Jack of Harts

Cannon Air Force Base’s private little civil war was a vicious affair. Those moving to arrest the base commander and bring Cannon under the new President’s control were elite Special Forces. Those standing in their way included Rear Echelon Marginal Fighters who were almost as dangerous to their friends as those they were trying to stop. Multiple Special Forces teams joined them, but they were trying to catch up with teams already armed, armored, and on their way. Casualty rates skyrocketed as the battle raged on the ground, below ground, and in the air above the base. The fighting shattered most of Cannon’s teams, gutted their aircraft, and set the base itself on fire in dozens of locations. Only a single team and a handful of aircraft remained fully operational in the end, but they and the surviving base staff spread word of what happened throughout the military networks. That and their intention to support Texas. It was a chilling message for the entire American military.

The news that units from Cannon Air Force Base had been deployed to arrest the former President of the United States hit the base like a bomb. Literally. The majority of the airmen deployed there did not approve of their fellows being used on American soil. The base commander quickly moved to make certain future actions on American soil would be contained before they launched. The President ordered the remaining Special Forces teams at Cannon to arrest the commander and secure the base for future operations. But members of the teams who opposed the arrest publicly announced the orders to the entire base. Decades of terrorist attacks on military bases had long since codified the practice of servicemen working on post with weapons on their person, so the reaction to that announcement was swift and lethal. Shots were fired and Cannon Air Force Base exploded into it’s own small civil war.

Cannon Air Force Base housed many of the Special Forces teams near America’s Old Border with Mexico, including some of the most secretive ones. What people still call the Black Helicopter teams, even if modern “helicopters” have little in common with the original vehicle that coined the term. The Black Helicopter teams were infamous in various conspiracy theories of the Pre-Second Great Depression era, performing missions as unbelievable as ransacking organic milk producers to doing away with inconvenient individuals like the real life Epstein whose death resulted in the saying we all know so well. The most sensational stories always made these missions so black that the soldiers went in without any identification to avoid being recognized as part of the military if they were caught. As in most stories of this kind, there is some basis of truth to the genesis of these stories. There are highly secretive Special Forces teams that perform dark missions, and it was to those teams that the new President of the United States went to after the FBI failed to arrest the old President on charges of treason.