Foreign Enemies and Traitors

FOREIGN  ENEMIES

a n d     t r a i t o r s

MATTHEW  BRACKEN

Steelcutter Publishing

Orange Park, Florida

  Kindle Edition 2011

This novel is a work of fiction.  The events and characters

described herein are products of the author’s imagination.

 Any similarities to actual persons are entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2009 by Matthew Bracken

All Rights Reserved.

This work, or any parts thereof, may not be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means; electronic, mechanical or otherwise without specific prior written permission from the author
.

ISBN 0-9728310-3-7

Library of Congress Control Number

2009903357

www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com

To Ellie, Brendan and Lauren, who are my world.

                                  
Acknowledgements:

Thank you to my brother, Joe Bracken, Jefferson Adams, Matt Bastian, Kasey Beltz, Dave Brown, Charlie Byrd, Beth Gunn, H.J. Halterman, Rob Henry, Arthur Hines, Kevin Knox, Jim Kononoff, Frank Parker, Robert Patty, Caylen Perry, Rita Samols, Joe Smith, Mark Spungin, Tim Ziegler and my sister Clare Strange for creating all of my cover art.

Also by Matthew Bracken:

Enemies Foreign And Domestic

A novel about the true meaning of loyalty and the

high cost of freedom in the age of terror.  (2003)

Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista

A novel about the deconstruction of the American

national identity and the loss of the Southwest. (2006)

Castigo Cay

The first Dan Kilmer novel, about a former Marine

sniper trying to live free in an unfree world.  (2011)

Over 100 pages of each book may be read at

www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

 Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

     Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

                Sir John Harrington, 1607

             
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

               Who shall guard the guards?

                                                         
1

The sailor cranked the wheel
from side to side,
swerving the fifty-foot catamaran in time to match the waves.  Lightning lit the ocean every few seconds.  In between flashes, his world was a black void, with mountainous swells rushing at him unseen.  The trick was to surf the waves at an angle, riding the biggest ones for as long as possible.  The problem was he couldn’t see them in the dark.  He’d surfed hundreds of waves in the last day and night, and had developed a finely tuned feel for the rhythm of their lift and rush, but in the end, his steering was intuition and guesswork. 

The greatest danger was stuffing the boat’s two knifelike bows into the bottom of a trough, then being lifted from behind by the next wave, flipping the boat stern over bow.  Once over, she would be permanently capsized, her mast aiming at the sea floor, her cockpit submerged under salt water.
 

The boat was running northward without a scrap of sail up, but even the bare mast and rigging presented too much resistance to the storm winds.  His backlit digital speedometer was reading in the twenties, as it had been for more than a day.  Since before Paulo had been lost overboard.  Since before the autopilot had burned out and he’d been forced to hand-steer the big catamaran. 

Phil Carson was sailing in a nameless December hurricane, lost somewhere in the northern Gulf of Mexico.  The Gulf was wide enough to produce storm waves twenty feet and higher, and shallow enough to make their onrushing faces stand up vertically.  Unlike in the open Atlantic, there was not enough sea room to sail out of danger before running into the land lurking over the unseen horizon.  He had no idea how much Gulf he had left in front of him.  GPS was a memory, a fondly recalled dream.  Either the old global positioning satellites were down, or their information was encoded and unreadable by civilians.  It didn’t matter which.  GPS was finished as far as Phil Carson was concerned. 

In this ugly weather, old-fashioned celestial navigation was just as useless.  He had not glimpsed the sun through the cloud cover in the two days since rounding Cuba, so he had no idea of his location.  After three days of “dead reckoning” in storm winds, navigation was a wild-ass guess, give or take hundreds of miles in any direction.  Now he was too fatigued to dedicate any mental energy to refining his guesswork.  He was somewhere between Texas and Florida.  He’d know where the land was only when he hit it—if he didn’t capsize and drown first. 

Since dawn, he’d been alone.  At the 0600 change of watch he’d come up from the boat’s Spartan galley with a thermos of coffee, only to find no trace of his crewman.  The boat was still running fast on the electric autopilot, leaving twin wakes of churning white water astern.  Paulo wouldn’t wear a safety harness.  Safety lines violated his fatalistic sense of Latin machismo.  Well, too bad for him—there was no way possible to bring the cat around and sail back against the storm winds.  By now Paulo was dead, drowned fighting the monster seas.  After sixty-four years, Phil Carson had seen enough death to know that there were worse ways to check out.  He was too numb from exhaustion to grieve for his crew.

He’d picked up the young Brazilian as last-minute crew in Recife, when the Dutch kid and his Martiniquen girlfriend had jumped ship.  He didn’t even know Paulo’s last name—or for that matter if Paulo was even his real name.  He had no papers that Carson had seen, and smugglers weren’t much on sharing biographies—especially across a language divide.  Only sailing skill, stamina and guts mattered for a smuggling voyage.  Now with Paulo gone and the autopilot dead, he was unable to take his hands off the leather-covered stainless steel wheel, lest the catamaran swerve out of control and capsize amidst the wild waves.

Lightning strikes crashed down to port and starboard like artillery, and his bare mast was a sixty-foot aluminum finger scratching the clouds.  Then, without warning, green balls of light were rolling up and down his mast’s wire rigging—Saint Elmo’s fire.  Phil Carson was out of adrenaline and incapable of greater fear or new amazement.  When the crackling glow disappeared with a final upward flash, so did the comforting backlights of his speedometer, his depth sounder and his magnetic compass.  His last remaining electronics had been fried.  Now the only light came from the strobe-like flashes of lightning, illuminating the saltwater canyons. 

The catamaran climbed again, over the next wave, fifteen, twenty feet up and over.  At the crest, a brighter flash far ahead left the flat line of the horizon clearly frozen for an instant.  On the horizon, still printed on his rods and cones after the flaring millisecond view, was a line of ships.  On the next wave top the ships became a row of buildings, which meant land dead ahead.  They were no more than a mile away if they were small structures, maybe a few miles off if they were large towers.

At over twenty knots of boat speed, he knew that it wouldn’t take long to get there.  His teeth and his hands were clenched as salt spray hit his face like warm hailstones flying sideways.  Another instantaneous view atop another lightning-lit crest, and the buildings were much closer.  Beyond astonishment or fear, Phil Carson hung onto the wheel as the catamaran’s twin hulls flew between concrete towers.  With the last of his energy, he braced for impact but none came.  Past the line of buildings, the waves diminished to less than ten feet in height for the first time in days.  These mere ripples were no impediment to the catamaran.  He thought he’d probably surfed right over a narrow barrier island, a coastal strip drowned under the storm surge, and into a bay. 

Then as swiftly as he’d passed between the condominium towers, the catamaran was sailing into a debris field.  Lightning bolts strobe-lit a mad wilderness of trees, roofs, boats and cars.  The yacht flew over and through the storm-driven trash.

Then came the impact—and nothing after that.

****

The wind awakened her. 
Not the wind per se, but the sound of trees blown about and jostled by the wind.  Her newly constructed home was in a clearing surrounded on three sides by ponderosa pines as tall as a clipper ship’s mast.  It took a strong breeze to start the Wyoming giants to groaning and creaking like this.  Ranya’s bedroom was on the second floor, and with no close neighbors there was no need to shut the curtains.  As the big pines swayed, between them she caught glimpses of the moon above the rim of Mount Baldy.  That wasn’t the mountain’s real name, but the one that her eight-year-old son, Brian, had given it.