October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “You mentioned levels of government … Last week, I read in the paper that the police had nabbed two separatists who were getting ready to steal a cache of arms from a military post in Montreal. Now, am I completely out in left field here, or if, when you speak of social agitation, and recycling the Canadian army into an anti-guerilla organization, you’re …”

  The general thrust his square jaw forward.

  “Putting Quebec in our sights? That’s what you were about to say, is it not?”

  “Well, er …”

  The general smiled. Everyone smiled except for Sheppard. What a bumpkin.

  “It’s three hours later in Regina,” sighed the Honourable Jay Vaugirard, District of Joliette, chin in hand. “Appetizer time,” he said to himself.

  “Mr. Minister,” said General Bédard, still smiling, “I’m going to have our documents office send you the last few issues of The Masses, a small, clandestine journal that I don’t think is distributed in Saskatchewan. In it, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that at this very moment, as we speak, there is in Montreal a paramilitary organization whose goal is to replace our democratic government with a socialist state much like the ones they have in Cuba and Moscow.”

  The general looked at his watch. Almost time for dinner. He cleared his throat.

  “To sum up, gentlemen, on the matter of our internal field of operations, we must be sure to apply all available forces to achieve maximum effect. Remember that the enemy operates on the lower part of our level of intensity in conflicts, where its efforts don’t habitually meet any but feeble opposition and can take advantage of a disproportionate amount of publicity. And therefore, while the atomic weapons of our allies continue to prevent the outbreak of a total world war between the West and the Soviet powers, we are going to prevent, by the imposition of forces far superior in numbers, equipment and logistics, strikes, demonstrations, disruptions of order, riots, homemade bombs, Molotov cocktails, that can easily degenerate into more serious conflicts. Allow me, in summing up, to leave you with what I call my Mugger Theory. The best way to protect yourself from a mugger isn’t to take out your knife and confront him with it on equal terms. It’s to corner him at the end of an alley, point a dozen machine guns at him and tell him to drop his knife. And that, gentlemen, is exactly what we intend to do with these young thugs. When the time comes, we’ll know how to provoke the right occasion. We’ll bring them along to precisely where we want them, and then, after we’ve surrounded them with our squadrons, we’ll provoke them to bring out their knives. And then, and only then, will we engage them …”

  The Minister of Defence was one of those who went up to General Bédard during the discussions that followed, armed with transcripts of the Commander of Mobile Forces’ talk, and walked with him toward the mess hall.

  “A simply remarkable presentation, my dear sir …”

  “Bah. Let’s just say I’m doing my best to attract the attention of our political men to certain realities.”

  “Remarkable, simply remarkable,” echoed the Honourable Peter Dryden.

  “Not for me to say,” replied the Commander of Mobile Forces, with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Three weeks later, General Jean-B. Bédard received his fourth star. At the same time, he was promoted to Chief of Staff Major General, the first French-Canadian to have risen to the highest rank in the Canadian military. From then on, he had the Armed Forces in the palm of his hand.

  RUE COLLINS

  THE DISCUSSION TOOK PLACE IN the living room, where there was enough Export “A” smoke to muffle the arguments coming from both sides of the room.

  The Lafleur brothers were there, and Lancelot, Gode, Élise, Justin, Ben, Le Corbeau, Pierre. And Sylvie, Lancelot’s wife, her long legs descending from a miniskirt that covered about as much as a beer-bottle cap. Their two-year-old toddler ran around between everyone’s legs with a plastic toy machine gun. Someone had made some spaghetti sauce. There was beer in the fridge, but not enough to cause a flood. Le Corbeau was the only one to make the trip to the kitchen with any regularity.

  Since they’d been obliged to abandon the farm in Milan, with its future Prison of the People, they’d holed up in the bungalow on rue Collins, which had become, at the end of the summer of 1970, a sort of headquarters. Tonight, they were discussing the two targets of their operation: Hite, the American, and Travers, the Brit. Taking them both wasn’t impossible, but it would seriously complicate the operation. No one considered this plan for action to be premature more than Jean-Paul. His proposal was to continue with the reorganization of the group and to concentrate on long-term preparations: hideouts, vehicles, backup, money, weapons. Élise, whose younger brother had been one of those arrested in Saint-Colomban, tossed the first salvo.

  “It’s easy to see that you’ve never had a brother in prison …”

  “But it’s going to take more than a hostage to made the government give in. And as of now, we have no place to hide them … Even this place is getting too hot.”

  “Yeah, like sometimes you can even smell the heat,” laughed le Corbeau. He was in a good position to know, having had to shake off a tail on his way to rue Collins several times.

  “We’re not dumb enough to bring a hostage to a house already known to the police,” Lancelot put in. “We’ll have to rent an apartment.”

  “An apartment? You mean a place with neighbours? What if the hostage cries out, what do you do then?”

  “I’d shut him up. It’s not complicated.”

  “We’d need to be in better shape to do something like that. It’s going to take more money, better hiding places, more vehicles. The police know about the ones we have. We’ll need machine guns. I have a contact in the States that can supply us with guns …”

  Lancelot was pacing nervously back and forth in the room. He stopped in front of Jean-Paul, who’d been watching him from the divan, sitting up on his haunches. Lancelot gave him a malevolent smile.

  “Nelson …” he said.

  “Nelson? What Nelson?”

  “Robert Nelson, in 1838. He came across the border from Vermont and claimed Lower Canada for the Republic. The Americans had promised him weapons to arm the locals, les Frères Chasseurs. The cases of rifles never arrived, and he went back across the border with his tail between his legs. You remind me of him …”

  Lancelot was now talking to everyone in the room, and Jean-Paul, though annoyed, calmly watched him take over the meeting.

  “The Tupameros have just succeeded in taking four hostages, and their manifesto has been read in the National Assembly!”

  “But they had to kill one of their hostages. And they didn’t succeed in getting any political prisoners out of jail.”

  Lancelot looked Jean-Paul up and down.

  “They killed a CIA agent. Four bullets to the chest, that’s all he was worth. But look at Brazil. There the authorities negotiated: forty political prisoners for one ambassador. And twelve in Bolivia … Why wouldn’t it work here?”

  The discussion went on all night. With Élise, who tried to slip a word in edgewise into the cockfight, and Justin, who was forced to play the role of mediator with about the same success as a Blue Helmet in the Congo, and René, who always took the side of his brother, and le Corbeau, who kept getting drunker and drunker and only opened his mouth to burp, and Ben, who got hungry and was eating cold spaghetti in the kitchen, and Chevrier, who never said a word and who, behind his thick glasses, looked more than ever like a deer caught in the headlights.

  Every once in a while Gode would stand up and take a look out the window. The area was very quiet. The fields. The small houses. Not even a cat could be seen moving about.

  Then Lancelot took out the Manifesto. He waved it in the air, like Thomas Jefferson with the Constitution, or as if it was the word of God.

  “We worked on this together. We corrected this together. And now the whole world will hear us speak. Who’s ready to start Operation Deliverance with me?”<
br />
  “We’ll put it to a vote,” Jean-Paul said, unperturbed, as though he hadn’t noticed that Lancelot had just pulled the rug out from under his feet.

  Lancelot swept the room with his eyes.

  “Who’s for?”

  Élise, his sister, raised her hand resolutely. Her brother-in-law followed suit. Then le Corbeau, after hesitating, making it look like he had no choice. Sylvie and her two-year-old abstained, for humanitarian reasons.

  “One, two, three, four …” Jean-Paul counted with satisfaction. “Okay, who’s against?”

  As expected, the former gang from the Fisherman’s Hut voted in a bloc: René, Gode, Ben. Finally, Jean-Paul raised his huge paw.

  “Two, three, four … Someone’s missing.”

  Everyone looked around for Pierre. He’d gone to take a leak.

  For Jean-Paul, it was in the bag. He was already breathing easier. Pierre, alias François Langlais, was one of the guys from the South Shore, like the others. A man of few words, which was fine: they only needed one, no more. One single word from him now could prevent this whole thing from slipping downhill. They would then be able to concentrate on long-term preparations, maybe spend two or three years rebuilding the organization, consolidating their secret network, developing connections with regions like the Gaspésie and start up a few others. Create a national structure.

  On the other side of the wall they could hear the toilet flushing. Pierre was now standing in the middle of the living room.

  “Are you in favour of going ahead with the kidnappings, or are you against? What do you say, frère chasseur?”

  “I say we should get our asses in gear.”

  THREE

  ZOPILOTE

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE CESSNA 172 SAT MOTIONLESS at the start of the runway.

  Bédard tuned the radio to the required frequency and contacted the control tower.

  “Saint-Hubert control, Uniform-Juliette-Oscar waiting on runway six right for clearance to take off.”

  “Roger, Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, you are cleared for takeoff on runway six right, go up to 1,000 feet and level off.”

  The general opened the throttle, and the single-prop plane shot ahead 1,500 feet and began its ascent. The horizon expanded beneath him: runways, hangars, roads, fields, woods in full colour, the buildings of the base, the flat, fertile fields extending toward the south and the United States. At 1,000 feet the controller’s voice came back on: “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, do not go higher than 1,600 feet. Make a left turn to leave this sector at Boucherville.”

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, no higher than 1,600 feet,” repeated the general.

  The cluster of islands spread out beneath the nose of the plane. He levelled off over Boucherville.

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, you have left Saint-Hubert sector. Radar contact terminated.”

  The former commander-in-chief of the Canadian Armed Forces was a recent retiree at the beginning of October 1970. He could rest on his laurels, he’d had a career that was nothing short of exceptional. His passion for civilian aviation and his “Twenty-Two” (the name painted on the fuselage of his Cessna), based in Saint-Hubert, allowed him to maintain direct contact both with his alma mater (the famous Twenty-Second Regiment) and his own baby, the general headquarters of Mobile Forces. Opportunity making the thief, it wasn’t unusual for him to drop by the officers’ mess for a glass or two after returning from one of his escapades in the Quebec sky. He’d flown as many as three or four times a week that summer and still felt, from the moment he set foot on the base, welcomed as the living legend he in fact was.

  He was now crossing the St. Lawrence. Above Charron Island.

  “Montreal control,” he spoke into his mike, “this is Cessna one-seven-two Golf-Uniform-Juliette-Oscar joining you. Good morning!”

  “Golf-Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, please hold …”

  The controller gave permission to an Air Canada flight to land before getting back to him.

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, identify yourself. What are your intentions?”

  Bédard flipped on his transponder. On the radar screen in the Montreal control tower, the blip representing “Twenty-Two” showed up clear and precise.

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar entering Pont-Tunnel sector to circle Ville-Marie at an altitude of 1,500 feet, if available.”

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, approved for 1,500 feet. How many circuits will you make, sir?”

  “Just one. And I’d like to go over to Victoria, destination Lake Champlain …”

  “Very well. Contact us when you cross into Victoria,” concluded the voice in his headset.

  The Botanical Gardens in Rosemont … the huge island seemed to be sleeping under his plane. He liked having this theatrical overview in which the game would be played out. And soon, too, if one could believe the latest reports …

  Retired though he was, Bédard, since his departure, had daily conversations with his friend, General Turcotte, who was also a former Twenty-Seconder from the Italian campaign, and his successor as head of Mobile Forces. Turcotte owed much of his irresistible rise in the hierarchy to General Bédard: the present commander of Mobile Forces was, as they say, in his debt. At the beginning of the 1960s, when Bédard ran the Division of Operational Preparedness, Turcotte had even “lent” him his nephew, a private in the Twenty-Second Regiment, whom General Bédard had taken under his wing and initiated into the art of intelligence, and later had him infiltrate into the revolutionaries, putting his personal spy within the FLQ. One of those small guys who push at the edges and heat up meetings and always want to go a little bit farther than the leaders, and manage to get others to follow them … To end up being arrested at the wheel of a van full of dynamite. Since his years of spying (although it wasn’t called spying) in Moscow, Bédard had always tried to see trouble coming well in advance, and this time Turcotte was definite: action would begin soon. The thugs were getting ready to take out their knives, Turcotte specified, with a knowing smile. It was already the fourth of October. A week ago, with the approval of his mentor, the head of Mobile Command had placed his troops on alert in Saint-Hubert. CATS was also ready to pounce. All that was left now was to be patient while politics did its job.

  Mont-Royal slipped by under his left wing. Outremont. The university. St. Joseph’s Oratory.

  The scene was set, the net was in place. Thanks to the army reserves, the commanders could count on the loyalty of many civilians who were, in fact, soldiers in disguise. Journalists and police officers, secretly working for the country’s armed forces in the heart of the general population. The secretary general of the government, the highest civil servant in the province, was a colonel in the reserve, as was the special counsellor to the premier (although it had to be said that Bob Lapierre was something of an unknown quantity. Who did Uncle Bob work for? A good question …).

  Bédard turned to follow the line of boulevard Décarie, putting Westmount on his left, and before long Victoria Bridge came into view. He wanted to make this little tour take him to Plattsburgh. To frolic a bit over the border and take a look, from a distance, in passing, at the base down there. You never knew what you could learn, in Plattsburgh or in Moscow. And though the general did not know what service Uncle Bob was in, one thing was certain, he really loved the Yanks. Even Bédard, whose loyalty to Canada could not be in doubt, felt safer in the knowledge that if things turned really bad north of the border, their neighbour to the south would send troops rolling up the maritime corridor.

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar crossing Victoria Bridge, request passage toward Lake Champlain.”

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, passage granted. What altitude, sir?”

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, I’d like 3,500 feet.”

  At 3,500 feet, the headset crackled and he heard:

  “Uniform-Juliette-Oscar, this is Montreal control. You are exiting our sector. Radar contact terminated. Would you like a flight plan?”

  “No, thank you. That won’
t be necessary …”

  OCTOBER 5, 1970,

  8:20 A.M.

  THE BLACK TAXI HAD JUST stopped in front of the luxurious home nestled on the side of the mountain among a splash of orange and purple maple crowns and fallen leaves that rustled underfoot like coloured crêpe paper. A blue, blue sky. On the ground floor, Her Majesty’s Commissioner of Trade, John Travers, was about to enter history dressed in a singlet, underwear, and socks. He emerged from the bathroom freshly shaven, looking as ridiculous as it was possible for a man to look, but saved from that same ridiculousness by a quarter-century of conjugal intimacy. There he was, trousers in hand, hopping back and forth before the foot of the bed in which his wife is sitting up reading the morning’s Montreal Sun. The couple’s Dalmatian, Fyodor, is curled up in the warm depression where the consular body had lain. What are they talking about? Bridge, of course. But Travers cocks an ear, he’s heard a bell: the front door. A long way down, down there. The maid will get it. She’s Portuguese.

  Travers left the bedroom without his pants on, talking to his wife, and found himself confronted by a young man holding a pair of handcuffs and pointing a .22-calibre Long Rifle pistol at his face, loaded with eight rounds.

  “Get down on the floor or you’ll be fucking dead!” the young man screamed, words that instantly assumed their place in history.

  FOREST PARK, ST. LOUIS,

  MISSOURI, AFTERNOON

  OF OCTOBER 5

  SITTING CROSSWISE ON THE BENCH of a picnic table, Gode looked up at the Gateway Arch whose straight, clean lines and full arc soared above the trees in the park that overlooked the banks of the Mississippi.

  “What you see there,” he said, “is the Gateway to the West. Everything on the other side of that arch was once called Louisiana, and it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Napoleon — talk about a raw deal — sold them the whole territory for a song. But what they don’t tell you in the history books is that a hundred years ago, St. Louis was as French as you and me. It was French Métis who got Lewis and Clark across the Rockies.”