Clarence

Clarence

"They haven't come to kill you but they will if you give them a second chance."

Clarence Delany

The taskforce was made up of 12 men and four women. There was also an auxiliary group of local SWAT that would be helping them if there were more worshipers than Coarse had suspected. And Clarence knew there would be. Two weeks back one had been captured by a local patrol and was still held at the station. "When there are this many agencies involved you lose almost all rights," said Ralph Knowen about the Worshiper’s prolonged stay at the Sam’s Town jail. After the two weeks CIA and EBA investigators had extracted a vague description of the hunting and scouting behavior of the hostile and trained worshipers. Their primary tactic is to separate into groups of two or sometimes there were individual scouts. Or at least that was the reason the captive used to explain why he was captured alone, Clarence thought. As far as the size of their entire group of worshipers there were nine or 10. And Clarence couldn't believe that the numbers were accurate so he asked for twice as many SWAT personnel but only got a curt frown from Jerry Coarse who was head of logistics and planning. Coarse was convinced that they would take the worshipers by surprise "adding more personnel would only slow us down," Coarse said.

Clarence requested to lead the taskforce that was being sent into the forest at the edge of Sam’s Town to subdue the hidden World Worshipper’s. It's the only way, if there is a way, to get Dell out of there safely. 
He approached the task force and said, "these are not drug dealers, gangsters, or thugs."

"Aren't those all the same thing sir," Ralph interjected with a smirk.

"Right, Ralph, and the ones you are dealing with today are not that. They are trained killers. Assassins." Ralph's smirk remained, defiant. "You have been training for this for years but they have been training for this their whole life." Although he couldn't know exactly which Worshipers were hidden in the forest he built a composite of the typical grunts: most were lean, young, and Newtopian.  The few leaders among them held past or current political ties.  From the classified information Norman Oakland gave Clarence it seemed that many likely have a military background. Some may have served together in North Africa before Newtopia rid itself of its standing army in the early nineties. "They haven't come to kill you but they will if you give them a second chance."

"So it's shoot to kill today, huh boss?”Said the quiet skinny FBI agent named Arnold.

"No, they are divided in their small groups and that will make ours seem bigger they may just put down their weapons- or not even pick them up if we can keep them separated and surprised.  They will be outgunned and outmanned that is the key. Take them down if you have to but let's try to not to make this a bloodbath."

"Hell yeah," Ralph said in affirmation, Arnold nodded and so did Mary.

Dell was the key. It wasn't long after he and Mary arrived in Sam's Town that he realized Oakland had orchestrated the capture of Dell's family.  If he could somehow find Dell in the chaos of the forests assault without getting either of them killed he could reunite Dell with his family.  Because if Oakland can get his hands on Dell he might release Dell’s family.  Then Oakland would trace down that Newtopian girl Dell had met in Spain. Oakland had called her Hope though Clarence assumed that to be an alias.  In any case she had information Oakland wanted. And it all has to do with Sen. Baxton’s murder. But how? And why is Dell the key?