Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

55 HINTERBOONIES

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 will 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.”

“Amen to that.”

As dawn broke over Sigutlat Lake, Rhiannon could see that they were just three hundred feet from shore. Rob started the plane’s engine. A flock of bufflehead ducks was startled by the noise and took flight. Rob maneuvered the plane to the tiny, deserted fishing village at the southeast corner of the lake. There were still two cabins standing, but what had been the larger lodge was a blackened ruin. A woodstove and a rusty Servel refrigerator body were still standing near the middle of the ruin.

The wooden dock was a T-shape with its shorter leg paralleling the shore. It was weathered to gray but appeared to be in serviceable condition. Rob handed Jake a length of rope and had him step out on the pontoon. After Rob had expertly maneuvered to the side of the dock, Jake was easily able to hop over and tie up the plane to a cleat. After shutting down the engine Rob jumped out and added another mooring line. Surprisingly, there were still some floating plastic buffers, and they were able to shift the plane down the dock to them, to protect the starboard pontoon from any damage. Once the plane was alongside the buffers, they snugged up both lines.

They were almost immediately attacked by mosquitoes. They wore mosquito repellent almost continuously, henceforth. Unloading the plane took a half hour, and then shifting the cargo to the woods behind the village took another two hours. All that they left on board was the one hundred pounds of ammunition and batteries that had been promised to the resistance fighters who would be refueling the Cessna at the mouth of the Dean River.

Rob shook their hands and said, “I’ll be praying for y’all. Before I fly out at sunset tonight, I plan to take a long nap and then do some catch-and-release fishing for rainbow trout with a hand line. I hope that I catch at least one big one. But even if I don’t, I’ll still have bragging rights.”

Rhiannon gave him a questioning look.

Rob clarified. “I mean bragging rights to say that I flew seven hundred miles into occupied Chinese territory while being painted by PLA air defense radars and dropped off a team of scrappy resistance fighters along with their fully automatic weapons, rocket launchers, explosives, and night vision gear. Then I did some fishing before I flew out. What a great story to tell my grandkids, someday.”

Rob grinned and gave them a stylized parade float royalty wave. Then he turned to walk back to the dock whistling “Dixie.”

Janelle readied her pack, filling her canteen with filtered water from the lake, and headed out with a GPS. (Since she was the most confident on a horse in the bush, it was decided that she would be the best one to hike out and lead back the horses.) While she was gone, the others planned to gradually shift the cargo and packsaddles to an agreed location six hundred meters away to a place even deeper in the timber. There, they would make a cold camp, set up thermal camouflage, and wait.

It took Janelle three and a half days to hike thirty-three miles east to the Andy Cahoose Meadow Indian Reserve. The trail was in worse shape than she had remembered it, with a lot of newly downed timber. By prior arrangement, there was a resistance team summer grazing a herd of cattle and a string of packhorses and mules. When she arrived, Janelle met the First Nations husband and wife team, who were camped in a yurt. They saw her walking in and asked, “Are you Janelle?”

“That’s me!”

They wasted no time and soon had two horses saddled, and halters and leads on the rest of the string. While the husband stayed to watch the cattle, his wife, Maggie, would accompany Janelle back to the lake. In addition to their sleeping bags, they each carried an axe and a bow saw to deal with the worst of the downed timber.

With the each horse’s lead tied to the tail of the horse ahead, the pack string looked like a herd of elephants. It took them five grueling days to get back to the cold camp. While they could detour around a lot of the fallen trees, some of them were on steep, rocky, or brushy slopes and had to be cleared. By the time that they reached the camp, Janelle and Maggie were exhausted and ravenous, since they had packed only four days’ worth of food.

Rhiannon had been quite worried by Janelle’s long delay. Janelle assured her she was fine. “But that trail is a mess. We’d better plan on four days just to make it back to the meadows.”

Jake and Peter had already organized the loads equally alongside each packsaddle.

There were a couple of ornery mules in the string, but they had them all saddled and loaded within two hours. That afternoon they covered only eight miles before they camped at dark and hobbled the pack string. The next morning they were short one horse, and found that even though it was hobbled, a dappled gray gelding had covered four hundred yards in crow hops. “That’s the thing about horses; there’s not two of them with the same personality,” Rhiannon said.

The next three days were frustrating. Because of the downed timber, they had to break up the string and lead horses individually or in pairs on some stretches. But everyone remained in high spirits, and each night Maggie entertained them with stories of what had happened in the region since the Crunch. Maggie said that she had been a horse packer for the resistance but that she had never personally engaged in any combat. She had lost three toes to frostbite while resisting the French, and had lost her left earlobe to frostbite while resisting the Chinese.

Back at Andy Cahoose Meadow, they shared a barbecue with Maggie and her husband. Like Maggie, her husband knew of the McGregors only by reputation and had not heard any details of what had happened at the ranch since the Crunch. Since they wintered at the Michel Gardens Reserve (fifty miles east of Anahim Lake), they had news only of families in their immediate vicinity.

The next morning as they prepared to head out on the forty-five miles of trail to the McGregor ranch, Jake asked Maggie’s husband what he might need from their cargo. “I could use some aught six shells, some .303 shells, and some matches.” Jake filled all of his requests, with two hundred rounds of each type of ammunition, and four large boxes of matches. He also added the bonus of a twenty-dollar-face-value roll of Canadian silver quarters.

Maggie accompanied them the next morning on her Morgan mare. The plan was that once they reached the McGregor ranch, she would lead the pack string back to Andy Cahoose Meadow by herself.

The next two days went quickly. They were now on well-maintained trails, so the going was much easier. They spent the first night in the woods near the Blackwater Meadow Reserve. Maggie explained that from here on, it would be safer to camp where there were cattle pastured to confuse “those Chinese thermal things.” They spent the next night at the Louis Squinas ranch, which was technically a First Nations reserve, but to all outward appearances was just a typical British Columbia cattle ranch. One family lived there, but the ranch was currently unoccupied because the family was running their cattle for the summer up at a place they just called “Fourteen”—their summer pasture range.

Though they were now quite close to the McGregor ranch, they stayed an extra day; they were getting closer to civilization and needed to transition to night travel to decrease the chance of being spotted by Chinese drones or patrols.

Up until now, they had been riding with handguns on their hips, but with all of their guns stowed, they asked Maggie if it was wise to break them out. She said, “No. If they attack with a gunship, then we’re all dead anyway. And if a ground patrol spots us, we’re better off trying to outrun them and ride back into the timber. From there, we can set up an ambush.”

They left the long guns stowed.

Although it was only a mile to the town of Anahim Lake, and another seven miles to the McGregor ranch, it took them all night to get there. They had to take a circuitous route around the hamlet of Anahim Lake.

They arrived at the ranch at 5:00 A.M. and were greeted by an ambush.

Phil and Malorie were up and cooking breakfast when they heard “Alert zone three.”

“Get ready to thermite all of the files and maps!” Phil shouted. Then he and Malorie rushed out of the house and ran down the north draw to reach one of their planned ambush sites. Just as they got into position, the pack string came into the far end of the kill zone. Phil flipped down the bipod legs of his MAG, quickly positioned the Bulldog bag, and clipped on its belt to the gun’s twenty-round teaser.

When the strangers were in the middle of the kill zone, Malorie shouted, “Halt! Who goes there?”

Rhiannon, on the lead horse, sharply reined her mount to a stop. She hesitated, and then answered, “Rhiannon McGregor Jeffords, and a group of friendlies.”

It took a few minutes in the early light of dawn to straighten out who was who. Phil and Malorie quickly identified themselves as “friends of Ray” and residents of the ranch.

When they reached the house, Janelle and Rhiannon were crying tears of joy as they saw their brother, Ray, for the first time in more than a decade. Their happiness, however, was quickly shattered when they learned that their parents had been killed by the PLA.