Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

43 FERTILE CRESCENT

The resistance war in British Columbia continued, with UNPROFOR steadily losing troops and equipment. Replacements were sporadic and never brought the units back to full strength. Morale of the French troops was deteriorating. Their road patrols became less frequent, more heavily armed, and more likely to be aborted, with an early return to base (RTB). There were very few nighttime patrols. Increasingly, the ALAT and IMa troops stayed bottled up in their compounds, and their helicopter flights became less frequent.

The few convoys that ventured out were always escorted by an APC or two or more technical trucks—pickup trucks with pedestal-mounted machine guns. Ambushing the UNPROFOR convoys was a challenge at first, but eventually the resistance cells became quite adept.

Rather than the traditional L-shaped ambush formation, the resistance adopted a crescent-shaped ambush perpendicular to a road, usually in places where the ambushers had the advantage of commanding terrain. Putting troops only on the short leg of the L and claymore mines on the long leg of the L made it easier for the ambushers to withdraw in an orderly fashion. Some of the resistance cells were large, so they could field fifteen-man ambush teams. Many of their ambushes were devastating, and so complete that they were able to advance into the kill zone and quickly scavenge weapons and ammunition from the dead UNPROFOR troops. Most of the ambushes, however, were conducted in classic guerrilla style—a method that minimized casualties among the ambushers: pounce and retreat.

Team Robinson, with just five field fighters (and sometimes only four, depending on Alan’s intermittent back problems), preferred deliberate crescent ambushes, using plenty of carefully positioned improvised claymores, which were detonated simultaneously. They used “breadpan claymores,” a popular design that they heard had been developed in Idaho. Theirs used explosives salvaged from French land mines instead of dynamite.

Malorie was exhilarated by her first ambush, but seeing two running men fall after aiming her M1 Carbine at them and squeezing the trigger had a strong effect on her. It was the knowledge that she personally had snuffed out their lights that bothered her. To just be “someone shooting” in an ambush was one thing, but to see two of her particular targets go down, and one of them kicking after he fell, was troubling. The images of them falling plagued her dreams for weeks. Gradually, she became more inured to it, but in a way she was never the same person again. She was now a killer, but she still had a Christian conscience.

The resistance ambushes became so successful that UNPROFOR had to adopt the tactic of sending out any unarmored vehicles only in convoys, with a three-vehicle minimum.

Because steel cable was so ubiquitous in logging country, the resistance cells often used it to block roads at ambush sites to prevent their targets from “blowing through” an ambush.

After several weeks of recon and ambush patrols, Malorie had switched to using a captured FAMAS carbine.