Enemies Foreign And Domestic

by Matthew Bracken

  The SPD Supervisory Agents’ offices were inside a 10,000 square-foot steel warehouse which also contained many of their vehicles. The right side roll-up door was all the way open. Malvone pulled his white Lexus inside and parked it. With so much square footage available to the original STU operators and techs (who were only the nucleus of the SPD) there was no reason not to park their vehicles inside and out of sight. The offices were built in a line along the right side wall inside the warehouse. When he opened the door to the office he had previously selected, the new carpet odor was still strong. The walls were still unpainted, showing the white seam tape and plaster over the sheetrock. The painters were scheduled to do their work over the weekend.

  Bob Bullard caught up to Malvone as he was going into his office, with Joe Silvari trailing behind him. Bullard said, “Wally, we need to talk. They found Hammet.”

  Malvone stopped in the doorway, his leather briefcase hanging at his side. “They found Hammet? They who? Where? Found him dead or alive?”

  “Very dead. In his car. It looks like he missed a turn and drove into a canal.”

  “Shit! For real? When did they find him? Is there a time of death?” The earlier the better, as far as Malvone was concerned. He had wanted Hammet dead since they had climbed down from the unfinished building overlooking the stadium on September 9th, but this was not the way he’d planned it. Now Hammet was confirmed dead, but Garfield, Edmonds and the other two were still missing…it would take time to digest this information, figure the angles, and calculate all the permutations.

  If Fallon and the others had escaped, and killed Hammet after forcing him to call Swarovski’s house, well he could deal with that. The expanding SPD needed real enemies; they could only gin up patsies for so long. But at least Hammet’s lips were now sealed forever, and that was all upside. There was no longer any chance of his worst fear ever being realized, which was George Hammet sitting in front of a grand jury, or a Senate committee.

  “No time of death yet,” said Bullard. “Sounds like he’s in pretty bad shape, I heard the crabs got a good whack at him… Maybe he’s been there since Monday night, or Tuesday morning.”

  “What do you think? Did he have help?”

  “Hard to say. If he was Vince Fostered, they did a good job of it. They found a whiskey bottle in the car… I don’t know, maybe Hammet and Garfield just dicked it up and let Fallon or Sorrento take a gun off them… Or maybe one of them played possum and Hammet or Garfield turned his back on him… I don’t know.”

  Malvone’s cell phone chirped and he took the call right there in the doorway. “Malvone here. Yes. Okay, that’s fine.” He listened for a half minute and concluded with, “I’ll be there.” He flipped the phone shut and dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “I’ve been called to Headquarters. Hammet’s unfortunate demise has gained their attention. That bitch of a SAIC at the Norfolk Field Office is pointing her finger at us. But Hammet never had anything in writing from us, not even an email. Anyway, it shouldn’t be a major problem, not with federal agents getting shot right and left. He’ll just blend right in with the rest. Garfield too.”

  Silvari said, “They’ve just about wiped that ‘Fed List’ off of the internet, but it’s still out there. I mean, every wing-nut who ever wanted a copy of it probably downloaded it already, or got it from a friend.”

  “Exactly. Agents are getting whacked every day, so Hammet winding up in a canal shouldn’t stand out too much.”

  “Don’t be so casual about that Fed List, just because you’re not on it,” replied Silvari. “I’m on the list, a lot of us are! I mean, I have to sneak into the back of my own house, like a damn thief! Wally, you don’t know what it’s like, feeling crosshairs on your back every time you put the key into your door.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know, it must suck. So, are you guys coming over tonight? You can unwind a little, and forget about that list.”

  ****

  At noon they were all in the pilothouse eating sandwiches, when the bridge edged above the horizon and into view ahead of them. The Governor Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge carried Route 301 high over the Potomac, connecting Virginia to Maryland at a pinch-point where the river narrowed to two miles wide and made a sharp left turn. Route 301 had been the primary highway linking the east coast states from Maine to Florida until the opening of I-95, when it had been eclipsed and almost forgotten except by local traffic. Now with the I-495 Wilson Bridge over the Potomac in Washington cut, Route 301 was once again a primary artery for mid-Atlantic travel. The Governor Nice Memorial Bridge, like an aging actor brought back on stage as a last minute replacement, once again stood tall in the spotlight.

  They all watched the bridge grow before them through the forward pilothouse windows. Ranya said, “It looks like a dead end in the river. The bridge looks just like a locked gate.” Until recently the river had felt expansive and safe around them, seemingly almost as wide open as the Chesapeake itself. All morning the Potomac had been tending north west, with an average distance from shore to shore of about five miles, which was too far to clearly make out details on the land. Now the land was closing in on them from both sides. North of the bridge the river would average under two miles across, and their feeling of anonymity would be gone…if they made it past the bridge at all. She added, “That bridge looks like a real junk pile. I wonder how old it is?”

  ****

  “Young lady,” said Captain Sam Hurley without turning around, sitting on his stool behind the wheel, “that bridge was built in 1940, and I remember it opening like it happened yesterday. The cars that drove across in those days, you can only imagine. Two of my cousins helped build that bridge; they were iron workers, high scalers! She may look like ‘junk’ to your young eyes, but she’s made of honest riveted steel, put up by brave men who knew their trades.

  “She’s a real ship bridge, 140 feet over the water at the center span, and it’s two-hundred feet down to the bottom. As the river narrows here, it gets mighty, mighty deep. Imagine that, two-hundred feet deep, and they built her before the war! Now, that was a job.”

  The elderly skipper stared ahead for a minute, blinking, remembering his cousins Arthur and Danny Maguire who died so very, very long ago. He remembered how they had worked as a team on projects around the bay and even up to Philadelphia and New York, putting in the red-hot rivets, and then hammering them into place forever. Another lost art, one of so many he had seen disappear from American life over his many decades.

  The past, the past, all gone now…like Artie, who had not even made it to the beach on Guam in ‘44, and Danny who survived the war, but left four young children when he fell from the almost finished Chesapeake Bay Bridge in ‘52.

  Including bright-eyed young Molly, who he raised as his own, taken by that damnable polio the summer after her thirteenth birthday…

  Artie and Dan were both gone, long gone like the water down the river. But their high steel bridge remained before him, still joining Maryland and Virginia, an unbreakable testament to their lives.

  “I’ll forgive you for calling that bridge ‘junk’ young lady,” said Captain Sam Hurley, his voice cracking. “You didn’t live in those days, and you don’t have any idea of how things were back then.” He didn’t turn around, so they would not see him weep.

  ****

  They were all quiet after that, staring at the bridge with new eyes. It was more words than they had heard Captain Sam speak since they had left Norfolk. Except for Barney Wheeler who knew him well, they weren’t sure how much of what was going on around him their elderly skipper, with his snow-white hair, hearing aids and thick glasses, heard or understood at all. Now they knew.

  They couldn’t see Chuck’s boat; it was too far away, one white dot lost among a dozen vessels ahead of them on the shimmering sun-lit river. They were listening carefully to the Molly’s VHF radio, bolted to the varnished plywood console in front of the steering wheel. It was set on channel 77 as the bridge steadily grew ahead of them.
The rainbow arch of steel trusses and girders were an elaborate Erector Set toy bridge in the distance, with emerald forests and jade fields squeezing it from both sides.

  Without preamble, Victor Sorrento’s voice hissed from the radio. “Bluebell, Bluebell, this is Harmony. How copy, over?”

  Carson was standing near the radio and unclipped the microphone, and slowly pressed the transmit button three times. The message from the nonexistent Bluebell to the equally nonexistent Harmony was repeated again in a minute, and was confirmed again with three more clicks. This prearranged brevity code meant that Chuck’s Baycruiser had not been stopped, boarded or searched while passing beneath the bridge, so it was presumed to be safe for the Molly and her illegal cargo to proceed up the river. If the Baycruiser had been stopped and searched, or if special security procedures on the water had been noticed, a different message would have been sent. Then, the Molly M would have turned west for a marina in Colonial Beach, to transfer the weapons to Archie’s truck.

  Another message came over on channel 16, the emergency and hailing frequency. “Securite, Securite. Hello all stations. The Coast Guard has established a security zone 500 yards on either side of the Governor Nice Bridge. All mariners transiting the Potomac are required to maintain their course and speed in the center channel, and not slow down or stop in the security zone. This is the United States Coast Guard, out.”

  Barney Wheeler said, “It sounds like they’re transmitting on low power, so it’s only heard within a few miles of the bridge. Usually, the Coasties boom out their ‘Securite’ messages on high power, so you can hear them from one end of the bay to the other.”

  “I think they’re playing it low key,” said Carson. “With the beltway bridge in Washington cut, you can be sure they’re keeping an extra watchful eye on this one. So I’m guessing they’re worried about sabotage, not gunrunning. At least, that’s what ‘maintain your speed in the center channel’ tells me. That’s why we’re going through now, when there’s the most river traffic: the more boats going through, the less attention they can pay to each boat. What I heard from my friend in Maryland is that the big clampdown on guns is further up. The DC beltway is the main perimeter for Washington; that’s where they’re checking everything that moves. Outside of the beltway, it’s just random FIST checkpoints.”

  They all knew from their briefings and map study that Malvone’s house was six miles south of the beltway. Six miles from where one span of the Wilson Bridge had been blown up.

  “I think you youngsters ought to get below,” said Wheeler. “The Coasties still might be doing random boat checks, and in my experience they’ll inspect a boat with a pretty girl on board a lot quicker than a boat load of ugly old reprobates like us.”

  “That’s the sad, sad truth.” said Captain Sam. “I haven’t been boarded in more years than I care to remember. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time the Coast Guard came aboard the Molly M.”

  Brad and Ranya needed no further coaxing to take their leave and disappear down into the cramped forward berthing compartment. The three older men remained in the pilothouse, to impress any young Coast Guardsmen with the harmlessness of their advanced years, and their utter lack of sex appeal.

  From a mile out they could see a white-hulled Coast Guard patrol craft anchored on the upstream side of the bridge, partially concealed behind one of the enormous concrete islands supporting the complex steel truss legs.

  As they approached the bridge at a respectable ten knots in the center channel, right between the red and green buoys, a day-glow orange rigid-hulled inflatable boat about twenty feet long made a high speed curving run from the Maryland shore and zoomed up their wake. It came alongside and paced them, just a half boat length from their starboard beam. The RIB was crewed by a half dozen young Coast Guardsmen in blue jumpsuits and orange life jackets, carrying slung M-16s and shotguns and holstered pistols. Two of them stood in the back of the RIB holding onto the side of the welded aluminum pipe frame radar arch, ready to climb across onto the Molly’s aft deck if they were instructed to do so. If the RIB’s coxswain wanted to send the boarding party over, he would simply press its orange port-side tube against the Molly M’s hull, while matching boat speeds.

  Captain Sam had put on a blue Navy-style ball cap with “WW2 PT Boat Veteran” emblazoned in gold across the front. Beneath the words was embroidered the famous silhouette of the plywood patrol torpedo boat. Carson and Wheeler were sitting at the dinette table, which dropped them just below the line of sight from the RIB.

  The Coasties, standing in their inflatable holding onto their bolster seats, peered in at Captain Sam through the Molly M’s plexiglass side windows, giving him a careful look-over. In return he gave them a friendly wave. After long seconds of expressionless study from behind his sunglasses, the senior petty officer waved back to him, spoke into his walkie-talkie, and then the orange inflatable accelerated away in a wide right hand curve, leaving a churning white wake behind them. The well-maintained Chesapeake Bay dead-rise workboat with the old skipper at the controls fit on the river like a hand in a glove, and obviously merited no further official attention.

  They passed between the concrete islands on either side of the main channel and beneath the iron bridge. The vaulted arch soared momentarily above them from shore to shore and up to the sky, and then it was behind them and they were through. The upper Potomac, narrower now and twisting in several tight dog legs, lay open before them. They were 45 miles from their target when Carson sent coded messages to Chuck and Tony, who were somewhere out in front of them, and to Archie and Edith, who were shadowing them unseen on the Virginia shore. The Molly M had made it past the bridge, and the mission was a go.

  ****

  Malvone arrived at the ATF Director’s outer office after passing through several new layers of security, including a pair of uniformed guards stationed outside the elevators. After being cleared to enter the waiting area and being announced by the director’s secretary, he was met by Deputy Director Frank Castillo, who was just coming out.

  “Walter, let’s take this in my office. The Director is tied up.”

  Tied up my ass, thought Wally Malvone. That preppie chicken shit doesn’t want a meeting with me to appear on his calendar, in case the Special Projects Division blows up into a flap. Well, screw him anyway.

  They sat in the same office, in the same two plush leather chairs, across the same mahogany executive desk as before, but the furniture had been rearranged. Castillo no longer had his back to the large window, which was now covered by gauzy curtains. Behind the curtains a new two inch thick sheet of the latest high tech bullet resistant laminated plastic glass was crudely bracketed and bolted to the wall around the window opening. Even with the new layer of bullet resistant glass, Castillo was taking no chances. A fifty caliber armor piercing round had penetrated the Director’s conventional Lexan polycarbonate window a week before, and Castillo had no desire to test the advertised rating of the new material with himself as the target.

  “Well, Walter, it’s been two weeks since you gave me your proposal…it sounds like you’ve really taken the ball and run with it. We’ve even heard from the White House about your unit.”

  “Thank you, I’ve got a fine team behind me.” Malvone was glowing inside, but made an effort to appear bureaucratically passionless.

  “Yes… I’m sure you do.” Castillo knew the records of the cast-offs and misfits that Malvone had assembled into his Special Training Unit, now the Special Projects Division, and why he had selected them. “And I understand you’ll be expanding soon… We’ve been instructed to provide you with every consideration in your selection of new personnel.”

  Malvone could read the bitterness in Castillo’s brown eyes, in the strained tone of his voice. He answered, “We’ll try not to disrupt any current field operations.” This was a subtle joke, because they both knew that from coast to coast, ATF Field Offices were in total disarray and confusion. Even before the internet posti
ng of the so-called Fed List, ATF agents were hunkering down and hiding, to avoid being an unseen sniper’s target.

  “Walter, speaking of personnel, I’ve been getting some rather pointed questions out of the Norfolk Field Office about their ASIC.”

  “Ahh…Norfolk? George Hammet, right? What about him?”

  “Are you aware that he’s been missing since Monday, and he was found dead in a river down there just this morning?”

  “I heard something about it, but not the details.”

  “Norfolk seems to be under the impression that Hammet was working with the STU, informally.”

  “Really? No, no, I’m afraid that their information is not correct. I believe Hammet was working with the Joint Task Force, and I think he may have assisted the STU indirectly with some of the informants he was running in Tidewater, but nothing more than that. Bob Bullard handles the day to day running of the team; I’ll ask him what he’s heard.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Walter, the SAIC down there is pretty upset. Very upset. She wants to depose some of your men concerning their knowledge of Hammet’s recent activities and whereabouts. And she wants to depose Bullard, and yourself.”

  This was getting Malvone’s attention: sworn depositions were not a good thing. He suppressed a wry smile and slowly shook his head no. “Frank, I don’t think that would be advisable, not at this time. The Special Projects Division is engaged in full-out counter-terrorist operations,” he lied, and then he dropped the biggest name of all. “They don’t have time to just stop what they’re doing. Anyway they can’t; they’re working directly under the President’s instructions. So I think we should forget about depositions for the time being.”