They're All Dead
It is estimated that there are about three hundred million television sets in the Saevitian Archipelago. This is an awful lot considering the expense of installing receiving stations on some of the smaller islands, and the small scope of the CSSA's private space programs. Therefore, politicians, in their memoirs, and journalists, in their articles, like to claim that an important media event was received by three hundred million television sets, despite the obvious inaccuracy of this. By contrast, Iapetus Varaínn -- Crown Secretary of Defence -- was well aware that only a tiny fraction of those television sets were ever generally tuned to the official government messages channel, and very few of the people looking at those television sets were paying close enough attention to understand the implications.
Thus, when -- at midday on a workday, more or less concurrently with the world hockey tournament and several popular if rather cultish television shows -- he had the message broadcasted, Varaínn had no illusions that Saevitia would be watching with bated breath. In fact, he rather preferred it the other way. The story wasn't broadcasted to the international networks, largely because Varaínn didn't feel they would care, and whatever journalists were interested would be able to dig it up on their own. He had better things to worry about, anyway.
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The island was vast for its population, which had numbered no more than five hundred, most of them occupying immense estates separated from one another by five or ten or fifteen miles. Nevertheless, it maintained in its southern extremity a small agglomeration, perhaps thirty houses, inhabited by eighty individuals; and this cluster, too small to be a village or hamlet, was nonetheless wealthy enough and active enough that the island was practically self-sufficient. There was farmland; there was a port; there was a hydroelectric generator; there was an airfield and a network of roads. The island, Patka, was independent of any nation and thus a tax haven, so in the small town there was a bank wherein millions of dollars were invested secure from the vicissitudes of governmental interference, and the singular warehouse along its harbor's embankment held shipments of drugs and weapons that were illegal in many places where governments hold sway.
The island was within Saevitia's sphere of influence but far outside its territorial waters. Its inhabitants, moreover, were mainly foreigners, wealthy ones from an assortment of different countries.
Five nautical miles off the island there was a destroyer, a pair of destroyer escorts and two troop transports. Docked at the harbor were the six LCACs, having ferried the entire complement of the transports ashore in the early hours of the morning. Through the streets of the municipality the marines patrolled idly, ensuring that no survivors remained in the area before they departed to comb over the forests and valleys for insurrectionists. The day had been short as yet, but eventful, and would become more so before evening.
A Saevitian flag had been raised over the warehouse to indicate the annexation, and within a group of prisoners huddled, awaiting extradition or execution -- whatever suited the commander's whim. Marines, meanwhile, raided the building to destroy everything not permissible within Saevitian borders, as this island now fell within those borders and even members of the military could be slapped with drug possession charges. Occasionally a distant roar became audible and then faded away again as another flight of strike fighters ran CAP.
Technically, there was no international law to ban annexation of random islands; and nobody had claimed this one before, presumably because it sat so close to one of the CSSA's major shipping routes and seizing it could be taken as a threat to Saevitia. The only people who would have reason to complain were the inhabitants of the island. And they couldn't; they were all dead.
