James Rawles - Liberators

“Understood.”

Jerry made adjustments to his controls as he spoke, interspersing his description of instrument readings. “There are friendlies scheduled to be waiting. Airspeed seventy, about one-ten AGL. Looking good. If someone drives up with their headlights off, then relax, that’ll be your friendlies. Airspeed fifty-eight, sixty AGL. But if you see headlights, then grab your pack and beat feet for the nearest timber.”

“Okay.”

What happened next was a blur. She felt the plane bounce and then touch down solidly. Jerry pulled back the throttle sharply, and he visibly braced his shoulders back against his seat as he stood on the brake pedals. The plane slowed very rapidly. Even before it came to a full stop, he turned off his landing lights. They were out of their doors quickly and Jerry ran behind the tail and joined Mal, who was already unloading gear. Even idling, the prop wash was strong. It felt like standing in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind. The pile of gear grew rapidly, ten feet to the right of Malorie’s door. Then Jerry shouted, with a wave: “Last one. God bless you!”

Jerry ran around behind the tail again and jumped back in the plane. He throttled the plane up in a roar, executed a tight 180-degree turn, and took off, this time with no landing lights. Suddenly it was quiet, except for a dog barking in the distance. The air felt chilly. Malorie pulled her backpack out of the pile and opened its top flap. She snaked out the carbine and laid it across her knees. After refastening the pack’s top flap, she reached into a cargo pocket of her pants and pulled out a fifteen-round magazine for her carbine. She slapped it in place, gave the magazine a tug to ensure that it was latched, and then chambered a round. The clank of the slide operating seemed uncomfortably loud. She reached down to confirm that the gun’s rotary safety was pointed down to the six-o’clock position. She waited. Only then did she notice that her hands were shaking. A few moments later, Malorie could hear a vehicle approaching. She was relieved to see that its headlights were off.

Malorie was sitting at the kitchen table of a farmhouse. A woman with graying wavy hair and a face ravaged by too many years in the sun sat across from her.

The woman said, “I can get you up there, and I can arrange to smuggle that carbine there, but I don’t think I can necessarily get both you and it there at exactly the same time.”

“Are you worried about checkpoints?”

The woman nodded. “Yes. There’ll be several of them. They don’t ask for ID except for whoever is driving, but they often search vehicles. We’ll have to send that gun and all the ammo, and any other items that might be hard to explain, via the courier network.”

Malorie nodded and her host continued, “It’s ten hours of driving. At the checkpoints, all you have to do is lay on the charm, and chat them up a bit in French. They love to hear anyone out west who speaks fluent French, and they always assume that French speakers are Ménard loyalists. Just don’t overdo it on the charm, or they’ll start thinking of you as a potential date rape.”

“Oh, great.”

The woman glanced at her wristwatch and carried on. “Our cover will be that we are midwives, driving a long distance to attend a twin birth.”

“So how do we carry that off?”

“I really am a midwife, so I can answer all of their questions, and I’ll have all my usual home delivery kit with me. I’ve learned to say in rudimentary French, ‘ Je suis une sage-femme ’ and ‘ Je suis pressé .’ Saying I’m a midwife and that I’m in a hurry usually does the trick.”

“And what if they question me ?”

“You’re an apprentice midwife, so you won’t be expected to know a lot. Right?”

They were stopped at seven checkpoints between Wynndel and Williams Lake, and their car was searched at two of them. At the checkpoint near Kamloops, one of the military policemen mentioned that Malorie’s olive-green Kelty backpack looked “too military.” He began unpacking it, methodically building a pile of clothes from the pack on the trunk lid of the car.

Malorie had stood silently, smiling. She now laughed disarmingly, and asked in perfect French: “And my panties? Do they also look too military?’

The soldier blushed and said, “ Donc, vous parlez français! ”

“Of course. As every good loyalist should.”

The soldier began repacking the clothes, looking embarrassed.

After they had driven well past the roadblock, the midwife began laughing.

Malorie kept giggling for several more minutes.

It was Claire McGregor who was waiting to meet Malorie at the Hudson’s Bay Company store parking lot. Switching Malorie’s pack and dry bag between car trunks took just a minute. The midwife left with a wave.

“How was your drive, Miss LaCroix?”

“Gorgeous scenery. It was just stunning. Lots of elk, and there were bighorn sheep. I’d never seen those in person before.”

“Any problem with the internal security checks?”

She turned to Claire, put on a smile, fluttered her eyelids, and said, “ Pas de problème .”

Claire laughed and replied, “Feminine wiles beat brute force every time.” They talked nonstop all the way to the ranch. Claire reminded Malorie of her aunt Helen. Very soon, Malorie knew that she would feel comfortable at Claire’s ranch house.

Malorie settled in quickly at the McGregor ranch. For her privacy, she displaced Phil from his bedroom and Phil began sleeping on a folding futon on the floor of Ray’s room. Meanwhile, Malorie’s bedroom doubled as the intel analysis and translation office. A boom lamp was set up over the desk, for the days that they ran the generator. On all other days, light was provided by a pair of Aladdin mantle kerosene lamps.

On her first full day at the ranch, Malorie gave Phil a briefing on her recent intelligence analysis experience and described how she had done French technical translation.

Then Phil said, “Rather than fill you in on our operations here, first I have a mental exercise for you. I want you to watch this movie along with Ray and his parents.”

He handed her a DVD of the World War II movie Defiance with Daniel Craig, and said, “You can watch this on our laptop tonight, which we occasionally power from the McGregors’ battery bank. I want you to watch it very carefully. There will be a quiz in the morning.”

“Okay. Can I take notes?”

“No. This is a memory exercise.”

The next morning, he quizzed her in detail, for thirty-five minutes. She thought that she did fairly well in answering his questions. Then he said, “Now what I want you to do is watch the movie again —by yourself, with total concentration . This time I want you to just ignore the story, the music, and the foreground action. You are going to watch for all of the subtleties in the background : colors, shapes, sounds, vehicle types, clothing textures, type of footwear, body language, flora, fauna, cartridge casings, wear and tear on objects, architecture, temporal incongruities, et cetera—everything except what the characters are saying and doing.”