44 TAKING OUT THE TRASH

I believe that being despised by the despicable is as good as being admired by the admirable.

—Kurt Hoffman, in his Armed & Safe blog

Williams Lake, British Columbia—April, the Sixth Year

Terrence Billy was an enrolled member of the Secwepemc. He had been born into the T’exelc band and held a band card. He grew up on the Soda Creek Reserve near Williams Lake. He liked his job with the Central Cariboo Landfill. The job was a paid thirty-two hours a week (plus some overtime in snowy weather), had benefits, and wasn’t stressful. Four days of each week he drove the truck on regular routes. When the Crunch came, he was “made redundant,” but he had expected that. Not only was the money inflated horribly, but everyone expected diesel fuel to become scarce. Just before he was laid off, all of the litter cans, household rolling trash bins (called “Schaefer Carts” in most of British Columbia), and Dumpsters were collected, hauled to the transfer station, and stored in neat rows. It was announced that the old landfill off Frizzi Road would be available for use, but that all families and businesses would have to haul their own trash. Rather than using precious fuel to haul it, most of the locals started burning their trash in rusty open-topped fifty-five-gallon steel drums.

After his layoff, Terrence got by with hunting, fishing, and gathering bitterroot, cattail root, Siberian miner’s lettuce, bilberries, and huckleberries. He traded the extra meat and hucks for other things he needed, such as salt and soap. He slipped into the Old Way fairly comfortably.

When the French arrived, they brought with them the new money and a steady stream of fuel tankers. The oil was produced north of Edmonton and refined on Refinery Row, east of Edmonton. The fuel and new “blue back” currency got the economy going again. Within just a few days after the gas and diesel tankers began runs to the coast, Terrence Billy got his old job back. But now it was just twenty hours a week and had no health benefits.

Like many others, he had a deep resentment of UNPROFOR, because he’d heard how they were treating some First Nations girls, turning them into sex slaves and keeping them locked up. One of those girls, his seventeen-year-old cousin named Katie, was kidnapped out of his own band. He heard that she and the others were being held in a hotel that had been converted into a brothel-prison. The former hotel was euphemistically called a centre d’interrogation. Terrence was also angry that public gatherings had been banned, which meant that there would be no more Secwepemc gatherings. He considered the UN’s ban an affront to his culture.

UNPROFOR soon took over the Williams Lake campus of Thompson Rivers University (TRU) on Western Avenue to use as their regional headquarters. This base covered the administrative region that stretched from the 100 Mile House to the south, Quesnel to the north, and Bella Coola to the west. The main building of the junior college—a brick structure with a graceful arched front and five pillars—had been completed in 2007. Because of the cold climate, nearly all of the college functions were integrated into that one building, with a gymnasium at the west end; offices, classrooms, labs, and a library in the center; and a cafeteria, computer lab, and trades class shops in the east end. Because it was a commuter campus, there were no dormitories.

Once the French army took over the TRU campus, there was a lot more garbage to haul. Several of the classrooms were converted into barracks rooms, and some of the faculty offices became bedrooms for officers. The cafeteria got a pair of large cooking ranges, and there were several new refrigerators and freezers installed. These appliances had been torn out of the Culinary Arts building at the TRU Kamloops campus. Trash pickups were scheduled for Tuesdays and Fridays instead of just once a week, and there were now four Dumpsters instead of two.

Terrence’s brother, John, was a fishing buddy of Stan Leaman. Before the Crunch, they often fished the Upper Dean River together. They were happy to get together and just fish with traditional spin-casting gear—without all the fancy equipment and snootiness of the local fly fishermen. Stan liked the Secwepemc (also known as the Shuswap) people. They were honest and unpretentious. And a lot of them, like John, were great fishermen and hunters.

When John and Stan were doing some ice fishing on Anahim Lake in early February, John mentioned to Stan that Terrence was looking for a way to get even with the French. So while denying any involvement of his own, Stan very discreetly replied that he had a friend who was with the resistance who was “a privacy freak,” and that he would be willing to meet Terrence only if he could wear a mask to the meeting. Through John, Stan scheduled a meeting with Terrence the following Saturday near Chilanko Forks, at a trailhead.

• • •

The trailhead was less than a quarter mile from the Chilanko Forks General Store. When Terrence arrived at the trail junction, he was fifteen minutes early. He sat down on a large cedar stump and rolled a cigarette. Just as he was about to light it, he heard a voice from close behind him. “State your name.”

Startled, Terrence jumped up and turned around. He said, “I’m Terrence. Are you the guy?”

A voice that seemed quite close answered, “Yes, I’m the man you’re supposed to meet.”

Terrence Billy was confused because he couldn’t determine where the voice was coming from. Then the bush fifteen feet in front of him started to move.

Ray McGregor emerged. He was wearing a shredded burlap ghillie suit, which he had borrowed from Phil.

Terrence laughed and said, “I guess I should call you ‘Mr. Tree.’”

“That name will work just fine, sir.”

As he walked forward, Ray said, “Weyt-k,” the Secwepemc word for hello.

Weyt-k,” Terrence echoed back.

They now stood just two paces apart. Terrence couldn’t see Ray’s face through the ghillie suit’s green-mottled face net. Ray said, “I’m not of the First Nations. In fact I’m of Scots-Irish extraction, but I have respect for your people. I understand that you don’t like the French and their evil deeds.”

“You understand correctly. Fact is, you could say that I hate their guts. I want to make war on them.”

“I heard about your cousin Katie. The UNPROFOR soldiers are world-class sicko bastards.”

After a pause, Ray asked, “Are you willing to use a dump truck to deliver an explosive device somewhere? You’d set a timer and walk away.”

“Skookum. Sign me up.”

“Now, wait. You have to realize that this will be a very big device, so there could be collateral damage, and that after you do this, you definitely won’t be able to show your face in town. You may have to hide out for years, or perhaps go into exile down in the States. So do you have someplace to go, and a good network with your band that can keep you supplied?”

“Yeah. My uncle has a cabin way back in the woods, outside of Dugan Lake, that he lets me use. It’s a ‘hike-in’ cabin. You take a trail in off Horsefly Road. That cabin was grandfather-claused when the provincial forest service got set up. But a few years back, they made my uncle mad when they told him that he couldn’t build a road to it. They had a hearing at the Forest Headquarters office. He told them, ‘I’m an old man and getting crippled, and you tell me I can’t build a road to my own cabin. You are disgraceful persons.’ Anyway, he promised me the cabin after he dies. I can stay there, and I have lots of cousins that can bring me grub.”

“Then I guess we can work together. But you are never to know my name—except as ‘Mr. Tree’—or see my face.”

Terrence laughed again, and said, “You NLR guys sure have a flair for drama.”

Ray snorted and said, “Pardon my elaborate precautions. Oh, and by the way, you can call yourself NLR now, too. We are the resistance.”

• • •

The truck was a 2012 Peterbilt New Way front-end loader Dumpster rig, with a forty-yard capacity. It was painted white with Central Cariboo logos on the sides. It had a Cummins 320 horsepower engine and a hauling capacity of fifteen tons, with a twenty-ton front axle and forty-six-ton tandem rear axles. The Mammoth brand front-end loader had been factory installed. Since the truck was fairly new, the forks were the only part of the truck that looked rusty and well-worn.

To gain the use of the truck, all that Terrence had to do was loosen a hydraulic line coupling slightly, just before he finished his route on Friday. The tremendous pressure generated by the hydraulic pump quickly made a mess of that side of the truck, spraying red hydraulic fluid around copiously behind the cab. When he got back to the transfer station, Terrence pointed to the truck and told his manager: “We got a leaky hose, just like the off truck used to get. I can drop it off at Haynes Machinery tonight, and they’ll have someone drop me back here so I can get my car. They can fabricate a new hose for it since they’re open on Saturdays. Do we have an account with them?”

“Yeah, we’ve got an open account,” his manager replied.

Terrence gave an exaggerated nod. “Okay, no sweat, boss. I’ll handle everything and head out from their shop directly to my route on Monday morning. And don’t worry, I won’t try to log overtime.”

His manager snorted. “What overtime? The UN contract says no overtime will be paid, period.”

Terrence parked the truck at a prearranged position, a quarter mile short of Haynes Machinery, and left the key under the floor mat. Before he walked away, he used a wrench to retighten the loose hydraulic line.

The truck never went to Haynes Machinery. Instead, at eleven o’clock that night, wearing a ski mask, Phil Adams climbed into the truck and drove it to a large shop with an RV door near the end of Western Avenue. The property had been abandoned after the owners had driven their diesel pusher RV to Montana, just as the Crunch began. Once the truck had been backed into the cavernous shop, they rolled down the door and got to work.

The explosives had been stockpiled in the shop for several months. They were stacked on pallets and covered with tarps. Packing the truck with explosives took Phil, Ray, and Stan nearly twenty-one hours, in three successive seven-hour sessions, over the course of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Stan did most of the positioning of the explosives, while Phil and Ray used a pair of dollies and a large Radio Flyer child’s wagon for the many trips back and forth from the explosives pile. Nearly every item got a wrap of PETN detonating cord to ensure that they’d all explode simultaneously. They included every explosive that they could find: hundreds of recovered land mines (with their detonators removed), some mining gelignite, as well as a few dud French artillery shells, which were handled very gingerly and wedged in nose-upward. By the end of the third night, Stan’s back was going into spasm.

In all, they estimated that there was ten tons on board, and even after deducting the weight of the artillery shell casings and land mine housings, there were at least eight tons of various high explosives.

• • •

At 10:15 on Monday morning, Terrence drove the Central Cariboo Dumpster truck to the front gate of the UN headquarters building, right on schedule. The gate guard recognized both the truck and Terrence’s face and waved him through.

One Dumpster was located at a door on the north side of the building, just east of the round Gathering Place Building, which after the UN took over the campus became jokingly known by the French as the Sex and Drugs Building. This Dumpster was near the auto shop. The nearest door was marked: DOOR 5.5 (SHOP). Two other Dumpsters were located at the southeast corner of the building near Door 7. But unlike those, Door 5.5 was outside the field of vision of the gate guards.

Terrence simply backed the truck up to Door 5.5 alongside the Dumpster, using the truck’s rearview camera to get the truck within a foot of the overhang. Leaving the engine running, he pulled the fuse igniter and then immediately hopped out of the cab and reached back in to jab the joystick to make it sound as if the truck was lifting a Dumpster, as usual. He ran in a sprint to the north fence. A dozen snips with a small pair of bolt cutters made a gap in the rear fence big enough for him to slip through. In his haste, he tore the shoulder of his jacket. Terrence was soon up and running.

The senior gate guard—a caporal with four years of service—grew impatient. He wondered why the garbage truck had not returned to the front of the building to empty the other two Dumpsters. He muttered, “Où êtes-vous, Macaca?”

Macaca was an epithet originally used by the French colonials to disparage the natives in the Congo, but more recently it had been applied to the aboriginals in Canada. The guard surmised that the driver was smoking a cigarette. He picked up his radio handset and hesitated. Finally, he pressed the handset’s talk bar and hailed the security office in the building.

At that moment a massive explosion leveled the building, leaving just one part of the west wall standing. A sixteen-foot-deep crater marked the spot where the dump truck had been parked. The adjoining round Gathering Place Building was also destroyed. Because that building was partially earth-bermed, it left a large circular crater next to the smaller, oval bomb-blast crater. The explosion killed everyone in both buildings. It also seriously injured the gate guards and ruptured their eardrums.

The shock wave from the explosion threw Terrence off balance and made him stumble to his knees, even though he was more than 450 yards away. Looking back, he could see that the explosion was sending fragments in all directions, and it had raised a huge reddish cloud of smoke and dust. The red hue of the dust had been created by pulverized bricks. The blast wave shattered house windows in a quarter-mile radius and set off car alarms even farther out. The sound of the explosion was heard as far away as the hamlet of Riske Creek.

Terrence regained his footing and began running. It sounded as if every dog in town was barking or howling. Nearby, he heard emergency service vehicle sirens wailing. He started to sing an old Salish fight chant as he ran. His getaway vehicle was his rusting old Ford Escort, now outfitted with stolen license plates. It was parked a kilometer away at the junction of Highway 97 and Dixon Road.

Terrence quickly got on the highway and past the reservation to make the turn to Dugan Lake before any new roadblocks were set up. A woman from his band was waiting right where she promised she would be. As she got in the car, she exclaimed, “Wow, I could hear that ka-boom from here! Was that really all the way down at the TRU campus?”

Terrence nodded and said with a laugh, “Yep. Big explosion!”

Ten minutes later, he stopped three hundred meters short of the trail to his uncle’s cabin and pulled his backpack and a duffel bag out of the trunk of the car. He handed the middle-aged woman the car key.

Terrence said, “Take bad care of my car for me, okay?”

“Okay. Pútucw!” (Good-bye.)

• • •

The scene around the headquarters was chaotic. Aside from the gate guards, the firefighters didn’t find any survivors, only bodies in the rubble. And close to the north door, where the truck had exploded, they found only parts of bodies. The unofficial casualty count was 207, but it was eventually arrived at by taking the full unit rosters and deducting the number of soldiers and airmen who were at the airport or at outlying posts. Among the dead were the French brigade commander and his entire staff.

In the following five days, UNPROFOR patrols and checkpoints began hand swabbing anyone they contacted. Anyone who tested positive for explosives—and false positives were commonplace—was subjected to arrest and lengthy interrogation. It was already well established that false positives were created by soaps and hand lotions containing glycerin. Traces of fertilizer and cleaning products also gave false positives for nitrates. Two elderly residents who took nitroglycerin pills for angina also had their hands test positive. There were summary executions of five men, all aboriginal, who were suspected of conspiracy in the bombing. Two of these men had failed hand-swab tests. Only one of them was a close friend of Terrence, and none of them had anything to do with the bombing.

Terrence later learned that his small house on Proctor Street had been searched very thoroughly by a composite team of RCMP and UNPROFOR officers. They even removed many Sheetrock wall panels. The yard was scanned with a metal detector and dug up in several places, but the investigators found nothing. The UNPROFOR officer in charge then ordered the house burned. Since it was a rental, Terrence’s landlord was not pleased.

Two weeks later, Terrence sent identical handwritten letters via courier to the editors of both the Kamloops and Prince George newspapers (there was no longer a newspaper published in Williams Lake). The letters read:

Dear Editor:

By now, you’ve heard that I drove the truck that carried the load of explosives to the UN HQ at the TRU Campus. Yes, I done it. I am not ashamed of what I done. Those basterds deserved it. We blew them up with their own land-mines and artilary shells. Serves them right! They are rapists, thiefs, and murderers.

But I do want to say that I am sorry for all the broken windows and the upset dogs, in town. (I hear they barked for two days.)

Most Sincerely,

Terrence Billy, Of The Secwepemc People

UNPROFOR’s censors refused to let the letters be published.

• • •

Terrence Billy was killed in a gunfight with an UNPROFOR patrol two months later, in which Terrence killed two French soldiers and wounded two others. Ironically, they never identified his body, even though he had been the prime suspect in the bombing and his photograph had been circulated widely. Following the gunfight, his body was intentionally burned in a house on Stanchfield Road near the hamlet of Miocene.

The French often found it easier for their troops to burn buildings than to haul bodies. So they systematically burned any house from which “bandit” gunfire had originated. This sent a strong message to the locals. In Fort St. James, resistance was so strong that the French army massacred more than five hundred mostly unarmed people (of a population of seventeen hundred) and burned every building in the town. Years later, when he eventually went on trial, the brigade commander lamented, “That was our Philippeville,” referring to a dark day in Algerian history.

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