Authors: Lewis Perdue
Once across the Roebuck Lake bridge at the east end of Itta Bena, the motorcyclist settled into a breakneck pace that would have been suicide for a less experienced rider, especially when the blacktop ran out southeast of Runnymede and fed into a wide, rutted lane of still-frozen gravel, sand, and mud. She wore a black helmet and was androgynously clad entirely in the woodland camouflage favored by local deer hunters. With her rifle slung crosswise over her back she looked pretty much like most any other hunter that time of the year.
The warmth glowed in her belly. Relaxed. Satisfied. At peace. The tingles of the orgasmic release crackled about her skin and warmed her thighs and groin where she hugged the saddle. She liked killing when it was quick and cold, but loved it like this morning, when she could expel every bit of anger and frustration from her body with just the right shot. Head shots were the best.
Behind the helmet's visor, her face was a smooth postcoital mask that did not change as she blew quickly past groups of black people, walking along the road in twos and threes. She gave no thought to them or the groups of old black men with old cynical eyes sitting on the steps of cheap mobile homes, which had replaced the gray, weathered wood shacks in which they had grown up. Their old eyes had watched the world change from one of poverty, official segregation, and legal inequality to one of poverty, de facto segregation, and de facto inequality. This was progress as good as they expected in this life.
The unpaved road cut through a winter Delta sameness as flat and featureless as an empty table. The motorcyclist glanced frequently in the rearview mirrors. Ragged tatters of bolls left behind by mechanical pickers clung to the sepia-black skeletons of last year's cotton crop and raced past her on both sides. In every direction, the fields gave way only to rows of winter-bare trees bordering water and marshy areas too wet to farm. The land was flat as a still pond, owing to the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers, the Big Sunflower and the Little Sunflower and the Yalobusha and a score of other tributaries of the Mississippi, which had meandered across the Delta for thousands of years, leaving behind countless oxbow lakes like Roebuck and depositing layer after layer of rich, black soil that still made for the best cotton growing in the world. The Delta's fetidly omnipresent moist smells were absent on this day, frozen to sleep by the winter cold.
There were unseen and mostly unimagined hills beyond the cinched-down horizon. That much she knew: southeast of her at Yazoo City and east at Carroll County. But here, a lid of haze squatted atop the land, creating an artificially close horizon cutting off visions of what might exist a few miles beyond. The grinding flat sameness threw a blanket of myopia over Delta culture. Geography became destiny as the flat topographic conformity imposed its two-dimensional will on the people, rolling their ambitions as flat and thin as cheap grits.
Some found the Delta inspirational in its adversity, especially those who had found their way to the hills and beyond.
In moments, she had left behind the last of the mobile homes and pedestrians, then began to slow as she strained to discern the overgrown dirt ruts leading down to the lake where she had left her truck. She downshifted as the road made a gentle arc toward the gray-green canopies of the cypress trees she knew grew only submerged in the silty waters of the old Yazoo River oxbow.
She found the frozen mud ruts easily enough, but less than twenty yards off the main road, the first complication of the day arose. Calmly, she rolled to a stop, stretched her left leg, and killed the engine. Options ran through her head as she took in the rusting Chevy Monte Carlo with a missing rear bumper and cardboard taped over one rear passenger-side window. The fabric of the landau roof had almost finished peeling off; a coat hanger emerged from a broken antenna. The loud, clear tones of a black gospel station reverberated from the car's radio. Her older, tan Ford 150 pickup truck sat less than ten feet away.
She dismounted, rested the bike on its kickstand, and made her way down the path on foot, unslinging the M25 sniper rifle as she walked. The gospel music masked her steps as she made her way down a steep slope ending at the edge of the brown, still water where a stooped, gray-haired black woman stood patiently holding on to a long bamboo fishing pole, which had been patched with gray duct tape. In the water, a large red-and-white float bobbed with the faint movement of the water. Nearby, two small children, warmly bundled into roughly the same shape as two tan hush puppies, played with some sort of yellow, blue, and red plastic toy. Grandma and her daughter's kids, the motorcyclist assumed.
Nailed high on a tree right next to the grandmother, a brilliant white sign with bright red letters warned of pesticide runoff from the adjacent cotton fields. The sign prohibited commercial fishing and cautioned individuals not to eat more than two meals per month of carp, gar, catfish longer than twenty-two inches, and no buffalo fish at all.
The cyclist thought about this neutrally as she raised the M25 and squeezed off two quick rounds, neatly taking out the two mobile targets first. Grandma dropped her fishing pole and turned, her face wide with fear and confusion. Then the cyclist shot her too. The slug went neatly through the round O of the grandmother's surprised lips and showered fragments of her cervical vertebrae into the water. The woman staggered and fell backward into the lake.
With quick, precise moves, the cyclist went back to her bike and drove it down to where the slope began. Then she dismounted and with the aid of a little throttle, ran the bike down the slope and into the water. The bike slowed, sieved, sank. The cyclist nodded, satisfied when the last inch of handlebar sank beneath the brown water
Next, she took the time to administer confirmation rounds to each of her three targets, then hurled the rifle high over the lake. She felt a moment of regret as the rifle and its Leupold sight rotored lazily out over the brown water.
The M25 had been tuned by one of the world's best gunsmiths, a man who had been her spotter when they'd picked off Taliban ragheads in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. She remembered sitting up in a notch of rocks on the border and dropping those crazy fucks who thought they were safe once they hit the Pakistan side of things. She'd been loosely connected with the Army's 187th Rakkasan Brigade in March of 2002, part of the fierce combat of Operation Anaconda. She had a contest going with one of the Canadians and dropped her eighty-third confirmed kill at 2,420 meters, a record for a combat sniper until one of the Canadians dropped his target at 2,430 meters.
He got a medal and the next day she got an Al-Qaeda round right through her forehead and out the top of her scalp. Her medical discharge had left her in a deep depression until the medicine and the new opportunities arrived at her door unexpectedly just nine months ago. The thought brought a faint smile to her face. Unconsciously she touched the bottom of the nearly invisible scar the plastic surgeons had left and followed it to her hairline. There had been problems until she got the experimental drugs.
She cleared her mind and made her way calmly over to the pickup, opened the tailgate, pulled out the motorcycle ramp, and hurled it into the lake. Without watching it sink, she turned back and pulled a red, plastic, one-gallon gasoline container from the truck bed and set it on the ground about twenty feet from the truck. Blond hair cascaded onto her shoulders as she pulled off the crash helmet. She set it upside down on the ground, then stripped off all her outer clothes, leaving her in jeans, a Pendleton shirt, and the surgical gloves she always wore when she was working. She stuffed the helmet with her camouflage overalls.
Next, the motorcyclist unlaced her boots, purchased at the same Goodwill store in Jackson as the outerwear, and set them next to the helmet. Standing there now in thick ragg wool socks, she emptied the gasoline on the boots and helmet and set the container down next to them. Finally, she stripped off the rubber gloves, set them on top of the pile of camouflage, and set the entire ensemble afire with a wooden kitchen match.
Checking off the items in her head, she nodded to herself, then quickly made her way to the pickup's cab, exchanged her ragg socks for a fresh pair of white athletic socks, and slipped on her well-worn Nike cross-trainers. She scratched another wooden match on the steering column and waited while it flared off the sulfur and phosphorus before using it to light a Marlboro. She drew deeply on the cigarette as the fire established itself. When she was certain the fire had eaten any latent prints, she put the pickup in gear and drove away. She watched the smoke recede in her rearview mirror as she drove along, dragging furiously on the Marlboro. Finally, she tossed the lit butt out the window, reached for her cell phone, and hit the number one speed dial.
The morning sun struggled up over Napa Valley and glowed off the vast quilt of wine-grape trellises carpeting the valley floor. Southeast of Rutherford, retired general Clark Braxton raised his face to take in the brushy seismic mountains that rose steeply to define the east and west flanks of the valley. A small scattering of long-extinct volcano cones studded the table flat valley floor and rose a hundred feet or more above the surrounding vineyards like carefully placed stones in a raked-gravel Zen garden. Their scarcity turned the old volcanoes into objects of intense desire and envy, coveted as trophy home sites by the very wealthy who inflicted their architectural whims on the general public.
Braxton ran swiftly into the westernmost shadows of one such cone, finishing a ten-mile run in and through St. Helena. A hundred yards behind him, Dan Gabriel's steady, even breathing grew louder. Braxton picked up his pace around the red-and-whitestriped road barrier leading onto his fortified estate and saluted the guard inside the stone and bulletproof-glass hut. The guard, charged with making sure only the proper vehicles were allowed beyond, returned the salute.
A tastefully landscaped visitors' parking lot shaded by scores of olive trees lay to the right, mostly empty save for a black Lincoln Town Car and a dowdy plain blue sedan with U.S. government license plates. Neither of the cars' occupants were visible, and they had obviously taken the small, well-appointed aerial tram that conveyed privileged guests up the precipitous slope to Castello Da Vinci, the General's massive Renaissance palace atop the old volcanic cone commanding a 360-degree view of the valley.
Deliveries and tradespeople used a massive freight elevator running from the wine caves at the base of the old volcanic cone up to the mansion's service entrance. A smaller, parallel shaft housed a cylindrical and opulently appointed, glass-sided elevator that granted an elite subset of his guests access to marvel at the General's massive tenthousand-square-foot wine cellar, filled with a multimillion-dollar collection from the world's premier chateaus and wineries.
Clark Braxton was renowned for the intensity of his passion for collecting—wine, historical military medals, cigars, stamps, coins, among many. The press had written extensively about his near-maniacal obsession with making sure his collections were complete at all costs. He never collected art, he had told
Fortune,
because it was impossible ever to have a complete collection. "All it takes is one empty spot to ruin the whole thing, like a single drop of vinegar in a fine claret."
Fortune
had concluded, "General Clark Braxton brings the same sort of intense passion to wine as that which made him famous as a combat field commander. He is known in the esoteric world of wine as a collector's collector and a man who will make no compromises in his near-maniacal quest to fill empty slots in his collection."
Braxton picked up his pace as he approached the steep cobblestone drive where only the General's private vehicles and those of his armed guards were allowed. In front of the gate and again another ten yards inside sat twin retractable, steel vehicle barriers sturdy enough to resist the impact of a fully loaded semi at more than fifty miles per hour.
Flanking the gate now, two armed outriders sat astride idling trail bikes, whose exhaust systems had been extensively engineered to provide maximum power despite their whispering quietness, which assured the General tranquillity during his famous earlymorning runs. In their earpieces the men listened to the terse reports from their counterparts on identical bikes bringing up the rear.
The outriders, along with the sentries behind the greenish blue armored glass of the guard huts, were only a handful of the extensive, well-trained, and heavily armed security staff paid by Defense Therapeutics to make sure their chairman met with no harm from the legions of religious fanatics, kidnappers, terrorists, antiglobalization protesters, extortionists, white militia groups, and other assorted mentally marginal groups who viewed him as the distilled essence of everything they hated about the United States. Security was always paramount for a company like Defense Therapeutics, which developed and manufactured biowarfare vaccines, nerve gas antidotes, battle-hardened diagnostic devices, electronic dog tags, and other military medical supplies.
One cycle rider put a hand over the microphone at his throat and leaned over to his comrade.
"The old man's an inspiration," he said.
"Fucking unbelievable," the second rider agreed. There was no disguising the admiration in both men's voices.
Braxton turned around and ran backward. "Come on, Dan!" His voice boomed now as loud and unwavering as it had been in combat.
"You're getting soft, soldier!" Despite the chronic pain from half a dozen actionrelated wounds and injuries, including the head wound that had nearly killed him, Braxton prided himself on being as fit and physically capable at sixty-four as he had been at thirtyfour. That, along with his legendary heroism in battle, had propelled him to the very top of the presidential polls.
"I'll still beat you to the top, sir!" Gabriel yelled.
Braxton laughed as he turned and launched his sprint up the 15 percent grade. The driveway spiraled counterclockwise up the weathered volcanic cone for a quarter of a mile. Braxton called it "a real man's 440."
Along the left side of the drive ran a sheer wall of fractured, red volcanic tuft. Olive trees defined the perimeter of the outer curb, teasing sightseers with lacy glimpses of the valley floor.
Gabriel audibly picked up his pace now. He was a sharp, tough man who had been Braxton's capable sword arm during his endlessly trying political years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Gabriel later became head of West Point when Braxton resigned to become chairman of Defense Therapeutics.
Braxton bent forward into the steep slope, challenging gravity as if he were heading back up Hamburger Hill.
"I imagine the incoming slugs," he told the interviewer from
Forbes.
"You never forget that battle separates the quick from the dead, and I always wanted to be the quickest. It's amazing how light your boots can be when you're trying to outrun the devil."
Behind them, the cycle-mounted armed guards paced the duo at a distance.
Ironically, his near-fatal head wound had not come from a hill but from a griddleflat rice paddy in the Mekong Delta when a Vietcong ambush wiped out most of his Ranger unit. The initial VC attack with RPG-7s tore through their two Hueys. Braxton saw the first one go off like a bomb in midair. Braxton, then a freshly minted major and less than a month in country, hung on to his surviving chopper as they pancaked hard into the paddy and came under withering AK-47 fire. Braxton pulled his remaining men together and charged their attackers.
"Did you see the videotape of that old CBS footage?" the first armed outrider asked.
"Who hasn't?" said the second man. "I mean, all that footage with Cronkite's voice showed the American people a real giant. A genuine hero."
The first man nodded. I never get tired of watching it. Talk about inspiring."
On the VHS tape, now copied to scores of DVDs and streamed from the web sites of Clark Braxton's most admiring supporters, viewers watched Cronkite call it "the aftermath of hell": four wounded GIs thigh deep in mud surrounded by black-clad bodies floating in the nearby water. But the image that found an immediate place in the American heart and its mythology was the close-up on Major Clark Braxton's face, particularly the scorched, twisted, foot-long rod of Huey fuselage that had entered his forehead a hairbreadth away from his right eye and emerged from the top of his head. From his hospital bed in Saigon, a rank second lieutenant among the survivors, Dan Gabriel, had told the CBS war correspondent that the sight of Braxton, a man with a hideous wound who should have been dead, broke the nerve of the Vietcong, who were gunned down as they fled.
"He never even lost consciousness," the first outrider said as they moved stealthily up the steep drive. "Jesus! He never even hesitated a second!"
And that look of surprise on his face when the cameraman pointed out the fucking metal sticking out of his head," said the second outrider. "Fucking amazing!"
When he received his Congressional Medal of Honor, Braxton still wore a bandage over his postsurgical wounds. Postsurgical evaluation of Braxton indicated no physical or neurological impairment, a finding consistent with a small number of similar wounds carefully cataloged by medical science. Interviews with his instructors at West Point indicated his actions that day in the Mekong Delta had demonstrated far more courage under fire than expected from a student whom they had once considered better suited for logistical and administrative command. Clearly, they said, battle was where the true man had emerged.
Braxton's legend grew through two more tours in Vietnam. He became the frontline commander the army called on when things got tough. Hanoi considered him so effective they marked him for assassination with a $1 million bounty on his head.
Army psychologists noted that Braxton's mania for collecting began about this time.
Now, as Dan Gabriel's footsteps grew closer, the General picked a memory to sustain himself. This time it was the charge he'd led to rescue a trapped squad of Marines at Hue. He felt his body respond as he visualized the terrain, recalled the clash of weapons, and smelled the stench of spent ordnance and open abdominal wounds. But Gabriel's ten more years of relative youth started to show as the men neared their finish line, another red-and-white barrier laid across the road with a guard hut beside it. Discreetly disappearing into the landscaping on both flanks of the gate was a double row of electrified metal fencing crowned with concertina wire.
At that moment, Braxton's wireless phone vibrated on his belt. With Gabriel's footsteps pounding in his ears, Braxton ignored the phone and urged his burning quadriceps into a final burst of energy, carrying him past the finish line inches ahead of Gabriel.
Braxton broke his pace then and allowed Gabriel to shoot past him.
"You peaked a bit too late," Braxton said as he searched for the precisely sportsmanlike tone the situation demanded. He kept the gloating to himself: it offered nothing to be gained.
Gabriel fell in beside the General. "Thanks, sir."
"Soon," Braxton said as he grabbed his phone and looked at the caller ID, "you'll be beating me." He smiled as a short message scrolled across his screen. The rules he had established with her required no voice mails, no trails. "VT86D," read the short text message.
Braxton worked on suppressing the broad smile he felt within. Vanessa Thompson was dead, and along with her one more of the few remaining barriers capable of derailing his presidential run. He looked at his Rolex. "Okay, we have twenty-five minutes before your briefing."
Gabriel looked at the Swiss Army sports watch on his own wrist. The altimeter function he had selected at the bottom of the hill indicated they had climbed a little more than two hundred feet straight up since passing the gate at the bottom of the driveavay. He pressed the watch's time button, then said, "Roger that, General."
They returned salutes from the guards who buzzed them through the last set of gates, which gave on to a Tuscan courtyard filled with exquisitely tended landscaping. The entire complex, named Castello Da Vinci by wealthy financier Kincaid Carothers, had once sat atop a hill overlooking Siena and, according to painstakingly preserved historical records, had been designed in 1502 by Leonardo da Vinci as a fortified sanctuary for his patron Cesare Borgia.
Leonardo's talents as a military architect have received little attention, but he had designed fortifications and invented weapons far ahead of their time. Borgia worried there might come a time when he would need a Renaissance bunker of sorts, and naturally he turned to Leonardo for help.
Carothers, whose company once exercised hegemony over the issuance of American Treasury bonds, had the entire structure disassembled in 1936, stripped, shipped to America, and reassembled. A briefly wealthy dot-com CEO bought the villa from one of the Carothers heirs before the first Internet meltdown. Defense Therapeutics had purchased it out of bankruptcy for a song equivalent to a coda and two arias. The corporation then signed the deed over to Braxton as a bonus. Framed copies of magazine articles about Castello Da Vinci lined many of the hallways. They appeared mostly in extravagantly snotty home and architectural magazines, and some dated back to the 1930s. One even detailed how Carothers had spent lavishly to prepare the site exactly as it had existed in Tuscany, duplicating many of the tunnels and underground safe-room chambers, leading to speculation that Carothers had once feared a workers' or domestic Communist uprising.
"Okay then, let's hit the showers. You know how I hate to be late." Braxton broke into a slow jog.
Gabriel smiled faintly. The General never arrived late.