11

 

Just after nine PM, after another scan of the “top of the hour” news summaries on the cable news channels, Ranya was pacing back and forth in front of her television.  Even the coverage by the ordinarily more balanced TOP News Network was disappointing.  The local Norfolk stations were teasing the gun store arsons for their late news programs, but there was no film footage of Freedom Arms or any mention of her father by name.  His death was referred to only indirectly, as one of the victims killed in the Virginia attacks.

Ranya held her unloaded .45 pistol in her hand and practiced racking the slide and dry-firing it, aiming at television talking heads the instant a new face came into view.  She practiced dry-firing right and left handed, with both single and double-handed grips, frequently spinning around and drawing from inside her belt.  She was working on acquiring a perfect sight picture on each newly appearing reporter as swiftly as possible, using them as convenient reactive targets.  Besides becoming familiar with the pistol’s sights, she was committing the pistol’s operation to instinctive “muscle memory.”

She stalked her drab room like a caged animal, constantly drawing, turning and shooting at the TV.  Snap down the safety as the sights settle on the target, squeeze the trigger dropping the hammer, rack the slide, safety on, over and over again.  She was imagining the federal agent she knew only as George, a “crew-cut gorilla.”  She was visualizing blowing his brains out with a 200-grain hollow-point.

At 9:30 she clicked off the television and sat cross legged on the bed, staring at the cheap seascape print on the wall of waves crashing on a rocky beach.  Enough.  What next?  She didn’t remember to bring her phone and address book with her from her apartment in Charlottesville, and anyway most of her Virginia Beach lifeguard crowd had scattered after Labor Day.  Then she remembered the new phone number she had on a scrap of paper.

Brad Fallon picked up on the second ring.  “Hello?”

“Hi, Brad?  This is Ranya…Ranya Bardiwell.”

“Ranya!  Hi, what’s up?”

“Remember you said to call you if I needed anything?  Well, I’m staying in a crummy motel and I’m going nuts.  Do you… are you busy tonight?  Anyway I’d like to see your boat, can you handle a visitor on short notice?  Just to talk…”

“Sure, why not?  No problem.  Do you know how to get here?  Sodermilk’s farm at the end of Old Cypress Road, all the way around the back.”

“I’ll find it.  Can I bring some beer or something?”

“No need, I’m testing out my new fridge even as we speak.  It’s loaded with cold beer already.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.  Just to talk, okay?”

“I’ve been such a hermit lately I’m kind of out of practice, but sure, come on over.”

 

****

 

Brad pushed the end button and set the cell phone down on his dinette table.  His phone, not Hammet’s, which he had left in a Tupperware box on the dock.  It figures, he thought, that when I finally get a nice looking female visitor, she’s involved in the local trouble and has personal problems up to her eyeballs.  Ever since last Sunday’s Stadium Massacre he had felt as if lighting bolts were landing in succession closer and closer to him, and he wondered just how wise it was to invite a lighting rod like Ranya Bardiwell aboard Guajira. 

He wasn’t much of a believer in fate, but he still found all the coincidences beyond merely bizarre.  Two months earlier, he had almost closed a deal on a sailboat in Fort Lauderdale, and he had also taken a close look at one in Charleston.  Both boats were under forty feet long, which was more in his price range, and were available almost “cruising ready.”  If he had bought either one, he’d have been in the Bahamas by now, sailing and snorkeling in warm clear turquoise-colored water.

Instead, he had chosen Guajira, a larger ex-racing boat that needed a new engine, a new mast, and an interior makeover.  And so here he was, as far up the eastern branch of the Nansemond River as a mastless forty-four foot sailboat with a seven-foot draft could get.  Now he was landlocked and trapped under the FBI’s thumb. 

So far his credit cards and bank accounts seemed unaffected, and on Monday he’d motor Guajira down the river and over to Portsmouth, to the boat yard where his mast was already waiting.  Once she was rigged and ready he planned to haul ass out onto the Atlantic just as fast as he could.  The thunderbolts were already landing too close to him, and he didn’t want to be waiting around for one to land on his head.

Brad had showered but not shaved today, after completing the installation of a new 12-volt compressor for his built-in icebox.  He checked himself out in the mirror of his cramped “head,” or bathroom, and rubbed his one-day whiskers.  Not too bad, not bad enough to warrant a high speed shave, which might leave him with a nick that could still be bleeding when Ranya arrived. 

He didn’t look thirty, he thought.  He had just the first hint of lines around his blue eyes, and he believed he could still pass for twenty-seven or so, not that he really wanted to.  He wondered if he seemed old to a college-age girl.  He did not feel old, in spite of hitting “the big three-oh.”

He considered cologne, but decided against it.  This was not a date; this was comforting someone who had lost her father.  But he did change from his old paint and varnish-stained cutoffs to clean khaki shorts, and a nice blue and white Hawaiian shirt.  Then he did a quick straightening-up of his boat’s interior, grateful that his refurbishing was nearly complete, and the power cords and paint cans were gone.  He didn’t want Ranya to think that he was an actual ogre, even if he lived alone on a boat on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.  Not that he was considering putting the moves on her, not on the day her father was killed…

Still…she was young and she was attractive, with a pretty face and a curvy figure, at least what he had been able to see of it.  She certainly filled a tight pair of blue jeans very nicely.  He had a vivid image of her climbing over the fence before him, and he’d liked what he had seen, very much.  Best of all, she rode motorcycles and knew her way around guns, so she was certainly no “princess,” a type Brad had no time for.  Who knows, maybe she’d like to sail to the islands, and forget her sorrows under the warm Caribbean sun…

No, she was just coming over because she needed to talk, and had no one else to talk to.

But there was no denying it.  Whether she was in mourning or not, she was a very attractive girl…

 

****

 

Ranya steered her way carefully down the oyster-shell road in second gear until she came around the last big tractor shed, and Brad Fallon’s boat came into view in her headlight beam.  It was bigger than she had imagined, long and low and gleaming like an ivory dagger beneath the limbs of an oak.  Soft golden light glowed from a row of oblong portholes along the sides of the low cabin, and shined up from the deck hatches.  The river was only about a hundred yards wide here.  Marshland and Spanish moss-draped cypress trees extending into the Great Dismal Swamp began on the opposite shore.  A steady breeze from the north moved the oak tree’s branches, and the yacht shifted restlessly against its dock lines.

Brad stood up in his cockpit in her headlight’s glare as she shut down her machine.  She pulled off her helmet, shook her long hair down over her shoulders, and walked onto the small wooden dock that ran along the riverbank.

“Welcome to Guajira, my humble home.  Please come aboard.  And yes, she really is a sailboat, or at least she will be next week, I hope.”

“Should I take off my boots?  I don’t want to leave any marks on your deck.”

“Don’t worry about it.  Who’s going to notice any more marks, with all these leaves and crud from the tree?”

Ranya stepped across onto the boat through an open gate in the white lifelines.  Soft jazz music was playing, coming out of speakers in the cockpit and from down below. 

“Can I get you something to drink? I have beer, but I can open bottle of wine, or make a drink, whatever you’d like.”

“Rum and coke?”
                “That sounds great; I think I’ll have the same thing.”  Brad slipped down below.  His galley was by the companionway steps, and while he fixed their drinks Ranya sat on a cushioned cockpit bench seat looking around at the outside of the boat and also down inside.

“What does Guajira mean?  Did you name her?” 

“No, she was named Guajira when I bought her.  Sailors are pretty superstitious, and they say that it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name.  But I liked the name anyway, so I kept it.”

“What doe it mean?” she asked. “It’s Spanish, right?”

“Guajira means a few different things.  It means a kind of a peasant girl, and it’s also the name of a wild Indian tribe in South America.  The Guajira Peninsula is where they live; it’s sort of a no-man’s-land between Venezuela and Colombia.  Did you ever see the movie Papillon?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s in the movie.  It’s one of the places that Steve McQueen stayed, after he escaped from Devil’s Island.”

“I guess you’re lucky that you bought a boat with a name you like.  I like it too.  But what if it was named ‘Rust Bucket’ or something?  Would you have changed it?  Are you superstitious?”

“Not really.  Well, maybe a little.”  Brad laughed.  “I mean, I’ll put a silver coin under the new mast when I raise it next week; that’s pretty much mandatory.  Just for luck.”   

Ranya thought he had a great smile, and his blue eyes seemed to light up.  She had made the right decision to visit his boat; he was cheering her up in spite of the ache that she felt.

“Cheers.” He passed up her rum and coke in a tall glass.  “You wanted to know if I’m superstitious.  Well I’ll tell you one thing I won’t do: I won’t start a voyage on a Friday.  Any sailor that does that is tempting fate.  That’s just asking for trouble.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.  I’m not really superstitious, and I don’t care about black cats or walking under ladders, but no real sailor ever starts a voyage on Friday.  That’s not a superstition, that’s a whole other thing…  You just don’t mock King Neptune.  Out there, he’s in charge.  Starting a voyage on a Friday, well, that’s just not something you do.”

“You’re kidding, right?” 

“Sort of.  But I won’t start a voyage on a Friday.  That’s just begging for trouble.  Ask any ocean sailor, they’ll tell you the same thing.”

Ranya couldn’t decide if he was pulling her leg or being serious.  “Mind if I see down below?  I’m curious to see what a sailboat like this is like inside”

“Of course, come on down.  I’ve done a lot of work on her, but I’m not much of a carpenter, and I’m definitely not Martha Stewart.  Guajira’s a K-44, a racer-cruiser, but more on the racer side.  There wasn’t too much of an interior to begin with, and her owners raced her hard, and well, she needed some home improvements.”

Ranya went below, Brad moved out of her way from the galley to give her room.  There were four wide steps on a varnished teak ladder with handrails on the side.  The interior was mostly cream-colored surfaces with varnished teak moldings and accents, softened with cozy royal blue cushions and curtains. 

Across from the galley and a little forward, on the right side of the main cabin, was a teak dinette table in its own little nook, with cushioned seating around it on three sides.  On the tabletop, there was a large chart of the Caribbean under a thin sheet of plexiglass, which was cut to fit just inside of a little wooden rail that ran around the edge of the table.  Ranya correctly guessed that the little rail was to keep dishes from sliding off the table at sea.  Even though she could feel the boat moving, rolling slightly at its dock, it didn’t make her feel uncomfortable.  She took her jean jacket off and hung it on a hook.  She intentionally exposed the butt of her pistol, which was sticking out above her wide black leather belt against the black t-shirt she was wearing.  She was curious to see Brad’s reaction, it would tell her a lot about him.

He made a joke about it.  “Hey, you won’t need that around me, I promise!”

“Sorry, I guess I’m kind of paranoid lately.”

“I wouldn’t call it paranoid, not after what you’ve been through.  I’d call it intelligent.  I keep my .44 ready too.  Up there.”  He pointed forward to his V-berth sleeping compartment.

Ranya eased out her .45, still cocked and locked with the hammer back, and laid it carefully into a narrow shelf full of paperbacks and CD’s, which was built against the boat’s hull above the dinette table.  This shelf also had a teak railing on its open side, as did most of the tables and shelves on the boat.  She thought it was handy; it kept a pistol or anything else that size out of sight but within easy reach.  She was rapidly becoming impressed with how cleverly the built-in furnishings on the yacht were arranged, like the parts of a 3D puzzle.

She sat down behind the dinette table to look at the chart.  Brad carried over their drinks and sat along the forward side of the table, careful not to crowd her.  She wanted company, but not closeness, and Brad was being careful to give her some space, which she appreciated.  The chart covered the Bahamas, and the Caribbean Islands from the latitude of Florida to Venezuela.

“That’s going to be my universe for a while, maybe a year at least.  Cheers.”  They both sipped their dark rum and cokes from matching heavy glass tumblers.  The smooth jazz sounds filled the interior of the yacht, occasionally their glances met above the chart, their eyes locking briefly and then quickly looking away.  Ranya thought he had gorgeous eyes, dazzling deep blue.  In another time and place she would have loved to stare into them.

“The last two summers I’ve worked as an ocean lifeguard in Virginia Beach,” Ranya said.  “I’d sit up in my stand and watch sailboats going past.  I always wondered what kind of people were on them, and where they were going.”

“Most of them are just out for a day sail, for just a few hours.  But some of them might be setting out to cross an ocean, or even to sail around the world.”

“Are you?  Setting out to sail around the world?”

“I don’t know…  First I want to cruise the Bahamas and the Caribbean, and then sail on down to Venezuela.  After that, I’ll have to decide if I’m going through the canal to the Pacific, or staying in the Caribbean, or maybe heading down to Brazil…or coming back to the States.  I’m going to play it by ear.  And then you have to factor in the hurricane season.  That’s a big part of the planning, because Venezuela is just under the hurricane belt.”

“But isn’t it hurricane season now?  Aren’t you going to wait until it’s over?”

“Good question.  I was planning on taking it slow and coast hopping down to Florida, staying close to safe harbors until after hurricane season, but with the feds on my case…I’m kind of getting anxious to get out of their reach.  Ever since last Sunday a lot of really weird stuff has been happening, and its getting way too close to me.”

“Not as close as it got to me.”

“I’m sorry, that was really stupid of me…”

“…Forget it.”

“It’s just…  None of this seems accidental any more.  Ever since the Stadium Massacre, it just hasn’t, it’s just, I don’t know…  It’s just not what it seems, it’s not what people think it is.”

“Well that stadium job was pure bullshit, you do realize that, don’t you?” asked Ranya.

“Yeah, of course, I mean, well anybody with a three-digit IQ knows that.  I think it was all done on purpose, it was a set-up.  To get the herd stampeding, the way that Indians used to stampede buffalo herds over cliffs.  The sniper stampeded the herd in the stadium, and now the whole country’s getting stampeded the same way.”

Ranya sighed and leaned back against the cushions behind her.  “Oh thank God, I’m glad to hear you say that.  I thought I was the only one who thought that way.  Everybody I know at school, at UVA, they all believe what they see on TV is the gospel truth.  They all think the ‘militias’ did it, and they all support the gun ban one-hundred percent.  They think the semi-auto ban’s a great idea, only it doesn’t go far enough!  They’d ban everything!  They think only cops and the army should have any guns at all, can you believe it?  If they only knew my father was a gun dealer…”

 “Ranya, this just isn’t the same America I grew up in any more.  I mean, we have all these Arab terrorists running around, but instead of focusing on the real threat, they’d rather be politically correct, and take everybody’s guns away.”

“Hey, I’m an Arab, did you know that?  I’m Christian Lebanese, but I’m 100% Arab.  But I know what you meant to say, you meant Muslims.”

“I’m sorry Ranya, again.  I’m really putting my foot in my mouth tonight…  I’m not really as stupid as I must sound.  I know the difference between Arabs and Muslims.  Not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs.”

“That’s right.  And nobody’s suffered under the Muslims more than the Christians in Lebanon.  That’s why my parents moved to America in the first place.  But the government’s still stuck in the PC mode, it’s still in denial.  They’re afraid to come out and say what we all know: a hell of a lot of Muslims are just plain crazy at batshit.”

Brad asked, “So, do they really want to stop terrorism, or just turn America into a police state?  If they really wanted to stop terrorism, they’d go after the real threat, and they still won’t even say there’s a problem with Muslims.  And now they’re trying to frame up white ‘militias’ as the next big terrorist threat.  Why?  I just don’t understand it, and I’m not sticking around to find out what’s going to happen next.”

“Where are you going to go that’s any better?  Some banana republic where they’ll take your boat and throw you in jail, if you don’t bribe the right people?”

“They’ll do that here.  The FBI or the BATF or who ever George really works for, they’re threatening to take my money and my passport if I won’t be an informant.  What do you call that?  And just look at what they did to your father!  Face it, America is turning into a banana republic right here, just a great big banana republic.  Laws don’t mean anything any more, and the Constitution’s become a joke.  Laws are just whatever a couple of left wing radical judges say they are.  I think this country’s gone past the point of no return.”

“Well that may be so, but I still think we should fight back.”

“How? You can’t stop it.”

“You might be right, but I’m still going to try!  I mean, it’s like what Phil Carson said: if America goes down, there won’t be anywhere left to hide.  Anyway, I’m not leaving.  My parents escaped to this country, and it’s still the freest country there is.  If America goes down…”

America is going down, isn’t that obvious?  And if most Americans want to live in a police state, well, I can’t stop them.”

“Well I’m still going to stay and fight it.  Maybe because there’s one big difference between us.”

Brad looked straight at her. “What’s that?”

“They killed my father.  I’m not letting it slide, and I’m not running away.  Somebody’s going to pay for killing my father!”

“I’m not ‘running away’, I’m just giving up on this country.  Well, for a while, anyway.  There’s a difference.”

“If you say so.  But I’m staying, and I’m fighting, somehow…  Hey, it’s about time for the news—does that little TV work inside of here?”

Brad got up, moved across the boat, and retrieved the little Panasonic from a shelf, and then he set it on the dinette table and plugged its cord into a 12-volt “cigarette lighter” style outlet in the galley.

The Friday night outbreak of arson attacks against the gun stores was the lead story on all the local stations.  Ranya twisted the dial between the local network affiliates, wondering if Freedom Arms would appear, but it didn’t.  The in-studio anchors were alternating with younger “stand up” info babes and blow-dried hunks in front of burned and ruined stores.  The operative word on all channels was “backlash.”  It was accepted at face value that the attacks across Tidewater Virginia were a result of fed-up local citizens on an anti-gun vigilante rampage.

Brad and Ranya caught part of a middle-aged black man’s impassioned tirade.  The title on the screen identified him as “Imam Sheik Ali bin Muhamed.”  The station was running some video taken earlier in the day of the Imam standing in front of a storefront mosque in downtown Portsmouth, just to the west of Norfolk.  He was wearing a long white robe and a white caftan and was surrounded by a dozen grim-faced young black men in dark conservative suits and sunglasses wearing long overcoats, who were standing at what looked like the military “parade rest” position.  The Imam gestured wildly as he shouted.

 

****

 

“These so-called attacks, they were not attacks; they were purely self-defensive in nature!  Certainly, they were at least as self-defensive as when the mighty United States Air Force bombed innocent Muslim cities in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing old men, women, and helpless baby children!  What happened last night was self-defense by the community against the vile and vicious merchants of death, merchants of death who have been feeding on the blood of our people, pushing the tools of death on our people!  So I feel no sorrow for their loss, for they can not ever repay the sorrow and pain which they have inflicted on our people with their white devils’ tools of death!  Now they have met their righteous fate, all praise be to Allah, peace be upon him!”

 

****

 

Ranya was burning inside.  “Look at those bastards!  ‘Merchants of death’!  All of those guys are packing.  They say they hate guns, but they’re all carrying them.”

“How can you tell?” asked Brad.

“Trust me—I was raised in a gun store.  We sold holsters every day, we taught the concealed carry license course, I can spot a gun.  But those guys are packing serious stuff, big stuff, pistol grip shotguns I’d say.  They’re hardly bothering to hide it!  And you don’t see the cops hassling them either.  I wonder if any of them were the same guys who burned our place down?  I wonder who paid them, the FBI or the ATF?”

She was livid, and violently twisted the channel dial.  She stopped briefly on the next local channel.  They were replaying for the hundredth time the signature video footage of the massacre: victims tumbling in a human avalanche from the upper decks of the stadium.

“Less than fifty people were hit by bullets,” Ranya said, “but it’s still called a gun massacre.  They should blame it on penning up thousands of people like cattle in those upper decks.  Anything could have caused that panic: tear gas, smoke grenades, anything!  But every single victim gets blamed on the gun.”  She switched it again, and on the next channel, it was also “backlash” night.  A pretty Asian-American female anchor was introducing her next piece.

 

****

 

“Today at the state capitol in Richmond, Commonwealth’s Attorney General Eric Sanderson held a news conference and fielded questions about the ‘night of rage’ against Tidewater gun stores.”  The camera cut to a handsome man somewhere in his forties, with a luxurious growth of thick dark hair graying at the temples.  He was standing at a podium in some formal briefing room, flanked by an American flag and the flag of Virginia

“While I regret the violence which swept through southeastern Virginia last night, I do understand the intense outrage felt by most of our citizens toward those gun dealers who have made a handsome living by selling the tools of murder and death.  And although the mass murderer James Shifflett does not appear to have personally bought his deadly assault rifle at one of the gun stores which was destroyed last night, the sad truth is, any of those gun stores could just as easily have sold it to him, or a wide variety of other assault rifles which are every bit as deadly.  And as incredible as it may sound, gun stores have continued to sell assault rifles, even after the Stadium Massacre, even up until today!

“So I do wholeheartedly support the Schuleman-Montaine Firearms Safety Act, and all of its provisions.  And I most seriously warn any persons in Virginia, anyone who might be tempted to hold onto an illegal assault rifle after next Tuesday, that the full force of the Commonwealth will be brought down upon you if you make that mistake!  I will have zero tolerance for any other Jimmy Shiffletts lurking among our law-abiding population.

“I have also been asked if I shall vigorously pursue and prosecute those criminals who participated in last night’s arson attacks, which resulted in the deaths of four gun dealers.  My answer is that in Virginia, we already have dozens of open murder investigations under way, and most of those murders were committed with guns sold by gun dealers like the ones who were attacked last night.  So no, I will not assign a higher priority to investigating last night’s attacks, than to all of the other unsolved murders caused by the firearms that these gun dealers sold!  These dead gun dealers, these merchants of death, well, they’ll just have to get in line and wait their turn behind all of their dead victims, who were already killed by the guns they sold for blood money.”

 

****

 

Ranya switched off the TV set.  She had passed beyond angry to morosely reflective.  “Blood money.  A merchant of death.  That piece of shit just called my father a merchant of death, just like the Muslim guy did.  What’s his name, Eric Sanderson?  He won’t even investigate.  He just declared open season on all firearms dealers.  He just drew a target on all of them.  Shit.”

“You want another rum and coke?”

“Just hand me the damn bottle.  This is the worst.  Sanderson just called my father an enemy of the people, and practically praised his murderers.  And did you hear what he said about next Tuesday and the full ‘force of the state’?  It sounds like he’s getting ready to deal with a lot more enemies of the state.  I guess that’s me too, I mean, I’m the daughter of a merchant of death.”

Brad poured an inch of Captain Morgan’s into a fresh tumbler and handed it to her.  She drained half of the dark spiced rum in a gulp, made a sour face, and coughed.

He said, “This country is finished.  The America we knew is gone, and now it’s time to get the hell out.  It lasted for two good centuries, that’s something, but now it’s over.”

“Maybe so, Brad Fallon, maybe so.  But they killed my father and burned my house, and I’m not going to just let it go.  I’m not!  Somebody’s got to pay.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.  I’ll think of something.  Find George, start there I guess.”  She finished her rum and poured herself some more.  Ranya was developing the germ of an idea, if not quite yet a plan.  She wasn’t going to forget George, she’d still look for him, and through him try to find out who was really pulling the strings behind the Stadium Massacre and the arson murders.  She was going to find George, but that might take a long time.  In the meanwhile, she was going to make somebody pay for her father’s murder.  Somebody who was making political hay from his death, somebody who didn’t think his death was worth investigating.  Somebody who was glad he was dead.

First she was going to kill Virginia Attorney General Eric Sanderson, the politician who had just put the government seal of approval on her father’s murder.  A slight smile curled across her lips as a delicious irony occurred to her: instead of using one of those ee-vil semi-automatic assault rifles with their high-capacity magazines, she was going to kill him with a single shot target pistol.  Oh yes, she had just the tool for the job. 

Now that she had decided on who, and she knew how, next it was just a matter of finding out where, and deciding when she would do it.  And she would do it.

Ranya slid down on her back on the sofa-like “settee” behind the dinette table.  The low ceiling above her began spinning as the sailboat rolled gently at the dock, so she closed her eyes.  She was still smiling as she contemplated Sanderson’s face in her crosshairs, with her right index finger increasing its pressure on the trigger one ounce at time.

 

****

 

Brad pulled a soft blanket out of a locker and spread it over her, then untied her tan hiking boots and gently pulled them off without causing so much as a stir.  Finally he placed a pillow next to her where she would find it if she rolled over.  He studied her while she slept; she was at peace for the first time since he had met her.  Ranya was attractive, but in a girl-next-door way; she had no fashion model’s angular features or swollen bee-stung lips.  She did have stunning eyes.  Even in her sadness and her anger they were beautiful, sometimes appearing amber, sometimes hazel or even pale green depending on the light.  Asleep, he could see a touch of the orient in their cast, which recalled to him an old girlfriend he had loved to kiss, just to see her eyes closed in passion.  Ranya’s eyebrows were not plucked into thin lines, but neither were they bushy, they were just perfect the way that God had made them.  He hadn’t really seen her smiling, but he imagined that she would have a terrific smile on a happier day.  She was taller than average, which appealed to Brad, with a nice figure that he had enjoyed seeing tonight after she had removed her jacket. 

She was pretty, yes, but she had more than her share of personal problems, to say the least.  Even so, from their first meeting Brad had been unable to avoid considering her as a possible partner for his tropical sailing adventures.  She was certainly more than sufficiently attractive and intelligent, and when she mentioned that she had been an ocean lifeguard, that had sealed it for him.  For Brad, swimming, snorkeling and scuba diving were a large part of his enjoyment of the sailing lifestyle, and his ultimate dream was to find a spirited mermaid to share it with.  He had little use for porcelain princesses or mere boat adornments.

But he knew that it could never happen with Ranya, she was finishing college, and she had her father’s murder to deal with at the same time.  To top it off she appeared to have a quixotic streak, and she planned to stay in America and tilt at windmills, while Brad was going to sail away far and fast.

Well, it didn’t matter that she wasn’t the one.  He knew that the Caribbean islands were full of pretty girls, tourists on holiday from Holland and Germany and Scandinavia, and further south he intended to discover the beauties of Venezuela and Colombia and Brazil.

Brad closed the hatches, turned off the music and the lights, brushed his teeth and crawled into his triangular V-berth double bed which was all the way forward in the bow of the boat.  He was trying to compare the qualities of the blond northern European girls to the raven-haired South American lovelies, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the motorcycle-riding brunette lifeguard named Ranya Bardiwell, who was sleeping only fifteen feet behind him.

 

****

 

George Hammet, the ASIC of the Norfolk Field Office of the BATFE, spent Saturday night drinking beer and swapping lies with visiting ATF and FBI colleagues at the Ship’s Bell.  This was a bar-and-grill close to Norfolk’s Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, a place which was much favored by the local Navy SEALs.  Some of the fifty or so out-of-town agents supplementing the Joint Task Force were staying at the amphib base’s Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, and a few had called old buddies who were still in the service.  The Ship’s Bell had come highly recommended as a meeting place; it was tucked discreetly into the back corner of an obscure second-rate shopping center.  By ten o’clock the parking lot was packed with dark full-sized SUVs; Suburbans and Excursions with discreet government bumper and windshield decals, known only to federal law enforcement insiders.

George Hammet enjoyed the fact that his unpredictable work hours meant that he never had to explain his comings and goings or whereabouts to his wife Laura, and he was free to spend his night drinking with other agents and flirting with the waitresses and “frog hogs” or SEAL groupies who frequented the place.  The jukebox was cranking, the beer was flowing, and the testosterone level was sky-high in the Ship’s Bell, with its walls covered with photographs and memorabilia of past Underwater Demolition Team and SEAL Team glory.  More girls were arriving by the minute as the word went out by cell phones and instant messengers that a real live crowd was in town at the Bell.

These impromptu parties and the easy women that gravitated to them were either a fringe benefit or an occupational hazard, depending on the outlooks of the federal agents who spent weeks at a time “in the field” on cases.  Very frequently, their gold wedding bands were left behind in their motel rooms as they became “out of town bachelors,” and this propensity to play the field was reflected in sky-high divorce rates. 

George Hammet was a local though, and he had a strict policy of not fooling around in Tidewater: he wasn’t stupid.  Tonight he was also limiting his alcohol intake, and he excused himself from his circle of new and old buddies just after midnight.  As a local, he had his own personal vehicle, and was not dependent on anyone for a ride.

He drove his red Jeep Cherokee across Norfolk, through the downtown tunnel and into Portsmouth, the location of Imam Sheik Ali bin Muhamed’s “Al Fuqra Mosque.”  The mosque occupied several storefronts taking up an entire block along King Street.  Hammet allowed himself one casual pass in front of it and saw that the lights were out and there was no activity around it to be seen.  The rest of the neighborhood was zoned for commercial use, but all of the businesses were closed, and not a soul was to be seen walking around.

He drove along the side streets across from the mosque south of King to establish his walking route in and out, and then two blocks away he found a dark and hidden place to park his Cherokee behind a shuttered laundromat.  He pulled on thin black driving gloves and a dark ball cap, and exited the Jeep carrying a black gym bag.  At this hour, no one was going to fool with a burly guy in a leather bomber jacket, even a white guy.  Just in case, Hammet carried his Glock 19 in his shoulder holster rig with his jacket open.  The ball cap was pulled low over his eyes, to make identifying him harder in case someone did happen to see him. 

He walked in the shadows in the alleys and foot paths on the way to his pre-selected position across King Street from the mosque.  Crouching behind a hedge, against the cement wall of a discount shoe store, Hammet unzipped his gym bag and withdrew an ugly little Ingram MAC-11 machine pistol, the smaller .380 caliber version of the infamous MAC-10.  He screwed a suppressor the size of an empty paper towel tube down onto the stubby barrel until it met the rectangular body of the gun.  This MAC-11 was one of the “dirty tricks” guns Malvone had given him a month earlier when they had finalized their plans.  A gun that had been seized from a member of one right wing group or another in Idaho or Montana or Arkansas, but never entered into any law enforcement log or registry.  A trace on the MAC’s origins would quickly prove that the “militia movement” was a serious national security threat, with “militiamen” and weapons flowing freely from state to state.

Hammet inserted a long thirty-round stick magazine into the pistol grip under the blocky weapon, then with his left hand he grasped the knob on the MAC’s flat top and pulled the bolt all the way to the rear until it caught.  That’s all there was to it; the MACs were, as they said, “crude but effective.”  The rough sights on top were a joke, and he ignored them as he raised the weapon above the waist high bushes.  He sighted down the long suppressor at the big crescent moon painted in white on the plate glass front of the mosque.  Hammet pulled the trigger and swept from right to left as he emptied the entire thirty-round mag in one three-second burst, holding the MAC down with his left hand gripping the suppressor.  The sound suppressor on the MAC-11 was fairly effective, and the puny low velocity .380 caliber rounds were subsonic so there were no sonic cracks to deal with, but in any case the sound of his firing off the magazine in one burst was completely drowned out by the plate glass exploding and crashing down across the street.

He dropped the warm MAC-11 machine pistol into the middle of the hedge, where it would soon be recovered as evidence.  Then he reached into the gym bag again and withdrew a sheaf of a hundred pages, which he tossed over the hedge onto the sidewalk, to be scattered by the wind and found later by citizens, reporters, and police.  His task complete, he crept along behind the hedge, until he reached the pathway that led to the alley and back to his hidden Jeep. 

In five minutes he was driving west at the speed limit on I-264.  He did not want to have his Cherokee filmed going back through the tunnel right after the shooting.  He was an experienced lawman, and he knew that the tunnel had cameras which recorded every vehicle passing under the Elizabeth River, so instead he took the long way home, circling around and returning to Virginia Beach on Military Highway.  He banged on his steering wheel in time with the country music on his radio; it had been a great night’s work.  The shooting had gone without a hitch, and the anxiety of operating in the danger zone dissolved into post-mission euphoria.  He even felt good for the “imam,” because after tonight, Sheik Ali bin Muhamed was going to be as famous as Al Sharpton or Louie Farrakhan.  He was actually doing the “sheik” a favor, as he saw it.

 

****

 

Ranya was walking down a sodden forest trail between steep fir-covered slopes.  She was following twenty feet behind a trail guide, or perhaps a ranger, who was dressed in green and brown with a pack on his back.  Going around a bend in the trail the guide suddenly froze, then turned and ran, shucking his pack, and began climbing up a medium-sized larch just ahead of a pair of onrushing yearling brown bears.  As soon as Ranya saw the bears she looked for her own tree, and in only moments she was twenty feet above the ground, looking directly across at the trail guide, as both grunting and huffing bears sniffed the air and raised up on their hind legs, and tested the trunk of his tree with swipes of their paws.

The smaller of the bears then hugged the tree, and inch by improbable inch it lifted itself up until it was snapping and snarling only scant feet beneath the trail guide, who was attempting to climb ever higher up the swaying boughs, until under the weight of bear and man it began to bend.  Finally the man could climb no higher, yet the bear kept hunching up the sagging tree, an inch at a time.  The trail guide was trying to lift his feet and legs above the snapping maw of the yearling bear, holding them up with no branches left to support them, holding them up for dear life.  At last he began to slide down the slender trunk, and the brown bear snatched his booted ankle as easily as a river-running salmon, then jerked him in one smooth motion out of the tree to the ground where he landed with a thud, and where the larger bear was waiting with open jaws. 

Ranya stared in rapt horror as the two bears then pulled at the man, thrashing him between them like two terriers playing bloody tug-of-war with a broken squirrel, and when the man was ripped apart they began to loudly eat the pieces on the ground, holding them down and tearing the flesh into bloody strips with their great fangs, then bolting down the shredded meat, chewing and gnawing at his bones until no flesh remained, and then all at once they were finished and without a single look up the other tree at Ranya, they both turned and lumbered into the brush, leaving only cracked and scattered bloody bones.