James Rawles - Liberators

For weapons, Rhiannon had a AUS-Steyr bullpup, a capable little rifle, but it used proprietary magazines that didn’t interchange with M16 magazines. However, Rhiannon had eleven spares (a mix of thirty- and forty-two-round), so she didn’t consider that a big drawback. Meanwhile, Peter had a captured Indonesian Pindad rifle, which was a clone of the FN FNC. It used standard NATO M16 magazines. When Jake asked Peter where he’d gotten the unusual weapon, Peter said, “I got it from an Indonesian soldier who had no further use for it.”

Jake would carry an LAR-8 variant of the AR-10 with nine twenty-round steel FN/FAL magazines. The Rock River Arms LAR-8 was designed to accept either FN/FAL magazines or L1A1 magazines. Jake and Janelle both carried SIG P250 pistols chambered in .45 automatic. (Hers had originally been a .40 S&W, but they were able to find a factory conversion caliber exchange kit and some extra .45 ACP magazines.)

For body armor, Peter had a set of the excellent Australian Army–issue Tiered Body Armor System. The TBAS was the equivalent of a Level IV vest in the civilian world. Jake had Level IIIA concealment body armor, and Janelle had Level II. It took some searching, but they also found a Level III vest for Rhiannon. Ironically, that vest was priced lower than a less-capable Level II vest being sold by the same store, but because of Florida’s hot and humid climate, thicker vests did not sell well after the UNPROFOR withdrawal.

Although U.S. ammunition makers were getting back into production, there were still chronic shortages of many varieties of pistol cartridges, as well as several rifle calibers.

They gathered what they could, following the NLR’s published list of ammunition needs.

Janelle also found fourteen boxes of .243 Winchester, intended for her mother’s deer rifle.

From three resistance veterans in Florida, they received donations of 144 electric blasting caps, twenty-seven kilos of German C4 in three-kilo blocks, two square yards of DuPont Detasheet in twelve-by-thirty-six-inch rolls, and two hundred meters of detonating cord.

Rob’s plane was kept in top condition by the Smith Brothers A&P mechanic. The only changes needed before the trip were temporarily removing some seats and taping over the Unites States N-prefix registration markings, making the plane “quasi-sterile.”

Their flight to Washington, completed in stages, was exhausting. After the initial thrill of lifting off the lake in Tavares, they were faced with two and a half days of flying across the country in a plane that, despite its fancy padded leather seats, was still cramped and noisy and lacked a bathroom. After two layovers at motels near small-town FBO airports, they were happy to arrive on the Olympic Peninsula.

Once they were in Port Angeles, they still had to disable the plane’s transponder and remove the plane’s emergency locator transmitter (ELT) radio. They also had to pick up another eighty pounds of batteries and night vision gear that, by previous arrangement, had been couriered from Spokane, Washington. One unexpected addition to this supplementary gear was a pair of PF-89s, the Chinese 80mm equivalent of the U.S. LAW rocket. Jake suspected that “the gnomes of Langley” had quietly supplied them. Because they were Chinese made, they were considered “sterile” and deniable for their upcoming foray into occupied Canada. The addition of these eight-and-a-half-pound rocket launchers meant that Rob had to rerun his weight and balance calculations. To compensate for the extra weight, Rob asked everyone to empty his canteens and hydration packs. This left just a few small bottles of apple juice for them to sip on the final leg of their flight to Sigutlat Lake.

They rested—or tried to rest—for nearly twenty-four hours at the home of a former resistance leader in Port Angeles. The tension was high. Since they were just past the summer solstice, there was more than thirteen hours of daylight at this latitude. Because he would be skimming the water during the first part of the flight, Rob wanted to take off while it was still daylight so that he’d have the best depth perception.

As Rob had explained before, they had two potential flight profiles for their infiltration: The first would be to fly very low in ground effect over the ocean and then fly nap-of-the-earth over land. The second would be to fly normally and attempt to blend in with Chinese-occupation cargo flights. Rob ruled out the first option because it would consume too much fuel. They settled on a combination of both plans: They would skim over the water while in U.S. airspace, but then once they passed over Vancouver Island, they would pop up and fly at sixteen thousand feet and do their best to look “normal” to Chinese ground controllers, except for their lack of an active transponder.

They took off at 9:35 P.M., and Rob immediately settled the plane into ground-effect flying. The water seemed very close. Janelle estimated that the plane’s floats were just fifteen to twenty feet above the choppy water. They were so low that Rob had to swerve around some fishing boats. This seemed harrowing to his passengers, but Rob laughed about it. The sun was setting over Peter’s left shoulder. The others heard him praying aloud. They reached Vancouver Island at dusk. Their landfall was just east of Sooke Lake. Rob pulled up to just above treetop level, and he skirted above the trees for a few minutes. “They tell me that if you do this right, your tires touch treetops so often that they never stop spinning,” Rob joked. In actuality, they were between thirty and fifty feet above the treetops, but they still seemed unnervingly close. He dipped the plane even lower, nearly touching the surface of Sooke Lake. It was now nearly dark.

Rob pulled back on the yoke sharply, emulating the profile of a takeoff from the lake. He then dialed in the autopilot to take them on a heading directly toward Campbell River, with a steady climb to 15,500 feet. Although the plane’s cruising ceiling was actually 20,000 feet, he chose this altitude because it was often used by the three Harbin ShuiHong-5 maritime patrol and utility planes that their intelligence contacts told them were deployed in British Columbia. (These aging planes used this reduced ceiling because their cabin pressurizing systems often failed.)

The rest of their flight would be in darkness, relying on instruments. As they neared Campbell River, Rob descended and turned northwest, following the profile of a routine landing at the Campbell River Airport. Instead of staying on course, he descended farther to just two hundred feet above the Campbell River Marina. Then he turned sharply east and climbed over Cape Mudge to again confuse radar intercept and ground-control operators into thinking that this was now a different plane. He pulled up into a gradual climb and set a heading northeast toward Williams Lake. Then, over Clendinning Provincial Park, he descended below the eight-thousand-foot peaks and turned due north up a broad valley. Once they reached the north end of the valley, Rob said, “From here on we should be outside of Chinese radar coverage, until we get closer to Williams Lake, where I’ve been told they now have an ATC radar, but no air defense artillery or surface-to-air missiles. Of course, if that intel is wrong , then we’ll be the first to find out.”