Rigged

by James Rosone

  “We still have the other assault group heading to their target,” explained one of the Army colonels hopefully. “They should be over the objective in minutes.”

  Everyone turned their eyes to the second assault group as it prepared to hit its target. Before the two Ospreys flew in to drop the next team off, the Apache made a slow circle over the farmhouse, scanning the area for possible threats. The gunner saw something suspicious near one of the outlying buildings on the farm and opened fire, shredding the building. In the blink of an eye, a heavy machine gun opened fire on the Apache from the nearby forest, hitting the helicopter with a string of heavy-caliber machine-gun rounds. Fortunately, the Apache was a heavily armored attack helicopter, and the rounds harmlessly bounced off.

  At this point, the two Ospreys changed course and moved to gain more altitude and let the Apache do its thing. While the gunship was circling back around for a better angle to attack the tree line, it let loose two antimateriel rockets at the heavy machine-gun position to silence it. Just then, the helicopter suddenly spat out flares as its emergency evasive systems took over.

  A fraction of a second later, a surface-to-air missile from a man-portable air-defense system streaked out of a nearby copse of trees. The MANPAD had been fired from less than a thousand feet away, leaving little time or opportunity for the flares to cause the seeker head to lock on to them before the missile slammed into the right engine of the Apache.

  The gunship’s engine started spitting out flames and smoke. The helicopter veered to the right, streaking smoke as it drifted away from the trees and the farmhouse. The pilot would now have to do his best to limp the helicopter back to Camp Bondsteel and hope he didn’t have to make an emergency landing.

  “What the hell is going on?” demanded the SecDef as he stood up, looking at the general and colonels sitting at the table. “Clearly, someone tipped these guys off that we were coming, because there’s no way they could have known we were hitting both locations.”

  Still fuming, he turned to one of the colonels, who was holding a phone receiver to his shoulder. “Order the other team to abort. Tell them to head over to the other objective and work to pick up our wounded. Order the Reaper to light that farmhouse up, along with the surrounding area. If our target is still there, then I want him dead. If not, then I want the rest of those hostiles dead!”

  A minute went by, and then they saw several missiles streak in and blow the entire farmhouse apart, along with the lone outbuilding and several spots in the tree line where the MANPAD had been launched.

  The two Ospreys that had been holding back at a higher altitude until the gunship made sure the area was clear headed toward the other objective ten minutes away to help pick up their wounded comrades from the other team.

  The President looked at the generals around the table and asked the obvious question. “How did we not know about this ambush? Why didn’t our surveillance pick up those guys in the tree line?”

  The lone rep from the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, leaned forward as he replied, “They must have been tipped off. As to why we didn’t pick them up on the satellites…they could have used a thermal blanket and just waited under it until our helicopter was in range. A thermal blanket is relatively cheap tech these days.”

  The President shook his head. “That’s not good enough, people. I want answers on who leaked the raid information and how this terrorist group knew exactly when and where we were going to attack. Someone on the Serbian side must have tipped them off. Figure out who knew what when, and what the heck is going on,” he ordered.

  Turning to look at the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the President added, “I’d like to talk to the both of you separately; we need to go over something in private.”

  The two looked at each other and then back at the President. “Yes, Mr. President,” said the SecDef. “We can walk up to my office.” He motioned for the other two men to follow him.

  The three of them exited the ops center, leaving the rest of the staff to handle the recovery and the rest of the mission on their own.

  *******

  When they left the ops center, the Attorney General and the Director for Homeland Security were both waiting for them in the hallway.

  The SecDef and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were caught off guard but quickly regained their composure. Turning to look at the President as the five of them now walked down the hallway toward his office, McElroy asked, “Something big is going on, isn’t it?”

  The President just nodded, not saying a word as they walked down the hall. Then he turned to look at the SecDef. “It’s best we wait to get into your office before we speak, but, yes, something big is going on.”

  The rest of the walk was shrouded in silence as the group made their way through the maze of hallways to reach the SecDef’s office. When they walked in, Chuck noticed it was 2247 hours, an hour and thirteen minutes until midnight.

  When everyone was in the office, the President asked the Secret Service agents to stay outside and to make sure no one disturbed them unless it was absolutely urgent. With the room now secured and all five of them seated, Sachs leveled with the SecDef.

  “Chuck, I’ve got some bad news about the election and everything that’s been going on,” he began. He had a nervous and uncertain look on his face.

  Holding a hand up before the President could say anything else, the SecDef said, “If you’re telling me it looks like we may lose, I wouldn’t count yourself out yet. The polls were wrong last time.”

  The President shook his head. “It’s not that, Chuck. I’m going to lose. It’s not even about the polls this time.” Sachs sighed, then turned to the Attorney General, Malcolm Wright. “Why don’t you tell him what we know up to this point? The sooner Chuck knows, the sooner he can help us figure out what to do next.”

  Malcolm nodded. “We’ve uncovered a very sophisticated plot to subvert the election,” he said.

  “Oh my God. You have to be kidding me,” said the SecDef, flabbergasted. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s bad, Chuck,” Malcolm said. He stood up and paced behind his chair for a second. “Several weeks ago, we uncovered what we thought was a couple of postal workers who had been bribed to intercept absentee ballots from being delivered to the post office during their daily mail routes.”

  “What? How the heck is that possible?” Chuck asked angrily.

  With this national ID card and iVote, the election was supposed to be infallible, he thought. So much for securing the election.

  “It’s complicated, Chuck, but I’ll do my best to break it down in layman’s terms. At first, we thought this was just a couple of bad apples, a few rogue postal workers. Unfortunately, the more we dug, the more we found. As of this morning, we’ve arrested forty-three postal workers involved in the scheme. There could be more, but those are the ones we’ve discovered up to this point.”

  The SecDef held up his hand. “Wait—can’t the election offices just send out new ballots to the individuals who requested them and just have the people recast their vote? There must be a mechanism that allows for something like that to happen.”

  Sighing before he replied, Malcolm explained, “Unfortunately, that’s not possible. For one, the election commission in each affected area would have to resend absentee and mail-in ballots to everyone in the affected districts. Second, there just isn’t enough time to send out new ballots to everyone and allow people to review and return them before election day. We’re less than four days away at this point. Also, even if the new ballots were sent out, they’d have no way of being able to distinguish between whose ballot had already been received and counted and whose hadn’t counted. We could have tens of thousands of people casting more than one ballot.”

  “This must be some sort of mistake,” McElroy insisted. “How many ballots could these postal workers have intercepted, anyway? Maybe it’s not enough to affect the outcome of the election.”

  “
No, this isn’t a mistake or some sick joke,” Malcolm insisted. “From the number of people the FBI have caught up to this point and the amount of money that has been identified as part of this scheme, it would appear these postal workers were able to intercept more than 192,000 votes in five states, enough to swing the outcome of the election in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Texas.”

  Malcolm hung his head low. “This is just what we know right now,” he said in a very depressed tone. “This scheme could be going on in other states as well. I’ve got the FBI looking at every postal worker in the country right now, but there just isn’t time to uncover every possible angle before the election.” He slumped back down into his chair with a look of despair and angst on his face.

  There was a short pause as Chuck and General Austin Peterson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, digested what they had just been told. Finally, the general asked, “How do we know these intercepted votes won’t help you, Mr. President? I mean no disrespect, but perhaps this is being done to advance you.”

  “We thought about that as well,” responded Patricia Hogan, the DHS Secretary. “However, the districts these votes were stolen from were districts that have traditionally voted Democratic by a two-to-one margin. The specific postal workers that were involved in this scheme targeted nursing homes, retirement communities, and assisted living facilities in these districts. Without fail, these specific groups have traditionally voted Republican by a wide margin. Not enough to tip the balance in their districts, but enough to keep the races there from being a complete defeat.”

  She leaned forward as she continued to explain, “The consensus at my department is that these facilities were targeted as a means of suppressing the Republican vote in these districts. If 30,000 fewer people voted Republican in one of these districts, it wouldn’t be as easily noticed because these districts already vote two-to-one against the Republicans regardless. So, if that margin were to increase to three-to-one, it wouldn’t necessarily raise any red flags. However, it would be just enough difference in the margin that it could shift the balance of the state, effectively changing the results in these states from closely voting conservative to just barely voting Democratic.”

  Jumping back into the conversation, Malcolm added, “When we reviewed the interrogation of Wen Zhenyu and reinterrogated a handful of the postal workers, we put two and two together and discovered that Wen was one of the key money guys supporting this effort.

  “One of the postal workers in North Carolina told us she was dating a fellow by the name of Michael Wang and that he was the guy who approached her about the scheme. When the FBI raided his workplace and arrested him, he eventually spilled the beans. He said he had been approached by some men who said if he didn’t cooperate with them, his grandparents who still live in China along with his extended family would be thrown in jail or possibly killed.

  “During his interrogation, he told us he was directed to set up several business checking accounts for a couple of companies in each of the states where the scheme was happening. He was then contacted by Wen Zhenyu, who said he’d start sending money through an offshore account to be placed into each of these shell corporations he had been directed to set up. Once we had Mr. Wang’s side of the story, we pressed Wen about it. He not only confirmed the information but revealed a greater plan to rig the election. So, as you can see, this is a much larger conspiracy than we first thought. We have actual, verifiable proof of at least one foreign power having successfully interfered in our election to engineer an outcome of their choosing.”

  Turning back to look at his Secretary of Defense, the President said, “That brings us back to what’s going on in the Balkans. This Wen Zhenyu appears to be the main money guy. We know he has supported this voter scheme here in the states and financially supported the terrorist groups that carried out the October 24th attacks. He’s also given money to help carry out the Halloween attacks tomorrow and the election day attacks, if our people aren’t able to stop them.”

  Shaking his head in disgust, Chuck asked, “To what end, though? And why? What is the end-state of all of this involvement? Surely they must’ve known that at some point we’d find out.”

  The President snorted. “To change administrations, Chuck. I mean, peel the onion back. The CIA analysts looking at Wen’s computers and electronic data were able to trace that Gmail and White House email hack back in 2018 to the Ministry of State Security. They were trying to figure out if we were going to impose new trade tariffs on them and label them a currency manipulator. They wanted our playbook for what we were going to do to them economically so they could anticipate our moves and have countermoves ready and in place. When they saw the severity of what we were going to impose, they opted to take a more direct approach in manipulating our democracy. What better way to control the trade policies to their choosing than to steal the election outright?”

  “This is crap! What are we doing about this?” Chuck demanded angrily as he looked at the four of them for answers.

  “There isn’t much we can do, Chuck,” said Malcolm. “We know what’s happening, but what are we supposed to do? Hold a press conference and lay all the cards on the table? If we do that, we’ll be accused of trying to rig the election a couple of days before it’s supposed to be held. The Democrats and the media will go absolutely nuts, and who can blame them? They’ll say we engineered this, that we allowed the terrorist attacks to happen, that we were incompetent in protecting the nation.”

  “It’s a perfect storm, Chuck,” said the President. “We’re in a total Catch-22 here. If we stay silent, we know Senator Tate is going to win because everything’s been engineered for him to do so. If we bring all this information forward, then we’ll be accused of attempting to rig the election. If we win, they’ll say we manipulated the voters at the last minute, and if we lose, they’ll say it was a repudiation of our attempt to lay blame for the loss on the Chinese and Islamic extremists. It’s the ultimate lose-lose position.” It was apparent from his expression that Sachs felt completely helpless.

  “We can’t allow this to happen, Mr. President,” the SecDef insisted. “We can’t allow the country to be manipulated like this.” He wasn’t happy with the President’s response up to this point.

  The President let out a deep sigh. “What would you have me do, Chuck? This has the potential to completely split the country apart. I mean, look what’s happening already from the weaponization of the October 24th attacks on social media. Shoot—half the country doesn’t even think it was Islamic extremists. They believe the narratives that were being pushed out on social media, that these were attacks carried out by Antifa, white nationalists or Black Lives Matters. You and I know that’s garbage, and we’ve put that out in multiple press conferences and briefings, refuting it. There’s just been so much sketchy news pumped out the last four years that no one’s listening anymore to what’s really going on.” Shaking his head, the President added, “I don’t want to go down as the last American president, Chuck.”

  Standing up, Chuck walked over to look out the window of his office. He needed to think for a moment. Surveying the capital across the Potomac, he shook his head in disgust.

  We’re not going to lose this country over this, he resolved. We have to figure something out.

  Turning to look back at the President, Chuck saw the four others were watching him, waiting to see what he’d say next. He didn’t hold back with his response. “I don’t accept that, Mr. President. We’re bigger than this. We have to stop this from happening.”

  “What do you want us to do, Chuck? Hold a press conference and tell the world what’s happening?” Malcolm retorted. “They won’t believe us. Even if we show them the evidence, half the country still won’t believe it.”

  “We can postpone the election,” Chuck asserted. He quickly held a hand up to stop them from interrupting him. “Let me finish my thought. Look, we’ve already made the blockchain voting an option for people. Heck, it loo
ks like 35 percent of the electorate has opted to use the iVote app. What if we brought our findings to the American people, and then, as a consequence of what we’ve discovered, we postpone the election for sixty days to allow people ample time to register to vote using the iVote app. That way, those who aren’t able to use the app have time to request a poll worker to help them with it, or to be allowed to vote via a new absentee ballot that is immediately scanned into the voting machine so there’s no chance for fraud.”

  The President surveyed the faces around him. Secretary McElroy could see that the AG and the DHS Secretary were still mulling the idea over.

  After a moment, Malcolm cleared his throat. “Mr. President, I’m not sure if Chuck’s plan could work, but with the pending terrorist attacks that we know are going to take place, we could use that as a justification to postpone the election. We can then present the case of voter fraud and void all absentee and mail-in ballots. We could announce that people either have to physically come to a polling station to vote or use the iVote app. Exceptions could be made for those who are homebound and unable to use the app or come to a polling station, but we’d have to really limit the exceptions and then go out of our way to make sure a polling worker was able to accommodate those who needed it.”

  The AG paused. “We’re going to get accused of interfering in the election if we try to make the American people aware of what’s going on—we have to accept that fact. However, if we don’t do anything, if we stay silent, then we have to accept that not only are we going to lose, but a foreign power would have succeeded in manipulating our election. If we allow that to stand, Mr. President, we may never know if our future elections will ever be free and fair. It’ll be a permanent smear on our nation, and worse, if word ever gets out that we knew about this and did nothing, it may tear the country apart.”

  “It may tear the country apart as it is, Malcolm,” said the President. He sighed. “No, the country is going to fall apart if we do this.”