A significant part of the resistance war was a war of words. Individual NLR cells produced and distributed pamphlets on sabotage and resistance warfare. Among the most popular were a digest of the book Total Resistance by von Dach, and reprints of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which had been declassified in 2008.

Through its publications, NLR also sought aid from sympathizers in Canada and the United States. Its most urgent needs were electric blasting caps, detonating cord (also known as det cord or Primacord), and rifle ammunition. Some of its specific requests for ammunition seemed odd or antiquated to residents of the United States, but these cartridges were still used regularly in Canada: .303 British, .300 Savage, .250-3000 Savage, .303 Savage, and .280 Ross.

31

STEEL SHIPS AND IRON MEN

Military analysts pretty much agree Japan lost the war in the Pacific because they were playing chess while we were playing checkers. Overthinking all but guarantees failure. Engineers will tell you complexity increases as the square of the subsystems involved, or near enough, something survivalists should keep in mind when they attempt to replicate their ‘normal’ life. And no, being a nice, deserving person with good intentions won’t make failure modes go away.

—Ol’ Remus, The Woodpile Report

Vancouver, British Columbia—July, the Third Year

On July 7, the Kingsway resistance cell received an intelligence report that was marked “SAM Sensitive.” These messages had sources and methods (SAMs) that if revealed could do great harm, for example, endangering the life of a confidential informant.

Their informant’s report gave them details on the upcoming arrival of two French cargo ships operated by La Compagnie Maritime Nantaise (MN). The MN Toucan and MN Colibri were sister ships, with a gross weight of more than nineteen hundred tons each. These were commercial roll-on-roll-off (RO-RO) vessels, specifically designed for transporting vehicles. The ships had loaded at the HAROPA terminal at Le Havre fifteen weeks earlier and had transited the Panama Canal. They were both laden with a mixed cargo of twenty-five-ton véhicule blindé de combat d’infanterie (VBCI) wheeled APCs, fourteen-ton véhicule de l’avant blindé (VAVB or armored vanguard vehicle), and an assortment of military cargo trucks and Renault Sherpa 2 utility vehicles—the French equivalent of the U.S. military Humvee. Based on the recent experience of the resistance in Canada’s eastern provinces, the VBCI “armored vehicle for infantry combat” was considered a key threat.

The two ships were standing in 170 feet of water in the Burke Channel, just a few miles from the port of Bella Coola. This inlet had been glacially carved during the Ice Age. Much like the fjords of Norway, Bella Coola Bay was surprisingly deep. Only the magnitude of its daily tides and its rough outer waters kept it from becoming a more significant seaport.

The ships were not yet anchored; their automatic station-keeping thrusters slaved to their GPS were holding within a few meters of their plotted location. The docking and unloading were scheduled for just after the regular midcoast BC ferry departed the ferry terminal at 9:45 P.M. The unloading was expected to take two full days.

Originally destined for Vancouver, the two ships had been diverted to Bella Coola when threat analysts from the French Directorate of Military Intelligence (Direction du Renseignement Militaire or DRM) decided that Port Metro Vancouver was too vulnerable to a mortar attack by demobilized Canadian Defense Force soldiers. Bella Coola, they reasoned, was a “safe backwater port.”

The royal-blue-and-white-painted ships both had the enormous letters “MN” painted in white on their blue sides, so they were hard to miss. The ships were in good mechanical repair but were heavily streaked with rust.

As the town’s small fishing fleet (now down to just four boats) motored out for the evening, the captain of one of the boats was careful to position his boat at the south side of the flotilla. Inside his boat, four divers were suited up and checking their gear. They crawled onto the boat’s aft working deck, concealed by a stack of crab pots. A quarter mile before the boat came alongside the two French ships, the divers—now wearing dry suits—quickly slipped into the water.

They bobbed at the surface for a few minutes, to adjust the buoyancy of both the rubber bags containing the limpet mines and their own dive vests. At first the bags were too heavy and were dragging them down, but some squirts of air from their regulators into the bags soon brought them to neutral buoyancy. Then their dive vests gave them too much buoyancy, so they had to bleed air to get them back to neutral buoyancy. (This was the same procedure that they had used when adjusting the buoyancy of their camera and gear bags during sport dives.) They hadn’t had the time to do a trial run with the limpet mine bags, and spending this much time on the surface now made them wish that they had.

They swam toward the ships at a depth of ten feet, welcoming the warmth from working their muscles in the chilly water. The leader popped his head above the surface for a moment to catch sight of the ships, then ducked back under and motioned with his arm, showing the others the correct bearing to follow. He held that position while the other three men consulted their wrist compasses and spun their outer bezels to set a rough azimuth for their directional arrows.

Swimming underwater to the ships and attaching the limpets was strenuous, but within the capabilities of the divers. Because they were nervous, they were all sucking air from their tanks faster than they would on a recreational dive. They each carried three limpet mines. All twelve mines already had their timers preset.

As they approached the ships, by prearrangement they diverged into two teams. The visibility was thirty feet, which was above average for the Burke Channel. One member of each team had to surface briefly to reestablish their bearings. Pressing on with only their wrist compasses to guide them, both teams had the enormous bulk of their target ships loom into sight after fifteen minutes of hard swimming. They had been told to attach the limpets at least six feet below the waterline. They opted for fifteen feet to reduce the chance that they might be spotted. The mines were magnetically attached directly over welded seams, at twenty-foot intervals. Each attachment made an audible clunking sound, and this worried the divers. Once the last mine was removed from each bag, they drained all of the remaining air and let them sink down into the depths.

Swimming under the keels of the ships, the two teams set their compasses for due north. They checked their compasses and wristwatches regularly. They were still anxious and going through their air supply quickly.

Two of their air tanks ran low when they were still two hundred yards from shore, so two of the divers had to clip into octopus rigs and share air, swimming side by side. Then they all ran low and one tank ran out completely. Their only option was to begin porpoising, surfacing once every twenty feet to breathe through their snorkels for the final eighty yards of their swim. They all reached the shore within seconds of each other and checked their watches.

There were still eleven minutes until the fireworks. Transitioning to just their cold-water neoprene booties, they rapidly walked uphill toward their planned rendezvous point, a location that was memorized but intentionally left unmarked on their maps.

Thirty seconds before the scheduled detonation they began to quietly but gleefully count down out loud in unison as they walked. At ten seconds before the detonation, they stopped at a clearing in the trees and looked back toward the bay. They sat down side by side and continued counting down, in their quiet chant. Right on schedule, they saw white gouts of foam jumping up the far sides of both ships. A few seconds later, they heard the dull thud of the simultaneous explosions. They sat, enthralled. They cupped their hands over their eyebrows, watching for signs of distress from the ships. Faintly, they heard some sort of klaxon. After two minutes, both ships had perceptibly begun to list on the sides where the limpets had been attached. And after five minutes, the ships were both listing at least forty degrees. Tony—their leader—said dryly, “They’re done. Let’s go.” They resumed their hike, feeling invigorated. One of their local resistance contacts was waiting for them at the rendezvous point.