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ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC
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PROLOGUE: OPENING DAY
The home team was set to receive the kickoff of their season opener. The 80,000 football fans packing the stadium were on their feet looking down at the two teams lined up on the vivid green field. It was a mild September Sunday in the Maryland suburbs of the nation’s capital, and every seat was taken by loyal crimson and gold wearing fans who were fervently hoping to see their team improve last season’s dismal record and make a run for the playoffs. The crowd noise reached a sustained roar as they watched the kicker trot toward the teed-up football, they saw the two teams rush at each other, and they followed the flight of the ball high into the air.
In the midst of this jubilant bedlam, in the center of the western end zone upper deck, a forty year old architect from Annapolis was struck by something on the left temple. He immediately collapsed forward, spurting blood over his friends and several other fans as he fell across the seats below. His shocking injury occurred while the football was still arcing through the air and down the field, so at first the louder screaming of the fans surrounding his crumpled bleeding body went unnoticed by the rest of the crowd around them.
Every two seconds a similar scene was repeated with horrifying variations across the western upper deck stands, as one fan after another was dealt a sudden bloody wound to the face, head, neck, shoulder, arm or chest. A few victims were killed outright, and some were only slightly grazed, but many received searingly painful wounds which caused them to shriek and jerk and fling blood in all directions. Every two seconds another tableau of unexpected violent trauma was created, sending out radiating bands of fear as the shouted word spread from mouth to ear among the trapped thousands: sniper! The waves of horror emanating from each new victim spread and merged and multiplied until the entire western end zone upper deck section became engulfed in seething animal panic.
A minute after the first victim was struck, with the kickoff returned to the twenty yard line and the home team huddled to pick their first play, the continuing frenzied crowd activity in the western upper deck stands was noticed by several cameramen around the stadium. The perplexed stadium video director selected a close up scene of some of the over excited fans and switched that camera onto the stadium’s two jumbotron screens. They immediately showed a house-sized image of a woman, her mouth open in an unheard scream, vainly using her hands to try to halt the flow of blood from a man’s face.
The rest of the 80,000 fans saw the ghastly open wound and his blood covered wife on the fifty foot tall video screens, and the panic began to spread from one end of the stadium to the other. Police radios crackled with reports of death and injury, police marksmen dashed out and scanned the stadium’s upper tiers and light towers through their binoculars and rifle scopes. The sudden appearance of black-clad police marksmen with their rifles shouldered was noticed by mystified fans throughout the stadium, adding depth to the rippling fear.
Complete panic erupted through the western upper deck as the realization spread like a wind-whipped forest fire that an unseen sniper had them in his deadly crosshair gaze. Six thousand adrenaline glands pumped out their ultimate fight-or-flight hormone. Unthinking mob psychology seized the crowd, and nearly all of the fans who were penned up in the killing zone stampeded down the steps and over the chairs. This fear driven horde charged straight over the smaller and slower fans in their desperation to reach the perceived safety of one of the four exit tunnels.
It had taken well over an hour before the game for six thousand cheerful individuals to fill all of the seats on the steeply sloping upper deck. Many of the fans routinely grew dizzy and flirted dangerously with vertigo while climbing the concrete stairs, which were as high and as steeply pitched as the roof of a cathedral. Now, gripped by primal terror and racing down to the exits, the thousands of fans attempted to do the impossible, they all attempted to escape the unrelenting rain of bullets in less than a single minute.
Police, paramedics, security personnel and the just plain curious were just beginning to rush from the stadium’s inside concourse through the tunnels to the stands when they ran headlong into the leading elements of the outpouring human tide. This slowed them enough to precipitate immediate jams at each of the four exits. But the terror of the fleeing mobs in the stands above the exit tunnels did not abate as the bullets continued to fall, and the crush began in earnest.
A hundred tightly pressed bodies, propelled by fear and assisted by gravity, pushed hard against each unlucky person already wedged against the safety railing at the bottom of the upper deck. The rails bent outward as the human avalanche gathered momentum, and then they buckled and victims began to tumble over. The falling victims were still holding tightly onto those above, pulling them over as well, and the solid cascade began. Dozens and then hundreds of linked victims fell past the VIP sky boxes, thudding down onto the fans packed into the lower stands ninety feet below.
He was jolted back from a peaceful place by blows to his head. He heard a gruff voice say “wake up asshole,” but when he finally forced his eyelids open there was no one to be seen. He wasn’t sure if the kicks and curses had been the bitter end of a dream, a hallucination, or reality.
Hairline cracks and spider webs on an unfinished cement ceiling came into focus above him; he could feel that he was lying on a cold rough cement floor. Familiar smells of concrete dust and some kind of smoke filled his nose. He rolled his head to the side and saw that an entire wall was missing, wide open to airy blue nothing only a yard from him. A breeze stirred white papers around the room and out to the sky, one page dipped as it fluttered past his face. He thought for a moment that he saw those crazy Arab worm letters on it, the worm letters he vaguely remembered from his time in the desert.
After years spent in and out of veterans’ hospitals and homeless shelters, Jimmy Shifflett was no stranger to waking up in strange places. He had come-to along the sides of highways, half in rivers, once even across the tracks on a railroad bridge. Randomly chosen construction sites and unfinished buildings were familiar surroundings. He raised his right arm to block the sun from his eyes, and saw a desert camouflage sleeve, something he could not remember wearing since his discharge from the Marines over a decade earlier.
The problem was that the damned nurses at the VA hospital put new drugs in your orange juice and never told you what to expect. They fed you new “study” pills by the handful like they were jellybeans. Some made you shake, some made you sweat, some brought nightmares and some brought peace. That’s what happened to a sick and broke vet: they used you for a damned guinea pig. Some of the nurses were nice though. Some were real angels come down from heaven. But they made you take the pills anyway.
There was a weight across his chest. His hands fell across something hard and hot, his fingers traced old half-remembered shapes and contours. Even for a hospital dream, this was a real doozy. “Any time now,” he thought, “I’m going to wake up in the VA hospital.”
In the meantime he used his elbows to push himself up into a sitting position, and looked down upon a strange rifle lying across his lap: black steel and brown wood, with a gray metal tube the size of several beer cans fixed onto the end of the barrel. There was a short black scope attached to a home made mount not straight on top of the rifle, but offset high on the left side. The scope was not only mounted off to the side, but seemed to be pointing downward, totally misaligned. A fat pad or pillow bulged out from the stock where a shooter’s face might rest; it was attached with wrappings of gray duct tape. A pair of bipod legs was attached to the barrel just behind the long gray can. A long curved ammunition magazine stuck out of the bottom of the gun.
It was without a doubt the ugliest and weirdest rifle he’d ever seen, as befitted a hospital dream, and after he finished looking at it he tried to set it aside but found it was attached to him by a sling made of green cord caught behind his neck. To get the cord over his head he needed to lift the heavy rifle up off his lap. If he wasn’t careful he could fall right out through the missing wall, but in a dream such as this he sometimes could fly. The dreams where he could fly usually started out scary but ended up happy, with him soaring like an angel over soft green meadows. Out the missing wall, past woods and fields and roads, way out in the distance stood some kind of huge multi-colored building. It looked for all the world like the mothership had just landed on earth to take him home. Or maybe they were just going to just do more experiments on him, poking and jabbing and injecting.
Suddenly dropping in front of the missing wall there appeared an insect-like blue and white helicopter, which slowly turned until its side was to him, its rotors invisible and unheard. “It’s not right they put the damned drugs in your juice and don’t tell you,” he thought, still trying to lift the rifle’s string over his neck.
“Roger that base, I have the shooter in sight. Confirmed shooter is in sight, he has a rifle, he has a rifle! He’s moving, take him out Billy, take him out!”
SWAT sniper Sgt. Bill Paxton found the subject only by his slight movement. The shooter was hard to spot, wearing clothes which matched the bare concrete of the half-finished office building which hid his sniper’s lair. A telephone tip from a civilian had alerted the police to the suspected sniper’s location, the tip was passed to the Maryland State Police helicopter, and they found him in under a minute after leaving their tight orbit around the stadium.
The sniper had found an A-1 position. Paxton had to give him professional credit; he was hundreds of yards beyond the stadium’s outermost security perimeter. No one had ever considered the fans inside the stadium to be in danger from such a distance, well over a thousand yards away. It had always been believed that any rifle shots fired from such a distance would either impact the stadium’s outer walls, or sail safely over it. This brainy sniper had somehow figured out a way to precisely drop his shots just over the near side of the stadium, and down into the opposite upper deck. Nobody had ever thought of it before, it was one for the books. This clever sniper had used a rifle for indirect plunging area-fire, almost like a mortar.
So Sgt. Paxton didn’t underestimate the shooter’s skill, and he quickly settled his scope’s mil dot reticle on his head. At 150 yards it wasn’t a challenging shot, even restrained by a harness sitting half out of the vibrating helicopter. The pilot held the chopper steady as Paxton squeezed his rifle’s trigger and fired a single .308 caliber hollow point, then flicked the bolt and reacquired his sight picture. There was no need for a follow up: the gruesome evidence of his accurately delivered head shot was clearly visible on the walls. The body of the sniper was sprawled flat on his back, and lying perfectly motionless.
CHAPTER 1
Two hundred miles south of the stadium at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay, thirty year old Brad Fallon sat alone in the tool-strewn cabin of his mastless 44 foot sailboat, staring at a small black and white television. A breaking news bulletin on the radio had caused him to put down his work and dig out the rarely watched portable 12 volt television. He sat transfixed, numb, the same way that he had up in Alaska when he had first seen the replays of the jetliners flying into the World Trade Center on another September day. No words spoken on the radio could duplicate the impact of seeing the actual events, even on a nine inch black and white screen.
His garage-sale Panasonic only received four broadcast channels, but it didn’t matter, because the network anchors had been found and brought to the studios, preempting all other programs. All of them wore similar black suits and maintained a funereal demeanor as they read the latest updates, interspersed with frequently repeated replays of the worst imagery of the disaster. The usual network talking heads were inset in the corners of aerial views of the stadium in suburban Maryland, near the Washington Beltway, where a full blown mass casualty triage and evacuation was underway. Familiar sports announcers provided grim eyewitness accounts from inside of the stadium.
The full proportions of the disaster were still emerging, but it appeared that a sniper shooting from outside had fired dozens or perhaps hundreds of bullets into the packed stadium, killing and wounding many directly, and precipitating a panic stampede. Many of the exit ramps and tunnels were still choked with tangled victims presumably both dead and alive. The seating areas beneath the upper decks which had become falling body impact zones were too gruesome to show on television. The whispered casualty estimates ran from hundreds to thousands depending on which expert was asked.
Military and civilian helicopters were landing directly on the football field. Charter buses which had come to the stadium full of cheerful fans were being pressed into service to augment the hundreds of arriving ambulances in removing the injured. Frenzied police struggled to open passable routes through the gridlock around the stadium. Commercial tow trucks were pressed into service clearing lanes, and abandoned cars were being pushed and pulled out of the way without regard to damage.
The stadium’s PA system continuously advised fans to find a seat and wait while rescuers removed the trapped victims. Some listened, but others crawled through exit tunnels over the heaps of dead and injured, searching for a way out, increasing the crushing weight on those struggling for their last breaths while buried alive far below.
Across America and around the world hundreds of millions of television viewers were once again absorbing the impact of mass casualty terrorism, not as the result of crashed jetliners or smallpox or anthrax or a suitcase nuke, but all apparently as the result of one sniper armed with an “assault rifle”. And this time, the carnage was ongoing, as the trapped continued to succumb to asphyxiation.
Two more weeks, three at the most, and Brad Fallon was sure that he’d be gone, right over that blue horizon, leaving America to work out its latest agonies without him. He had $75,000 banked after his last six month contract working in the Alaskan ANWR oil fields, a bought and paid for boat, and a mast and engine just waiting to be installed. If domestic events now unfolded the way he suspected they might, he guessed that he had picked an opportune time to leave the States for a few years of cruising the world’s tropical oceans and islands.
The networks broke simultaneously for an impromptu press briefing. The governor of Maryland, the mayor of Washington, and many recognizable national politicians stood behind the local chief of police, taking the opportunity to get their deeply concerned faces on national television. The uniformed police chief was handed a wallet by a helmeted SWAT officer wearing black tactical gear, cameras jerked as the press pushed forward. Microphones cut in and out and the grandstanding Chief of Police, making the most of his fifteen minutes of national fame, began a short statement.
“This wallet was just taken from the sniper’s body and brought directly to me by the commander of our tactical unit.” He slipped on reading glasses, and then he opened the shiny black wallet, oblivious to his contaminating possible evidence. He examined it for a moment, and then he turned it around to the cameras, which zoomed in on the ID cards behind two clear plastic windows. He cleared his throat and said “James R. Shifflett. The ID found on the sniper is in the name of one James R. Shifflett, of Norfolk Virginia.” Fallon’s TV picture zoomed in on the ID cards; a Virginia driver’s license and a military card of some sort. The tiny photos were too blurry to make out anything other than that Shifflett was a white man with light brown colored hair and a stringy mustache. Most of the printed information was too small and grainy to read.
It was a sign of the deep cynicism Fallon felt that he was not surprised that they put the sniper’s name and photo on national television right away: he seemed to be a garden variety Caucasian male. When an act of terrorism occurred and the suspect was from the Middle East or had a Muslim name, that fact was usually concealed for days, in order to dampen anti-Muslim anger. The way that the broadcast television networks strived to “protect” their viewers from politically incorrect news was one reason Fallon’s TV set usually stayed buried in a locker. He listened to AM news-talk radio to find out what was really going on.
Brad Fallon had hoped that he would get his new 80 horsepower Perkins turbo diesel aboard Guajira today, or at least from the dock over onto her deck, but as the afternoon wore on he resigned himself to waiting until Monday. The news that the sniper was from Norfolk gave him a sense of unease, drawing the day’s horrific events uncomfortably close.
The Suffolk Virginia police department needed less than thirty minutes to discover James Shifflett’s last domicile, a dilapidated thirty foot camper trailer located at the end of a long dirt driveway. The trailer was tucked back among pine trees and was almost invisible from the paved state road, where the first TV vans were sending up their microwave antennas. The hundred yard long driveway and dusty weed-choked yard was already packed tightly with marked and unmarked police cars, a SWAT truck, and mobile crime scene vans.
The SWAT team and bomb disposal technicians quickly examined the trailer for booby traps; one of the local TV crews with a lucky camera angle captured the sight of SWAT officers carrying out rifles in each of their hands. This damning evidence was laid on top of the hood of a police cruiser as a temporary exhibit, and camera crews were permitted in to film them. By two PM the entire world knew that James “Jimmy” Shifflett was a fanatical gun nut, who had lived in a trailer containing an “arsenal” of five rifles and shotguns and over two thousand rounds of ammunition. His small library contained books on sniping, bomb construction, and white supremacist hate literature.
Even as millions of TV viewers were still watching and rewatching video clips of the day’s bloodbath in the stadium, and while the residents of southeastern Virginia were absorbing the fact that a local man had gone berserk and caused it all, the never-stopping gears of the federal government were turning out reactions, responses, and contingency plans. The new and untested president, in office only eight months, called an emergency meeting of the Homeland Security Team in the White House situation room beneath the Oval Office. One of their first decisions was to ask the national television networks for a prime time slot to give a brief presidential address to the country at nine PM eastern time.
All afternoon millions of families sat quietly in front of their televisions as the toll of dead and injured mounted. They watched as the triage of victims continued on the stadium parking lots. They saw an unending stream of departing ambulances, and helicopters flicking in and out. In several areas around the stadium the steadily increasing ranks of the dead were laid side by side covered with blankets and sheets. Over and over Americans watched replays of the fateful moments after the kickoff when something strange began to happen in the western end zone upper deck, which in two minutes became a life and death stampede for 6,000 desperate fans.
That false rush to nonexistent safety ended cruelly as the lowest fans were pushed ever downward by the sheer weight of the fleeing crowds above them, until their broken bodies collapsed the railings at the bottom. At last they tumbled over the edge in linked clusters, falling nine stories down onto the disbelieving fans below them. This horror show then triggered a general panic throughout the stadium, and even though the sniper had fired only a limited number of bullets into one section, the entire stadium dissolved into a bedlam with hundreds and thousands of trapped fans jamming every exit tunnel. The stronger behind climbed up over the weaker ahead until every way out was plugged with choking and groaning masses of crushed and suffocating humanity.
The video clips of the thousands of fans tumbling from the upper deck to their deaths before the unblinking television cameras became the indelible image of the day, even though far more victims died trampled and asphyxiated and unseen in the exit tunnels.
“Get me the gun! I want to have the gun during the address,” President Gilmore told his Assistant Chief of Staff.
“Mr. President, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think we can emphasize the enormity of the tragedy without resorting to any… theatrics which may detract… “
“I said get me the damn gun! Where is it? Put it on a chopper, do what it takes, I want that damn gun here by nine PM, is that clear enough?”
President Edward Gilmore sat behind his Oval Office desk in a black suit and a charcoal tie, the lights hot on his makeup-caked face. It was funeral director’s attire, he thought, his eyes on the teleprompter, and a funeral director is what I am tonight. The clock ticked down to nine PM.
“Good evening my fellow Americans. I come to you tonight with a heavy heart, a broken heart. As of my latest information over 1,000 of our fellow citizens have died since today’s catastrophic events. Thousands more lie in almost a hundred hospitals up and down the coast, many near death or on life support, as our wonderful doctors and nurses work into the night to save them. My prayers go out to all of the victims and their families, and to our heroic medical staffs who are working so hard to save lives even as I speak.
“I have received over one hundred telegrams and letters and calls of condolence from leaders around the world on this terrible day, and it is difficult for me to find the words with which to answer them. Difficult because this was not a natural disaster which befell us today, nor was it an accident, nor even an act of war by a hostile power or a foreign terrorist group.
“No, my fellow Americans, this was an act of sheer malice, a calculated act of evil springing from the darkest pit of our own national heart. This was an act made possible only because of a peculiar sickness in our American culture. Today’s tragic event resulted from our inexplicable national love affair with firearms and weapons of war, like the assault rifle which was used today to mow down our friends and neighbors.”
Jimmy Shifflett’s murder weapon had been placed upright against a wall, at a sufficient distance from the president that the camera would not place it with him in the same view. President Gilmore pointed toward the rifle and another camera cut briefly to it. Across America and around the world viewers saw the ugly black and brown rifle, with its long menacing home made silencer, and its curved banana clip magazine. It had a telescopic mounted on the left side and pointed down at the exact angle which would raise the barrel just enough to loft its bullets over the stadium walls from 1,250 yards away. Ugly as it was, the obsolete Russian-surplus military rifle exuded menace. It had been cheaply but effectively customized into a long range crowd killer, it was clearly the product of a cunningly evil mind.
“I am told that this is an SKS assault rifle, manufactured decades ago in the former Soviet Union, and legally sold in any gun store in America for under one hundred dollars. It was built to hold ten bullets at a time inside it, but it has been modified to accept thirty round magazines. It can fire the thirty bullets automatically, as fast as the trigger can be pulled. Three of those magazines, ninety bullets, created today’s massacre.
“Apparently Mr. Shifflett was a former Marine, and served his nation with honor in 1991 during the first Iraq war. Since then he has been beset by numerous health problems, including mental health problems, and he had been hospitalized for both physical and psychiatric reasons many times. Yet in spite of that troubled personal history, Mr. Shifflett was able to acquire a virtual armory of assault rifles, including the one responsible for today’s carnage.
“Something is very deeply wrong in our country, when a long-time mental patient is able to obtain a private arsenal of assault rifles. Something is very, very deeply wrong, and now it is time to correct that wrong.
“So I have asked the leaders of both parties, many of whom witnessed the horrific stadium massacre today in person, to take up this issue without delay. It is long past time to acknowledge that our gun laws, which utterly failed to keep assault rifles out of the hands of a dangerous psychotic, are not sufficient to provide for the safety of our people. It is long past time that the United States of America addressed its unholy love affair with weapons of war and death. We must join the ranks of all other sane and civilized nations in keeping these awful instruments of death away from criminals and the unbalanced. Let Congress address this cancer eating at our soul without delay, so that there can be no more assault rifle massacres.
“Good evening, and may God bless and have mercy on the United States of America.” |
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Copyright © 2002 by Matthew Bracken, All Rights reserved
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