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- Jacques - 05-25-2015
In the days after the massacre at the Masiaka refinery-turned-refugee camp, Legion Premiere had been busy. For the Legionnaires on the ground, little had changed, and moods had begun to sour. Rumours spread that Jacques had been aware of what was going to transpire at the refinery, knew that the refugees there would be killed, and that he had done nothing to prevent it, and continued to do nothing to avenge it.
He offered no excuses, no heart-felt speeches to the men under his command. Only a select few would have seen how deeply it had affected him, and even they didn't know the truth of it. He had doctored the entire situation, had counted on the government troops to follow him out of the city. He had planned that they would execute some of the refugees, as a show of control and force. He hadn't planned on the Temne attack.
That had been a miscalculation, a grievous error on his part. So much effort had been put into arranging the extraction of the children, to protect them from the worst of what the Mende troops would do. And instead, he had put them, and men loyal to him, into harms way. Few had survived that mistake, and even then only because of that freelance reporter whom had so foolishly decided to tag along. But so long as he had a job to do, he would not allow himself the right to grieve or be swallowed by self pity.
Legion headquarters staff had been busy over the past five days, starting even before the events at the refugee camp. Plans had been set into place. Objectives and targets had been carefully selected and deliberated over. The company had been quietly rewritten from the ground up. It had gone unnoticed thus far, but they were no longer referred to publicly as Legion Premiere, but rather simply as 'the Legion.' No more allusions to being a private security company. All contracts of that flavour had been handed off, and the every Legionnaire not serving in Sierra Leone, or part of the relief convoy, waited at the company headquarters in Morocco.
Jacques had kept both himself, and his people, busy. Some meager understanding had been made with the Interim President General Wallace-Johnson in the wake of the refugee camp massacre. Legionnaires moved in small groups around the city, encouraging some semblance of normality, although they had no official control or influence. The government's soldiers had all but replaced the city police, and what little remained of the city's emergency responders, fire fighters and paramedics and the like, were barely able to operate with a half dozen military members breathing down their necks.
City infrastructure was stretched beyond its limits; with the city over flowing with refugees, there was a huge strain on the electrical grid, the city's ability to produce potable water. With the airport and ports under military blockade, and with the ongoing conflict and raids by bandits and rebels, there was no influx of food to the city. The reserves were near depleted, and rationing was already strictly enforced. Public executions had been carried out by the military on undesirables who were caught hoarding food. Those undesirables were, of course, Temne refugees. And if the military didn't get them, then riots and looters did.
Of course, along side dealing with those hoarding food, Interim-President General Wallace-Johnson's loyal forces, and those members of the elected government that had thrown in with his camp, also tended to seize property. Exotic cars, money, belongings. Imagined or real insults were answered with theft and murder. Temne or Mende didn't matter.
The flow of refugees into the city also brought with it news and rumours of what was happening beyond the relative safety of the military cordon. Of soldiers-turned bandits in the east, near the border of Liberia, whom had met little to no resistance in their raping and pillaging. Of the growing number of attacks by Guinean warlords into Sierra Leone; much of the north-east border was over run already, and many of the smaller communities there had been razed to the ground, women and children taken, men killed and boys turned to child soldiers.
And the rumours of the return of Ebola to the region. It had festered for decades, quietly, in what had once been Guinea, but it had reared its ugly head once more. A team of volunteer doctors in Kamakwie, Sierra Leone, had reportedly confirmed the presence of the disease in a group of villagers that had fled to the city to escape the Guineans. Two days later, Warlord ShakeSpear's forces took the city and executed the doctors.
Then there were news reports of suicide bombers and drive-by shootings in Egypt, linked to religious extremists oozing out of the CCD. A rebirth of the extremist violence that had dominated the late 20th/early 21st century.
Jacques had been working behind the scenes even before the trip to the refugee camp. Contacting people of interest around the city; police department heads, city workers, even so far as a carefully disguised message to the military commander tasked to guarding the international airport.
His talks with the police, those loyal to the people, not the pay check, had proven fruitful. That morning, nearly two thirds of the city's police force had staged a walk out. One that was little felt, as the military had assumed most of their duties already. The military garrison of the international airport sat ready; they were those that the General hadn't trusted to support him, so he had left them away from the brunt of the action, where they wouldn't have been forced to make a decision. Jacques had convinced their officers to remain exactly where they were, and not get involved with what was to come.
The city workers; the plumbers and electricians and heavy equipment operators that made a city run, had been the easiest to sway of all. They had led a simple life, one that they wished to see return. As stood, the city was dying under the pressure and lack of government interest in their departments. Them, bolstered with skilled refugees that Jacques' Legionnaires had been encouraged to identify for rebuilding purposes, would allow him to take control of the city's infrastructure. Power and telecommunications to be exact.
All that remained was for the Interim President General Wallace-Johnson to make his next move.