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.
33
COLOR OF LAW
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
On a Tuesday morning, three weeks after the helicopter sabotage raid, the McGregors were surprised to hear their Dakota Alert driveway alarm go off. A quick scan with binoculars showed Alan that there were at least four vehicles rapidly approaching. The one in the lead was a white RCMP Ford crew cab pickup with the usual red, yellow, white, and blue trim stripes.