“And they called our agents traitors? Traitors?”
“Yes sir, it’s that Second Amendment thing again. They told our agents they were violating their oaths, and they were ‘domestic enemies of the Constitution.’ It’s all of that Constitution business...”
“Traitors!” The President had slowly been building toward a rage, and his voice was raised almost to a scream. The FBI Director forced himself to meet the President’s scathing glare, but the other members of the Homeland Security Team were watching the FBI Director, or looking down at their papers.
“They’re the traitors! They’re the ones sniping at Senators! They’re the ones blowing up bridges and shooting up stadiums! And they have the brass balls to call us traitors?” The President was leaning against the conference table, looking up and down at them all. “Now listen people, and get this real clear: I want those roadblocks doubled, tripled! I want them in all fifty states, I don’t care what it takes—mobilize the National Guard, I don’t give a damn! If they think they can just drive around on our highways with guns and bombs in their cars like these Goddamn Green Berets, well, well, they’re not! They’re not! I won’t have it!”
The President brought his voice down and said in a hushed voice, “Make it happen people. Make it happen. That’s all I’m going to say.” Then he pointed his finger at his CSO Harvey Crandall and indicated that he should follow him out. The President swept out of the Situation Room through his own door, a Secret Service agent scrambled to open it without causing him a single moment’s delay, afraid of incurring his wrath.
In the walnut-lined passageway President Gilmore said to his friend, “Harry, get in touch with that Malvone. Find him now, right now. Tell him we’re taking a beating, and we can’t let these assassinations just stand out there with no response. We’re losing control of the situation, this fire is spreading fast, and we need to stamp it out now, right now. Tell Malvone we need to see concrete results, and we need to see them now, like to-day!”
24
The grimy yellow-and-black mobile hydraulic crane was set up perpendicular to the quay wall, with its unextended boom jutting over the barge and Brad Fallon’s mast. For a twenty-five-ton-capacity crane that usually earned its keep doing jobs such as lifting out and installing massive Caterpillar and Detroit Diesel fishing boat engines, lifting 400 pounds of sailboat mast and rigging was not going to be a challenge. Brad was going over the mast hoisting plan with the boatyard’s crane operator Ramon, and his brother Salvador. They were standing next to the crane by the quay’s edge and Brad was pointing out various aspects of the job, using a mixture of English, Spanish, and hand signals.
Brad was holding a wooden paint roller’s extension handle as a stand-in for his mast. He had tied a piece of string around its middle and was showing them how he expected the lift to proceed. Crosby’s yard rarely handled sailboats, and this was unknown territory for the brothers. Although the mast was light and would be easy for the crane to lift, it would be vulnerable to expensive and time-consuming damage while it was swinging in the air. All together Brad had put over $12,000 into the mast and rigging, and he needed the job to proceed smoothly to stay on his departure schedule.
The crane operator’s brother spoke virtually no English beyond yes and no, and Brad’s Spanish was uncertain at best, so they had to find the key words they would need to direct the soon-to-be vertical mast into place on Guajira. Brad was wearing paint-stained khaki shorts and boat shoes and a t-shirt with the semi-profane name of a bar in Fairbanks Alaska on it. The two brothers were wearing long blue jeans and work boots and tan Crosby’s Boatyard work shirts, with the sleeves rolled all the way down, even though it was sunny and almost eighty degrees out and growing warmer by the hour.
The three men halted their discussion in mid-sentence when a stranger on a red white and blue Japanese café-racer-style motorcycle appeared from around the big corrugated steel paint shed, heading slowly their way. The two Guatemalan brothers looked back to Brad to see if the interloper was someone he knew. The motorcyclist, whose entire head was concealed under a black helmet, was looking less and less like an hombre the closer he came. The short-statured brothers reflexively straightened up to their full heights and ran their fingers back through their black hair. When the biker parked her Yamaha close by them and pulled off her helmet and shook down her brunette ponytail, Ramon and Salvador glanced between Brad and the young woman, grinning broadly. The younger brother, Salvador, asked Brad, “Es tu amiga, esta guapissima?”
Before Brad could think up a clever or diplomatic answer to the question “is this hot babe your girlfriend,” Ranya retorted to Salvador, “Brad no tiene amig; es un solitario.” Meaning, Brad doesn’t have a girlfriend, he’s a loner. The brothers erupted in laughter and began to pepper Ranya with friendly questions in rapid-fire Spanish, but she said, “sorry, lo siento muchachos, pero mi Espanol es terrible.” This wasn’t exactly true, her Spanish was better than adequate, but she thought it would be rude to exclude Brad from any of their conversation. Besides, she was not here to chat with boatyard employees.
Ramon said, slowly and carefully, “Brad, you are the capitan of this yate Guajira; you are going to have many amigas I think!” At this remark Brad and Ranya made direct eye contact, and neither of them hurried to look away.
Brad could not hide his complete joy at her totally unexpected arrival; he was beaming and made no effort to conceal his delight. She looked sexy in her tight jeans and red sweater, and there was something else: she was actually smiling back at him, something Brad had only imagined before. “Ranya, oh my God, it’s so great to see you again, I can’t believe you’re here! And just in time to see the mast go up.” He extended his hand to her and she shook it willingly, still holding eye contact with him.
“So, this really is the day when Guajira becomes a sailboat?”
“Right now.”
“Is there anything I can do to help out?”
He reluctantly let go of her hand in order to point out the elements of the task ahead of them. “There sure is. We have to get the bottom of the mast through that hole in the cabin top and down over the mast step. Well it’s easy to get it through the hole in the deck, but it’s very tricky to line it up exactly vertically, so that it’ll go right down over the step. See, look at the lifting strap: the mast gets lifted from the middle, not the top, and it won’t really want to go perfectly straight up and down. If you go down below on Guajira, when the mast is over the step on the keel, just call up to me if it needs to come right or left or front or back, then I’ll yell over to Ramon how to move the top of the crane. Simple right? And when it’s perfectly lined up, tell me, and I’ll tell Ramon to lower it down.”
Brad continued, with instructions to the brothers. “And Salvador helps me on deck. Tu conmigo en el barco, okay Salvador? You with me, okay?” The arrival of Ranya was fortuitous. Brad had not been excited about the prospect of depending on the eager but non-English-speaking Salvador to be a part of the chain of communication, where a botched order to Ramon at the crane’s controls could result in a bent and ruined mast.
Salvador nodded solemnly and said, “Si, capitan, I with you.”
Brad continued instructing his little team, using his wooden pole and string to demonstrate. “Okay Salvador, we’ll stand on the barge while the mast is lifted to vertical, then we’ll hold the bottom and walk it across, while Ramon booms out the crane.” Salvador was nodding assent as Ramon translated Brad’s words. “All right? Everybody understand? Let’s do it then.”
Ramon climbed up on the mobile crane and into the operator’s compartment and fired up the diesel engine which powered the hydraulics, revving it with earsplitting blasts and belching smoke. It was parked facing the river by the quayside with its outriggers planted on the cement on each side for stability. The steel boom whined as it telescoped out and up to its full length, eighty feet above the center of the horizontal mast. Brad, Ranya and Salvador jumped across the gap from the seawall
down onto the barge.
When the crane’s hook with its steel “headache ball” came down within reach, Brad grabbed it. He had previously duct-taped a carpet remnant around the steel ball as padding to keep it from scarring up the mast’s paint. Brad had already fastened a nylon lifting strap around the mast just slightly above its mid point, and now he placed the nylon webbing loop over the crane’s hook, looked all around him on the barge and on board Guajira for a final check, then he walked back to the base of the mast where Salvador was waiting.
“Everybody ready? Todos listos?” Once the fragile sixty-foot mast was lifted from its five saw horses and was swinging around it would be very susceptible to damage.
Brad looked at each of them in turn. “Listo, Ramon? Listo, Salvador? Ready Ranya? Everybody ready?” Brad pointed his right hand straight up and made a circling motion with his index finger and called out, “Okay Ramon! Arriba! Take her up!”
The hook took up the slack from the long nylon webbing sling, then without even pausing it smoothly lifted the mast up a few feet into the air over the saw horses. The mast flexed and quivered slightly along its sixty-foot length. As the mast continued ascending Brad and Salvador held down its base, and it rotated smoothly to the vertical, almost touching the crane’s wire along its top half. The base of the mast came to rest suspended in mid-air at shoulder level by the two men. The mast swayed and turned as they struggled to control it from the bottom.
“All right, let’s walk her across. Ramon, ready?”
Ramon nodded, concentrating on his controls. He slowly lowered the angle of the crane’s boom, while he extended its telescoping sections outward. The precisely coordinated movements sent the now-vertical mast out across the barge, its base held by Brad and Salvador. The two men hopped one at a time across onto Guajira’s deck; Ranya had already gone aboard the boat and disappeared down below.
When the mast was directly above the hole in Guajira’s deck, Brad gave the finger-circling-down signal, and Ramon spooled out wire to lower it slowly until it was only a foot above the deck, where he stopped it again. The two men twisted and rotated the oval shaped mast to align it properly with the hole, then Brad gave a slower finger-circling-down signal to Ramon, and the base of the mast was smoothly swallowed by the deck.
There was a band of blue electrical tape around the mast which marked what would be its final position at deck level. When the mast was a few inches from the blue tape, Brad made a sudden fist and the mast stopped short, swaying slightly.
“Okay Ranya, how’s it looking?” Brad called down to her through a small open deck hatch aft of the mast.
“It’s got to go left one inch, and back a half inch,” she replied.
Brad did the quick geometric conversion in his head and yelled loudly to Ramon, to be heard above the crane’s diesel, “Bring it back this much!” He held his hands a foot apart to show Ramon the distance he needed to pull the top of the crane back toward the land.
After a few adjustments front and back and side to side Ranya called out, “Stop! That’s it! Let it down!”
“Okay Ranya, watch your fingers—here it comes!”
The mast slid the final inches down through the deck and Ranya called up, “That’s it Brad, she’s on the step!”
“Fantastic! Okay, come on up and help us pin the stays.” Brad smiled a little nervously and said, “Now we get to see if I’m a complete idiot or not.” He used his folding pocketknife to slice away the yellow cords which held all of the wire ends together in a single bundle. This awkward bundle had been covered in a piece of bubble wrap plastic and tied to the mast to keep it in place while it was lifted.
“Each turnbuckle has three inches of adjustment, and if I did my math correctly, each wire will fit tightly. If not…” Brad shrugged and smiled at Ranya, putting a brave face on his apprehension.
This was crunch time, the pass-fail acid test, and all four of them knew it. The mast was completely new, and Brad had cut the wires to their lengths entirely according to his own mathematical calculations.
“If they don’t fit, then what?” asked Ranya, helping Brad to separate the wires from the bunch and lead them in their correct directions.
“If they’re too short, we’ll have to pull the mast back out and put it back on the sawhorses. Then I’ll have to go buy some more hardware to add on a few more inches. If they’re too long, I’ll have to take the end fittings apart and whack off a few inches of wire, and do them over. That’ll take time, and the crane’s not here for free. Okay, let’s start with the four lower shrouds…”
In just a few minutes, all ten of the rigging wires were pinned to Guajira’s deck chain-plates with thumb-sized stainless steel cross pins, and all ten wires did indeed fit. Brad went below and came up with four cans of cold beer to celebrate this milestone, in spite of the morning hour. They toasted Brad and drank some beer; they were all in high spirits, happy to share his victorious moment with him.
Salvador went back up onto the quay and helped his brother with the crane. Its hook spooled all the way up, the boom’s telescoping sections slid back down, and the steadying outrigger legs were withdrawn. Brad tipped them a twenty dollar bill each for coming in and doing the weekend job, even though he had already paid the yard the $240 minimum for the crane service. They drove the machine away grinning, winking at Brad about his “guapa chica” back on Guajira.
When they were gone Ranya was left alone on the sailboat with Brad to help him tighten down the turnbuckles and tune the rig evenly. As they moved around the deck from bow to stern and side to side, alternately tensioning the stay wires a little at a time, Brad had numerous opportunities to observe just how pretty a girl Ranya actually was. He wondered why she was out riding her Yamaha wearing only running shoes and a thin sweater besides her jeans. She had always worn hiking boots and a jacket before.
“Well, I guess this proves you’re not a complete idiot,” she told him with a warm smile. They were both all the way aft, behind the cockpit crouched on either side of the backstay wire’s turnbuckle, making the final adjustments. A few times when they handed each other tools or cotter pins or rolls of white rigger’s tape they brushed fingertips, and each time Brad felt a little electric charge...
He couldn’t remember seeing her smile before today. He thought she was actually beautiful when she was smiling. She had perfect teeth, absolutely flawless, straight and white. He’d never appreciated this before, because he hadn’t seen her smiling until now. He’d always loved her mysterious eyes, which were sometimes amber, hazel or even green, and now she had the dazzling smile to match them.
He accepted her praise about his rigging job. “Thanks. I guess I was a little lucky too, going ten for ten.”
“I’m impressed Brad, this is really an accomplishment. And not just the mast. All of Guajira…everything. I guess this is really an important day for you, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah. Very important. It’s huge. Guajira is a sailboat again, almost.”
“So what’s next?”
“We’ll finish tuning the rig, and I’ll make sure the mast is nice and straight. Then let’s put on the boom and the mainsail and go sailing!”
“Just like that? That’s all there is to it?”
“That’s it! Don’t you want to go sailing? I know I do! It’s going to be a perfect day on the bay. Warm, sunny, nice westerly breeze… You know, I spent a long, long time up that river on Guajira without a mast. I really want to take her out; you don’t have any idea how much I want to take her out sailing! I’ve been planning for this day for so long…”
“But I’m not dressed for it—I’d need to get changed. I can’t go like this, in long blue jeans…”
“Oh, don’t worry about it; I’ve got some things you can wear. We’ll figure it out, come on, let’s go sailing!”
They worked steadily to complete the rigging work and install the boom. Then together they partially unfolded the giant white mainsail across the cockpit, and slid the plast
ic slugs which were sewn along its front and bottom edges into the slots on the back of the mast and the top of the boom. Finally the entire mainsail was flaked down and secured along the boom with red nylon straps, ready to haul up the mast and catch its first breeze. They cast off from the rusty barge at Crosby’s Boatyard before noon.
****
When the President’s CSO called, Wally Malvone was skimming two thousand feet above the Virginia countryside in “his” new helicopter, flying south. The royal blue Eurohelo VK-100 was smaller than what he had envisioned for transporting his STU Teams, but it represented a remarkable start on such short notice. “Mr. Emerson” didn’t tell him who the helicopter and the tight-lipped pilot actually belonged to, and Malvone didn’t ask. Mr. Emerson didn’t think there would be a major problem getting the larger choppers with greater troop carrying capacity that Malvone was requesting, but it would take a little time.
Wally Malvone understood that it was not a simple process to create and activate fictitious “proprietary front” companies and covertly interface them with secret government black-budgets. This required engineering invisible wheels within bureaucratic wheels. Just how many layers of real and phony corporations and holding companies, Malvone couldn’t begin to guess. That was Mr. Emerson’s bailiwick. Neither did Mr. Emerson ever inquire as to exactly what the STU Team’s mission was going to be. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the guiding principle of the relationship between Malvone and Emerson in both directions. They both had the authority they needed to do their jobs, and that was enough for each of them.
Among the items Mr. Emerson had given to Wally Malvone when they met in an anonymous office in an unmarked building in Alexandria was a special telephone. It was a real “brick” and came in its own gray metal box, but it was supposed to provide secure encrypted voice communications between the Malvone and the White House from almost anywhere in the USA. Malvone didn’t know how it worked and he didn’t care. Cell, satellite or radio, that wasn’t his department.
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