Earth Operations Central: The Millenium War: the Assassins

You had better hope to God that this is fiction.

The Assassinations

For the insurgency to gain a primary foothold in any given area, they must first remove anyone who they believe to be alert enough to immediately notice their presence or operations. There are a variety of techniques. Wherever possible, they prefer to remove the opposition through non-violent means. If they were, for instance, to completely remove an entire primary teir of counter-intelligence specialists, they would tend to arouse the suspicion of the secondary and tertiary teirs. The insurgency seems to be primarily operating under the theory that if you kill the head, the body will follow, but moreso they seem to be operating under the theory that it is better to incapacitate or compromise the extant heads than to kill the head and have it possibly be replaced by a more-effective head. Thus, wherever possible, direct assassinations are avoided, with an emphasis placed on discreditation.

Where discreditation is not easily done, direct physical attacks will be performed, but wherever possible, these attacks will not be blatant, and they will only as a last resort use any weapons that will be readily identified as weapons. "Plausible deniability" must be always maintained.

If at all possible, combinations of weapons and technique will be used so that wherever possible, the attacks themselves cannot be readily identified as attacks. If the head must not be killed, one does not do well to leave the body in good condition, and so many of these attacks are, as single instances, little more than a nuisance, but in concatenation, they add up to both mental incapacitation and physical mayhem, or permanent disability or disfigurement.

It cannot be overemphasised that the insurgents absolutely depend on plausible deniability. That is to say, they must at all times be able to defend themselves with indignant accusations of hallucinations on the part of their victims. Getting caught with a smoking gun would not be conducive to "plausible deniability" and so they prefer to adapt commercially-available products to suit their espionage and assassination needs. If such products are available only through the criminal or clandestine sector, that's fine with them, even less chance of accountability and they will make every effort possible to penetrate and assume control of large sectors of the criminal-enterprise venues.

Please note that the premier venue for special-weapons-and-tactics tends to be public places, with a preference given to anyplace where "neutral witnesses" or surveillance cameras may be spoofed into support of "plausible deniability". For instance, if one can block a camera's view of a provocation with one's body, the camera will see only the response to the provocation, furthering the "he just went crazy for no reason" plausible-deniability approach.

Also note that "plausibly-deniable weapons" are characterized by, where possible, being composed of material that does not film well due to:

speed of application, as in darts or nunchaku

small size of weapon, as in venomed darts

techniques of application, as in lethal injections given in close body-to-body contact, as in crowd situations

optical transparency of weapon, as in polished-glass daggers or poigniard.

complete "unbelievability" of the weapon or weapons system.

A note - persons in military uniform at low rank are the prime targets of the insurgency. Any enlisted personnel visiting the area can expect to never leave it, or at least not in any state that could possibly be useful to either the main military, or to any resistance or militia. For some reason, the insurgency mostly leaves officers alone, scrupulously, rather than chance someone with a good record being in a position combining Awareness, Training and Connections giving the alarm - which in the Washington DC area might already be too late. If a person would like to test this out, all they will need to do is to appear in public in most Montgomery County Maryland suburbs wearing military-cut clothing or any camoflage colors.

Weapons observed in use by insurgents in the Washington DC area include, but are not limited to:

Contact Weapons

Psychoactive chemical dusts. These certainly include
Ketamine
Rohypnol
Combinations of ketamine and rohypnol or other combinations of dissociative-anesthetics and amnesia-inducing diazepines.
Scopalamine or other sedative-hypnotic chemicals that induce fugue-states combined with suggestibility.
Other chemical agents not yet ascertained, none pleasant, some experiences seem to indicate that "anxiogenics" such as cholecystokinin-tetrapeptide (CCK-4) may be used in doses as small as 50 micrograms to precipitate panic attacks, which can be exploited for discreditation or incapacitation purposes.

Assorted barbs, which include
Fishhooks
Medical staples
Thin stiff wires, such as guitar string.

Stun guns, often attached to long stiff wires such as guitar string, used as contact electrodes.

Projectile stun-guns such as modified versions of the Air TASER.

"Memory Materials" - there are a variety of substances, quite commonly deployed in commercial products such as eyeglasses frames, which will tend to return from any deformed position to their original shape. Also, one must note that there are also composite materials which combine such resilience with piezoelectric layers, or possibly piezomagnetic layers. such materials are exceptionally dangerous as they can be introduced into the body of the target in extremely compact forms, and will then expand and resume their former shapes, which may be fairly large or complex. The piezoelectric or peizomagnetic variants on memory-material themes are potentially horriffic, as they would not return to their expanded "forged" shapes until stimulateed to do so by electromagnetic, magnetic, or radio-frequency impulses. It must be noted that there are memory plastics which are very strong, and which are optically transparent.

Glass or plastic rods which do not show up well on Xray have been observed as a preferred weapon. This is very difficult to see coming, and does not videotape well. It must be noted that extremely strong and transparents plastics and spun-glass products have been produced in vast quantities in recent years - there are spun-glass/polymer-fiber composite materials which are very strong, very light, and of such small diameter that they can be grasped between the fingers of one hand, and driven through thin bones such as those found in the temple of the skull.

Combinations of the two previous techologies may be deployed, and may have been modified in conjunction with the following technolgies:

Medical technology including but not limited to:
Medical staples and medical staplers, and variations on this theme
Catheters. The thin and amazingly stiff catheters used for deep work are a preferred weapon, as some of them are designed to be almost invisible except with the most finely-tuned X-ray. They also don't degenerate within tissue and tend to drift within the body, occasionally causing lots of problems.
Psychiatric restraint injector technologies (hardened poly-sucrose carriers which dissolve on entry)
Pressurized injectors
Dimethyl sulfoxide and other topical-absorption carriers
Suturing technologies, especially self-sealing or shrinking-plastics suture technologies.

NEW! 10 JUN 1998 - We have at last had a clear sighting of one particular weapon. We had for some time been quite convinced that one major weapon being used was probably a medical catheter, and in some cases this may also be a common weapon of the insurgents. However, after a certain amount of clueless investigation, we have determined that a primary weapon of the insurgency is optical fiber. It's exceptionally strong, can be honed to a sharp point, and is as invisible as technology can make it. Beware, the stuff's extremely dangerous. In combination with an optically-correct plastic crossbow, this is an amazingly effective weapon in that it can be attached to the plastic quarrel, and used to retrieve the quarrel, with a sort of yank-and-wrap motion. Also, shorter lengths of the thicker varieties of the stuff make for a sort of nearly-invisible rapier. Think of a limp, floppy/droopy sword, almost infinitely thin and considerably stronger than steel. It's almost invisible, doesn't film or image well, even with state-of-the-art medical technology, and it can go right through you, where it basically coils within your innards and slowly migrates.

Optical Weapons are considered the ideal "range" or "distance" weapon. Such weapons include but are not limited to
High-intensity strobes, often salvaged from "disposable cameras". At between eight and twelves dollars a pop, and eminently reusable, these strobes can be bundled together or overpowered. When the emissions are gathered and focused through a decent compact lensing system, the strobes can be used to temporarily incapacitate a person at close range, and repeated uses at a distance from the same angle can induce retinal damage, without attracting much notice from the targets or observers, particularly if focussed through such lenses or infrared or ultraviolet filters as are commonly associated with photography.

Diode Lasers. Diode lasers have increased in both power and efficiency over the last two years. While they are not yet "inexpensive" in terms of unit-cost, and the power-supplies are often somewhat bulky, the per-use costs of diode lasers as non-lethal antipersonnel weapons have fallen to well below the costs of gunpowder. One unit investigated turned out to be a mid-infrared Class 3 diode unit about the size of a sewing-thimble, emitting approximately 2 watts of power. That may not sound like much, but when focussed by the lens in a person's eye, this can cause severe damage very rapidly. Visible-frequency units are available which output approximately one to five watts, which is instantaneously blinding. Cost of these units is approximately one dollar per hour of operation, not counting power, approximately $1500 to $2000 for the diode, powersupply and decent lensing. It must be noted that the powersupplies are somewhat bulky, weighing about ten pounds with no batteries, and are about the size of a briefcase. Ordinarily, these units will be operated from within or within-cabling-range of a running motor-vehicle.
It should be noted that a minivan capable of carrying a refrigerator is capable of towing all necessary equipment for a one shot deuterium-floride laser that operates in the megawatt/second class. Deuterium-floride lasers are rather hellishly expensive, though, even only in terms of fuel. However, hydrogen-floride lasers capable of similar power outputs, and 25,000 watts/second delivered for ten seconds will carve up a car rather nicely, and relatively silently as well.

Techniques

First and foremost - if you see anything orienting towards your eyes, squint, evade, and block your eyes. Also expect physical attacks to be directed at you from within the optical shadow created by your blocking! Also note that the primary initial uses of optical weapons (see above), particularly in the low-power IR and UV ranges, is to slowly erode your peripheral vision. Makes it a lot easier to sneak up on you.

If you enter any store or office and you see someone starting to move to your rear and close in on you, prepare to get out quickly. If simultaneously someone starts moving to block the door, it is time to bolt out of there.

If you see anyone entering a strange posture, as if they were holding an invisible spear, get out of the axis of that invisible spear. They may well be preparing to run you through with a long, thin piece of optically-correct plastic. Note that these plastic spears can be of almost any length from about eight feet long down to mere inch-long slivers.

Also observed has been fairly complex equipment made out of nearly-transparent materials. One such observed device was as best we could tell a functional crossbow made almost entirely out of nearly-transparent plastic, complete with a plastic quarrel.

If you see someone approaching holding what appears to be a small tab of flesh-tone plastic, be ready to jump - it could be attached to a very thin stiff piece of conductive wire, the other end of which is connected (via the handling tab) to a stun gun.

If anyone walks up way too close to you in line, particularly in areas where your ability to move is restricted, be ready to spin and strike, be be advised - the insurgents practice a technique where one will harass you from the rear, and when you turn, you will be struck by the person to whom you have just presented your back, in rather the same way that attacking wolves dash in to strike at the hamstring of a bull brought to bay.

Be particularly alert to situations where the stores seem to be designed to either hem you in to where you have no latitude of motion, or where the lobbies are designed to permit people to walk up to your rear totally unobstructedly, particularly in situations where views from the outside are extremely obstructed. Consider any shop that has restricted views from the street, despite architecture to the contrary, to probably be an enclave held by the insurgency.

Be very cautious when using public transportation. It's very common for an insurgent to take up a place on the bus where they have control of access or egress. Wherever possible, they also seem to be targeting the employment position of bus-driver. Since most local busses have two-way radios, it's quite possible for the drivers to generate and relay intelligence on habitual or frequent riders. It must be noted here that as a rule, when the insurgents have acquired a position as bus-driver, they are not at all averse to allowing situation on their bus to be "out of control" - so far as non-insurgents are concerned. They're also in a prime position to engage in discreditation and deception, passing false tales to cause resistance or suspected-resistance personnel to be targeted by non-insurgent dupes.

Post Offices are prime targeting zones. The US Postal Service, which is not a Federal Agency (though it does enjoy special legal status) has been one of the most consistent adherents to New-Citizen Hiring programs, and in some regions the Post Offices are aggressively targeted by insurgents for total staff replacement. In such Post Offices, extremely bad things can happen and if you think that the friendly staff won't go postal on you if you try to defend yourself from some "ringer" sent in to take you from the rear, you can be taken out very quickly. They have well-established disposal protocols in place; you're just another large package to be delivered.

Beware the dreaded Foreign Teen Ninja Vixens. Whenever possible, insurgents use the laws and law-abiding tendencies of most unAware Americans as an aid to their activities. They quite commonly will send teenagers, generally disguised as gangsters or ganster-wannabees, to do their dirtiest work for them. This is a particularly insidious technique, since if one teen can flee removing any evidence against them, any adult defending themselves can wind up in big trouble for "assaulting a minor".

Beware! Assassins may be all about you, and due to the multi-generational nature of The Insurgency and The War, that cute young white boy may have a perfect American accent and indeed may be your homeboy - but his allegiances will be to a monstrous and discredited ideology distilled into a well-trained human weapon whose contempt for you is boundless and whose hatred is beyond monstrous. You are everything that he and his parents were bred and raised to hate and destroy.

Overheard (04 Aug 1997 @ 15:05 datestamp register # 06) in the Rockville, Maryland (20850) Main Post Office, from some skinny-headed baseball-cap-wearing Spetznaz gangsta, when asked by a real American "you aren't gonna do that to him are you?" - :

"Better him than you!" - - delivered with a smirk. And he did (the plastic fishhook in the occiputal neck muscles). And the American didn't do a damned thing.

Be advised that in the areas controlled by The Insurgency, the Star Spangled Banner no longer waves over the home of the Free, and certainly no longer over the home of the Brave.

Be very ashamed.

Learn to fight.

The Insurgency

The Resistance

The Lockdown

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