Liberators

by Rawles James Wesley

  The explosives had been stockpiled in the shop for several months. They were stacked on pallets and covered with tarps. Packing the truck with explosives took Phil, Ray, and Stan nearly twenty-one hours, in three successive seven-hour sessions, over the course of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Stan did most of the positioning of the explosives, while Phil and Ray used a pair of dollies and a large Radio Flyer child’s wagon for the many trips back and forth from the explosives pile. Nearly every item got a wrap of PETN detonating cord to ensure that they’d all explode simultaneously. They included every explosive that they could find: hundreds of recovered land mines (with their detonators removed), some mining gelignite, as well as a few dud French artillery shells, which were handled very gingerly and wedged in nose-upward. By the end of the third night, Stan’s back was going into spasm.

  In all, they estimated that there was ten tons on board, and even after deducting the weight of the artillery shell casings and land mine housings, there were at least eight tons of various high explosives.

  • • •

  At 10:15 on Monday morning, Terrence drove the Central Cariboo Dumpster truck to the front gate of the UN headquarters building, right on schedule. The gate guard recognized both the truck and Terrence’s face and waved him through.

  One Dumpster was located at a door on the north side of the building, just east of the round Gathering Place Building, which after the UN took over the campus became jokingly known by the French as the Sex and Drugs Building. This Dumpster was near the auto shop. The nearest door was marked: DOOR 5.5 (SHOP). Two other Dumpsters were located at the southeast corner of the building near Door 7. But unlike those, Door 5.5 was outside the field of vision of the gate guards.

  Terrence simply backed the truck up to Door 5.5 alongside the Dumpster, using the truck’s rearview camera to get the truck within a foot of the overhang. Leaving the engine running, he pulled the fuse igniter and then immediately hopped out of the cab and reached back in to jab the joystick to make it sound as if the truck was lifting a Dumpster, as usual. He ran in a sprint to the north fence. A dozen snips with a small pair of bolt cutters made a gap in the rear fence big enough for him to slip through. In his haste, he tore the shoulder of his jacket. Terrence was soon up and running.

  The senior gate guard—a caporal with four years of service—grew impatient. He wondered why the garbage truck had not returned to the front of the building to empty the other two Dumpsters. He muttered, “Où êtes-vous, Macaca?”

  Macaca was an epithet originally used by the French colonials to disparage the natives in the Congo, but more recently it had been applied to the aboriginals in Canada. The guard surmised that the driver was smoking a cigarette. He picked up his radio handset and hesitated. Finally, he pressed the handset’s talk bar and hailed the security office in the building.

  At that moment a massive explosion leveled the building, leaving just one part of the west wall standing. A sixteen-foot-deep crater marked the spot where the dump truck had been parked. The adjoining round Gathering Place Building was also destroyed. Because that building was partially earth-bermed, it left a large circular crater next to the smaller, oval bomb-blast crater. The explosion killed everyone in both buildings. It also seriously injured the gate guards and ruptured their eardrums.

  The shock wave from the explosion threw Terrence off balance and made him stumble to his knees, even though he was more than 450 yards away. Looking back, he could see that the explosion was sending fragments in all directions, and it had raised a huge reddish cloud of smoke and dust. The red hue of the dust had been created by pulverized bricks. The blast wave shattered house windows in a quarter-mile radius and set off car alarms even farther out. The sound of the explosion was heard as far away as the hamlet of Riske Creek.

  Terrence regained his footing and began running. It sounded as if every dog in town was barking or howling. Nearby, he heard emergency service vehicle sirens wailing. He started to sing an old Salish fight chant as he ran. His getaway vehicle was his rusting old Ford Escort, now outfitted with stolen license plates. It was parked a kilometer away at the junction of Highway 97 and Dixon Road.

  Terrence quickly got on the highway and past the reservation to make the turn to Dugan Lake before any new roadblocks were set up. A woman from his band was waiting right where she promised she would be. As she got in the car, she exclaimed, “Wow, I could hear that ka-boom from here! Was that really all the way down at the TRU campus?”

  Terrence nodded and said with a laugh, “Yep. Big explosion!”

  Ten minutes later, he stopped three hundred meters short of the trail to his uncle’s cabin and pulled his backpack and a duffel bag out of the trunk of the car. He handed the middle-aged woman the car key.

  Terrence said, “Take bad care of my car for me, okay?”

  “Okay. Pútucw!” (Good-bye.)

  • • •

  The scene around the headquarters was chaotic. Aside from the gate guards, the firefighters didn’t find any survivors, only bodies in the rubble. And close to the north door, where the truck had exploded, they found only parts of bodies. The unofficial casualty count was 207, but it was eventually arrived at by taking the full unit rosters and deducting the number of soldiers and airmen who were at the airport or at outlying posts. Among the dead were the French brigade commander and his entire staff.

  In the following five days, UNPROFOR patrols and checkpoints began hand swabbing anyone they contacted. Anyone who tested positive for explosives—and false positives were commonplace—was subjected to arrest and lengthy interrogation. It was already well established that false positives were created by soaps and hand lotions containing glycerin. Traces of fertilizer and cleaning products also gave false positives for nitrates. Two elderly residents who took nitroglycerin pills for angina also had their hands test positive. There were summary executions of five men, all aboriginal, who were suspected of conspiracy in the bombing. Two of these men had failed hand-swab tests. Only one of them was a close friend of Terrence, and none of them had anything to do with the bombing.

  Terrence later learned that his small house on Proctor Street had been searched very thoroughly by a composite team of RCMP and UNPROFOR officers. They even removed many Sheetrock wall panels. The yard was scanned with a metal detector and dug up in several places, but the investigators found nothing. The UNPROFOR officer in charge then ordered the house burned. Since it was a rental, Terrence’s landlord was not pleased.

  Two weeks later, Terrence sent identical handwritten letters via courier to the editors of both the Kamloops and Prince George newspapers (there was no longer a newspaper published in Williams Lake). The letters read:

  Dear Editor:

  By now, you’ve heard that I drove the truck that carried the load of explosives to the UN HQ at the TRU Campus. Yes, I done it. I am not ashamed of what I done. Those basterds deserved it. We blew them up with their own land-mines and artilary shells. Serves them right! They are rapists, thiefs, and murderers.

  But I do want to say that I am sorry for all the broken windows and the upset dogs, in town. (I hear they barked for two days.)

  Most Sincerely,

  Terrence Billy, Of The Secwepemc People

  UNPROFOR’s censors refused to let the letters be published.

  • • •

  Terrence Billy was killed in a gunfight with an UNPROFOR patrol two months later, in which Terrence killed two French soldiers and wounded two others. Ironically, they never identified his body, even though he had been the prime suspect in the bombing and his photograph had been circulated widely. Following the gunfight, his body was intentionally burned in a house on Stanchfield Road near the hamlet of Miocene.

  The French often found it easier for their troops to burn buildings than to haul bodies. So they systematically burned any house from which “bandit” gunfire had originated. This sent a strong message to the locals. In Fort St. James, resistance was so strong that the French army massacred mor
e than five hundred mostly unarmed people (of a population of seventeen hundred) and burned every building in the town. Years later, when he eventually went on trial, the brigade commander lamented, “That was our Philippeville,” referring to a dark day in Algerian history.

  45

  LE DERNIER COMBAT

  One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

  —C. S. Lewis

  Williams Lake, British Columbia—April, the Sixth Year

  In the aftermath of the UNPROFOR headquarters bombing, it was learned that most of the casualties had been support and service-support troops. These were mostly pencil-pushing clerks, paymasters, bakers, supply NCOs, mechanics, and various technicians. There were also two French Directorate of Military Intelligence (Direction du Reseignement Militaire or DRM) agents in the building. Those in the French contingent who survived did so by virtue of being out “on the line” when the bombing happened. These were nearly all regular combat troops. The survivors reacted with predictable ferocity. Their new battle cry was: “Leurs têtes vont rouler”—their heads will roll.

  All of their old smiles and feigned civility were gone. The UNPROFOR troupes de ligne were now quick on the trigger and had zero tolerance for insolence. There were more checkpoints, more searches, more raids, more arrests, and much more torture. If anyone had doubted it before, British Columbia was now clearly under the iron heel of military occupation. They even stopped cleaning up their messes, allowing ravens to police the battlefield.

  The strong resistance in the western provinces—highlighted by the Williams Lake headquarters bombing—was well publicized in the east, and consequently the level of UNPROFOR brutality was stepped up nationwide.

  UNPROFOR’s heightened oppression had a surprising effect: Instead of making people cower, it brought out their courage. French patrols could now expect to be sniped at wherever they went. Any UNPROFOR or RCMP vehicle left unattended would soon be firebombed or at least have its tires slashed. NLR and MOLON LABE! graffiti was spray-painted and penned almost everywhere imaginable.

  Nearly everyone felt that there would soon be a general uprising, but that subtle breaking point had not yet been reached.

  46

  THE TRAP

  Shortly before World War I, the German Kaiser was the guest of the Swiss government to observe military maneuvers. The Kaiser asked a Swiss militiaman: “You are 500,000 and you shoot well, but if we attack with 1,000,000 men what will you do?” The soldier replied: “We will shoot twice and go home.”

  —Historian Stephen Halbrook, as quoted by Bill Buppert in ZeroGov: Limited Government, Unicorns and Other Mythological Creatures

  The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia—May, the Sixth Year

  The continuing threat of UNPROFOR’s two remaining Gazelle helicopters based at Williams Lake weighed heavily on the minds of the McGregor resistance cell. The helicopters patrolled regularly, and they often engaged at any sign of activity. In several instances, woodcutters and fishermen were strafed without provocation. The FLIR sensors that they carried had been given the menacing nickname “The Eye of Sauron” throughout Canada, making helicopters greatly feared by the resistance.

  Since the Gazelles sat in hardened revetments, they were invulnerable to small-arms fire. The helibase was also heavily guarded and lit with infrared floodlights. A Pilatus PC-12 patrol airplane that belonged to the RCMP at the same airport had been covertly sabotaged with a time-delay firebomb—apparently set by another resistance cell or a solo—but there had been no other successful hits in recent weeks. The Team Robinson cell spent many hours brainstorming ideas—everything from fabricating mortars to adulterating the base’s deliveries of JP4 fuel. In early May, news leaked out from the airport that one of the two Gazelle helicopters at Williams Lake was grounded with engine trouble.

  It was finally Phil Adams who came up with a workable plan to eliminate the remaining helicopter. Phil had spent hours poring over topographical maps, comparing them with a set of aerial photos that had been pilfered from the unoccupied BC assessment office. Much of the region was a sea of trees, dotted with occasional clearings—either angular clear-cuts or more oblong openings from lightning-sparked timber fires.

  When scanning through an aerial map of the area five miles east of Nimpo Lake, Phil spotted one small clearing that was the only open ground within a one-mile radius. If they were going to have a good chance of isolating the helicopter anywhere, then this would be it. By comparing some distinctive curves of a stream bottom, he correlated the aerial photo to the topo map and was pleased to see that the opening was at the edge of a plateau, with a steep descent on one side.

  He tapped on the map with a forefinger and said to himself, “Perfect.”

  That afternoon he brought the map and aerial photo to present his plan to Ray and Alan, who had just come in from doing some fence work. They sat down across the kitchen table wearing their socks. (Claire was strict about allowing muddy boots in the house.)

  Phil began, “I think I’ve found a way to ambush the last functional ALAT Gazelle at the helibase. If we present them with a target that they can’t engage effectively from the air, they’ll probably want to insert airmobile troops or an artillery forward observer. But we’ve seen that the ALATs certainly don’t like fast roping.”

  “Mauviettes!” Ray blurted out.

  “Yep, they’re wimps. Operationally, they’ve demonstrated that they prefer to pop into open LZs and land briefly or just hover for a few seconds to drop off troops.”

  Ray jumped in. “So we create an attractive target and make them want to use a nearby LZ on a promontory terrain feature that we already have covered.”

  “So how do we then take out the helicopter? With IEDs?” Alan asked.

  “Much simpler than that: We use five-eighth-inch steel cable. There’s miles of it available, with all of the old logging operations around here. A steel cable in the main rotor will ruin your whole day.”

  Ray shook his head and chided, “So we string a cable over an opening. Even if we were to paint the cable to make it blend in, depending on the lighting, they’d probably spot the cable and divert at the last minute.”

  Phil pointed his forefinger toward the floor and said, “Not if the cable is hidden in the grass.”

  Ray cocked his head. “What? How’s that going to work?”

  “I’ll explain it all to you when we hike out there for a recon.”

  • • •

  Rigging the LZ for helicopter ambush took some time, but the terrain was advantageous, from the size of the trees to the steep drop-off just east of the clearing. One end of the cable was attached with three cable clamps in a row, twenty-four feet up a large cedar tree on the northwest edge of the opening. The cable was left slack, so that it touched the ground at the base of the tree. It was then threaded as deeply as possible through the knee-high grass, diagonally across the middle of the oblong seventy-yard-wide opening. At the southeast side of the opening there was a large cottonwood tree with a wide fork twenty-five feet off the ground. The cable was tossed over that fork, but again left slack on the side that faced the opening. The far end of the cable was carefully aligned through the trees to a large, dying western larch tree at the edge of the drop-off.

  Now came the tricky part. Using a girth strap and a pair of tree-topper’s climbing spikes, Ray quickly climbed thirty-five feet up the larch, hoping that the tree wasn’t rotten at the core.

  Watching him climb so deftly, Phil said, “Hey, that’s pretty slick. You climb with a purpose.”

  Ray shouted back, “Just a Jedi trick that I learned from my cousin Obi-Wan.”
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  Phil laughed. Ray often joked about the actor Ewan McGregor, who shared their surname. He kidded about the actor being a first cousin, when he was more likely a fiftieth cousin.

  Trailing from his belt was fifty feet of parachute cord. Once he’d reached the desired height, he reset his boot spikes solidly and leaned back in the strap. He felt solid, but the situation still made him nervous. Climbing a dying tree that might be rotted or hollowed out by wood ants was a dicey proposition.

  He shouted down to Phil, “Okay, tie on the cable with a sheet bend and a half hitch!”

  “Ummm . . . okay. What’s a sheet bend?”

  “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.