Ranya Bardiwell was relieved that no one recognized her, sitting alone in the last pew of Saint Charles Catholic Church. She didn’t particularly want to be there, but felt obligated to make an appearance. She had awakened suddenly on Brad’s boat in the first light, with a cutting headache and vague nightmare images still rolling through her consciousness. She had to piece together where she was, and why she was there, and suddenly all of yesterday’s unimaginable events came flooding back in a rush.
But she didn’t allow her grief to paralyze her. She dragged herself off the boat and onto her bike without waking up Brad, and didn’t come fully alive until she was under the shower in her motel room. She inhaled a McBreakfast in Suffolk, and made it to church in time for the eight o’clock mass wearing her jeans and denim jacket.
Ranya sat, and stood, and kneeled with the rest of the congregation, her lips half-moving along automatically with long memorized prayers, but she did not hear the spoken words of the readings or the sermon.
Instead, she sat in church behind a hundred dutiful and faithful parishioners and she plotted a murder. She schemed and figured and planned several of the ways that she might be able to sneak undetected within three-hundred yards of the highest law enforcement figure in Virginia, and snipe him from a hidden place.
“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” rose from a hundred throats, but not from hers. No, she would not forgive, not now, and maybe not ever. If there was a hell, perhaps she would go there, but she would not forgive. If God wanted to forgive her, if there was indeed a God, forgiveness was going to be up to Him.
Anyway, hadn’t she earned some special consideration, some surplus of blessings to weigh against her sins? She rarely lied, drank practically no liquor for a University of Virginia Cavalier, did not do drugs, and most of all she had remained true to the pledge she had made to her dying mother, all those years before. Ranya Bardiwell, with the amber eyes and the swelling hips, almost a decade beyond puberty, was still a virgin. Beside her mother’s deathbed it did not seem like a difficult promise to make or to keep, not for a girl of twelve, to take no boy into her bed before marriage. “True love waits,” her mother said, and Ranya had made the promise and had waited all these long years.
She had become an expert at fending off the clumsy hands of horny boys, as well as detecting counterfeit promises of undying love. She had steeled herself to wait for the Right Man, and she was still waiting.
Now, a twenty-one year old virgin, she was plotting murder in church during Mass. She was going to kill a man, even before she had slept with one.
So be it. Sanderson had publicly and proudly spit on her father’s murdered body. Her father, who had been shot and burned by government agents. And now Sanderson was going to pay.
She guessed that she would never be able to get a long-range shot in Richmond anywhere near the capitol: Sanderson’s schedule would be confidential, and his precise path a mystery. She could stalk him, and get close enough to use her .45, but escape would then be impossible, and her plans didn’t end with the death of the Attorney General of Virginia.
On short notice, it would be impossible to find out where he lunched or clubbed or golfed or played tennis, not without making herself conspicuously nosy.
That left his home. Even the Commonwealth’s Attorney had to have a home where he went most nights, and he was likely to own a nice chunk of property that would have adequate hiding places within range of her scoped .223 caliber Tennyson Champion. If she could locate his house, she could get him. After three years of doing university undergrad research on the internet, she knew she could easily find his house. She made a mental list of the things she would need for the operation, and where she could obtain each item on a Sunday in Tidewater.
Ranya did not join the line to walk up to the altar to take Holy Communion, but she did wait until the end of Mass before leaving, so that she could speak to Father Alvarado as he greeted his flock outside of his church. She had to do it, to pretend, for the sake of ensuring her father’s proper burial in the family plot next to her mother. Her own belief in God was very much in doubt, but she could not extend that doubt to her father, who had been a devout Catholic to the end.
****
After returning to her motel room, Ranya changed into jogging clothes, pulled her hair into a pony tail with a colored band, and ran the mile down the gravel shoulder of State Road 32 to her property. As she approached she could see a man in a gray suit talking to a deputy who was leaning against his patrol car. Ranya was amused by their surprise when the female jogger they had been watching suddenly stopped in front of them. She held her hand out to the fortyish man in the suit, catching her breath. “I’m Ranya Bardiwell, Joseph Bardiwell’s daughter. Who are you?”
“Nice to meet you Miss Bardiwell. I’m Fred Pybus, from Atlantic Property and Casualty.” He handed her his business card. “We underwrote the store and the house, the whole place. I’m real sorry about what happened, to your father, everything…but you’ll be glad to know that he had excellent coverage with Atlantic. You’re the, uh, only living relative, correct?”
“That is correct. I’m the last, the bitter end.”
“Well that will certainly simplify things. I’ve been in touch with your father’s attorney… Say, you don’t happen to have a key for the burglar doors, do you?”
“No. They might be back there,” she pointed to the ashes and ruins of her house, “if you have a rake.”
“That’s okay. It’s better locked up. I was thinking about getting a dump truck tomorrow, and having the place cleaned out. The truck can yank the burglar doors off with a chain. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“What do you mean a dump truck? There’s a lot of valuable stuff in there, it can’t all be burned.”
“Well, Miss Bardiwell, we’d like to call it a total loss, and just write it off. It’s not worth it to try to assess the condition of each firearm. With the high temperatures a gun that seems okay might not be safe to shoot. They could never be sold; it’s a question of liability. We’ll inventory them as they go in the dump truck for the claim, but we’re going to clean the place out. It’s best for everybody.”
“All right, what time?”
“Say, make it ten?”
“I’ll be there Mr. Pybus.”
****
Ranya left them and walked around the store and across the big lawn, stopping at the scorched and blackened earth marked by the little yellow flags. Once again she was hit with a painfully vivid image of his burnt and ruined body, and she looked skyward beyond the clouds, deep into the blue and said, “It’s not over, Daddy. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to make them pay. I’ve got your guns now, and I’m going to go after them.”
She unlocked her little shed by the back fence, swung the two plywood doors open wide, and pulled the green canvas cover off of her two old motorcycles. Sometimes she would accept a ride in a car down from UVA, so she kept her spare street bike’s tag and registration current, to have transportation around Tidewater when her Yamaha FZR was back up in Charlottesville. Ranya admired her still-gleaming “black cherry,” her 1986 450cc Honda Nighthawk, which she had found unwanted and unridden in a Freedom Arms customer’s garage and bought for a song. It didn’t have the blinding speed of her 600cc café racer, but the Nighthawk was a perennial classic, a sweet ride, and a lovely all-around bike. It was the first street-legal bike she had ever owned, and she would never give it up.
The 250cc Enduro next to it was as ugly as the Nighthawk was beautiful, built up from parts, and painted in flat tan primer. It was a screamer that could run trails flat out and catch more air than anyone could handle, but despite its dirt-eating look it had been made street legal with a bolted-on light kit. When Ranya needed to cover any distance on the highways on it, she just switched the tag over from one of her other bikes, and she had never been pulled over or had any problems.
Ranya backed the Nighthawk out and locked the shed up again. She folded up the green cover and strapped it over the back of the saddle with her bungee cord net. She was taking the canvas cover because she already had a use for it in her steadily evolving plan. The black motorcycle had her extra helmet hanging from a handlebar. She checked it for spiders (she’d made the mistake of not looking carefully inside her stored helmet before), then twisted her ponytail up with her left hand and trapped it under the white plastic “brain bucket.” The Nighthawk’s motor caught as soon as she turned the key and pushed the start button, living up to its reputation as her “black cherry,” and immediately settled into a rhythmic purr.
While nowhere near as fast as her FZR at its top end, the Nighthawk was plenty fast enough for what Ranya had planned, and it had sufficient range in its gas tank. The FZR had an eye catching (and memorable) red white and blue “slash” paint job over its full fairing, but the black and chrome Nighthawk was handsome in a more classic, but rather generic and less memorable way. Finally, the Nighthawk had much higher ground clearance beneath it than the low-slung FZR, and if necessary it could be carefully ridden off of the pavement.
Ranya took an old trail through the woods to a small back road to return to her motel, because she didn’t want the cop to remember seeing her on the black bike. She parked it behind the end of the Colonial’s twelve units away from the office.
****
“Danny, I think we’d better bring the Jeep off the street, and back it right up to the garage. We need to be extra careful today.”
“Can I do it Dad?”
“Do you think you can reverse it straight up the driveway without plowing into Mom’s rose bushes?”
“Aw Dad, that’s easy. I’ll get it.”
Mark Denton pushed the button inside the garage to roll the door up out of the way, while his son Danny went down to get their black Jeep CJ. His wife’s Lexus occupied one side of the two-car garage, while the other side had been surrendered years before to their eighteen-foot ski boat on its trailer, and a small mountain of recreational gear. Sixteen-year-old Danny Denton had a learner’s permit, and he reversed up the driveway slowly and carefully until the back of the jeep was flush with the open garage door.
If any of their neighbors on the adjoining half-acre properties had been watching very closely, they would only have seen a large igloo cooler, a few plastic storage crates, and a golf bag being loaded into the back of the Jeep. In reality, the boxes contained ammunition and cartridge magazines, and the golf bag contained four semi-automatic rifles.
“Dad, can I drive today, please?”
“Son, I’d say yes, but we can’t risk getting pulled over today, not with what we’re carrying.”
“Why not? The ban’s not until Tuesday.”
Mark Denton, gray haired at 57, but still an imposing figure with ever present military bearing, shot his son the withering “no way” look. “You ready? Let’s roll.”
“Will we be back in time for supper?”
“Nah, it’s eighty miles down, a couple of hours to bury this stuff, then eighty miles back. We’ll eat on the road. Just us men today kiddo, no split tails, so maybe we’ll eat at a real truck driver’s diner on the way home. The kind of place your mother hates.”
“That sounds cool dad.”
Mark Denton weaved his way out of his Virginia Beach subdivision and swung onto West 44, the Virginia Beach Expressway. They both knew every inch of the route which would take them down into North Carolina, where they had a cottage near Harvey Point along the Albemarle Sound.
Danny said, “At least they’re letting us keep our shotguns and bolt actions. We’ll still be able to go hunting this fall.”
Mark Denton stared at his son through his green-lensed aviator’s sunglasses. “Isn’t that special. They’re ‘letting’ us keep some of our guns. ‘Letting’ us. For how long? What ever happened to the second amendment? What ever happened to ‘shall not be infringed’? Danny, when I was twenty-two, just a few years older than you are now, the government handed me a fully-automatic M-16, and all the ammo I could carry, and sent me out to kill as many NVA as we could find. No tag limit, and no season!
“And now I can’t keep the semi-automatic AR-15 that I bought twenty years ago. Your grandpa Denton hauled an M1 Garand from Guam to Okinawa, and our own government sold me that surplus Garand in the golf bag for 250 bucks. Now they don’t trust me with it any more, and I’m supposed to just throw it in a police dumpster. Same thing with your M1 carbine: your Uncle Herbie brought it back from Korea, no problem. It was okay for Herbie to bring it back on a troop ship in ‘51, but now we can’t keep it any more. They don’t trust us any more, because of what one lunatic supposedly did up in Maryland. Supposedly. And now all of the semi-autos have to go. Danny, you do understand what’s happening, don’t you?”
“Well, at school they said it’s for everybody’s safety. It’s for the common good.”
“For the common good, my ass! Danny, it’s all about power: who’s got it, and who doesn’t. Just about the only weapons a SWAT team is afraid of are these semi-auto rifles. They’ll cut through Kevlar vests, and they put out plenty of firepower. Shotguns won’t penetrate their body armor, and bolt actions are too slow. With the semi-autos out of the way, the SWAT teams can go anywhere they want and pick up anybody with no trouble. No muss, no fuss. Anybody, anytime.”
“But only if you’re a criminal, dad. We don’t have to worry, because we don’t break the law.”
“Are you kidding? We’re getting ready to break it today! And the way things are going in this country now, anybody can be arrested for breaking one damn law or another just about any time. If you do your taxes wrong, or you step on a rare endangered cockroach, or if you fill in a puddle without the EPA’s permission, your ass will be hauled in front of a judge. And if you won’t go, they’ll send the SWAT boys to bring you in… or kill you.”
“Dad, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but…you know, you’re sounding kind of…paranoid. That’s what mom says.”
“Yeah? She does? Paranoid? Well maybe getting shot a couple of times in Vietnam and Laos will do that to you! Danny, I saw a lot of good men die, better men than me by a long shot, and I killed some folks too, and I learned something important: the big difference between coming home alive or in a tin box is firepower! Smooth talking lawyers and preachers and congressmen won’t save your ass when it gets down to brass tacks! When it’s really crunch time, when you’re right down in the mud and the blood, there’s only two kinds of people: the ones with the fire power, and the dead ones. Fancy words don’t mean crap when somebody’s pointing a gun at you!
“You know, when I was shot on my second tour, that’s the purple scar across my hip, we were almost out of ammo. We were hauling ass to a landing zone near the Laotian border, and I was down to just my .45. I was getting carried along by my buddies like you help your grandma. Now a .45’s a great handgun, but don’t let anybody kid you, AK-47’s will trump it every time. That is, until a friendly Huey with a pair of mini-guns shows up and trumps their sorry asses! Oh yeah!” Mark Denton smiled at the old memory of the sudden reversal of fortune, which had saved his life. “That’s what it always gets down to Danny, trump the chump. And if you’ve got no firepower, you’re the chump.”
“Then why are we going to bury these rifles?”
Mark Denton had to pause and think about that one. “Well, I guess I’m afraid one of our brainwashed commie neighbors might call the snitch line, and we can’t take the chance. We’d lose the house, I’d go to jail, hell, they might just shoot in the pyrotechnics and do a Waco on us, and burn us out. You know, when the SWAT boys find out they’ve got an old Special Forces guy holed up, they come in hot and heavy. They probably know about these rifles, at least the Garand. Hell, they sold it to me! I’m sure they have it all in a database somewhere. They might decide to pay us a visit, and maybe come in the hard way, at oh-dark-thirty. We can’t risk it.”
“But Dad, they can’t do that, that’s against the Fourth Amendment, right? No search and seizure without a good reason and all that?”
Mark Denton shook his head slowly. “Danny, you’ve got a lot to learn. That’s how it used to be, when the Bill of Rights used to mean something. But between the war on drugs and the war on terror, they can basically smash down anybody’s door and find a reason later. After Tuesday, they’ll have ‘probable cause’ to come charging into any gun owner’s house any time they want to, searching for illegal semi-autos.”
Their Jeep approached the I-264 cloverleaf interchange just after crossing into Norfolk, and Mark Denton signaled and moved to the right lane, slowed down and got ready to exit. A moment later there was a blinding flash and a fireball accompanied by a crashing thunderclap, and the Jeep, which had been traveling west at sixty miles an hour, was sent cart wheeling end over end down the highway in chunks. Pieces of the Jeep, pieces of Mark and Danny Denton, pieces of rifles, and thousands of bullets and ammunition fragments rained down and rolled along both sides of the highway for three-hundred yards.
Several other cars were destroyed or knocked out of control by the force of the blast, and a fifty-car pileup resulted in seconds. This happened on a warm September Sunday just before noon, when tens of thousands of tourists were flocking to the beaches, and in minutes both major highways backed up in solid gridlock for miles, to the north, south, east and west.
****
“Hey boss, it’s me. I’m in Norfolk. It just went down.”
“Oh? All right. It’s sooner than I expected. Everything cool?”
“Very.”
“Which one?”
“Number two.”
Wally Malvone looked at a copy of the potential target list he had given Bob Bullard at his house, after the poker game broke up Friday night. “Number two” on the list meant Mark Denton, a fifty-seven year old corporate attorney who lived in Virginia Beach. Denton was an avid hunter and NRA match target shooter, who at one point several years ago had been associated with the Black Water Rod and Gun Club. It wasn’t a tight connection, but it would be enough to stick in the public mind. Most important of all, Denton was a combat veteran who had done two tours in Vietnam with the Army Special Forces. Mark Denton was a former Green Beret, and therefore, he was obviously an extremely dangerous “angry white man.”
“Any collaterals?”
“Oh yeah, big time. He was turning off the highway. He would have been heading away from downtown if I waited any longer. Traffic was kind of heavy, so it’s a mess. But on the plus side, we really lucked out and scored some major bonus points! You should see the crash site. There’s pieces of rifle ammo all over the place, and I saw a cop carrying half of an AR-15. It looks like Denton was moving weapons. I saw .223 and 30 caliber ammo, so you can bet he had more rifles in his car, and the cops are bound to find them.”
“Hey, well, that sounds great! Okay, get on back up here, oh, anytime tomorrow. Have a big night out on the card I gave you, just stay out of trouble. We’re really looking good on this one. Oh, and make sure you watch CBA News tonight. I think they’re about to get a major scoop.”
****
Ranya Bardiwell changed into her disguise in a stall in the women’s bathroom on the first floor of Old Dominion University’s main library. She had spent a productive hour shopping in the downtown Norfolk Goodwill Store, and now she admired her new look in front of the long mirror above the row of sinks. Her hair was pulled back and pinned in a tight bun and covered with a crocheted Jamaican-style Rastafarian cap, and an oversized pair of orange-tinted glasses obscured her eyes. Her jeans, boots, t-shirt and bra were now in a large hemp shoulder bag, and in their place, she wore a calf-length Mexican peasant’s dress, with a deeply scooped front and tight elastic gathers under her breasts. She bounced her heels on her Birkenstock clogs and was satisfied with the visible jiggle it produced.
In less than five minutes, Ranya located her quarry, a pimply-faced freshman web surfing on a library computer in an isolated corner of the stacks on the second floor. There was an untouched tower of books beside him on the desk at his carrel, all of them concerning the Civil War.
“Oh, wow, are you a Civil War buff?” she asked, leaning over as she pretended to study the titles on the book spines. “Or should I say, the War of Northern Aggression?”
“Uh, yeah, sure, I guess so,” he stammered, his eyes darting between her face and her exposed cleavage. He had a slightly deeper voice than she had expected.
She said, “Nathan Bedford Forrest was the greatest Confederate general, even though he was a slave master and he started the Ku Klux Klan, don’t you think?”
“Uh, well, probably, but he was just in Tennessee. I think you have to consider the generals in Virginia to be much more important.”
“Hey, that’s a great point! Are you a history major?”
“I haven’t declared my major yet, but I think so.”
“Say, can I ask a teeny favor from you? I’m down here visiting my friends at ODU; I go to Georgetown. Are you online? Do you mind if I check my email for a few minutes?”
“What? Oh, not a problem, be my guest.” The pizza-faced frosh got up, offering Ranya his chair. “I need to go outside for a cigarette anyway. Take your time.”
Mission accomplished, thought Ranya, clicking to her favorite search engine as soon as he walked off. The tricky part was not finding Eric Sanderson’s home address: the tricky part was doing it from a computer that could not be traced back to you. Her queries of real estate sales, property tax and mortgage records would leave an electronic trail, and after Sanderson was shot Ranya knew that investigators would be checking those databases for anyone who had shown recent interest in his home and property. It was unlikely that even skilled cyber sleuths would get beyond the library’s computer network to find her unwitting accomplice, and even if they did, she was certain that he would not be able to provide a useful description above her neck.
It only took a few minutes to find Sanderson’s address and a bit of biographical data, including the fact that he had a ten-year younger wife, and two college-age daughters of his own. She went to a free satellite imagery website and zoomed in on the area around his house and made a quick hand-drawn sketch, because she had no capability to print out the overhead picture. Then Ranya deleted her computer “cookies” showing the sites she had visited, logged off, and was gone before the freshman returned to his empty chair.
Before leaving the library, Ranya made a stop in the reference section and located the U.S. Geological Survey elevation contour maps. She found the paper map covering the area around Sanderson’s house in complete detail, down to every stream and fence and dirt road. Each house and barn was marked on the map by a tiny black square. She slid the map out of its wide steel drawer, folded it up unobserved, and put it into her shoulder bag. Then she returned to the ladies’ room and changed back into her jeans; the peasant dress and shoulder bag and clogs went into her black daypack. She let her hair down, brushed it out, and left the library. She found the process of becoming another person to be quite enjoyable, the first diversion she had enjoyed since learning of her father’s death.
****
Bob Bullard was halfway through his bottle of room service scotch. He was staying on the seventh floor of the Virginia Beach Sheraton overlooking the Atlantic. Wally Malvone had said to enjoy a big night out on the credit card he had provided, and Bullard was not one to turn down such an offer. Access to shady unaccountable credit cards to cover operating expenses in the field was one of the attractions of leading the Special Training Unit.
The escort service he had called assured him that his “date” would be equipped to handle the card, and while he waited for her (“blond, long legs, big knockers”) to arrive, he lay on the king-sized bed in his boxer shorts chomping on a cigar and clicking between the cable news shows. Call girls loved his huge muscles and thick black chest hair; he could hardly wait for his “date” to arrive.
The Stadium Massacre and its aftermath was still the lead story, but now the rash of gun store arsons, the machine gun attack on the mosque in Portsmouth, and the breaking-news freeway car bombing were competing for the top billing. Bullard was proud that the freeway explosion was not only dominating the local news, but it was getting major play on the nationals.
It had been a good night’s work. He had quickly settled on Mark Denton as his target when he saw that Denton drove a Jeep that he parked on the street in front of his house. It had been a simple matter to jam the ten-pound bomb up under the chassis between the gas tank and the rear axle. He secured it in place with wire coat hanger rods that stuck two feet out of each end of the duct tape wrapped package.
Bullard knew that eventually fragments of the radio-firing device and the coat hanger wire might be discovered, but it didn’t worry him. For one thing, the analysis would not be completed for weeks if ever, and by then it would be old news. But Bob Bullard mostly didn’t need to worry because the bomb analysis would be done by ATF’s own Arson and Explosives Division, and he knew everybody that mattered down there.
Finally, it was time for the CBA nightly news. Bullard sat cross-legged on the king-sized bed, a glass of Chivas in one hand and a stogie in the other as the show began.
****
The blow-dried CBA weekend news anchor was visibly excited to be breaking a fast moving story ahead of the other networks, even ahead of The Sledge Report, for once! This had not happened to him in more months than he could remember, and he was lucky that the senior anchor was fly-fishing in Montana, or he would have been dragged in to claim credit for the CBA exclusive. This was a big break for the weekend anchor’s career, and could push him ahead of his backstabbing colleagues in the cutthroat race to replace the doddering senior anchor. He relished his coup as he was given the countdown to airtime.
“Good evening. CBA News has been covering the deadly car bomb explosion on the highway in Norfolk Virginia that claimed seven lives today. Now CBA News has learned from a senior federal law enforcement official that the driver of the vehicle that exploded was until recently a member of a mysterious anti-government militia group in southeastern Virginia. James Shifflett, the stadium sniper, may have also been a member of the same militia group.
“The driver of the Jeep, Mark Palmer Denton of Virginia Beach Virginia, was a successful corporate attorney with connections to the Republican Party. Interestingly, three decades ago he was a ‘Green Beret’ officer in Vietnam. Denton was traveling with his son when their Jeep exploded at the interchange of the Virginia Beach Expressway and I-264 in Norfolk. Both of them were killed, along with five others who had the horrible luck to be traveling near them at the same time. Twenty seven more were injured, many critically.”
The camera switched to an aerial view recorded earlier showing a scene of unimaginable gridlock stretching to the horizon in all directions. At the center was a highway cloverleaf strewn with cars, trucks and rescue vehicles.
“In the wreckage of the fifty-car pileup which followed the explosion, police found an entire arsenal of assault rifles, and literally thousands of assault rifle bullets scattered on the highway. All of the assault rifle bullets recovered are said to be deadly ‘cop killer bullets’ capable of penetrating any police officer’s bulletproof vest. Several of the rifles which were recovered have been positively identified as belonging to Mark Palmer Denton.”
Bullard laughed aloud at these inane comments. Virtually all rifle bullets made in the last century or two would penetrate Kevlar vests, so in the view of the network news writers, they were now all “cop killer bullets.” And thousands of bullets, which sounded on the news like enough for an army, would fit in a few shoe boxes and could be shot on a single weekend at a range. It was great to see that the networks were still singing from the ATF’s music sheet.
“Now our sources within federal law enforcement tell us that they have very strong information from informants within the Virginia militia movement, that Denton was on his way to plant his powerful bomb inside the Norfolk federal building. Our sources believe that the attempted bombing of the Norfolk federal building is related to the Stadium Massacre, and that the bomb was going to be detonated on Tuesday, when the assault rifle ban comes into effect.
“Our sources tell us that a faulty detonator, or old degraded explosives, possibly stolen years ago from an Army Special Forces depot, may have caused the premature accidental explosion. Forensics experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are now on the scene investigating all the evidence.
“Meanwhile the entire Tidewater Virginia region is a literal powder keg of fear and anger. Earlier today CBA reporter Beverly Bronwyn interviewed Muslim leader and community activist Sheik Ali bin Muhamed, whose Portsmouth Virginia mosque and community center was heavily damaged in a machine gun attack early this morning. Here is her report.”
An attractive blond reporter was holding her microphone in front of Sheik Muhamed, who was wearing a green military-style flak vest over white robes. Behind him were the shattered empty windows of his storefront mosque. All around him stood more than twenty bodyguards, angry-faced young African-American men in black suits and dark sunglasses who were openly brandishing pistols and shotguns.
“I’m telling you, I’m telling America, I’m telling the whole world that if these white-devil racist militias want a war, we’ll give them a war!”
He held up one of the leaflets that had been found after the attack. The visible headline of the pamphlet said in large block letters:
NIGGERS GO BACK TO AFRICA!!
MOSLEMS GO BACK TO HELL!!
“I was right back inside there last night when we were attacked,” the Sheik lied, pointing behind him to the open windows, which still had shards of broken glass hanging from the edges. “The machine gun bullets flew all around me, but mighty Allah, all peace be upon him, saw fit to protect his servant, to save him for his work, and I was not struck, all praise be to Allah, peace be upon him!
“These disgusting papers were left behind after the cowardly machine gun attack. Now you can see the kind of genocidal murdering butchers who are trying to exterminate us. Jimmy Shifflett was just the tip of the white devils’ iceberg! This paper says it is ‘Communiqué Number One from General Lee of the White Christian Militia of Virginia’, now, what does that tell you? I cannot even read to you all the filthy, evil, disgusting, vile, racist, anti-Muslim insults written on this so-called Communiqué!” Ali bin Muhamed’s hand was shaking; he held the paper by a corner with a thumb and one finger, as if it was infected with a deadly contagion. “Today we are demanding, demanding that the President send the Army into Virginia to smash these rampaging white-racist militias!”
The news cut back to the weekend anchor in the studio, a look of deep worry on his face. “There is a further development in the Stadium Massacre investigation. Experts from the ATF’s firearms tracking program have positively identified the SKS assault rifle used by Jimmy Shifflett as having been purchased by a founding member of the White Identity Militia group in Idaho. The rifle was purchased at a gun show in Coeur d’Alene Idaho in 1993 by Frederick Fultz, who was later convicted on federal weapons charges in 1999, and sentenced to fifteen years confinement at Leavenworth Kansas. In a strange twist of fate, Fultz hanged himself with a towel in his prison cell just one month ago, on August 16th.
“Tonight I am joined in the studio by Rutherford Cavanaugh, an expert on militia groups and domestic terrorism. Mr. Cavanaugh is the founder of ‘The Center to Study Militia Violence’ in Chicago, and is a leading consultant to the federal government on domestic terrorism. Mr. Cavanaugh, were you surprised to learn that Shifflett’s SKS assault rifle came from the White Identity Militia in Idaho?”
Cavanaugh was a morbidly obese balding man in his forties, with rolls of fat completely obscuring his shirt collar. “I’m not surprised at all, because we have found that there is a constant flow of militia members and assault weapons from state to state and from region to region. Working closely with federal law enforcement, we have discovered a nationwide network linking the most dangerous right wing militia fanatics, who frequently hide within the so-called ‘gun show circuit.’ So no, it’s no shock that Shifflett’s assault rifle came from the White Identity Militia.”
“What do you expect next, Mr. Cavanaugh? The assault rifle ban goes into effect less than 48 hours from now, on Tuesday at noon eastern time. Are the militias going to comply with the new law?”
“Well, just today we have seen a machine gun attack on a mosque in Portsmouth Virginia; that was clearly a white-racist militia attack. In addition, we have seen the attempted bombing of the federal building in Norfolk. So I certainly don’t see the militia violence stopping before the Tuesday deadline. But I hope and I believe that the right wing violence will end soon after the deadline, as even the most rabid gun fanatics come to accept the new law of the land. After all, Europe and the entire civilized world have accepted common sense gun laws for decades, and so will all good and decent Americans, given time.”
“Thank you Rutherford Cavanaugh.”
“Thanks for having me on.”
****
Back in his room at the Sheraton, overlooking the ocean, Bob Bullard couldn’t stop grinning. Wally Malvone, the unnamed “senior federal law enforcement official,” was a genius! He was playing 3D chess when the rest of the country was struggling to learn checkers. Bullard was certain now that the President would give the green light to upgrading the Special Training Unit into a larger and permanent Special Projects Division, just the way that Malvone had laid it out. When that happened, he would get some of these magic credit cards of his own to keep.
There was a knock on his door; his “date” had arrived. Life was great. Bob Bullard was on a solid winning streak with no end in sight, and it was only going to get better.
“Come on in Sugar Darlin’, and say hi to your new Sugar Daddy!”