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ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
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CHAPTER 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 ¾ inch diameter 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 digging into the rat’s nest of fouled 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 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 mazelike 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 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 had completed 21 years with the Bureau, and 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 promotion and 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, and pretending to the world that they still believed that Islam was “the religion of peace.” 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 got 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 Libere, 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 1970s, 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 3 am. The pickup was later 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 1970s. 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 1970s 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 late fifties 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 1970s, 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. A 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 they 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 in place behind a 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 Alhambra Apartments at the dead end of a shady street. Older single-family homes and duplexes lined the street leading to the Alhambra, 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 the 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 Alhambra. 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.”
“I give only for six month or year.”
“I’ll pay cash, all in advance.”
“Come to the office.”
There was an ironwork gate at the back of the passageway by the alley. Ranya asked, “Is that locked?”
“I lock every night six PM. I give you key, okay?”
“That will be okay.” In fact it was fine, almost perfect. She could park her van out front and her Yamaha in the alley. She could exit or enter either way, so no one could easily keep track of her coming and going. Her front door was obscured in shadow by the stairwell above it, and she had a back window for an emergency exit. With the electricity included, she wouldn’t need to register with the electric company. Paying cash, she didn’t have to provide references or submit to any kind of background check. Her van would be registered to her family address in Suffolk at the end of the month, but for the time being she’d use the old tags. There would be virtually no record at all of her at this East Ocean View address.
She’d done it, she thought, she’d become a ghost. And after her father’s funeral tomorrow, she’d start hunting.
Ben Mitchell was clicking through the cable news channels in his den in the early afternoon when his back porch doorbell rang. It was his neighbor Mrs. Mendoza, so he opened the door.
“Hello Mr. Mitchell?” (He loved how she said Meester Meechel.) “I’m sorry for to bother you, but a delivery man give me a package, and I think it’s a mistake. Inside is just another little package for you. And a little time before, a man he called me by the telephone, he said he was an old friend of the Army, and the present was a surprise for you. Anyway I don’t understand these things, but here is your present, all is okay?”
Mitchell was very surprised, but he made an effort not to show it. “Well, muchas gracias Guadalupe, thanks. I have some real crazy Army amigos. Muy loco amigos. Sometimes I don’t understand them either.”
Ben went back into his kitchen and carefully slit open the securely wrapped and taped package, which was the size of a compact disc box. On the outside it just said “For Ben Mitchell” in magic marker block letters. Folded inside was a note on a plain piece of printer paper, also in block letters like a first grader had written it.
SERGEANT MAJOR, YOU HAVE BEEN MADE.
EXPECT VISITORS SOON. GET OUT. GOOD LUCK.
D.O.L.
He trembled, reading the short message over and over. Damn, damn, damn he thought. He’d been totally 100% careful. He’d left no fingerprints, no fibers, no nothing. The typewriter was an old piece of junk, and now it was gone without a trace, smashed to bits and scattered. What could it have been? He’d told no one.
Certainly he had realized they would focus on the old SF’ers who had served with Mark Denton. Even though Denton had never officially been rostered on one of his recon teams, no doubt his name had been in some of the old after-action reports covering the missions he had tagged along on. And there were bound to be old photos, in Denton’s house and elsewhere…
Well at least it looked like he had a friend in the FBI, someone who knew that his house was already under surveillance. Someone clever enough to send the warning message through his neighbor, in order to avoid detection.
Shit. Oh well Ben, you knew you wouldn’t live forever anyway. Six months, or a year at the outside, and he would have to make the decision to have his balls cut off, or get ready to die. That’s what the doctors all said, and he’d never had any intention of letting them castrate him. Cancer or no cancer, his gonads were going to stay right where they had always been. Ben Mitchell was going to live, die and be buried as a complete man.
He’d felt the same way about blowing up the bridge. Live or die, some considerations just went beyond how many more years one could bargain out of God to keep breathing the air on His sweet blessed planet. So what was the point of running now, of going on the escape and evasion? He needed too much medicine, which he couldn’t possibly get on the run, so what was the point? He was too old, too tired, and soon he was going to be too sick to run.
He walked into his living room and peeked out a front window. Sure enough, a cable television truck had a cherry picker going up a utility pole diagonally across the street, installing some new gadget. Cable truck my ass, he thought. “Smile, you’re on candid camera,” is more like it.
What to do, what to do? Just don’t let me burn, Lord Jesus, that’s all I ask, just don’t let me be burned alive. He knew all too well what happened when the FBI’s “Hostage Roasting Team” went the pyrotechnic tear gas route: a house burned to ashes was the preordained result, along with anybody trapped in it.
Ben Mitchell had seen, heard and smelled men who had been burned alive, and even 35 years later they were something he had never forgotten. They were some of the worst of the many indelible scars he had on his memory.
There was no worse way to go. Death didn’t frighten Ben Mitchell, but burning alive did.
Okay, he thought, if they call me on the phone, or send somebody to walk up to my front door and knock politely with a warrant, maybe I’ll just go with them. Then I’ll get a chance in court to explain exactly why I blew up the bridge. And that could last for years, maybe for all the years I’ve got left.
But what if they attack? If they attack, I’ll fight. So let’s think about this. Let’s sit down and start making a plan…
What the hell Ben, you always knew you weren’t going to live forever.
Wednesday afternoon Virginia Attorney General Eric Sanderson was in his natural element, chairing a high-profile conference convened to organize a new multi-jurisdictional law enforcement program. President Gilmore had just signed Presidential Decision Directive #87, and in one paragraph of his directive he had “requested” assistance from the governors of Maryland and Virginia. They were “requested” to immediately implement a program of highway checkpoints, in order to prevent terrorists from transporting illegal firearms and explosives through their states. These two states, flanking the seat of federal power in Washington DC, would provide the test programs which would then be analyzed and modified and put into effect nationally if the security situation warranted such measures.
The Governor of Virginia had passed the ball to his hot-shot Attorney General for him to actually devise the plan and put it into action. Eric Sanderson was the obvious choice. Before becoming Attorney General he had been an FBI Special Agent, a congressional staffer, an assistant district attorney, and a federal prosecutor. The inner workings of a complicated joint task force were as familiar to him as springs and cogs to a clock maker.
The checkpoint program was being touted as a temporary measure, a response to the outbreak of right wing militia violence which had begun with the stadium massacre. Once the message was received by the gun crazies that the government was serious about controlling the movement of firearms, it was hoped that the problem would become manageable. Semi-automatic assault rifles (banned on Tuesday) and telescopically-sighted sniper rifles (banned in the Presidential Decree) would no longer have free run of the highways.
In the immediate aftermath of Senator Randolph’s assassination, the President was under enormous pressure by all of the members of both houses of Congress to take any steps necessary to lessen their chances of becoming the next target. These politicians understood the utter impossibility of assigning to each of them the twenty or thirty highly-trained bodyguards, working in three shifts, which would be required to afford them security out to the range from which Senator Randolph had been killed.
Senators, Congressmen and other senior federal officials were literally running scared, dashing from vehicles to buildings obscured by clouds of black umbrellas held aloft around them by staffers. Their personal bodyguard details, with their close range pistols and submachine guns, suddenly seemed as useless as life jackets in the desert.
The tragicomic sight of famous politicians ducking and weaving and running for cover was being shown on television, and it was making a mockery of their prestige and authority. Some politicians instead went the television hero route, boldly walking in the open (just as long as television cameras were on hand to record their bravery). In truth, the almost casual assassination of Senator Randolph had them all terrified down to their marrow, particularly those who had in the past been vocal advocates of restrictive gun control measures.
So a comprehensive system of mobile highway checkpoints had been suggested as a viable means of increasing their physical security around Washington DC at least, and there was not a Senator or Congressman in either party who raised the issue of the fourth amendment, and the right of the people to be secure from arbitrary search.
Eric Sanderson had immediately grasped that the successful implementation of a bold new anti-terrorism program, with the broad national exposure it would bring, would be a major feather in his political cap when he ran for governor in two years. He had to reign in his excitement at the prospect of all of the favorable media coverage he would garner, and force himself not to constantly smile.
The meeting was held in the main conference room in the Virginia Attorney General’s office, overlooking Richmond’s Capitol Square across 10th Street from the Federal Court. Also present were the Commanding General of the Virginia Army National Guard, the Commandant of the Virginia State Police, the Assistant Director of the ATF Office of Firearms, Explosives and Arson, the ATF’s Resident Agent In Charge from the Richmond Field Office, and various other Virginia chiefs of police in full dress uniforms.
The conference dragged on most of Wednesday afternoon, and after a lengthy period of haggling between the ATF and the State Police, it was decided that each mobile highway checkpoint team would consist of two ATF agents, four Virginia State Troopers, six to eight National Guardsmen, and a number of local police to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the jurisdiction.
The checkpoint teams would be under the operational control of the ATF agents, they would communicate on State Police radio frequencies, and the State Troopers would be permitted to depart the checkpoints temporarily to respond to local emergencies, but they would not leave less than two troopers on scene.
The use of camouflage uniformed National Guard soldiers driving Humvees in domestic anti-terrorism roles no longer created a public perception problem in the aftermath of 9-11, the beltway sniper case, and the stadium massacre. In fact, citizens had come to expect to see M-16-carrying camouflaged soldiers in and around airports, train stations, and government buildings. It provided them with a feeling of reassurance to see that the government was taking every step possible to ensure their safety. The National Guard soldiers would provide overall control and perimeter security around the lines of detained cars, permitting the law enforcement officers to focus on searching the vehicles. No one was likely to bolt from the holding area to try to make a run for it with machine gun mounted Humvees at each end of the control zone.
The actual searching of vehicles for illegal concealed firearms still raised some residual constitutional issues. Sanderson and the state law enforcement officials in the end agreed with the ATF to simply go the “consent search” route. Any drivers deemed suspicious by the law enforcement officers present would be asked to permit a voluntary “consent search” of their vehicles. Recent Supreme Court decisions had upheld the admissibility of evidence found after suspects had given their “voluntary consent” to squads of heavily-armed police to search their cars. It was not required of the police that they inform the suspects that they had the right to refuse to give “consent.” It was not the job of the police to give roadside lessons in constitutional law.
Any suspicious cars (in the opinion of the police, based on their training and experience) which refused to give “consent” to be searched would be directed to a holding area. In the present high threat environment, refusal to give “voluntary consent” would be construed as “probable cause” for the police to request a search warrant. One of the state police on the scene would be swiftly dispatched with a pre-formatted warrant, which would immediately be signed by a judge waiting nearby and returned to the checkpoint.
In effect, any and all vehicles stopped at the checkpoints could be searched at the discretion of the police, one way or the other. This apparent “Catch 22” search strategy had been used with great success for years in the war on drugs, and thus far it had always passed constitutional muster. After 9-11, police were given even greater latitude in conducting vehicle searches.
The 2002 beltway sniper attacks in Maryland and Virginia had further pushed back the constitutional envelope, as hundreds of white men had been unceremoniously pulled from white vans by police at ad hoc checkpoints. This occurred after law enforcement officials leading the investigation issued erroneous instructions based on a wildly incorrect psychological sniper profile, as well as incorrect witness testimony concerning white vans. The actual killers were two Black Muslims firing from the trunk of an old brown Chevy, who had passed unhindered through many of the temporary highway checkpoints set up to catch the imagined sniper, the legendary but nonexistent “white man in a white van.”
No one at the conference dwelled on the basic constitutionality of conducting mass searches on the public streets and highways of Virginia. These officials were so accustomed to getting their way on vehicle search policies that they assumed that there would be no serious challenge to their authority to pull over dozens or hundreds of motorists, any where at any time, and search their vehicles.
The subject of the use of police K-9 units in the searching of the vehicles was also brought up and discussed. There was some debate between the ATF and the state police representatives about the effectiveness of “gun-sniffing dogs” in an environment where a dozen police officers and soldiers were themselves already carrying firearms and ammunition. The eventual consensus was that dogs would still be quite effective at sniffing for hidden firearms under seats and in open trunks, saving the police time and effort on each search.
As an added benefit, the K-9 advocates half-jokingly mentioned that the mere presence of snarling German Shepherds usually caused otherwise smart-mouthed “curbside lawyers” to just shut up and go along with the program. It was their contention that the mere presence of gun-sniffing dogs in the search area would cause most drivers concealing contraband to admit to any weapons hidden in their cars. It was decided that the state and local police would contribute their K-9 units to the greatest extent possible, and that the feasibility of borrowing additional K-9 teams from the Customs Department and other federal agencies would also be explored.
The overall checkpoint process was compared to the routine vehicle and body searches now being given to airline passengers and their vehicles in and around airports. By and large the public had stopped griping and grown accustomed to these searches, and there was no reason to believe that they would not do the same with random highway checkpoints. After all, it was for the greater safety and security of the entire population.
The final policy decision reached was to immediately field ten mobile checkpoint teams, five each in Northern Virginia and in Tidewater. They would be working in two twelve hour shifts initially, and then go to three shifts as the manpower stream was brought on line. The required number of National Guardsmen would be called up for periods of 90 days, the state police would be shifted around as needed, and the BATF would bring in additional agents from out of state. The BATF Special Agents who would actually be conducting most of the searches would wear their tactical uniforms, helmets and external body armor to enhance their personal security. The National Guard soldiers would also be deployed in helmets and body armor. The composition and deployment patterns of the checkpoint teams would be modified as experience was gained and lessons were learned.
The meeting wrapped up for the senior officials after two hours, they had other important places to be, so they let their aides and staffers remain to hammer out the details and put it down in black and white for the governor’s signature. Eric Sanderson allowed a brief “media availability” outside the conference room, and returned to his office.
Once he was back at his desk overlooking Richmond’s Capitol Square, the Attorney General tilted back in his leather executive’s chair and gloated for a few minutes. By moving so quickly, he would get his checkpoints into operation days before Maryland did, and capture the lion’s share of the national press coverage!
He then pondered the two most critical aspects of the program. First, how to present “his” checkpoint program to the media in the most effective way to put himself in the best possible light, and second, the creation of a snappy and easily remembered name for the new mobile units. Coming up with the right acronym was of primary importance to the success of any new law enforcement program. A powerful nickname like “DARE” or “SWAT” could almost ensure a program’s success, regardless of its actual merits. The key was coming up with a clever acronymic slogan which looked and sounded terrific on promotional t-shirts, ball caps, coffee mugs, and of course on billboards and on the local television news. A successful new high-visibility anti-terrorism program with a memorable name could very well launch him into the governor’s mansion in two years, and from there to the U.S. Senate, and from there….
Sanderson spent the next half hour at his desk doodling on a yellow legal pad, juggling likely words and letters like a dyslexic Scrabble player.
The quiet Reston Virginia neighborhood had finally gone to sleep, as indicated by the last remaining lights of the late night television viewers blinking off one by one. Inside a bogus electrical contractor’s van, men sat staring at grainy green-tinted night vision video monitors, with headphones on their ears and microphones on slender stalks in front of their lips. Down the tree-lined street rolled an unlit windowless club-sized van. It slowed almost to a stop, and from its far side and open back doors shadows spilled out and flowed across a yard and up to the front door of a middle class house.
On both sides of the paved walkway and the small landing in front of the door there were chest-high hedges; the shadows sank below them and disappeared. Eight men in black, wearing black uniforms, helmets, body armor, soft-soled boots, gloves, balaclava masks, ski goggles and MP-5 submachineguns were crouched in perfect silence, stacked tightly in two files on either side of the door, ready to charge into the house.
The split-level wood-framed house had presented a bit of a problem. The lower elevation back yard was fenced in chain link, and the high back porch was a rickety-looking wooden affair, and totally exposed. One adjoining neighbor had a pair of alert Labrador Retrievers in the back yard, and maintaining the element of surprise on an approach from that direction was doubtful. Under each ground floor window there was a thick hedge which would impede entry, so the front door was the choice by default.
Into the front hall and living room, turn left, 25 feet straight ahead, master bedroom. Flash-bangs through the bedroom window first for a diversion, and in seconds it’s over, one way or the other, with a deafened and stunned man in his bed pinned down under a half-dozen blinding gun lights. That was the plan, rehearsed until it was second nature.
The leader beside the front door whispered, and his voice was picked up by the microphone built into the elastic band he wore around his head beneath his helmet. Beside him the door breacher swiftly applied his small charges. No mere battering ram would do in this outfit; this was not some local Podunk PD SWAT team busting a crack house. This was an FBI Enhanced SWAT team making a violent felony arrest on a federal warrant.
“Romeo, Fox One ready,” went the whispered call.
“Romeo, Fox Two ready,” came back from one of the wraiths under the bedroom window.
“Fox One, this is Charlie. All quiet, no movement inside,” said a man in the electrical contractor’s van, watching his screens and listening to his headphones.
“Okay Fox One, this is Romeo. Show time Fox Two, give us a countdown.” This was the go-head from the on-scene supervisor.
“Copy Romeo, Fox Two. We are going in five, four, three, two...”
From his small window perch up on top of a heavy table in his attached garage workshop, Ben Mitchell had a clear view of the front of his house between slightly opened curtains. As expected, they had come, and as hoped they had been channeled into his front walkway. He had set a timer to turn off the television and lamp in his den at 11:35 PM, and another to turn off his bathroom light at 1145. When they had gone out he was already in his guard position, sitting on a chair placed atop his cleared off workbench, where he could see out of the small garage window across the front of his house and out to the street.
Ben was wearing an old BDU uniform he’d dyed black in his washing machine. Underneath he wore civilian clothes, a gray suit for Washington camouflage. Over his uniform he wore an old military kevlar vest covered in pouches and pockets, and an old Kevlar helmet on his head. He had spray painted all of this black, to closely match what he guessed an FBI assault team would be wearing. He wore clear parachuting goggles to protect his eyes and obscure his face, and green Nomex aviator’s gloves on his hands.
The pouches and pockets attached to the vest were packed with escape tools and getaway gear. In the end he just couldn’t bring himself to formulate a plan which didn’t include a provision for his escape, no matter how short or long term it might prove to be. One of the pouches on his chest had been modified into a holster, and in it he carried his government model Colt .45 pistol. If he could escape, he would.
Beginning at eleven PM the same dark Crown Victoria drove slowly up and then back down his street at even 15 minute intervals. Ben wondered why the supervisors didn’t just go with the video imagery that they were undoubtedly getting from all angles. Perhaps the older supervisors just couldn’t bring themselves to trust the technology, and had to personally lay their eyeballs on the house to reassure themselves. He wished he had a radio scanner, he could only imagine the web of radio traffic swirling around his house.
At 2:30 a dark van with all of its lights out rolled up and slowed in front of Mrs. Mendoza’s house, almost beyond his sight. A half dozen or more dark figures poured out of it and scurried low across her yard and into his. They moved to his front door where they sank down to hide out of sight below his bushes. Two of the men continued across his yard to a position below his bedroom window, no more than twenty feet from Ben’s garage lookout post. They were just visible in the glow from the streetlight on the distant corner of the block.
That old intense rush came back over him, flowing through him stronger than any drug, that never forgotten thrill of waiting motionless in ambush, to be rewarded by the appearance of the unsuspecting enemy in the kill zone…
They wouldn’t wait now. Their snipers and rear security team would already be in position, ready. Ben knew what was coming next, and he was ready too.
He held in each hand a small green electricity generating “clacker” the size of a computer mouse. Each trailed a long thin wire tail. They had originally come packaged with claymore mines, the mines were long gone but the clackers remained.
Ben had chosen to use the old military hand generators as much out of nostalgia as for any other reason. Some of the most intense memories of his life had revolved around those spring-hinged claymore clackers, sending squads of NVA soldiers to their doom in a steel hailstorm. If tonight was going to be his last combat action, he wanted to feel something comforting and familiar in his hands. He had tested them on small light bulbs and they had worked perfectly, and this had saved him the trouble of putting together a battery-powered switch.
The FBI SWAT team members crouched on each side of the low front porch and looked away, ready for their small breaching charges to blow the door inward. A pair of SWAT team members waiting outside the master bedroom was going to initiate the assault by “breaking and raking” his window with a long handled sledge hammer, and then immediately tossing in two def-tek flash-bang grenades with two second delay fuses. The front door breaching charges would be fired the instant that they heard the window shatter, and they would be on top of their man in less than five seconds. They knew just how long it would take, because they had already run through the maneuver a dozen times today in full assault gear on their base at Quantico. They trained and trained, but arresting a violent felon never became routine, and now their adrenaline was surging as it always did.
Each crouching man held his MP-5 with its sound suppressor and barrel mounted gun light in front of him, their stocks tucked into their shoulders. Their gloved right index fingers all rested just outside their trigger guards, their right thumbs rested lightly on the safety selector switches above their pistol grips.
A thirty round magazine fully loaded with ten millimeter bullets was in the well of each of their MP-5s, a second magazine was bracketed alongside it for a faster first reload, and more magazines were ready in the pouches on their tactical vests. In each left ear a tiny radio speaker kept them synchronized to the plan as Romeo Two counted down from five to one. In a matter of seconds the entry team could fire 240 devastating ten millimeter slugs into any person presenting a threat to them, but they fully expected that a pair of flash-bang grenades and eight retina-searing gun lights would make shooting their quarry unnecessary.
Ben Mitchell stood peering out between the curtains of the garage window, his hands holding the twin claymore mine clackers firmly, waiting for the assault team to move first, waiting for them to initiate the violence. He saw one of the men below his bedroom window stand tall, leaning over his hedges with a sledge hammer held back over his head as his partner stood up behind him.
The long hammer came down through his window, exploding it, and then was raked in a swift circle clearing the screen and the glass shards away as the second man tossed in two small cylinders, flash-bang grenades. At the moment the glass shattered there was a flash of light and a boom from his front porch, and then more booms from his bedroom and the stacked assault team rose up and went flooding through the front door.
Ben paused a moment to let them all get inside, then he squeezed both spring-hinged clackers hard and electrical charges shot down the thin green wires to the blasting caps at the other ends.
The electric blasting caps were embedded into golfball-sized chunks of white C-4 military high explosive, saved from the Wilson Bridge demolition charges. Mitchell had plenty of blasting caps. They were smaller than cigarettes, made of aluminum with a pair of thin red and white wires trailing from one end. And it had been no particular problem to cook up crude high explosives, not with his garage workshop full of solvents and other chemicals that he routinely used in his business, along with a few items from his medicine cabinet, his bathroom and from under his kitchen sink. The technical problem was in reliably initiating a clean high-order detonation of his kitchen explosives using only blasting caps, which was why he had saved a little C-4 for just this type of contingency. The caps would detonate the C-4, and the C-4 would detonate his kitchen demo mines, no problem.
The FBI Enhanced SWAT team poured into his foyer, lighting up his living room with the amazingly bright Sure-Fire flashlights mounted under their gun barrels as the boom of the flash bang grenades reverberated from his bedroom down the hall. Fifteen feet away from them, against the opposite foyer wall, was a kitchen chair with a towel draped over it. Hidden under the towel was a square plastic Tupperware casserole dish the size of a text book, which was duct-taped on its edge to the back of the chair. The casserole dish, with its lid snapped tightly on, had a small green wire leading into a tiny hole in its back. Just in front of the casserole dish on the seat of the chair was standing a cardboard box full of a common household cleaning item, and in front of that box was a one gallon plastic milk jug that was not filled with milk.
The entire SWAT entry team was within 15 feet of the towel-draped kitchen chair when the electrical impulses reached their blasting caps and Ben’s living room exploded outward in a massive fireball. That end of the house was an immediate splintered inferno; it went from zero to Armageddon in one second, and nobody came out.
Behind Ben’s house, just beyond his backyard fence, his other improvised mine had detonated in the gulley where he had guessed that the assault team’s rear security element would be lying in wait. As soon as he squeezed his two hand generators Ben dropped them and jumped off his table and crossed his workshop to another table. Here a row of high capacity military smoke grenades the size of spray paint cans were waiting, with their pins pre-straightened and partially pulled out. The small window on the back side of his garage was already open; he pulled the pins and threw out four smokes in rapid succession. Ben drew his cocked and locked .45 while he paused to let the smoke bloom, and then he pushed his side garage door open and dove through it, rolling sideways into his yard lest the snipers find him. The flames from the other end of his house were already hot on his back. He scrambled to his feet and ran through the billowing clouds of fire-lit purple and yellow smoke, reached his waist high chain link fence and vaulted over it, and then rolled down into the drainage gully running behind his property.
FBI SWAT team member Weston Thatcher was lying prone at the top of the ravine, peering over the berm watching the back of the suspect’s house and listening to the assault team’s countdown in his earphone. The door-breaching charges detonated exactly as he expected, then there was a massive explosion just off to his right side. The concussion of the blast rendered him senseless momentarily, but much of its force was absorbed by the other three rear-security team members to his right. Two of them had been kneeling or hunching upright for a better view instead of lying flat, and so they had been blown over Thatcher, who also was hurled some distance. He of course remembered none of this, but when he could see again through one eye he saw a helmeted figure in black moving through radiant yellow smoke just past where he lay. The man paused and looked directly at him, holding a pistol in his hand.
Thatcher tried to say, “Who are you,” through his smashed teeth and bloody lips but no sound came out, anyway he could not have heard a reply with both of his ear drums ruptured. Anyone fleeing the house in this direction would be a Bad Guy, and it was Thatcher’s sole mission tonight to stop anyone from fleeing. The man crawling past him was dressed like a team member, but not quite. The man was dressed in black, with a black helmet, but this man wore no black face mask. This man was black; this man’s face was black, black, black. The suspect was black, and nobody on his team was black. Black. Black face, black. Thatcher slipped in and out of sensibility as bands of pain tightened their grip around him. Anyone coming in this direction was a Bad Guy. Anyone coming in this direction had to be stopped, and even in Thatcher’s semi-delirious state his mission tasking rose to the front of his mind. Anybody who was black was the Bad Guy tonight. The Bad Guy.
Ben Mitchell looked briefly at the broken bodies of the SWAT troopers, covering them with his pistol. One was still alive, moaning, his face was a bloody wreck, his left arm was bent impossibly, a compound fracture. He scrambled past them and got to his feet and began to run up the slope toward the protection of the bushes and woods and the fence line which led away to safety.
Special Agent Thatcher, lying on his back, felt for his MP-5 but he could not reach it, and that’s when he discovered that his left arm didn’t work at all. His MP-5 was trapped under him still connected by its sling, so he reverted to training without thinking and drew the .45 caliber pistol from the black tactical holster which was still strapped to his right leg. He raised it one-handed across his stomach, flicked the safety down and then depressed the gun light’s pressure switch with his thumb.
The light mounted to the rail under the pistol’s slide threw a harsh yellow cone out into the swirling smoke and its brilliant center found the running man’s back, wavered and fell and found him again through the glowing smoke. He couldn’t hold up the heavy pistol any longer as the beam wavered from side to side across the man’s back. Thatcher squeezed the trigger twice, and then he passed out.
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Copyright © 2002 by Matthew Bracken, All Rights reserved
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