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.
