Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Monday morning Brad Fallon was hosing down and scrubbing Guajira’s dirty leaf-covered decks with a long-handled brush, while his new Perkins turbo diesel was chugging steadily, throwing hot river water and exhaust smoke out of the stern at the water line. AM talk radio was turned up loud enough to be heard all over the boat; Brad was trying to stay up with the events that could affect his departure. His escape plan was serious business now, and he had switched over from music to more useful news radio. After weeks of sweaty and often filthy work at the dock way up the Nansemond, and after all the craziness that was descending around him, he was finally ready to motor downstream to the boatyard, where Guajira’s mast lay waiting.

  Ranya had left the boat early Sunday morning while he was still asleep, and he hadn’t heard from her since. Maybe when he was underway going down river he’d give her a call, from his own cell phone of course, and not the one George had given him. Or maybe to be on the cautious side he’d just wait to call her from a land line pay phone around the boatyard. Or maybe he wouldn’t call her at all. She probably wasn’t interested in hearing from him anyway, or she wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye or at least leaving a note.

  After months of celibate bachelorhood, weeks of it up the river at the Sodermilk Farm’s dock, he had finally had a pretty girl sleep over aboard Guajira—and he hadn’t even touched her, which seemed typical of the way his love life had been going. But in Ranya’s case this was probably just as well, because she was carrying such heavy emotional baggage. Brad wished her well, but he knew that he had to steer clear of any close personal attachments now, with the blue horizon beckoning him and the feds dogging his heels.

  He just needed to wait for a few more weeks, and then he would glide into an anchorage near one of the big Caribbean resorts and have his pick of the Scandinavian girls on holiday, many of them predictably eager to find a way to avoid returning home for another frozen and sunless northern winter. He had been working on this plan with single-minded determination for years now, and he could wait for a few more weeks, and do it right.

  Brad was intently scrubbing at a series of purple stains left on his cabin top by a bird that had obviously been digesting wild berries in the oak tree above Guajira, when he happened to glance aft. A narrow silver boat was coming up river, steered by someone wearing a khaki-colored shirt and long pants. The boat was an aluminum canoe with a square transom mounting a small outboard motor. Brad couldn’t make out who was steering, the man was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses.

  Instead of passing in mid channel and continuing upstream, the man steered for Guajira’s port side, popped his motor into neutral and grabbed onto the toe rail by the cockpit. The visitor looked up at Brad, who was standing in the cockpit, tanned and glistening with sweat, wearing only a pair of old cut-off jeans.

  “You know who I am, right? We’ve met before.”

  Brad could see the short gray beard and recognized the voice. The man’s hat and sunglasses and zinc oxide covered nose hid the rest of his face. It was Barney Wheeler, from Dixie Hardware and Lester’s Diner.

  “I know you.”

  “We need to have a chat, grab my bow line. Do you have a gas can handy? I should have a reason to be stopping here.”

  “What? Sure, I have a gas can.” Brad walked the canoe’s thin bow-line a little way forward and tied it to a life line stanchion, casually scanning the Sodermilk farm property behind Guajira and the marshland across the river. Then he lifted open the lazarette locker at the aft end of the cockpit and retrieved a brand new and still empty red plastic fuel jug. Wheeler’s cautious approach had caused Brad to wonder yet again if he was under observation, but he realized that his watchers, if there were any, would be invisible to him. The feds could have mounted a remote video camera up in a distant tree or electric pole, or they could be watching from an airplane or conceivably even a drone from thousands of feet above him, far higher than he could either see or hear.

  Barney Wheeler was not behaving so carefully for no reason. If they were under observation, the gas can provided a plausible “cover for action,” and if he was asked about his visitor later, Brad could reasonably say that he had merely been providing a little extra fuel to a passing fisherman who was running low. The canoe’s outboard, Guajira’s diesel engine, and Brad’s talk radio would render a directional microphone useless, but ultimately each man had to trust that the other was not an informant in the first place.

  “Here you go,” said Brad, passing over the empty red container, and then sitting in Guajira’s cockpit close by Barney Wheeler in his canoe. Wheeler went through the motions of pulling out the pouring spout and transferring imaginary fuel into his own red metal tank.

  “I assume you’ve been following the news, and you heard about Mark Denton and his son and some folks getting blown up on the highway?”

  “Sure, it’s been all over the radio and the TV. They’re talking about it on the radio right now.”

  “Well, have you figured out yet that Mark Denton used to be in the Black Water Rod and Gun Club, the same as Shifflett, the same as you met at Lester’s Diner Friday night?”

  Brad was stunned again to hear the confirmation of his fears. Here was yet another lightning bolt landing too close. “Damn, that figures. The news just said that he might have been involved in militia activities with Shifflett, but it didn’t mention the Black Water club.”

  “Quite a nasty string of coincidences, don’t you think?” asked Wheeler. “First Shifflett, who was half-dead and afraid of heights, climbs pipe scaffolding up a building and shoots at a stadium twelve-hundred yards away with a tricked out SKS. Now Mark Denton ‘accidentally’ blows himself up. And in between we have gun stores burned by so-called anti-gun vigilantes, which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one.”

  Brad leaned back and sighed, staring across the river into the distant marshland. “You know, I almost bought a boat in Fort Lauderdale… I mean, I’m just minding my own business, I’m just trying to finish this boat and get out, and the next thing I know the FBI is right here, right here on this boat, threatening to take my money and my passport, forcing me to infiltrate the Black Water club, and all I want to do is get the hell out! And believe me, the last thing I want to be is an informant for the feds! That’s why I passed you that note at Lester’s.”

  Barney placed Brad’s gas tank in the bottom of his canoe and sat back down on his thwart seat. “It’s a good thing you did; that was a nice move. I don’t think a real FBI informant would have pulled that trick with the note. And I didn’t tell any of my friends about it; that’s between us. After what happened to Shifflett, and now with Mark Denton getting blown up, I think if some of my buddies even heard Fallon and FBI in the same sentence, they might take a shot at you on general principle. You know, some of my friends were thinking back to Friday night at Lester’s, and started wondering about just exactly who the stranger was with the sudden interest in the club. I sure didn’t mention what you said in the note, about the FBI being interested in them.”

  “Thanks. I’ve already got the feds on my case, and I sure as hell don’t need your friends coming after me too.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so. Brad, I know I wouldn’t want to be in your spot, but look at us! Somebody’s gunning for our club, picking us off one at a time. And I include Joe Bardiwell too, even if he was supposedly killed by gang bangers.”

  “Yeah, it sure seems like the feds have it in for you guys. Listen, Barney…I’ve really thought this out, and if you ask me, I’m being used as a diversion, a ‘dangle.’ I mean an obvious informant, sort of a red herring, and that probably means somebody wants to draw attention away from a real informant.”

  Wheeler cocked his head and looked up with new interest after that observation. “Brad, I checked you out, as much as I could, and it looks like you really were working up in Alaska. But that could all be faked too, backstopped with false records… So now I’d like to know how you know about things like informant
s and agent dangles?”

  “You’ll have to take my word for this, but I read a lot, really a lot. Up in the oil fields you have plenty of time to read. There’s no where to go and not much to do on your twelve hours off, and I guess I’ve read too many spy books. Now where did you learn about using a gas can for a cover for action?”

  “Cover for action…now that’s a term of art I haven’t heard in a while. Maybe I’ll tell you some day, if we live through this. Not in books, I can tell you that much. Anyway, I figure you’re clear of all this. Shifflett and Denton hadn’t done anything with our group in a couple of years. We’re not any kind of formal organization, so whoever fingered Denton and Shifflett had to have one of our old telephone lists to work from. Those phone lists are about all the ‘organization’ the club has ever had, so if there’s a real informant, he has to be one of my own hunting buddies. Ain’t that a pisser? One of my old friends, giving up Shifflett and Denton to the feds. Or giving them an old phone list anyway.”

  “Well let me tell you, the FBI can be very persuasive when they have your nuts in a vice.”

  “I can imagine that’s true. You know, Jimmy Shifflett, he didn’t amount to much, but he was a good kid. Maybe the war ruined anything he might have become. I don’t know about that Gulf War Syndrome stuff, but something happened to that kid over in the desert. Something. But Denton… Mark Denton was a real hero, and I don’t use that term lightly. He was the real deal, and he was as fine a gentleman… That they’d kill him and his son, and all the others in the stadium, just to…” Wheeler looked down at the water, hiding under his wide-brimmed hat while quietly choking with emotion.

  “Anyway Brad, I’m getting out of here. I’ve got some creeks down in Carolina calling my name. What about you? You look like you’re about ready to go too.”

  “I’m leaving the farm today, and as soon as I can put up my mast, I’ll be out on the ocean and I won’t be looking back. But listen, there’s something else.” Brad was grateful for the information that Wheeler had given him, and on some level he felt that he should return the favor. “The feds killed Joe Bardiwell, not gang-bangers or vigilantes. I was at Bardiwell’s place Saturday with his daughter Ranya. I met her there. I buried her dog for her, they shot her dog too. I was the only one there with a shovel…

  “Anyway, we found ten millimeter brass in the woods right across from where Joe Bardiwell was shot, definitely from a fed’s submachine gun. They had those stripe marks an MP-5 leaves, and the dented-in lips. So for certain, the feds killed him, and that means all the gun store attacks were done by the feds too, probably using gang bangers as contract muscle, judging by their brand of Molotov cocktails. It’s feds on all sides of this equation. Look at that mosque in Portsmouth, isn’t it mighty convenient that a MAC-11 just ‘happened’ to be left at the scene, a MAC-11 that just ‘happened’ to trace back to some guy that belonged to a militia group in Montana? Now just who might get their hands on a gun like that, a gun with that kind of pedigree, and then just might ‘accidentally’ drop it at the scene of an anti-Muslim hate crime?”

  “Well, I’d say the BATF could do it for sure. Or the FBI, I guess.”

  “That’s how I see it too.”

  “Brad, I hope we get to talk some more about all this some day. I’ve been here too long already as it is. Here, let me give you your gas tank back. Take it easy son, I hope you make it clear of the feds and out on the ocean real quick. Good luck, keep your powder dry, and watch your back.”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to sit down and talk about all this over a few beers some day.”

  “Maybe, I hope so. Just don’t spill the beer next time, and no more notes.”

  “No more notes. Good luck to you too, Barney.” Brad slipped the bow line off of his lifeline stanchion and tossed it into the front of the canoe. Wheeler snapped the gear lever ahead on his outboard and waved back to Brad, and motored up the river. In a minute he was out of sight around the bend. Brad coiled up his water hose and unscrewed it from the tap on the dock, and stowed it away in his aft lazarette with the empty plastic gas jug. Guajira’s deck was clean enough. He had to get the hell away from this place that the feds knew so well, and get down river to the boat yard and his mast.

  ****

  The squat gray mile-long Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which crossed the Potomac River just below the bottom diamond-point of Washington DC, never won an award for design or engineering. But if such records were kept, it would have retired the gold medal for headache creation among the motorists forced to use it on a daily basis. The Wilson Bridge completed the circle of the I-495 beltway around Washington at the six o’clock position, joining the state of Virginia to Maryland. The next bridge across the Potomac to the south was thirty miles away, and the next bridges to the north ran straight through downtown Washington. The Wilson Bridge also formed a critical link completing I-95, the primary interstate highway running from Maine to Miami.

  The Woodrow Wilson Bridge was built cheap and fast for a paltry fifteen million dollars in 1961, during the rush to complete I-95. At that time the bridge was seen as a temporary solution, to be replaced within twenty years by a permanent and superior structure. As a temporary solution, it was engineered to carry only 75,000 vehicles a day.

  In 1961 almost no one could have predicted the explosive growth which would occur in the Washington metro area, most of it the result of the exponential growth of the federal government during the following decades. Instead of 75,000 vehicles, the Wilson Bridge had been carrying more than 200,000 vehicles every day for twenty years beyond its originally predicted twenty year working life. Every tenth vehicle was a heavy truck, and the bridge was literally shaking to pieces.

  On its best day the Wilson Bridge was the worst bottleneck in the Washington area. The mile long bridge was the only six lane constriction on the eight lane I-495 DC beltway. Every single day of the year from before dawn until long after dark unlucky commuters forced to use it could expect to spend at least an extra half hour creeping up to and over it. Accidents on or near the bridge instantly resulted in backups stretching for miles, and the Wilson Bridge had more accidents occur on it than any other single mile of the Washington Beltway. Even after midnight, when the bridge opened its draw spans for the passage of large vessels, the road traffic was heavy enough to instantly cause long backups.

  A few years earlier, construction began on a two billion dollar twelve lane replacement, a sweeping monument of architectural excellence, but it would not be completed for years into the future. Until then, highway engineers and the Governors of Maryland and Virginia would keep their fingers crossed, hoping that the new bridge would be finished before the patched and re-patched Wilson Bridge inevitably shook apart and collapsed into the river under the relentless stampede of traffic.

  For Ben Mitchell, the Wilson Bridge was the obvious choice for his target. Countless times he had been forced to sit parked in choking exhaust-fume gridlock on its approaches and on the bridge itself during his Pentagon tour, and when delivering tables to Maryland after he retired. He had spent what seemed like weeks of his life creeping along at a walking pace, in the middle of a sea of cars locked bumper to bumper to the horizon, trying to get across the bridge. He had often wondered what would happen to the federal government, if the old bridge finally did collapse into the Potomac, and tens of thousands of federal employees simply couldn’t get to work.

  ****

  Now, at 0235 hours on Tuesday morning, if his demolition shot went off as planned he wouldn’t have to wonder any longer. He glanced again at the luminous digital timer on his wristwatch. He had pulled the rings on the fuse igniters thirteen minutes earlier, while standing on the catwalk under the Wilson Bridge. His linear shaped charges were in place against one of the steel I-beams that supported the road bed. The entire mile-long bridge was held up by 32 quad sets of concrete pilings; each set of four pilings was 165 feet from the next four. From piling to piling, twelve-foot-tall I-beams carried the weight of the
road, four of the giant I-beams for each 165-foot span of the bridge. Ben Mitchell only had enough C-4 to cut eight feet of one single steel I-beam, including the horizontal web at its bottom.

  After the fuses were burning, he packed up his gear and rappelled fifty feet down to the small inflatable kayak, which was waiting below him at the end of his rope, hidden in the darkness directly below the bridge. Once he was away from the bridge and paddling south on the ebb tide, he paused and called the Coast Guard on a handheld VHF radio, using a micro recorder to repeatedly send the electronically distorted message that there was a bomb on the Wilson Bridge, and it needed to be cleared of cars immediately. Seven minutes after pulling the fuse igniters, he saw flashing red and blue lights at each end of the bridge, and by ten minutes after there were no more vehicle lights visible crossing it at all. A helicopter was slowly flying down its length at a safe altitude, scanning the roadway with its “night sun” spot light.

  At thirteen minutes Ben reached the shore a mile south of the bridge on the Maryland side at Fort Foote Park, having already discarded all of the tools which he had used for the operation, including his rope, his caulk gun loaded with fast-bonding adhesive which had stuck his shaped charges to the steel, his VHF radio and all the rest. At the river’s edge, he slit his kayak tubes with his old Randall knife and pushed the deflating remains out into the current, to be carried away and sink in deeper water.

  Fourteen minutes. Ben crouched in some bushes, oblivious to the mosquitoes. There was no moon and the river and the park around him was inky black to his eyes, but he knew that to an infrared equipped helicopter his body heat would stand out from the background as if it was daytime. Still he waited, watching the bridge, checking his digital timer.

  At fifteen minutes and twenty-five seconds, there was a flash of light under the bridge, at the center of the span between his chosen pilings. Ben counted off the seconds, on “seven one thousand” a loud boom reached him across the water followed by several resounding echoes. The charge had gone off, but the bridge didn’t move.