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 passing 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 shielding, 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. Amitiés.

—Giselle

The note, in a sealed envelope, was passed 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 grass just as planned. In an instant, the cable caught in the rotor, the helicopter spun violently, and the three fiberglass 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 grass.

One four-foot-long shard from one of the helicopter rotor blades came bouncing across the meadow directly toward Phil’s hide. Though it passed 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.

There were four ALAT personnel still onboard. The two others who had been thrown free in the crash were not moving. One of them was clearly dead—since the top half of his body was fifteen feet away from his pelvis and legs.

The fuselage was lying on its side. The shorn rotor mast had stopped spinning. A wisp of smelly white smoke was coming from the engine compartment, apparently from leaking oil that had reached something hot. The door gun’s muzzle was pointed straight upward. After more shouting from inside the helicopter, the pilot, copilot, and door gunner all crawled out in rapid succession. They were apparently not badly injured in the crash. The pilot and copilot started shooting wildly at the tree line with PA-50 9mm pistols. Meanwhile, the door gunner was reaching up, attempting to detach his FN-MAG-58 light machine gun from the mount.

Phil had a good angle on the pilot, and Alan had line of sight to the copilot and door gunner. With deliberate neck shots, all three of the men were shot down and bleeding out in less than twenty seconds.