Читать книгу Uprising - Douglas L. Bland - Страница 12
ОглавлениеDAY TWO
Monday, August 30
Monday, August 30, 0530 hours
Ottawa: National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ)
The night shift was coming to an end. Colonel Ian Dobson, the National Defence Operations Centre’s director, was at his desk earlier than usual, filling in the last sections of his report, which would form the basis for the daily ops briefing at 0730 hours. He expected the day’s “Morning Prayers,” as these sessions were known at NDHQ, to be routine: a few words from the intelligence staff, brief reports on the status of deployed units and ships, summaries of the last day’s activities from deployed units overseas, comments on major exercises, and the status of the one active search-and-rescue operation, SAR Harper, which was looking for a missing person presumed lost in Newfoundland’s wilderness. Ten, twenty minutes tops, then off to the cottage to join the kids for one last precious week before they went back to school. Next year, Carolyn would be heading off to college and might not be around for the summer; Julie was going to junior high this year and was getting squirmy about family. They’re growing up so fast, he thought. The last thing he wanted was something surprising that would cut into this one last blissful family week.
Refocusing, Ian turned his gaze to the room around him – a world far removed from his idyllic cottage. For all its importance and worldwide scope, Ian thought, the National Defence Operations Centre was not, in fact, very impressive. Only about the size of a corner store, cramped, and rimmed with electronic screens showing most of the general and current information concerning the whys and wherefores of the Canadian Forces, the NDOC was a windowless, rather drab facility.
Despite its unspectacular appearance, however, Ian knew how crucially important the centre was to Canada’s military operations: it was its nerve centre. And access to this secure facility was tightly guarded. Entrance into NDOC, located on the twelfth floor of NDHQ, required passing through security checks at the main entrance, and further, increasingly stringent checks, which involved the supplying of highly secret codes, to get through the many doorways and elevators leading to the upper levels of the building. Ian, like everyone else in the room, wore a special security tag on a neck-chain, so that guards could easily identify individuals and their security clearances. On the twelfth floor, as on the other upper-level, high-security floors, guards randomly verified the identity of those walking the hallways and their purpose for being there. The inside joke, however, was that security was unintentionally assured by the confusion caused by the continual rebuilding and rearranging of offices, meeting rooms, and hallways that made the top floors into an impenetrable rabbit warren. If a bad guy were ever to get in here, Ian thought, he would never be able to find his target or his way out without a guide.
Inside the operations centre, the senior duty officer and several middle-ranking officers worked at individual consoles, keeping abreast of ongoing operations and developments by watching and responding to operational reports and situations in various regions and commands at home and abroad. The atmosphere was “24/7 busy normal.” Computers hummed, telephones chimed softly, clerks carefully ordered the endless flow of paper, and officers, each responsible for a particular part of the world or some special function, spoke matter-of-factly to distant stations and other officers crammed into the NDHQ labyrinth.
Behind the main room, communications clerks, or comms clerks, as they were universally called, constantly monitored and operated the global Canadian Forces communications network, receiving and sending scores of messages mostly in secure and coded formats. Both sections of NDOC were hooked into the adjacent National Defence Intelligence Centre, a facility where even greater security prevailed, and “need to know” rules were even more closely defined.
Once Dobson finished his morning briefing, complete with the inevitable PowerPoint slides, at 6:45, he would walk down the hall and up the back stairs to the office of the deputy chief of the defence staff. The DCDS, Lieutenant General Carl Gervais, was (nominally, some said) the senior operations officer in the Canadian Forces. Together they would go over the details and discuss likely questions and answers on operational matters that he and Gervais would address at the 0730 meeting in Conference Room B on the thirteenth floor of NDHQ.
Over the past two years, Dobson had learned that Gervais liked to look as though he were in control and handle every question brought up by his boss, the chief of the defence staff, or any of the dozen or so officers and civilian assistant deputy ministers gathered around the large conference table. But Dobson knew also that Gervais expected him to jump in quickly if Gervais’s sometimes shaky grasp of relevant details threatened to become apparent. As had become glaringly obvious over the years, when Gervais dumped a problem into Dobson’s lap, he left it there.
Far better to prep the old man so he could blather his way past any uncertainty and then clean up problems later. Which wasn’t easy, given Gervais’s impatience with details during briefings and indeed with briefings altogether. So, after his quick meeting with the DCDS, Ian would return to his desk, make any final amendments to the script to steer around especially obvious holes in Gervais’s knowledge, then rehearse the briefing with his assistant, who controlled the slides. At the appointed hour, he would walk over to the meeting room for his quick dog-and-pony show in front of the brass and the senior civvies.
It was just coming on 0615 hours when a call from across the room drew Dobson away from his report. Lieutenant Commander Dan Noble, halfway through a message one of the comms clerks had just handed him, called over his shoulder, “Hey, sir, I just got a flash message, a Significant Incident Report from Petawawa. You had better look at this.”
“Bugger,” Dobson said to no one in particular. Half an hour before he was to see the DCDS and what does he get? A SIR from, of course, Petawawa – that place was cursed. “What now? Did someone cut off another head at Chez Charlie’s last night or have they just found more horses on the payroll?”
“Seems a bit more bizarre, even for Petawawa, sir. A female MP has gone missing with her car and all.”
Dobson reached for the paper and read the formatted message. He paused a moment and turned to Noble. “Call the base duty officer and find out if we’re talking about a deserter or what. Have comms get the deputy base commander, Colonel Neal, on the phone, and alert the DCDS’s assistant. I might need to see the general earlier than usual.”
“Aye, sir.” Noble reached for his phone and hit the speed dial with one hand while beckoning a clerk over with the other.
Almost immediately, Dobson’s desk phone buzzed. He flipped off his desk speaker and lifted the receiver. A voice announced, “Colonel Neal on the line for you, sir.”
“Bob, Ian, glad to see someone else is up. What the hell is it this time?”
“We’re not sure yet, Ian. The MP commander was called into his office about 0330 after his people couldn’t raise this MP, Corporal Joan Newman. The desk sergeant already spent about two hours pissing around trying to find the car – figured it was broken down somewhere, had another car retrace the route she was on, the usual. They found nothing. Checked the guard house; she never left the base. And she’s not shacked up for a quickie with her boyfriend – checked that too. Then the sergeant called his CO, who went over the same searches again with more people. Still nothing. So he called me. We’re still looking. That’s all we have.”
“What do you know about the MP?”
“Good record, smart and reliable – this is way out of character.”
“So what are we dealing with? Has she gone over the hill or had an accident, or is this some criminal act? What?”
Neal bit his tongue. He’d just said they didn’t know what was happening. “Don’t know, Ian. But shit, who’d take off with a police officer?”
“Has the media caught wind of this?”
“Not so far,” Neal responded, refraining from pointing out that as it was 6:15 a.m., the only journalists out of bed were radio drive-in-show people too busy catching up on the morning papers to notice if the building they were in was on fire. “But the search has started the rumour mill and they probably will in short order.”
“Yeah, okay. Keep me posted. I have to give this to the boss ASAP and then to morning prayers. The base commander can expect a call from the DCDS in thirty minutes. You guys are top of the hit parade again. Good luck, Bob.”
Dobson put down the phone and called to Noble, “Keep on top of this; make copies of the SIR for the usual list of people but don’t send it out until I speak with the general. Call the provost marshal and ask her to be at prayers – give her the bare facts. We need a complete description of the MP detachment up there and this Newman person’s file. Now!”
Turning to the Canada Command desk officer, Ian warned her, “Cindy, get ready for an overlap in shifts for a few hours until this thing is cleared up and put away.” As he turned back to his report, he thought, not for the first time, that if the military wanted you to have a family life they would probably have issued you one … an all-purpose, completely flexible one.
Monday, August 30, 0625 hours
On the Ottawa River, five kilometres south of Fort William, PQ
Alex Gabriel’s flotilla touched down on the Quebec shore across from Petawawa. An assortment of trucks and pickups rolled down along a trail through the bush off Chemin Fort William to take on the precious cargo. A tall, sour-looking man walked towards Alex, and, pulling him aside, glanced over the packs, boxes, and weapons crates.
“What did you get?” he asked sharply.
“Much as we planned. We found the stores as described, carried away what we could and got out. We had a run-in with an MP, but she did no harm.”
“Did you shoot her?”
“Of course not! What’s the matter with you? We don’t go around shooting people out of hand.” Alex’s instant dislike for the guy grew legs. He turned to walk away. “I’ll count the stuff off the beach once I’ve seen to my people.”
“Nope. You leave that to me. My guys will take the loads from here on and we’ve got plans for the team.”
“I thought we were going to use this stuff locally. Why the changes? And what plans for my team?”
“Best you remember not to ask such questions. I’ll have your second-in-command get your people into those two trucks there, and you get in the van here. Someone wants to see you elsewhere.”
“What’s happening to the team?”
“I told you not to ask about things that aren’t your business. Anyway, they’ll be taken to a camp somewhere to eat and sleep, then we’re going to prepare them for something else. We can’t just let them go wandering around town. They’ll get drunk or start fighting or bragging to who knows who about the whole exercise. The Mounties will be out in force soon enough without us spreading the word.”
The late summer sun broke over the eastern hills, sending long shadows across the beach as strangers jumped from the trucks and grabbed the cargo, roughly pushing Alex’s warriors to the side. He took one step to intervene, but the tall man grabbed his shoulder and pulled him towards a van parked near the road. Reflexively, Alex seized his arm and started a palm-strike but checked himself. For a moment they stood frozen, glaring at one another, then from the corner of his eye Alex saw Christmas step between the strangers and the team and start coaxing the warriors into the trucks. Christmas turned, flashed Alex a thumbs up, then jumped in the lead truck and slammed the door. Alex released the tall man’s arm and started toward the van. The last he saw of his little team’s effort was their boats being loaded into trucks and driven off the beach eastward towards the village of Sheenboro.
Monday, August 30, 0730 hours
Ottawa: NDHQ, Thirteenth Floor, Conference Room B
The room was arranged as usual for morning prayers. Name cards ranked in a never-changing order sat with parade-ground precision down each side of the long, dark, rectangular table. This odd habit always amused Ian – these people know each other, he thought. But the staff was simply doing what the staff had always done. A pad of paper and two sharpened pencils sat ready for each principal, although these pads were never used. No one took notes so access-to-information prowlers couldn’t demand them.
Ian tapped his few pages of notes into order on the lectern at the front of the room as he looked down the table towards the chairs at the opposite end set aside for the chief of the defence staff – the CDS – and beside him, the deputy minister, the public service head of the Department of National Defence. Senior officers and officials moved into the room, dropping their own note pads at their usual places along the sides of the wide table. The room felt crowded, though it was actually less full than usual. It had been cleared of the hangers-on, the aides and staff officers who normally sat on the side walls, stationed and ready to provide their bosses with the details of any issue. In private, they called themselves ventriloquists. Ian was not the only one who wondered why they were not at the table with the generals and civilian officials.
Today, tension filled the room. People gathered in small factions, immersed in separate, tense conversations, and the absence of the customary banal chatter made the space feel cramped and airless. Ian shuffled his papers again, checked the slides and his boss’s short briefing notes, which sat on the simple podium. As he glanced up, the DCDS was gesturing earnestly to Vice Admiral Marie Roy, the vice chief of the defence staff.
The CDS was late. That, Ian reflected, was rare, and meant bad news.
A few minutes later, General Andrew “Andy” Bishop marched through the door with Deputy Defence Minister Stephen Pope and, unexpectedly, the minister of defence himself, James Riley, Member of Parliament for Winnipeg South. General Bishop motioned the minister into his own chair while a staff officer hurriedly brought another to the head of the table for the CDS as the attendees quickly took their places.
The CDS sat down, looked at the DCDS, and commanded immediately, “Let’s hear it.” His sharp tone brought all eyes to Carl Gervais as he stepped up to the podium.
“Minister, General Bishop, I’ll begin with a television clip which we recorded an hour ago. Then I’ll provide a brief situation report on last night’s incidents. Colonel Dobson will provide greater detail on the intelligence background, and then the CDS will give us his thoughts on future operations.” He looked down at his script while the staff in the next room clicked on the television monitor.
“This clip,” Gervais continued, “was recorded at 0700 hours from the First Nations’ Television Network. We do not know whether FNT was complicit in this broadcast or whether they were taken over electronically for the period by the so-called Native People’s Army, but we suspect the latter.”
Riley turned to the CDS. “Is it likely that the native groups have such technology?”
Bishop responded carefully. “Yes, minister. It’s a relatively simple cyberspace technical procedure with the right equipment and the right people. In modern cybernetic warfare, even a secure network can be quite vulnerable. We have to assume that the natives have sophisticated systems and the people to run them.”
The chief looked to Gervais. “Let’s see the tape, Carl.”
The DCDS nodded at an apparently blank wall and the staff monitoring proceedings from the projection room hit “Play.”
The scene that appeared had an al-Qaeda ambiance, despite the mixture of modern camouflage gear and traditional native costumes and the giant Warriors’ Brotherhood flag backdrop. A woman, simply masked, flanked by two men dressed in traditional native costume but carrying M16 rifles, sat at a desk. She glanced down occasionally at a handful of papers as she spoke quickly and forcefully.
The native people of North America were violated more than 400 years ago by European slave traders and invaders. Since that time, we have been assaulted by racists bearing weapons of mass destruction, germ warfare, and firearms. They poisoned our people with their drugs and alcohol and religions. Genocide from coast to coast has been visited on our nations across the Western hemisphere. Our forefathers tried to negotiate peace and understanding with the whites, but they simply played into the hands of the invaders. We remained “les sauvages,” and nowhere were we so humiliated and cheated than in what you call Quebec – it is our native land, not theirs.
The lap-dog leaders of the First Nations, “white Indians” all of them, are totally discredited. They fill their pockets with bribes and tokens. They negotiate without our authority to give the whites our lands and future. We, the People of the Land, the true First Nations, will not negotiate. We already have what we need, sovereignty and liberty, and now we will use them. We will take what belongs to us from the ruling cliques in Quebec and, supported by the brave warriors of the Native People’s Army, we will restore to our people their rightful heritage. Remember the genocide of the villain Champlain and the heroic defence of our land by the Iroquois Confederacy. Remember all our heroes and early resisters and today the brothers and sisters killed and wounded in the same fight for our land. A new day has arisen and the native people in the occupied lands you call Quebec will rise with it.
The tape ended abruptly and static filled the screen. The monitor went blank. While Gervais returned to his notes, the principals sat still and silent, except for the minister who shifted about in his chair, reached for a pencil, then changed his mind and tossed it irritably onto the table.
The DCDS resumed his presentation. “Last night, a series of obviously coordinated raids were launched against several military installations in Eastern Canada, apparently in support of this attack on Quebec. In each case, the targets were ammunition storage facilities and weapons lock-ups. The raiders were well organized and apparently had prior knowledge of just where various types of munitions were stored within the compounds and armouries.” On cue a black-and-white map with red X’s appeared on the monitor. “As this slide illustrates, raids were made at Halifax, CFB Valcartier, CFB St. Jean, two armouries in Montreal, and, the largest one, at CFB Petawawa. There were no incidents at any other installations across the country.
“The raiders seemed intent on taking major and special weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank missiles, some anti-tank mines from Petawawa, mortar bombs, plastic explosives, small arms ammunition, radios, and other lesser equipment. The staff is still calculating the losses.
“The raiders were almost certainly members of various native people’s organizations. Although we have no clear intelligence to confirm this assumption, the tape leaves little doubt that’s what’s going on.”
Gervais flipped through his slides. “The raids were conducted from various approaches. For instance, the Halifax attack was mounted on heavy-duty pickup trucks which rammed through the gates in the early hours this morning, then made off into the local area. That raid, unfortunately, resulted in the death of a civilian guard, who it seems was run over trying to stop the raiders at the gate. In Petawawa, the attack seems to have come from across the Ottawa River, a rather daring idea that, ah, unfortunately, may be something our summer exercises in 2008 suggested to the native soldiers who were part of the scenario. In that scenario, Petawawa was raided from across the river by a ‘rebel force’ of, ah, factious aboriginal militants.”
Carl Gervais, who had argued loudly against the exercise, couldn’t resist a pointed extemporaneous observation. “You may remember that exercise, minister. I recall you praised the, ah, ‘display of multiculturalism in action’ involved in treating aboriginal grievances seriously.”
Gratified to see the minister look away and reach for his glass of water, the DCDS returned to Dobson’s notes. “We’re still trying to reconstruct each of these incidents. In Petawawa, the raiders were interrupted by a female military police officer. She was captured by the raiders, but not harmed. A search party found her an hour ago, tied up in her patrol car hidden in the back of the compound. She is still being debriefed, but she told her commanding officer that one individual, whom she thought was the leader, was referred to by the others as ‘sir,’ and that while giving the others distinctly military-style orders, he called one of the others ‘sergeant.’ Her account of their language and discipline alike indicates not merely a high level of organization but the probable presence of several trained soldiers.
“Unfortunately, other raids caused a number of casualties. As I said a moment ago, in Halifax, a civilian guard, a commissionaire, was killed. As well, a brief firefight erupted when a military police patrol responded to a silent alarm in Valcartier, but they were overwhelmed by the raiders’ weapons. Thankfully, the military police escaped without fatalities, but the two MPs were injured – not badly – and their vehicle was destroyed.
“Minister, CDS,” Gervais continued, “we have put Canadian Forces bases on alert, launched searches, and mounted guard units around ammunition compounds and vital points at bases and militia locations. These precautions have been as unobtrusive as possible, so as not to alarm the local populations – we are advertising these raids as the actions of criminals looking for weapons to sell on the black market, and downplaying both the precision and success.”
“Chief,” the minister said, turning to Andy Bishop, “that message can’t hold given the tape. I think the cabinet will have to – the prime minister – will have to make a public statement confirming briefly what we know and what we’re doing about it. And he is going to have to do it today.”
“I agree, minister. And so does the clerk of the Privy Council; she’s scheduled a meeting in one hour with me, the commissioner of the RCMP, the chief of the Security Communications Establishment, the deputy minister of the public safety department, the prime minister’s principal secretary, and others to thrash out a response along precisely those lines.”
Jim Riley pushed back his chair and stood up. “Thank you, General Bishop, and the rest of you as well. I’ve things to do too. General Bishop, after your PCO meeting, I’ll meet you in the prime minister’s office. I’ll let you know the exact time.”
Monday, August 30, 0915 hours
Chisasibi, on James Bay
Will Boucanier looked out the small window as the Air Creebec Dash 8 made its long, slow approach into Chisasibi, an unattractive Cree village of some 3,000 souls on the La Grande Rivière, six kilometres from James Bay and about 100 kilometres from Radisson and the main James Bay hydroelectric generating plant. But it was home to Will – a soldier home from the wars and on his way to a new one.
Long ago, at age eighteen, Will had left the village and the band, travelled to Montreal, walked the streets, homesick yet incredibly happy to be away. The big city had been totally unfamiliar to him, weird, baffling, and threatening, but Will had never felt so safe. In Chisasibi, he had spent every night of his young life afraid, terrified, that Dad would come rolling in the door drunk, and, as Mom would say, “in a mood.”
Fear and noise all night. Not in his room, but menacingly close, out there, down the dark hallway. He would lie in bed, whimpering, “Go away!” His thoughts made no difference.
“Get out. Leave me alone.”
“Bitch!” A cry of pain, then scuffling, and in the morning, bruises, scrapes, and sullen silence.
Demons in his house and in his dreams. His younger brother, Jimmy, crying himself to sleep at night.
Morning. Dad sleeping it off, and Will and his brother slouching about the house, exhausted, hating going to school, but afraid to stay home. Will feeling guilty leaving Mom alone with her abuser, but he was just a kid. What could he do?
Mom, worn out, tangled hair, face swollen from tears, fists, and lack of sleep, wandering the kitchen in a floppy pink track suit. “Now, boys, don’t wake your dad. Get yourselves ready for school. Will, make some porridge for your brother. Hurry now!”
Every day hoping to come home and find Dad had run off. Relieved when his “ways,” as Mom called them, got him another thirty days in jail, and guilty for feeling it. The shame of the “drunken Indian” followed Will all his days on the outside. “Are we natives,” he asked himself repeatedly and without answer, “doomed to be our fathers’ sons?” Will had never had a drink of alcohol in his life. He’d never dared to.
“Sunday, we’ll go to church,” Mom said as if it would help. But the only good the priest ever did for him, Will recalled, was to keep him in school and send him running from the village.
Three weeks after leaving Chisasibi, Will had wandered off the street into the army recruiting office on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal and signed up. That decision he had never regretted, and he served for fifteen years with distinction. Right from the start he was recognized as a first-class recruit. Coming from his background, fieldcraft was as natural as walking, and weapons were second nature. His peers, mostly city boys, admired their “crafty redskin” comrade. Leather-tough, he was impervious to weather, long marches, heavy loads, and the purposeful harassment of his instructors; once he’d left home, no insult from outside could touch him on the inside. But what really set him apart – a natural gift for leadership, for being in front, for commanding – wasn’t truly evident until he was promoted to infantry corporal, then, in just five years, to sergeant, and warrant officer in five more.
Warrant Officer Will Boucanier: stone cold, emotionless, dedicated to the army no matter the mission. He could look at the battlefield with a dry eye, as great captains must. He just focused on the job and got it done, and expected the same of those under him. In command, he took no back talk, no malingering, accepted no excuses and gave none. His “people” – though the word carried a profound ambiguity to his native ear – he treated with the utmost care. Everyone equal, everyone his prized responsibility. But he followed the rule: mission first, men second, myself last. He was never nasty, but never soft. That was his code, and the pride it engendered kept him going.
Will Boucanier, as everyone of experience in the army knew, “walked the talk.” He won the Medal of Valour during the Battle of Medak Pocket – the night-long battle in the former Yugoslavia in which, on September 15, 1993, the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry – the Patricias – stood and fought a much larger Croatian force that was threatening four Serb villages with “ethnic cleansing.” It was the first major battle for the unit in the post-Cold War era, and one the Liberal government hid from Canadians for years. There were no news stories, no ceremonies, no homecoming welcome or remembrance for the casualties, just officially imposed silence, lest Canadians discover the consequences of the “decade of darkness” which had starved the Canadian Forces.
But soldiers across the army knew what had happened in the Medak Pocket and then-Sergeant Boucanier’s part in it. That night, he had led a six-man Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) detachment attached to the Patricia battalion tasked to protect the four Serb villages isolated in the midst of the hostile Croatian population. In the darkness and chaos of that September night battle, Will watched through his powerful night-vision scope as Croatian infantry, supported by two T54 tanks and intent on slaughtering their neighbours, worked their way around the Canadians’ right flank.
Will had reported the situation to the Patricia battalion commander, but he knew no one in the unit, already under heavy fire, could slow the assaulting force in time to save the villagers. However, he figured that his little force, off on the flank of the Patricia companies, might be able to surprise and distract the Croatian infantry. Will had stood up, gathered his soldiers, and led them in an attack on the enemy company in the valley below his position. The citation to his decoration read:
Sergeant William Boucanier MMV
Chisasibi, Quebec
Medal of Military Valour
On September 15, 1993, Sergeant Boucanier, commanding a JTF2 Detachment allocated to peacekeeping duties in the area of the Medak Valley in Krajina, came under heavy Croatian mortar and small arms fire. During the ensuing engagement, he observed these same forces preparing to attack an undefended village inhabited by women, children and old people. Without regard for his own safety and under heavy fire, he led his small detachment into the village and there successfully defended the villagers from further assault. During the night, he was wounded twice, once seriously by mortar fire, but maintained command of his soldiers, encouraging them and adjusting their deployment to defeat the Croatian assault. Sergeant Boucanier’s courageous and skilful actions helped prevent a massacre of the villagers and secured the battalion’s exposed flank until reinforcements arrived at daybreak the next morning.
All of that seemed a long time ago, though. Now, he was slipping and sliding slowly into his hometown as the pilot dodged the rain clouds and fought the high winds bouncing the small aircraft around above the bare, grey, granite hills of the James Bay basin. It was the end of a long hip-hop flight from Montreal through Val-d’Or and Waskaganish to Chisasibi. Some homecoming – a flight from modernity to cultural calamity and personal trauma. But Will had steeled himself. The mission brought him here, not family or home. Indeed, his family had disappeared: his brother to Montreal, drink, and jail; his father long ago lost on the land; and his mother in despair to the grave. He was home today because he was Cree, because he knew the land, the language, Chisasibi and Radisson, and who he could count on. The right man for the job. Still a soldier, he told himself. Not a mercenary. A soldier and a man of honour.
Only last month, Will had abruptly taken his release from the army, despite persistent, heart-felt urging from his superiors to stay, and unanswered pleas from the sergeants’ mess for reasons. He was sick at heart to leave the only home he’d ever known, a home made safe by order, merit, and predictability; a home where things made sense. After a childhood of chaos, of feeling worthless, he’d found a real home among soldiers, a special group set aside by society for a special purpose. But just as he had fifteen years earlier, he felt relieved as well as homesick. Across the country, he knew, were villages like his, full of homes like his, and getting himself out of there, no matter how successfully, had always felt a bit like running away. Like going to school and leaving Mom alone with that man. Well, not any more. He had fought the white man’s wars, “for peace and freedom,” they had told him. Now he was coming home to fight for the same things, to fight the only way he knew against the despair he’d escaped so long ago.
* * *
Boucanier, too, had been identified by the Movement. Its leaders had reached out to him several times early in his career and as he advanced in it, only to be rejected. But Will’s gut-wrenching, mind-bending experiences in Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Afghanistan changed him profoundly. His sympathy for the people he helped in those places, people forced by history’s whims to surrender their culture to the tyranny of the majority, affected deeply his sense of himself and his people and his homeland on James Bay. The political jumble that was Yugoslavia, which the UN and the Western allies had turned into the even bigger Balkan region mess, convinced Will that nationalism, not federalism, saves lives and cultures.
He learned also from watching certain Serbian patriots and Afghani communal leaders that strong leaders can achieve a great deal if they have the strength and determination to unite people around their own traditions. The key lesson Will took away from his experience, however, was that the people’s success and security depend on one thing: cultural unity, protected by one unchallenged leader, and set free from distracting entanglements in other people’s causes.
Will convinced himself as he watched the clandestine Movement grow, that it might just prove to be the organization that could create the winning, disruptive conditions that would allow him to set his family and his people and his culture free from its woeful history. He believed, he truly believed, what Molly Grace had told him at their first secret meeting after he contacted those chiefs who had approached him over the years: they really could “take back the land” and reshape it with the power of pride. What he did not reveal to anyone, however, was his longing, his ambition, to become the one to lead his people in their ancestral lands.
Wars change soldiers and the ones that he had seen had changed Will’s faith in his army. The Canada he deserted had deserted honour first when it walked away from its pledge to the Afghanis he had fought to protect. For Canadian politicians, Will thought, honour is a pliable thing. He and a few others soldiers were the real army, the army of soul, duty, singleness of mind and purpose.
He knew and accepted that race meant nothing in the army. There, only truth, duty, and valour command all. The creed needs no explanation, abides no excuses, and has no nationality. But his people, his people, were the Cree; he would not desert them. Instead he was now part of a different army, as honourable as his Canadian Forces, and it would fight as well and maybe even win. He promised himself long before he returned home that no matter the success or failures of the Movement, he would lead his people to his kind of peace and freedom.
* * *
Out the window, below, Will could see his old home, the James Bay territory: a mass of granite, part of the Canadian Shield, one of the oldest geological formations on the planet; endless mountaintops, smooth and peakless, ancient yet enduring, shaped by the grinding of advancing glaciers and the constant assault of wind, snow, and rain; and everywhere the sparse landscape commanded by black spruce, just “the forest” in his youth, but, as he had learned later, actually the largest single-species forest in the world. To the north, where the trees reluctantly gave way, the lichen – reindeer moss, as it was commonly called – covered the rocks and thin topsoil like a soft, pale green mat. Cladonia rangiferina. To the white man, strange green stuff on rocks, but to the people, vital food for the caribou they hunted and, sometimes, for the hunters as well.
His people, the Cree, and the Inuit with whom they shared the land in northern Quebec, had hunted the caribou, along with other animals, for millennia before the whites came. They had learned how to survive in this harsh place; and, Will thought, despite all the terrible changes the arrival of the whites had brought, they still managed to survive. For Will, the approximately 12,500 Cree and the few hundred scattered Inuit families who continued to eke out a living on the northern perimeter of the territory personified the tenacity of the human mind in the face of nature’s indifferent outrages.
The outrages inflicted by the whites were more difficult to deal with. Not only had most of the animals on which the natives depended for their livelihood been killed, not only had the whites brought disease and the alcohol that had destroyed so many lives, but most of their land had been taken too. Today, they shared the territory with about 15,000 non-natives, many of whom were transients.
Will knew everyone in the territory was once a transient. The first inhabitants were migrating natives who settled on the land because they found just enough substance and a climate just tolerable enough to provide a precarious existence. Boucanier’s distant ancestors had settled the area as fishers, hunters, and gatherers long before history came to these places. They lived off the land – what else could they do? Like native people across northern Canada, they could not conceive of any other world, and only moved on to a new sameness that offered better hunting grounds once they had depleted the area where they had been living. Or they moved to escape savage, bloody competition with other bands and the “meat-eaters, the Eskimo.” But nature was the real enemy, always unforgiving and deceitful, ready to snare anyone who ventured too far onto the land, or worse, the water. Will had no illusions about it. For centuries, sameness, violence, and hard nature had framed the Cree’s existence. But they had found joy as well as hardship, and they had loved the land as well as they feared it.
Much later, Europeans moved through and into the territory, to trap, prospect for minerals, and to hunt and fish. Some settled in small communities to service the transients and the mines. Their coming meant trouble: not only disease and booze, but an alien religion based on fear of God rather than his people’s religion founded on harmony between the people, the land, and the spirits. But at first, the Europeans who had stayed in the North shared the Cree’s respect for the land and saw in the bleak wilderness an overwhelming beauty. Later, things had changed; more white men had come to alter the land – to master it, not live with it – and brought disaster to Will’s people on a much greater scale.
The Cree might still be living a so-called traditional life, like the more northerly Inuit, had it not been for the white man’s gluttonous appetite for electricity. But the hydroelectric dams came, and history decided that the Cree would now exist in the unsettled world between the shaman’s animist vision and the complexity of modernity. Lured by jobs and the promise of broader horizons, many native people departed the traditional world to help export to the modern world the energy that drove its machines and its cities, that made European Canada thrive and grow, and in so doing helped the modern world bring disaster to traditional communities.
Negotiators from the communities had, of course, signed papers which all sides expected would at once bridge the gap between and protect the two worlds. These “treaties” supposedly allowed all the economic benefits, the good of the modern world, to be blended into the traditional native world. Unfortunately, the communities found that these papers were no barriers against all that was bad in the modern world. The white man’s economy took away the reasons, the rhythms of the old ways, turning tradition into inertia, ignorance, and stale custom. But it didn’t bring Will’s people into its rhythms either; it left them wandering like vagrants between a world that no longer existed and one they couldn’t enter.
No more. Will knew he was himself in part a product of the white man’s world. He was a modern soldier as well as a traditional warrior, at home amid technology and organization as well as at home on the land. After today, he would dedicate all his skills to the service of the people – a promise, he sometimes pondered, that might one day make him king.
The airplane brought him back to his childhood world and his people, scattered in tiny communities with familiar names like Wemindji, Eastmain, and Waskaganish along the coast of James Bay, and in others such as Nemaska, Sakami, Waswanipi, and Oujé-Bougoumou farther inland. But it was Chisasibi on the south bank of the La Grande Rivière that held his special attention. His home village, yes. Near the James Bay coast. But also near Radisson, the administrative centre of the La Grande power project, and six kilometres from it, the Robert-Bourassa hydroelectric power plant.
Will tightened his seat belt as the Dash 8, banging and complaining, lowered its landing gear in the final approach to the runway. The pilot fought the strong wind, and the little plane, drifting sideways as it descended to the tarmac, bounced twice, and then, its engines roaring in protest, slowed to a halt just before running out of runway. As the Dash taxied toward the terminal, the young native attendant made the usual empty plea for the passengers to remain seated and said “Welcome to Chisasibi” unconvincingly in three languages.
Will reached for the bag under his seat and checked his watch. If his luggage had come through without damage, and his contact from the local cell was on time – and sober – he would get straight to work training whatever “warriors” the local band chief had assembled for him. He had low expectations for his new troops, but that was okay. He didn’t need JTF2 for his mission. The kids only needed to do as they were told and show some steadiness in the initial attack. He would do the rest.
Monday, August 30, 1220 hours
Akwesasne: Native People’s Council Planning Headquarters
Alex woke abruptly as the van slid roughly and halted at the entrance to somewhere. He pushed himself up on an elbow from his cramped backseat bed and slid half-awake onto the floor with bright sunlight shining in his face. How long had he been out? More importantly, where was he?
Although Alex was a key combat leader in the NPA, he knew that his status didn’t mean he was a trusted agent in the inner circle. Alex had learned this lesson some time before. When he had first agreed to join up, he had tried asking questions about the structure and plans of the Movement. However, he had been told that, for the sake of the Movement, such things must remain secret. Revolutionary organizations, Alex had been told, are secretive with good reason – they operate outside the law and threaten established governments and leaders. Governments use their considerable authority and means to infiltrate revolutionary organizations, even comic and inept groups, to gather information, plant disinformation, disrupt plans and the supply of resources, especially money, and to collect evidence of criminal activities for future use in courts. A revolution’s best defence against these types of intrusions is internal secrecy and compartmentalization of information, people, and plans. Any clandestine movement that works on trust is soon destroyed, often from within. Molly, the Movement’s leader, understood this rule very well. She trusted no one.
Alex until now had been kept in his own small box. He understood his operational task, was vaguely aware that other operations were underway at the same time he launched his, and that the Movement had some type of control centre on a reserve in Quebec near the U.S. border.
After he joined the NPA, he was moved irregularly from reserve to reserve across northeastern Ontario. Six weeks before he raided Petawawa, he was taken to a reserve on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, and there he was given his orders and supplies and met his warriors. His “briefer,” who Alex concluded had a military background, though not a Canadian one, was obviously experienced and professionally trained – likely some kind of mercenary. From his accent, Alex guessed the man hailed from the southwestern U.S.
As the van rolled through the village, Alex could see a few small houses, a fence in front of them, older vans and pickup trucks in the driveways, a mix of Ontario, Quebec, and U.S. licence plates. A wide river spread in the distance. The HQ, he guessed – on the St. Lawrence? Seems, he thought, I’m about to move into a wider world – or maybe this is actually the end of the line for me, now that my job is done. What the trip to the centre meant in fact he had no sure idea.
Armed men at the window scanned the interior of the van, questioned the driver, and, after an irritated response, waved them on into the village. They drove past more small houses, kids, and dogs, not very far, but Alex paid little attention, focusing instead on making himself physically and mentally alert. After what seemed a couple of kilometres, the van stopped near a small building covered in dull-grey plastic siding; the driver killed the engine and more armed people crowded up to the doors.
The tall, sour man threw the driver’s door open, pushing them away. He stepped out of the van and spoke to a couple of older men in cheap camouflage clothes of the sort you could buy at any Canadian Tire store. They carried M16s which, Alex immediately noticed, needed a bit of maintenance. But the weapons, magazines in place, looked loaded, and so did at least one of the “Mohawk warriors,” as he soon learned they liked to be called. A quick survey revealed other armed people near the building, and they weren’t loafers. Their clothes and weapons were clean and they carried themselves in a soldierly manner. So there is a hard core to this outfit, Alex thought. And they’re the guys to watch.
One of the serious ones came forward, slid the side door open, ordered Alex out in a decidedly unfriendly manner, then pushed him aside and searched the vehicle’s interior, looking, Alex supposed, for a troop of Mounties. To the left of the grey plastic building, he noted a large Quonset hut, its curved walls supported by sandbag revetments about one and a half metres high and one metre deep. The entrance was guarded by more serious-looking people and draped with canvas to hide any light that might escape from inside at night.
The tall, sour man got back into the van and drove off, and most of the ragtag hangers-on drifted away and disappeared into the surrounding buildings. The new man in charge motioned Alex towards a small hut. A guard, no more than eighteen, in mismatched camo and an uncomfortable-looking army surplus store hat, stood in the doorway fidgeting with the trigger guard on his old army-issue FN rifle. That scared Alex a lot more than his admittedly ominous surroundings.
The serious man motioned Alex into the building and told the kid to watch him. Then, in one swift move, he grabbed the rifle from the boy’s hands and cuffed him on the head, sending his hat flying into the dirt.
“I told you already not to load this thing! Do it again without orders and I’ll kick the crap out of you. Understand?”
The kid nodded dumbly, bent slowly to pick up his hat but jumped back as his chief swiftly and expertly pulled the magazine off the rifle, snapped the breech open, emptied the chamber, and shoved the weapon back into his fumbling grasp.
As he walked away, he spoke over his shoulder to Alex. “Hard to get good help, captain. There’s a washroom in the hut. You’ve got time to clean up. Sonny here will get you something to eat. Grab a nap. No telling how long before they call for you – maybe tomorrow morning.”
Captain? Alex thought. He’d pegged the man without hesitation – or doubt – as a professional, a sergeant or warrant officer. But how did he know me? Do I know him? Uh, uh. He must have been briefed. Somebody here knows what they’re doing.
The kid opened the door and motioned with his empty rifle towards a bench in the corner. Alex sat down and dropped his small pack on the floor. The raid had been tiring and the nap in the van uncomfortable and insufficient. Alex suspected, however, that he wouldn’t get much rest in the next few days. Might as well shake off the stress hangover – hot water always worked – then grab what sleep he could.
Alex looked at the kid, slouching against the inside door, clearly unsure of what to do or what attitude to take to the person his boss had called captain. “Say, young fellow,” Alex said. “Did anyone ever tell you that cleanliness is next to godliness?”
The kid shook his head, more confused than ever. Alex stood up and made a move for his small pack. “I need a shit, shave, shower, and shampoo,” he said, and pointed towards the toilet room in the corner.
The kid waved his rifle vaguely. “There’s no shower.”
“That’s okay, son,” Alex said, slinging his pack over his shoulder as he crossed the room. “I’ll use the sink.” Please, God, he thought, don’t let him reload that rifle. If I’m gonna get shot, I want it to be on purpose and not by some amateur’s mistake.
Entering the bathroom, under the kid’s uncertain gaze, he unwrapped his shaving kit, stripped off, set clean socks, underwear, and a T-shirt on the back of the toilet, and sat down to do his business. He let the water run hot in the sink, shaved cleanly and closely, watching himself in the mirror.
His thoughts swarmed randomly. Who are these people? They seem …what? Tense, aggressive, suspicious? What next? Where am I? What am I expected to do? He stopped shaving and looked firmly at himself. Get a grip, he silently told his reflection. Stay quiet, assess the situation, find out what they want, then decide whether to go along. Refilling the sink with hot water, he took a facecloth and improvised a sponge bath, put his old clothes and his kit into the pack with instinctive neatness borne of long military habit, and went back into the room, startling the kid who lurched nearly upright. “I think I’ll get some sleep on that cot over there, if it’s all right with you.”
“Ah, sure, I guess so. No one ever tells me anything. They just yell at me.”
“Welcome to the army, boy. And remember: keep your finger off the trigger!”
Alex dropped on the cot and, suppressing questions he couldn’t yet answer, fell asleep immediately. The boy slouched into the corner chair baffled and seemed to ask his empty rifle, “Like who’s the guard and who’s the prisoner in this revolution anyway?”
Monday, August 30, 1300 hours
Chisasibi on James Bay
Joe Neetha was the senior Native Peoples Army “commander” in the Chisasibi area, and the only one outside the Committee besides Will Boucanier who knew the names and locations of the James Bay NPA “warrior cells.” Neetha’s family lived in the area of Mistissini where he grew up in the local custom. But Joe had been around; he’d travelled to Radisson, worked in a small store, then as a labourer for Hydro-Québec in town. There he’d fallen in with the native political community and worked for a time in the band office. It was there he was recruited into the Movement. Five years ago, he’d been ordered back to Mistissini to develop his own cell and join the local Canadian Forces Ranger patrol, one of nineteen such units in Quebec.
Although he knew all about the Rangers from living in the North, Joe had made a point of reading up on the group when he signed up. According to the official line, the Canadian Rangers, part-time reservists, provided military units to patrol isolated and coastal communities in Canada. They helped protect Canada’s sovereignty by reporting unusual activities or sightings to the Canadian Forces, especially in the northern region. Defence ministers liked to say that the Rangers played an important role in advancing the self-reliance of Canada’s First Nations and Inuit groups.
Joe remembered laughing when he’d read that – he didn’t believe the average Canadian had any idea how much natives contributed to the defence of the country, but he had to admit that the small Ranger patrols, typically fewer than twenty people, were a highly efficient means of protecting Canadian sovereignty in the sparsely populated North. Ironically, given this purpose, they also provided an organized authority within communities, which made them a prime target for subversion by the Movement. A significant number of Rangers held leadership positions as mayors, chiefs, or band leaders, and had a powerful influence on their peers, especially the youth in the community, who were naturally attracted to the Rangers’ martial image. So strong was the pull of the Rangers that the Canadian Forces in 1996 organized the Junior Canadian Rangers. The program unintentionally provided a perfect cover (as the Movement quickly realized) for indoctrinating new members and leaders into the NPA from the growing cohort of disaffected twelve- to eighteen-year-olds who were living boring, frustrating lives in remote and isolated areas of Canada.
Canadian Forces officers close to the program around the James and Hudson Bay regions watched the development of what they reported as “dangerous trends.” They sent their misgivings to their superiors in Ottawa and explained that the Inuit weren’t a problem, yet, but no one there took much notice. Some officers were even reprimanded for their “alarmist and insensitive” reports. Officers with long experience in the North who persisted in raising alarms or tried to redirect the program in the field were soon posted, often at the insistence of native leaders in the patrols, to desk jobs by officers who rarely left Ottawa.
* * *
When he enrolled, Neetha participated in a ten-day Basic Ranger Qualification Course in Mistissini. Like the other Rangers, he was given a uniform – flash-red Ranger sweatshirt, T-shirt, ball cap, brassard, vest, and toque – and also a Lee Enfield rifle and ammunition. He was taught basic drill, rifle training, general military knowledge, navigation with map, compass and GPS, first-aid techniques, search-and-rescue procedures, and formal radio communications techniques. Like many of the Rangers, his unit was also provided with snowmobiles and boats.
All of that material and training was given to him by the Canadian Forces. However, since his patrol operated in a “politically sensitive area,” it also had some very modern military equipment, obtained for it not by the Canadian Forces but by the NPA. This equipment was stored well out of sight of the Canadian Forces officers who weren’t part of the Movement.
The Canadian Forces sent Joe on “patrol sustainment training,” which involved additional weapons and live-firing exercises, operational planning, and search-and-rescue drills. Outside these government-provided courses, Joe had joined other recruits in non-CF exercises designed to teach setting and reacting to ambushes, offensive patrolling, advanced map reading, and the care and use of grenades and explosives – all given by long-standing members of the patrols and by outsiders flown into the area by the NPA.
Joe had taken to the life easily. It was, after all, just another form of hunting. But he was noticed by his peers and Canadian Forces commanders as a leader, and that distinction marked him for advanced training beyond the regular Ranger schedule. Members of the NPA noticed as well. Joe soon found himself on new, exciting training at Canadian Forces bases in the south, at Gagetown, for instance, where his operational planning, patrolling, and leadership skills increased considerably. But the NPA had plans for him too.
Joe, under the cover of visiting distant relatives in the United States, began to train at American native reserves. There he learned how to handle sophisticated weapons and how to plan and conduct sabotage operations involving several units. He also received large doses of propaganda, which reinforced the grievances he had come to accept as the true history of the Cree, and in fact of all the native people in North America: the story of the natives as victims of the “genocidal invasion” of their land by marauding Europeans.
As a Ranger, under close direction of regular forces officers, Joe practised the routine duties of “providing a military presence in support of Canadian sovereignty” by collecting local data of significance needed for military operations, and conducting surveillance/sovereignty patrols. His Ranger patrol, like the others, assisted Canadian Forces activities by providing local expertise, guidance, and advice; conducting Northern Warning System patrols; helping local search-and-rescue activities; and reporting unidentified vessels sailing along the coast. Joe had five years of Ranger work behind him, and each year he became a more proficient and dedicated soldier standing on guard. Just not for Canada.
* * *
Joe met Will outside the airport terminal, loaded his kit into an old Ford pickup, and together they drove the dusty hundred kilometres into Radisson. They picked up a police tail somewhere just outside of town, Will noted without surprise. At least the police communications system was functional, he thought. At the Chisasibi airport he’d seen the local cop eyeing him carefully as he picked up his luggage. Naturally enough, the local band police were always suspicious of natives they didn’t recognize and who seemed out of place. If you weren’t a familiar face or a Hydro worker returning for another three-week shift, you were “a person of interest,” perhaps a drug-runner or an unemployed drifter home from the city. And after fifteen years on the outside, Will Boucanier expected to be noticed. Fine; he had a cover story ready.
Radisson was a typical resource industry company town – boring, small, low-slung, a place for surviving until you could leave. About 2,000 people – workers and natives – existed in this town of one school, one hospital, and many bars. Will reminisced idly as the truck bounced over the once-familiar terrain and finally stopped in front of L’Auberge Radisson, a forty-room hotel of less than Holiday Inn standard.
Will and Joe walked together into the hotel and up to the front counter. “Boucanier,” Will announced. “Will Boucanier.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Boucanier. Hope you had a good flight, a bit gusty and maybe bouncy, I bet.” The short, slim, white clerk beamed and prattled on without waiting for an answer. “And I think you’re staying for four days, is that right, sir?”
“I may be longer, a week in fact; it depends on the business.” Will looked around the small lobby, just in time to see the local cop, a respectable-looking Cree, wander in and pretend to scan yesterday’s newspapers, which were piled in disorder on the table near the door. “I might be opening a hunting and fishing outfit, bring in some tourists, you know. Got me a development grant.”
“Fine, sir, you can let us know. A credit card for an imprint, please.” Hotel clerks are the same everywhere, thought Will. Please and thank you, without looking into your eyes.
“There you go, sir. Just fill in the card and sign at the X. You’re in room 312. Do you need someone to carry your bags?”
“No, thanks, I’ve got this savage here to do that.”
The clerk started.
Joe only grunted, then leaned his large frame over the counter and growled, “Who is the savage in the room, do you think, sonny?”
“Sonny” had no answer. But the remark wasn’t aimed at him. It was for the cop loitering near the door, who glanced coldly at Joe, then back at the newspapers. Joe picked up one of Will’s bags and headed for the stairs.
After they were out of sight, the policeman sauntered over to the desk. “Let’s see the card.” The clerk handed it over with a worried glance toward the staircase. “Trouble, Bob?”
Bob Ignace ignored the question. “Did you ask him why he was here like I told you to?”
“Yeah. He said ‘business.’ Setting up a hunting and fishing camp with his new partner. Says he’s got a government grant.”
“Sure. We’ve all got government grants. But that’s Will Boucanier from Chisasibi. He was a hero in the army. The only thing he’s been hunting in fifteen years is people. So what’s he doing here, with that big-mouth troublemaker, Neetha?”
The clerk flushed. “Well, he left a business card, so he must be serious.”
“Boy, you’re a regular Sam Spade,” Ignace replied. “Let me see it.” He read it without interest, then said, “Make me a copy. If they leave, call the station. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut. And don’t go telling stories to impress that fat-ass squaw you’re trying to screw, understand?”
The little clerk blushed crimson and pushed the card into the photocopier. “Sure, got it.”
“Thanks,” said Ignace. As he left, he tossed over his shoulder, “No way she’s going to sleep with you anyway.”
* * *
Up in room 312, Will dropped his bags and computer on the bed and glanced out the window in time to see the police car drive off. He locked his computer, locked it inside his bag, and then motioned Joe towards the door. “We can’t talk here. Let’s go for a walk.”
He didn’t speak again until they were in the parking lot. “I looked over your Ranger record,” he told Joe. “You’ve been busy. Tell me about your people.”
Joe pointed toward the centre of town, suggesting a turn along the noisy main street. “I have twenty members in my patrol. Two are ex-army – infantry, not too bad – but I have to kick their asses if they get near the booze. The rest are kids from around the village and nearby. Most have three years in and two had advanced courses outside. They’re steady enough, but they’ve never done anything except throw a few grenades at our homemade range.”
“Have they got the legs for the work?”
“Yeah, we’re okay there. I work them pretty hard, lots of packing cross-country. And living on the land comes naturally, of course. But working at night is still a bit awkward – they see spooks and ghosts and stuff. I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, but they can hump it and they do as I say.”
“Okay. What about the other cells in the area?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I know most of the leaders from Ranger courses and some from the States. But some I just met after I got the message from Montreal. As for their people, who knows?”
“Montreal? Who did you talk to and what did they tell you?”
Joe stopped walking and hesitated. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it,” he said. “Except to say Maurice told me to follow your orders.”
Will nodded. “Okay. I have a fair idea of the makeup of the cells and patrols, and their leaders’ strengths and weaknesses, but I need a feel for their guts – are they disciplined, confident, more than just boys playing a game? What’s your feeling?”
Joe thought for a minute. “They seem ready to do something more than training,” he said. “They’ve got the bravado of all inexperienced soldiers who’ve been training. You know how people change when you hand out the live ammo. But their leaders are okay, and they understand the challenges. I think they can hold their people together with a pat on the back and a kick in the ass when needed.”
They waited for a car to pass and then crossed the street. “Well,” said Will, “they’re going to get their chance, sooner than they might think. Okay. Here’s what I want: a rental truck, civvy maps of the local area, and some safe place to store supplies heading our way. I’ll call a meeting with the cell leaders, together if possible, some time later. But in any case, these guys had better be committed because they know too much already. If you have any doubts about any of them, come clean now.”
“All the guys I know are all right, I’m sure of them,” Joe said, looking into Will’s eyes. “The ones I just met, I didn’t get a bad feeling about any of them.”
“Fine. I’m counting on you to lead your patrol and to back me up as second-in-command. Can you do that?”
“Yeah. If we need to, I’ll have my number two back me up so I can back you up.”
“Good. Here’s what we’ll do for now. I’ll rent a pickup later this afternoon. Tomorrow I have business out of town that doesn’t concern you. I’ll meet you back here at the hotel, day after tomorrow, thirteen hundred. Don’t be late. Lateness is one thing that really pisses me off. It gets people hurt.”
Will reached into his jacket. “Here’s two cellphones. Use one to call the leaders to meet you tomorrow at the RV north of Chisasibi you were told to select last week. The leaders are not to say a word to their members; they just have to drop everything, say they’re going hunting, and make for the camp. They’re to wait there for orders I will pass to you later in the week. Once you’ve reached them all, smash the phone and throw it in the river. Use the other as a backup or to find anyone you can’t reach tonight, then get rid of it too. My cell number is on this pad; it’s legitimate, so only use it if you have some real emergency. And then speak as if the Mounties were listening because they probably are. Got it?”
“So we’re going somewhere, some real action?” asked Joe excitedly.
Will’s easy manner changed abruptly. He turned to face Joe directly and stepped toe-to-toe into the young leader’s space. “Don’t ask questions unless you don’t understand what I just told you to do.” Will raised his voice just enough to convey the intended reprimand. “Do you understand what you’re to do?”
Joe, startled, pulled his hand from his pocket and dropped his arms to his sides, awkwardly trying to stand to attention without attracting attention. He blushed. “Yes, sir!”
“Good. Then do it!”
Will walked away. Joe, a couple of steps behind, followed along in silence – the boundary between superior and subordinate clearly established. After a few steps, Will, without looking back, waved Joe alongside. “Come along, Joe. Let’s get something to eat and an iced tea – do they make iced tea in this metropolis?”
Monday, August 30, 1530 hours
Robert-Bourassa Generating Facility
It was late afternoon when Will joined a small group of tourists on a trip to the great generating facility, to view, in the inviting words of the Hydro-Québec commercial, “the splendid northern vistas and colossal hydroelectric structures” that, together with the mechanics of the generating system, are the heart of the La Grande hydro project which supplies more than half of all the electricity generated in Quebec, and as such is a crucial component of a vast network of interconnected power grids serving eastern North America.
The project is in fact a giant stairway of dams and hydroelectric plants, all founded on the vast watershed of the east shore of James Bay and the steep, eternal cascade of the La Grande Rivière as it races towards the bay. The centrepiece of the project is a massive fifty-three-storey-high storage dam near Radisson and the immense reservoir behind it. Here the river is diverted through plunging tunnels into two underground powerhouses which together comprise the fifth-largest hydroelectric development in the world. By far the larger of the two powerhouses is the Robert-Bourassa plant, the pride of Hydro-Québec, the largest in Canada, and the world’s biggest underground powerhouse. It was here that Will and the other visitors were taken.
The tourists were promised a view of “nature as you have never seen it” – a promise difficult to keep because the site is in every respect unnatural. Will marvelled at the awe on the faces of the visitors as his small group wandered, whispering, through the “true cathedral-like structure carved into the bedrock at a depth of 140 metres.” They walked reverently amid the roaring generators and complex machines, staring at the high granite ceiling and pointing to the wonders not of nature but of man’s invention.
The well-rehearsed guides, clutching electric torches, seemed to Will like minor officials in some great mediaeval European church, reciting sacred phrases to worshippers rather than offering technical guidance to the curious in a workshop. At each station, the guides’ ever-respectful manner and the soft cadence of their words combined with the sheer scale of the site to transform the tourists into pilgrims of technology, much as a visit to Rome and the Sistine Chapel is said to convert every tourist into a Catholic pilgrim, if only for a moment.
But Will Boucanier was no idle visitor and he wasn’t there to see the wonders of nature, the docility of tourists, or the marvels of technology. He was there to recce the complex and get a first-hand look at the control room, generating units, and the other underground works that produced the energy without which southern cities would die. Of course he already had a complete description of the system, and maps and sketches of all the facilities, collected and confirmed by native workers on the site. The NPA planning team at Akwesasne had used the very open Hydro-Québec website to locate critical features in the system, the mechanisms and structures whose destruction would bring the whole complex to a standstill. But websites can be wrong – sometimes deliberately so – or outdated, and sometimes even accurate diagrams fail to bring out important features of a target that are immediately obvious once you’re actually looking at it. Soldiers will launch attacks based on maps if they must, but if the enemy leaves all the doors open, then they’d rather take a look for themselves. So Will had come to see his target at the invitation of Hydro-Québec and walked right on in.
The La Grande complex was, in military parlance, a soft target. It wasn’t hard for the planners to figure out how to cripple these critical sites, or even how to gain control of them, because the project had been built and maintained since its inception without much regard for even low-level security. The plentiful information Hydro-Québec made available to the world on its website didn’t conceal careful layers of security; the whole thing was as wide-open as it looked. The main problem for NPA planners was to conduct the reconnaissance, develop the operation, train the assault team, and assemble the resources and people for the raid without alerting the government.
With inexperienced leaders and followers, operational security is a major problem, even with a straightforward battle plan. In fact, the whole thing had almost unravelled twice in the spring of 2008. First, a patrol leader training his people to use explosives decided to try out some of their stolen dynamite on a Hydro pylon south of Radisson. They succeeded in damaging the transmission tower and line, but as a predictable result caused a wide-scale alarm that brought the Sûreté du Québec – the SQ, as the provincial police were commonly known – and the RCMP into action. Fortunately, the investigators couldn’t find any links to anyone and the government was happy to dismiss the attack as “some pranksters playing with stolen explosives.” The RCMP suspected more and continued their undercover investigation, but the politicians didn’t want to hear about it and there were no harmful consequences for the Movement, although the patrol leader in question suffered a tragically fatal boating accident three weeks later.
The second incident involved a group of CBC journalists who simply strolled into the Radisson installation without being stopped by guards, and then highlighted the problem for several nights on TV news. Premier Commeau asked both Hydro-Québec and the provincial police to investigate the matter only after the CBC’s French language network aired its investigative report. That prime-time news event showed journalists entering several power installations – including walking right up to the command centre at the site, and driving unchallenged in an unmarked van into another part of the site that provides power to millions of people in Quebec and the United States.
“We have asked Hydro-Québec to give us reports on the state of security and asked the Sûreté du Québec to do an independent evaluation, so we have a solid picture of what the security situation is,” the premier said in a news conference.
The utility company’s chief executive officer said guards in fact had the news crew under video surveillance at all times, but admitted to serious security shortcomings. He admitted also that Hydro-Québec had promised to increase security at its sites after the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001 but had not in fact done anything.
“In this case, it was just journalists,” he said. “It is not acceptable … If it was a terrorist, obviously, it would not be acceptable. And therefore, what we have to make sure here is that intrusions like these can never happen again.”
As managers of power grids in Ontario and several U.S. states expressed their concern, the federal public safety minister faced criticism in Parliament over the security breaches. She told Parliament that it was a matter for the company and the province to resolve.
Later, Premier Commeau responded saying, “The federal public safety minister is mistaken. The federal government has to provide more security funding for Quebec … something that they have failed to do since 9/11.”
Fortunately for the Movement, the federal and Quebec governments continued to squabble over responsibilities and money, and did nothing after this intrusion. Hydro-Québec closed all tours of its facilities across the province for two weeks while it “reviewed” its security arrangements at James Bay. The review resulted only in an insignificant increase in unarmed guards near the control room and the installation of a few security cameras and alarms to provide a better view, but no better way to respond to a more serious incident. The changes were typically enough to keep honest people out of the facilities but no real inconvenience to Will and his comrades.
The tour proved to Will that the facility and its security arrangements were almost exactly what the NPA had believed, and that it was safe to proceed with the plan. Later that day, he walked around town to place in his mind the vital points that in the coming days would be the lead subject of every news broadcast across Canada. The walk didn’t take long: down the street from the hotel past the three radio stations to the post office, then across to the police station, taking particular notice of the location and layout of the police car park, around to the town offices, and then back to the hotel.
He rented a pickup for tomorrow’s recce outside town and the meetings with patrol leaders along the road south from Radisson. So far, everything checked out. Everything on the ground matched everything on the maps and the website, and there weren’t any unpleasant surprises after Will had seen things for real. He was almost ready.
