CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

NEW YORK TIMES — MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2018

US TROOPS RAID OLIGARCH’S OCEAN LAIR

Early on the morning of October 31, a joint task force of US Marines, Navy SEALs, and FBI special agents conducted an amphibious assault on the mega-yacht owned by the Russian billionaire, Mikhail Potemkin, a close associate of Russian president, Vladimir Putin, while the ship was anchored in international waters off the coast of North Carolina. The assault on Potemkin’s ship, which is registered with the UN General Assembly as an independent state called “Wiegatesland,” was carried out under a presidential emergency authorization for the use of military force.

According to a White House press release, the decision to attack arose when “overwhelming evidence gathered by the FBI implicated Potemkin in a cyberattack on the New Canterbury Medical Center in New York State that represented a vicious maneuver by a foreign power upon US home soil with the intent to damage the nation’s health care system.” Leaders in the House and Senate have demanded a “full investigation into this exercise of executive power.”

Potemkin and his crew of nearly two hundred individuals from numerous nations were allegedly involved in an array of criminal activities including murder, extortion, corporate espionage, drug trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, interference in the conduct of elections, securities fraud, forgery, tax evasion, insider trading, illegal arms dealing, counterfeiting, the facilitation of terrorist activity, bribery, grand larceny, artifact looting, and money laundering.

Troops ferried by stealth watercraft launched the assault at 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Two US marines suffered minor injuries during the boarding. Expedition commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Corcoran, USMC, stated there were no casualties among Potemkin’s crew thanks to an immediate surrender delivered by Wiegatesland’s minister of security, Leonard Spavin. A former US Army ranger, Spavin is in federal custody along with 57 other Wiegatesland “citizens” with outstanding arrest warrants in the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia, France, Ukraine, Poland, Moldavia, Finland, and the United Kingdom. More arrests are expected to follow.

The corpse of Mikhail Potemkin, who had died several days before the attack, was discovered in the ship’s cold-storage locker, along with that of another crew member who appears to have died from a head injury. Based upon the statements of witnesses aboard the ship, the authorities believe that Potemkin may have been exposed to a toxic nerve agent favored by Kremlin assassins. In a surprising twist to the story, the serial murderer Dr. Bryson Witner was on board at the time of Potemkin’s death. Witner had escaped last Wednesday, October 27th, from the Patterson Psychiatric Institute.

According to anonymous sources in the Pentagon, Witner is believed to have been flown to the ship in a helicopter piloted by Dr. Lawrence Haines, president and CEO of Health Wealth Associates (HWA), a hospital consortium that owns and operates 38 hospitals in the Southeast and Southwest, and that had been in the process of acquiring the New Canterbury Medical Center, the target of the alleged cyberattack. Reports indicate that Haines, who had a previous social relationship with both Potemkin and Witner, flew off the ship with Witner on board shortly after Potemkin’s death. Two days ago, the Coast Guard recovered a helicopter registered to Haines in shallow waters near Ocracoke, North Carolina. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the crash. The bodies of Haines and Witner have not been recovered as of the time of this report. Shortly after this operation, the assets of HWA were frozen and its operations placed under federal oversight.

The Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean ambassadors have filed formal protests with the UN Security Council, declaring that “once again, the imperialist American government has staged an unprovoked attack upon the rights and property of a sovereign nation.”