On Monday, January 20, shortly before President Donald J. Trump officially became the 47th President of the United States, US Marines in California were in a gunfight against FBI agents guilty, allegedly, of planting surveillance gear in the off-post home of a White Hat council member stationed at Camp Pendleton.
Two days earlier, the officer found miniature audio and video recording devices in his bedroom, living room, and home office. Whoever installed the gadgets had infiltrated the home, circumventing a wireless alarm without leaving signs of intrusion. They hadn’t left a fingerprint or footprint or disturbed a piece of furniture. And while the intruder(s) had a degree of expertise, he apparently hadn’t the prescience to predict a White Hat council member would have counter-surveillance contraptions inside his home, which he checked habitually. And when he reviewed video footage from one of his strategically placed cameras, he saw two men garbed in black installing micro-cameras in lighting fixtures and other discrete locations. The intruders wore masks, their features undiscernible, but one held in his right hand a Glock 19, which he put on a counter while handing his companion a screwdriver. The officer’s camera had enough resolution to capture the gun’s serial numbers on a metal insert in front of the trigger guard.
White Hats accessed the Federal Firearms License (FFL) database and learned that the gun belonged to a California resident named Charles Dubois. Dubois was also a longtime FBI agent who worked at the bureau’s Fresno office.
Naturally, White Hats decided to visit him.
On Monday morning PST, US Marines arrived at and staked out Dubois’ domicile, with orders to arrest him on espionage charges. As they prepared to storm the house, a sedan carrying two men wearing dark suits and sunglasses pulled into the driveway. The driver honked the horn. It seemed that Dubois was carpooling to work that day.
Although the Marines had concealed themselves, upon opening his front door, Dubois must have sensed something was amiss; he glanced about nervously. He pulled a cellphone from his jacket and held it to his ear. A second later, the man in the sedan’s passenger seat had a cell to his ear—the two obviously were speaking to each other.
Dubois ducked back inside but left the door ajar, and the sedan reversed slowly.
The Marines intuited they had somehow been made and broke cover. But by the time they reached the sedan, its occupants had fled the vehicles, entered Dubois’ house, and slammed shut the door.
Windows suddenly shattered, and the Marines came under fire. Bullets whizzed past them. One Marine diving for cover got hit in the leg and oozed blood on the pavement. A valiant Marine dashed toward him but had to retreat as the distinctive sound of automatic weapon fire erupted around him. When the gunfire subsided momentarily, the Marine in charge shouted at the top of his lungs, telling the three feds they were outnumbered and outgunned and would certainly die unless they surrendered immediately.
Meanwhile, a fountain of blood gushed from the wounded Marine’s leg. He lay in a pool of his own blood, telling his compatriots not to rescue him because they, too, might fall to enemy gunfire.
A standoff, an impasse, ensued. Both sides eyeballed one another, but neither was willing to break the stalemate. The feds demanded the Marines surrender, and vice versa.
It was high noon in DC, the highest point of culmination, often described in Old West fiction as the zenith of a confrontation between gunslingers.
Two minutes afterward, the unimaginable happened: The feds hurled their weapons out a shattered window, announced they were unarmed and surrendering, and beseeched the Marines to accept their unconditional surrender.
Their capitulation coincided with Trump’s inauguration.
“We work with you now, we’re coming out with hands up, don’t shoot, we give up,” one of the feds shouted. “We serve President Trump.”
The Marines treated the wounded after subduing the feds, who were true to their word.
Synchronously, Gen. Smith’s office received a flurry of phone calls from FBI offices in Portland, San Diego, Detroit, New York City, and fifteen other cities—all vowing allegiance to the Constitution and President Trump and imploring White Hats to show mercy. An FBI field supervisor in Virginia told Gen. Smith he had former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who sanctioned the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, in handcuffs and would deliver him to the military.
“It’s too soon to say if what we’re seeing here is a changing face of evil,” a source in Gen. Smith’s office told RRN. “But something is happening. We’re pondering the profundity of it all.”