Sergeant Christmas came out of the darkness. “Fine night, sir. A guy should be getting home to the old lady, don’t you think?”
Alex smiled. Who’s encouraging who now? “Yeah, piece of cake.”
“Reorg?”
“Yeah, Steve, I told the section leaders to pull their people together just past the intersection and then we’ll force march them down the hill and across the plain. I’ll call Annie in a few minutes and get the boats moving. I think we can trust Villeneuve and Patty to bring up the rear after we pass the intersection. You get ahead and mark the beach. Give us a quick light if necessary and guide us to the boats. Let’s make it a smooth move into the boats and off the beach.”
“Got it. See you on the beach, sir.”
After stopping and sorting themselves out, the patrol was looser. Alex was relieved to find that they hadn’t lost anyone or apparently any gear. But this was no time to relax. He’d seen this a hundred times, even with trained soldiers: once you got past the critical point, a little rest, a bit of adrenaline come-down, and the giggles and joking start. It’s a dangerous mood. Alex had to use their confidence to cover the next few kilometres quickly, without letting it cause carelessness. He knew Christmas had picked up on the mood too and could hear the sergeant encouraging and admonishing the troops in the same sentence as he moved down the line to get forward.
“Morrison,” Christmas stage-whispered for everyone to hear, “if I see you drop Her Majesty’s ammunition again, I’ll call your mom to come and carry it for you. You’re an idle crow, Morrison.”
“Actually, I’m Cree, sergeant.”
“You’re a no good smart ass! Get your gear sorted out!”
The others snickered at the exchange, partly glad not to be the butt of the sergeant’s feigned wrath, but partly disappointed too. Thank God, Alex thought to himself, I have Steve Christmas as my second-in-command.
Alex saw the mood improve as if high morale were wafting through the air from one warrior to the next. Without any direction from him, they picked up the pace, improved their spacing, and started encouraging one another. Comments like, “Okay, let do it”; “Let’s go, guys”; and “Beat you to the boats” replaced the furtive “Let’s get away” of only minutes before.
And there was still no response from the base. Alex got a familiar sweet feeling of a mission coming to a successful close as he joined the dog-trotting warriors moving in good order down the hill towards the river. Pulling out his cellphone, he called Annie and gave her the code phrase to bring in the boats. “Hi, sweetheart, we will be home in about fifteen minutes. Can you open the doors to the barn?”
“Sure thing, I was getting worried, it’s late. So you drive carefully. Bye.”
As the patrol crossed Passchendaele Road, Alex saw Steve Christmas’s light flashes marking the place on the beach, about a hundred metres to the west of the original landing point, where the boats were waiting for them. Christmas waited, counting his charges through to the beach. The rear guard came in a bit off course, but in good order.
Alex joined his sergeant, just as young Villeneuve came up. “Everyone clear from the road, Villeneuve? Anything left behind?”
“No, sergeant. Nobody we could see, but somebody dropped this ammo belt on the road.”
“Okay. Good job both of you – get to the boats.”
Alex watched as the warriors loaded the little craft. Quiet more from fatigue and ebbing excitement than self-discipline. It didn’t matter. It was not a perfect patrol; he was sure that small bits of kit were back on the road and would eventually lead investigators to piece the plan together. But as he walked to the last boat, he wasn’t worried; he felt sure he would never come this way again. His kids had done well and would have stories to tell. He walked proudly with Christmas to the water’s edge.
Annie was all business and ordered Alex into the boat. Everyone else had done their job and could relax; she’d been waiting and biting her nails the whole time, and now it was her turn to get it done. She rallied the other helmsmen into line, the engines revved in unison, and they headed at full throttle towards the far shore and safety.
Alex glanced across the river to Quebec and the red dawn rising up from behind the eastern hills. “Red sky in the morning,” he thought to himself. “Now there’s a menacing sign.”
“Everything okay, Alex?” Annie asked.
His face lit up. “Sure, Annie. Almost perfect.”
Annie smiled broadly and couldn’t resist a sudden impulse to reach out and squeeze his hand. She felt so proud to be with him, and proud also to be one of the warriors who’d really struck a blow for their long-suffering people.
DAY 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
