MacArthur's Freehold

Chapter 55

Chapter 55 -- NGEQSMXDPUZYRF

Carter and Jessica joined the others in Donald's office for the daily briefing. The second day after the operation was underway, and the spent an hour or so watching the news for any significant developments. There were none, at least none that interested them. There was the the expected press conference at the White House, with the Director of Homeland Security and the Attorney General assuring their audience that the investigation was proceeding and that they were confident of results in the near future, followed by the usual expected questions and canned responses.

With no news of major consequence, Donald turned to updating the others. He had gone to the office in town early that morning, returning just after they had arrived, having a quick breakfast of little more than a toasted pastry and a cup of coffee.

"Since our enemy doesn't have any news" he said "let's go over what we have. We were pretty well up to date by last night, other than a final report on the teams. All are back to base, no casualties or prisoners other than the one we knew about last night. Our tech guys are sifting the information flow very fine, looking for any traces of a link to the League. If we think they've found something, we'll move to prevent if from spreading. Each freehold has contingency plans, from removing any evidence of their links to the League to completely vanishing, in those cases where it's possible."

"Any word on the guy we lost" asked Carter.

"Not much. He's still in the hospital. Apparently he took a pretty good hit, just one shot but breaking a rib and perforating a lung. We've got a lawyer on it, he doesn't know anything about the League but he's well paid and knows what he's doing. They probably won't try the dirty tricks yet, like drugging him. Having our lawyer on top of if 24/7 should prevent that. And since he knows all he has to do is wait and we'll get him out. And he's got enough good stories to leak that will lead them on wild goose chases to stall for a while. They'll believe anything that they think will confirm what they already believe, or what they profess to believe"

"So we're waiting for, what?" asked Jessica. "Is our contact to happen before further action, is it already set?"

"Yes, it is at least in terms of our intention to make contact, offer to talk, and see what happens. At this point we're waiting for the optimum time. We want them to try to figure something out, for a few days, and when they still have nothing we'll contact them. There are probably two likely scenarios. They may dismiss it as a hoax and do nothing, in which case we escalate. If they do contact us, we'll make our demands. Obviously they'll reject them, and we'll escalate."

"And so we're enter phase two" said Jessica. "Infrastructure attacks. How does that go?"

"We have a plan to cut off a major city" Donald said "as we've discussed. We disrupt traffic by cutting the interstate highways, railroads, and electrical and water supplies where possible. We're thinking of Chicago, but the decision is a couple of days off. But it will be accompanied by a series of unrelated actions around the country. We want the pain to be widely distributed."

"Do we have any part to play?" Carter asked.

"At this point a small one" said Donald. "We're going to need quite a lot of explosives for this operation. We'll be shipping out some supplies in the next few days. More interestingly, we may be involved in extracting our man in DC. The Council was impressed by both of our test runs - extracting James and the hit on McCormick. We could be doing quite a lot of that if this goes on for a while.

"And when we take our man out of DC, this could be a good place. He's from Turquoise Valley, and he can't go back there. If they connect him with the place they'll be all over it, and if he shows up anywhere - they'll have his DNA and fingerprints, and of course his picture will be all over the place in camera surveillance systems. And the chance that he can be recognized by one even with good disguises is too great. He may end up hiding out here, like James."