The Coming Storm: Liberators Part 22

"You're such a rear-echelon pogue. Just use four or five half-hitches, and then stand well clear in case you screw up, so you don't put your eye out."

"Okay."

Pulling up the paracord hand over hand, Ray pulled up the free end of the cable. After untying the paracord, he flung the cable around the tree. He misjudged the length required, so he had to adjust and try twice more before he was able to grab the free end. When he finally did, the needlelike frayed end of the cable filament drew blood from the meat of his hand. (He wasn't wearing gloves because he would soon be working with the nuts on the cable clamps.) Ray visibly winced.

Phil shouted up from the ground, "Ooh, that's gotta hurt."

"Yeah, thanks for the sympathy, pal."

He pulled up the slack in the cable so there was just a slight sag in the portion that ran back to the big tree fork. Pinching the cable back on itself took the full strength of one hand, and he knew that positioning the first cable clamp and its pair of nuts would require the use of two more hands, leaving him one hand short. He had come prepared with some plastic cable ties. Pulling one of the ties tightly gave just enough tension to free up his left hand so that he could position the cable clamps. Even so, it was tricky and exhausting. He dropped two of the hexagonal nuts in the process, but fortunately he had brought spares. By the time he was done torqueing down the pair of Nylock nuts on the third cable clamp, sweat was dripping off the end of his nose.

He put the socket wrench back in his tool-belt bag, and shouted, "Okay. Done here. Coming down."

When he reached the ground, Ray said, "Okay. The North Woods Lumberjack phase is done. Now it's your turn, Mr. Gee Whiz Explosives Expert."

Phil shook his head and said, "I'm no expert, but I think I can fake it."

Phil had already sized up the tree. It was leaning slightly downhill, which was good. Rather than attaching the explosives at the base, he opted to position them six feet up the trunk. Here, the girth of the trunk was 30 percent smaller.

The explosives they had were not ideal for the job-he would have preferred to use C4 plastic explosives-but the dynamite sticks would suffice. Phil started out by reexamining the sticks of DuPont dynamite. They were the 80 percent variety, with diatomaceous earth filler, and brown cases and red warning labels. He checked them for any signs of weeping or leaking. The cases looked dry, and that made him feel less tense.

Phil spent a few minutes whittling a stick to a fine point, smaller than a pencil. He used this to drill transverse holes in the middle of eight of the dynamite sticks. Next, he dug a claw hammer and a handful of eight-penny nails out of his pack. Walking to the uphill side of the tree, he sighted upward and aligned a nail with the cable that was stretched back toward the opening. He reached up, and standing on his backpack, he drove a nail into the trunk at a forty-five-degree angle, at nearly nine feet off the ground. The head of the nail was angled upward.

Then he walked around the tree and did his best to estimate the counterpoint of the nail that he had just driven. He used a nail point to scratch a vertical mark, six feet off the ground. He drove the nail in at that spot with just a couple of light taps of the hammer. Then he stood back to size up the positions of the two nails. He walked around the tree twice, at a distance of five paces. He judged the angle at which the tree was leaning again. Not satisfied with the position of the lower nail, he repositioned it upward four inches and two inches to the right. Then he repeated his inspection walk. Finally, he drove the second nail straight into the tree trunk, leaving just one inch exposed.

He said softly, "This'll be the center point of the lower charge."

Ray gulped and said, "Whatever you say. You're the expert." After a pause, he added, "Is this something scientific, or is this all seat-of-your-pants Kentucky windage I'm witnessing?"

Phil palmed the side of the tree twice as he answered. "A little of both, I reckon. A lot of it will depend on just how solid the core of this tree is. I'll try to err on the side of caution, and this old boy being more stout than he looks."

He knelt and carefully threaded the end of a twenty-foot length of green parachute cord through the holes that bisected all six of the dynamite sticks. He then positioned them vertically in a flat bundle, straddling the lower nail.

"I'll hold these in place, with each of them flat against the trunk, while you give it a couple of wraps around the trunk."

Ray did as he was asked. Once the line was loosely around the tree trunk, he asked, "How tight?"

"Tight enough so that they won't budge, but not so tight that the paracord digs into the cases. I'll let you know."

Ray applied tension to the paracord as Phil watched.

Phil nodded and said, "That's good. Tie it off."

Phil then began wrapping detonating cord at a forty-five-degree angle around the trunk of the tree with the high end looped around the uphill nail and the low end of the coil pa.s.sing over the sticks of dynamite. In all, he applied twelve concentric wraps of the explosive-filled detonating cord. His goal was to have the det cord cut a deep gash around the tree while simultaneously collapsing the downhill-rear side of the trunk, by means of the larger dynamite charge.

They spent another twenty minutes camouflaging their handiwork with slabs of bark (attached with commo wire) and festoons of light green old man's beard moss.

As they worked, Phil said, "You know, with tamping, we could get by with only half this much dynamite."

"Yeah, but with the charge that far up the tree, and it being on the downhill side, it would take a great big long brace to hold a box or maybe a burlap sack of tamping mud, and the sight of that would be all too obvious from the air."

"I agree."

The final step in the process was using the sharpened stick to puncture the ends of two of the dynamite sticks, and then insert a pair of electric blasting caps. Their wires were secured with plastic cable ties in place of the traditional tied girth hitches. Although these were wires connected in parallel to a piece of commo wire, they were left shunted for safety.

The commo wire was carefully routed around the small meadow and led up to an observer's position twenty-five yards east of the opening. Here, by looking straight down the length of the cable, the observer could determine the precise moment to explosively fell the larch. They were confident that the falling tree would hoist the "chopper stopper" cable to full height in just a couple of seconds.

47.

THE CHEESE.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

-Benjamin Franklin Near Nimpo Lake, British Columbia-May, the Sixth Year After some discussion, it was decided that the key observer's position should be an earth-covered trench to provide thermal shielding, thus countering any use of FLIRs. They also decided to bury the commo wire just a few inches under the ground. Then two more trenches with overhead cover were constructed-one for Alan at the east edge of the opening, and one for Phil at the north end. Each of these took the four men a full day to construct and camouflage.

The "cheese" for their trap was a smoky campfire. Stan, who was the fastest runner of the three, had both the hazardous and tedious task of keeping the campfire going and walking back and forth to the cable ambush site, doing his best not to leave a trail. His hide, ninety feet north of the east end of the cable, was the only vertical entrenchment. It had a unique tablelike top cover with a waterproofed sod covering that afforded him a view of both the landing zone opening and the smoke plume from the bait camp.

Once they had the entrenchments and the "cheese" camp set up, they had Malorie translate and transcribe a short handwritten note composed by Claire. The original had read: Messieurs, I am a proud loyalist. I have a reliable report that there is a bandit training camp being built about five kilometers to the northeast of Nimpo Lake. I trust that you will find this information useful. Amities.

-Giselle The note, in a sealed envelope, was pa.s.sed to a gate guard at the new Williams Lake UNPROFOR Headquarters (the old Service BC building on Borland Street) by an eleven-year-old boy on a bicycle.

The Gazelle arrived the following afternoon. The pilot wasted no time and began orbiting the bait camp, which was in heavy timber six hundred yards northeast of the cable ambush opening. Predictably, as the Gazelle orbited in a counterclockwise direction, the door gunner poured four hundred rounds of 7.62 into the vicinity of the base of the smoke plume at the "fromage camp."

The Gazelle then swung into an even wider orbit and headed for the opening that Team Robinson had rigged. Phil waited until the helicopter slowed and its skids were about to touch ground. The cable was about eight feet ahead of the helicopter's nose. With a diameter of thirty-three feet, six inches, the rotor disc made for a big target.

Phil whispered to himself, "Perfect," and twisted the handle on the ten-cap blasting machine. The explosives at the base of the big larch tree went off with a loud bang, and the tree fell. Before the Gazelle pilot could react, the cable snapped up out of the gra.s.s just as planned. In an instant, the cable caught in the rotor, the helicopter spun violently, and the three fibergla.s.s composite rotor blades were sheared off. Two men were thrown out, and the fuselage pitched violently over on its side. The helicopter's fuselage thrashed around violently on the ground like a gored beast, and it spun 270 degrees before coming to a halt. The stubs of the rotors, now hitting the ground, were further shortened as the rotor mast shuddered to a stop amid a cloud of dust, dirt clods, and tufts of gra.s.s.

One four-foot-long shard from one of the helicopter rotor blades came bouncing across the meadow directly toward Phil's hide. Though it pa.s.sed harmlessly overhead, it made Phil gasp. If the shard had flown a few feet lower, his fate would have been much different.

Either the pilot had shut down the Turbomeca turbine engine, or some automatic safety feature triggered a shutdown, because it soon was quiet enough for the ambushers to hear shouts from inside the Gazelle's fuselage.

There were four ALAT personnel still onboard. The two others who had been thrown free in the crash were not moving. One of them was clearly dead-since the top half of his body was fifteen feet away from his pelvis and legs.

The fuselage was lying on its side. The shorn rotor mast had stopped spinning. A wisp of smelly white smoke was coming from the engine compartment, apparently from leaking oil that had reached something hot. The door gun's muzzle was pointed straight upward. After more shouting from inside the helicopter, the pilot, copilot, and door gunner all crawled out in rapid succession. They were apparently not badly injured in the crash. The pilot and copilot started shooting wildly at the tree line with PA-50 9mm pistols. Meanwhile, the door gunner was reaching up, attempting to detach his FN-MAG-58 light machine gun from the mount.

Phil had a good angle on the pilot, and Alan had line of sight to the copilot and door gunner. With deliberate neck shots, all three of the men were shot down and bleeding out in less than twenty seconds.

The ambushers quickly advanced on the downed helicopter, firing coup de grce head shots once they were within forty feet. Inside, they found another crewman dead, apparently from a broken neck. His weapon was a FAMAS bullpup, but it had a bent barrel and a broken stock. They decided to bring it with them to use for spare parts.

Phil exclaimed, "Hoo boy! This is better than a box of Cracker Jacks. I always wanted an M240, and here's a MAG-58, which is almost identical."

He detached the machine gun from its dogleg mount and examined it. Except for a sc.r.a.ped flash hider and a gouge in the pistol grip, the MAG had survived the crash intact. Once it was detached, it could be fired from its bipod. The door mount included a four-hundred-round ammo box of linked ammunition, but the gun could also be operated from a teaser belt and a Bulldog two-hundred-round camouflage nylon shoulder bag that they also found onboard. In addition to the four hundred linked rounds in the ammo can and the two hundred linked rounds in the Bulldog bag, there were one thousand rounds of ammo in narrow, brown-painted European-style two-hundred-round ammo cans. All of the ammo was FN-made 7.62mm NATO, a four-to-one alternating mix of ball ammo and tracers.

Ray warned, "Okay, the clock is ticking. We need to strip anything useful off this bird, burn it, and get out of here before they send anyone to investigate."

They worked quickly. There wasn't any time to remove the Gazelle's built-in avionics. They did strip a notebook and a callsign/frequency card from a clear pocket that was built into the pilot's flight suit, just above his knee. They also took a satchel that held a sectional aeronautical chart and a notebook. The loose belt of ammo for the door gun, ammo cans, six extra FAMAS magazines, the two pistols, and the broken FAMAS carbine were all distributed and stowed in their backpacks. Almost as an afterthought, Alan pulled out the helicopter's plastic first-aid chest and stuffed it into his own pack, along with one of the two-hundred-round ammo cans. Phil carried the twenty-eight-pound MAG and the Bulldog bag. Since he was also carrying his M4, his combined load was almost eighty pounds.

They walked thirty-five yards to the tree line at the north end of the opening. Phil got down p.r.o.ne and pulled back the cartridge from the loose end of the MAG's teaser belt and clipped on the first cartridge from the Bulldog bag. He fired two short bursts from the MAG into the Gazelle's fuel tanks. The tracer bullets (interspersed every fifth round on the belt) soon set the fuel ablaze.

A year before the Crunch, Phil had the chance to buy a nearly new semiauto version of the M240 light machine gun, made by Ohio Ordnance Works, but he had balked at the eleven-thousand-dollar price tag. In retrospect, when the purchasing power of his savings dropped to nearly nothing and the value of an M240 soared to an incalculable level, he wished that he had bought it. Now, with the capture of the MAG, he felt redeemed from his previous mistake.

Alan shouted, "As they often say in the French army: 'Nous devons fuir!'"

They did just that. They ran away, heading into the dense timber to the north. They didn't slow down until an hour and a half later, when they had covered five miles of rough ground.

48.

EFFRONDREMENT.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

-George Orwell The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia-June, the Sixth Year The day of the collective disgust arrived, at last. It came immediately after a p.r.o.nouncement on Progressive Voice of Canada that all residents age six years and older would have to enroll in a National Ident.i.ty Card program. These new smart cards, with an embedded microchip, would be used both for identification and as a cashless debit card that would be required for all transactions over three dollars. After the announced forty-five-day enrollment period, cash transactions would be banned, as would mere possession of the old paper currency or any gold or silver bullion. All would be criminal offenses.

A rapid turn of events for the Menard government followed. There were large street rallies in cities throughout Canada protesting the National Ident.i.ty Card scheme. The crowds were ordered to disperse, but they stood their ground. Then some RCMP officers crossed the line and joined them. This proved to be a key psychological turning point. The crowds of protestors grew larger. In some cities, as the UNPROFOR troops grew weary of the standoff, they began using tear gas. But this only strengthened the resolve of the protestors.

Most of the ma.s.s protests were filmed, mainly with smartphones. Then, via satellite Internet connections that had recently been reestablished, these videos were aired on U.S. television networks. News spread that the handwriting was on the wall for the Menard regime, which had recently been derided as "The Mauviette Union" by detractors.

The UNPROFOR troops were ordered to retreat to their garrisons. The protests then shifted from town and city squares to the perimeters of the garrisons. The citizenry created a twenty-four-hour "perimeter around their perimeter." Sensing that the scales had shifted, Menard and his entourage panicked and fled to France on a midnight flight. Once word leaked out about this Airbus A380 flight, it was all over for both the LGP and UNPROFOR.

The UNPROFOR command in Ottawa quickly agreed to demobilization and a rapid withdrawal from Canada. Calls for war crimes trials were outnumbered by a majority (mainly in Quebec and Ontario) who favored a general amnesty and "Peace and Reconciliation" commission hearings. It took two months for most of the UNPROFOR combat troops to leave the country, and it would be six months before all of the support troops were withdrawn.

After the Menard government's capitulation, there was not much cheering in the streets. Most Canadians simply wanted to get their lives back in order. The French minefields began to be cleared, but it was estimated that even with the meticulous emplacement maps available, the process would take five years. Commerce across the U.S. border was slowly restored, and Canadian factories gradually resumed operations. Food and fuel came first, to meet a pent-up demand. A free-floating exchange rate with the gold-backed U.S. dollar was established, and then quickly rescinded after the new Canadian dollar plummeted. The precious metals redeemable U.S. dollar very quickly became the de facto currency in Canada, as many sellers had begun refusing to take payment in Mooneys.

The citizenry fell into three categories: those who had collaborated with the Menard government, a small minority who had actively resisted, and a majority who-though they sympathized with the resistance-had stood by and done nothing. They earned the new label "The Mundanes." The collective guilt for several years of inaction weighed heavily on the nation. Inevitably, many collaborators fled the country. But most collaborators stayed-facing humiliation but not prosecution.

49.

BEIJING CHARADES.

The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.

-From the treatise "Unrestricted Warfare" by Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel w.a.n.g Xiangsui, People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia-November, the Sixth Year Three years after the liberation of the U.S. was declared and one year after the liberation of Canada, there was some startling news: Chinese ships were landing troops in Canada via the seaports of Vancouver, Bella Coola, Bella Bella, and Prince Rupert. Meanwhile, Chinese troops of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) were landing at airports in Kelowna, Edmonton, Calgary, Kamloops, and Saskatoon. Wave after wave of troops arrived before any organized resistance could be mounted.

The Chinese had the audacity to call themselves a "UN" force and fly UN blue flags. They did so because the original UN resolution that had authorized peacekeeping troops in Canada was poorly worded and open-ended. The declaration stated, "Any nation with a full UN delegation that is willing to send troops may do so, using their organic transport capability."

So now the UN was in a strange position: "UN troops" were again invading western Canada. But, in their cla.s.sic debating-society style, the UN General a.s.sembly adopted a "wait-and-see" posture, rather than condemning the Chinese incursion. Some of the delegations reasoned that if the invasion was not immediately countered by the U.S. there might be international trade advantages in allowing the Chinese to stay.

Phil reacted to the news. "The sheer numbers are daunting. While the French had attempted to control western Canada with just a few brigades, the Chinese are pouring in corps-size formations. By the way, the Chinese use the term brigade to designate what most other armies would call a 'division,' and what they call a 'division' most other armies would call a 'corps.' In their mechanized infantry brigade table of organization, for example, there are four thousand soldiers.

"As near as I can determine, there is a full mechanized infantry brigade controlling a fifty-kilometer-wide swath stretching from Bella Coola to Williams Lake. Each brigade has four battalions of mechanized infantry, one battalion of tanks, one artillery battalion, one communication battalion, and one engineer battalion. Oh, I should mention that there are two different flavors of PLA mechanized infantry: one with tracked equipment and the other with wheeled equipment. And it is obvious that the one that they are garrisoning here is the wheeled variety.

"Now, a.s.suming that they are using their published post-2006 TO&E, then within the mechanized infantry battalions, there are three companies, with three platoons per company. Each company has thirteen infantry fighting vehicles (with four per platoon) plus one command vehicle. Now, the artillery brigade has seventy-two PLZ89 122mm self-propelled guns, and their tank battalion has ninety-nine Type 96 main battle tanks.

"So, not even counting the tanks, we're talking about a total of 156 APCs in just our sector. That means we're facing more armored APCs on the ground than the French had fielded vehicles of all descriptions-of which half were merely stolen pickup trucks that were turned into technicals. Add to that another ninety-nine tanks? That is a Schumer-load of armor."

He paused to let his words sink in, and then continued. "The bottom line is that we simply cannot fight the Chinese the same way we fought the first UNPROFOR."

Alan said, "I think they plan to treat Canada just as they have much of Africa, as a colonial strip mine. They want all of our mineral wealth, and they want our timber. Why else would they be here in force?"

The PLA timed their invasion of Canada for the period just after UNPROFOR's capitulation, but before a Canadian Defense Force could be reestablished. China recognized that it was in a nuclear stalemate with the United States. Both nations had nukes, but both were reluctant to use them for fear of escalation to a full-scale exchange. The Beijing government, therefore, felt that they could get away with invading western Canada. Their plan was to seize all of the provinces from Saskatchewan westward, and then bargain for permanent occupation and a peace settlement with the Toronto government.

As one well-known political and international affairs blogger put it, "So the Chinese position is simple: 'We take western Canada and keep it for our own. And if you play nice, then we promise not to nuke you.'"

When the Chinese arrived in western Canada, they had expected a level of resistance similar to what they had encountered in Africa, but they were in for a rude surprise. Not only did the resistance cells that had fought the French UNPROFOR troops have plenty of experience, but they were now very well equipped, with large quant.i.ties of captured weapons, ammunition, and night vision gear. Much of that gear was widely distributed in homes, farms, and ranches. (After the French had surrendered, the new status symbol for Canadian ranchers was to have a captured UN armored vehicle in their machine sheds, alongside their tractors.) The Chinese had few friends waiting for them in Canada. They were almost universally despised. Even the majority of the large Chinese immigrant population hated them, since the PLA represented everything that the immigrants had left behind when they fled China.

Six weeks after the Chinese arrived, Malorie had switched from carrying her FAMAS to a captured Chinese 5.8mm carbine. Her new weapon was a QBZ-95 (Type 95 automatic rifle). Like the FAMAS, this was a bullpup-style carbine manufactured by Norinco. It shot the Chinese 5.8x42mm cartridge, which, up until the Crunch, was only rarely exported, and only for military contracts.

The PLA's experience in invading Africa had helped ready them for their planned Canadian invasion. They had become accustomed to operating with a long logistics "tail," ranging over long distances with limited resupply. The majority of their tanks, APCs, and trucks were retrofitted with trundle racks to hold fuel cans, giving their vehicles "longer legs." While this increased their vulnerability, the longer-range capability was a must. And, since Canada was viewed by Chinese strategic planners as a vast, underpopulated expanse, it was decided that all of the vehicles sent to Canada should be similarly outfitted for long range. (The PLA borrowed the aviation term "radius of action" in their ground-combat doctrinal treatises.)

50.