with more dried blood. The hair on his head was only a bit longer than his beard. He’d gotten a boot camp crewcut in Recife, Brazil, before the voyage, and had not shaved since. He slowly turned his head, studying his grizzled face, now bloody and bruised. He filled a plastic cup with water from the hand pump, and drank it down. At least the freshwater tank hadn’t been breached, even if the electrical system was ruined.

  He left the tiny bathroom. He had to walk hunched over; the headroom inside the hulls was an inch under his five foot eleven. Forward
of the navigation station and his narrow berth, the hull was still packed with its primary cargo. Fifty large solar panels in this hull alone, each four feet by two feet and packed in a slim cardboard box. All of the brown boxes still appeared to be dry, a testament to the catamaran’s solid construction.

  The Seabago had been built a decade earlier in Key West to Coast Guard specs, qualifying her to carry twenty-five day-tripping passengers on deck between the two hulls. She’d been built both tough and light, of carbon fiber, Kevlar and epoxy. After the tropical tourism trade died, Carson had picked her up cheap in Saint Barts for a smuggler. Cheap, because her narrow hulls were built without consideration to permanent live-aboard habitation, not even providing standing headroom in the hulls. There was no enclosed bridge deck cabin between the hulls, just flat space for passengers to sit during their excursions, and only webbed netting between the hulls forward of the mast. He’d purchased Seabago for cash money without a vessel document or legal title. As time went on this became less and less of a problem. In the free ports Phil Carson had frequented from Brazil to Belize, possession equaled ownership—as long as a boat skipper paid his yard bills promptly.

  What a run of bad luck he’d had! His comfortable home in Porto Bello had been confiscated after the last Panamanian coup d’etat, when “rich” gringo expats had been scapegoated by the new regime. He’d been lucky to get out of the country aboard Seabago with most of his gold, which had been just enough to finance this latest smuggling venture. Now if he returned to Panama, he would risk prison—or worse. Well, that was a moot point anyway. How could he return to Panama or anywhere else in the Caribbean? His remaining wealth was locked within the two hulls of this catamaran, in a most illiquid state. He had no other base of operations left in the Caribbean, no home or even a home port to call his own, no refuge beyond where he stood. Eight years after fleeing the United States on another sailboat, he had returned on a smuggling venture. Now he was shipwrecked and stranded.