Their first CBLTV trip to Canada began on August 20, and they were back home by August 24. Their first crossing was east of Lick Mountain, which was north of the town of Yaak, Montana. There, the Yaak River Road looped within three miles of the Canadian border. By prior arrangement, they simply dropped off their cargo at a prearranged set of GPS coordinates just across the border. They hastily cached the pile of parcels with cut fir boughs.
Their second trip, which began on August 27, was nearly identical except that their crossing was on the west side of Lick Mountain.
Their third trip, in early September, was a shorter drive, but a longer walk. They parked at the Good Grief store, 2.5 miles short of the then closed Eastport border crossing station. From there, they had a strenuous hike for ten miles up Canuck Basin Road, which was impassable to vehicles. A half mile beyond the border fence (three strands of barbless wire, which had previously been cut) they came within one hundred yards of the southern terminus of Hawkins Canuck Road. Waiting for them there was a man named Chet—their NLR contact. He thanked them profusely for the two previous deliveries as well this latest one. He presented each of them with a keepsake Canadian silver dime and declared them members of the NLR.
Chet stayed to talk with them for two hours, describing his perspective on the current situation in British Columbia, the NLR’s current logistics and technical needs, and some ways that people in the United States might be able to help with the Cause. He was convinced that the U.S. could do more to apply diplomatic pressure on the UN to withdraw their troops. He also questioned why the CIA wasn’t involved. On this note, he said, “It shouldn’t just be volunteers footing the bill.”
Providentially, all three trips were without incident except for one sprained ankle on the last return trip. (Jeff Trasel rode the last mile back to his pickup in a deer cart.) On all three trips—each with four hundred pounds of materiel—they were able to fill some specific requests that had been relayed from resistance cell leaders. These requests included a replacement magazine for a SMLE Mk. III rifle, some CR123 batteries, and ammunition in some oddball calibers including .25-35, .307 Winchester, .38-55, .30 Remington, .30 Herrett, and .221 Fireball.
Filling the special requests took some coordination via the CB radio relay network. (The phone network was still down, but the CB network covered from Grangeville, Idaho, northward and stretched into eastern Washington and western Montana.) Much of this ammunition had been custom handloaded.
• • •
Though they had planned to make additional trips into Canada, news of construction of a cordon sanitaire and uncertainty about just where it might be land-mined gave them pause. Instead they sent their gathered ammo and gear to Jerry Hatcher in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Jerry was a former Alaska bush pilot who had volunteered to make some daring solo low-level night flights into Canada in his Cessna 180, an airplane equipped with oversize tundra tires. He landed in remote farm fields near Wynndel, High River, and Taber, British Columbia. In all, he made eleven flights, ferrying between 350 and 420 pounds of cargo per flight depending on the distance to his landing fields. On three occasions, he also flew out wounded resistance fighters to the United States for medical treatment.
39
INGRESS
Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.
—John Locke
Moscow, Idaho—September, the Fifth Year
Ken Layton and Kevin Lendel came to visit Joshua’s house on a Sunday afternoon in mid-September. Soon after he arrived, Ken had a question for Megan and Malorie. He asked, “I know that you two grew up speaking French. Do either of you know how to translate written French, like technical or military documents?”
Megan answered, “I assume this is about your NLR friends who are fighting the French forces up in Canada. Technical translation would be Malorie’s department. She is more fluent in French than I am, and she used to work part-time as a technical translator.”
Malorie nodded. “For translating technical things, yes, but military things might be a stretch since I don’t know anything about the French army, their order of battle, or their command and staff structure. After all of the fighting here, I know a lot more about the German and Belgian land forces than I do the French. Do you have the document that needs to be translated? I assume that it’s a captured document.”
Ken said, “A little more complicated than that. My resistance contact up in BC mentioned that they’re looking for a French translator on site with a small intelligence unit of some sort to translate captured French documents and military manuals.”
Malorie blinked. Her mind was racing. She asked, “Go there? So how soon do they need this translator?”
Ken answered, “Yesterday. Are you up for it?”
• • •
Malorie and Megan were transported to Todd and Mary Gray’s ranch in a captured Krauss-Maffei Wegmann light truck. Todd and most of his group were there to help. They had all brought some gear to donate. They already had Malorie’s gear and clothes spread across the floor of the living room. As she was segregating items into piles, Malorie asked, “So what does a girl pack for a trip like this?”
Kevin Lendel suggested sarcastically, “How about a stainless Walther PPK, a little sack of cut one-carat diamonds, some knockout drops, a couple of lipsticks, and a Gerber Mark II fighting knife?”
Ken groaned. “This isn’t a 007 trip. It’s more like going off to a university or going to work on some intense corporate research project—but, ah, you should be ready to rough it out in the boonies, just in case.”
Working together, they tore apart Malorie’s pack and dry bag, and then repacked them, now including many items donated from the occupants of both Kevin’s house and Todd’s house.
In the end, her load was heavy on cold-weather clothes and light on weaponry. The pack contained her M1 Carbine, eight spare loaded magazines (six of them were fifteen-rounders), a rifle-cleaning kit, two bandoleers of .30 carbine ammunition, a Cold Steel Voyager XL tanto pocketknife, a fairly complete outdoor survival kit with a waterproof match case and a magnesium fire starter, an olive-drab space blanket, two SureFire compact flashlights, some trioxane fuel bars, eleven MRE entrees, and several pairs of socks. There were lots of other practical items like a Bible, thirty-one dollars’ worth of 1950s and 1960s Canadian silver coinage, a pair of Yaktrax ice creepers, four legal pads, an assortment of pens, a pair of rubber-armored Hensoldt Wetzlar Dienstglas 8x30 binoculars (that Kevin had liberated from a captured German officer), a folding stereo viewer for analyzing aerial photos (also recently liberated), and an eight-by-ten-inch Fresnel lens page magnifier.
On short notice they were able to locate a copy of the Routledge French Technical Dictionary, per Malorie’s request. It was a gift to the resistance effort by a professor at Washington State University. Adding the dictionary to Malorie’s pack brought its weight to nearly thirty-five pounds. The dry bag held the overflow of cold-weather clothing and her sleeping bag. That was another twenty-two pounds.