Текст книги "Liberators"

Автор книги: James Wesley Rawles

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

After gouging the top of the ties for the first thirty feet, the Claw finally bit down and caught beneath the ties. It immediately began loudly snapping the ties, one after another, with ferocity. They were amazed to see that instead of slowing down, the trio of engines continued to accelerate. The noise was tremendous.

As the engines approached seven miles an hour, Alan leaped from the bottom step of the front stairs of the forwardmost engine and rolled down the ballast. He banged his right knee in the process. Just as the old man regained his feet, the Claw came ripping past him, sending shards of creosote-impregnated tie wood and a spray of ballast rocks painfully against his legs.

His son walked up to him and they stood side-by-side, watching the destruction of the tracks ahead of them in the moonlight and listening to the cacophony of the uneven rending and snapping of ties. It sounded like an enormous deck of cards being shuffled. All of this was accompanied by the roar of the three engines. As the ballast rocks were shattered and struck each other, they threw off a strange blue-green brisance that formed a halo-like glow around the Claw. The Claw itself had already heated up so much that it started throwing sparks as well.

As the noisy contraption drew farther away, Ray shook his father’s hand and shouted, “Well, Dad, you’ve really done it this time. You are the Master of Disaster.”

Back at the Guyot shop building, there was the sound of rending steel and the whine and clanking of the overhead crane that had just destroyed its own undercarriage and one corner of the building.

Ray supported Alan McGregor as he hobbled back to where the Claw had first dug in. The gash between the rails behind them was tremendous. Both rails were tipped up at a thirty-degree angle, and chunks of broken ties stuck up at odd angles. They were startled to see that at the transition between the undisturbed ties and those that had been broken, the rails were each literally twisted outward almost forty-five degrees.

Stan’s pickup came up alongside them on the wayside service road. Stan shouted, “Hop in, guys! If we stay here, we’ll be in a world of hurt.”

Alan slowly reached the door of the truck, and Ray helped him get in.

In the aftermath, the distance that The Claw had traveled amazed everyone. Even their most optimistic predictions were for the destruction of ten to fifteen miles of track before it either fell apart or came off the rails. But the contraption continued, ripping up tracks relentlessly. From a distance it looked like an enormous zipper had been opened. After reaching a speed of twenty-seven miles per hour on level ground, the apparatus slowed to just twelve miles per hour on some of the steepest grades. With the tremendous power of the engines, the Claw still motored on, mile after mile. Finally, after ripping up the track for almost fifty-eight miles, the growing heat and cumulative fatigue of the steel in the Claw became too great. Now glowing deep orange along its full length and bright yellow at its notch, the Claw finally sheared away, leaving the lower portion embedded in the ballast.

The three engines picked up speed after that. By the time they passed through Vanderhoof, they were going sixty miles per hour. Two miles west, the trio was up to 105 miles per hour and ran off the rails when they came to a sharp left-hand curve, just past the Highway 27 overcrossing. All three engines and the Claw assembly came to rest in a surprisingly neat row. It was only after the engines had tipped over that mercury safety switches triggered relays to shut down the electric motors and diesel engine units.

When the first PLA officers arrived at the scene of the wreck, they found that the broad top rim of the Claw’s counterweight box had been emblazoned with raised beads from an arc welder. They read NLR! on both sides, BEWARE THE CRAW! on the forward rim, and DEFILE YOUR ANCESTORS TO THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION on the back rim.

In the aftermath of the Claw’s track sabotage, it was estimated that 57.8 miles of track were rendered useless and that 173,400 ties had been snapped in half. Most of the rail was badly bent—particularly on curves—so that it could not be reused. Since nearly all of the rail had been welded together, it would have to be cut into sections before it could be removed and replaced.

The enormous length of unzipped track was the most beautiful mess that Alan McGregor had ever seen.

•   •   •

The escape of the Guyot shop families was nerve-racking, but successful. In the hours preceding the Claw’s track sabotage, the employees spent several hours destroying the big lathes and the shop’s other heavy equipment with cutting torches. Then all of them except Larry went home to their families to prepare for their imminent departure.

They had already rigged the crane to self-destruct. The crane had tremendous lifting force available. It was fairly simple to pay out all two hundred feet of cable, loop three wraps of the end of the cable around the crane’s own T-shaped wheeled undercarriage, and then connect the snatch block to the I-beam post at the northwest corner of the building.

The original plan was to somehow replace the crane’s momentary on-off switch with a continuously on switch. But since the combined skills in the shop were more mechanical than electrical, they opted instead for the expedient of fabricating a clamp that would hold the green Lift button fully depressed.

As soon as Larry Guyot heard Alan toot the train’s horn, he triggered the crane Lift button, affixing it in the fully depressed position with the clamp fixture. The slow, high-torque crane began pulling in the nearly two hundred feet of slack cable as Larry ran for his car. He had already accelerated his Dodge to forty-five miles per hour and was a half mile down the road when the cable finally pulled taut. The gantry crane then folded itself in half and collapsed the front of the building. When the snatch block reached the motor housing, the tremendous force of the motor snapped the steel cable. The stub end of the cable in the cable housing made a loud “thunk” once every four seconds, until the motor was finally turned off by the first fireman to arrive at the crumpled building.

The charter bus was idling and had its door open when Larry pulled up. They heard a siren in the distance. He jumped out of his Dodge and leaped aboard the bus, and it started to roll forward even before the hydraulic door had completely closed. Larry’s brother was at the wheel of the bus. He was wearing an N95 respirator.

Larry’s wife, wearing a nurse’s uniform and also wearing an N95 respirator, gave him a hug. The families cheered as the bus rolled out toward the Yellowhead Highway.

They carried with them two forged letters that were designed to get them past PLA checkpoints on their intended route. The first letter was an official-looking document that certified that the passengers onboard the bus were residents of Olway (just west of Prince George) who were quarantined H7N9 influenza patients being transported to an infectious disease ward at the seven-hundred-bed Foothills Medical Centre, in Calgary.

Just as they hoped, the mere sight of the mask-wearing nurse and the words influenza and quarantine were enough to get the guards at two highway checkpoints to quickly wave the bus through.

From Prince George the bus drove six hours southeast to the Highway 11 junction. Once they were there, the respirators and the nurse’s uniforms were hidden, and the second letter was readied. They stopped briefly to switch the license plates on the bus.

They continued, carrying a forged RCMP letter identifying them as wedding guests from the vicinity of Eckville traveling to the town of Smoky Lake (north of Edmonton) to attend a wedding. (Weddings were one of the few exceptions to PLA’s “no public gatherings” rule but required official travel documents.) This letter successfully bluffed them through three more checkpoints.

At 4:30 P.M. local time they reached their actual destination, Fort McMurray, in the heart of Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands region. They had been on the road for fifteen and a half hours and were near the end of the bus’s one-thousand-mile driving range. Seven cars, vans, and pickups were waiting to shuttle the Guyot families to their new homes and jobs, under assumed names, at the Suncor Mine. The mine was part of the recently reemerging oil industry in Alberta. The Suncor operation was already back up to twenty thousand barrels of production per day, with plans for much larger production in the months to come. (Back before the Crunch, Suncor’s Mackay River plant had produced thirty-four thousand barrels per day, and had plans to eventually produce three times that much. In anticipation, there had been a lot of “spec” housing built, which now was mostly vacant. The Guyot families ended up in these houses.)

After their baggage had been unpacked, the bus was immediately driven by a resistance man to the Suncor Fort Hills mine, where it was parked next to an enormous overburden pile. There, the conveyor belt arm was shifted temporarily to direct the flow over the top of the bus. They ran the conveyor for three hours, burying the bus under thirty feet of overburden soil and rock. The bus was never seen again.

DRM investigators quickly made the link from the Guyot shop to the “quarantine bus” described by the Sécurité Routière sentries, but they lost track of it from there. Their fruitless search for the saboteur families centered on Calgary.

The FM radio network—which had recently been renamed People’s Voice of Canadian Liberation (PVCL)—downplayed the severity of the rail sabotage, referring to it only as “a temporary railway disruption, west of Prince George.”

Larry worked under the name Larry Gwinn for many years, eventually reaching middle management with Suncor. His role in the Claw sabotage plot was not publicized until after his death in 2047.

53

NI HAO

When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters—one represents danger, and one represents opportunity.

–John F. Kennedy, “Convocation of United Negro College Fund”

Forty-eight Miles East of Bella Coola, British Columbia—November, the Eleventh Year

Alan and Claire borrowed Ray’s pickup to go buy supplies in Bella Coola. They were hoping to spend some of their Chinese Occupation Scrip before it lost much more of its value to inflation. (Since the Chinese arrived, the new currency had already lost 70 percent of its value.)

The pickup hit a patch of black ice in a shady stretch of road and spun out. There was no damage, but it ended up perpendicular to the road, nose down in the borrow-pit ditch on the right side of the road. The slope of the ditch was quite steep. Alan put the pickup in four-wheel drive before attempting to back up, but the tires immediately cut through the thin crust of frost into the soft mud beneath. Experience told him that continuing his attempt to drive out would only dig his wheels in deeper, so he shut down the engine.

Alan said resignedly, “Prepare for a long, chilly wait, my dear.”

He stepped out of the cab and messily made his way up out of the muddy ditch. Now standing at the back of the truck, Alan lifted the camper shell’s glass and then flipped down the tailgate. He could see that Ray carried his usual oiled twenty-five-foot tow chain in a plastic box strapped with a bungee cord in the front end of the pickup bed. Along with it was a well-worn rectangular laundry detergent bucket filled with traction sand, an axe, a come-along, a short D-handle shovel, a hank of rope, a folded tarp, and a sheepherder’s jack. All of this gear was neatly secured by bungee cords. Seeing this assortment of gear made Alan smile. His son was prudent and methodical, just like him. He had raised him well.

Alan’s boots were a muddy mess, so he stretched out prone to reach down to the tow-chain box. Pulling the heavy box with him as he inched his way back up and out of the pickup bed strained his back. He muttered to himself, “Here we go again.”

Alan often reinjured his back, and recovery from each injury could last weeks; each episode began with two or three days of his back muscles in painful spasm. Taking valerian root helped reduce the muscle spasms and magnesium pills helped limit the inflammation. But each injury tested his patience; he was a man who didn’t like to slow the pace of his daily chores. Alan carefully set the tow-chain box on the lip of the icy road, careful not to further injure his back. He leaned back in on the lip of the open tailgate and waited.

Claire cranked down her window slightly and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Not exactly. I tweaked my back again. Getting old really stinks, you know that?”

Claire rolled up her window and began to hum the tune to the gospel song “This World Is Not My Home.”

Alan wondered how long he would have to wait until someone with a stout vehicle would come by and help tow them out. He reached into his coat’s front snap pockets and pulled out his camouflage hunting gloves and his green pile cap. After donning them, he let out a sigh.

The sun’s direct rays were beginning to strike the pickup. It was a cold morning, but the fog was beginning to lift. The landscape now lacked its recent autumn beauty. The aspens had lost their leaves, and the western larches had lost their needles. The dense fir trees on both sides of the highway still looked beautiful, wearing a coat of frost. Where the sun was hitting them, mist was rising from their boughs. He concluded that it was a still a scenic place to be stuck in a ditch.

A few minutes later, he heard a low rumbling accompanied by a higher supercharger whine from the east. Soon it became distinct: the sound of numerous vehicles in a convoy. In another minute, they came into sight. It was a convoy of four Norinco Type 92 wheeled six-by-six APCs followed by a canvas-topped Dongfeng 2.5-ton troop truck.

Alan shouted to Claire, “A Chinese patrol. What do you want to bet they’ll just wave and offer us no help whatsoever?”

Claire rolled down her window slightly and shouted back, “What if they search us?”

“They won’t find diddly-squat. But don’t be surprised if they rough us up. You know they’ve been pretty brutal with folks they’ve encountered outside of city limits recently. So be ready for that.”

She shouted back one of her favorite sayings: “We have nothing to fear in this world. This world is not our home.”

The convoy slowed to less than twenty miles an hour. Once they were within one hundred yards, Alan began to wave, flagging them down.

Mistaking the McGregors’ spun-out truck as a ploy for a road ambush, the PLA’s first lieutenant in the lead APC ordered a herringbone deployment using his radio handset. Once the APCs had splayed out, he shouted, “Attack!”

The gunners on the first three vehicles opened fire with four machine guns—a type 67 (7.62x54r) and three Type 77 heavy machine guns (12.7mm DShK variants). After shooting Alan and shredding the pickup, the gunners on all four APCs engaged the tree line on both sides of the road with seven machine guns, mostly with fire from the Type 77s. By chance, one of the 12.7mm rounds detonated an old French land mine. This excited the gunners, and they fired even more frenziedly. The young second lieutenant commander in the second APC in the column even ordered his 25mm main gun to open fire where the mine had gone off. Finally, the convoy commander ordered a cease-fire using both his radio and his APC’s public address loudspeaker.

The PLA later logged the incident as a “thwarted ambush, with PLA prevailing. Two insurgents killed. No PLA casualties or damage.” They also dispatched an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team to map the land mines. The Chinese usually just mapped French minefields, rather than going to the trouble of disarming and removing them.

•   •   •

The Chinese did not bother to collect Alan’s and Claire’s bodies, or to tow away Ray’s pickup truck. They simply dragged Alan’s body to the side of the road and rolled it down the borrow-ditch slope. Stan Leaman’s father discovered the scene several hours later and relayed the sad news to Ray. It was Ray, Phil, and Malorie who came to collect the bodies. By the time they arrived, a pair of gray jays was already pecking at Alan’s body and ravens were starting to congregate nearby. Ray shouted and scared off the birds. Then he sat down near his father’s body and sobbed.

They had brought several tarps to help them collect the bodies. Phil fought back tears as he wrapped up Claire’s lifeless figure. Malorie helped him carry it up from the pickup. The corpse was placed in the back of Phil’s pickup. By then, Ray had regained some of his composure, and he helped them wrap up his father’s corpse in several rolls of a twelve-by-twenty blue tarp. After the three of them carried Alan’s shrouded corpse to rest alongside that of his wife, Ray said to Phil, “Please see what you can salvage from my truck. I don’t want to look in the cab.”

The interior of the pickup was drenched with blood and the truck was thoroughly riddled with holes. All four tires and the spare had been punctured. All that they could salvage was the Hi-Lift Jack and the axe from the back end of the truck. The shovel’s blade and handle had both been penetrated by 12.7mm bullets. From the glove box, they got a handful of road maps and a flashlight. They also took the tow chain, which was still in its box by the side of the road, surprisingly untouched by bullets.

The ravens had flown off, but the gray jays lingered, hopping around in a nearby larch tree. The birds seemed curious about what Ray and the others were doing.

As Phil was stowing the salvaged gear, Malorie asked, “What kind of birds are those?”

Phil answered, “They’re called gray jays. They’re in the crow family.”

In a surprising moment of clarity, Ray added, “Around here, we call them whiskey jacks. That’s an Anglicized corruption of their original Algonquin name, Wisakedjak. He was the Trickster in their mythology—a lot like Loki was to the Norse. To the First Nations, Wisakedjak was the one responsible for the Great Flood.” Ray’s cheeks were streaked with tears, and his face showed profound sadness.

Ray’s pickup had not caught fire in the attack, even though its gas tank had been punctured by the Chinese machine-gun fire. The vehicle still reeked of gasoline. Just one tossed road flare was all it took to set the pickup ablaze. As they watched the pickup burn, Ray picked up a few pieces of the Chinese .30 and .50 caliber brass from the highway. The brass had “CN,” “101,” and “CNIC” head stamps. He tucked the brass in his coat pocket.

“Evidence. Also made in China,” he said.

•   •   •

Ray decided to bury his parents’ bodies side-by-side on the knoll behind the ranch house. They were still wrapped in the blue tarps. As they dug the shared grave, Ray mentioned that it was on this same small hillock where his great-grandfather Samuel McGregor had pitched his tent, when he first staked claim to the ranch in 1913.

They read some psalms and said prayers. Then they refilled the grave and said another prayer. Phil helped Ray construct a matching pair of crosses for the grave the next morning.

Almost immediately after the deaths of Alan and Claire, Ray and the rest of Team Robinson decided to do some combined operations with another local resistance group that Stan had met. The unnamed group had eight members and had been responsible for several sniping incidents and repeated sabotage of PLA vehicles from Anahim Lake all the way to Bella Coola. Their trademark was a time-delay vehicular incendiary device that used a machine-rolled 100mm cigarette as a time-delay fuse.

What started out as a cooperative agreement eventually turned into a merger. While Phil and Malorie would still be in charge of intelligence analysis, Ray went on to lead the combined group, which had assumed the name Team Robinson.

Fighting the Chinese turned out to be much more difficult than fighting the French. Because they had so many more armored vehicles, IED-initiated ambushes were far less decisive. This meant that there were fewer opportunities to capture weapons, and that ambushes often ended with the ambushers fleeing for their lives into the forest, as their fire was returned by damaged but still partly functional APCs. Because they wanted to minimize track wear, the Chinese tanks rarely left their garrisons. Even if they did, few resistance units would attack them while they were manned and in motion. Nearly all of the Chinese tanks destroyed by the resistance were sabotaged while they were parked and unattended.

The first Chinese weapon that Team Robinson “inherited” was a QSZ-92 Services Pistol (“Type 92 handgun”) that was stripped from the body of a uniformed Chinese junior officer. This young man was foolish enough to drive an EQ2050 East Wind (a Chinese Humvee equivalent) into the town of Anahim Lake by himself. Perhaps he was looking for romance. Three shots from Ray’s FAMAS ended his military career and his life.

Fearing that the vehicle was equipped with a hidden transponder, Ray left it where it was. But Ray did get the pistol, a full-flap holster, two spare fifteen-round magazines, a magazine pouch, and the officer’s wallet. He also grabbed a Chinese e-tool entrenching tool, which was superior to the U.S. and Canadian models.

The QSZ-92 Services Pistol, designed and made by Norinco, shot the diminutive 5.8x21 cartridge. Ray described the gun as “China’s idea of how to make an FN Five-Seven.”