Uprising. Douglas L. Bland
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sergeant. Nobody we could see, but somebody dropped this ammo belt on the road.”
“Okay. Good job both of you – get to the boats.”
Alex watched as the warriors loaded the little craft. Quiet more from fatigue and ebbing excitement than self-discipline. It didn’t matter. It was not a perfect patrol; he was sure that small bits of kit were back on the road and would eventually lead investigators to piece the plan together. But as he walked to the last boat, he wasn’t worried; he felt sure he would never come this way again. His kids had done well and would have stories to tell. He walked proudly with Christmas to the water’s edge.
Annie was all business and ordered Alex into the boat. Everyone else had done their job and could relax; she’d been waiting and biting her nails the whole time, and now it was her turn to get it done. She rallied the other helmsmen into line, the engines revved in unison, and they headed at full throttle towards the far shore and safety.
Alex glanced across the river to Quebec and the red dawn rising up from behind the eastern hills. “Red sky in the morning,” he thought to himself. “Now there’s a menacing sign.”
“Everything okay, Alex?” Annie asked.
His face lit up. “Sure, Annie. Almost perfect.”
Annie smiled broadly and couldn’t resist a sudden impulse to reach out and squeeze his hand. She felt so proud to be with him, and proud also to be one of the warriors who’d really struck a blow for their long-suffering people.
DAY TWO
Monday, August 30
Monday, August 30, 0530 hours
Ottawa: National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ)
The night shift was coming to an end. Colonel Ian Dobson, the National Defence Operations Centre’s director, was at his desk earlier than usual, filling in the last sections of his report, which would form the basis for the daily ops briefing at 0730 hours. He expected the day’s “Morning Prayers,” as these sessions were known at NDHQ, to be routine: a few words from the intelligence staff, brief reports on the status of deployed units and ships, summaries of the last day’s activities from deployed units overseas, comments on major exercises, and the status of the one active search-and-rescue operation, SAR Harper, which was looking for a missing person presumed lost in Newfoundland’s wilderness. Ten, twenty minutes tops, then off to the cottage to join the kids for one last precious week before they went back to school. Next year, Carolyn would be heading off to college and might not be around for the summer; Julie was going to junior high this year and was getting squirmy about family. They’re growing up so fast, he thought. The last thing he wanted was something surprising that would cut into this one last blissful family week.
Refocusing, Ian turned his gaze to the room around him – a world far removed from his idyllic cottage. For all its importance and worldwide scope, Ian thought, the National Defence Operations Centre was not, in fact, very impressive. Only about the size of a corner store, cramped, and rimmed with electronic screens showing most of the general and current information concerning the whys and wherefores of the Canadian Forces, the NDOC was a windowless, rather drab facility.
Despite its unspectacular appearance, however, Ian knew how crucially important the centre was to Canada’s military operations: it was its nerve centre. And access to this secure facility was tightly guarded. Entrance into NDOC, located on the twelfth floor of NDHQ, required passing through security checks at the main entrance, and further, increasingly stringent checks, which involved the supplying of highly secret codes, to get through the many doorways and elevators leading to the upper levels of the building. Ian, like everyone else in the room, wore a special security tag on a neck-chain, so that guards could easily identify individuals and their security clearances. On the twelfth floor, as on the other upper-level, high-security floors, guards randomly verified the identity of those walking the hallways and their purpose for being there. The inside joke, however, was that security was unintentionally assured by the confusion caused by the continual rebuilding and rearranging of offices, meeting rooms, and hallways that made the top floors into an impenetrable rabbit warren. If a bad guy were ever to get in here, Ian thought, he would never be able to find his target or his way out without a guide.
Inside the operations centre, the senior duty officer and several middle-ranking officers worked at individual consoles, keeping abreast of ongoing operations and developments by watching and responding to operational reports and situations in various regions and commands at home and abroad. The atmosphere was “24/7 busy normal.” Computers hummed, telephones chimed softly, clerks carefully ordered the endless flow of paper, and officers, each responsible for a particular part of the world or some special function, spoke matter-of-factly to distant stations and other officers crammed into the NDHQ labyrinth.
Behind the main room, communications clerks, or comms clerks, as they were universally called, constantly monitored and operated the global Canadian Forces communications network, receiving and sending scores of messages mostly in secure and coded formats. Both sections of NDOC were hooked into the adjacent National Defence Intelligence Centre, a facility where even greater security prevailed, and “need to know” rules were even more closely defined.
Once Dobson finished his morning briefing, complete with the inevitable PowerPoint slides, at 6:45, he would walk down the hall and up the back stairs to the office of the deputy chief of the defence staff. The DCDS, Lieutenant General Carl Gervais, was (nominally, some said) the senior operations officer in the Canadian Forces. Together they would go over the details and discuss likely questions and answers on operational matters that he and Gervais would address at the 0730 meeting in Conference Room B on the thirteenth floor of NDHQ.
Over the past two years, Dobson had learned that Gervais liked to look as though he were in control and handle every question brought up by his boss, the chief of the defence staff, or any of the dozen or so officers and civilian assistant deputy ministers gathered around the large conference table. But Dobson knew also that Gervais expected him to jump in quickly if Gervais’s sometimes shaky grasp of relevant details threatened to become apparent. As had become glaringly obvious over the years, when Gervais dumped a problem into Dobson’s lap, he left it there.
Far better to prep the old man so he could blather his way past any uncertainty and then clean up problems later. Which wasn’t easy, given Gervais’s impatience with details during briefings and indeed with briefings altogether. So, after his quick meeting with the DCDS, Ian would return to his desk, make any final amendments to the script to steer around especially obvious holes in Gervais’s knowledge, then rehearse the briefing with his assistant, who controlled the slides. At the appointed hour, he would walk over to the meeting room for his quick dog-and-pony show in front of the brass and the senior civvies.
It was just coming on 0615 hours when a call from across the room drew Dobson away from his report. Lieutenant Commander Dan Noble, halfway through a message one of the comms clerks had just handed him, called over his shoulder, “Hey, sir, I just got a flash message, a Significant Incident Report from Petawawa. You had better look at this.”
“Bugger,” Dobson said to no one in particular. Half an hour before he was to see the DCDS and what does he get? A SIR from, of course, Petawawa – that place was cursed. “What now? Did someone cut off another head at Chez Charlie’s last night or have they just found more horses on the payroll?”
“Seems a bit more bizarre, even for Petawawa, sir. A female MP has gone missing with her car and all.”
Dobson reached for the paper and read the formatted message. He paused a moment and turned to Noble. “Call the base duty officer and find out if we’re talking about a deserter or what. Have comms get the deputy base commander, Colonel Neal, on the phone, and alert the DCDS’s assistant. I might need to see the general earlier than usual.”
“Aye, sir.” Noble reached for his phone and hit the speed dial with one hand while beckoning a clerk over with the other.
Almost immediately, Dobson’s desk phone buzzed. He flipped off his desk speaker and lifted the receiver. A voice announced, “Colonel Neal on the line for you, sir.”