Shanghaied - 2ACW

Wow, that's a lot of work done there. Well done!
There is the matter of owners and also players. Not much is really local with regards to that so the split into two countries will blow any established order out of the water.
A ministry of Sport in the DAR is an idea I like. The issue over the politics of sports stars came up a bit during the war but it will be a bigger deal post-war for sure.

173 – Mutiny

To anyone who thought that there were people with power, influence and (especially) guns who were just going to accept the United States giving in to the Western secessionists, they got a rude surprise on April 12th. What President Mitchell was doing just wasn’t acceptable to many but only a few had the ability, and the guile, to do what was done that day in DC. Diplomats were talking out in Cañon City about securing an end to the fighting yet in the nation’s capital, armed soldiers sought to seize control of the centre of government so that the ceasefire could be terminated and ultimate victory won. That meant flooding the heart of DC with armed personnel hellbent on overthrowing Mitchell.

Colonel Peter Gibbons led the mutiny against the federal government. He was a US Marines senior officer who had started out as a youngster as a Rifleman recruit before gaining a commission to reach his colonelcy. Those who knew the Mustang which was Gibbons would always agree that he was one hell of a Marine. He was also an Idaho native. Gibbons had left there as a teenager to join the US Marines and had never expressed much affinity for his home state. However, when it was gobbled up by the Democratic American Republic, everything changed. Gibbons had been left heartbroken but also mad. He spent the first six weeks of war far away from home. The command of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit was his with the 24 MEU ordered to remain afloat aboard amphibious ships – led by the USS Bougainville – in the Med. Contingency plans had been for Gibbons to lead his demi-brigade combined arms force into a wide range of possible scenarios. No landings in Algeria, Egypt or anywhere else came about though and there was instead a recall home at the end of February. It wasn’t to join the fighting out in the West that the 24 MEU went despite the belief that that was why the recall had come. Gibbons had received orders to hold his force on the US East Coast for undefined ‘out of area operations’: the amphibious ships that brought his Marines home stayed at Little Creek while he moved his force up to MCB Quantico. That military base, home to more than just the US Marines, had been hit by a massive missile attack before Gibbons arrived there and he saw for himself the worst that the secessionists could do when viewing the aftermath there and elsewhere in the DC area. For weeks on end, the 24 MEU remained at Quantico with Gibbons not given a mission. When the ceasefire news broke, he was livid. Not just Idaho but the entire West was being abandoned! Like him, many Marines were furious and wanted something done though there was an unwillingness to act. Gibbons found sympathetic opinions yet at first there was no one was prepared to take the next step.

Major–General Ronald Harrington was though. A two-star general in the USMC command chain, he served as the commander of Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic. He had operational control over the 24 MEU though was nowhere near the decision-makers at the top. Gibbons and Harrington put their heads together after expressing shared outrage and a willingness to act. Harrington was in contact with a high-level politician though one who wouldn’t move until the opportunity was right. The two Marine officers decided to make that opportunity come about. They told themselves that they acted in the best interests of their country and what they did was the right thing. It had to be done by them because no one else would. However, it was believed by each man that when they did what they did, the rest of the US Armed Forces would join them: their political contact assured them that that was certain. Gibbons received new orders that came from Harrington. Those were fake and Gibbons knew the difference but the orders came so that Gibbons would be able to do what he planned with as little hindrance as possible from those not in the know. He gained transportation authority, clearances that would get him past obstructions and also an official justification for what he and Harrington planned so that Gibbons could get his Marines to do as he wished. The men and women of the 24 MEU were lied to. Officers and enlisted personnel were told they were doing something else entirely than what they did. Gibbons didn’t try to win them over with the truth.

The 24 MEU left Quantico that morning in a road convoy. The unit was formed around the 3/6 MARINES with a good portion of the 3 RAIDER under command too. Those battalions were joined by various attachments of all sorts of other Marines in combat-support and service-support roles. The few tanks and amtracs under Gibbons’ command were left at Quantico because he believed he didn’t need them… plus they would attract the wrong sort of attention. It was wheeled vehicles only that went towards DC. There were trucks and HMMWVs as well as light armoured vehicles in the form of LAV-25s and M-30s (the eight-wheeled SuperAV personnel carriers). Military police with an attached Civil Affairs teams aided, along with what Harrington did from afar, in opening the way for the 24 MEU to make the trip to DC. Gibbons led the convoy up Interstate-95 across Northern Virginia and right towards the heart of government. There were military roadblocks which he went through with the correct authorisation on-scene and also send to those manning checkpoints too. The biggest checkpoint was where I-95 met the Capital Beltway and the convoy was practically waved through. Without a hitch at all, the 24 MEU approached the Potomac. Gibbons split his convoy into three elements as they went over into DC using the 14th Street bridges, the Arlington memorial Bridge and the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. He did that to avoid someone trying to stop him at the last minute, in case the authorisation for the movement into DC by almost two thousand US Marines was questioned. It wasn’t though. Gibbons got his Marines into DC unmolested with no one ahead nor afar any the wiser.


Harrington made that happen. Without what he did, the 24 MEU would have never left Quantico. His false orders and lies giving authorisation opened the way ahead for the movement into DC by Gibbons. He never went into the city himself though. Instead, Harrington took a company from 3 RAIDER which didn’t go with that convoy and took them in another column of vehicles to Fort Belvoir on the Virginia side of the Potomac, downstream from DC. The headquarters for the Military District of Washington had been moved to there following the blasting of Fort McNair by DAR cruise missiles in one of their strikes against the city. It was a booming US Army facility with a lot going on there including the transfer to the Mark Centre of so much of the DOD’s non-essential operations after the Pentagon was practically demolished in another enemy attack. The Marine Raiders, special forces troops, were brought in to Fort Belvoir with Harrington and – with more false orders – took over the portion of the facility when the HQ was for the Military District of Washington. No violence was needed though that was an option on the table had resistance been met. Major–General Scott Leonard and several of his key staffers were detained by Harrington’s Marines. The charge against them was that they were plotting a military coup and engaged in mutiny against the federal government. A lie told the truth, just misidentified the perpetrators. With that HQ in his hands, Harrington had new orders sent from there to soldiers inside DC that Leonard had had under his command.

They were to stand down and be relieved by arrived US Marines.

The Military District of Washington at that stage in mid-April 2029 commanded a lot of troops within DC itself as well as nearby areas. The task was to ensure the security of the capital against external threats and to aid the internal situation. At the beginning of the war, it was a task which was initially achieved but the war had spread what forces were available thin. The historic 3rd Infantry Regiment had two battalions of riflemen best known for ceremonial duties yet undertook combat tasks once instructed to. Both 1/3 INF & 4/3 INF were at first concentrated before, due to necessity, their component parts were then moved about. Companies from both battalions were detached to assist in protection around the underground bunkers at Mount Weather and Raven Rock as well as given further security tasks at various DOD sites and Camp David too. Reinforcements came from a company of the 1/1 INF – another unit best known for ceremonial duties but combat-capable – that arrived from West Point and was put under 3rd Infantry Regiment supervision. Nowhere near enough men were on-hand though. Some of those regular soldiers were in DC, around DC Armory especially due to all that was going on there, but most were far outside of the city. Inside, national guardsmen with the 74th Military Police Gruop were deployed around key infrastructure. That brigade-sized force had been stood up in 2023 but had never been funded to allow for the full-size it could have been due to the DC Army National Guard having become a political football for those in Congress. Two battalions of MPs, plus another of reservists meant to be assigned from outside if need be, were meant to form its full strength in such a situation as DC was in during April ‘29 with a national crisis on. There was only a little over a battalion of MPs though. They were all over the place manning checkpoints etc. Just a lone company of them were inside, around the DC Armory too where those regular soldiers were.

From out of Fort Belvoir came that order to stand down to be relieved and that went to those right inside DC within close proximity of the important government buildings. Those at the DC Armory were told to stay in-place and wait on arriving US Marines. They did just that. The White House, Congress and buildings housing government departments were within reach of them yet they stayed where they were. Everyone else too, who could have rushed into the middle of the city in an emergency, were given those orders to hold fast and also had their outwards communications links shut down as per centralised control. Marines did arrive at the DC Armory and take command there: those soldiers and national guardsmen had no idea that they were prisoners even though they still had their weapons to possibly save the day.

Gibbons had detachments sent to several locations, the outward ones to secure key military infrastructure, but the bulk of his force was in two columns that went into the middle of DC. One vehicle convoy went to Capitol Hill where Congress was while he personally took the other to the White House. There, at the official resident of the head of state, there were no troops present upon his arrival. US Park Police and DC Metropolitan Police officers were very surprised to see the arrival of armoured vehicles laden with US Marines. Questions were asked as to what was going on with the answer coming that the 24 MEU was moving into to protect the White House against a coup. Marines spilled out of their vehicles carrying a lot of guns while mounted weapons atop the LAV-25s & M-30s were highly visible. The majority of those police officers individually realised that something was not right but in the face of all of that fire power could do nothing to stop what was happening. That wasn’t the case with the US Secret Service, both the plain clothes & uniformed division elements. Spotters on the White House roof saw the approaching vehicles coming towards the White House from every possible direction at once. Urgent queries were made with a call made for military support… one which went unanswered with Harrington at Fort Belvoir and Gibbons’ Marines at the DC Armory. The Secret Service opted to stop what looked to them like an unauthorised armed takeover. They were outnumbered and surrounded but the senior agent-in-charge on the ground, who sought to get his ‘principle’ out of the building, ordered them to fight. The order was given so an escape could be made of whom all of those agents were based in the White House and its grounds were there to protect.


The first casualties of the day came right after that order for the Secret Service to oppose the US Marines.

Snipers took shots at several crewmembers out of their hatches atop a couple of LAV-25s. There were more long-range shots directed against groups of Marines around the fences to the north and east of the grounds. Fire was returned from the surprised but capable 24 MEU. Gibbons had told them all in a big address before they left Quantico that they were going into DC to save the country from putschists who had illegally seized control of the government. Those firing on them were those who had taken control of the White House and which they set about to free from hostile control. That was what they believed. Engineers started opening access points for the rifle teams to enter the grounds. Marines returned fire when they were shot at. Gunfights thus erupted all around the perimeter. That was all in broad daylight, witnessed by civilians who started running away after first admiring a ‘show’, and also recorded by a Newsmax camera crew who had been on their way to do an interview nearby. As Gibbons expected, his Marines got inside the White House grounds fast. The railings were there to keep out wandering tourists and the odd crazy nut. Riflemen and then armoured vehicles smashed their way into the grounds. Secret Service officers had pistols as well as carbine assault rifles quickly pulled from weapons boxes. They hit many Marines but their fire was useless against those armoured vehicles. Moreover, there were a lot of attackers pouring forward who fast overwhelmed them. Those spotters/snipers up high did a sterling job until Gibbons’ counter-sniper teams, who had taken far too long to get atop roofs of neighbouring buildings, were finally able to put them down.

The East Wing was entered first by US Marines before the Executive Residence in the centre. The West Wing was extremely well defended and, in a significant sacrifice of their lives, Secret Service agents also kept a portion of the South Lawn nearest the West Wing clear as well. Gibbons heard about that on the radio when taking to his subordinates and assured the majors & captains leading the assault effort that that was pointless. No helicopter rescue was coming for those whom all of those agents gave their lives to protect. Eventually, the South Lawn, plus the Rose Lawn too, was taken by the 24 MEU and they gobbled up the West Wing as well. Riflemen escorting engineers over in the East Wing battled their way past a ferocious last stand made by half a dozen Secret Service agents who guarded the way to the entrance point to the Presidential Emergency Operations Centre (PEOC). That was the bunker underneath with those inside locked behind quite the fortifications. Once the last defenders were killed, after refusing to lay down their weapons when invited to accept defeat their, the engineers went to work.

Inside the PEOC lay the President of the United States.

All told, one hundred and seventeen lives – those of good guys, bad guys and innocents – were lost during the twenty minutes fight where Gibbon’s Marines seized the White House.


The Treasury Building next door, plus the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the other side, fell into his hands as well without any blood spilt at all. At the Supreme Court, the organic police force there engaged US Marines surrounding that building (with Justices inside) and there were losses of life on both sides of another nine people before it was declared to Gibbons to be properly surrounded with defenders having retreated inside. His Marines didn’t force their way in there. Neither did they went he had 24 MEU personnel secure Capitol Hill. Congress wasn’t entered and into the building, full of legislators, retreated the Capitol Police officers. They made urgent calls for assistance but none came. Senators and representatives were trapped inside the building with no one knowing if those outside were about to burst inside to kill and capture anyone they fancied doing that to. At the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president was defended by more Secret Service agents. US Marines and they fought a quick but lethal engagement with the agents made urgent calls for helicopter evacuation. No helicopters showed up, just like they hadn’t at the White House either. Eight agents and three Marines died before, forcing the issue despite all protestations, Christina Cruz Flores brought about a ceasefire herself where she asserted her authority. She surrendered herself to those who had come to seize her as vice president rather than see a continuing loss of life. Treated with respect, and addressed as ‘ma’am’ by a combat-stained female US Marines captain, Vice President Cruz was taken to the White House for what she was assured was her own safety. Gibbon’s Marines didn’t stay there but rather went to the White House too: the Naval Observatory was outside of the heart of the city and undefendable.

With all objectives secure, apart from the president down in his bunker, Gibbons reported to Harrington that he had taken DC. His superior had never expected to be ‘lucky’ enough to take Lee Mitchell so easily but he knew that the Marine engineers would get into that bunker soon enough. From where he was at Fort Belvoir, Harrington checked on the status of HMX-1: the US Marines’ helicopter unit with presidential & vice presidential evacuation taskings. The squadron had a lot of them, which would often play the ‘shell game’ when moving the president, using several identical helicopters leaving any attacker not knowing which one their target would be in, but all of those tasked with the Marine One & Marine Two mission were still on the ground at various sites. At Quantico, NAF Anacostia (in DC) and at AAF Davison (next to Fort Belvoir), none of them had received orders to fly. His own orders sent out with false authorisation from the highest level had kept them grounded, and so too had the communications cut he had instigated from where he was between those in DC and the HMX-1 operations centre.

Cruz was in custody and Mitchell soon about to be. Harrington had secured Congress with the vast majority of the members inside while the Supreme Court was under control too. With the White House in his hands, that meant that he had seized the executive, legislative & judicial centres of government. SecState Renzi and the Acting SecDef were beyond his reach, so too the Joint Chiefs, but Harrington had enough of what he wanted. Only Mitchell remained below ground, to be blasted out of his bunker. He agreed with Gibbons that the mission was complete, enough so anyway. As per the plan, those who had achieved the task of taking control of the heart of DC still thought that they were putting down a coup rather than undertaking a mutiny. Only a very few involved, no more than a handful with Gibbons foremost among them, knew the truth. Harrington had no desire to dissuade hem of that falsehood. The truth was for another day.

Newsmax had been joined by more networks covering the situation on the ground in DC. Harrington watched a little of the coverage and saw the general confusion. He knew that that would rapidly change. He moved afterwards to contact the political ‘sponsor’ of what he had done. The new president was sent word to go to the White House – it was damaged but not fatally so: the East Wing in the worst shape when several cannons from LAV-25s fired into it – and save the nation from the disaster it was in.

Christ, another coup. This story is insane.
Only China is benefiting at this point so the Middle Kingdom has finally regained its rightful place as the sole superpower of the world once more after 2000 years.

Someone was always going to do something in that situation. No one senior though, just those ideologically minded below.
I did think of a 'quiet' attack but the USSS were never going to fold, even when faced with a battalion of marines.
Ferdinand would have done it more organised and Miller is dead. The 'sponsor' is someone mentioned before, someone who has called for ALL MEASURES to be taken (nukes) and is clearly on a power trip.
Going after teh DAR al the way to the end is the ambition. The results? We shall have to see.




Its been in my mind for a while as an outcome of giving in like that. Someone had to snap in such a hypersensitive, polarised situation.


Alas, the writ of the 51st President will run no more than a few blocks of DC. Their actions will only unite opposition to ending the war to instead opposition to that act. 

The PEOC was well-known in 2015 after the White House released photos of the 43rd President and his cabinet during 9/11. Also, the 45th President was hustled there - against his will - during the protests of 2020. It's what gave him the nickname as "Bunker Boy".

For certain, it is believed that there are tunnels connecting the PEOC to the Treasury Building and Camp David. Perhaps Mitchell could have been evacuated into those tunnels.

Also, I know for sure that this short coup won't end well for the putchists.

175 – ‘The tree of liberty...

...must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’


The DC Air National Guard’s 113th Wing operated a squadron of two dozen F-16s. A third of them had remained at Andrews AFB in Maryland – just outside of the District of Columbia – while the remaining jets had been dispersed widely throughout the war in four flights of four to Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina & Virginia. The mission for those fighters was air sovereignty in defence of a good portion of the East Coast (and the interior) alongside other similar forces. When Colonel Gibbons’ US Marines had assaulted the heart of DC, the commander of the 113th Wing had received a message from Gibbons calling upon him as ‘a loyal American’ to join with the mutiny against President Mitchell. Many of those had been sent out far and wide to military commanders spread out at various locations. From Andrews, as from elsewhere, there was a rejection of that call to treason. F-16s out of Andrews were the first in the skies over DC, before US Navy FA-18Fs from NAS Oceana and New Jersey ANG F-16s from Atlantic City ANGB. Flights of two at a time had raced towards the city before slowing down, dropping altitude and roaring over Gibbons’ 24 MEU in an intimidation measure. Air-to-air missiles and shells for their cannons were carried: not ground-to-air munitions. VFA-106 from Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic, a peacetime training unit, eventually got the strike mission for Fort Belvoir but those DC-manned jets were tasked to just keep on doing what they were doing.

At 3pm on the afternoon of April 12th, as US Army units rushed into towards DC, the 133th Wing’s fighters made a trio of simultaneous flybys. Two each came in from the northwest, the northeast and the southeast. Their ‘time-on-target’ was coordinated so that they all crossed over the three concentrations of hostile forces at the same moment. US Marines at the DC Armory had two jets come straight towards them from out of the clear bright sky and then race towards the Anacostia River: those F-16s were no more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground. Over Capitol Hill, another pair of fighters shot over Chinatown before splitting up to flash past either side of the dome above Congress with an onwards flight towards the Anacostia as well. Their low-level pass allowed those below to be in no doubt of what was right above their heads. The final two F-16s went over the Potomac, past the spire of the Washington Monument and then flew above the White House before pulling up sharply as they turned towards Dupont Circle. That low off the ground, and going fast enough to make an impression but not too fast to do anything dangerous, unleashed a roar as they made that flyby. Buildings shook, everyone’s eyes darted skywards. The half dozen F-16s split up after that into individual flights and circled the city low while also making further passes over those below them. It went on for fifteen minutes with no one sure which direction the jets were coming from at any time and whether falling from them would be bombs.


Vice President Cruz was in the Lincoln Bedroom, on the second floor of the Executive Residence portion of the White House, when those fighters started making those terribly low passes. She couldn’t see them but heard, and felt, them. After being taken there, she had worried for her personal safety as a trio of male Marines had put her inside a bedroom. All sorts of horrible images had flashed through her mind. However, she had soon found herself joined by other women. Sara Keating, chief-of-staff to Roberts first and having stayed on in-role for Mitchell, was likewise in the Lincoln Bedroom and so too were the president’s chief speech-writer and the chair of the National Economic Council. Cruz was placed with high-value female captives and those male Marines left. Two female sergeants became her captors as well as Captain Alexis Palmer. Palmer, on the command staff of the 24 MEU, had been the officer who had led Cruz away from the Naval Observatory to take her to the White House. It had long been said that Cruz was a people person. She got on with people, even political opponents. Congress had voted for her to become vice president when there was a vacancy because she wasn’t only qualified but because she didn’t even have many enemies. Plenty of Democrats didn’t like her because she was a Republican yet they didn’t hate her either. Away from politicians, Cruz had always managed to win people’s trust and make them like her. Once the fears of mistreatment had passed, and worries over being taken outside and machine gunned into a ditch had also lessened too, the vice president had sought to win over Palmer.

Cruz and Keating both had starting working on her even before the jets went overhead.

Palmer justified the capture of Cruz and the seizing of the middle of DC by claiming it was done for the vice president’s own safety as well as that of the nation too. There was a coup being forestalled, hence while Palmer and other 24 MEU Marines were in action. It was all about ensuring democracy. Keating had found that humorous – Cruz shut her up ahead of laughter with an elbow in her side – and had listened to all that Palmer had to say. Then there were questions. What was that coup all about and who was behind it? Had the Secret Service agents whom Palmer’s detachment of Marines at the Naval Observatory had killed been part of that effort to subvert democracy? How about more agents, plus civilians too, who’d lost their lives at the White House? Cruz went to the window and pointed to the smoke coming out of a corner of the East Wing: was restoring democracy about letting the White House burn down? Who gave Palmer her orders? Could those be trusted? Cruz suggested that Palmer use someone’s phone, anyone’s at all, and have a look at what was going on online: she assured her captor that the only coup underway was one which the 24 MEU was undertaking. She and her fellow Marines had been lied to. They had committed mutiny, murder and treason.


TF Capitol moved on DC throughout that afternoon. It took longer than thought for the ad hoc, emergency force to get to the city. Brigadier–General James Lafferty didn’t follow the example set by Gibbons and go forward first at the head of his command. That would have been impossible anyway: the component pieces came towards the city from several directions. He flew by helicopter to Fort Myer, just over the Potomac in Virginia and behind Arlington National Cemetery, at first and impatiently waited to get started. The challenge facing him was huge. To complete his mission, retaking DC, Lafferty had expected an intensive engagement lasting anywhere up to forty-eight hours. Hundreds could die, maybe as many as a thousand people including civilians. A good portion of the middle of DC could be laid waste too. Gibbons’ Marines were urban warfare trained and equipped to do that. Overcoming them and liberating the city was his duty though. Upon arriving at Fort Myer, Lafferty got to work. He had non-combat troops from that facility issued weapons and formed up into rifle teams. The men and women were soldiers despite mostly being involved in administration. They were deployed out onto the four sets of crossing points over the Potomac linking Virginia to DC. The 24 MEU had used three of them to get into the city and those, plus the fourth bridge, was moved upon by US Army soldiers. They cleared away civilians and set up defensive positions: their task was to stop any attempt by Gibbons to block access to DC using his own Marines so that TF Capitol elements moving up from the south could go over those crossings.

News media crews broadcast images of what the soldiers did. Lafferty made sure that there was no interference in that. He was on the staff of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs who had been based at Raven Rock when assigned the mission he was. General Dowd herself had tasked him to retake DC and told him that he was to seek every opportunity pre-attack for contact with the media. Along with what the National Command Authority was doing elsewhere in the public eye, Lafferty set about making sure that everyone could see what was going on. His soldiers looked like combat troops and acted like them. They were within sight of the city and getting ready for a fight. Marching not upon the White House nor Congress they weren’t but that wasn’t the point. Raven Rock was the source of authorised yet unattributable leaks asserting that TF Capitol was far larger than it was with more combat power than it had… as well as closing in faster on DC that it was too. The point was for those Marines to see and hear all of that, just as they were overflown by those F-16s. Intimidation, making them think again about making a fight of defending what they had taken, was far preferred over a real fight. Lafferty had to be ready to do the latter though. He had those tanks on the way along with multiple infantry units. TF Capitol slowly but surely closed-in.

Images from what was happening on bridges over the Potomac were seen by the major over at the DC Armory in-charge of the 24 MEU detachment there. He had a couple of hundred Marines under command. They had secured the largest military base inside DC itself and also the stock of political prisoners – former Vice President Padley included – held at that location. A larger number of US Army regular soldiers were also there, those who had been given false orders to stand down. The soldiers had no weapons nor access to ammunition after the Marines had secured that before anything else, but they were still within the complex. As to that major, his orders from Gibbons were to be prepared to execute all of those captives taken by the federal government and held at the DC Armory upon command. They were traitors to the country: the major had no problem with doing that at all. However, he did have a problem with what he saw on the rolling news coverage across every network which had had access too. Gibbons had told his subordinates to take no notice of ‘fake news’ during their activities but the major had disobeyed that command when a lieutenant under him had convinced him that he just had to know what was being said.

They weren’t putting down a coup, they were the coup! Disbelief came first. Then there was reflection. Later in the day, with the jets overhead and continuing news coverage which included that broadcast by Lori Oakes madly asserting she was the new president, the major’s mind was changed. He realised he and his fellow Marines had been duped. Gibbons had made fools of them. The realisation hit that officer hard. He could have done a lot of things, up to and including going to the White House and confronting Gibbons. What he did though was to take a moment to himself in the men’s room. There was a lone shot which many heard and rushed to investigate. They found their commander dead at his own hand.

More lives were lost down at Fort Belvoir not long after that suicide. Lafferty issued orders for more non-combat soldiers at that sprawling Virginia facility to move towards the portion of the US Army base where Major–General Harrington had taken over the command post for the Military District of Washington. They were to try and detain Harrington if possible but if not, then isolate him beginning with his communications. An air strike was on the cards but Lafferty sent in his uniformed personnel on the ground first in the hope that they might do the job without things getting to that destructive stage. The personnel assigned there moved forward and were engaged by the detachment of Marine Raiders that Harrington had with him. Almost twenty lives were lost when they really shouldn’t have been. VFA-106 jets appeared not long afterwards. Their flight up from Oceana was short and their payloads heavy. They dropped a wide variety of guided-bombs atop the command post. Pairs of aircraft made several passes over a couple of buildings, flattening them and killing all within. Harrington lost his life along with another four dozen plus others, so many of them innocent and fooled into believing his lies. Other Marines there fought on afterwards and wouldn’t give in for a couple of hours more once news from DC came & was believed.


Up in the White House, Palmer switched sides. She got the battalion commander of 3/6 MARINES into see Cruz. That lieutenant–colonel, like his Marines, had been duped into doing what they had when following Gibbons. The officer almost shot himself. Cruz talked him round like she had done with Palmer. They had done wrong but they could save themselves, maybe even the entire future of the US Marine Corps too, by honouring their service oaths. The lieutenant–colonel nearly wavered in going up against his superior Gibbons yet Cruz was his superior too, far above the 24 MEU commander.

New orders went out.

3/6 MARINES were to stand down. Gibbons was to be arrested, Oakes too. The assault on Mitchell’s bunker under the smouldering East Wing was to stop. Over on Capitol Hill and at the (leaderless) DC Armory, the Marines there were to stand down as well.

Palmer, thoroughly ashamed of herself yet seeking redemption, personally volunteered to detain Gibbons and Oakes. She took a squad of Marines across to the West Wing with the battalion commander clearing the way for them. Into the Oval Office armed Marines went for the second time that day. Oakes started to give a speech quoting Thomas Jefferson. She got as far as saying ‘the tree of liberty must be…’ before a scuffle with several female Marines saw her silenced. Gibbons tried to use his pistol to change the situation. Gunshots rang out. Oakes was hit in the crossfire, wounded yet not mortally so: in a confrontation with Cruz later, the vice president would tell the senator she looked forward to seeing her hang. Two Marines and Palmer too were both also shot with Palmer losing her life. A patriot she had been and she shed her blood there in the Oval Office. As to Gibbons, he was shot twice in the chest. Marine medics rushed forward and managed to save him after a frantic effort. He would live just as Oakes would, both to see justice delivered upon them for what they had done.

Across DC, the 24 MEU stood down. Troops from the DC Armory received instructions coming from Lafferty at Fort Myer to start taking their surrender. TF Capitol was still some time away but those soldiers with the 3rd Infantry Regiment within the city suddenly found themselves back in control. The overflights of jets were eventually lessened and soon a couple of detachments of soldiers from 1/31 INF on their way down by road from Fort Dix got a lift via helicopters into DC: the vehicle columns were stuck in traffic crossing into Delaware. Cruz went to Congress escorted by Secret Service agents and DC police from that internal cordon who had had one hell of a day. Everyone was alive inside Congress just as they were in the Supreme Court too.


Yet… there was the matter of the president down in the PEOC bunker below the White House’s East Wing that everyone had questions on. Communications with the bunker, which Mitchell had used to make that public broadcast out to the country via, had gone silent when Gibbons had intensified his efforts to break in. The combat engineers and assault team had been sent the order to cease operations, and the commander of the 3/6 MARINES had gone down there to see why they hadn’t responded.

What had gone on down there?

What had happened to President Mitchell?