102: Chapter 102 All Images Destroyed, President Draws His Sword (Fifth Update)

Three rifle butts slammed down simultaneously.

Cooper curled up on the ground, shielding his head with both hands, but the rifle butts still pierced through the gaps in his arms, striking his shoulders, ribs, and back, each blow dull and heavy.

His screams bounced between the stone walls of the visitor center, and the tourists lying on the ground around him buried their faces even lower, none daring to look up.

Cooper remained curled on the ground as blood seeped from the back of his head into his collar, and then out through the tear in his sleeve, staining the scattered shards of a mobile phone screen on the floor red.

Finally, just before another rifle butt was about to land on his lower back, he completely broke down and screamed at the top of his lungs: "I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!!"

"The cloud drive is Google Drive! The account is Jack Cooper Adventure! The password is CooperExplorer666! There are no other backups!!"

"Please, stop hitting me!!"

The captain raised a hand. The rifle butts stopped simultaneously.

He took a step forward, lowered his head, and pressed his military boot onto Cooper's chest—not heavily, but enough to pin the man, who had just struggled to lift half a shoulder off the ground, back onto the cold stone floor.

He sneered and leaned close to the side of Cooper's blood-stained ear, his voice icy: "If I can't handle the Aliens, can't I handle you?"

"Say the cloud drive password again, now!"

...

At the same time, scenes similar to the one on the Hoover Dam observation deck were playing out simultaneously across the Lighthouse Country.

In Manhattan, New York, a young couple on the balcony of their high-rise apartment, who had been using a Leica camera to film the fleet, were pinned to their living room floor by National Guard soldiers who had suddenly burst through their door. The camera's memory card was pulled out and snapped on the spot, and their phones were forcibly factory reset.

...

At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, an astrophysicist at NASA had frantically recorded all the thermal imaging data of the battle between two thousand UFOs and the two-hundred-thousand-strong fleet. Before he could transfer the video files to an independent offline server, the door to his laboratory was forcibly unlocked from the outside by an on-site CIA security officer using a master electronic key. The hard drive was physically removed, all backups were formatted on the spot, and he was handcuffed by two agents while being pinned to his keyboard.

...

In San Francisco, in the basement server room of the Twitter headquarters building, a duty engineer had secretly copied footage of the fleet battle automatically captured from user live streams, intending to upload it anonymously to a distributed storage network. Just as he typed the final command to upload, he was dragged out of the server room, keyboard and all, by a federal agent squad that had stormed in through the emergency exit.

...

Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Miami... Military bases in every city received the same encrypted order, sent directly from the White House Situation Room to the command nodes of the National Guard in each state. The content of the order was concise, consisting of only two lines: Seal everything! Not a single one left behind!

...

The White House, Situation Room. Ronald Sawyer did not bring a folder when he pushed the door open to enter.

He had been rushing between the Oval Office and the Situation Room for over an hour. His tie was loosened by half an inch, and dark sweat stains had seeped through the armpits of his shirt. But the expression on his face was no longer the anxiety he had shown hours ago when he rushed to the president's desk to report the mutiny; now, beneath his anxiety lay a layer of suppressed shock.

He stood still at the end of the curved long table, nodded slightly to the president in the center, and caught his breath before beginning his report.

"Mr. President, the military has followed your previous orders and completed the containment of all targets."

"According to the latest aggregated data from the National Guard Bureau and military bases across the states, there are approximately hundreds of independent nodes nationwide that captured footage of the fleet battle above the Hoover Dam, covering live streaming platforms, social networks, news organizations, academic observations, and some private encrypted cloud drives."

"All footage has been successfully controlled. All related devices and cloud backups have undergone deletion and destruction procedures. Nothing was missed."

The air in the Situation Room remained silent for a long time after his last word settled.

Vice President Harris had been drinking her third glass of ice water; the glass, halfway to her lips, froze in mid-air before she slowly set it back on the table with an unnatural stiffness, the ice cubes clinking softly against the glass.

Secretary of Defense Lawrence Geller slowly unclenched the fists he had been pressing against the table and looked at Biden, as if staring at a stranger he had never truly known.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, lips pressed tight. However, the deep lines at the corners of his eyes, etched by years of desert warfare, twitched inadvertently—a physiological reaction that only appeared when he was expressing the highest level of scrutiny during meetings at The Pentagon.

National Security Council Chair Evelyn Strauss, who had been recording every key timeline node in her shorthand notebook, paused with her pen hovering over the paper for several seconds. A drop of ink seeped from the tip and bled into the page, unnoticed.

Secretary of State Victoria Monroe placed her hands flat and crossed on the table, as if to hide some uncontrollable slight trembling, but she knew in her heart that the trembling was not fear—it was shock!

Shock at the fact that the same old man who had been dozing off and drooling in front of them for so many years had, when the crisis truly struck, become the only person in the room who hadn't panicked!

NASA Administrator Glenn Callahan slowly flattened his palms, which had been rubbing against his knees in anger, and silently studied the president's thin, gaunt face from the side, focusing on those quiet yet sharp, piercing old eyes.

Director of National Intelligence Alan Holt tucked his chin in almost imperceptibly. He had spent thirty years in the intelligence community and served under four presidents, yet he had never seen any sitting president, after encountering a situation of this scale, capable of implementing a full lockdown chain—from information lockdown to nationwide execution—within an hour.

Everyone had thought he was a puppet—a senile waste of space manipulated by transnational capital, unable to even control his own sphincter, unable to even remember what he had eaten for breakfast.

But this "waste" had, today, within one hour, choked off every single image dissemination node in the entire Lighthouse Country.

Biden leaned back in the high-backed leather chair, his shoulders resting slightly against the armrest, his fingers crossed in front of him.

These top power elites of Washington, whose gazes never lingered on his face for more than two seconds on any normal day, were now all staring at him in unison, as if nailed to their chairs.

Watching this scene, a faint, fleeting trace of gratification flashed in the depths of his eyes.

He masked it well, his tone remaining that same gravelly, restrained old-school style. His mouth didn't curve, his eyes didn't crinkle; he simply lowered his gaze to look at his crossed fingers on the table, then lifted his eyes again to scan the group, his tone as flat as if he were discussing a trivial daily chore:

"There's no need to make a fuss."

"The fact that the order could be implemented relies on the speed with which your respective departments handled the execution."

"You yourselves have also performed very competently."