The Coming Storm: Liberators Part 23

BLINDING FLASH.

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air-that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

-H. L. Mencken United States Phil Bucklew Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWC), Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, California-July, the Eleventh Year The air-conditioning unit was not working, but as was the tradition in the U.S. Navy, adverse environmental conditions were not an excuse to cancel or reschedule training. Rather, they were considered "an opportunity to excel." It was ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit in the cla.s.sroom. The video that they were watching was on improvised explosives and incendiary devices. A lot of the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) students were not paying close attention to the film. They were now in the final days of phase three (land warfare) of their twenty-four-week course and feeling confident that they would beat the odds, graduate from the course, and go on to a SEAL team a.s.signment. Many of the students were slumped in their chairs, daydreaming about cold bottles of beer. As Petty Officer Third Cla.s.s (PO3) Jordan Foster was watching the video, his mind began to wander. He thought about his cousins in Regina, Saskatchewan, and he pondered their situation living first under the French Army occupation, and now under the Chinese Army occupation. He wondered how they might be fighting back. As the training film was showing a time-delay thermite incendiary device, an idea popped into Jordan's head. He sat bolt upright in his chair, and a scatological expression escaped his lips. He stood up and walked briskly to the door. His instructor had been standing in the back of the cla.s.sroom, doing his best to stay awake. Noticing the petty officer's odd behavior, he followed him out the door, close behind. Once they were outside, the bright sunlight made them both blink.

"What's the matter, trainee? You know, it's not too late to disqual you and send you back to the fleet. Can't take the heat, pogue? Att.i.tude problem?"

"No, sir! With your permission, I need to diagram something for you."

Jordan pulled a notebook and pen from the breast pocket of his utilities. He began sketching a long, cylindrical object.

Jordan described it as he drew. "Sir, this may not be an original idea, but I believe that its potential application may be. Here we have a hermetically sealed cylinder, say, forty millimeters in diameter and about a half meter long. A full pound of thermite is in the bottom two-thirds of it, a time-delay electronic timer just above that, and a spring-loaded sleeve at the top end."

The instructor removed his BUDS baseball cap briefly to wipe his brow. He asked, "What the flying fig is this all about, trainee?"

"Canada, sir. Reliberating Canada!"

51.

PROJECT JORDAN.

For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in mult.i.tude of counsellors [there is] safety.

-Proverbs 24:6 (KJV) United States Phil Bucklew Naval Special Warfare Center (NSWC), Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, California-July, the Eleventh Year Two hours after PO3 Jordan Foster had his flash of brilliance, his invention diagram was reviewed by a UDT lieutenant commander staff officer with SEAL Team Seven, also at NAB Coronado. Recognizing its potential utility, he wasted no time and picked up a STU phone to call one of his old cla.s.smates, who was now a paramilitary operations officer with the CIA Special Activities Division (SAD)-the action arm of the National Clandestine Service, in Virginia.

Three days later, "Project Jordan" went into formal planning. The first prototype "Pogo Stick" was built one month later and was approved for final design review and production soon after, under a cla.s.sified Presidential Decision Doc.u.ment (PDD) finding. It was decided early on that the devices would be built with all-commercial off-the-shelf components so as to be untraceable. Ironically, their PROM timer chips had all been manufactured in China before the Crunch. The key component in the thermite igniters had also originally been made in China but was marketed by the Estes Rockets company as model rocket engine "Solar Igniters." Full-scale production began in October, and the production run of eight thousand units was completed in January.

The Pogo Sticks began arriving in Canada in February. Some were parachute-dropped by B2 stealth bombers while others were infiltrated by land or sea in civilian craft. In one case, they were transported via hermetically sealed containers on the Multi-Mission Platform on a stealthy U.S. Navy nuclear Seawolf-cla.s.s submarine.

The Pogo Stick incendiary devices were all timed to burn at 1212 hours on December 12-nearly a year after their manufacture. They were not programmable. To enable them, the upper sleeve needed to be depressed by one inch (or more). If the sleeve was left fully extended, they wouldn't function. Alternatively, the spring could be removed from the sleeve cap, so that the sticks became armed without being under tension. They couldn't be more simple or foolproof.

They were designed to fit in a standard twenty-liter Chinese "Big Mouth" plastic fuel can. These ubiquitous cans were used for gasoline, diesel fuel, and kerosene. They were quite similar in design to the Scepter cans widely used by the U.S. and Canadian militaries.

Prototype tests had shown that if a Pogo Stick was placed in a fuel can filled with diesel, when the timer went off a stream of molten thermite would quickly burn through the bottom of the can and still have the exothermal energy to burn through fourteen millimeters of plate steel beneath. Then, depending on the width of the air gap, up to twelve liters of flaming diesel fuel would follow down the hole that had been cut by the burning thermite. Alternatively, if a Pogo Stick was placed in a fuel can filled with gasoline, there would be a flaming explosion with a twenty-foot-diameter fireball.

Inserting a Pogo Stick took just a few seconds. Because they were spring-loaded and because there were internal tapers on the top and bottom of the fuel cans, the top of a Pogo would automatically wedge itself into the far corner of a can, where it could not be seen through the open spout hole.

The Chinese did not trust Canadians around their vehicles (for fear of sabotage), but it had become the norm in the lengthy occupation to send out all of their empty fuel cans to commercial fuel stations for refilling. Because the Pogo Sticks would be inserted incrementally, there would be no way of knowing whether any particular can had already been rigged. So a discreet stripe drawn with a felt-tip marker underneath the triple carry handles on the cans was devised.

Although not all of the commercial fuel contractors were "in the loop" and supplied with Pogo Sticks, more than 60 percent of them were. Between March and August, the resistance rigged the majority of fuel cans in most of the Chinese-held Canadian provinces and territories. Always well regimented, the PLA had a policy of rotating their stocks of stored fuel, so that it would not go bad in storage, and this policy was enforced quite stringently in Canada, partly as an "antisabotage measure." As a result, even though it was more laborious, their SOP was to always use gas in cans first before filling vehicle tanks directly from pumps. This meant that eventually the resistance would get their hands on nearly every Chinese fuel can in many regions.

Then, in September, the resistance had a major coup. In the Northwest Territories, a part of Canada where Pogo Sticks had become available only late in the game, three boxcars full of brand-new empty fuel cans were received from China, all with yellow cap straps-designating them for use with diesel fuel. With the impetus of a kickback payment from a fuel contractor, the regional logistics coordinator was convinced that the new cans should be distributed full of fuel. This gave the contract operator the chance to insert Pogo Sticks in every one of those fuel cans.

52.

TIEBREAKER.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion-in the long run, these are the only people who count.

-Robert A. Heinlein Prince George, British Columbia-September, the Eleventh Year The first wave of China's invasion had largely ignored the importance of the Canadian rail network. But in the second wave, the Chinese clearly planned to use the railroads extensively to "vigorously extract" Canada's mineral and timber resources. Some key mineral resources were the zinc, lead, copper, and molybdenum mines in British Columbia and the base-metals mines of Ontario, the Yukon Territory, and British Columbia. With many decades of reserves, the Leduc oil fields and the more recently exploited oil sands in Alberta were also considered strategic. Saskatchewan also held uranium and the world's largest deposits of potash. The gold mines in northern Saskatchewan and British Columbia were considered plum prizes, especially the extremely rich Eskay Creek gold-silver mine. The former Nickel Plate gold mine in British Columbia was reopened. There was also diamond ore to be exploited up in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

Although Canada had no bauxite reserves, the Chinese had plans to expand British Columbia's aluminum industry, to take advantage of the region's plentiful hydro power. The bauxite ore would be hauled by s.h.i.+p from their newly seized mines in Guinea and brought across the Pacific to Vancouver.

Because China and Canada used the same standard "1435" rail gauge-1,435mm (or four feet, eight and a half inches)-their rolling stock was mostly compatible. (Their car couplings and brake hose fittings were different, but they had brought plenty of adapters.) Within the first week of the Chinese invasion, Chinese rail speeder trucks were seen operating. A few weeks later, there were Chinese-built switch engines and flatcars in operation that came in through the Port of Vancouver, which was accessible by railcar ferry s.h.i.+ps. The PLA commandeered all of the railroad rolling stock that was within their reach.

The hundreds of miles of rail lines that connected Jasper to Prince Rupert and Jasper to Vancouver were repeatedly severed by the resistance. Both the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and Canadian National (CN) rail lines were broken, often for days or weeks at a time. Hara.s.sing fire on the crew responding to the first break changed everything. They insisted on having security posted before they would go out for another repair. This added several days to all subsequent repairs, since PLA forces had to be sent out in advance to set up a security perimeter.

Most of the rail breaks were made on curved sections of tracks, over trestles, and on grades to make repairs more difficult. Explosives and thermite were used sparingly in destroying tracks. The resistance found that "borrowed" Cat D8 or Komatsu D155 bulldozer could do the same work, leaving their initially small supply of donated, improvised, and stolen explosives and incendiaries for more important uses-primarily for targets that were under active guard.

The resistance also had hopes of derailing trains, but modern rail-signaling technology often prevented this. Electrical continuity checks detected breaks in the rail miles in advance of approaching trains. The resistance cells learned to overcome this technology in two different ways. First, if they blew up tracks immediately in front of a train on a curve, there was no way that a train could come to an immediate stop. (Stopping distances for laden trains at full speed were measured in miles, not feet.) Second, they learned to use heavy-gauge electric cable to "splice" circuit continuity, so that if a section of rail was loosened, it would still show a complete circuit.

Inevitably, the industrious Chinese began repairing the rails nearly as quickly as the scattered resistance cells could break them. The war against the rails had reached a stalemate. While the resistance succeeded in degrading the efficient use of the railroads, they could not quite deny them to the Chinese.

Alan McGregor, who was an avid reader of U.S. Civil War and American frontier books, came up with an invention that would almost permanently deprive the Chinese use of one long stretch of railroad from Prince George to the outskirts of Vanderhoof. His brilliant idea, "The Claw," was based on accounts that he had read of the Union army's destruction of Confederate railroad lines.

They chose the section of track that meandered west from Prince George through the mountains because it was a single track. With no redundancy in this segment, destroying just one track would completely deny the PLA the use of that route.

Guyot Railway and Engine Maintenance, Ltd., was a family-run business that had been in operation since 1939. They mainly did railway maintenance, but they were also set up for engine and railcar repairs. Their long rectangular shop had two sets of rails running straight through it.

The centerpiece of the shop in Prince George was a 180-ton-capacity overhead rail-mounted crane that straddled the inside of the building. Most frequently it was used for lifting railcars off their four-wheel and six-wheel bogies (also called trucks) so that the undercarriages could be repaired or replaced. Up until the Crunch, the big crane had been used to lift entire engine and motor units out of diesel-electric locomotives. After the Crunch, however, with currency fluctuations, erratic train scheduling changes, and uncertain payments from CN Rail, the Guyot company had laid off most of its work crew. Under their new contract with the Chinese, they didn't do much more than track repairs, minor engine repairs, lower-level (but still heavy) railcar repairs, and putting on four-hundred-pound car adapters.

Unlike most European nations, which had long since converted to the use of concrete railroad ties, Canada's western railroads still used wooden ties quite extensively. In Canada there were typically three thousand wooden ties per mile of track. Alan preferred to use the British Empire term sleepers instead of ties.

Even without the weight box, the Claw weighed nearly two tons. It had originally been a piece of open-pit mining equipment called an Alternate Drag-a cable-dragged rock ripper used by a coal mine operator for the times when their excavations. .h.i.t a layer of hard shale. Its cross section was much like that of a traditional farming plow, but scaled up by a factor of four. The blade was twelve feet long, six feet tall, thirty-eight inches wide at the rear, and just two inches wide at the front.

The Claw's plow blade was expertly recontoured into an axelike blade and a notch to tailor it for cutting railroad ties at a precise depth below the wheels. The new tie-cutting notch was reinforced with dozens of successive rows of TIG welds. Honing the Claw's notch and point took nearly seven hours and burned up fourteen abrasive cut-off wheels in the process. This was followed by flame hardening, quenching it with water from a hose, and then annealing it with a second application of heat from a torch.

The Claw was attached to a double set of six-wheel trucks that had been salvaged from both ends of a sc.r.a.pped intermodal well car. Atop this was a ma.s.sive framework holding the Claw, and above that was welded a deep C-shaped metal box, which held twenty-seven tons of a.s.sorted sc.r.a.p steel that had been laboriously hauled from the Guyot shop sc.r.a.p pile. This enormous weight was designed to keep the wheels from jumping off the tracks once the Claw dug in. Their hope was that despite the tremendous vertical and lateral forces generated by the Claw, the great weight of the twelve-wheeled apparatus would keep the wheels on the tracks.

The Claw could be raised only by a pair of hydraulic pistons that had originally been mounted on a Case IH LRZ 150 front-end loader tractor. The pistons were simplistically set up for "one-time use"-meaning that they could be raised only using an off-board hydraulic pump at the railway shop.

They backed a coupled trio of SD70M-2 engines into the shop. These engines still had mostly Canadian crews but per PLA orders there was always at least one armed guard on each train that was "in motion." (The guards usually came in pairs.) Once the engines were turned over to the shop for repairs, they were "out of sight, out of mind," and left unguarded.

Like the rest of CN's rolling stock, these three engines had been commandeered by the Chinese in the first few weeks of the invasion and crudely repainted in PLA colors (black with red trim) with a PLA logo on the front, the ubiquitous "Eight One" (in hanzi logogram characters).

The three train engines had all come into the Guyot shop over the course of the four preceding days on various repair pretenses that had been faked by resistance operatives. (The PLA rail transport coordinator had been lulled into the habit of taking all repair paperwork at face value.) One of the three work orders read: "Replace Broken Turbo-Entabulator."

The three engines were the SD70M-2 model, a powerful DC traction engine that had been built from 2005 up until the Crunch and widely used. Canadian National had 190 of them. They were all equipped with the 16-710G3C-T2 prime mover, which was rated at 3,200 kilowatts, which equated to 4,300 horsepower, generating 113,100 pound-feet of continuous tractive effort, and 163,000 pound-feet of starting effort.

The resistance consulted two structural engineers to calculate the energy needed to break up the ties. Their final estimate was that it would require around 250,000 pound-feet of force on level ground, which meant they'd need the combined power of three locomotive engines.

The most complicated part of the planned rail sabotage operation was not constructing the Claw itself. Rather, it was making all of the arrangements to spirit away the Guyot employees and their families, finding them jobs under a.s.sumed names where they could be put in hiding for the duration of the conflict. At the same time that the Claw apparatus started ripping its way west, all five of the Guyot employees and their families were on a bus headed east to Calgary.

Just before the planned midnight departure of the engines, Alan met with Larry Guyot. The two men prayed. The three engines pulled out of the Guyot shop on the dedicated spur line to the main line, heading west. Just past the switch, Larry gave Alan his final directions. He then jogged back to the workshop.

Alan watched his wrist.w.a.tch carefully. At exactly two minutes past midnight, he gave two toots of the engine's air horn and advanced the slaved trio of engines to full throttle. The dead-man's vigilance alert system as well as the dead-man's foot pedal had already been fully bypa.s.sed by one of the Guyot employees. Alan quickly walked forward to the engine's front steps.

When the engines reached what felt like five miles an hour, Ray hit the release lever for the hydraulics. As soon as he saw that the Claw was dropping, he immediately hopped off the Claw a.s.sembly's small forward platform and tumbled to the ground beside the tracks.

After gouging the top of the ties for the first thirty feet, the Claw finally bit down and caught beneath the ties. It immediately began loudly snapping the ties, one after another, with ferocity. They were amazed to see that instead of slowing down, the trio of engines continued to accelerate. The noise was tremendous.

As the engines approached seven miles an hour, Alan leaped from the bottom step of the front stairs of the forwardmost engine and rolled down the ballast. He banged his right knee in the process. Just as the old man regained his feet, the Claw came ripping past him, sending shards of creosote-impregnated tie wood and a spray of ballast rocks painfully against his legs.

His son walked up to him and they stood side-by-side, watching the destruction of the tracks ahead of them in the moonlight and listening to the cacophony of the uneven rending and snapping of ties. It sounded like an enormous deck of cards being shuffled. All of this was accompanied by the roar of the three engines. As the ballast rocks were shattered and struck each other, they threw off a strange blue-green brisance that formed a halo-like glow around the Claw. The Claw itself had already heated up so much that it started throwing sparks as well.

As the noisy contraption drew farther away, Ray shook his father's hand and shouted, "Well, Dad, you've really done it this time. You are the Master of Disaster."

Back at the Guyot shop building, there was the sound of rending steel and the whine and clanking of the overhead crane that had just destroyed its own undercarriage and one corner of the building.

Ray supported Alan McGregor as he hobbled back to where the Claw had first dug in. The gash between the rails behind them was tremendous. Both rails were tipped up at a thirty-degree angle, and chunks of broken ties stuck up at odd angles. They were startled to see that at the transition between the undisturbed ties and those that had been broken, the rails were each literally twisted outward almost forty-five degrees.

Stan's pickup came up alongside them on the wayside service road. Stan shouted, "Hop in, guys! If we stay here, we'll be in a world of hurt."

Alan slowly reached the door of the truck, and Ray helped him get in.

In the aftermath, the distance that The Claw had traveled amazed everyone. Even their most optimistic predictions were for the destruction of ten to fifteen miles of track before it either fell apart or came off the rails. But the contraption continued, ripping up tracks relentlessly. From a distance it looked like an enormous zipper had been opened. After reaching a speed of twenty-seven miles per hour on level ground, the apparatus slowed to just twelve miles per hour on some of the steepest grades. With the tremendous power of the engines, the Claw still motored on, mile after mile. Finally, after ripping up the track for almost fifty-eight miles, the growing heat and c.u.mulative fatigue of the steel in the Claw became too great. Now glowing deep orange along its full length and bright yellow at its notch, the Claw finally sheared away, leaving the lower portion embedded in the ballast.

The three engines picked up speed after that. By the time they pa.s.sed through Vanderhoof, they were going sixty miles per hour. Two miles west, the trio was up to 105 miles per hour and ran off the rails when they came to a sharp left-hand curve, just past the Highway 27 overcrossing. All three engines and the Claw a.s.sembly came to rest in a surprisingly neat row. It was only after the engines had tipped over that mercury safety switches triggered relays to shut down the electric motors and diesel engine units.

When the first PLA officers arrived at the scene of the wreck, they found that the broad top rim of the Claw's counterweight box had been emblazoned with raised beads from an arc welder. They read NLR! on both sides, BEWARE THE CRAW! on the forward rim, and DEFILE YOUR ANCESTORS TO THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION on the back rim.

In the aftermath of the Claw's track sabotage, it was estimated that 57.8 miles of track were rendered useless and that 173,400 ties had been snapped in half. Most of the rail was badly bent-particularly on curves-so that it could not be reused. Since nearly all of the rail had been welded together, it would have to be cut into sections before it could be removed and replaced.

The enormous length of unzipped track was the most beautiful mess that Alan McGregor had ever seen.

The escape of the Guyot shop families was nerve-racking, but successful. In the hours preceding the Claw's track sabotage, the employees spent several hours destroying the big lathes and the shop's other heavy equipment with cutting torches. Then all of them except Larry went home to their families to prepare for their imminent departure.

They had already rigged the crane to self-destruct. The crane had tremendous lifting force available. It was fairly simple to pay out all two hundred feet of cable, loop three wraps of the end of the cable around the crane's own T-shaped wheeled undercarriage, and then connect the s.n.a.t.c.h block to the I-beam post at the northwest corner of the building.

The original plan was to somehow replace the crane's momentary on-off switch with a continuously on switch. But since the combined skills in the shop were more mechanical than electrical, they opted instead for the expedient of fabricating a clamp that would hold the green Lift b.u.t.ton fully depressed.

As soon as Larry Guyot heard Alan toot the train's horn, he triggered the crane Lift b.u.t.ton, affixing it in the fully depressed position with the clamp fixture. The slow, high-torque crane began pulling in the nearly two hundred feet of slack cable as Larry ran for his car. He had already accelerated his Dodge to forty-five miles per hour and was a half mile down the road when the cable finally pulled taut. The gantry crane then folded itself in half and collapsed the front of the building. When the s.n.a.t.c.h block reached the motor housing, the tremendous force of the motor snapped the steel cable. The stub end of the cable in the cable housing made a loud "thunk" once every four seconds, until the motor was finally turned off by the first fireman to arrive at the crumpled building.

The charter bus was idling and had its door open when Larry pulled up. They heard a siren in the distance. He jumped out of his Dodge and leaped aboard the bus, and it started to roll forward even before the hydraulic door had completely closed. Larry's brother was at the wheel of the bus. He was wearing an N95 respirator.

Larry's wife, wearing a nurse's uniform and also wearing an N95 respirator, gave him a hug. The families cheered as the bus rolled out toward the Yellowhead Highway.

They carried with them two forged letters that were designed to get them past PLA checkpoints on their intended route. The first letter was an official-looking doc.u.ment that certified that the pa.s.sengers...o...b..ard the bus were residents of Olway (just west of Prince George) who were quarantined H7N9 influenza patients being transported to an infectious disease ward at the seven-hundred-bed Foothills Medical Centre, in Calgary.

Just as they hoped, the mere sight of the mask-wearing nurse and the words influenza and quarantine were enough to get the guards at two highway checkpoints to quickly wave the bus through.

From Prince George the bus drove six hours southeast to the Highway 11 junction. Once they were there, the respirators and the nurse's uniforms were hidden, and the second letter was readied. They stopped briefly to switch the license plates on the bus.

They continued, carrying a forged RCMP letter identifying them as wedding guests from the vicinity of Eckville traveling to the town of Smoky Lake (north of Edmonton) to attend a wedding. (Weddings were one of the few exceptions to PLA's "no public gatherings" rule but required official travel doc.u.ments.) This letter successfully bluffed them through three more checkpoints.

At 4:30 P.M. local time they reached their actual destination, Fort McMurray, in the heart of Alberta's Athabasca oil sands region. They had been on the road for fifteen and a half hours and were near the end of the bus's one-thousand-mile driving range. Seven cars, vans, and pickups were waiting to shuttle the Guyot families to their new homes and jobs, under a.s.sumed names, at the Suncor Mine. The mine was part of the recently reemerging oil industry in Alberta. The Suncor operation was already back up to twenty thousand barrels of production per day, with plans for much larger production in the months to come. (Back before the Crunch, Suncor's Mackay River plant had produced thirty-four thousand barrels per day, and had plans to eventually produce three times that much. In antic.i.p.ation, there had been a lot of "spec" housing built, which now was mostly vacant. The Guyot families ended up in these houses.) After their baggage had been unpacked, the bus was immediately driven by a resistance man to the Suncor Fort Hills mine, where it was parked next to an enormous overburden pile. There, the conveyor belt arm was s.h.i.+fted temporarily to direct the flow over the top of the bus. They ran the conveyor for three hours, burying the bus under thirty feet of overburden soil and rock. The bus was never seen again.

DRM investigators quickly made the link from the Guyot shop to the "quarantine bus" described by the Securite Routiere sentries, but they lost track of it from there. Their fruitless search for the saboteur families centered on Calgary.

The FM radio network-which had recently been renamed People's Voice of Canadian Liberation (PVCL)-downplayed the severity of the rail sabotage, referring to it only as "a temporary railway disruption, west of Prince George."

Larry worked under the name Larry Gwinn for many years, eventually reaching middle management with Suncor. His role in the Claw sabotage plot was not publicized until after his death in 2047.

53.

NI HAO.

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters-one represents danger, and one represents opportunity.

-John F. Kennedy, "Convocation of United Negro College Fund"

Forty-eight Miles East of Bella Coola, British Columbia-November, the Eleventh Year Alan and Claire borrowed Ray's pickup to go buy supplies in Bella Coola. They were hoping to spend some of their Chinese Occupation Scrip before it lost much more of its value to inflation. (Since the Chinese arrived, the new currency had already lost 70 percent of its value.) The pickup hit a patch of black ice in a shady stretch of road and spun out. There was no damage, but it ended up perpendicular to the road, nose down in the borrow-pit ditch on the right side of the road. The slope of the ditch was quite steep. Alan put the pickup in four-wheel drive before attempting to back up, but the tires immediately cut through the thin crust of frost into the soft mud beneath. Experience told him that continuing his attempt to drive out would only dig his wheels in deeper, so he shut down the engine.

Alan said resignedly, "Prepare for a long, chilly wait, my dear."

He stepped out of the cab and messily made his way up out of the muddy ditch. Now standing at the back of the truck, Alan lifted the camper sh.e.l.l's gla.s.s and then flipped down the tailgate. He could see that Ray carried his usual oiled twenty-five-foot tow chain in a plastic box strapped with a bungee cord in the front end of the pickup bed. Along with it was a well-worn rectangular laundry detergent bucket filled with traction sand, an axe, a come-along, a short D-handle shovel, a hank of rope, a folded tarp, and a sheepherder's jack. All of this gear was neatly secured by bungee cords. Seeing this a.s.sortment of gear made Alan smile. His son was prudent and methodical, just like him. He had raised him well.

Alan's boots were a muddy mess, so he stretched out p.r.o.ne to reach down to the tow-chain box. Pulling the heavy box with him as he inched his way back up and out of the pickup bed strained his back. He muttered to himself, "Here we go again."

Alan often reinjured his back, and recovery from each injury could last weeks; each episode began with two or three days of his back muscles in painful spasm. Taking valerian root helped reduce the muscle spasms and magnesium pills helped limit the inflammation. But each injury tested his patience; he was a man who didn't like to slow the pace of his daily ch.o.r.es. Alan carefully set the tow-chain box on the lip of the icy road, careful not to further injure his back. He leaned back in on the lip of the open tailgate and waited.