Foreign Enemies and Traitors (2 page)

Their home was surrounded by miles of pine forest, but its exterior was not built of wood.  She had insisted on this.  Instead, they had it custom built from granite stones, trucked up from a quarry near the Wind River and cemented together.  The steeply pitched metal roof was guaranteed to be fireproof, also at her insistence.  The gray rock home was their fortress and their refuge.

The bedroom door slowly creaked open, and she sensed small feet padding across the floor.  A warm wraith slid under the down comforter and nestled against her back.  Ranya turned, wrapped Brian in her arms, and pulled him tightly to her.

“I’ll protect you, Mommy,” he murmured sleepily, as she smiled and pressed his little face to her flannel pajama top. 

“I know you will,” she whispered back.  Outside, the trees continued to growl and snap as the wind hissed and moaned through a million branches.

“When is daddy coming home?”

“Friday.”

“Two weeks is a
long
time.”

“I know,” she agreed.  “Two weeks is a very long time.”

Alex was in Spokane, Washington, training for the Wyoming State Militia.  He was learning how to fire the new Korean shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles.  When his course was finished, he’d be qualified as an instructor.  This meant that for two weeks, Ranya and Brian were alone on their two hundred acre estate, but she wasn’t worried.  Ranya Bardiwell could take care of herself, and neighbors could be reached on the emergency radio net by day or night. 

Her neighbors (the closest were a half mile away), didn’t know her as Ranya Bardiwell.  She was now Robin Douglas, thirty years old, the wife of Alan Douglas and the mother of Brian.  This had been her identity for two years, and she had grown into it.  She had
become
Robin Douglas, even if she could not forget her old life.

Alex—Alan—had suggested their new last name.  Garabanda and Bardiwell were far too unusual, glowing beacons for any identity-tracking program.  A last name that was also a common first name was just the opposite: database camouflage.  Alex became Alan, so that if anyone from his previous life as an FBI Special Agent recognized him in public and called out his old first name, it was similar enough to his alias, that the alias would not be betrayed to anyone in earshot.  Brian kept his own first name.  It was ordinary enough, and the child had been through too many wrenching changes already.

Ranya chose Robin.  This was not a common first name, but she had insisted.  Robin was a nom de guerre from her old life, and she was comfortable with it.  It was a private link to her secret past, a name given to her by Phil Carson during their month of high adventure and eventual tragedy in Virginia.  She briefly thought of Carson and wondered where he was now, and if he was well.  Years ago, he had said that she was the closest thing to family that he had in the world.  Despite their thirty-year age difference and lack of blood connection, they were sibling orphans because of their shared experiences and losses. 

The last time she had seen Phil was when she left Colombia, to fly home to America.  She had returned so that Brian could be born in the USA as an American citizen, instead of being raised on false papers as the child of an overseas fugitive.  No good deed going unpunished, she had been arrested in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport upon her arrival in the States.  Brian was born while she was in prison.  Ranya lost the first five years of his life before escaping from the detention camp in Oklahoma.  It seemed like a dream now, rediscovering Brian in New Mexico, then kidnapping him in San Diego with Alex’s help, and flying to Wyoming to begin new lives.

And so, the freshly minted Douglas family had settled into the foothills of the Rockies after their escape from California.  Their arrival had drawn no attention—they were one family among many thousands making a similar trek to freedom.  The source of their wealth was never challenged, gold and silver coins being universally accepted in the American West.  With gold coins offered in payment, signatures and identification were never an issue.  Gold required no official stamp of government approval, no bureaucrat’s printed form nor any banker’s countersigned validation.  Gold coins carried no history or baggage, but only unquestioned value based on their weight and purity, and nothing else.  In the free states there were no more dollars and cents, only grams and ounces of gold and silver.

Alex called it “God’s money,” because unlike paper dollars, only He could create gold.  Ranya thought of their golden treasure as a measure of God’s mercy, after what she had endured before arriving in Wyoming with Brian and Alex. 

****

He sensed light,
but his eyes were stuck closed.  Phil Carson was lying on his back on a hard surface.  His head ached, and it took a long time to regain full consciousness.  His first memories were of the storm, and sailing between condominium towers.  His fingertips touched the floor beside him and fanned out from his sides, and after a period of uncertainty, he determined that he was down below in one of the catamaran’s twin hulls.  The boat was still.  Perfectly still.  It was the stillness of dry land, a foreign sensation after weeks of ceaseless motion.  He was not sure if he was in the port or starboard hull.  He felt around himself with a weak right hand and found the seat of his navigation station, and with grim determination he pulled himself up to a sitting position.  The navigation station meant that he was in the starboard hull, and the head, the toilet compartment, was behind him. 

He made it up to a crouch and felt his way through the narrow bathroom door to the sink, found a tap and turned it, but no water came out.  There was not even the sound of the electric pump.  He was puzzled until he remembered the ball lightning, and the electronics going out.  Probably his entire electrical system was shot.  There was also a manual lever-operated backup water pump.  He found the hand towel by feel, still hanging from its ring.  He leaned against the sink, wet the towel with a dozen quick strokes of the hand pump, and gently swabbed his eyes.  After a while, whatever dried gunk had stuck them together released its grip, and he tentatively opened them one at a time.

Well Phil, you’ve looked better
, he thought.  The face staring back at him from the mirror was a mess.  Both eyes were encircled by raccoon rings, and his skin was encrusted with dried blood.  His nose was cut and broken again.  Worse, he had a horizontal gash at the top of his forehead, just below his hairline.  The wound was as long and wide as a finger, still oozing blood.  His pale blue eyes were bloodshot, and his stubble of gray hair was matted with more dried blood.  The hair on his head was only a bit longer than his beard.  He’d gotten a boot camp crewcut in Recife, Brazil, before the voyage, and had not shaved since.  He slowly turned his head, studying his grizzled face, now bloody and bruised.  He filled a plastic cup with water from the hand pump, and drank it down.  At least the freshwater tank hadn’t been breached, even if the electrical system was ruined.

He left the tiny bathroom.  He had to walk hunched over; the headroom inside the hulls was an inch under his five foot eleven.  Forward of the navigation station and his narrow berth, the hull was still packed with its primary cargo.  Fifty large solar panels in this hull alone, each four feet by two feet and packed in a slim cardboard box.  All of the brown boxes still appeared to be dry, a testament to the catamaran’s solid construction. 

The Seabago had been built a decade earlier in Key West to Coast Guard specs, qualifying her to carry twenty-five day-tripping passengers on deck between the two hulls.  She’d been built both tough and light, of carbon fiber, Kevlar and epoxy.  After the tropical tourism trade died, Carson had picked her up cheap in Saint Barts for a smuggler.  Cheap, because her narrow hulls were built without consideration to permanent live-aboard habitation, not even providing standing headroom in the hulls.  There was no enclosed bridge deck cabin between the hulls, just flat space for passengers to sit during their excursions, and only webbed netting between the hulls forward of the mast.  He’d purchased Seabago for cash money without a vessel document or legal title.  As time went on this became less and less of a problem.  In the free ports Phil Carson had frequented from Brazil to Belize, possession equaled ownership—as long as a boat skipper paid his yard bills promptly.

What a run of bad luck he’d had!  His comfortable home in Porto Bello had been confiscated after the last Panamanian coup d’etat, when “rich” gringo expats had been scapegoated by the new regime.  He’d been lucky to get out of the country aboard Seabago with most of his gold, which had been just enough to finance this latest smuggling venture.  Now if he returned to Panama, he would risk prison—or worse.  Well, that was a moot point anyway.  How could he return to Panama or anywhere else in the Caribbean?  His remaining wealth was locked within the two hulls of this catamaran, in a most illiquid state.  He had no other base of operations left in the Caribbean, no home or even a home port to call his own, no refuge beyond where he stood.  Eight years after fleeing the United States on another sailboat, he had returned on a smuggling venture.  Now he was shipwrecked and stranded.

He climbed up the two teakwood steps from the hull and into the wide cockpit, to inspect the damage outside.  The sun was blazing overhead, between the whip ends of storm clouds escaping north.  The mast was gone from its familiar spot in the sky.  Looking forward with a hand shading his eyes, he stared at the rusting bow of a steel fishing vessel or tugboat.  Seabago’s twin hulls had straddled the tug’s bow on impact, and the immovable wedge of rusting iron had destroyed the cat’s forward crossbeam.  His boat was finished.  Seabago would never sail again, even if she could find saltwater to float upon.

When the crossbeam was destroyed upon impact, down had come the mast.  Unsupported by its forestay wire, the aluminum mast fell straight back, and now it lay across the cockpit and far astern of the cat in a snarl of tangled stainless steel rigging wire.  Other than the crushed forward crossbeam, the two hulls appeared to be intact.  What really finished the boat was its location: it was buried deep in a debris field left by the receding storm surge, with no ocean or bay in sight.  Smashed houses, telephone poles, overturned cars, shattered pine trees and random lumber and trash extended in all directions, even lapping over Seabago’s trapped hulls.  Everywhere in between was sand and mud and rubbish, laced together with half-buried wires, cables and ropes. 

Closer examination of the debris revealed an even more interesting fact: most of the surrounding destruction wasn’t new.  The steel tugboat he’d challenged with the cat’s fragile forward crossbeam had not recently come to rest on this spot.  It was a mass of rust—it had obviously lain in this place for many years.  A small tree, recently stripped of leaves, grew from its windowless pilothouse.  All around the catamaran, pieces of weathered gray plywood and other broken construction materials were stained by old dirt and mildew.  Saplings grew from within half-buried cars, sprouting through missing windows.  He was in a place that had been hurricane-blasted at least once before, and had not been cleaned up since.  A new layer of trash had settled over the old when last night’s storm surge receded.

The catamaran was a total loss, but his cargo was not.  There were a hundred Japanese solar panels he’d picked up in Recife; each was worth more than an ounce of gold in Texas.  Packed over and around the panels were 700 two-kilo plastic containers of Brazilian coffee, a luxury currently unavailable in the United States at almost any price.  Both cargos were worth a small fortune if they could be sold, but the boat was trapped in a labyrinth of storm wreckage.

His watch told him it was 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday, December 11.  At least the cheap digital timepiece still worked.  He removed his sextant from its mahogany case in the navigation station, and prepared to shoot a noon sun sight.  GPS was gone, but the sun and the stars remained—at least when they were not hidden by thick clouds, as they had been during the storm.  Low marshland provided an inexact horizon, but it would be enough to make a rough fix today. 

Back in the navigation station, he sat at his desk and entered the sun’s mid-day height into his pocket-size celestial navigation calculator, and his numbers were quickly converted to latitude and longitude.  A water-stained chart of the Gulf of Mexico lay unfolded on the small table.  He ran his finger up the longitude line to where it intersected the coast: he was in Alabama, between the Mississippi state line and Mobile Bay.

This was much, much further east than he had hoped, and his spirits sank.  His cargo was destined for Port Arthur in East Texas, the so-called Texas Republic…but here he was in Alabama.  Alabama was under some kind of martial law or emergency rule, from what he’d heard.  Even western Louisiana would have been better.  He would be lucky to get himself out of Alabama, much less find a way to sell his cargo.  Salvaging the cargo would require hundreds of trips on foot, across tricky broken terrain.  Even if he could salvage it, selling the cargo in Alabama would be difficult to impossible without local contacts—contacts he didn’t have. 

He had to face the new reality: his cargo was of no value to him if he couldn’t sell it, or even move it.  What were his alternatives?  He had enough food and water to remain aboard the trapped catamaran for a few weeks, but then what?  Eventually he’d be discovered, and his cargo would be found and taken away, either stolen by bandits or confiscated by government officials.

If he couldn’t stay, and he couldn’t sell or salvage his cargo; if the Seabago was a total loss and would never float again…what then?  Could he somehow find another boat and transfer the cargo?  How far across the debris field and the marshes was it to deep water, and could this movement be made without discovery?  Unlikely.  No…impossible.

Sixty-four years old, and shipwrecked again.  Sitting on a fortune in cargo that was useless to him.  Like a homeless pauper resting on a solid gold park bench, as they said in Brazil.  So what options remained?  Could he make his way across the debris and marshland to the bay, and then find some craft to sail back down island while leaving his cargo behind?  As quickly as he thought of this idea, he dismissed it as fantasy.  What seaworthy craft would be left floating and intact after a hurricane, just waiting for a stranded sailor?  Sailing back down island was not a realistic option.