The second house was very much like the first, but about a third bigger and with an extra floor. It, too, was wooden and had a flat, felted roof, but its stilted area had been enclosed with plywood sheeting. Two large doors opened onto a concrete slipway which led down to the water’s edge. A boat, a four-seater fibreglass job, ideal for fishing, was parked on the land, still on its trailer, nose facing down towards the water, the outboard engine towards the house.
All the curtains seemed to be closed. I couldn’t see any rubbish bags outside, or towels or anything else which might indicate that the house was occupied. However, the garage doors were only three-quarters closed and the rear of a black 4x4 was protruding, which made me think that maybe there was another one inside.
I heard a groan from the two boys in red polo shirts. A man was coming towards the fort with three kids, all highly excited about hiring a canoe and already fighting about who was going to have the paddle.
I put the binos down and had a swig of Coke, which was now warm and horrible, like the weather. I binned it and got another one, then I took a walk back to the car.
The rave at the picnic area was still going strong; the kids were dancing, and the adults, beer cans in hand around the barbecue, despite the signs forbidding alcohol, were putting the world to rights. Even from this distance I could hear the loud sizzle as steaks the size of dustbin lids were dropped onto the smoking griddles.
The old couple were still in their car, her struggling to drink a can of Dr Pepper through her false teeth, him reading the inside pages of a newspaper. Nice day out.
I could read the headline, even through the windscreen. It looked as though I’d been right: the black convoy that had held me up in DC must have been carrying either Netanyahu or Arafat, because both boys were being welcomed to America.
I got back to the car and slowly rolled out along the gravel road to the main drag, turning left, back towards the Falls of Neuse and the beltline. I didn’t follow the signs back to Raleigh, though. This time, I wanted the road to Fayetteville.
8
Fayette Nam, as some people in the States call it, due to its high casualty rate, is the home of the 82nd Airborne and US Special Forces. They were stationed at Fort Bragg, the only place I knew in North Carolina. About an hour south of Raleigh – or so they told me at the gas station – I’d first gone there in the mid-1980s for a joint exercise training with Delta Force, the Regiment’s American counterpart.
‘Deltex’ was designed to further an atmosphere of co-operation between the two units, but all it did for me was induce huge amounts of envy. I could still remember being bowled over by the sheer size of the place; you could have fitted the entire town of Hereford twice over into what they called a ‘fort’. The quantity and quality of equipment on show was beyond belief. Delta had indoor 7.62 and 5.56 shooting ranges; at Stirling Lines we only had the 9mm equivalent. We also had only one gym, while they had dozens of them, including jacuzzis, saunas and a massive climbing wall for their Mountain Troop. No wonder we renamed the place Fort Brass. They had more helicopters in one unit than we had in the whole of the British army; come to that, there were more personnel in just that one base than in all of the British armed services put together.
Fayetteville is effectively a garrison city, with every business geared up for the military. The troops are the ones with the money and the desire to burn it. Like them, in all the times I’d been there I’d never felt the need to venture out of the city limits.
The 401 was a wide single carriageway. I drove through a few small towns which would have made great locations for 1950s films or, better still, could have done with a couple of thousand-pounders to put them out of their misery, before the area started to open up into cornfields and grassland. Houses and small industrial units dotted the route, alongside open barns filled with tractors and other agricultural gear, and every few miles, in case people needed reminding that they were in the boonies, I came across a road kill, a mess of blood and fur as flat as a pancake in the middle of the blacktop.
I knew I was getting near when I hit the Cape Fear river. The water was about 300 metres across at this point, getting wider as it got closer to the sea, and sure enough I passed the ‘City of Fayetteville’ sign before long and kept my eyes peeled for anything directing me to Fort Bragg.
Bragg Boulevard was a wide dual carriageway with a grass central reservation, but as I passed rows of car showrooms with new 4x4s and sports cars under miles of red, white and blue bunting, it changed back to two lanes. The buildings on either side were mainly one-storey breeze-block warehouses behind a shop front. Korean pawn shops and tailors jostled with Vietnamese restaurants and takeaways, representing a weird chronicle of all the conflicts the USA had ever been involved in. They just needed an Iraqi kebab stall to complete the set.
I was beginning to see the kind of outlet I’d come here to find. Neon signs and posters announced boot-shining specialists, tattoo artists and gun shops – ‘Test fire before you buy – we have our own range’. On every sidewalk, young men and women strode around in smartly pressed BDUs (combat uniform) and very short haircuts – the men usually had a ‘whitewall’ with a little lump on top. It felt very strange to see uniformed soldiers on the streets without a weapon and not on patrol; the terrorist situation in Europe meant that off-duty soldiers were forbidden to walk around in uniform; they’d just be ready-made targets.
I drove on base and got my bearings. American military installations aren’t like European ones, which resemble World War Two prisoner-of-war camps, again because of the terrorist threat. This place was open and sprawling, with vehicle pools and groups of men and women on route marches, singing cadence, their unit flag carried proudly at the head of the column.
I couldn’t remember the name of the road I wanted, but I followed my nose, driving along roads with buildings on each side which looked more like smart apartments than barrack rooms. I found it – Yadkin, a long road that came out of the base and moved into the city area. There had been quite a bit of building since my last visit in the late Eighties. Roads coming off the main drag had names like Desert Storm Boulevard, or Just Cause Road. I wondered if the Firm would ever get round to naming thoroughfares after its operations – if so, they’d have to be called things like Blackmail Lane, or Stitch Them Up Big Time Street.
I carried on along Yadkin until it took me off base, past Kim’s No. 1 Sewing, Susie J’s (I wasn’t too sure what service she was offering) and whole blocks of military supply shops. There was one I remembered, called US Cavalry. It had been a complete department store for the start-your-own-war nut, glass counters displaying sharp, pointy things, racks of BDUs, military T-shirts and combat helmets, rows and rows of boots, and shelves of posters and books with such politically correct titles as
Ragnar’s Big Book of Home-made Weapons
and
The Advanced Anarchist Arsenal: Recipes for Improvised Incendiaries and Explosives
– always good for that last-minute Christmas present.
I drove past shop fronts displaying murals of airborne assaults. One had a giant poster of John Wayne in uniform in the window. After another mile I saw the store I wanted and drove into the carpark. Jim’s was the same size as a small superstore; the front had a wooded ranch look about it, but the rest was whitewashed breeze-block. The front windows looked almost cottagey from a distance, with lots of little square panes, but as you got nearer you could see the panes were just white-painted bars behind the thick plate glass. And the anti-ram barriers one third of the way up the windows weren’t there to tie your horse up to either. Through the foyer I could see keyboards, VCRs and rows of TV screens all showing
Jerry Springer
. It was to the left of all that, however, a place where there were no windows at all, that they kept what I’d come here for.
I walked onto a small verandah where a large red sign warned me, ‘Before entry weapons will be unloaded, actions opened and thank you for not smoking’.
The inside of Jim’s Gunnery was L-shaped. To my right was a pawn shop; the rest disappeared around the corner to my left, past a counter selling magazines and sweets. Opposite was a small shop within a shop, selling jewellery. The place smelled more like a department store than a pawn shop. It was very clean, with a polished, tiled floor.
I turned left towards a series of glass display cases, all containing pistols – hundreds of them – and behind them, in wall racks, rifles, with something to suit every taste, from bolt action to assault. After I picked up a wire basket, I was greeted by a very well-fed white guy in his mid-thirties, wearing a green polo shirt with Jim’s logo on it, a Glock .45 in a pancake holster on his belt and a big smile. ‘Hi, how are you today?’
In my bad American I replied, ‘I’m good, how are you?’
I wasn’t worried; the transient military population made it a lot easier to get away with a dodgy accent. Besides, they’d only think I was Australian – Americans always do.
‘I’m good, sir. Is there anything I can do for you today?’
‘Just having a look round, thanks.’
He beamed. ‘If you need anything, just holler.’
Heading towards the weapons counter, I passed shelves stacked supermarket fashion with boxes of ammunition and everything for the hunting man, even down to Barbour jackets and shooting sticks, which surprisingly didn’t look out of place.
Anti-mugging sprays hung from racks. I couldn’t decide whether to have the CS gas or the pepper spray, so in the end I put both in my basket.
The footwear section sold camouflaged Gore-Tex boots and an assortment of wellingtons and leather footgear. What I wanted, and eventually found, was a normal pair of high-leg assault boots, a mixture of cross-trainer and boot. The Gore-Tex and go-faster boots were all well and good, but I could never really be bothered with trying to keep my feet dry. Once they were wet, which they would be tonight, that was it, I just got on with it. I didn’t bother to try the boots on; it wasn’t as if I was going to be tabbing for six days across the Appalachians. I got them in a size ten; I was size nine, but remembered from a very painful few days in a pair of new US trainers that their sizes are one up from those in the UK.
I went over and had a look in the weapon cabinets. There were hundreds of revolvers and semi-automatics to choose from. I could see what I wanted and waited my turn to be served.
Next to me, a woman in her early thirties had a two-year-old in a carry-rig on her back. She was being helped by one of the assistants to choose a new nylon holster for her Smith & Wesson .45 CQB, and they were also chattily discussing the pros and cons of various models. The one she was carrying was the stainless-steel version. As she was saying to the assistant, the matt-black, alloy version was lighter, but the steel one was more noticeable and therefore a better deterrent. It was a fantastic weapon, and would always have been my weapon of choice were it not for the fact that I preferred 9mm because the magazines carried more rounds. Mind you, if she needed more than the seven in the mag plus one in the chamber, she was in the shit anyway. The conversation moved back to the new holster as opposed to keeping it in her handbag.
A bit further along, a young black guy in a blue tracksuit was being briefed on the merits of a .38 revolver over a semi-automatic. ‘With this baby y’all don’t even have to aim,’ the sales pitch went. ‘Especially at the range y’all be using it at. Just point it like your finger at the centre mass and it will take them down.’ The customer liked that; he was going to take it.
The woman had gone and the assistant came over to me. ‘Hi, how can I help you today?’
It was bad accent time again. ‘Can I have a look at your Tazers on the bottom shelf there.’
‘Sure, no problem.’ The assistant was black, in his mid-twenties, and dressed in the house green shirt. He was also ‘carrying’. It was a Sig 9mm, held in the same sort of nylon pancake holster the woman had been interested in. He bent down and pulled out the tray of Tazers.
They were selling all different types, from little handheld ones, to the sort that fire out prongs on a wire which you can use to attack someone from a five-metre range, right up to big ones which resembled police truncheons. I was tempted by a handheld one called ‘Zap-Ziller – the monster of stun guns!’ mainly because of the slogan. There was even a picture of a dinosaur on the box that told me it packed 100,000 volts of stopping power.
I read the packaging to make sure it suited my needs: ‘A short blast of a quarter-second duration will startle an attacker, cause minor muscle contractions and have a repelling effect. A moderate length blast of one to four seconds can cause an attacker to fall to the ground and result in some mental confusion. It may make an assailant unwilling to continue an attack, but he will be able to get up almost immediately.
‘A full charge of five seconds can immobilize an attacker, cause disorientation, loss of balance, falling to the ground and leave them weak and dazed for some minutes afterward. Note: Any blast lasting over one second is likely to cause your assailant to fall. If you do not help them down, gravity may injure them.’ I hoped so. They’d certainly done the business in Syria.
In the clothing area I picked out a set of ‘woodland camo’ Gore-Tex, choosing one two sizes too big so it was nice and baggy. Gore-Tex had changed a lot since it was first invented by God in answer to every infantryman’s prayers. In the early days it had made a rustling noise as you moved, which wasn’t good if you were moving on target, and as a result we’d had to wear it under our combat clothing. But nowadays it was much more like textile than plastic.