Missing FBI task force¶

The missing FBI task force is the team of five veteran FBI agents that President Ross Perot had handpicked to redo the Radford investigation, who vanish in the Virginia woods and leave behind an intact campsite.


Type	Organization (FBI field team)
Aliases	Perot's handpicked task force; previous FBI team; five agents; the original task force
Affiliation	FBI
Members	Five unnamed career agents, all over forty
Status	Missing; presumed dead by the task force (as of Radford Horrors 04)
First appearance	Radford Horrors 01 (cold open)

Overview¶

After President Ross Perot found the quality of the earlier Radford reports unacceptable, and FBI Director Sessions stood by them and was fired, Perot had a list drawn up of very reliable career agents to run an independent investigation. The five chosen are all over forty, have served through multiple administrations, and are considered "very professional guys." Their names are never given (Radford Horrors 01, Radford Horrors 02).

History¶

Cold open and assignment¶

The first episode of The Radford Horrors opens on FBI agents in yellow-lettered jackets sprinting through snowy woods at night, flashlights bouncing; one sobs, and something swoops overhead and picks them off one by one from above. They reach a clearing with a suspended, emaciated man and similar figures hanging from the trees, and one agent is drained to a husk by a shape in the brush while another is forced to turn her gun on a colleague. The players take these to be the missing team (Radford Horrors 01).

New FBI Director Rudy Giuliani tells the reassembled task force that there are a number of missing people in Radford and that the original FBI team sent to look into them has gone AWOL. His two priorities are to establish what happened to the previous team and then to establish an "acceptable fact pattern" for the previous case (Radford Horrors 01, Radford Horrors 02). The Director does not believe the agents are dead; the players, having seen the cold open, assume they are (Radford Horrors 01).

The campsite¶

The agents spent a night at the Pay n' Stay, then drove to Roanoke for good camping gear. About a week before the task force arrived, they radioed in to say they were still fine and chasing up some odd things, with no strong leads. Sheriff Molly Underhill tells the team that people who looked into the disappearances got the strong arm from scary lawyers, that she called the FBI, and that the agents who came have vanished too. She gives the team directions to the campsite (Radford Horrors 02).

At the Sportsman RV Campground, the team cuts open the locked tents. Huell's Investigate a Mystery roll finds no sign of haste or foul play and gear for five people: two tents with three cots and two, plus an administrative tent. In the administrative tent is a map of the woods marked with irregular polygons and an illegible scribble beside one boundary. Huell takes the map. The agents' car is still in the lot, with two shotguns locked in a case in the trunk, and the camp is only a couple of miles from the moth site (Radford Horrors 02). The map leads the team to the fenced land of the Safe Environment Fund; see the missing agents' map.

In Radford Horrors 04 the team returns to the campground and pitches its own tents immediately beside the missing agents' tents (Radford Horrors 04).

Giuliani's deadline¶

In Radford Horrors 04, Webster reports to Giuliani that the missing locals have all left letters claiming they went to an addiction center in Los Angeles, which is out of character, and that the team suspects the gray vans and the Safe Environment Fund. Giuliani says that if the team can find the FBI agents in the next twenty-four hours, "dead or alive," it would make his next conversations easier. He says he already has a man looking into the fund. See also the LA treatment cover story.

Theories¶

Daniel Webster suspects the earlier task force was a political dirty-work unit of President George H. W. Bush and that the "alien stuff" is a cover (Radford Horrors 02).
The cold open shows the agents hunted by a flying thing, one of the Radford woods predators. It is never established whether the same creature took the agents from their campsite, or whether it is connected to the first arc's moth.

Unresolved¶

The agents' fate, their names, and any link to the Safe Environment Fund's fenced site remain open as of Radford Horrors 04.