Jacob still looked incredulous.
Peter jumped back in. “For years, I’ve been hearing Rhi rave about Sigutlat Lake, way up in the Dean River country, in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. It’s what, eighty or ninety miles northwest of the ranch? It’s a fly-in lake that was used by tourist fishermen. That was where her dad took her by horseback, to catch those famous eighteen-pound trout. The lake freezes up in early November, so I say we get there well before October.”
“Is that lake big enough to land on?” Jake asked.
“Certainly. Sigutlat Lake is eight miles long,” Rhi said. “And Peter is right. Unless the Chinese discovered uranium up there or something, there will be nobody, and I mean nobody, there. There are no more tourist fly-fishermen. A family built a fly-in lodge there, back around 2006, but the last I heard, the lodge had burned down. Hopefully the dock is still there.”
“So who would be crazy enough to fly us up there?” Rhi asked.
Jake and Janelle glanced at each other, and then Jake answered for both of them: “Rob, at Smith Brothers.”
• • •
Smith Brothers Air & Seaplane Adventures had been in business for twenty years. The small company flew charters in Florida year-round as well as in the Lake of the Ozarks region of Missouri each summer.
The company was owned by a former Delta Airlines pilot with thirty thousand hours of flying experience. His son and right-hand man was Rob Smith, a former U.S. Air Force pilot with a poorly concealed wild streak. Rob had more than twenty-five hundred hours of stick time, and nearly half of those hours were in seaplanes and pontoon floatplanes. He had made hundreds of takeoffs and landings on lakes.
For many years the company had three small floatplanes and “The Big Plane,” a five-seat UC-1 Twin Bee. Then, just a year after the UN capitulation, they gambled and bought the “Really Big Plane,” a Cessna Amphibian—a floatplane variant of the recent-generation Cessna Caravan. (Since floatplanes were primarily recreational, and the recreational aviation market had not yet recovered, Smith had the chance to pick it up for twenty cents on the dollar.) While it outwardly looked like a typical floatplane, it was scaled up considerably and was powered by a beefy 675-horsepower turboprop engine that burned either JP4 or JP5.
The thirty-nine-foot-long Cessna seated twelve passengers and cruised at 159 knots once up at altitude, and 128 knots on the deck, with a range of 805 nautical miles. The plane’s useful load was 3,230 pounds. With a full load, the plane had a takeoff distance of 3,660 feet.
Rob felt guilty about not being more active in the resistance against the Fort Knox government, so he jumped at the opportunity to take the risky charter. His father objected at first, but he eventually relented.
• • •
“Looking at the sectionals, I can see that the closest U.S. airport—at least straight-line distance—is the tarmac strip at Port Angeles, Washington. That is a 6,347-foot-long strip that can handle a Boeing 737, so it can certainly handle our puddle jumper, even if we are overloaded and just stagger off the ground. But it’s about five hundred miles to your lake. The problem is, it’s another five hundred miles back, and our plane only has an eight-hundred-mile range flying a standard profile, and a lot less if we try to dodge radar.”
“What if we were to refuel up there?” Jake asked.
“You can arrange that?” Rob asked. “We’re talking about a crud load of jet fuel. The capacity is 332 gallons, which equates to 2,224 pounds. Depending on how much low-level flying we have to do, we’ll probably burn between 260 and 300 gallons of that getting there, leaving only about 65 gallons in the wing tanks when we land.”
“Let me make some inquiries,” Jake said.
• • •
The next day, Jake met with Rob again and presented a solution. “The resistance guy tells me that there is a very active cell in Bella Coola. Apparently it is a cell that is independent of the Anahim Lake group, which I assume is the one that Alan and Claire are in. We can arrange to have a resistance boat refuel you with two hundred seventy gallons of jet fuel—all in five-gallon cans—at the mouth of the Dean River, which is almost impossible to reach overland, but it is only forty air miles from Sigutlat Lake.”
“Okay. With two or three minutes per can—since five-gallon cans are slow to pour—we’re talking two hours to refuel. Call it three hours, to be on the safe side. I hope you realize that the top of the wing is sixteen feet over the water, so we’ll need very calm seas to be able to refuel. It’s like standing on a metal roof of a house, but the house is moving. If there are swells, it feels like you’re surfing when you’re up on the wing.”
Jake pulled out a map and showed him the water-landing site, and said, “You’ll be landing on salt water, but on a very sheltered waterway. The Dean Channel is one of the longest inlets on the coast of BC. So unless there are unusually high winds that day, at most there will be just very small swells.”
“What about Chinese troops?”
“Not an issue. We’re talking about some remote and unpatrolled coastline, not Vancouver Island. The nearest PLA garrison is in Bella Coola, and there are no roads to the mouth of the Dean. You can only get there by boat or by floatplane. “
Rob Smith rubbed his chin. “So why don’t I just drop you and your gear off with the resistance there at the inlet from the get-go?”
“It’s on the wrong side of the mountain range, and the Chinese have the only road—Highway 20—very closely watched. They’re sure to be checking IDs and they probably search every round-eye vehicle that passes through. Getting thousands of pounds of contraband cargo through would be tricky at best. The intel guys say that they scrutinize the east-west highway routes in particular, since they consider those strategic.”
“Well, if you’re sure you can arrange that, then I’m game. But if your refueling committee falls through, then I’m up a creek without jet fuel,” Rob said.
“I’m going to promise them about one hundred pounds of various ammunition and batteries in trade for the fuel, so they’ll definitely be there.”
“Batteries?” Rob asked.
“Yeah. Most people don’t realize it, but modern armies depend on batteries just as much as they depend on ammo, fuel, and MREs. They burn through a ton of batteries for radios, starlight scopes, intrusion detection systems, flashlights, laser aiming lights—all kinds of things. Without batteries, any army is back to nineteenth-century warfare.”
“Maybe you should be sabotaging battery factories in China.”
• • •
All four of them took a four-week immersion course in Chinese. With a better ear for languages, it was Peter who did best in the class. The others were able to absorb only a few words and key phrases. Their instructor—a refugee from Taiwan in her sixties—found it amusing when they asked her how to say phrases like, “Throw down your weapons,” and, “Surrender, or we will shoot.” In the end, only Peter became conversant in Chinese at a rudimentary level. But at least the other three of them remembered their key phrases and one crucial command: Surrender.
For weapons, Rhiannon had a AUS-Steyr bullpup, a capable little rifle, but it used proprietary magazines that didn’t interchange with M16 magazines. However, Rhiannon had eleven spares (a mix of thirty- and forty-two-round), so she didn’t consider that a big drawback. Meanwhile, Peter had a captured Indonesian Pindad rifle, which was a clone of the FN FNC. It used standard NATO M16 magazines. When Jake asked Peter where he’d gotten the unusual weapon, Peter said, “I got it from an Indonesian soldier who had no further use for it.”
Jake would carry an LAR-8 variant of the AR-10 with nine twenty-round steel FN/FAL magazines. The Rock River Arms LAR-8 was designed to accept either FN/FAL magazines or L1A1 magazines. Jake and Janelle both carried SIG P250 pistols chambered in .45 automatic. (Hers had originally been a .40 S&W, but they were able to find a factory conversion caliber exchange kit and some extra .45 ACP magazines.)