After Phil Carson and Brad Fallon departed, long after her father’s body was taken away, there was nothing left for Ranya to gain by lingering on her property except more painful memories. At the age of twenty-one she was burdened with the crushing knowledge that she was utterly alone in the world. She had no living relatives in America that she was aware of, and only scant knowledge of any family left in Lebanon. All that she knew of her family history in Lebanon was that many of the Christians in their native village had been wiped out during the civil war in the 1970’s, and the survivors had been forced to flee in an unlamented modern-day Diaspora. Now, thirty years later, the last remnant of her tribe was again faced with extinction.
She would have had an older brother named Michael, but he did not survive to see his sister born. He had been killed when only a toddler by a car bomb in East Beirut, where her parents had taken refuge. He was buried somewhere over there, somewhere Ranya could now never know. Her mother, Elise, was buried in a Catholic graveyard here in Suffolk County Virginia. As for her father, she could not bear to think of where he was, because then the agonizing images of the morning stormed back into her mind and paralyzed her with another layer of grief.
Only the clarity of onrushing asphalt could push back the images, so she twisted her ponytail up under her helmet and blasted up State Road 32. She passed anonymously through Suffolk’s business and commercial district, and a few minutes later she parked near her mother’s grave in a sunlit granite-studded meadow. Her entire family was now lying in graveyards, or even worse, in some cold stainless steel drawer. On the short walk to her mother’s grave, Ranya knelt to pluck a few yellow wildflowers that were growing at the base of a hedge, ashamed that she had not remembered to stop at a proper florist’s shop.
She had last seen her mother alive a week before Christmas in 1992, bald and puffy after months of radiation and chemo. Her mother had always been beautiful, with Ranya’s hazel colored eyes and thick brown hair, but her last months on earth were a horror show. Ranya extracted a pair of small color snapshots of her mother and father from her wallet, and set them in the grass at the base of the grave stone. On the left side of the rose-colored marble was chiseled “Elise Marie Bardiwell, Beloved Wife and Mother, Eternal Peace.” The right side of the stone was smooth and uncarved—another task to add to my list, Ranya thought.
She sat on the lawn facing the marker, and then gently placed her father’s silver cross between the two pictures. The cross came from her mother’s family, one of their few family keepsakes to be brought out of Lebanon.
There was no one else nearby, and Ranya spoke softly. “Hi Mom, I’m sorry I haven’t visited in a long time. I guess you already know what happened… I hope that Dad has found you and you’re together again.
“I’m trying to keep it together here. I’m trying to hold up. I’m trying to understand everything, but I don’t know if God hears my prayers at all. Mom, what happened to our family, why am I left all alone?”
There didn’t seem to be much of a future in being a Bardiwell, and not much point in trying, when they all died so young. She fell asleep crying on the warm grass above her mother’s grave.
The afternoon sun moved behind a nearby stand of Poplar trees. A burial service awakened her, and she sat up and brushed the grass from her hair, and put away the cross and their pictures. She knew she looked awful, and she was grateful to get on her bike and be able to hide again beneath her full visor helmet.
A mile from the graveyard, at the northern edge of the ‘city’ of Suffolk, was the brick and plaster Saint Charles Catholic Church. Ranya parked in front of the small adjoining rectory and hesitantly rang the doorbell. She had stopped attending weekly Mass when she went away to college three years earlier. The white-painted door finally creaked open and to her relief Father Alvarado greeted her.
Ranya Bardiwell had been blessed with a face that was not easily forgotten, not even by an elderly parish priest, not even after hours of crying had taken their toll. It took him only a few moments to recall her name. She had attended Saint Charles Elementary School through the eighth grade, and her father Joseph Bardiwell never missed the eight o’clock Mass on Sunday.
“Ranya? How are you? Come in, you don’t look so well. What’s the matter?”
“My father’s dead. He was killed last night.”
“Oh, God help us all! I saw something on the news, gun stores were burned, was he...?”
“He was shot, and he was burned. Oh Father, it was terrible what they did to him!” She fell against the frail priest, sobbing again. There was no end to her tears today.
****
After leaving the church rectory, Ranya rode north to the home of a high school friend. She had only vague ideas of where she might stay, so she was letting her Yamaha pull her along rural lanes remembered from happier days. Valerie Edmonds was in her senior year at nearby William and Mary, and spent most weekends at her family home in northern Suffolk County. Her house always seemed like a mansion to Ranya, located on a dozen acres of high ground overlooking a bend in the Nansemond River near its mouth on the Chesapeake Bay. Valerie’s house had numerous guest bedrooms, and Ranya hoped that they would offer to put her up for a few days while she sorted out her father’s affairs.
Valerie’s father Burgess Edmonds had been one of Joe Bardiwell’s best customers over the years. He was a prolific gun collector, with tastes running mainly to custom-made hunting rifles in the latest ultra-magnum calibers. Joe Bardiwell had done much of the customizing himself, delivering rifles that were not only works of art to behold, but were invariably capable of astonishing accuracy. All of Bardiwell’s rifles came delivered with proof targets, demonstrating that they had been zeroed in to shoot groups of under one-half inch at one-hundred yards. This was the minimum acceptable level of accuracy for a rifle out of Bardiwell’s custom shop, which on a paper target produced a single ragged hole resembling a cloverleaf. Joe Bardiwell charged a lot for his custom work, and Burgess Edmonds had been happy to pay the premium, often while waiting months for the gunsmith to work through his back orders.
Ranya had been a guest of Valerie’s on social occasions from grade school birthday parties, all the way through high school to their senior prom pool party, complete with a band. They had been friends, but Ranya was always aware of the social gulf between them. Upper class Valerie had her horses and piano lessons, middle class Ranya had her motorcycles and shooting. Something they had still in common were their dogs. The Edmonds had two Dobermans from the same litter that had produced Armalite; they had been sold to both families by another regular customer of Freedom Arms. Ranya expected to see the two black dogs come sprinting down the hill to meet her, and then lope alongside her on her ride up to the house, and she knew it would hurt.
So Ranya reached the Edmonds’s private road with mixed hope and dread, but she stopped far from the big white house when it became obvious that a social event of some kind was taking place. A dozen or more gleaming luxury SUVs, convertibles and foreign touring sedans were parked on the circle and the lawn in front of the house, and there was a white canopy tent the size of a tennis court visible on the lawn. Music from a live band drifted down the long private driveway to her.
Ranya held in the clutch, standing over her bike, imagining her entrance: a poor ash-smeared Orphan Annie, sweat streaked, her hair pulled back in a dirty ponytail, wearing boots and jeans. She pictured the smiles and whispers among the satin-gowned debutantes as they struggled to recall Ranya What’s-her-name, the gun dealer’s daughter. Perhaps they would sit her in the big trophy room on one of the stools made from an elephant’s foot, place her between the stuffed lion and the polar bear rug as a new exhibit: “wild Arab girl.” Maybe they would let her earn her room and board in the kitchen, or perhaps she could help the caterers, but suitably behind the scenes.
No. She was resigned to being the outsider, the loner. It was part of her inner core anyway, why else had she owned seven motorcycles, but never once a car? Ranya Bardiwell had always been able to stand her own company, and now she would have to. First she had been an only child, then she had lost her mother, and now there was the final loss and she was alone. Alone.
She drove to the outskirts of the city of Suffolk to the Super K-Mart, and bought what she would need for a few days: toiletries, shorts, running shoes and plain black t-shirts, a conservative black dress for church and the funeral, and a nylon zipper bag to hold it all on the back of her bike. She ate as an afterthought, a tasteless sandwich she picked up at a fast food place next to the K-Mart.
****
Ranya bypassed the Suffolk Holiday Inn and drove to the old motel located at the intersection a mile north of her former house on State Road 32. The “Colonial” hovered between quaint and seedy, with twelve units in a straight line, set well back from the road under towering loblolly pines. The Indian manager in the office did not stare at her or ask questions; his sari-clad wife was also behind the desk.
The air conditioner in her unit was loud but at least it pumped out a steady stream of cold air. The bed was not too soft, the sheets and the room were clean. The austerity matched her spirit. She showered, glad to shed her very stale running clothes and sports bra, then she changed into entirely new clothes from the skin out: black nylon running shorts, a black bra and a black t-shirt, and mostly-black running shoes. The shower and new clothes gave her a lift, and at last she felt ready to examine what she had taken from her father’s floor safe. She sat cross-legged on top of the bed, and spread out the contents of her daypack.
A sealed business-sized envelope was on top of the stack, on the front her father had hand written “Ranya, read this first.” She opened it carefully with her folding pocket knife, which had been in her jacket pocket when she had thrown it on back at her apartment in Charlottesville. She withdrew the single sheet of stationery and unfolded it slowly, savoring her father’s imagined touch.
Hello Ranya My Love,
If you are reading this letter, then I have either died or I otherwise cannot communicate with you, so I am terribly sorry for leaving you all alone my beloved, please forgive me. I have prepared a list of all of our bank accounts and insurance agents and attorneys to call now.
In the small yellow envelope you will find a bank safe deposit box key and instructions. The deposit box contains some items and papers which you may find useful as well as some family photographs and records. The white envelope contains some emergency money to hold you over temporarily. The box wrapped in brown paper contains my graduation gift to you.
Now that I am gone, there is a good chance that our family business is gone as well, or Freedom Arms is no longer under your control. In that event, I have prepared some items and put them into a safe location for you. Do you remember where you separated your shoulder, and where I found you? Go there. Going west, take the left fork, and stop at the stone tower. From the tower walk 200 feet (80 paces) at 300 degrees by the compass. Look under the southwest corner.
Ranya, if you are reading this after my passing, always remember your Mother’s undying love for you, and try not to forget your father, who loved you so dearly.
Ranya read the letter a second and a third time, and then she folded it into a small square and put it into her wallet next to her parents’ pictures. She slit the fat white envelope with her folding pocketknife and riffled through the cash; there was a half-inch thick stack of fifty-dollar bills.
In her mind, Ranya tried to picture the location of the arms cache her father had described in his personal code. At age fifteen she had slammed into a hole on her 125cc Enduro and badly dislocated her left shoulder. She clearly remembered the accident and thus the general location of the cache. She knew that she could reach it in twenty minutes on a dirt bike, or a bit longer on her Yamaha.
Finally, she turned to the wrapped gift box, which was as big as a medium sized textbook. Under the brown paper was a polished rosewood box. She lifted open the top and saw a gleaming blue-black pistol set into red velvet padding, along with two spare magazines, and a plastic compass the size of a large coin. She understood at once that the compass was to guide her way to her father’s arms cache. He was a methodical man, and he had left nothing to chance.
The pistol was a highly customized compact .45 caliber “Colt Commander.” Ranya lifted the pistol out of its velvet bed: it fit her hand perfectly. She noted all of the improvements: the extended beavertail grip safety for softer felt recoil, the checkering cut into the front of the grip, the glow-in-the-dark tritium sights, and the extended slide release for quicker reloading. Importantly, the pistol had safety release catches on both sides just above where her thumbs would rest for ambidextrous use. She was right handed, but if she needed the pistol while riding her Yamaha she would have to draw and fire left handed. Her father knew this, and put safeties on both sides.
The .45 was a beautiful piece of custom gunsmithing, right down to its sharply checkered rosewood grip panels, which matched the presentation box. Ranya stood by the bed and jacked the slide back with her left hand, verifying that the chamber was empty, and then eased it forward with a smooth metallic rhythm. She tested the safety, clicking it up and down with her thumb, and then she took aim at a mark on the wall and slowly squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped forward crisply with a loud click.
There was no ammunition stored with the pistol, a wise precaution because it might have cooked off from the heat of the fire and ruined the rest of the contents of the safe. But without its cargo of ammunition, the pistol was no more useful for self-defense than a brick or a hammer. After seeing what men had done to her father, and feeling extremely vulnerable alone in the motel, Ranya put obtaining ammo for the pistol at the top of her list. It was out of the question that she would spend the night in the motel room defenseless and at the mercy of anyone who wanted to kick in her door.
Ordinarily Ranya traveled with a smaller Kahr 9mm pistol, to defend herself if she broke down or ran out of gas in an isolated rural or dangerous urban area. Today she had been in such a hurry that she had left the pistol still hidden in her apartment back in Charlottesville. She did not yet have a concealed pistol permit, she had only recently turned twenty-one, but she had “carried” for several years anyway with her father’s knowledge and approval. The 9mm pistol was purchased in his name because she had been officially under age.
Ranya Bardiwell had known she was attractive ever since she had been a young teenager from the way men often gazed at her. Sometimes leering men stared hard at her while unconsciously licking their lips, like a starving lion contemplating a gazelle. She knew what these men wanted, and that some of them would take it by force if they could.
Both Ranya and her father had nothing but contempt for lawmakers who would prefer to see a young woman raped and strangled, than to see her carry a pistol for her own self-protection against much larger and stronger men. At five-foot-eight and 120 pounds, Ranya harbored no delusions about her ability to fight off a 200-pound rapist in a bare-knuckles contest. She much preferred the idea of presenting a would-be rapist with the choice of instant flight or sudden death, after being confronted with her unexpectedly drawn pistol.
But without ammunition, the .45 was just a pound of steel. She tried to think of where she could buy ammo nearby late on a Saturday afternoon. The big national discount chain stores had stopped carrying ammunition, after repeated protests from gun control advocacy groups, and the other local gun store had also been burned out the night before. Then it occurred to her: the cache. She could get there easily before dark, and besides, she was curious to see what her father had left in it.
Ranya dressed again in her jeans and tan boots, and as she closed the door she left a “tell-tale,” a small wad of rolled-up paper on the carpet which would be moved if anyone entered while she was gone. She felt it was a somewhat paranoid thing to do, but after what had happened to her father, she felt justified in her fears. The unloaded .45 was wrapped in a new t-shirt in her daypack.
****
The last afternoon sun was slanting through the pines when Ranya parked her Yamaha near the “stone tower,” which was actually a chimney from a long-vanished house. The abandoned homestead sat in the middle of thousands of acres of immature new-growth pines belonging to the Federal Camp Timber Corporation. She had cautiously steered her street bike around the gate off the paved state road. It was only a heavy chain hanging between two steel posts, sufficient to keep out a car but not a motorcycle. After a mile of cautious riding on the dirt road (her low-slung café racer was not suited for rutted terrain to say the least) she found the old stone and mortar chimney, which ironically was the only remnant of another house fire generations before.
Compass in hand, she set out through the forest underbrush on an azimuth of 300 degrees. It was not easy counting off precisely eighty paces while trying to walk a straight line through brambles and bushes and around trees, but she finished the course in short order, arriving at what she hoped was the correct location.
“Look under the southwest corner.” The southwest corner of what? She hung her daypack on the stub branch of a pine tree and began a spiral search around it, studying the needle and leaf covered forest floor until she found a tiny clearing with only weeds and a few hardy saplings struggling to emerge. The clearing was a little higher than the surrounding ground, and when she brushed away the pine needles she found part of an old concrete foundation. She kicked the dirt and leaves away until she could see the edges of the fifteen by twenty foot slab; the earth beyond the southwest corner was lower where the ground sloped downward.
That has to be it, she thought, scooping away at the weedy soil beneath the corner. She wished she had brought a shovel, but still she made steady progress working her way under the cement until she came to a wall of rocks, which she quickly pulled down. There under the slab was a metallic case, with a folding handle facing her. She dragged the box out from under the concrete slab. It was green-painted aluminum, about four feet long by about eighteen inches high and wide. It had faded white Cyrillic lettering and numbers stenciled on it, and Ranya had no doubt that the case had once carried shells or grenades for the Soviet military. Now it contained another type of ordnance, for one private American citizen.
The lid of the metal case fit over the bottom with metal clips around its perimeter. Ranya unsnapped them quickly, eager to see the contents. She had spent her entire life around hundreds of guns and now they were reduced to the contents of this one aluminum locker. She lifted off the lid and set it aside. Inside she saw three rifles nested together on their sides: two 5.56mm AR-15 variants similar to the military’s M-16s, and an FAL in the heavier 7.62 NATO caliber. The AR-15s lacked the usual M-16 style carrying handles. All three of these semi-automatic military-style rifles had small scopes mounted on top. One AR-15 variant was a short-barreled carbine with a collapsible stock and the other was the standard length. They were set in their own plywood rack with magazines and ammunition boxes packed between them. These so-called “assault rifles” definitely had their uses, and perhaps she would need them one day, but for now they did not suit her motorcycle lifestyle. Even taken down into its two parts, the carbine was too large to carry inconspicuously in a backpack, and anyway Ranya had no intention of engaging in shootouts with better armed and more numerous enemies.
She lifted out the plywood shelf carrying these first three rifles and placed it on top of the locker’s lid on the ground. Next there were another three rifles, these were bolt-action hunting rifles mounted with large telescopic sights. All three of them had black synthetic stocks. These rifles were not just lying on their plywood shelf, but were raised above it on precisely made notched wooden stands with nothing else touching them. Their steel parts were coated in a thin layer of some type of clear grease. There was a paper and string tag hanging from each of their trigger guards, noting their calibers. They were in the utilitarian high-powered calibers of .243 Winchester, 7mm Remington magnum, and 7.62 NATO. Ranya admired the rifles without touching them, not wanting to disturb their protective coatings. She understood that these powerful and accurate long-range rifles might prove very useful in the future, but again she knew that it would be ridiculous to try to transport any one of them on her motorcycle.
So she lifted out the plywood shelf containing the three sniper rifles and set it aside as well. The bottom of the aluminum box was jammed with cartridge boxes and bags and fabric zipper cases. Ranya rooted among the boxes until she found what she had come for: a bright yellow plastic carton labeled “.45 caliber.” She snapped opened its lid; each of the 50 hollow-point cartridges was standing in its own little compartment like so many tiny brass eggs in a crate. Right away, she loaded seven rounds into each of her three magazines, then slid one of them into her new pistol and jacked the slide to chamber a round, and finally snapped the safety up with her thumb. Her .45 was now “cocked and locked,” perfectly safe to carry but ready to fire in a fraction of a second.
This simple process provided an immediate sense of comfort and relief to her. Loading the pistol transformed her from a basically helpless female, at the mercy of the next pack of toothless hicks or hostile home boys to cross her path, into a warrior who could confidently take care of herself in almost any situation. Anyone who had grown up around guns knew that the world was divided into two groups: unarmed potential victims, and armed survivors. Most of the unarmed potential victims didn’t have any awareness of this dichotomy. Like sheep grazing placidly in a pasture, they optimistically hoped that they would simply slide through life without ever being confronted by a violent criminal.
As an added measure, Ranya dropped the magazine out and loaded one more bullet in it to replace the one she had chambered, providing her the full complement of eight rounds that her .45 could carry. Other pistols carried more rounds, but her eight fat .45 caliber bullets were each showstoppers, and would not require more than one shot delivered per attacker. Being a “single stack magazine” pistol, with its bullets resting one directly on top of the other in the magazine, the overall width of her .45 was still slim enough that she could carry it stuffed halfway down inside the front of her jeans. Held firmly in place by her leather belt, it would be virtually invisible with her jacket hanging over the exposed grip.
It was growing dark and Ranya had accomplished the task of acquiring ammunition for her .45, but she was still curious to see what other useful items were in the small cases at the bottom of the locker. These zipper cases also had paper and string tags tied to their carrying handles. She saw tags for various pistols, but one tag in particular caught her eye and she pulled out its black nylon case and unzipped it. Inside was an unusual type of firearm completely unknown to the vast majority of people, a single shot Tennyson Champion long-range target pistol. These pistols looked like a cross between an antique dueling piece and a science fiction movie prop gun. This one had a walnut grip and a fourteen-inch-long blued steel barrel. A telescopic sight was mounted on top of the rear of the barrel, and the muzzle end was threaded to accept a compensator or other devices. The Tennyson Champions were unique in that their grip and trigger assemblies could accept a wide variety of interchangeable barrels in literally dozens of calibers. These ranged from .22 rimfire, to rifle cartridges capable of taking down an elk—if the shooter had wrists capable of handling the brutal recoil.
This particular Champion’s barrel was chambered for .223 caliber, also called 5.56mm, the same cartridge fired by the military M-16 and its civilian version, the semi-auto AR-15. With a quality scope and superior ammunition, and fired from a steady rest position, the Champion was capable of rifle-like accuracy. Best of all, the Champion would fit easily into Ranya’s daypack. If and when she ever found the federal agent who killed her father, she intended to pay him back in kind, and the Champion could be exactly the right tool for the job. Her new .45 was a fine pistol for close range defensive use, but it would be nearly useless beyond 50 yards, the range at which her father had been killed. And Ranya had no desire to engage in a close-quarters-battle against agents armed to the teeth with the latest German submachine guns. The 5.56mm Champion could give her a rifle’s long-range stand-off distance, but in a portable low profile package.
The black pistol case had three pockets on the outside, and Ranya glanced into each. Two contained special ammunition in red plastic cases the size of cigarette packs, but the third Velcro-flapped pouch contained the real prize, a black sound suppressor no bigger than a fat stogie cigar. Sound suppressors could not remove the cracking sound of a supersonic rifle bullet flying through the air, but they could remove most of the sound of the muzzle blast as the bullet cleared the barrel and the expanding gases hit the air. Anyway, the “sonic crack” did not point to a shooter’s position, since it was created by the passing bullet. Even when firing supersonic rifle bullets, a good sound suppressor would serve to keep a shooter’s position from being discovered by greatly reducing the far louder muzzle blast.
Ranya decided to take the Champion with her, so she loaded the big pistol case into her daypack along with the rest of the .45 ammo and two more spare .45 magazines. She stuck her cocked and locked .45 into her jeans just inside of her hip on the left side, its grip toward her right hand in the “Mexican carry” position. As soon as she could, she intended to get a decent inside-the-pants concealment holster that would hold the gun more securely.
The rest of the cache would await her return on another day. She replaced the stackable rifle shelves in the locker, gasketed down the aluminum lid with its metal latches, and shoved it back into its hole under the cement slab. She quickly rebuilt the concealing wall of rocks, then heaped dirt against it and finally covered everything she had disturbed with a layer of pine needles.
Now Ranya not only felt the security of being able to defend herself with her pistol, she also enjoyed the new power of being able to reach out and touch an enemy at any distance out to several-hundred yards away. With her better-than 20/20 vision and her steady hands, combined with what she now carried in her pack, she began to entertain thoughts of turning the tables on her father’s killers, and hunting the hunters. Left alone in the world, she had no other remaining goal.
In a half hour she was back at her motel room. Her tell-tale wad of paper had not been disturbed.