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Nikki at The Liberty Zone reviews Matt Bracken's Enemies and Traitors.

Foreign Enemies and Traitors by Matt Bracken

 Bracken manages, in the last installment of the trilogy, to include just about all of the fear-based memes of the folks who despair of the path our country has taken in the last fifty years. The action shifts back to our old acquaintance, Phil Carson, who has decided it's too hot down in South America and is returning to his native land with a cargo of real coffee beans and solar panels, both of which are in high demand in an economically strapped and energy poor United States, after one disastrous event follows another.

Phil, himself, can't seem to avoid tragedy, and instead of sailing to Texas - one of the last beacons of freedom in the country - he is blown off course by a tropical storm and shipwrecked somewhere on the coast of North Carolina. After he comes to land, we get to follow along with Phil on his journey to try to reach either Texas or the other "free" territory formed by several states in the Northwest. Martial law has descended on most of the South, as the federal government tries to get all those racist rednecks who are clinging to their guns and religion to accept pacification. In support of that effort, President Jamal Tambor has imported foreign troops from the former Soviet Union and Africa to help out, after U.S. soldiers refused to fire upon their countrymen.

Good 'ole Bob Bullard turns up once more, as a deniable liaison between the White House and the Kazaks pacifying Tennessee, where Carson runs into a few hitches in his journey, spending time in a relocation camp until he can ally with an Army doctor who is willing to help him on his way for the cargo on Phil's boat. There are still a few freedom fighters on the loose in Tennessee, and Phil joins them in their fight against the feds and their foreign allies.

A pretty good conclusion to the trilogy, but I hope Bracken gets around to writing about how things get put back together again someday.

Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista by Matt Bracken

If you haven't read the first book in the Enemies trilogy by Bracken, you probably shouldn't read any further; big spoilers follow.

After a disastrous attempt to capture rogue Agent Robert Bullard and take down his renegade BATF team, Ranya and former Green Beret Phil Carson flee on Brad's sailboat to the Caribbean. Brad was shot during the raid, and bled to death on the Zodiac during the escape, and Ranya carries his child. Deciding she doesn't want her son born outside of the United States, she returns, but despite Presidential assurances of amnesty for her crimes, she is arrested, jailed, her son taken away from her, and sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp in the Midwest, which stretches into six years.

When the warden of the camp singles Ranya out for special favors in return for, you know, "special favors", Ranya goes along with the program long enough to spend time alone with the warden in her quarters, kills her, and escapes wearing the warden's uniform and driving her pickup truck. She makes her way southwest from there, having found out that her son was adopted by a married pair of FBI agents in Albuquerqe, New Mexico.

Speculative fiction can be defined as the sort of story that arises when we look at a particular trend or technology, and extrapolate, "what if?" from there. In this novel, there are two new factors which Bracken uses to form his alternate time stream - the effects of unrestricted immigration amnesty and loss of control of the southern border by the federal government, and the rapid devaluation of the U.S. dollar, as it is replaced sequentially by new dollars, then blue dollars, which buy less goods at every stage. Private ownership of gold is once again outlawed, and only outlaws will own gold.

In New Mexico, the situation has gotten very strange, indeed. The new immigrants from down south have decided to enforce the old land grant treaties of the 1800s, and to confiscate the ranches and homes of the gringos to distribute to the more deserving people who have recently arrived. Various semi-official armies have arisen to enforce these land grabs, and Ranya is captured by these revolutionaries, and feigns enthusiasm for the cause, joining the Zetas, led by Colonel Ramos. As one might expect from her history, Ramos takes a more than professional interest in her, taking her under his wing, so to speak. Her expertise with all things having to do with guns comes in handy when she is asked to train his troops in marksmanship and maintenance, and she plays along with the revolution until she finds an opportunity to escape and recover her son from his adoptive family.

Aside from the whole evading the crazed militia hunting for her thing, there's another wrinkle in her kidnapping plot. Her son's new parents are divorced, the wife has been granted full custody, and is moving to San Diego with her lesbian lover, who is transferring to the Homeland Security office there, run by...Director Robert Bullard. Her adventures turn out to be exciting and interesting, keeping me up way past my bedtime to finish the book. Lots of food for thought, in this purely "speculative" book.

Enemies Foreign and Domestic by Matt Bracken

While  some may find Bracken's Enemies trilogy out there in the realm of tin foil hat, black helicopter conspiracy theorist alarmist rhetoric, I found the first novel in the tale quite engrossing, tightly written, and entertaining - albeit scary as being swept down river towards raging rapids. With just a bit of tweaking, our own time stream might look just like this cautionary tale.

When a group of overly enthusiastic BATF agents arrange a false flag operation where a veteran suffering from PTSD appears to massacre hundreds in a football stadium, the U.S. Congress decides, once and for all, that the public cannot be trusted with scary black guns, and completely outlaws the possession of semi-automatic rifles, first calling for voluntary turn-ins, then proceeding to raids (which rapidly turn deadly) and confiscation. Rather predictably, this doesn't sit well with a large segment of the population, sometimes derided as the "gun culture", but which in reality is composed of a quite sizable portion of the populace, and after the rogue agents stage a few more incidents targeting the "gun nuts" and innocent bystanders - blamed on gun nuts - battle is definitely joined.

One of the main heroes in this story is Brad Fallon, a thirty-something veteran of the Alaskan oil fields, who has seen enough of the erosion of American civil rights over the last couple of decades and is presently restoring a sailboat so that he can become a PT (Permanent Tourist) in more tropical climates. The boat is moored in the Chesapeake Bay area, and Brad has become as accepted as any outside in a small town can by the local shooting sports enthusiasts, especially after he won a regional target competition.

Our other hero is Ranya Bardiwell, daughter of Lebanese Christian refugee immigrants who have made a life for themselves in the small town. Her father is a gun dealer, supplying local sportsmen with guns, ammunition and gunsmithing services. Ranya grew up around the gunnies, and is an expert shooter with a number of small arms, as well as holding a black belt in martial arts. When her father's store is burned to the ground and he is murdered, she returns from her studies at UVA to mourn, and soon discovers evidence pointing to government agents responsibility for the crime.

Of course, as one might expect, Ranya and Brad fall in love, and despite Brad's previous commitment to get out of Dodge, he decides to aid her in her quixotic quest to find the men who killed her father and to bring them to justice. They are joined in their efforts by a revolving cast of patriots, old friends of Ranya's father who bring to the table a rather astonishing assortment of weapons of retail destruction. Suffice it to say that looking over a fruity drink with an umbrella at a Jamaican sunset isn't likely to appear in the couple's near future.