If you cannot take my word that Mark Denton was a loyal and upright American every day of his life, then take my word on this: if he had wanted to, he could have demolished the Wilson Bridge or any other target of his choice as competently as I did, also without injuring anyone. He did not“accidentally” blow himself up.
My fellow Americans: all that I can ask is that you search out the facts which most of the media seem reluctant to give you, from the very questionable stadium massacre to the more recent events across southeastern Virginia. Don’t be led like sheep, stand up on your own hind legs and look around at the facts for yourself!
To the FBI: I realize that most of you gentlemen are honorable and loyal Americans, doing your duty trying to defend America from terrorists, while also upholding your oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Please study all of the evidence carefully: James Shifflett was a patsy, Mark Denton and the others in southeastern Virginia were murdered. The events at the stadium and in Virginia are certainly connected, but not in the way they are intended to be seen. Follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads to “domestic enemies” concealed within our own government, who are running a destabilization campaign for their own evil purposes.
If this letter is widely printed and read on television and radio, you will not be hearing from me again.
D.O.L.
17
Guajira was dragging anchor and being swept by breaking waves onto a boulder-strewn coast. Brad was all the way forward on his belly in the chain locker, trying to untangle an armload of fouled nylon anchor line. He was attempting to prepare a second anchor in order to save the boat, but the spare anchor line was knotted and twisted into a solid mass with dock lines and sail halyards mixed into its coils and loops. He opened his folding rigger’s knife to cut and remove the other lines braided into this all-important backup anchor line, but when he pulled the blade against a dock line it was as dull as a butter knife, and when he sawed against the line even harder in desperation, the blade broke free from the handle. He was clawing into the rat’s nest of tangled lines for the blade when Guajira’s keel and hull first slammed against the unseen rocks. He heard and felt the splintering fiberglass as the cold ocean rushed in.
Brad awakened suddenly in his forward V-berth, prepared to leap to his feet to save his boat, but then he oriented himself, and checked the glowing green dial of his diver’s watch. It was 4:15 AM Wednesday morning. The shipwreck dreams were not unexpected. Moving Guajira down the river to Portsmouth meant that she had taken on entirely new motions, which could spark his sleeping fears. Being tied alongside of a rusty barge on the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River meant that Guajira was exposed to the industrial-strength wakes of passing tugboats as they hurried between jobs. Without the inertia of a mast to dampen her rolling, her hull snapped hard from side to side with each passing tug, and then gradually returned to the stillness which he had grown accustomed to up the narrow and almost untraveled Nansemond.
Mile by mile Guajira was moving closer to the open ocean, and his stormy shipwreck dreams were born of the increasingly lively salt water the yacht floated in. It couldn’t be helped, it simply had to be understood and endured. In a month, Brad knew he would be sleeping soundly down below, while Guajira bashed along at nine knots, under autopilot control in typical ten foot mid-ocean waves. The mind and body could adapt to almost anything; it just took time.
He slipped on a gray sweatshirt against the chill and went topside to check his fenders. Lying against an old barge and being subjected to strong wakes he had to frequently check that his yard-long white rubber bumpers had not worked themselves up out of position. Without his four sausage-shaped fenders in place Guajira would be hurled violently against the steel barge with the next strong wake, gouging and scraping her gleaming white fiberglass hull, and Brad had not allocated any time for hull repairs in his getaway schedule. The passing tugboat which had awakened him with its nightmare-producing wake was already gone from sight.
On the land side of Guajira the only nearby lights were affixed over the boatyard’s business office. Workboats and fishing trawlers and a few pleasure craft stood propped up on the ground, awaiting the next day’s scraping and welding and painting. Alongside Guajira on the barge her new mast gleamed like a white lance, resting atop a half dozen sawhorses. Two more days of measuring and cutting the last of her ten wire stays, of running the internal electrical wiring and mounting lights and hardware and masthead instruments, and her mast would be ready to put up.
Brad had bought Guajira with a frozen engine, an overly Spartan racing interior, and a broken mast with questionable, undersized rod rigging. It was the only way he had been able to afford a fast 44-footer with such a thoroughbred pedigree. Now after months of hard work she had a brand new 80-horsepower Perkins turbo-diesel engine, a cozy interior, and with luck on Friday he’d step her new mast. This sixty-foot spar would carry Guajira’s sails, and send her flying across the oceans. Once the mast was up, its extra mass and inertia would also help to steady her from rolling so violently, when the tugs sent their wakes slamming against her hull.
In the boatyard, it was easy to forget the FBI and BATF agents who had visited him at his old dock up the Nansemond, but Brad still worried and he reflexively looked around for signs of surveillance. Crosby’s Boatyard was a dump, a third-rate yard at best, but it was cheap and it was secure. Beyond its few acres lay waste ground, scrap yards and derelict warehouses. The only landward access was through a single chain-link vehicle gate, which was locked after business hours. Due to the proximity of several railroad tracks, the street route leading to the yard was extremely confusing, with several long maze-like detours to navigate in order to get over the crossings.
Neatly attired FBI agents would stand out like strobe lights if they managed to find their way into this gritty world of welders and marine mechanics and painters. Since moving Guajira to the yard on Monday, Brad had detected no sign of the feds. He had let the battery on their cell phone run down and he had deliberately not recharged it. If he was pressed about it, he hoped to tap dance around the issue by pleading ignorance of the state of the battery.
Dawn’s first tentative glimmers began to reveal the low Portsmouth skyline across the Elizabeth, as the river’s blinking red and green buoy lights faded and disappeared. Today he’d finish mounting all of the stainless steel hardware bits on the mast and boom, and put the last end-terminals onto his wire stays. He’d work late, under lights and into the evening if necessary, to get ahead of his schedule. Thursday he would take the morning off to go to Joe Bardiwell’s funeral in Suffolk. On a certain level he genuinely wanted to pay his respects to the gunsmith, who had been shot dead simply because he wouldn’t take the hint, and leave the firearms-selling business quietly.
Really though, most of all, he just wanted to see Ranya again. He knew he had no possible future with her, because in a week’s time he’d be sailing out of U.S. waters, probably for years. Still, he wanted to see her, and find out how she was getting along since her father’s murder. She had been an only child, now she was an orphan, and Brad didn’t want to leave her by herself to bury her father. He knew a great deal about being alone, even if it had been mostly by his own choice, and he could well imagine her utter desolation.
****
Dale Gunnison completed twenty years with the Bureau, and had taken his retirement from government service just months before 9-11 to open his own private investigative agency in Philadelphia. After the terrorist attacks he had been offered a job at Headquarters in Washington to come back in, and he had been glad to do his patriotic duty and return to service under a certain set of new understandings. He had been roundly assured that the era of political correctness within the FBI was finally over, and that they would take off the PC gloves and aggressively battle the Islamic terrorists and their supporters hiding throughout America.
Unfortunately, he had been disappointed
once again to discover that this had only been hot air and wishful thinking. The Bureau continued to tip-toe around the Muslim issue, denying the obvious reality which they all knew. Once again he was disillusioned with the Bureau, and he was thinking of putting in his papers to retire a second time, permanently.
Gunnison was ascending in an executive elevator within the Hoover Building after taking his mid-morning cigarette break outside, when the doors opened and two colleagues he knew by sight joined him. They nodded to him, and then continued their hushed conversation. He stood apart from them, but could still hear some of their talk.
It was widely considered that the bridge bomber or bombers had come from within the Army Special Forces community. The bomber’s letter focused on the allegedly accidental car-bombing death of the ex-Green Beret officer Mark Denton. Also, the bomber signed his letter “D.O.L.” which in the Special Forces context meant De Oppresso Liber, or To Liberate from Oppression.
Dale Gunnison knew this before almost anyone else in the bureau did. In fact it leaped at him off the page, because Gunnison had been an Army Special Forces officer himself in the 1970’s, before getting out to pursue a career in the FBI. The Army had paid for his college education with an ROTC scholarship at Villanova, and Gunnison had both enjoyed and benefited from his five years in the military. But since childhood he had set his mind on becoming a Special Agent, having grown up watching the television heroics depicted on “The FBI” starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. When his obligated service was up, he left the Army for a career in federal law enforcement. He found that the reality of the FBI had rarely approached the idealized fictional version.
Dale Gunnison overheard words and phrases spoken quietly between the two men sharing his elevator, enough to catch the essence of their conversation. The bridge bomber’s mailbox had been located, and a pickup truck had been filmed by a nearby security camera just before three AM. The pickup was tracked from camera to camera as its route was reconstructed across Washington. The plate was traced, and the tag number had produced a hit: the truck belonged to a retired Green Beret named Ben Mitchell.
Gunnison exited the elevator on the seventh floor, went straight to his office and closed the door behind him. Sergeant Major Ben Mitchell was the bridge bomber! Jesus! Ben Mitchell had been a legendary combat veteran and all around stud at Fort Bragg when Gunnison had been just another young Special Forces lieutenant in the early 1970’s. Mitchell would almost certainly not remember First Lieutenant Dale Gunnison, one of the dozens of neophytes he had impacted during his long SF career, but Dale Gunnison sure remembered him!
Mitchell had been an unforgettable presence, the black Sergeant First Class with the chiseled face and the body builder’s physique, exuding the kind of magnetism born of supreme self-confidence. SFC Mitchell taught parts of the demolition phase at the Special Forces Training Group when Gunnison was a trainee. He had hung on every word and look and movement from the decorated veteran, one of the rare breed of men who had led the “Studies and Observation Group” recon teams deep into Laos and Cambodia. In the 1970’s the very existence of cross-border outfits like the SOG was still classified top secret, and Gunnison had felt extremely privileged to learn guerrilla warfare techniques from masters of the art like Ben Mitchell.
Dale Gunnison only stayed in the Army for five years and got out as a Captain, but he had maintained his membership in the Special Forces Association through the years, and had seen Sergeant Major Ben Mitchell’s name come up from time to time. Gunnison recalled their brief professional contact with great pride.
So, Ben Mitchell was the bridge bomber. Damn! On one level he could understand Mitchell’s anger over the death of Mark Denton. Dale Gunnison also considered that “accidental detonation” to be highly suspicious. So the Sergeant Major had dropped a span of the Wilson Bridge as an expression of his displeasure. From a purely professional standpoint, Gunnison had to admire the operation. I-95 and the DC Beltway had been severed with one demo charge, paralyzing Washington traffic, and all without injuring a single person. And Mitchell was what, in his mid-sixties by now?
Gunnison paced back and forth in his tiny office. His SF days had been among the best in his life, and he often wished that he had stayed in the Army and “lifered out,” instead of leaving to join the FBI. In the 1970’s, there was no war on the horizon, only an endless series of Mobile Training Team missions to third world backwaters, and the FBI had appeared more attractive to him at the time. He had soon learned that he had left the honor and clarity of the Special Forces, for the venal office politics of a Bureau which was far more concerned with grooming its media image, than with catching mobsters or spies, or as it had finally turned out on 9-11, than with catching Islamic terrorists.
He knew perfectly well what would happen next, now that a case was being built against Mitchell. An arrest warrant was being filled out and signed by a judge, and an FBI “Enhanced SWAT Team” was studying the plans of Mitchell’s house and doing dry runs on mockups. An advance team was already reconnoitering his neighborhood, his phones were being monitored, and his computer was being remotely examined.
Soon, very soon, possibly tonight, Sergeant Major Ben Mitchell would be awakened by stun grenades, and at the very best he would be cuffed and manacled and dragged out onto the street in his skivvies.
If he went for a gun—and he would—he’d be trapped in the beams of a half dozen incredibly bright gun lights and riddled with submachine gun bullets.
And if he managed to get himself into a barricaded position, flaming tear gas canisters would be shot through his windows until his house caught on fire, and he was roasted alive inside. These were the only three possibilities left open to Ben Mitchell.
Dale Gunnison sat down at his desk and stared at a wall and meditated on the twin virtues of honor and loyalty. The warriors of Mitchell’s era had fought and died to defend Montagnard villages which had later been abandoned, to be slaughtered by the communists when the Americans were pulled out. The Green Berets had gone into Laos and Cambodia on their government’s orders, but they all too often had to depend only on each other to get themselves out, because officially they were never there at all. When things went wrong they fought to their last bullets, but they never, ever left a wounded comrade behind.
After leaving the military, he had spent his career in the FBI, where the “elite commandos” of this group, the Hostage Rescue Team, were most famous for roasting civilians alive at Waco, and sniping a mother holding a baby at Ruby Ridge.
There was no comparison between the two worlds, the world of the Special Forces and the world of the FBI.
He would not let Ben Mitchell be burned alive.
****
Wednesday Ranya went apartment hunting, dressed innocuously as a student in her jeans and a peach-colored top, with her hair brushed back and held primly in place behind a matching plastic band. She hoped to pick up George’s trail near the downtown Norfolk federal building, but she didn’t want to live too close to it, so she ruled out the student-infested areas near Old Dominion University. There were tremendous off-season bargains to be found along the Atlantic in Virginia Beach, but that was a long drive from downtown Norfolk, and there was too great a chance of being seen by someone she knew from her summer lifeguard job.
So she headed out in her loaded van for Ocean View, a short stretch of coast running east to west along the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. Ocean View was the northern-most part of Norfolk, sandwiched between the giant Norfolk Naval Base to the west, and the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base to the east. She cruised around a few blocks from the beach, looking for vacancy signs. In a once-genteel working class neighborhood now in decline, she found the Alcazar Apartments at the dead end of a shady street. Older single-family homes and duplexes lined the street leading to the Alcazar, which was a gray and pink stucco two story structure built in the shape of a “U,” with the open end facing up the street.
The manager’s office was at the end of one of th
e two legs of the building; a small sign out front on the wall announced that a one-bedroom apartment was for rent. Ranya rang the doorbell, and in a minute she was greeted cautiously by the apparent landlady, a heavily accented middle-aged woman of indeterminate Central Asian origins.
“Yes, what do you want?”
“I’d like to see your one bedroom apartment, is it still available?”
“It is, yes, but it is very small, you live by yourself? Are you student or dancer? I don’t want no dancers, dancers give trouble. I don’t want that here.”
East Ocean View had far more than its share of strip tease clubs, well supported by the thousands of sailors on the nearby bases.
“No I’m not a ‘dancer.’ I’m a student at Old Dominion. Can I please see the apartment?”
The short woman looked hard at Ranya, evaluating her. Not finding any needle marks, missing teeth, tattoos or evidence of silicone breast implants, she relented. “Okay, come with me.”
The apartment was on the ground floor in the back of the courtyard formed by the “U.” Its front door was under the open stairway leading to the second floor balcony, to the right of the door was a narrow passageway leading through the ground floor to an alley behind the Alcazar. The place showed promise. The landlady opened it up, it was a bit musty but Ranya had seen worse during her years as a student. The furniture seemed functionally adequate. The tiny front room was a combined kitchen, dining room and living room with one window looking out to the courtyard garden, which would permit her to see anyone coming. The small bedroom at the back had a window which opened to the alley; it could be a rapid escape hatch if necessary.
“It’s fine, I’ll take it. How much?”
The landlady seemed a bit surprised. “Six hundred a month, includes electric.”
“I want it the rest of the year.”
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 26