Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

27 LA MAIN DE FER DANS UN GANT DE VELOURS

The two years that followed the onset of the Crunch were fairly quiet. Everyone at the ranch got into a routine and stuck to it. Although there was some bartering with their neighbors, all other commerce essentially stopped. There was no point in wasting fuel to drive all the way to Bella Coola, because the few stores that were open had run out of merchandise and were reduced to bartering used goods, local produce (mostly from greenhouses), and locally caught fish.

After an initial die-off of 12 percent over the first winter, the population of British Columbia stabilized at 3.8 million. Most of the deaths resulted from chronic health conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease, and COPD. The suicide rate also jumped dramatically, as the threat of starvation loomed large for city dwellers. But actual deaths from starvation were fairly uncommon. Most British Columbians were able to revert to a self-sufficient lifestyle.

Greenhouses all over the country were quickly transitioned from growing flowers and decorative plants to growing vegetables. Windows from abandoned buildings were sought after for use in cold frames and greenhouses, as millions of Canadians sought to start gardening “under glass.” Many farmers transitioned from monoculture to vegetable truck farming. Most of this work was labor-intensive, given the shortage of fuel. Refugees from the big cities provided much of the requisite labor, and quasi-feudal systems quickly developed.

The wave of property crimes committed by drug addicts, alcoholics, and the welfare class was manageable by authorities in rural western Canada, as long as the hydro power grid stayed up, so that burglar alarm systems still functioned and radio and phone communications would allow prompt dispatching of police. There was the gnawing fear that fuel and lubricants would run out before transnational commerce was restored. If that happened, then the collapse would become total—just as it had in Quebec and in most of the United States.

The world was a very different place, once the United States collapsed into chaos and its nuclear umbrella was suddenly missing.

The Chinese spent the first few years after the Crunch consolidating their position and gearing up for what would be a sequence of strategic national invasions. After quickly seizing Taiwan, they blockaded Japan, intending to gradually starve it into submission. Meanwhile, they used container ships converted into troop ships to invade Africa, starting with a foothold in Kenya and Tanzania. But first, on the absurd pretext of countering a concocted “terrorist plot,” they used fifteen parachute-deployed medium-altitude neutron bombs in South Africa. These small neutron-optimized fusion bombs were dropped decisively: one on the capital city of Pretoria and almost simultaneous strikes on the key troop garrisons and air bases at Bloemfontein, Thaba Tshwane, Johannesburg, Durban, Kimberley, and Port Elizabeth. Then they followed up with successive neutron bomb strikes on Ladysmith, Langebaanweg, Lohatla, Makhado, Oudtshoorn, Overberg, Pietersburg, and Youngsfield. The PLA planners were so ploddingly methodical that these last eight bombs were dropped in alphabetical order, two per day, over the four following days.

Then, after their landings in east Africa, they began a systematic three-year campaign. This was nothing less than wholesale genocide, sweeping west and south across Africa, with conventional airstrikes, drone strikes, artillery, and massed mechanized infantry. It soon became obvious that they wanted to simply wipe out the inhabitants and that they were only there to plunder Africa’s mineral wealth. The Chinese had brought with them their own miners, truck drivers, and locomotive crews. The sound of approaching Z-10 and Z-19 attack helicopters became dreaded throughout the African continent. Their fleet of drones was also feared. Their Yilong drone was a clone of the U.S. Predator UAV and the Xianglong was a clone of the U.S. Global Hawk.

Meanwhile, Indonesia took over Malaysia in an anschluss, and then proceeded to invade East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and northern Australia. There were many other wars that ignited globally, as long-held grudges and turf battles erupted, once Uncle Sam was no longer able to intervene.

While the eastern seaboard was still in the throes of a devastating influenza pandemic that caused huge loss of life, Dustin Hodges was called to the scene of a car fire and apparent homicide on Mannsville Road. Inside a torched 2009 Mercedes E350 sedan with no license plates, they found the charred remains of a man. By his dental work he appeared to be at least forty years old, and possibly as old as sixty. He wore eyeglasses. He could have been shot, but with the body so badly burned, it was hard to tell. (There were no bones with bullet marks, but most of the rib cage had been burned away, so it was hard to determine.) Inside the car, the only useful evidence he could find was an XD-40 pistol magazine near the body.

Outside the car, there were wrappers and other signs that several assorted boxes of food had been repackaged and hauled away. There was also a large footlocker containing more than two thousand driver’s licenses and passports. Most of these were for Atlanta, Georgia, residents, although there were seventeen other states represented, as well as a few foreign passports. The majority of the IDs belonged to either college-age or elderly people. The coroner told Dustin that this would be consistent with influenza victims, since the highest number of deaths would be either in old people with weakened immune systems, or in young people who had suffered cytokine storm over-reactions to the flu.

Dustin concluded that the driver was most likely a medical professional from Georgia who was driving west for some unknown reason and either ran out of fuel or had engine trouble, and then was waylaid by local bandits. Why he would be carrying such a large collection of IDs was a mystery.

With no communications available, and Atlanta in ashes, this case was baffling. The trunk was eventually dubbed “The Jonestown Footlocker” by the county sheriff, who remembered news accounts of a trunk filled with nine hundred passports, following the Jonestown, Guyana, murder and mass suicide incident in 1978. The trunk was placed in the Bradfordsville evidence room and largely forgotten.

Resistance to the provisional government grew slowly. At first, people were just happy to hear that grid power would be restored to Kentucky and southern Ohio, and that refineries would soon be operating. Then people started hearing stories of widespread corruption, incompetence, wholesale larceny, rapes, and other acts of savagery by out-of-control foreign “guest” troops. There were also dozens of cases of people who went “missing” in the dark of night.

Dustin, Joshua, Megan, and Malorie started to make plans for resistance in the region even before the decrees banning most firearms were issued by the ProvGov. Since Bradfordsville was relatively close to Fort Knox, they realized that they would have to be very cautious. They thought that covert sabotage would be the most effective use of their time, with only moderate risk.

Joshua started out by building a hidden compartment in his rental house to hold all of their guns and ammunition. This wall cache was put in the plumbing wall between the kitchen and bathroom, so that anyone searching with a metal detector would assume that it was plumbing pipes that were causing false returns. Then he helped Dustin build a similar cache in his house.

Realizing that their former positions with the NSA might give them a high profile with the ProvGov’s nascent Gestapo, Megan and Joshua asked Dustin if he could somehow help them create fake IDs. Dustin spent several evenings looking through the mysterious Jonestown Footlocker. He ended up finding three Georgia driver’s licenses that were good facial matches for Megan, Malorie, and Joshua. Megan would be Stacy Titus, age twenty-five; Malorie would be Carrie Lynn Peters, age twenty-three, and Joshua would be Joseph Kwok, age twenty-four. (Joshua thought this was ideal, since Kwok was a fairly common surname in both Korea and China.)

The ages on the false IDs were all too young, the body weights were all too high, and the eye color for Megan and the hair color for Malorie were both mismatches. But since the twenty-first century was the era of rapidly changing weight and hair color, and tinted contact lenses, those discrepancies could all be explained away.

In the same search, Dustin also found an ID that would be a good match for himself, if he grew a beard. The crucial thing was facial features, and for those, he had found quite good matches. As long as they memorized the details on their fake driver’s licenses, they could get past at least cursory ID checks, such as roadblocks.

Because the IDs in the footlocker had never been cataloged, it would not be noticed that the four driver’s licenses were missing. Since they were already known in Bradfordsville by their real names, Dustin suggested that they keep their false IDs hidden, just in case of any contingency.

Soon after the French arrived in each province, a decree went out that banned most firearms. Western Canada felt the impact of the Ottawa government’s edicts much later than the eastern provinces. In their first few guns raids in Vancouver and Fort St. John, the RCMP took six officer casualties and netted just eight guns. So the RCMP suspended any future raids in British Columbia “for fear of officer safety.”

The RCMP’s failure to enforce the UN’s gun ban made the UNPROFOR commanders furious. Despite some threats and posturing, they did nothing. They recognized that they needed the cooperation of the RCMP to successfully occupy western Canada, and that cooperation was marginal, at best. Although they had access to the same gun registration records, UNPROFOR didn’t even attempt to go door-to-door, searching for guns. They preferred to make proclamations and to send out notices. These public notices threatened the citizenry with long prison sentences, deportation, and even the death penalty for noncompliance.

The Canadian government had attempted to create a universal long-gun registry when the Firearms Act became law on December 5, 1995. However, it took until 1998 to develop a system to issue licenses and require buyers to register long guns. As originally enacted, by 2001 all gun owners were required to have a license and, by 2003, to register all of their rifles and shotguns. But there was massive noncompliance and loud complaints, especially in the western provinces.

The registry’s database had some huge flaws. The consensus was that the registry was unworkable, that it had no impact on crime, and that it was outrageously expensive. (The administrative costs were estimated at $2.7 billion in 2012.) With the passage of bill C-19 in 2012 the registration scheme was abandoned, and the registry records were destroyed. So even if UNPROFOR was willing to take the casualties, they still would not have known where to find all of the guns in Canada.

The UNPROFOR occupation smothered every aspect of life in Canada. Most public meetings were banned. Any public protests were quickly broken up, and the leaders jailed. Freedom of speech and press were history. Government censors were in every newsroom. Amateur, CB, and marine band radios had to be turned in to the authorities. (After a public outcry, the marine band radio confiscation was almost immediately rescinded, for the safety of saltwater fishermen and crabbers.) While some dutifully turned in their radios, many of those turned in were nonfunctional transceivers with burned-out finals or other electronic problems, or they were earlier-generation spares. Nearly everyone retained their good gear but kept it hidden.

UNPROFOR had underestimated the growing resistance, characterizing the resisters as “bandits,” “a few scattered anti-Francophone malcontents.” They also misread the mood of the populace in western Canada. The citizens at first appeared happy to see “help from France” with the arrival of fuel tankers by road in Kamloops and by sea in Vancouver. But when infantry troop ships arrived at Vancouver and Prince Rupert, passive resistance began almost immediately. The French tried to use le gant de velours (“the velvet glove”) approach at first, to cast themselves as the Nice Guys. But the passive resistance grew and soon morphed from vehicle sabotage to sniping.

UNPROFOR was slow to react, but when it eventually did, it came down with a fist of iron. Many of the French counterinsurgency tactics dated back to their experience in Algeria in the 1950s. As resistance grew, the French tactics became more brutal, with torture of prisoners becoming commonplace. Once the serious shooting started, the velvet glove was removed from the iron fist.

The French army had been freshly emboldened by massacring illegal aliens protesting in France, with impunity. Their Foreign Legion troops were used primarily to police Quebec, while the French-born soldiers were used in the other provinces, where English was the predominant language. These deployments both fit in with the UN’s strategy of using unsympathetic troops to quell local uprisings.