Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  The night sea breeze was no more than fifteen or twenty knots, and Guajira was riding the chop and slight swell easily. There was no moon, and the land was only discernable as a black smear wiping out the stars down low. This void was punctuated only by scattered porch lights and street lamps, and the lights across the Route 17 bridge spanning the Nansemond River where it narrowed behind him. The southward pointing peninsula of Newport News was a single swatch of bright lights marking the horizon seven miles to the northeast.

  The glowing green face of his GPS navigational unit, located among the instrument displays on the back of his cabin top beside his companionway, told him that his Delta anchor was holding fast. If the anchor had been dragging backwards through the mud, it would have triggered an alarm after moving a hundred yards beyond his predetermined safety zone. The combined length of only a hundred feet of anchor line and chain in water twenty feet deep was marginal for the conditions, but Brad wanted to see what kind of holding performance the Delta anchor was capable of.

  Even if the anchor did drag tonight, he would have ample time to start his engine and motor upwind and reset it in a new location. In the worst case, if a sudden gale swept down on him from the open northeast, Guajira could conceivably be blown ashore. But he had been monitoring the marine weather channels on his VHF radio, and knew that there was virtually no chance of such a surprise.

  Brad welcomed the old familiar satisfactions and worries of standing watch at night, even anchor watch, but this time he was not crewing on someone else’s boat, this time he was the skipper. And on his very first night away from the land on his own “yate,” Brad did indeed have an amiga on board, a beautiful young lady, but for how long was an open question…

  He enjoyed the test presented by being anchored in open water, exposed to the wind-driven waves. Guajira was dancing on the anchor line, pitching slightly in the chop, swinging twenty yards to port and starboard every few minutes. Sixty feet up on the top of the mast, a bright white anchor light marked the sailboat’s position, to avert the slight risk of collision with any late-traveling boat. The anchor light’s shine illuminated the masthead antennas and the wind direction indicator arrow, and the mast traced arcs across the star-filled sky as Guajira pitched and rolled. On another night in another anchorage, he could be staring down a full gale or even an approaching hurricane. He knew he would look back on this first night’s conditions as idyllic, so he savored the experience to store it against the storms that surely would come.

  At its worst the open ocean’s fury could sink your boat or even kill you. Even at anchor the shoreline could snatch your boat away if you were the least bit careless or stupid. But these were honest and eternal dangers, known and understood, and nothing like the concealed and shifting dangers to be found on the land.

  A few days more, and he’d leave the land and its hidden perils and secret treacheries astern…

  The white Dacron mainsail was flaked down and tied along the top of the boom, its idle halyard line was hanging down the back of the mast. As Guajira swung back and forth across the wind the halyard was lifting off the mast, and beginning to make a rhythmic slapping clang against the hollow aluminum. Brad grabbed a bungee cord and climbed up on the cabin top to the mast. He reached high up the flapping halyard and hooked on the bungee, and then he pulled the halyard away from the mast and hooked the other end of the tightly stretched cord to one of the wire stays which supported the mast.

  A trivial job he thought, silencing a clanging halyard, a task neither possible nor necessary yesterday. But in another week I’ll be standing in this same spot reefing down the main in big ocean swells, grappling vast yards of flailing Dacron sail, with Guajira heeled over and the spray flying as we slam across the waves…

  The salt air Brad smelled and felt on his skin had been sent as a messenger from the Atlantic only twenty miles away, whispering to him to flee the narrow confines of the Chesapeake Bay for the open ocean. He thought, just give me 360 degrees of clear horizon around me, and 500 deep blue fathoms under my keel, and I’ll take any weather that comes! The risk of encountering storms at sea would be a fair trade for escaping the land’s clutches.

  He stepped lightly down off the cabin top onto the forward deck, to check where his anchor line passed over the grooved black rubber wheel of his bow roller. Since he’d bought Guajira, he’d beefed up the size of all of the bow hardware and the foredeck cleats that the anchor line was now tied to. The rest of the anchor line passed down the hawsehole to where it was stored in the anchor locker just forward of his triangular bed, the bachelor sailor’s bed which tonight warmed Ranya, his new lover. She was the first girl he had slept with in months beyond counting, and the first girl that he had cared deeply about in years.

  Guajira’s bow was facing to the northeast, out of the mouth of the river, easily taking the chop coming down the Hampton Roads. Even so, it was enough to bring her hull to life and make her spring like a new colt against the anchor line. Brad stood on Guajira’s bobbing nose, just behind the bow roller, holding the forestay tight against his shoulder to steady himself with the ocean breeze pouring against his face. Next week, he thought, if I need to work up here it will be in full foul weather gear, as Guajira flies off of waves and slams down into troughs, sometimes burying this foredeck half under water, with green wave tops breaking across this spot where I’m standing so dry and comfortable tonight…

  But hopefully he wouldn’t need to work on the bow while sailing off shore at all, especially since he would be sailing solo with the boat under auto pilot control. If he tripped or fell or was swept off of Guajira’s decks, the sloop would not turn around for him or even stop. Instead, she would sail mercilessly over the far horizon while he treaded water and watched in despair. Even if he was restrained by a safety harness and a stout line clipped securely on board, he would probably be dragged alongside Guajira’s hull until he drowned. It would be virtually impossible for him to climb back up the side of the hull against the force of the ocean, not while Guajira sliced through it at eight or ten knots.

  This was the greatest danger of ocean sailing: the unexpected lurch of the deck beneath your feet, the missed step, the slip and stumble and plunge over the side and into the briny blue racing astern. The unlucky solo mariner could drown while being dragged along by his safety tether, or if untethered, he could drown after watching his boat sail out of sight. The result would be the same in either case: a prolonged watery death.

  Just behind him he heard a little metallic hardware rattle and a squeak as the closed foredeck hatch lifted slightly, and Ranya’s sleepy face appeared in the faint starlight.

  He asked, “Did I wake you, stomping around up here?”

  “No…I don’t know… I just woke up. Do you want some company?”

  “Of course, come on up. But it’s chilly; you’ll want to put on your sweater.”

  The hatch dropped back down, Brad went along the side deck to the cockpit and slipped down below, and slid a few of his favorite night-time-on-the-water CDs into his machine: some Cowboy Junkies, Enya and Enigma. Now that he was finally on the verge of sailing away, he wanted to make her fall in love with every aspect of this cruising life that he could. He wanted to seduce her into sailing away with him. He briefly thought of opening a bottle of wine but rejected the idea only because of the hour. They had been making love and sleeping and making love again since the afternoon.

  She walked aft through the main salon, a little unsteadily since she had just awoken and the boat was rolling and pitching a bit, and this disequilibrium was magnified inside the boat, where she could not fix her gaze on the land to balance herself.

  “I’m so…disoriented. I had some of the craziest dreams...”

  “That always happens, on your first night on a boat.” He was standing by the companionway ladder after putting the music on.

  “It’s not my first night on Guajira, remember?” She walked right to him until she was pressed against him, her head against
his chest, and his arms slipped around her waist. She was wearing just her red sweater and panties, and he slid his hands onto the hollow of her back beneath her clothes.

  “That’s right; it’s not your first night. But it’s your first night away from the land. Guajira’s moving around a bit, it’s a little choppy. How do you feel?”

  “I’m fine, if you mean am I seasick. Just a little disoriented.”

  Brad retrieved a fuzzy yellow blanket from the aft stateroom and followed Ranya up into the cockpit. He spread the blanket around his shoulders and sat down next to the open companionway, just behind the back of the raised cabin, to keep them out of the wind. Ranya sat in front of him and pressed her back against his chest, her head resting on his shoulder, sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, encircled by the blanket. He wrapped his arms around hers and intertwined her fingers in his own, and she squeezed his in welcome return.

  Ranya snuggled back into him, his arms and legs around her keeping her warm, with just her face peeking out above the warm blanket that cocooned them both. The Cowboy Junkies’ Margot Timmons was singing in her languid haunting style, so softly and so moving, with words that seemed written for them and for this night, and they didn’t speak for a long time.

  ****

  Brad kissed her gently on the nape of her neck and her ear, soft baby kisses while they both cuddled under the blanket. He was striving to spin his web tightly around her, trying to set his hook deeply.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered at last. She was holding his hands close to her face and kissing each of his fingers in turn.

  “I know. I feel so sorry for people, most people really, people who never get to experience this. The music, the stars, the lights across the water; it’s just something so…special. It’s something magical.”

  “Are you going to have many nights like this? Anchored I mean? Or will you be staying in marinas? Or just sailing most of the time?”

  “Not too many marinas. They cost too much, and anyway that’s not the kind of life I’m after. I could live in marinas here. I want to sail and explore until I find perfect places. Tropical lagoons and little bays with warm clear water, and I’ll stay there until I get tired of them.”

  “How long are you going to be gone? How long can you live like that? Just wandering the oceans?”

  “Mmm… I don’t know, exactly. At least a few years I guess. I don’t have a schedule, there’s really no set plan. But I know one thing: I’m not coming back to a police state.”

  “But how long do you think America is going to be like this?”

  “I don’t know…years maybe, I guess. I can’t see it just going back to the way it was…at least not anytime soon. What about you? You only have another year until you get your degree, then what?”

  “Well, I’m punting this semester. Maybe I’ll go back to school in January, I don’t know. I have to decide if I’m going to rebuild on our property, or just sell it. I have, well… There’s pretty good insurance.”

  “You don’t have any family at all in the states? Nobody at all?”

  “Family? No one. Not in America. And I have no desire to go to Lebanon. That place means nothing to me. I’m an American, and that’s it. Bad as it is, America’s all I’ve got left.”

  “Well why don’t you come sailing with me? And if you can’t come right now, then fly down and meet me in Nassau in a few weeks, when everything’s settled for you up here.”

  “Brad, I’d love to, I really would. But my father didn’t pass away, he was murdered, and the people who did it haven’t been punished. Nobody’s even looking for them. I’m not leaving before I find out who did it. I can’t leave before I do at least that much, it would be like deserting him. I can’t leave before that.”

  “It won’t bring your father back.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I have to do it.”

  “Then you have to find George. The George that Phil Carson met at Freedom Arms, the same George who wanted me to spy on the Black Water boys.”

  “That’s right: George the Fed, George the G-man, George the BATF agent.”

  Without any warning a helicopter shot past them, a black shadow that for an instant blocked the lights on shore as it whipped across the Nansemond River almost at wave top level, heading north up the James River.

  “Jesus, he was low!” exclaimed Brad. “He could have hit my mast!” They both strained to follow the helicopter with their eyes but it was already gone from sight, and the sound was fast diminishing to a distant whine. “Military, he had to be. He wasn’t showing any lights.”

  “I don’t think so; he was too small for a Blackhawk or a Navy Seahawk. They fly low level up and down the beach all the time, just out over the ocean. I know what they sound like, and that was no military helicopter.”

  “Well, if it’s civilian, he’s taking a big chance joyriding with no lights on this close to the Navy bases; it’s all controlled air space. Unless he was too low for radar to pick him up.” The sound of the helicopter was already gone.

  Ranya said, “SEALs from Little Creek are out here all the time training; parachuting into the bay, or just jumping out of low-flying helicopters and climbing back up rope ladders. And the pilots all fly with night vision goggles, so they don’t care about the darkness. It’s not dark for them, it’s bright green, so they could see Guajira, they could see everything. We sold some night vision stuff in the store, and what they’ve got is a lot better. Around here, the military is training all the time, you never know what they’re up to.”

  “But on a Saturday night? I mean, at three AM on Sunday? I was in the Navy, and I don’t remember any training at three in the morning on Sunday, not on shore duty.” Brad was about to tell her how he had enlisted in the Navy to try to get into the SEAL teams, but he decided to skip it. Why tell her that? It was too long a story, and so what? He hadn’t made it, and it was long in the past. He changed the subject instead, trying to get her to think beyond George, so that she might consider sailing with him later.

  “So, if you find George, what then? If he killed your father, will it be enough for you to take revenge on him?”

  “I don’t know; I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I’d like to ask him some questions… Sure, I’d like to find out if he shot my father, and why he did it. But who was behind all the gun store attacks? George didn’t do them all. Who gave the orders?”

  “But what do you expect to find out? If our own government is behind it, then what? You can’t fight the entire government. I mean it might be admirable, but it’s not exactly realistic, don’t you think?”

  “But just what’s realistic any more? So much is happening that I wouldn’t have ever thought was realistic a week ago.”

  “Well that’s sure true. But what about after you…deal with George, why don’t…”

  Brad was interrupted by an orange bloom of light a mile to the south on the high ground, which was followed a few seconds later by a dull boom. “Did you see that? Look over there!”

  “I saw it, what is it, a bonfire? Sometimes people throw parties on the shore and they light up driftwood bonfires.”

  “At three o’clock in the morning? And it’s not on the beach, it’s up higher.” It was becoming more obvious by the second exactly what it was.

  “It’s a house fire.” Ranya stood up in the cockpit, holding onto the silver grab-bar in front of the compass pedestal. “What’s with all the fires around here?” She was crying, Brad stood up to hold her, and she wept against his chest. The sight of the distant blazing house took her back to what she had found after her high-speed ride down from school.

  Brad said, “It sure started fast! There was nothing, then wham! Flames everywhere.” He let go of her and reached inside the companionway for his binoculars, popped off the lens caps and took a quick look, then passed them to her.

  “Brad, I know somebody that lives over there on that point. There’s not very many houses over there, I might know them! We sho
uld call 911.”

  “I’ll get my phone, but I think it’s too late.” The distant fire had grown to an enormous size in less than a minute. It was obvious that anyone who had not gotten out of the house would not get out now. He said, “There’s been too many fires around here lately. Fires and explosions and killings.”

  “Brad, do you remember at the funeral, the older man who was at Mass, who came by himself to the burial? The one with the nice black suit, with the gray hair and glasses? He drove a Mercedes, remember him?

  “Who? Yes, I think so. Why?”

  “That man was one of my father’s best customers for years and years, Mr. Edmonds. Burgess Edmonds. I went to high school with Valerie Edmonds. Brad, that’s where they live, right around where that fire is! I’m not sure, but it’s got to be one of those houses on the point.” Ranya was getting hysterical, shaking and crying.

  “Burgess Edmonds lives over there? Ranya, I know that name.”

  “You do? How do you know him?”

  “I don’t know him, I mean, I only saw him at the funeral, but I know his name. Burgess Edmonds was on the list that George gave me last week, the list of people to spy on in the Black Water Club! He was on the list, and Mark Denton was on the list, and you know Jimmy Shifflett, he used to be in the club too.”

  “My father knew them all, from the store. And they’re dead.” She had put the binoculars away and was holding him again, while they both stared across the water at the distant house fire.

  A feeling of doom, a feeling of being fatally caught in a trap descended over Brad. He held Ranya tightly and they rocked together slowly. “I need to get away from here. Tomorrow. From this side of the James River, I mean. If George is still keeping tabs on me, this is where he’d look, on the south side of the bay. My sail maker’s over in Newport News, so I’m going to take Guajira up the bay and hide out in the wildlife refuge in Poquoson, until the genoa’s ready. Then I’ll have a straight shot out to the ocean.”