Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

32 PUMAS AND GAZELLES

Phil Adams was not surprised to learn that a detachment from the Cinquième Régiment d’Hélicoptères de Combat (part of the Fourth Brigade Aéromobile, or Fourth BAM) had established a helibase at the Williams Lake airport. They had brought in two types of helicopters, Pumas and Gazelles, both manufactured by Aérospatiale.

The larger SA 330 Pumas could carry up to sixteen troops, while the SA 342 Gazelles could carry only three. Phil considered these helicopters a key threat to the resistance, one that needed to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Lazy at heart, the UNPROFOR’s local command foolishly set up its three roadblocks just five kilometers out of Williams Lake and didn’t have any others until just outside Bella Coola to the west, Prince George to the north, and Kamloops to the southeast.

Driving his Ford F-250 pickup with a camper shell, Alan McGregor was able to drop off the three-man team just two miles before the roadblock. He then continued into town to buy supplies, as he did once every two months.

Canada’s infrastructure had fared better than that in the United States, in part because the power grid was predominantly powered by hydroelectric power. There was still grid power up in much of Canada. Some stores were still open, but it was a scramble to find anything to buy. Alan and Claire were often disappointed on these trips. It wasn’t until they learned to bring butchered sides of beef with them in their pickup that they got fully in tune with the barter networks in Bella Coola and Williams Lake.

The three raiders—Phil, Ray, and Stan—had opted to travel lightly armed, for the sake of speed on their planned exfiltration. Phil carried his M4gery with four extra magazines; Ray had his Inglis Hi-Power pistol with stock/holster and five extra magazines. Stan had a Ruger Mini-14 with four magazines. Stan and Phil also both carried .22 pistols in their packs. All three of their backpacks were bulging with glass cider jugs filled with napalm and padded with quilted poncho liners and their Nemesis suits. Each pack weighed nearly sixty pounds.

Although thermite would have been more compact and more effective, they opted for the expedience of simple Molotov cocktails, using gasoline. The gasoline was thickened with Styrofoam to the consistency of heavy syrup. Since they had used green Styrofoam pellets, the finished product had a light green tint.

Since there hadn’t been resistance activity west of Edmonton other than the sinking of the RO-RO ships (an act blamed on “American commandos”), UNPROFOR’s helibase at the Williams Lake Airport was lightly guarded and only three kilometers northeast of the town. From a timbered hill to the east, the raiders watched the routine for two days and nights, using binoculars and Phil’s PVS-14 night vision monocular. A variety of tents and vehicle shelters housed the pilots, ground crew, and cooks. Their ALAT’s light discipline was atrocious, with light blasting out each time a shelter door or a tent flap was opened. Their eight helicopters were parked in rows at eighty-meter intervals. Behind them was the unmistakable squat shape of a brown rubber fuel bladder—almost universally called a blivet. This one had a sixteen-kiloliter capacity. Next to it was a pair of fifty-five-gallon drums, standing upright.

During the first day that they watched, French soldiers used a commandeered bulldozer to methodically scrape the ground over a wide distance on three sides to create a protective embankment around the fuel storage point. They were obviously getting ready for a prolonged occupation. Taking his turn with the binoculars and watching the bulldozer’s work, Phil whispered, “What do you want to bet that the next thing they’ll do is bring in something like Hesco bastions and make revetments for the helicopters?”

Even at 450 yards, Phil recognized the distinctive outline of the FAMAS “bugle” 5.56mm bullpup carbines being carried by the French troops. By 2015, most of the French army had transitioned to the FÉLIN (Integrated Infantryman Equipment and Communications)—the French infantry combat system of the 2000s. It combined a modified FAMAS rifle with a variety of electronics, body armor, and pouches. The suite had an integral SPECTRA helmet fitted with real-time positioning and information system, and with starlight light-amplification technology. The power source was two rechargeable Li-ion batteries. The SPECTRA helmet was used by both French and Canadian military units. In France, it was also known as the CGF Gallet Combat Helmet.

The chronic supply shortages and breakdown of sophisticated electronics repair facilities during the Crunch meant that the high-tech portion of the FÉLIN gear was rendered useless. Without the communications, positioning, and night vision gear, all that they were left with was traditional “dumb” helmets, body armor, and nonelectronic optical sights and “iron” sights for their FAMAS carbines.

It soon became clear that there was only one pair of ALAT enlisted sentries posted each night in six-hour shifts, and that they walked the perimeter in alternating half-hour rounds. Part of their patrols brought the two sentries together at the far side of the airfield at regular intervals. There, they would often take breaks to smoke cigarettes.

At just after 1:30 A.M., Phil and Stan waited until they saw the flare of cigarette lighters, which spoiled the sentries’ natural night vision. The two sentries, both armed with FAMAS carbines, were sitting side-by-side, sharing one pair of earbuds from a digital music player. They were singing along to a French hip-hop song by Tiers Monde. Instinctively, the sentries faced toward the airport’s perimeter fence.

Wearing the masks from their Nemesis suits to conceal their faces from any security cameras, Phil and Stan quietly padded up behind the ALAT sentries and by prearrangement, shot them each ten times with .22 LR Ruger pistols loaded with target-grade standard velocity (subsonic) ammunition. The pistols had been fitted with empty two-liter soda-pop bottles duct-taped onto their muzzles, serving as ersatz suppressors. Each report was not much louder than a hardback book being slapped shut.

They continued just as they had rehearsed: They reloaded and flipped up the safety buttons on the pistols. Then they removed and stowed the pop-bottle silencers. It took a couple of minutes to clumsily pull off the FAMAS magazine pouches and detach the sling buckles from the lifeless bodies of the sentries. Slinging these extra guns and web gear made their heavy loads even heavier, but they weren’t going to walk away from useful weapons.

They moved in, advancing on the rows of helicopters. There were three Pumas and five Gazelles. First they opened the fuel cells on each helicopter and opened their doors, which surprisingly were not locked. (They had brought a large hammer and a cold chisel in case they were.) Each of the raiders carried four one-gallon cider jugs.

They opened the caps on the jugs and poured the sticky napalm—about the consistency of honey—around the interior of the helicopters. They made a point of heavily coating the avionics panels—and poured traces to each fuel cell. With the cider jugs removed, there was now enough room for the FAMAS carbines in two of their packs. Their hands were shaking as they got those stowed, along with web gear and the Ruger pistols.

Their last task before igniting the napalm was rupturing the brown rubber fuel bladder so that it, too, would burn. Ray did this with a pocketknife, punching a hole at waist level and then giving it a short slash, sending a torrent of the fuel spurting out to form a rapidly widening puddle on the ground. Meanwhile, Phil walked up to the fifty-five-gallon drums and noted that they were labeled “110LL,” which he knew was aviation gasoline. A crewman had left a bung wrench on top of one of the drums, which prompted Phil to whisper, “How convenient.” He quickly removed the bungs from both drums, and with some effort, he tipped the drums onto their sides. Doing so made more noise than the pistol shots.

Phil and Stan simultaneously lit pairs of road flares. Ray opted out of this phase of the plan because he had splashed some JP4 on his hand and forearm when he’d slashed the fuel bladder open. Running in sprints with the flares, they quickly set ablaze all eight helicopters and the nearby JP4 fuel bladder.

They then began what would become a memorable escape. The flames lit up the entire airfield, making them feel exposed until they were through the gap they’d cut in the fence and well into the woods. After two minutes, they started to hear secondary explosions of the 20mm cannon ammunition onboard the Pumas cooking off. A minute later, the flames reached the fifty-five-gallon gas drums. They each exploded with a bright flash and a deep bang in rapid succession. The three men felt both exuberant and terrified. They paused to take off their Nemesis masks and stow them in their packs. These masks badly obscured their vision.

They alternately jogged, race-walked, and more deliberately walked until just after dawn. They ran due north for the first hour, then cut east for two hours, and then headed southeast. They found a particularly dense stand of timber on a steep side hill inside the Williams Indian Reservation, the nexus of the Secwepemc tribe. They carefully picked their way up the hill, doing their best to not leave any tracks. There was no level ground, but they found a large fallen tree that was lying transverse to the slope, so they sheltered behind it, keeping them from sliding or rolling as they slept. After their breathing got back to a normal cadence and they’d had some water, they donned their Nemesis suits, which were too hot to wear during heavy exertion, at least during summer months. (One of their nicknames was “Sauna Suits.”)

Despite having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, they had trouble falling asleep. As they lay prone behind the downed tree, Phil commented quietly, “You know, we didn’t have to go to all the trouble of mixing up and lugging those jugs of napalm all the way there. If we’d only known that there was not just JP4 but also aviation gas there, all we would’ve needed to carry with us was some empty five-gallon buckets. A few buckets of gas thrown into each helicopter and it would have had about the same effect.”

Ray chuckled and whispered, “We may be amateurs, but at least we’re effective amateurs. You guys get some sleep. I’ll take watch for the first three hours.”

They were comforted by the lack of sound of any approaching helicopters. Phil suspected that the nearest functioning UNPROFOR helicopter was in Kamloops, 290 kilometers away, or perhaps even in Vancouver, which was 540 kilometers. At midday, they faintly heard what they thought was a drone, but they never caught sight of it.

The raiders repeated the pattern of taking turns sleeping during the day and traveling quickly at night. They made a point of following small deer trails, or walking up creek beds, with the hope of throwing off any tracking dogs. The second night they walked eleven exhausting hours, changing directions often, eventually zigzagging to the southwest. They stopped for only a few minutes at a time, several times each night, for sips of water from their canteens. Still feeling edgy, they shouldered their rifles and disengaged their safeties whenever they heard a strange sound. This was often just a deer or a startled grouse.

At dawn they arrived at another hide campsite in deep timber. They were thoroughly exhausted. They took off their sodden boots and wrung out their socks. As usual, this would be a cold camp; they feared even a tiny campfire could be spotted by FLIR sensors. After waking in the afternoon they ate one IMP ration apiece, supplemented by some elk jerky.

Despite their exhaustion, they couldn’t resist pulling the captured FAMAS F1 bullpup carbines out of their packs. The FAMAS was a curious design. It had a very long loop-top carry handle that resulted in the gun picking up the nickname “the bugle.” FAMAS carbines were quite sturdy and had a good reputation for reliability.

Oddly, the carbines used a proprietary straight-bodied twenty-five-round magazine, while most other nations had adopted curved thirty-round magazines for their 5.56mm weapons. (Phil mentioned that the later FAMAS G2 model took the NATO standard thirty-round M16 magazines, but these guns were the earlier model, and their magazines did not interchange.)

The three of them took the time to practice loading and unloading the guns, the manipulation of their safeties, flipping open and closed their integral bipods, and switching the steel rear sights between their standard and low-light settings. Learning how to field strip the guns would have to wait for another day. Because Phil already owned a capable M4 Carbine it was decided by default that the two captured bullpups should go to Ray and Stan.

At one point they heard a single helicopter far in the distance. It never came within ten miles. A few minutes after the sound of the helicopter had faded away, only the intermittent rustling of a nearby bird could be heard. Ray whispered to the others, “I don’t think the Frogs have a clue about our direction of travel, or which drainage we’re in.”

The others nodded in agreement. Stan said quietly, “The farther away we get, the larger the radius they need to search. Right now they are probably searching about a forty-mile circle. That’s a lot of territory.” After a pause, he added, “They must be pretty peeved.”

Ray replied, “That’s putting it mildly. They’re probably swearing like sailors right now.”

Then, sounding like joshing teenagers, the three men spent a few minutes trying to remember French swear words. They suppressed their laughter after reciting each of them. Somehow, the French soldiers in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail came up, and they started quoting the heavily French-accented taunts from atop the castle wall. Before he drifted off to sleep, Ray quoted, “Your mother was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries!”

The next night they hiked another eleven hours, making slow progress bushwhacking over steep terrain, passing just north of Junction Sheep Range Provincial Park. Ray’s GPS was helpful in choosing paths along contours where they could avoid steep canyons, but the going was still slow since they were avoiding established trails and roads.

Ray summed up their agreed approach to navigating: “If it’s a trail that is big enough to be on a map, then that’s not for us. That’s just an invitation to get ambushed.”

They continued through the night, roughly paralleling Highway 20. They had a couple of unnerving surprise encounters with moose crashing through the timber. One moose, uncertain of the direction it should head in the dark, trotted noisily past them, coming within ten feet, its hooves clattering on rocky ground. Phil was surprised how much noise the big animal made in comparison to deer, which were almost silent when they ran.

Just before dawn, after anxiously crossing the deserted highway in rushes, they reached their prearranged rendezvous point on the edge of the Anahim’s Flat Indian Reserve. There, an elderly member of the Tsilhqot’in tribe named Thomas—a committed resistance fighter—had prepared lodging for two days and nights at a secluded hunting dugout cabin that was well stocked. These traditional earth-bermed cabins were called quiggly cabins, locally. Thomas returned on the second day to tell them that the French forces were hopping mad and had been making reprisals in the town of Williams Lake.

The following day, Thomas came to tell them that their transport was ready. Before leaving the cabin, they donned the green masks from their Nemesis suits to conceal their faces. Thomas escorted them to an open-ended hay barn, where they and their gear were loaded into a four-by-four-by-eight-foot wooden crate that was in the center of an eighteen-wheel truck bed. The crate had dozens of one-inch-diameter ventilation holes bored through it, which created odd lighting for the three men once they were closed inside. A tractor then loaded the truck with large square bales. The bales, stacked four high, were strapped down, fully concealing the five exposed sides of the crate. They could just make out the sound of the tribe members, who laughed as they worked.

Two and a half hours later the truck stopped and they heard voices and another tractor starting up, to unload the hay bales. They were at a 140-ton capacity hay barn at the Squinas Indian Reserve Ranch, a few miles from Anahim Lake.

One of the Indians who was rolling up the tie-down straps that had just been removed tapped on the crate and asked, “You fellas still breathin’?”

Ray grunted in reply and swung the door on the crate open. He crawled out, cradling his Inglis Hi-Power and dragging his backpack. Phil and Stan followed him. They had their Nemesis face masks on again. One of the men there asked, “Why the masks? We’re on the same side, you know.”

Phil answered: “If you don’t know who we are then you can’t slip up, or be tortured into telling anyone, can you? That’s just good operational security.”

Another one of the men on the hay crew quipped, “Oh yeah. OPSEC. Secret agent stuff.”

They thanked the hay crew and asked them to keep quiet about what they had just seen. Ray insisted, “Don’t even tell your wives. Loose lips sink ships.”

One of the tribe members said with a chortle, “They certainly did sink ships at Bella Coola. Blub, blub, blub.”

The last few miles of their return trip to the McGregor ranch were quiet and uneventful. They walked at their now-accustomed intervals—five meters apart when under timber cover and ten to twelve meters apart when crossing open ground. They paused at the north corral and observed the ranch house with binoculars. There was no gap in the interval of clothes on the laundry lines, and the window curtains were all shut. If either of those had not been as they were, that would have signaled that there was trouble.

Details on the reprisals at Williams Lake reached the McGregor ranch via the rumor network: Two civilian employees at the Williams Lake airport had been tortured and then shot. The mayor had been tortured for two days, and then released without any explanation. Ten people of various ages were plucked off the streets of Williams Lake and interrogated for nineteen hours. They were all threatened with death and coerced by threats to their relatives. After it was apparent that none of them knew who was behind the helicopter sabotage, they were released. Most of them were physically unharmed, but all had undergone severe mental stress. One woman suffered permanent nerve damage in her hands because her handcuffs had been overtightened.

All eight helicopters were beyond repair. Only a few tail rotors and other tail section parts from three of the helicopters were useful for cannibalization. When replacement helicopters arrived for the squadron a week later—just two Gazelles—they were heavily guarded.