Chapter 447: Plausible Deniability
The United States congress was currently embroiled in turmoil over the southern border, and the ongoing Mexican Revolution. Reports showed that men armed with old Winchester rifles had left a trail of blood and bodies in their wake.
And if these rumors were to be true, they appeared oddly organized and trained, better than even the remnants of the old federal army. Their equipment was lightweight, capable of being moved rapidly via horseback, and was ideal for the terrain they were fighting in.
They carried repeating rifles chambered in modern calibers, and revolvers suspiciously similar to current-issue U.S. designs. Their arsenals also included heavy machine guns lifted straight from old German blueprints, lightweight man-portable mortars—proven in the Great War, and finally lightweight and rapid firing 75mm field guns that oddly enough looked like sanitized and modernized German 7.5 cm FK 16 nA.
It would appear this was a force armed by both the Americans and the Germans alike, and these men were waging total war against every other faction in the chaos south of America’s borders. As for the American congress, they desperately wanted to know who had given the approval to sell US manufactured weapons to these violent guerillas?
The reality was that the weapons were sold in a way that was completely deniable from the Winchester company, their markings were scrubbed if even added in the first place, and were chambered in a caliber Winchester had never produced before, but had also been given a more military aesthetic which otherwise didn’t exist in this timeline.
So their response as a company when summoned by the court to answer for this very clear violation of ethics, and potential criminal act, was to claim ignorance, and state it was possible Germany or some other nation managed to reverse engineer Browning’s old designs which had been sold under their banner, and were given by said unknown actors to the Mexican guerillas.
But Germany also claimed ignorance. Of course, the reality was that Winchester was lying, and the German nation was genuinely unaware of the agreement between Bruno and the President, conducted entirely through Backchannel diplomacy.
And because of this, nobody really knew who was selling these weapons to this new and terrifying force which was claiming to be fighting not for gods, kings, or country but to restore order to an otherwise lawless hellscape.
Thus, congress could only shout and squabble as the President used his authority to move us troops to the southern border to prevent more senseless violence from revolutionaries like Pancho Villa whom he suspected was already in retreat.
Order from Washington had come down in secrecy to the Sons of Liberty, to capture, torture, and execute Pancho Villa, making a spectacle of his end as a message to others like him, this was the fate of those who dared to intrude upon the lands of the red, white and blue.
Of course these orders could have been deliberately mistranslated by the Germans who relayed them, as the Presidency’s only real way of giving out these orders to his Mexican Proxies was first through secured communications with Bruno, who would then pass them along to the Werwolf Group operatives in the area acting as trainers and liaisons to this force of armed combatants forged beneath their tutelage.
Which meant that only Bruno and the President truly knew the hand that guided the chaos. Hence why, at that very moment, the leader of the Sons of Liberty stood smoking a cigarillo... watching as his soldiers utilized their rapid fire 75mm field artillery to batter the hiding place where their target was suspected of residing.