Quote:
Originally Posted by evileeyore
The longer it takes to raise the Warden (Step 1 in determining the level response required) the greater the likelihood the response is escalated from "send someone out tomorrow to investigate the prank" to "send parity force and contact the Navy, we have a serious situation". Depending on the time of day this time could be as short as 30 minutes to as long as one hour (the operator on th island doesn't want to wake the Warden, etc).
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There is no reason that the Deputy Warden cannot be contacted immediately. He's bug-house, yes, but he's also sitting in the operations center / Warden's office of the Manhanock Asylum, directing his men through the intercom (so he doesn't have to leave a channel open in the jamming).
The chief administrator of the Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane actually prefers not to use Warden as his title. We call him the 'Administrator Formerly Known as the Warden'. Our PCs don't have any idea what has happened to him during the takeover of the asylum by Deputy Warden Tyrrell's men. He might have been killed, detained or simply fed some prepostorous lie that seems to justify the actions of the guard force. In any case, I'm sure Deputy Warden Tyrrell will not allow him to talk to anyone unless the AFKatW is a willing participant in his crazy mutiny.
Deputy Warden Tyrrell has a lot of advantages when it comes to bluffing his way through despite the distress call, in that he is intimately familiar with Coast Guard procedure and the specific emergency plans that apply to Jewell Island and Manhanock, mostly because he wrote a fair bit of it. He's a former Chief Warrant Officer in the Coast Guard and has been in charge of this post from all the way back when it was still an active Coast Guard outpost.*
He also has some major weaknesses in his bluff. A huge one is that he can't produce Special Agent O'Toole to explain the distress call and he probably can't allow anyone other than himself or his trusted men to speak with the Coast Guard. If Warden Tyrrell hasn't already killed him, he might have Special Agent Banks in his power, but putting him on the line while holding a gun at him is a pretty high risk tactic.
Agent Banks is a former O-4 (LCDR) of the Coast Guard himself, so the Coasties will not just brush off Agent O'Toole's claims that he has been kidnapped by Warden Tyrrell without wanting to speak with Banks himself. And as Banks was a successful Counterintelligence Officer with deployments in the GWOT and seems pretty tough-minded, it's probably not safe to assume that he'd play along even at gunpoint, without managing to warn the operator at South Portland that things were not okay at all.
The Coast Guard commander at South Portland is perfectly aware that Agent O'Toole arrived on the island earlier this day along with Special Agent Banks, both of them from the Department of Homeland Security OIG. The Coast Guard also knows that they were accompanied by a DHS lawyer, one Jonathan Townsend, two other DHS employees and a senior officer from the DoD as a liaison/observer, a Colonel Andrew Burr. The fact that
none of these people can be produced to come to the phone is a pretty huge indication that Warden Tyrrell, regardless of how plausible he seems and how many of the Coasties might have professional and even personal relationships with him, is not on the level.
The PCs aren't exactly sure of the extent of the cover story given to anyone who might be briefed on their visit to Jewell Island, but the basics are that they are investigating potential liability concerns and the possibility of professional misconduct relating to the case of Inmate Sherilyn Bell, which might relate to either her time as a DoD employee, workplace safety or to physical conditions in buildings that now belong to the DHS.
This has the virtue of being close to the truth, as if the DHS really did care to hold anyone accountable, Inmate Bell
was actually exposed to hazardous materials while enlisted in the Army and she did briefly also handle materials that belonged to FEMA, making it difficult to determine the chain of responsibility for the workplace related accident.
*Though I suppose he might have been theoretically second to an officer from time to time, either from the Army or the Coast Guard, as sometimes they'd be assigned there as Chiefs of Security to a given research project.
Quote:
Originally Posted by evileeyore
Regardless, there would be no "waiting until Monday" to send investigators. Proper code clearance words were used, other operations might be compromised depending on the level of the leak that got this 'prankster' those code words.
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Probably fair enough, but the Warden will be doing his best to convince the Coast Guard that his men are handling the situation, that the extent of the leak is known and can be easily dealt with and anything else that they can think of to prevent someone from coming to the island right now.