[h3]Going Loud[/h3][hr]

Dan sat through all this with a bit of a 'holy shit' attitude, starting from the security check by the Rangers. He motioned to the rest of the group to stay cool through the process and just go along with it, from the questioning forward. The place was bristling with heavily armed security in the form of a fully uniformed squad of rangers plus a forward detachment and then all the green berets in the room to boot. They'd been cocking this pistol for a while, but now it felt like they were at the break and it'd all move fast from here. Months of building up in the hills, the patient work of dealing with the black market, stealing usable equipment and fortifying the Green Mountains. He even heard rumors of SAM systems being moved in, stingers and bigger stuff.

They were dressed down for the event, because apparently a bunch of the militia type guys showed up in their best Sunday BDU's and web gear, though there were other groups of discreetly dressed guerrillas. Dan guessed, but couldn't tell for certain, if these groups were picked for reliability or what. He knew that his group paid their dues, dutifully forking over most of the opiates in Vermont on charity through the largess and patriotic sentiment of Billy Boyle. Some of the other groups had the same sort of look, like they'd been doing the hairy end of this sitzkrieg for a minute-- the black market groups tended to stick out among the camouflage in their civilianized gear, but they didn't stick out in downtown Burlington.

The plan was audacious and huge. They'd heard the rumors of what was going on in Georgia and Alabama and Florida, and how the other parts of the country were faring, but they didn't have the best information in the universe. One thing the Ranger captain mentioned that was interesting to him was that they had no firm plan for extracting the rangers, but no further reinforcements expected either, "Dig this guys," he muttered to Joe and the Giguere brothers, "they're reinforcing us with a battalion of Rangers. That's it." They already knew it would be down to them, but it was interesting to see the other cells around the room too and compare notes on mode of dress, but he deliberately ignored the introductions on names and things he didn't want to even know, things that an enemy intelligence officer would wannt to pull out of you.

It was a cynical sort of thought. The absolute candor of the operations planning struck Dan as a little dangerous -- if there was a traitor in the room, they'd have the mother of all intelligence to give to the Stasi in Burlington...but on the other hand, who would believe it? Everyone -was- watching each other though, and there was a bit of tension. Dan kept his hands out in the clear, to make sure that no one saw him taking down notes or anything else that was overly suspicious. He just prayed no one in here had a photographic memory.

But at least they knew their target. He wasn't keen to shoot Vermont State Troopers if it came down to it, but they also had to take out that communications center. It would force the Soviets to bring more equipment in and probably more troops as well. As to that airfield? Well, with the Soviets using it to launch sorties against US forces, it had to go. The strategy of just building up guerrillas in the mountains and not even shooting at these planes, of just stockpiling, digging in and otherwise setting up for a long, ugly fight, made sense now. They were going to swing in on that airfield and bag a lot of equipment in one fell swoop, while attention was on Georgia.

It struck him that they worried a lot over covering up LeBeau's murder and all the evidence out of a conccern for discretion, trying to make it look as much like a drug deal gone sour as possible, down to taking the money. 

Now Dan felt like a bit of a fool; they didn't need to worry about it because all of New England was about to go loud. He glanced back at the Giguere brothers, who could probably read his expression for once -- it was tense and it was real. They signed on for this, sure, but now they were staring down the barrel. Once they got down to talking to Park about the nuts and bolts, they'd hopefully be able to settle down and just concentrate on the actual job. The big stuff was a little too much to think about, when the day to day was survival and not getting pinched on this deal or getting caught killing this guy...