“Hmm,” said the President, in a tone that said, “Could we please speed this up?”
Molly flipped a page on her notepad, then continued. “The wife, Aarushi, has two brothers serving in the Indian Army. One was a colonel who served in Siberia — he was killed last October. Her second brother perished in the battle of St. Petersburg. Shortly after his death, she made contact with someone on an Indian chat board we regularly monitor. Combing through the chats and activity, we learned that she apparently met this person a couple of times in person. We used the Google geotracking on her phone to place her at several locations we’ve had under surveillance as known meetup locations for Indian intelligence. We believe it was at one of these meetings that she was recruited to their cause and then passed her husband’s admin credentials to them.”
“OK, so where is this person?” the President insisted.
“We have her under surveillance right now,” FBI Director Nelson answered. “She’s still at home with her family, and she hasn’t tried to leave yet or done anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. Do you want us to grab her right now?” she asked.
“No, not yet,” said the President. “We need to sort through things here first before we grab her. Taking her into custody is going to lead to speculation, and until we have a plan in place, we can’t risk this information getting out.”
Moments later, the Fed Chairman, Wendy Oliver, walked in. Seeing that she was late to the party, she plopped down at her seat next to Hampton. “I’m sorry I was late in getting here — traffic was brutal. I have, however, been on the phone with my team to discuss this problem, and I’ve read the quick blotter the FBI and DHS sent over to me. Can you guys take a minute to get me caught up?” she asked as she pulled out a pen and pad of paper.
Ten minutes later, the President asked the only real question he had for her. “What do we do, Wendy? Is JP Morgan salvageable, or what?”
All eyes turned to Wendy. She gulped, then blurted out the only real answer. “No, Mr. President, it’s not — not unless you want to do a 2008-style bank bailout.”
The words hung in the air like many needles, piercing each one in the room.
“The best we can do as the Fed is make sure the FDIC honors its deposits and we do our best to help the bank unwind their holdings and sell them off,” Wendy continued. “I’m sure we can get other banks to buy up parts of JP Morgan. It’s not like they’re an unprofitable bank, but they have no equity or cash to cover their current holdings, and no matter how much stock they’re offered or what they sold off, it wouldn’t equal the amount they just lost. If I may, I do have a recommendation that I believe will help to soften the blow to some people.”
“Yes, please, what is your recommendation?” the President asked, desperate for anything that would ameliorate the situation, even a little bit.
“The FDIC only protects a person’s deposits up to $250,000 per person at the bank. So, if Mom and Dad had a joint account in their names, they would be protected up to $250,000 each. While most people don’t have that much sitting around in their bank accounts and are going to be fully protected, the wealthier individuals who do all of their banking and investing at JP Morgan are the ones who will be devastated. I propose that for this one specific instance with this bank, we increase the $250,000 limit per individual and raise that up to $1 million. In the case of a business account, I propose the limit be raised up to $5 million. While this won’t recover all the lost monies that a lot of individuals and businesses will incur, it will help.”
The President nodded. It seemed reasonable.
Wendy continued, “With regards to businesses, I propose that any business that had its accounts with the bank be allowed to borrow directly from the Fed at a 1 % interest rate for up to five years. This will help make sure businesses both large and small are not suddenly without money and frozen out of the credit market. This will be critical to making sure we don’t have an immediate economic collapse. Now, as to the investment side of the bank, their portfolios — we’ll move to get them sold tomorrow to other firms who will take over the management and positions of the accounts. Because the money was already invested, the individual holders won’t lose anything. We just need to have the management of the accounts transferred to a new bank that is solvent to manage them going forward.”
The President held his head in his right hand as he thought over everything that he’d just been told. At the end of the day, the bank was still going to become insolvent, and over 250,000 employees were suddenly going to find themselves unemployed. But if they moved decisively, they could prevent this one collapse from destroying the rest of the financial sector and the economy.
After nearly an hour, the President thanked the financial folks for their input and help, and then dismissed them to begin putting the plan into action. He signaled for the FBI and DHS directors to stay put as they turned their attention to the response to this brazen attack.
Looking each of the women in the eyes, the President asked, “You are clear there is no doubt that this attack was directed by the Indians?”
Both women nodded in agreement.
Foss turned to look at the SecDef and Admiral Meyer. “I suppose we have our response to our ultimatum, gentlemen. Admiral, I want our cyberattack to commence immediately. Jim, I want our naval assets to begin hitting their targets as soon as possible. I also want their navy hunted down and destroyed. Let’s move forward with the immediate capture of Chennai. The sooner we can get some air bases set up on land, the sooner we can start to pound them into submission.”
With the decisions made and the orders issued, the leaders of America’s military began to get the wheels of their forces moving to crush India. The Indians might have just hurt the US economy, but the US was about to hammer their society by crippling their transportation sector.
Operation Fight Club
Sergeant First Class Conrad Price smiled a bit at the sight of so many of his men snoozing like babies. The hum of the engines on the C-17 had lulled most of the soldiers in the cargo bay asleep. Many of them had smartly taken the opportunity to grab some shut-eye before they had to get ready for the jump, but he couldn’t sleep.
Once again, the Rangers of 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, were being called upon to capture an airport in a hostile nation. This time, they were going to seize the Chennai International Airport ahead of a seaborne invasion. This airport, unlike the past ones they’d seized, was a large commercial airport. Current intelligence didn’t show there to be any military units present or even nearby, though that could change quickly once the enemy figured out where their little air armada was headed.
Flying advance for them were several airwings from the US Navy’s Task Force 92. They had spent the better part of three days hitting every Indian air base within a 400-kilometer radius of Chennai to make sure there would be no enemy fighters to greet them. Flying several hours behind them was a long gravy train of 747 planes, carrying a brigade from the 82nd Airborne. Even further back were more C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster cargo planes, which would be landing their ground equipment.