Liberators

by Rawles James Wesley

Jake and Janelle glanced at each other, and then Jake answered for both of them: “Rob, at Smith Brothers.”

  • • •

  Smith Brothers Air & Seaplane Adventures had been in business for twenty years. The small company flew charters in Florida year-round as well as in the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri each summer.

  The company was owned by a former Delta Airlines pilot with thirty thousand hours of flying experience. His son and right-hand man was Rob Smith, a former U.S. Air Force pilot with a poorly concealed wild streak. Rob had more than twenty-five hundred hours of stick time, and nearly half of those hours were in seaplanes and pontoon floatplanes. He had made hundreds of takeoffs and landings on lakes.

  For many years the company had three small floatplanes and “The Big Plane,” a five-seat UC-1 Twin Bee. Then, just a year after the UN capitulation, they gambled and bought the “Really Big Plane,” a Cessna Amphibian—a floatplane variant of the recent-generation Cessna Caravan. (Since floatplanes were primarily recreational, and the recreational aviation market had not yet recovered, Smith had the chance to pick it up for twenty cents on the dollar.) While it outwardly looked like a typical floatplane, it was scaled up considerably and was powered by a beefy 675-horsepower turboprop engine that burned either JP4 or JP5.

  The thirty-nine-foot-long Cessna seated twelve passengers and cruised at 159 knots once up at altitude, and 128 knots on the deck, with a range of 805 nautical miles. The plane’s useful load was 3,230 pounds. With a full load, the plane had a takeoff distance of 3,660 feet.

  Rob felt guilty about not being more active in the resistance against the Fort Knox government, so he jumped at the opportunity to take the risky charter. His father objected at first, but he eventually relented.

  • • •

  “Looking at the sectionals, I can see that the closest U.S. airport—at least straight-line distance—is the tarmac strip at Port Angeles, Washington. That is a 6,347-foot-long strip that can handle a Boeing 737, so it can certainly handle our puddle jumper, even if we are overloaded and just stagger off the ground. But it’s about five hundred miles to your lake. The problem is, it’s another five hundred miles back, and our plane only has an eight-hundred-mile range flying a standard profile, and a lot less if we try to dodge radar.”

  “What if we were to refuel up there?” Jake asked.

  “You can arrange that?” Rob asked. “We’re talking about a crud load of jet fuel. The capacity is 332 gallons, which equates to 2,224 pounds. Depending on how much low-level flying we have to do, we’ll probably burn between 260 and 300 gallons of that getting there, leaving only about 65 gallons in the wing tanks when we land.”

  “Let me make some inquiries,” Jake said.

  • • •

  The next day, Jake met with Rob again and presented a solution. “The resistance guy tells me that there is a very active cell in Bella Coola. Apparently it is a cell that is independent of the Anahim Lake group, which I assume is the one that Alan and Claire are in. We can arrange to have a resistance boat refuel you with two hundred seventy gallons of jet fuel—all in five-gallon cans—at the mouth of the Dean River, which is almost impossible to reach overland, but it is only forty air miles from Sigutlat Lake.”

  “Okay. With two or three minutes per can—since five-gallon cans are slow to pour—we’re talking two hours to refuel. Call it three hours, to be on the safe side. I hope you realize that the top of the wing is sixteen feet over the water, so we’ll need very calm seas to be able to refuel. It’s like standing on a metal roof of a house, but the house is moving. If there are swells, it feels like you’re surfing when you’re up on the wing.”

  Jake pulled out a map and showed him the water-landing site, and said, “You’ll be landing on salt water, but on a very sheltered waterway. The Dean Channel is one of the longest inlets on the coast of BC. So unless there are unusually high winds that day, at most there will be just very small swells.”

  “What about Chinese troops?”

  “Not an issue. We’re talking about some remote and unpatrolled coastline, not Vancouver Island. The nearest PLA garrison is in Bella Coola, and there are no roads to the mouth of the Dean. You can only get there by boat or by floatplane. “

  Rob Smith rubbed his chin. “So why don’t I just drop you and your gear off with the resistance there at the inlet from the get-go?”

  “It’s on the wrong side of the mountain range, and the Chinese have the only road—Highway 20—very closely watched. They’re sure to be checking IDs and they probably search every round-eye vehicle that passes through. Getting thousands of pounds of contraband cargo through would be tricky at best. The intel guys say that they scrutinize the east-west highway routes in particular, since they consider those strategic.”

  “Well, if you’re sure you can arrange that, then I’m game. But if your refueling committee falls through, then I’m up a creek without jet fuel,” Rob said.

  “I’m going to promise them about one hundred pounds of various ammunition and batteries in trade for the fuel, so they’ll definitely be there.”

  “Batteries?” Rob asked.

  “Yeah. Most people don’t realize it, but modern armies depend on batteries just as much as they depend on ammo, fuel, and MREs. They burn through a ton of batteries for radios, starlight scopes, intrusion detection systems, flashlights, laser aiming lights—all kinds of things. Without batteries, any army is back to nineteenth-century warfare.”

  “Maybe you should be sabotaging battery factories in China.”

  • • •

  All four of them took a four-week immersion course in Chinese. With a better ear for languages, it was Peter who did best in the class. The others were able to absorb only a few words and key phrases. Their instructor—a refugee from Taiwan in her sixties—found it amusing when they asked her how to say phrases like, “Throw down your weapons,” and, “Surrender, or we will shoot.” In the end, only Peter became conversant in Chinese at a rudimentary level. But at least the other three of them remembered their key phrases and one crucial command: Surrender.

  For weapons, Rhiannon had a AUS-Steyr bullpup, a capable little rifle, but it used proprietary magazines that didn’t interchange with M16 magazines. However, Rhiannon had eleven spares (a mix of thirty- and forty-two-round), so she didn’t consider that a big drawback. Meanwhile, Peter had a captured Indonesian Pindad rifle, which was a clone of the FN FNC. It used standard NATO M16 magazines. When Jake asked Peter where he’d gotten the unusual weapon, Peter said, “I got it from an Indonesian soldier who had no further use for it.”

  Jake would carry an LAR-8 variant of the AR-10 with nine twenty-round steel FN/FAL magazines. The Rock River Arms LAR-8 was designed to accept either FN/FAL magazines or L1A1 magazines. Jake and Janelle both carried SIG P250 pistols chambered in .45 automatic. (Hers had originally been a .40 S&W, but they were able to find a factory conversion caliber exchange kit and some extra .45 ACP magazines.)

  For body armor, Peter had a set of the excellent Australian Army–issue Tiered Body Armor System. The TBAS was the equivalent of a Level IV vest in the civilian world. Jake had Level IIIA concealment body armor, and Janelle had Level II. It took some searching, but they also found a Level III vest for Rhiannon. Ironically, that vest was priced lower than a less-capable Level II vest being sold by the same store, but because of Florida’s hot and humid climate, thicker vests did not sell well after the UNPROFOR withdrawal.

  Although U.S. ammunition makers were getting back into production, there were still chronic shortages of many varieties of pistol cartridges, as well as several rifle calibers.

  They gathered what they could, following the NLR’s published list of ammunition needs.

  Janelle also found fourteen boxes of .243 Winchester, intended for her mother’s deer rifle.

  From three resistance veterans in Florida, they received donations of 144 electric blasting caps, twenty-seven kilos of German C4 in three-kilo blocks, two square yards of DuPont
Detasheet in twelve-by-thirty-six-inch rolls, and two hundred meters of detonating cord.

  Rob’s plane was kept in top condition by the Smith Brothers A&P mechanic. The only changes needed before the trip were temporarily removing some seats and taping over the Unites States N-prefix registration markings, making the plane “quasi-sterile.”

  55

  HINTERBOONIES

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

  —Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty, in Blade Runner (screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples¸ based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick)

  Port Angeles, Washington—August, the Eleventh Year

  Their flight to Washington, completed in stages, was exhausting. After the initial thrill of lifting off the lake in Tavares, they were faced with two and a half days of flying across the country in a plane that, despite its fancy padded leather seats, was still cramped and noisy and lacked a bathroom. After two layovers at motels near small-town FBO airports, they were happy to arrive on the Olympic Peninsula.

  Once they were in Port Angeles, they still had to disable the plane’s transponder and remove the plane’s emergency locator transmitter (ELT) radio. They also had to pick up another eighty pounds of batteries and night vision gear that, by previous arrangement, had been couriered from Spokane, Washington. One unexpected addition to this supplementary gear was a pair of PF-89s, the Chinese 80mm equivalent of the U.S. LAW rocket. Jake suspected that “the gnomes of Langley” had quietly supplied them. Because they were Chinese made, they were considered “sterile” and deniable for their upcoming foray into occupied Canada. The addition of these eight-and-a-half-pound rocket launchers meant that Rob had to rerun his weight and balance calculations. To compensate for the extra weight, Rob asked everyone to empty his canteens and hydration packs. This left just a few small bottles of apple juice for them to sip on the final leg of their flight to Sigutlat Lake.

  They rested—or tried to rest—for nearly twenty-four hours at the home of a former resistance leader in Port Angeles. The tension was high. Since they were just past the summer solstice, there was more than thirteen hours of daylight at this latitude. Because he would be skimming the water during the first part of the flight, Rob wanted to take off while it was still daylight so that he’d have the best depth perception.

  As Rob had explained before, they had two potential flight profiles for their infiltration: The first would be to fly very low in ground effect over the ocean and then fly nap-of-the-earth over land. The second would be to fly normally and attempt to blend in with Chinese-occupation cargo flights. Rob ruled out the first option because it would consume too much fuel. They settled on a combination of both plans: They would skim over the water while in U.S. airspace, but then once they passed over Vancouver Island, they would pop up and fly at sixteen thousand feet and do their best to look “normal” to Chinese ground controllers, except for their lack of an active transponder.

  They took off at 9:35 P.M., and Rob immediately settled the plane into ground-effect flying. The water seemed very close. Janelle estimated that the plane’s floats were just fifteen to twenty feet above the choppy water. They were so low that Rob had to swerve around some fishing boats. This seemed harrowing to his passengers, but Rob laughed about it. The sun was setting over Peter’s left shoulder. The others heard him praying aloud. They reached Vancouver Island at dusk. Their landfall was just east of Sooke Lake. Rob pulled up to just above treetop level, and he skirted above the trees for a few minutes. “They tell me that if you do this right, your tires touch treetops so often that they never stop spinning,” Rob joked. In actuality, they were between thirty and fifty feet above the treetops, but they still seemed unnervingly close. He dipped the plane even lower, nearly touching the surface of Sooke Lake. It was now nearly dark.

  Rob pulled back on the yoke sharply, emulating the profile of a takeoff from the lake. He then dialed in the autopilot to take them on a heading directly toward Campbell River, with a steady climb to 15,500 feet. Although the plane’s cruising ceiling was actually 20,000 feet, he chose this altitude because it was often used by the three Harbin ShuiHong-5 maritime patrol and utility planes that their intelligence contacts told them were deployed in British Columbia. (These aging planes used this reduced ceiling because their cabin pressurizing systems often failed.)

  The rest of their flight would be in darkness, relying on instruments. As they neared Campbell River, Rob descended and turned northwest, following the profile of a routine landing at the Campbell River Airport. Instead of staying on course, he descended farther to just two hundred feet above the Campbell River Marina. Then he turned sharply east and climbed over Cape Mudge to again confuse radar intercept and ground-control operators into thinking that this was now a different plane. He pulled up into a gradual climb and set a heading northeast toward Williams Lake. Then, over Clendinning Provincial Park, he descended below the eight-thousand-foot peaks and turned due north up a broad valley. Once they reached the north end of the valley, Rob said, “From here on we should be outside of Chinese radar coverage, until we get closer to Williams Lake, where I’ve been told they now have an ATC radar, but no air defense artillery or surface-to-air missiles. Of course, if that intel is wrong, then we’ll be the first to find out.”

  He laughed, but the others didn’t.

  He climbed to 20,600 feet, exceeding the normal operational ceiling of the aircraft. The plane droned on until they reached Big Creek Provincial Park, at the north end of the coastal mountain range. From here, the terrain dropped off into the Chilcotin Plateau. Rob now set a new heading that would take them to Charlotte Lake. At Charlotte Lake, he turned again slightly toward the Blackwater Meadow Indian Reserve. Once over the reserve, he descended to 15,000 feet and made his final turn to Sigutlat Lake. They had now flown seven hundred nautical miles, and Rob was nearing exhaustion.

  He turned his head. “I waited until we were this far north to make our final turn because I wanted to be in the shadow of Itcha Mountain. Even if they have an ATC radar at Williams Lake or even at Bella Coola, we’ll be outside of their line of sight,” Rob explained.

  “Which means?” Janelle asked.

  “Which means they can’t see us on radar. Radars can’t see through mountains. So, for all they know, we could be landing anywhere in about a three-hundred-mile radius. And if they have a blinding flash of the obvious and realize that their target is an amphibian floatplane, then they’ll realize that there are at least a dozen lakes where we could land, not to mention umpteen little airfields. To them, we are now a proverbial needle in a haystack.”

  Jake reached across and gave Rob a high five.

  Their descent to Sigutlat Lake was uneventful but stressful, considering that they were making the descent on instruments, and the moon had now set.

  “Now, this is where we take a chill pill and just trust the accuracy of the Garmin TAWS,” Rob said.

  Jake was transfixed, watching the display, which in three dimensions showed Rob’s banking turn and descent over the lake. It was like watching a video game or a computer flight simulator. This was a true instruments-only landing, with hardly any outside reference. The only light that he could see was the glow from the engine’s exhaust below his window, and just a faint white reflection from the snowy peaks above. As he paralleled the centerline of the lake, Rob had already dropped the flaps and had throttled back.

  “Our sink rate is about fifteen feet per second,” Rob reported. Closely watching his instruments, he pulled back on the yoke to flare at the last moment and they touched down on the lake in a very smooth landing. After feeling that, he pulled back the throttle. Once they had slowed to twenty miles an hour, Rob pushed the left rudder pedal to turn and taxi to the center of the lake. Then he shut down the engine. “The gauges show one hundred forty-five pounds of fuel. That wi
ll be plenty to get me over to the Dean Channel. As for now . . . It’s too dark to pull up to the shore safely.”

  “What about GPS?” Rhiannon asked.

  “That won’t tell us where a boat or other obstruction might be. Nor do we know the current condition of the dock. It’s almost pitch dark out there. “

  He popped his head out the door for a moment to sniff the air and look around. He was just barely able to discern the shoreline in the distance. The lake was quiet.

  Rob closed his door. “The lake is dead calm, and there is no wind. We might drift a bit, but we should be fine. Wake me up at first light.”

  With that, he turned off the avionics, took off his headset, reclined his seat, and closed his eyes.

  “Cool as a cucumber,” Peter whispered.

  “That’s why we hired a professional pilot with thousands of hours of flying time,” Jake replied. “Now, let’s take turns getting some rest, too.”

  • • •

  That same night, Phil was cuddled in bed alongside Malorie. Tree frogs were peeping in the distance. Phil turned slightly, shifted his arm under his pillow, and let out a soft sigh.

  “You awake?” Malorie whispered.

  “Yeah.” He reached his hand up to gently stroke the side of her head.

  After a minute, she turned to face him. “What was that sighing about?”

  “I was just praying some more. I’m worried about the lack of progress in booting out the Chinese. I think that we’re going to run out of resistance fighters before they run out of PLA soldiers and vehicles. We’re down to our last four blasting caps. Without force multipliers, we can’t gain the initiative. And if we can’t gain the initiative, then we need to seriously consider cutting our losses and—”

  Malorie interrupted. “Is this Phil Adams, the eternal optimist, that I’m talking to, or did some strange man sneak into my bed?”

  Phil chuckled.

  She kissed him and then said, “We just have to keep up the fight and trust in the Lord. Ultimately, he’s the one who is in control. Not General Zhou, not you, and not me.”