Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  Then, almost imperceptively slowly, the road between his pilings seemed to sag ever so slightly, and a low grinding and moaning sound was heard across the still water. Ben’s span, one of the 32 comprising the Wilson Bridge, began to take on a distinct shallow V-shaped appearance. His linear shaped-charges had in fact cut cleanly through the bottom eight feet of the twelve foot tall I-beam that supported the southern edge of the roadway. The hundreds of tons of steel and concrete above the cut steel would not be denied, the cut I-beam slowly spread apart, and at the top of the eight foot cut the steel suddenly ruptured and the I-beam split all the way through to the top.

  The untouched second I-beam, one of the pair supporting the center of the roadway, could not carry both its load and that of the now unsupported and sagging southern quarter of the span, and it too began to stretch and twist and droop, as if in final refusal to say goodbye to its faithful brother of more than four decades. This second old steel girder, after decades of sustaining the double traffic load, offered its own collection of small stress fractures to the demands of the suddenly compounded weight above it and it too buckled and split from bottom to top.

  This process repeated itself more quickly with the third and fourth I-beams, and the entire 165-foot long span broke in the middle and collapsed into the river, dragging the ends of the I-beams off the concrete towers at either end. Finally, the last echoes of the tortured metal grinding and groaning stopped and the night was silent again. Power lines within the bridge had snapped, and much of Alexandria on the Virginia shore opposite Ben went dark, as neighborhoods blinked out in succession.

  15

  The President and his advisors were getting the latest information on the sabotage of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge the same way that millions of other Americans were: they were watching the local and national television news programs. The Homeland Security Team was assembled in the Situation Room beneath the Oval Office watching a bank of four enormous TV screens, all of them depicting the bridge from various angles. From above, the bridge resembled a long row of teeth with one tooth knocked out. An unseen aide in harmony with the President’s tastes kept the four televisions tuned to whichever four stations were running the best images, or had the most interesting expert being interviewed. President Gilmore sat in his black leather recliner (with the Presidential Seal on the head rest) holding the remote control, bringing the sound up on the channel he wanted to hear moment by moment.

  A dozen news helicopters buzzed around the bridge like gnats, focusing their cameras on the mid-river gap where the span had been dropped. No one spoke as the President switched the sound from channel to channel. Television voices fired out random comments.

  “That’s right Katie, if you’re in a hurry in Washington today, you’d better have a helicopter!”

  “…looks like a laser-guided smart bomb hit the bridge Tony, or at least a very smart bomber!”

  “The other downtown bridges are completely overwhelmed. People are abandoning their cars and walking to metro stations, which is compounding the gridlock…”

  “…DC Beltway is at a total standstill from the Baltimore Washington Parkway around to I-66, so stay away from Washington is all I can say.”

  “This is Bob Margate, your eye in the sky. We’re taking a break from the bridge for a moment to show you the National Mall, where smaller than expected crowds are gathering this morning for the countdown to the assault rifle deadline…”

  The President muted the sound entirely. “Turn them off, I’ve seen enough.” Walnut panels quietly slid across the television screens. “What a total goat-screw! How long until that section is repaired and the bridge can be reopened?” The President glared at the Secretary of Transportation, who had just entered the Situation Room disheveled and out of breath, part of his “comb over” hanging the wrong way across his ear.

  “Me? Uh, well sir, I’m just getting up to speed on the particulars on this sit…”

  “Then tell me what you do know, dammit!”

  “Well, the part that’s down was 165 feet between the cement columns on each end. The bridge spans all rest on four long I-beams between the columns, and we might be able to get new I-beams in a couple of weeks, at least…”

  “Weeks? Weeks? Don’t tell me that! That bridge can’t be out for weeks.”

  “Uh, sir, we’re checking everywhere, they don’t build bridges that way any more, and I-beams like that, well they’re not lying around anywhere, they have to be manufactured in a foundry, and we’re checking everywhere. Also, sir, I need to mention, the engineers are telling me the support columns have been damaged, they were cracked when the girders tore off. This is going to be tricky to fix if we use the same columns and don’t replace them. If we go that way, we’ll have to keep the speeds down, and, um, well, no more trucks. What I’m told is the Wilson Bridge was a wreck to begin with, and the damage goes well beyond what we can see.”

  President Gilmore sank down in his recliner. “Oh that’s just great. And the new bridge is still what, two years from completion?”

  “Yes sir, maybe a bit less.”

  “Does anybody have any good news? Wayne, what’s the FBI got so far? Is this an Al Qaeda job? Is it Muslims?”

  “Mr. President, no one has claimed this one yet. We do have a preliminary report from our dive team.”

  “Did they find anybody? Did any cars go over when the bridge went down?”

  “The dive team reports no vehicles sir. The Coast Guard received a warning call at 2:25, and police were able to clear the bridge before it went off.”

  “So can the divers tell what happened? Was a car bomb parked on the roadway?”

  “No sir, it looks like explosive charges were placed underneath on the supporting steel itself. I’m told it’s very sophisticated work, definitely the work of pros. We’ll know what kind of explosive was used in a few hours. And we have some photos taken by the dive team.” FBI Director Wayne Sheridan signaled to another audio-visual assistant, a Navy Senior Chief in a white dress uniform, and murky color images appeared on a large screen for the Homeland Security Team to examine. The clean cut young FBI director slipped a laser pen from his suit pocket to point out the areas of interest with its brilliant red dot. “This picture shows the precise area of the original explosive cut, on one half of the I-beam that was on the southern side of the span. You can see how clean the cut was, like an axe hit it. Next picture please.”

  “What’s this one showing Wayne? Letters?”

  “Yes sir, the letters D.O.L. are spray painted next to the cut. Possibly the name of a new terrorist faction, we’re checking it out against all known groups. Possibly it’s an authentication code: in case the terrorists try to contact us, they can use the letters to prove who they are. We don’t know yet.”

  “What’s your feeling? Is this a Muslim job, or a militia job? Is it Shifflett’s old gang? Is it the same people as that car bomb in Norfolk? Is it related to the Stadium Massacre?

  “We don’t know yet sir. With the assault rifle ban coming in three hours, it could possibly be some type of protest over that. It might be an attempt to disrupt the ceremony on the Mall. We really don’t have a handle on how these things are tied together yet, or even if they’re connected at all.”

  President Gilmore stared hard at the giant image of the broken steel under murky water with the initials spray-painted near the cut. “D.O.L…. Okay, that’s all everybody, thanks for your time.” More quietly he said, “Harvey, you stay,” to his most trusted advisor. His Chief Staff Officer and old friend Harvey Crandall pulled his chair closer to the President. Crandall was a nearly obese man with an uncanny ability to calculate political fallout.

  After the others had filed out, the President asked him, “Any ideas? How do we play this?”

  “It’s a tough one. If all of these…incidents after the Stadium Massacre are unrelated, if they’re just spontaneous, then we’ll take a big hit for asking for the gun ban and provoking the gun nuts. You know, the
Second Amendment fanatics. Pushing them beyond their limits. I thought we’d just hear the usual carping about “trampling on the Constitution,” like we heard after we passed the Universal Surveillance Act, but this might be something much deeper. We might have really struck a raw nerve.

  “So no matter what, we have to spin it all as a planned and coordinated militia terrorism campaign, from the Stadium Massacre on. We need to play the domestic terrorism angle all the way. The people will rally against terrorists, even domestic terrorists. That’ll play bigger than the gun nuts’ anger over the assault rifle ban. The people always rally against terrorism, that always comes first.”

  “Okay…that makes sense. Tell Mickey to spin it that way.” Mickey was Mickey Flanagan, the White House press spokesman. “And you can leak it the same way to your usual reporters, from the ‘unnamed senior white house official.’ Now what about my making an ‘unscheduled appearance’ on the Mall for the deadline ceremony, like we discussed yesterday?”

  “Absolutely not, not after this bridge fiasco! Let Schuleman and Montaine have their day in the sun. Let them catch the laurels today, and then they can catch the brickbats if this situation blows up any worse.”

  “Is that statue made out of guns finished?” asked the President.

  “What? Yes, it is, that’s my understanding. Schuleman and Montaine are going to unveil it at noon. They’ve got white doves and about a million white balloons ready to go. It’s going to be a real dog and pony show.”

  “What kind of crowd are they going to get with the traffic fouled up like this?”

  “They’ve already got a few thousand true believers there, the ‘million mom march’ types, and more are coming in on the Metro. But it doesn’t really matter. As long as they have at least four or five thousand show up, the networks will shoot it close and tight and make them look like a million. Anyway, they can blame a low turnout on the traffic, and they can always say there was fear of a right wing militia attack.”

  The President sighed, sinking even lower into his presidential recliner. “What a day.”

  “And it’s only nine o’clock.”

  ****

  There were two men in a silver Toyota 4-Runner, a father and son, trapped on a highway that had become a vast parking lot.

  “We should have driven all night Dad, then we’d have been at the launch point hours ago, instead of being stuck in this mess!”

  The older man slammed his hands against the dashboard. “You’re beating a dead horse Joel, I know it already! So what’s the absolute maximum range on that thing?”

  “Round trip like we planned it? Or one way?”

  “No, still round trip, back to here. Can I launch from here and fly to the Mall and make it all the way back?”

  “With a full tank, you might get twenty-five miles total range, depending on the wind. So sure, you could theoretically launch from here and make it back. But I don’t think you should fly it Dad, not from here. You’ve only had a couple of hours on it.”

  “So what? I can fly it, can’t I? It’s easy. Like you said, it’s the safest flying machine ever invented. You’re already under your parachute, right?”

  “That’s not the point Dad. Sure, you could fly straight down the Mall, turn around and come back. But from here? I don’t think you have enough control. It’s not like flying the Cessna.”

  “Right, it’s a lot easier! More throttle, you go up, less throttle, you go down. Pull right, pull left. How hard is that?”

  “Dad, I know this whole thing is your idea, but I don’t want you flying into a bridge or a building, or getting messed up with a jet coming out of Reagan National. It’s too far, and I won’t be able to help you if you go down. If we have to start from here, I’ll fly it.”

  “Joel, this was my idea, I should do it. You’re young, you just got married…”

  “Look, Dad, this traffic is completely stopped. Face it, we have to launch from here, or we have to abort the mission and drive back to Knoxville. You can’t fly it from here, not safely. I’ve got over a hundred hours on the power chute, it’s my rig. Either I fly it, or we abort the mission and go home.”

  The sixty-something year old man and his thirty-something son studied each other across the front seats of their SUV. They had spent the last three days working on this plan, printing 5,000 leaflets and training Michael Friedman to fly his son’s motorized parachute.

  Now, with less than an hour to go until the twelve noon assault rifle deadline, and the ceremony on the National Mall, they were hopelessly stuck in traffic gridlock on I-66 just inside the DC beltway near Falls Church Virginia. The National Mall was only ten miles due east, but the traffic had finally stopped creeping and come to a complete halt an hour before, due to the spillover from the Wilson Bridge sabotage. All of the other Potomac River bridges going into Washington had frozen tight with traffic detouring around the Wilson Bridge, and the ripples continued extending outward and intersecting with each other until the entire DC Metro area was locked up tight.

  “Okay Joel, you fly it. We can’t go back now, we’ve come too far…we have to see this through.” Michael Friedman paused and cleared a lump in his throat. “We owe it to all the Jews that went quietly.”

  “I know. We have to do it… I’ll fly. We can set up and launch from that field over there. Everybody’s pulling U-turns across the median, so let’s roll.”

  “I’ve got the bail money Joel, just in case.”

  “Just in case.”

  ****

  “All right Mr. Fallon, your check is approved, are you ready to ring it all up now?”

  “I think I’ve got everything I need today, let’s do it.”

  The manager of the Boat America marine super store had several employees help carry Brad Fallon’s selected products to the front of the store by the checkout lanes. “We’ve got the twelve foot Avon inflatable dingy, the 25-horsepower Yamaha motor, the ICOM single sideband, the Furuno radar, the Garmin GPS color chart plotter, the lap top, the salt water rods…then we have everything in those shopping carts… Is this everything?”

  “I believe it is; I don’t think we left anything back on the shelves. Let’s start ringing it up and I’ll write the check.”

  “Well that’s fine by me, let’s get to it.” The other employees carried Brad’s selections to the counter, and as they were scanned, they placed his items into large cardboard boxes and placed them under the windows along the front of the store.

  Several customers in the other checkout lines and a few plain gawkers stared in awe as Brad racked up his titanic order. You never could tell with yachties: a millionaire or a trust fund baby could walk in wearing shorts and old boat shoes, and buy enough gear to outfit a brand new sport fisher in one shopping spree. This young fellow seemed to fit that mold. Or he could just be the hired captain of a big yacht simply doing his job, working off the boat’s expense account. And, of course, it was impossible to rule out that the young fellow with the big order might be spending the profits made running an illegal cargo from Colombia or Jamaica. Boaters were hard to pigeonhole that way.

  All Brad Fallon cared was that Boat America would accept his personal check, and that the bank had given them its blessing in advance. The feds had threatened to freeze his accounts if he fled, but it appeared that he still had the ability to write substantial checks against them. If they were going to freeze his accounts after he took off, he planned to leave them as little as possible of his savings to freeze.

  The cashier at the register scanned the last small item from the fourth shopping cart and deducted fifteen percent, a discount that had been worked out in advance with the manager, and then added the state sales tax. The paper receipt ran several feet along the counter from its printer within the register. The cashier tore it off and circled the bottom line figure with a ball point pen and pushed it across to Brad. He took the receipt and sat in a canvas folding deck chair and spent several minutes checking the listed items. The store manager waited
patiently until he was finished, and then invited him into his office off to the side of the checkout counters.

  In the private office, sitting across the desk from the manager, Brad wrote the second biggest check of his life, for twenty-six thousand four-hundred and eight dollars. His only larger one had bought Guajira.

  The store manager shook Brad’s hand as he accepted his check. “Thanks for choosing Boat America Mr. Fallon, let me give you some store coupons. These are our big ones, and there’s no expiration date. And of course, since your order is so large, we’ll be happy to provide free delivery anywhere in Tidewater.”

  “I really appreciate the offer, but I have my own truck. I’ll pull it in front.” Brad had no intention of unnecessarily disclosing the location of Guajira to anyone if he could help it. He felt fairly sure that “George” would soon be hearing about this big purchase, and he might come to Boat America trying to find Brad’s current location.

  “We’ll be glad to help load up your truck Mr. Fallon.”

  “That would be fine.” Tomorrow Brad planned to do it again at East Marine, and what he couldn’t use he would sell or trade down-island, or later in South America.

  ****

  “William Peter, William Peter, this is Henry Niner. I have visual on what looks like a red white and blue motorized hang glider, repeat hang glider, flying southeast over the Roosevelt Bridge, estimated altitude 500 feet, how copy over?”

  “Uh… Roger, copy all Henry Niner, you have visual on a red white and blue motorized hang glider, what’s your location over?”

  “William Peter, I’m at two grand over the Lincoln Memorial. William Peter, is this guy on the program? He’s turning east toward the Mall at ten to fifteen knots. Is he on the program over?”