structures, and harass police and military convoys on that road to cause confusion and delay any rescue of Radisson. Ideally, police and military commanders would send an initial force towards Radisson. Will’s units would then trap it on the way to the La Grande by means of demolitions placed on or near the roadway before and behind it, and subject it to harassing fire, causing the police and military to send another force to rescue the first one. Small native units would then simply repeat the tactic, trapping the rescue unit itself on another, more southerly section of the road. Eventually the army’s rescue of Radisson would become a mission to rescue the rescuers: a series of traps sure to draw in ever larger numbers of the troops and helicopters that neither the police nor the Canadian Forces had in abundance.
It was a tactic that had been used with great effect in the Vietnam wars, and Will had studied it carefully. The Viet Minh had used it against the French, and the Viet Cong used it a decade later against the Americans. Will would create for the Canadian Forces their own “street without joy” in the forests of Quebec. Operations of this type required only a few conditions: an isolated target valued by political or military leaders, a single overland route through difficult terrain between the target and the rescue force, and skilled teams of hit-and-run ambush and harassing squads to attack the rescuers from the shadows. The James Bay power complex and single access highway offered the ideal geographic situation, and now the social and military situations were right as well.
As Will drove south through the rough, rocky terrain, he automatically noted useful tactical positions and solved tactical problems, a field soldier’s habit. The land provided many good ambush locations but overall it was far from ideal. Too much of the terrain was bare rock, devoid of useful cover. And while clever camouflage might overcome this disadvantage in static positions, once a unit moved, or was forced to move, it would be almost fully exposed, especially to air attack. Even at night, the army, with its Light Armoured Vehicle III – the LAV III of Afghan fame, capable of all-weather, day and night surveillance – and its helicopters and infantry patrols with night-viewing scopes, would make short work of anyone caught in the open. Yet the surrounding terrain left police and army units little choice but to fight their way along the road. Properly placed demolition of key stretches would hold them up. But harassing fire was also essential, and for that, careful selection of attack sites in this barren country was critical to success.
At around 0920, Will stopped his truck on a small bridge on Highway 109. Stepping out, he walked to the railing, looked over, and checked the structure. An ideal spot for demolition, much harder to repair than a mere hole in the road. But a hard target, he thought, one that would take a lot of explosive or very careful … A smart “thwack” on an adjacent pond startled Will and drew his attention to his unknowing allies, a pair of beavers swimming directly away from the dam they had constructed just upstream from the target bridge. The pond stored hundreds of tons of water. An expertly released, extremely sudden flash flood would sweep this bridge away in moments – the beavers’ revenge on man’s slaughter of their ancestors for hats, and the people’s revenge, using the white man’s dull national symbol.
And Will had his human experts at his disposal too. Experts to handle this dam – and others like it – in the cells he would visit that day, former soldiers and construction workers who were thoroughly familiar with explosives. All along the road to Radisson, bridges meant streams and streams usually meant beavers. In some places they’d have to use less efficient means, but in literally dozens of places, Will’s demo-teams could blow dams before and behind military convoys, washing away bridges and roads, trapping them in both directions. All this havoc with just a few dozen kilos of plastic explosives.
Simply flooding the roadway, without an accompanying firefight or even a smashed bridge, would pose a significant tactical problem for any convoy hurrying along a single road to James Bay. As soon as a couple of vehicles tried to cross a flooded road and fell into craters previously blown then hidden by the water from a destroyed dam, or were blown up on mines hidden in the water, the whole expedition would slow to a crawl. Commanders would begin to call forward engineers to check each flooded section. “Mine fright,” a psychological phenomenon, would cause soldiers to creep slowly forward, fearful that their next step would be their last: expecting to have your balls blown up your ass does that to people, even to the female soldiers of the modern Canadian Forces. Will gazed at the stream as his mind wandered south along the road and forward in time watching his plan unfold.
The sudden approach of a fast truck heading north brought Will sharply back to the present. As it sped across the bridge and down the road, Will noticed the whip antennas that marked it as a police or game warden patrol, probably sent to spy on his journey. Or not. Perhaps he was overly cautious. But this was no time to get careless. He hurried back to his rented truck, stowed his binoculars under the seat, checked his map, and started down the road to his first rendezvous as the dust from the other truck receded in his rear-view mirror.
Will made four stops that day, as far south as the road off the highway to Waskaganish. Each time, he visited cell leaders who were unaware of the others’ instructions or even, supposedly, their identities. In a community like this, though, it wasn’t hard to guess who else was likely to be a committed militant. But it didn’t matter now, so there was no point worrying about it. In any case, his instructions at each stop were the same: “Get your people ready. Watch for a courier who’ll come by with cases of explosives, C4, fuses, detonators, detonating-cord, and small arms and weapons. He’ll know who you are but be ready to be approached. When the courier arrives,” he told each leader, “so will a small team, four or five guys. You take them wherever they want to go. Ask no questions, make no arguments.”
Then he gave each road patrol leader a set of cellphones, codes, and maps. Finally, he gave them all a pep talk and, in case it didn’t take, a veiled threat about what happens to traitors. “Last year a cell leader went over to the other side; they promised protection and money. He didn’t get the protection and his widow didn’t get the money. You know, boys, you can’t trust whitey or the frogs.”
Tuesday, August 31, 0600 hours
Akwesasne First Nations Reserve
Alex too was up early, relieved that his nap had turned out to be a full night’s sleep. They hadn’t summoned him at midnight or some such stunt to keep him off balance. But now someone was banging on the door. “Come on, captain, you’re wanted in the Complex.”
“The Complex” sat within a sprawl of trailers, vans, and makeshift huts, surrounded by a high wire fence – all set aside from the usual band residents and partially hidden on the far eastern section of the St. Regis, the American portion of the Akwesasne Reserve close to the Canada-United States border. The compound provided a secure headquarters and logistical base for the Movement and its leaders.
Akwesasne was a logical base for the Movement, Alex thought, and had obviously been chosen with care. Alex remembered details from an intelligence briefing he had attended during an internal security training exercise. Some 13,000 Mohawks lived in Akwesasne, a huge tract of land on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near Cornwall, Ontario, and about 150 kilometres west of Montreal. The reserve had gained notoriety with both the civil and military authorities because of the numerous illegal activities supposedly given cover by the fact it was, in the report author’s words, a “jurisdictional nightmare.” Straddling the international boundary between Canada and the United States, and governed under laws, agreements, and customs of these nations as well as the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and the state of New York, the reserve was felt by many police and military leaders to be almost lawless. That this territorial maze was all subordinated to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, an elected council of twelve district chiefs and a grand chief, was considered by the report’s author to be a further black mark against it, and another reason why the reserve was deemed the very antithesis of the Canadian ideal of “peace, order, and good government.”
To be fair, Alex had to admit that the governing structure of the reserve was complex.
