Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?¹

(Source)

Herb Moriarty and Rick Golden parked their van next to a stand of trees just north of the Foundation of Faith Worship Center. It was on King Street, they had a pretty good view of the Rod and Gun Club from where they sat, about a quarter of a mile away.

It was a standard surveillance van, packed with camera equipment, computers, and it also sported a parabolic dish antenna which could be extended from what looked like a sun roof. US-13 was fairly well traveled so they wouldn't be extending that during the day. They planned to visit the building in the wee hours of the morning to plant listening devices around the property.

If they had the time to gain entry into the biggest building, where they assumed any weapons and ammo would be stored, they'd plant pinhole cameras in there. Another team would join them in the morning. If needed, they could maintain surveillance around the clock, the van sported a small cot where one of them could sleep while the other monitored the equipment.

Calls of nature could be taken care of as well, if it was in the most primitive of manners. Resealable containers would suffice, though things could get pretty stinky after a couple of days. Hence the backup team.

Golden was scanning the place, which they had taken to calling "the Armory," hoping to see something, anything. But it was a Sunday afternoon and the place seemed deserted. Oh well, nobody said surveillance was exciting.

Willy Batchelor was near the roof in the interior of a maintenance shed, just south of the Club. They had cut a vision slit near the peak which was nearly invisible unless you knew exactly where to look. He had rigged a small video camera and was looking through its lens to the south of the Club.

Another man, Leroy Beardsley was north of the Club hidden by a thick stand of brush and trees. With his ghillie suit he was nearly invisible. He too had rigged a camera and was just waiting for something to look out of place. When he did, he'd point the camera in that direction and turn it on. It's signal ran by a thin wire back to the Club's main office. As did Batchelor's camera.

Both Batchelor and Beardsley had been in Special Operations when they had served in the military, Batchelor had been in the 75th Rangers, Beardsley in Marine Force Recon. Neither man was in as great a shape as they had been in their twenties, but they were still hard men. Both worked their own fields and Batchelor made a few bucks running fishing charters out into the Atlantic.

Shortly after the last car had left the little church down the road, Batchelor spotted a white van pull onto King Street, make a U-turn then pull over and park, the front facing the highway. Batchelor chuckled to himself, nondescript white Ford van, tinted windows, they might as well have painted "FBI Surveillance Van" on the side. Who did they think they were fooling?

It didn't strike Batchelor that most people wouldn't have noticed it. Why? They weren't looking for such a thing in their everyday, boring lives.

"See anything, Rick?" the big black man turned to his partner and shook his head.

"The crackers seem to be laying low today, Herb. Can't say I blame 'em, it's gotta be 90 in the shade."

"It ain't the heat bro, it's the humidity."

Both men chuckled, neither man saw the watcher to their north, nor the one to their south, as those two men left their hides and headed back into the woods, away from US-13.

Beth Chapman parked her car in the lot at the Department of Homeland Security's St. Elizabeth Campus. Her main office was here, though she also had an office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building as one of her main jobs was liaison with the Bureau. She'd just come back from a meeting at 1000 Colonial Farm Rd, McLean, VA, home of the Central Intelligence Agency.

There she'd been in a meeting concerning the shipment of foreign weapons into the United States, the AK-47 was ubiquitous, cheap, and pretty effective. Domestic criminals were always trying to get their hands on that weapon.

It had been two hours of sifting through rumors and very little hard intel, but she felt that the Company had their eye on the ball on that score. She had given one agent the "stink eye" after being told, for the hundredth time, "it's illegal for the agency to operate within the United States ..." Blah, blah, blah. They did, and often, if it suited their purposes and, most importantly, if they thought they could get away with it. Didn't bother her as long as it kept the American people safe.

There were at least three committees on Capitol Hill screeching about and searching high and low for what they called "domestic terrorists" and "the illegal militia." She seemed to recall that having a strong independent militia had been a key to their freedoms in the early days.

But what did those strutting idiots in Congress know anyway? All they knew was how to get re-elected and how to feather their own nests. Bastards.

"Beth, you got a minute?"

She turned and saw Ephraim Johansen standing outside his office.

"Sure, Ephraim, what do you have?"

"Come on inside." He motioned into his small office.

"Anything come from that meeting at the Agency?"

"Nothing that I can share without authorization." She pointed out.

"Well, I'm hearing chatter on certain channels about a shipment of arms and ammunition coming into Virginia, maybe by sea, maybe by truck down from Canada. Does that jive with what you folks talked about up in McLean?"

She could tell that the slippery bastard was fishing, but why, what was his angle?

Deflecting him, she asked, "Chatter where?"

"A couple of websites on the dark web, bulletin boards for people looking for things, people selling things. That sort of chatter."

Chapman shook her head, the guy thought he was wired in, but he didn't have a clue. A rank amateur really.

"I'll pass it along, Ephraim, that's all I can do."

As she left his office, she wondered just what the man did all day other than chase rumors and make up some of his own. She'd heard his little hiss as she'd left. She smiled, a few words in the right circles and we'll see 'who's the bitch,' guy was an asshole.

¹ Latin: Who will guard the guards themselves?

Editor's Note: 72nd revolution around this system's star commences today.