Ben Mitchell looked up Terry Shriver’s number and called him back, but the line was busy. Terry was probably calling up other old SF buddies of Denton, so he took the phone into his den and snapped on the TV, which was already set to TOP News, the only cable news channel he considered worth watching. They were showing an overhead shot of a huge highway smashup in Norfolk; dozens of cars were piled up on both sides of a highway overpass. The title at the bottom read “Highway Car Bomb in Norfolk Virginia.”
Ben hit redial and got right through. “Terry, Ben Mitchell here, what’s going on?”
“Have you been watching the news Sergeant Major?”
“I just turned it on.”
“Mark Denton, you remember him?”
“Sure, I know Mark. What’s going on?”
“His car blew up right on the highway in Norfolk, killed him and his son. Now they’re saying he was in some kind of militia, and he was carrying a bomb and it went off early. They say he was going to bomb the federal building in Norfolk, and it looks like he had some rifles and a bunch of ammo in his car, they’re all over the road is what they say. I tried calling his house, but the phone must be off the hook. I just can’t believe it Ben, I just can’t believe it.”
There was a long pause while neither man spoke. Ben Mitchell said, “It’s a crock. It’s bullshit Terry. There’s just no way, no way at all.”
“It’s a setup Ben. It’s got to be a setup.”
“Yeah, it has to be. Thanks for calling Terry, and keep your powder dry—there’s something mighty strange going on.”
“You watch your back too, Ben.”
****
Ben Mitchell had retired from the Army after putting in 25 years, most of it in the Special Forces. One wall in his den was covered with military plaques, unit memorabilia and framed photographs. He walked over and took one large picture down off its hook and brushed his fingers gently over the glass. The faded black and white photograph showed a group of ten smiling men, half of them Americans and half Asians, dressed in tiger-striped jungle uniforms and wearing all types of non-regulation head gear. They were carrying a mix of CAR-15s, M-60s, AK-47s, and an assortment of other weapons. They still had a faint smear of camouflage paint left on their faces; they had the look of happy, exhausted warriors.
“Recon Team Utah, Kontum RSVN, 9-29-68,” was hand-written across the bottom of the picture. Lieutenant Mark Denton was in the center of the photo, holding one end of a captured NVA flag, a wide grin on his face. Staff Sergeant Ben Mitchell was holding up the other side of the flag, also grinning at the camera. He was the only black man in the picture, a largely immaterial detail that was totally irrelevant in the Special Forces community, which was a large part of the reason he had stayed in for twenty-five years.
Mitchell did three tours in Vietnam, in 66, 68 and 71, but his time with the SOG had always been what he remembered most intensely, running covert ops into Laos and northern Cambodia against the NVA on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The SOG recon teams’ primary mission besides gathering intelligence was calling in air strikes, which sometimes rained death and destruction on NVA troop concentrations. More frequently however, they were themselves discovered by NVA hunter teams and had to flee under pursuit to landing zones for hot extractions.
LT Denton had ultimately gotten shot during a Hatchet Force rescue mission, a clean “million dollar wound” which finished his tour without ruining his life.
And now he had been blown up on a highway in Norfolk, along with his son and five other people, and he was being called a fumbling “militia terrorist.”
Ben Mitchell, Sergeant Major (Retired), tried to watch more of the news, but he was too disgusted by all the lies that he heard.
Number one, Mark Denton was not going to bomb a federal building, or anything else, period.
Number two, he wouldn’t involve his son in anything like that, period.
Number three, he would not in any way be associated with white racists, period. The “Niggers Back to Africa” leaflet from the Portsmouth mosque, which was being tied to Denton’s alleged “militia” activities, looked like a very crude and amateurish attempt at false-flag psyops. Mark Denton would not in a million years be involved in any way with that sort of racist crowd, whether or not the “Niggers Back to Africa” leaflet was a fake.
Number four, Mark Denton would never “accidentally” blow himself up with his own C-4 bomb. Your average civilian might buy that line of horse crap about “old unstable C-4,” but no professional demolitioneer ever would. During his decades of handling demo, Ben had often used hard-cast blocks of TNT left over from World War Two. It had been as safe and stable after forty years as brand new stuff, and C-4 was much better than TNT in every regard. Like all military demo, it was built to last just about forever. It didn’t just “go off by itself,” and Mark Denton was not some goofball who would throw together a Rube Goldberg firing device and blow himself up. Impossible.
Clearly, someone had murdered Mark Denton and his son and the others. Clearly, it was meant to be tied together with Jimmy Shifflett and the Stadium Massacre. Clearly, someone or some group was trying to panic the American people and make them believe in a right wing “militia” boogieman plot, and so far it seemed to be working.
But to an old pro, it just didn’t wash. Ben Mitchell knew all about “black ops.” The Special Forces and SOG had run them all the time in Southeast Asia, such as leaving doctored exploding ammunition and mortar shells in NVA caches along the trail. The CIA would then insert manufactured rumors into NVA communications back channels saying that poor quality control at Chinese munitions factories were to blame for the “accidental explosions.” This was an attempt to make the NVA and VC distrust their ordnance, and their Chinese suppliers.
Later in El Salvador and elsewhere in the 1980s he had been aware of programs to leave doctored weapons and field radios for the communist guerrillas to “find” after what they considered successful attacks. Sometimes the weapons and radios were fitted with tiny beacons, to lead the government forces to guerrilla hideouts. Other times they simply exploded when used by the guerrillas.
He knew from friends serving in the Balkans in the 90’s that it had been practically SOP for one side to occasionally blow up some of its own civilians, in order to score propaganda points and win world sympathy, by blaming their own atrocity on the other side. It was real nasty business, the worst form of black op there was.
Yes, Ben Mitchell knew all about black ops, and everything from the Stadium Massacre to Mark Denton’s death said black op to him. He was not fooled for one minute. The so-called assault rifles and incriminating books immediately found in Shifflett’s trailer proved that the Stadium Massacre was a false-attribution operation as far as Ben was concerned. The rifles conveniently being carried out of the trailer an hour after the massacre just screamed “made for TV.” It was all just too pat, too perfectly scripted, just like the “Niggers Back to Africa” leaflets. No, the week’s events had all the hallmarks of a classic false-flag operation to Ben Mitchell.
The only question was, who was running the op, and why?
Whoever was running the operation was probably in the government; it was the only source that made logical sense. It made no sense for any “militia” to be doing it; it would be suicidal for them to go head to head against the FBI. Besides, the only “militias” Ben had ever heard of were composed of middle-aged wannabees playing Rambo and drinking beer. The only “militias” he had ever heard of couldn’t organize a successful gas station heist, much less get Shifflett up in that building, hit the stadium upper deck eighty or ninety times from a thousand yards, and then get clean away.
What made Ben Mitchell certain that the operation was being run from somewhere inside the government was the one glaring anomaly: the gun store arson attacks Friday night. All of the other actions plausibly could be explained as having originated in a right-wing militia conspiracy. They wanted to blame the Stadium Massacre on Muslims, they shot u
p a mosque, and Mark Denton was being portrayed as a militia terrorist on his way to bomb a federal building.
But the gun store arson attacks didn’t fit the pattern in any way. They were obviously done to create the illusion of a vigilante reaction to the Stadium Massacre, but who ever heard of violent anti-gun vigilantes? It made no sense; it was the flat note in the song. The anti-gun crowd would hold candlelight vigils, or pay for anti-gun TV ads, but attack gun stores with gasoline bombs, and kill some of their owners? No way. The most violent thing the anti-gun crowd ever did was scream and throw trash down onto the Senate floor during the debate. They preferred to let paid agents of the federal government handle their anti-gun violence for them, in the form of the black-clad ninja storm troopers of the BATF.
The gun store arsons were probably designed to provoke a genuine violent reaction from the right wing gun rights crowd, and to make it appear that some type of dirty war was starting up in southeastern Virginia. But they just didn’t add up. Little old ladies in tennis shoes made up the anti-gun crowd, and they were hardly the types to throw gasoline bombs. So if it wasn’t them, it was the government, or some group inside the government. After serious reflection, Ben Mitchell grew sure of it.
But if it was all a government sponsored black operation, what was their motive? He had some ideas.
Ever since the early 1990s, Ben had been watching the militarization of American police forces with growing dismay. Increasingly, young Special Forces officers were doing their minimum time in the Army, and then getting out and going directly into the FBI and other federal agencies’ special operations teams. SF enlisted men, without college degrees, were getting out in droves and joining local police department SWAT teams. It was the same thing with the Army Rangers, and he also heard from his Navy buddies that young SEALs were frequently serving one hitch and then going on to law enforcement SWAT teams, where they could still enjoy “the action,” but without having to spend months and years in third world shit-holes like Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and Kosovo. SWAT teams had the latest gear and the best training, at least as good as the military equivalents, but they didn’t have to deploy overseas. A civilian SWAT team operator got to kick down doors and shoot guns for a living, and then go home and sleep in his own bed with his own woman in his own town.
Along with the increasing militarization of the police came a militarization of the police mindset. Military specops personnel who were routinely involved in covert ops and dirty tricks overseas had to be bringing their “total war” mindset back to the states when they left the military and joined a SWAT team. There was no way to avoid it. Military specops troops and civilian SWAT personnel often practiced side by side at the same training academies, learning the same skills from the same instructors.
The flow was constant, back and forth, between the military and civilian special tactics units. They first learned their skills in the military, and then they got out and joined SWAT teams. Then they typically stayed in the military reserves, where they were periodically activated to serve on deployments overseas again, keeping up their military skills. Back and forth they went, until there was virtually no noteworthy distinction between the military and the civilian special operations troops.
Everything from the Stadium Massacre to what was happening in Norfolk smelled like a covert operation to Ben Mitchell. Perhaps it was part of the military covert ops mindset trickling over to the civilian law enforcement world? That mindset said that the only thing that matters is results, and how you achieve them isn’t important, as long as you’re not caught red-handed flagrantly violating the rules of engagement. If a civilian law enforcement unit in this gung-ho “war on terrorism” era felt that it was being hampered by overly strict rules of engagement in carrying out its missions, it was predictable that they would simply bypass the rules. It’s what they were encouraged to do overseas in the war on terror on a weekly basis, with a wink and a nod from the highest authorities. “Do what you need to do, just don’t get caught,” was the new unofficial motto of American specops units.
At the outer fringes of the specops covert action mindset, framing and killing the innocent could even be rationalized in the pursuit of their greater mission. Perhaps the Stadium Massacre had indeed been meant to be blamed on Muslim terrorists. In that case, the war on terror might have been turned into a war on all Muslims in America…. Special ops troops who learned to hate Muslims fighting them overseas might be getting eager to ratchet up the battle against their perceived enemies at home. It was a possibility.
Or, perhaps the goal was to incite an armed reaction from the pro-gun crowd, in order to begin a new crackdown in that direction? Either motive was plausible.
But whoever was behind this campaign stepped over a very personal line when they blew up Mark Denton, forever damning his good name as a racist militia terrorist. Denton’s honorable combat service for his country in Southeast Asia all those years ago was now being twisted into some kind of evidence of his terrorist tendencies, just background material to turn him into a convenient fall guy for a black operation.
And so far, from what he had seen and heard on the television, it was working. Denton was already being uncritically accepted as some sort of incompetent militia bomber. Well, Ben Mitchell wasn’t accepting it. If whoever was running this operation thought that they could use an old Special Forces officer in this way and get away with it, well, they had better think again. By blowing up Mark Denton and his son and the others on the highway, they had made the fight personal.
After twenty-five years in the Special Forces community, Ben Mitchell not only knew about black ops, and he not only knew about C-4 plastic explosive, he actually had forty pounds of it. And he already knew where he was going to put it.
If the President of the United States didn’t know what was going on in his government behind his back, well then, Ben Mitchell was going to tell him. Once his C-4 calling card made its mark, the President would listen to him, with his complete and undivided attention.
And if the President knew what was going on in Virginia and approved of it, then to hell with him: it would be war.
****
By the time it grew completely dark Ranya Bardiwell was in position overlooking Eric Sanderson’s three story brick Colonial-style home in the exclusive Fox Hills area ten miles east of Richmond. The Virginia Attorney General’s desire for seclusion and privacy now worked against him: once she had found his address, his isolation and lack of close neighbors made her approach to within range a simple task.
She had ridden the Nighthawk up Route 460 almost to Petersburg, and once in the area she stayed on back roads until she found the best place to leave her bike while she stalked into position. A dirt road ran parallel to a small stream a quarter mile west of his property, it was county watershed land and there were no houses built on the wooded slope which ran up to Sanderson’s hilltop property line. She left the bike hidden in a thicket under the green canvas cover while she put on her sniper’s garb in the last light. An old set of brown mechanic’s coveralls went over her jeans and jean jacket. They were big enough to pull on over her boots, which she then covered with a pair of men’s galoshes, which would leave false footprints if she could not avoid leaving footprints at all.
Over her head she wore a dark green t-shirt, with the neck hole pulled up around her eyes. The two short sleeves were then tied together behind her head to create an instant camouflage mask. This left a clear horizontal slit for her vision, and gave the overall effect of an irregular misshapen stump with the shirt draped loosely over her shoulders. This was a trick an old turkey hunter had showed her, from the days before there were store-bought camouflage head nets. It worked just as well, and left her with no incriminating mask in her possession, just an ordinary t-shirt.
On her hands she wore thin brown driving gloves, supple enough to load and fire her .223 caliber shells while hiding the shine of her hands, and of course preventing the leaving of any possible fingerprints.
Ranya moved slowly along the inside of the tree line until she had a clear view of the front of his house, facing the side of the long driveway that descended away to her right. There were security lights on the corners of the house and over the front and back porch landings, bathing the immediate area in bright light. Ranya thought they should be called “false security lights,” because they put anyone near the house into her clear view, and at the same time blinded them to anything beyond their brilliant circle of illumination. She was certain that the top of the hill and the woods that concealed her would just be a black void to any light-blinded people in or around the house.
Fifty yards from the house, a dark sedan was parked under some small trees along the side of the driveway. At 7:35 PM by her wrist watch another car came up the driveway, a Chevy Caprice or Ford Crown Victoria by its look, and after a few minutes the first car drove away. So, Sanderson has a detail guarding his house, Ranya thought. Probably plain-clothed state troopers. She wondered if the security detail had been added since he had made his “merchants of death” speech; no doubt he’d received some threats after going high-profile with that gem. But certainly not from Ranya Bardiwell: she was light years beyond making anonymous threats.
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 19