Part 22 (1/2)

”You're such a rear-echelon pogue. Just use four or five half-hitches, and then stand well clear in case you screw up, so you don't put your eye out.”

”Okay.”

Pulling up the paracord hand over hand, Ray pulled up the free end of the cable. After untying the paracord, he flung the cable around the tree. He misjudged the length required, so he had to adjust and try twice more before he was able to grab the free end. When he finally did, the needlelike frayed end of the cable filament drew blood from the meat of his hand. (He wasn't wearing gloves because he would soon be working with the nuts on the cable clamps.) Ray visibly winced.

Phil shouted up from the ground, ”Ooh, that's gotta hurt.”

”Yeah, thanks for the sympathy, pal.”

He pulled up the slack in the cable so there was just a slight sag in the portion that ran back to the big tree fork. Pinching the cable back on itself took the full strength of one hand, and he knew that positioning the first cable clamp and its pair of nuts would require the use of two more hands, leaving him one hand short. He had come prepared with some plastic cable ties. Pulling one of the ties tightly gave just enough tension to free up his left hand so that he could position the cable clamps. Even so, it was tricky and exhausting. He dropped two of the hexagonal nuts in the process, but fortunately he had brought spares. By the time he was done torqueing down the pair of Nylock nuts on the third cable clamp, sweat was dripping off the end of his nose.

He put the socket wrench back in his tool-belt bag, and shouted, ”Okay. Done here. Coming down.”

When he reached the ground, Ray said, ”Okay. The North Woods Lumberjack phase is done. Now it's your turn, Mr. Gee Whiz Explosives Expert.”

Phil shook his head and said, ”I'm no expert, but I think I can fake it.”

Phil had already sized up the tree. It was leaning slightly downhill, which was good. Rather than attaching the explosives at the base, he opted to position them six feet up the trunk. Here, the girth of the trunk was 30 percent smaller.

The explosives they had were not ideal for the job-he would have preferred to use C4 plastic explosives-but the dynamite sticks would suffice. Phil started out by reexamining the sticks of DuPont dynamite. They were the 80 percent variety, with diatomaceous earth filler, and brown cases and red warning labels. He checked them for any signs of weeping or leaking. The cases looked dry, and that made him feel less tense.

Phil spent a few minutes whittling a stick to a fine point, smaller than a pencil. He used this to drill transverse holes in the middle of eight of the dynamite sticks. Next, he dug a claw hammer and a handful of eight-penny nails out of his pack. Walking to the uphill side of the tree, he sighted upward and aligned a nail with the cable that was stretched back toward the opening. He reached up, and standing on his backpack, he drove a nail into the trunk at a forty-five-degree angle, at nearly nine feet off the ground. The head of the nail was angled upward.

Then he walked around the tree and did his best to estimate the counterpoint of the nail that he had just driven. He used a nail point to scratch a vertical mark, six feet off the ground. He drove the nail in at that spot with just a couple of light taps of the hammer. Then he stood back to size up the positions of the two nails. He walked around the tree twice, at a distance of five paces. He judged the angle at which the tree was leaning again. Not satisfied with the position of the lower nail, he repositioned it upward four inches and two inches to the right. Then he repeated his inspection walk. Finally, he drove the second nail straight into the tree trunk, leaving just one inch exposed.

He said softly, ”This'll be the center point of the lower charge.”

Ray gulped and said, ”Whatever you say. You're the expert.” After a pause, he added, ”Is this something scientific, or is this all seat-of-your-pants Kentucky windage I'm witnessing?”

Phil palmed the side of the tree twice as he answered. ”A little of both, I reckon. A lot of it will depend on just how solid the core of this tree is. I'll try to err on the side of caution, and this old boy being more stout than he looks.”

He knelt and carefully threaded the end of a twenty-foot length of green parachute cord through the holes that bisected all six of the dynamite sticks. He then positioned them vertically in a flat bundle, straddling the lower nail.

”I'll hold these in place, with each of them flat against the trunk, while you give it a couple of wraps around the trunk.”

Ray did as he was asked. Once the line was loosely around the tree trunk, he asked, ”How tight?”

”Tight enough so that they won't budge, but not so tight that the paracord digs into the cases. I'll let you know.”

Ray applied tension to the paracord as Phil watched.

Phil nodded and said, ”That's good. Tie it off.”

Phil then began wrapping detonating cord at a forty-five-degree angle around the trunk of the tree with the high end looped around the uphill nail and the low end of the coil pa.s.sing over the sticks of dynamite. In all, he applied twelve concentric wraps of the explosive-filled detonating cord. His goal was to have the det cord cut a deep gash around the tree while simultaneously collapsing the downhill-rear side of the trunk, by means of the larger dynamite charge.

They spent another twenty minutes camouflaging their handiwork with slabs of bark (attached with commo wire) and festoons of light green old man's beard moss.

As they worked, Phil said, ”You know, with tamping, we could get by with only half this much dynamite.”

”Yeah, but with the charge that far up the tree, and it being on the downhill side, it would take a great big long brace to hold a box or maybe a burlap sack of tamping mud, and the sight of that would be all too obvious from the air.”

”I agree.”

The final step in the process was using the sharpened stick to puncture the ends of two of the dynamite sticks, and then insert a pair of electric blasting caps. Their wires were secured with plastic cable ties in place of the traditional tied girth hitches. Although these were wires connected in parallel to a piece of commo wire, they were left shunted for safety.

The commo wire was carefully routed around the small meadow and led up to an observer's position twenty-five yards east of the opening. Here, by looking straight down the length of the cable, the observer could determine the precise moment to explosively fell the larch. They were confident that the falling tree would hoist the ”chopper stopper” cable to full height in just a couple of seconds.

47.

THE CHEESE.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

-Benjamin Franklin Near Nimpo Lake, British Columbia-May, the Sixth Year After some discussion, it was decided that the key observer's position should be an earth-covered trench to provide thermal s.h.i.+elding, thus countering any use of FLIRs. They also decided to bury the commo wire just a few inches under the ground. Then two more trenches with overhead cover were constructed-one for Alan at the east edge of the opening, and one for Phil at the north end. Each of these took the four men a full day to construct and camouflage.

The ”cheese” for their trap was a smoky campfire. Stan, who was the fastest runner of the three, had both the hazardous and tedious task of keeping the campfire going and walking back and forth to the cable ambush site, doing his best not to leave a trail. His hide, ninety feet north of the east end of the cable, was the only vertical entrenchment. It had a unique tablelike top cover with a waterproofed sod covering that afforded him a view of both the landing zone opening and the smoke plume from the bait camp.

Once they had the entrenchments and the ”cheese” camp set up, they had Malorie translate and transcribe a short handwritten note composed by Claire. The original had read: Messieurs, I am a proud loyalist. I have a reliable report that there is a bandit training camp being built about five kilometers to the northeast of Nimpo Lake. I trust that you will find this information useful. Amities.

-Giselle The note, in a sealed envelope, was pa.s.sed to a gate guard at the new Williams Lake UNPROFOR Headquarters (the old Service BC building on Borland Street) by an eleven-year-old boy on a bicycle.

The Gazelle arrived the following afternoon. The pilot wasted no time and began orbiting the bait camp, which was in heavy timber six hundred yards northeast of the cable ambush opening. Predictably, as the Gazelle orbited in a counterclockwise direction, the door gunner poured four hundred rounds of 7.62 into the vicinity of the base of the smoke plume at the ”fromage camp.”

The Gazelle then swung into an even wider orbit and headed for the opening that Team Robinson had rigged. Phil waited until the helicopter slowed and its skids were about to touch ground. The cable was about eight feet ahead of the helicopter's nose. With a diameter of thirty-three feet, six inches, the rotor disc made for a big target.

Phil whispered to himself, ”Perfect,” and twisted the handle on the ten-cap blasting machine. The explosives at the base of the big larch tree went off with a loud bang, and the tree fell. Before the Gazelle pilot could react, the cable snapped up out of the gra.s.s just as planned. In an instant, the cable caught in the rotor, the helicopter spun violently, and the three fibergla.s.s composite rotor blades were sheared off. Two men were thrown out, and the fuselage pitched violently over on its side. The helicopter's fuselage thrashed around violently on the ground like a gored beast, and it spun 270 degrees before coming to a halt. The stubs of the rotors, now hitting the ground, were further shortened as the rotor mast shuddered to a stop amid a cloud of dust, dirt clods, and tufts of gra.s.s.

One four-foot-long shard from one of the helicopter rotor blades came bouncing across the meadow directly toward Phil's hide. Though it pa.s.sed harmlessly overhead, it made Phil gasp. If the shard had flown a few feet lower, his fate would have been much different.

Either the pilot had shut down the Turbomeca turbine engine, or some automatic safety feature triggered a shutdown, because it soon was quiet enough for the ambushers to hear shouts from inside the Gazelle's fuselage.