Liberators Read online

  The French army had been freshly emboldened by massacring illegal aliens protesting in France, with impunity. Their Foreign Legion troops were used primarily to police Quebec, while the French-born soldiers were used in the other provinces, where English was the predominant language. These deployments both fit in with the UN’s strategy of using unsympathetic troops to quell local uprisings.

  28

  BRUSSELS CHARADES

  Calling it your job don’t make it right, boss.

  —Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke (1967)

  The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia—May, the Third Year

  The small meeting at the McGregors’ house started with Phil recounting the chatter that he’d heard on the shortwave radio. In addition to Alan, Claire, Ray, and Phil, there was also Stan Leaman, a twenty-three-year-old bachelor from an adjoining ranch. Stan was a descendant of one of the earliest settlers of the region. Most of Stan’s siblings had moved to Canada’s oil sands region, following opportunities with the petroleum boom. So Stan had to hire laborers to help him operate his raw-milk dairy farm.

  Stan rode up to the McGregor ranch house on his big gelding one afternoon and said to Alan, “If you’re planning something to fight back against these UN clowns, then count me in.”

  The five of them formed an independent resistance cell that would later be known as Team Robinson. They chose the name in memory of the FOB in Afghanistan where Ray and Phil had first met each other. Their first formal meeting was in May, just after news came to them of some mass arrests in Edmonton. Stan arrived wearing his usual green-and-black-checkered flannel jacket. After Stan had joined them in the living room, Phil adopted a businesslike tone and said, “We obviously need to do something when UNPROFOR arrives in British Columbia. But even before then, we need to train, organize—and of course cross-level equipment and ammunition. We need to cache a lot of gear. Not only will they be searching houses, but they’re also going to lock down the towns tight, with checkpoints. So we need to gather intelligence, take stock of what we have available, and pre-position some gear so that we can use it to our best advantage.

  “The vast unpopulated expanses in this part of British Columbia will give us a few advantages. It will be a huge area for UNPROFOR to control and patrol. Their forces will necessarily be spread thin. The muskeg regions are ‘no go’ country for nearly all of their vehicles. With our opponents on foot, we’ll be fairly evenly matched, despite their firepower, communications, and night vision gear. And when we do engage them, the response time for them to receive any backup will be lengthy. That will give us time to beat feet, so that they’ll have great difficulty in tracking us down.”

  Stan asked, “So what are you proposing?”

  “I think that we can manage a few operations inside city limits—mostly very carefully targeted demolition and sabotage. Out in the boonies, we’ll probably be doing ambushes on remote stretches of road, and perhaps engaging isolated detachments. In cold country like this, simply burning down their barracks in winter months will be quite effective—both logistically and to push down their morale.

  “The UNPROFOR units will likely be moving in from the east via Highway 1, and by rail. Interdiction of these routes would be possible but likely limited to delaying actions by irregular forces; the prairies are awfully wide open. Any force with decent air superiority or armor will prevail conventionally. Once the French arrive to occupy the west, things will get more sporting. Securing the highways and rail lines through the Rockies and the coastal ranges will be much more difficult than pushing across prairie. Our country here is challenging terrain to operate in summer, and winter makes conventional operations extremely difficult.

  “There are three main routes that they can come west on: south through Crowsnest Pass, in the center-west of Calgary on Highway 1, and farther northwest of Edmonton on the Yellowhead Highway.”

  Stan raised his hand and declared, “My family has a Mini-14, a SMLE .303 that was shortened, and a Browning A-Bolt, in .30-06 with a four-to-twelve-power variable scope. None of them have ever been registered. I don’t even have a possession and acquisition license.”

  Ray laughed and said: “No PAL, but you’re a pal of mine.”

  There were some groans in response to Ray’s pun, and then he asked, “Ammo?”

  Stan glanced upward and then said, “I’ve got about two hundred rounds for each gun. With the bolt actions, that’s probably enough. But for the Ruger, laying down semiautomatic fire, that might only be enough for one lengthy firefight.”

  Phil nodded and said, “I can help you out with some 5.56 ammo for your Mini-14. I suppose I can spare at least three hundred rounds. But after our first few engagements, I have a feeling that 5.56 ammo won’t be a problem, if we do our job right.”

  Stan chuckled, and said, “Yeah, I suppose that once they stop breathing, they cease to have any need for the ammunition in their pouches.”

  “Precisely.”

  Ray raised his hand and asked, “What about OPSEC?”

  Phil cocked his head and shot back, “Ours, or theirs?”

  “Ours.”

  Alan chimed in and said, “I’ve heard Ray talk about military operational security a few times over the years. It seems to me that our best OPSEC protection is absolutely no talk whatsoever about any of our activities or even of the existence of the cell to anyone, even if we know they’d be sympathetic. Leaderless resistance is most effective and impenetrable when the cells keep totally anonymous, and all of the members outwardly carry on with very mundane daily lives.”

  Claire asked, “Could we, or should we, expand our cell?”

  Phil answered, “No, not unless the tactical situation on the ground dictates it. For now, I can’t foresee fielding anything more than three or four people at a time for small raids, emplacing IEDs, and some sniping harassment. More people will just mean a larger signature, more chances of getting spotted, and more chances of a slipup or betrayal. And any group larger than three or four people in a vehicle or multiple vehicles convoying has ‘resistance profile’ written all over it. We want to operate in ways that don’t attract suspicion.”

  Alan said firmly, “Agreed.”

  Claire asked, “How long do you think it’ll take the resistance to drive them out of Canada?”

  Alan answered, “It all depends on how quickly resistance builds—and a lot of that depends on the public perception of their tyranny. Perhaps as long as three, four, or five years.”

  “Nah. They’re a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” Stan retorted.

  Claire giggled, remembering that phrase from an episode of The Simpsons.

  Phil turned to the couch, where Ray and Alan were seated and asked, “What about the RCMP?”

  Alan replied, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Back in the east, the Gendarmerie Royale du Canada—the GRC—are nearly all quislings. Out here, we’re policed by the RCMP’s E Division, which covers all of BC except Vancouver. In E Division they’re mostly good guys, but they have a reputation as rowdies who play by their own set of rules. The bottom line is that I predict that in a few months we’ll be able to divide the RCMP in the western provinces into four categories:

  “Category one will be all the RCMP officers who quit in disgust—but probably citing some fictitious ailment or some family crisis. They’ll dutifully turn in their weapons, body armor, uniforms, and radios, and go home, feeling content that they ‘did the right thing.’ That may be a fairly sizable number. Perhaps forty percent of the force, at least in BC, Alberta, and up in the Yukon.

  “Category two will be your real hard-core guys who wait for the right moment to either: a, abscond with as many weapons and as much body armor, ammo, and assorted gear as possible, and head for the hills and play Maquisards; or b, turn their weapons on the UNPROFOR while still in uniform, timing it so they can take several of the French bastards with them, before they get gunned down. But I think that this category will be very small—and
nearly all of them will be unmarried RCMP officers, maybe one or two percent.

  “Then there’s category three, who will just go along with the program, by kidding themselves that they still represent a legitimate government, even if it means rounding up fellow Canadian citizens and putting them into forced labor. I’m afraid that might be as much as one-third of the force in the cities, and probably a smaller percentage out in the woods. It’s almost always the freedom lovers who ask for the rural assignments.

  “Lastly, there is category four. Those are the cops that are secretly wanting to resist, but who are blocked mentally from doing so, and always finding excuses that ‘it’s too soon,’ or somehow intend to do subtle sabotage to the system, without getting caught. You know, like the old ‘Hitler’s Barber’ comedy shtick.”

  “The what?” Stan asked.

  “An old stand-up comedy routine by Woody Allen, from the 1960s. He played the part of Friedrich Schmeed, barber to Hitler and his general staff. After the war, he justifies his actions, claiming, ‘Oh, but don’t you see that I was always plotting against Der Führer, in my own small way. Once, toward the end of the war, I did contemplate loosening the Führer’s neck-napkin and allowing some tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me.’”

  29

  UN ESSAIM

  Why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanised state system presided over by criminals and drunks?

  —Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), Resistance Leaflet 3, 1942

  The McGregor Ranch, near Anahim Lake, British Columbia—June, the Third Year

  UNPROFOR swarmed into Canada’s western provinces simultaneously from three directions: from British Columbia’s western seaports, by road across the U.S. border, and by road from Ontario. Once they had control of the highways, they took over airports, seaports, and railroads. Because the rioting and looting had been less widespread than in the U.S., and the power grids suffered only limited interruption, reestablishing commerce went fairly quickly. The key ingredients were liquid fuels—gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, and propane—all of which had been disrupted by the Crunch.

  UNPROFOR’s strategy for western Canada could be summed up in the phrase: Control the Roads. Checkpoints, manned by mixed UN and RCMP contingents, were set up on all highways.

  The parliament met in a marathon emergency session in response to the global financial crisis. By means of some back-channel maneuvering and building a fearmongering coalition, the new Canadian Le Gouvernement du Peuple (“People’s Government,” or LGP) took power. They promised to “restore law and order to the streets,” and to “create order and fairness to the markets.” The new prime minister was Pierre Ménard, a strongly pro-UN socialist/collectivist and dyed-in-the-wool statist. Even before trucks began rolling in with foodstuffs, the LGP took advantage of the stable power grid in most of Canada and launched Progressive Voice of Canada (a.k.a Progressive Voix du Canada or PVC), operating on the old CBC transmitters and using their old studios. Annoyingly, more than half of the broadcasts were in French. And even more annoying, the broadcasts were pablum propaganda: promising the world, and sprinkled with charming human interest stories about how the benevolent LGP was making everyone’s lives beautiful. The truly laughable part of PVC was that it featured a lot of the same newscasters and radio show hosts who had been on CBC before the Crunch. Now they were dutifully parroting the LGP party line.

  Alan McGregor said dryly, “Well, before I suspected they were a bunch of Bolsheviks, but now they’ve really come out of the closet, haven’t they?”

  Not to be outdone, Stan said, “The thing about listening to PVC is that it gives me the uncontrollable urge to go dig up my own PVC.” (Stan still had his banned Mini-14 buried in a watertight length of eight-inch-diameter PVC water pipe, beneath his house.)

  The one-dollar bill of the new LGP currency featured a portrait of an obscure 1950s French-Canadian socialist UN delegate with a distinctively round “moon” face. Because the old Canadian one-dollar coins had a picture of a swimming loon, and had been nicknamed the Looney, and then the bimetallic replacement one-dollar coin was nicknamed the Tooney, it was only natural that the new bill would be called the Mooney.

  The citizenry was happy to see some commerce restored, but one of the immediate shocks was that their lifetime savings in the old dollars were now worth a pittance. With the exception of small change and the Looney and Tooney coins, the old dollar lost its full legal-tender status. The old paper dollars could be exchanged at banks for the new bills, but at a one-hundred-to-one ratio. Meanwhile, all deposits in bank accounts had two zeroes lopped off. In the case of the McGregors, their $81,220.52 balance at RBC became an $812. 20 balance. The same thing happened to their Registered Retirement Saving Plan (RRSP)—an account similar to a 401(k) in the United States. The net effect was that they’d had 90 percent or more of their lifetime savings inflated away; and everyone implicitly knew that inflation was a hidden form of taxation. Somehow it was the government-enmeshed bankers, brokers, and bureaucrats who came out of it with a profit and a smile.

  For the average workingman, the new economic order seemed strange. The new “living wage” was set at $1.20 new dollars a day. And while rents and groceries seemed less expensive with the shift of two decimal places under the new currency scheme, their real prices were actually higher. The most painful thing for farmers, ranchers, and commuters was that gasoline and diesel were both “fair market” priced at twenty-two cents per gallon. But when 62 percent of those prices was paying an “Economic Recovery Tax” levied by LGP, then everyone naturally asked, “How truly fair is this market?” Very few people could afford to pay five Moonies for a tank of gas.

  About the only good news for the McGregors was that Alan’s coin collection would now buy a lot of groceries, and that their property tax bill dropped two zeroes. But there was already talk of property reassessments. LGP began sticking its nose into many aspects of life by pegging wages and prices. All land transactions—even within families—had to be approved by a fairness monitor, and it was soon rumored that they didn’t get out their approval rubber stamps until some cash (“le pot de vin”) was slipped to them.

  Private transactions in gold and silver were officially banned. By law, any holders of bullion and miners could sell their refined metals to the government only at the “Free Trade and Fairness Balanced” official prices, which were quite detached from reality. Of course black market gold and silver transactions flourished, despite the government’s threats of fines and lengthy prison sentences.

  The bankers would still accept deposits of the 1962 to 1981 mint date Canadian nickels (which were 99 percent nickel) and both pre-2000 dimes and quarters (which had various compositions of silver and nickel, depending on their vintage) at face value. But nobody was surprised to see that once accepted, hardly any of those older coins were returned to circulation. Somehow, they just “disappeared.” Only the later-issue copper and steel tokenlike coins were recirculating. Alan McGregor could see through this smokescreen, so he held on to all of his pre-2000 coinage. He liked to say, “Gresham’s law can never be repealed.”

  There wasn’t much of it going on in the western provinces, but they heard on the shortwave that European investors were snapping up prime farmland in Ontario for a pittance, using their new euros. The new euro had a fixed exchange rate of 4.5 to 1 to the new Canadian dollar. This made a hectare of Canadian farmland worth only about 20 percent of the price of comparable land in Europe.

  The LGP was clearly either firmly in league with the UN, or an outright puppet government. From their first few days in power, they requested the “temporary assistance” of UN military police and “technical experts.” Not surprisingly, most of these UN troops dispatched to Canada were from France. (There were also smaller contingents from Holland, Chad, and Moroc
co.) The UN troops were under their own command structure, which was dubbed the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Security Assistance Command.

  Along with the LGP’s much-heralded beneficence also came its new bureaucracy. It seemed as if Bloc Québécois had magically staged a coup. Every school that reopened had a French-speaking principal. These were snooty easterners with ubiquitous red maple leaf pins on their lapels and purses, a symbol that was fully co-opted by the new government and the Agenda Nouveau. By decree, all school students in the western provinces had two hours of French instruction daily, in a curriculum with a simplified vocabulary. Their goal was all too transparent: They wanted compliant “worker bees” who understood enough French so that they could understand orders, and a statist mind-set, so that they would accept orders unquestioningly.

  Although news of it emerged slowly, there was a none-too-subtle long-term Francophone transition plan. Starting with the following academic year, all kindergartners would have 100 percent French instruction, and that mandate would advance one year, per year, so that after twelve years, all primary and high school students would gradually transition to French-only instruction. The obvious historical analogue to this mandatory language shift was in Alsace-Lorraine, where successive waves of invasion attempted to mandate public school instruction in German. In the case of western Canada, the shift in language would be more gradual.

  • • •

  Phil made a habit of saving recordings of shortwave broadcasts. To do this, he used an Olympus DS-50 compact digital recorder that he’d bought for his use as a DCS agent. But that had mainly sat unused in his glove box because of the SCIF rules on bringing in personal recording devices. Since the impedance of the radio’s headphone matched that of the recorders’ microphone input, all that he needed to make the recordings was a “male-to-male” ministereo plug cord.