Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (2 page)

She should never have returned to America.  Returning had only meant betrayal and imprisonment, and worst of all, losing her son…and Brad’s son.  The most bitter irony was that the only reason she had returned to the United States, was to give her son a proper start in life as an American citizen.  She did not want to risk ruining his life by beginning it as a baby fugitive, with his mother living under an alias in a foreign country.  For attempting to bring her son into the world as an American, she had instead lost him, and lost five years of her life.

***

From over the eastern horizon
a crop duster appeared, a buzzing yellow

dot, lining up to fumigate a distant field.

“A-rab!  Yo, A-rab!  Come here, Bardy-well!”

It was Big Kendra.  The black Philadelphian couldn’t quite grasp the concept of Christian Arabs, and frequently wondered aloud how an “Arab” had wound up in D-Camp, instead of in a separate camp for Muslim women.  Ranya had never attempted to educate her. Big Kendra was hopelessly stupid; a perfect camp guard, a model employee of the Internal Security Agency.  It was a standing joke among the detainees that if government employees were completely illiterate and lacked the people-skills required to work for the DMV, they were still more than qualified for the ISA, the bottom rung of the Department of Homeland Security.

Ranya turned and walked back nonchalantly.  She wasn’t afraid of the guard, despite Kendra’s height and weight advantage.  She could easily cleave the guard’s skull with the edge of her steel hoe, but after that moment of satisfaction, she’d be shot down by the two trailing riflemen, the so-called “gun guards.”  Still, Ranya habitually fantasized doing it. She vividly pictured a full steel-edged swing to Kendra’s throat, the stark terror on Kendra’s open-mouthed and bug-eyed face, the scream that would never make it past the severed windpipe, the spouting arterial blood.  

She regularly imagined rushing one stupefied gun guard, and wrestling his rifle away from him before he could unsling it and prepare it to fire.  The question was: would the other rifleman fire at them both, rolling on the ground?  And even if he didn’t open fire immediately, what then?  Even if she managed somehow to kill Big Kendra and both gun guards, she couldn’t outrun their radios and helicopters.  Not out here in the endless open fields of western Oklahoma.  

Even so, she wanted to kill a guard, to kill all the guards.  She wanted very badly to kill them.  She endlessly daydreamed their sudden, painful, violent deaths.  She just wasn’t quite ready to sacrifice her own life to that end. Not yet. The camp guards were only bottom feeders, they meant nothing in the greater scheme of things.  The ones Ranya had a stronger desire to kill were much higher up the food chain.  Ranya still valued her life too much to trade it away for the momentary satisfaction of cleaving Big Kendra’s empty skull.

After almost five years at D-Camp, Ranya knew all of the guards’ weaknesses.  One of her infrequent victories had occurred the previous summer, when she had found a king snake in a soybean field. Growing up in rural Virginia, Ranya had no fear of non-poisonous king snakes, which mimicked the deadly coral snake with a similar color pattern.  She had carefully pinned the banded red, black and yellow snake with her hoe and grabbed it behind the head, and when Kendra’s back was turned, she had flung the snake at her feet.  

The guard had broken every Olympic record sprinting from the field, and then she split the back of her too-tight khaki pants climbing on top of the flatbed stake truck.  The other guards, male and female, had mocked Big Kendra for weeks after the incident, baiting her with false snake alarms, and leaving rubber snakes in her lunch pail. Ranya’s original tossing of the live snake had never been suspected.  If any other prisoners had witnessed her defiant act, they had kept their mouths shut.

“A-rab, what you doin’ giving that white girl you hat? Why you be doin’ that?”

“I don’t need it anymore.  I’m almost as dark as you now.”

“Hah!  That’ll be the day!”  Kendra grinned, her single gold tooth gleaming in the sun.  “I don’t understand why you is feeling all sorry for a no-good white bitch like that. What she do for you?”

It was pointless to try to explain normal human feelings to a line pusher, one of the bottom guards at D-Camp.  Collecting a federal paycheck for following hapless prisoners across fields was about as low a living as Ranya could imagine.  Obviously, Big Kendra considered the deeply tanned “A-rab” Ranya Bardiwell to be something other than “white,” and therefore she couldn’t fathom Ranya’s sympathy for the new pale-complexioned prisoner.  Politically correct racial solidarity must have been drummed into Kendra’s pea-brain in government schools and institutions all of her life, Ranya mused.  She ignored the guard’s question.

“That ain’t why I called you back, Bardy-well.  Warden Linssen, she want you back by the tool truck. That little pickup truck over there, that be Warden Linssen.  I don’t know why, but she just axed for you on my radio. Go drop your hoe in the tool bin, and see what she want.”

Without replying, Ranya marched back down the row of corn, between the two male guards with their Mini-14 rifles slung on their shoulders.  These gun guards in their khaki uniforms regarded her carefully as she passed between them: they formed the back points of a wide triangle 50 yards behind Big Kendra.  The two men tracked Ranya with their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, their faces obscured by wide-brimmed tan desert hats.

No matter what direction a prisoner might try to run, one or both of the gun guards would have an easy shot.  Their iron-sighted Mini-14s were crummy rifles, provided to prison guards solely because they were the cheapest of the available alternatives, but she knew that at these distances, even a gun guard with a Mini-14 would not miss.  

She carried the hoe across her chest at military “port arms,” with her head up and eyes front.  She wanted to shoulder the hoe like a rifle of her own, and aim down the “barrel” at them, but that type of rebellious gesture would only earn her another stint in D-Camp’s rusty iron “sweat box,” where one could neither stand up nor fully lay down.

Besides, she was consumed with curiosity about why Deputy Warden Linssen wanted her, and she would do nothing to jeopardize this meeting.

***

At the edge of the field was the tool truck,
a mud-splashed white full-size GMC pickup.  Ranya dropped her hoe into a plastic bin in the back, and the supervisor sitting in the cab made a notation in his ledger book. Beyond the tool truck, on the dirt road leading from the cornfield, was Warden Linssen’s black Ford Ranger.  The power window on the driver’s side rolled down as she approached.

“Ranya? Get in.  You’re done with the weed line for today.  Maybe for forever.”  The warden was wearing wire-rimmed aviator’s sunglasses, and she smiled warmly through the open window.

It was the first time Ranya had opened a vehicle door in five years. She had ridden in the backs of camp trucks on occasion, but never in the cab. The AC hit her with a forgotten alpine blast, pushing out the Oklahoma summer heat.  As she settled into the spongy seat, Ranya suddenly remembered riding in another pickup truck that mad September in Virginia, six years before.  Brad’s pickup truck.

The deputy warden was wearing a crisp Internal Security Agency senior officer’s summer working uniform: black pants and a white short-sleeved dress shirt, with the ISA patches on the shoulders.  She was an attractive woman about forty, Ranya guessed, with short jet-black hair that was cut flat around the back to keep it the regulation length: just covering her collar, but no more.  Like the other senior ISA officers Ranya infrequently saw, she carried no sidearm. She was an administrator, and duty guns were beneath her station and pay grade.

Linssen put her truck into gear and pulled out.  “You must be wondering what’s going on, right? Why I came for you?”  She was grinning, relishing her secret.

“Am I getting out of D-Camp?”

“No, no I’m afraid not.”  The warden sounded genuinely sympathetic. “But I do have good news for you, some very good news.  But let’s have lunch first, and get you cleaned up!  I think maybe I’m going to take you out of the fields and put you into admin.  If you want it—if you have the right attitude for it.”  She turned and smiled at Ranya again.

The last time she had spoken in private at any length with Deputy Warden Starr Linssen had been in her office in the administration section of D-Camp.  Ranya had requested the meeting, after being beaten in her bunk by a group of male and female guards during one of her first nights in camp.  Ranya had forcibly resisted their brutal “seduction” attempts, biting and kicking at her attackers.

During that initial meeting, Linssen had appeared sensitive to her plight, and Ranya was able to steer their conversation to the subject of her missing son. The warden had promised to seek out any available information about the child, if she could.  Her main concern was that Ranya “fit in,” and not invite further abuse by “antagonizing” the guards.  As if defending herself against sexual assault constituted antagonizing the guards! Nevertheless, the guards had kept a wary distance after that first unsuccessful attack, and Ranya gave the deputy warden some of the credit for that small mercy.

A series of dirt road turns led to a cracked asphalt track, just inside the ten-foot-high razor wire topped perimeter fence.  The fence itself presented only a minor obstacle to escape.  The real control was exerted by the tiny chips implanted behind her left shoulder, just under her neck: Radio Frequency Identification Devices smaller than a grain of rice.  The RFID chips were used inside of the camp to control the movements of the detainees.  Every time they passed through a gate or numerous other portals, they were automatically counted to determine that they were where they should be at all times.

Around and beyond the inner camp, sensor wires were buried in the ground, and other wires were strung along the many fences.  Any prisoner crossing a buried sensor wire, or approaching within a few feet of a fence, would trigger an alarm at central control.  Beyond D-Camp lay unknown miles of rural western Oklahoma: more fields stretching to the horizon, and probably more buried sensor wires.

“Ranya, I hated seeing you turned out as a field worker. Hated it! But after your fight with the guards…  Anyway, I know about your background, your education.” The warden reached over for Ranya’s left wrist. “Let me feel your hand…ugh.  All callused, so rough...that’s no way to live!  But there’s no reason D-Camp has to be so bad, not all of it.  We have a saying: you scratch my back…and I’ll scratch yours, all right?” The warden squeezed her hand.

Ranya said nothing, but withdrew her hand, glancing over at Linssen. The warden had a blue-black tattoo of a grinning quarter-moon visible on her neck, partly above her collar, and a matching sun-face on the opposite side.  Her white uniform collar always made them appear to be rising or setting. “Is the good news some word about my son?”

“Ranya, you’ve been here for almost five years—let’s not rush things. Okay?”

Linssen stopped at an open vehicle gate in another fence, which separated different areas of the former Army base containing D-Camp.  A few feet opposite an electric eye on a steel post, she held up an ID card against her side window to be scanned.  A guard stepped out of his cement blockhouse, gave them both a perfunctory look from a few steps away, and waved them on.  In five years, Ranya had never seen this area of the base. It was both unsettling and exhilarating.

They drove past another vehicle gate in the chain link outer perimeter fence.  Beyond it to their left lay a two-lane blacktop road, heading south into the distance across endless fields.  It was impossible for Ranya to know if the road she saw lay inside or entirely beyond the boundaries of the old military base.  The gate itself led into a tractor-trailer-sized double box of chain link fence, all topped with razor wire.  Any vehicles leaving the base through it would have to stop inside the steel rectangle for inspection, before the outer gates were opened.

The pickup continued on into an area of trees and white-painted wooden structures, warehouses mainly, parts of what seemed to be an abandoned military supply depot.  Warden Linssen made another turn into the interior of the base and in a few minutes, they arrived at what appeared to be a small suburban enclave, complete with sidewalks, lawns and shade trees.

“Home sweet home, Ranya.  It was married officers’ housing, back in the Army days.  Pretty nice, eh? We can have lunch, and talk.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy some fresh fruit.”

Linssen didn’t seem concerned about her own personal security, or any escape risk presented by Ranya.  She evidently believed the implanted chips made escape impossible.  The white clapboard ranch-style house had an old-fashioned key lock in the front door.  Linssen opened the door for Ranya and followed her inside, locking it behind them with a dead bolt. She pulled off her sunglasses, revealing startling ice-blue eyes, made more so by the contrast to her raven hair.

“I’ve prepared a wonderful salad for us, and I can fix you almost any kind of deli sandwich you’d like.  But first I think you’d like to clean up, and take a real bath—am I right?”  Linssen cocked an eyebrow, almost winking, and smiled knowingly at Ranya.  Detainees were permitted only cold showers, twice a week, in the open barracks latrines.  Shaving legs and underarms was not possible, and shampoo was a rarely seen luxury. “I’ve gone to central supply and drawn you some new uniforms.  I really don’t think you’ll be going back to the fields.”  The warden was now beaming continuously, obviously in anticipation of more than a leisurely luncheon.

             Ranya looked around the living room and adjoining kitchen, absorbing the soft homey touches, while noting the absence of evidence of any family.  There was a calendar on the wall by the open kitchen door, and she noted that it was Friday, the 20
^th
of June—not that this had much meaning in the camps.  She asked, “Why are you doing this for me? I don't understand.”  But Ranya did understand.  She hoped that Linssen would have news of her son, and she guessed what Linssen wanted in return. In spite of her five years in detention at hard labor, Ranya knew that Linssen was attracted to her.  The warden had regularly checked up on her, and always used her first name.  Ranya was 27, and although the summer sun and bitter winter cold had aged her a bit beyond her years, she still had a face and a figure which made most of the guards, male and female, follow her with their eyes.  The meager prison diet kept her slim, and the field work kept her fit.