Far is the Fall.

Chapter One.

Cedar Lake, Ontario. Northern Algonquin Provincial Park.

0835 hrs, 15 April 2009.

Day Zero.

The raw early spring Ontario morning was crisp, and cold, the temperature in the low forties. The morning light had a pale, crystal clear quality that left shadows that seemed to be cut with a knife and gave the water a translucent colour. Snow still clung to the earth in the shade cast by the trees, but the ice had long since broken up on the countless lakes and rivers.

Very few people made use of Ontario’s Algonquin Park during the winter, and this early in the spring it still remained silent and largely unpopulated. Soon enough the serenity of the park would be overwhelmed by the noises made by the thousands of campers and canoeists from Toronto and Ottawa that streamed into it every summer. However, until that time the park was open to be used by people other than peaceful campers.

The silence of the morning was shattered as a Canadian Forces CH-146 Griffin helicopter roared over the treetops along the edge of the lake. Missing the top branches by a mere five feet, the camouflage painted helicopter dropped like a stone to within yards of the lake’s mirror smooth surface. Seconds later, with the trees still swaying from the first helicopter’s passage, a second Griffin roared into view, some thirty feet to the right of the first. Each helicopter carried a crew of three, as well as twelve well-armed combat soldiers seated along the sides of the helicopters, their feet resting on the landing skids. The Griffin’s four rotor blades left a visible wake on the crystal smooth surface of the water as they sped over it at slightly over 120 miles per hour.

Captain Rick McCallum leaned back slightly to get his body out of the cold wind grinning happily. Had a photographer been there the shot would undoubtedly have been used for recruiting posters throughout Canada. McCallum was the son of a Scottish father and a Spanish mother, inheriting enough traits from both to be considered strikingly good looking; black wavy hair and olive skin from his mother, with the deep blue eyes and rugged features of his Scottish highlander father. He was six foot two, one hundred ninety five pounds, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and had the powerful legs and grace of a Spanish dancer. McCallum had never faced being alone at night if he chose not to be.

McCallum kept right on grinning as the helicopter skimmed mere feet over the lake. The almost surreal nature of operations like the one he was on always made him smile. Every time he did a Helo Op the image of the Air Cavalry coming over the beaches in Apocalypse Now, with Ride of the Valkyries blaring from load speakers would flash through his mind. Humming the tune to himself he glanced at the map secured to the helicopter’s bulkhead, and then at his watch. He was pleased to see that they were on schedule, having reached Cedar Lake exactly when they were supposed to.

That wasn’t always the easiest thing to do, given the tortured course they were following. He knew the pilot of this bird well, Captain Godet, but wasn’t as familiar with the co-pilot who had been in control up to this point. He was a new guy who had just joined the squadron a little over one month before. New guys can be a problem. Fortunately for McCallum the pilot was responsible for dealing with his new guy, and apparently was doing a good job of it. Flying at low altitudes was a hard style of flying; it took an incredible amount of concentration and made navigation extremely difficult. Take too long looking at an instrument, a compass or a map and you could fly into the ground in the blink of an eye.

McCallum’s real problems were the three news guys that had joined his unit. This was their first nap-of-the-earth flight and two of them had already puked twice since getting airborne. That was the main reason why the experienced troops sat close to the front of the bird and let the new guys sit to the rear. Having a puke shower come at you on these flights was not the greatest way to start the day.

“Sandman One,” his headset crackled to life. “Sandman Two.”

“Go Two,” he responded, looking across the water to the second chopper where Sergeant Major Gilbert Brace, on loan from the Special Air Service, was riding. Brace had been with Joint Task Force 2, also known as JTF2, for slightly over one year. He had been with McCallum for a six-month tour in Afghanistan, and had proven himself to be one very effective soldier, in normal Ops and the more specialized Black Ops JTF2 was often called upon to perform. McCallum admitted that he was still young, and relatively inexperienced compared to Brace. He’d only been with JTF2 for 18 months, a newly minted Captain, while Brace had been fighting all over the globe with the SAS for almost twelve years.

“I show us five minutes from Check Point Charlie,” he announced with a clipped British accent, letting him know that he was also watching the maps and the timetable as well. The two choppers had taken off from their forward operating base at first light, heading north at extremely low altitude in order to evade any radar coverage in the area. They had flown an evasive route, sticking to valleys and lakes. The pilots for TAC-HEL were very good at this kind of flying, bragging they could fly so low they could measure the size of a deer’s dick as they passed under it. They hadn’t flown quite that low on this flight but there were a few instances where treetops had brushed the bottom of McCallum’s combat boots.

The two helicopters had gradually made their way to a position well north of where the simulated enemy, in this case elements of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, were positioned. Their next checkpoint would bring them to a firebreak, a nice wide avenue cut through the forests of Algonquin Park to control fires, which would take them due south. That would be when the pilots would show their real skill, and get the helicopters between the trees and fly at less than thirty feet above the ground. The goal was to reach a position about two miles behind the RCR positions.

“Roger that, Two,” McCallum replied.

“Say again, One,” the radio crackled with static. “Did not copy.”

McCallum tapped his headset, annoyed at the increasing static on the channel. A loss of communications at this point wouldn’t be a showstopper but it would complicate the mission. He leaned back into the helicopter, tapping the pilot on his thigh and pointing at his headset when he had his attention. The pilot nodded and tapped his own, indicating he was having trouble as well. McCallum shrugged and sat forward again, looking across the gulf between the helicopters to see Brace looking back. He raised his hand to show five fingers, tapped his watch in an obvious way and then gave a thumbs up, indicating he had understood Brace’s transmission. He then tapped his headset to indicate a malfunction.

“Captain, look up!” the trooper next to him yelled in his ear while pointing to the sky.

McCallum did so, his brow furrowing as he tried to figure out what the hell it was he was looking at. Far to the west, a dozen or so lights seemed to be falling from the sky. At first they were just tiny specks, then they grew into reddish blobs, starting to trail what looked like whitish smoke. The reddish blobs quickly increased in intensity, becoming blindingly white stars of twinkling fire.

“What the fuck?” He whispered to himself.

Suddenly the lights that were deeper into the atmosphere exploded, in a flash of light so intense it almost hurt. There was no noise, just a light that seemed to speed from horizon to horizon, vanishing almost as quickly as it came. McCallum squinted hard, trying to clear the burning after-image of the flash.

“Oh, shit!”

He heard the pilot swear clearly, his voice not coming over the radio, and heard clearly when it should have been drowned out by engines that should have been roaring with power, but weren’t. McCallum was just turning his head to look at the pilot when he felt the nose of the helicopter dip. It slammed into the smooth surface of the lake at slightly over 100 miles per hour. Then they were cartwheeling across the surface, like a top in a fog of spraying water and broken metal. The shattered remains of the helicopter came to rest on its roof and then slowly sank out of sight.

*********

McCallum opened his eyes and gasped, the shock of the cold lake water squeezing his chest. Thrashing and kicking, completely disoriented, he pushed his way upwards, pushing aside wreckage and cables, following his air bubbles to the surface. Gasping and spitting out water, he broached the surface of the lake, still stunned.

The only sound he could hear was his own breathing and the disturbed honking of a flight of Canada geese taking off from the other end of the lake. While he was still trying to make sense of what had happened two figures bobbed to the surface forty feet away from him. He started to swim towards them, and then had to pause and discard some of his heavier equipment. It took him a few moments to reach the pair, one of whom was not moving and was being pulled to the nearest shore by the other.

“Brace!” He yelled upon recognizing the Sergeant Major.

“Bugger bloody hell, sir! Wha the fuck happened?”

McCallum had noticed the only way it was possible to tell when Brace was upset was by how much his accent deteriorated from professional British to pissed off Limey. Brace was not having a good day.

“Not sure Sar Maj, I think the choppers lost power, right after that flash of light.”

“What a bloody muck-up, me being in bum fuck Egypt when a bloody nuke war goes off!”

McCallum swam up alongside the two and grabbed the man Brace was pulling, it looked like the pilot, so that Brace could ditch his heavier gear. He was amazed he had been able to swim at all with all his heavy gear and carrying a limp body. Instead Brace put a finger onto the man’s throat and held it there for a moment while they swam. He then ran a hand under the water, feeling across the man’s back and chest.

“Poor lads done for, sir.”

McCallum just nodded and kept swimming for the shore, which was now very close. Brace was a fully qualified medic, and wouldn’t have given up on the man if there had been any chance of saving him. The two men reached the shore and pulled themselves up onto the tree-lined bank, pulling the body of the pilot up as well. They sat for a moment without saying anything, neither one really certain what to say. They watched the surface of the lake, hoping that someone else would miraculously surface. After a few moments Brace stood and started to strip down.

“Best we swim out and see what we can recover from the helos, sir.”

“Ok, how certain are you that the balloon has gone up?” McCallum asked as he took off his TACvest, Brace’s last comment finally translated in his head. He withdrew his kukri, the Gurkha knife given to him on a dusty battlefield near Tora Bora by a grateful Nepalese in Afghanistan, from its scabbard. He knew that he may need a blade to cut things loose if they could reach the wrecks of the helicopters.

“The flash, and then everything losing power, sounds a lot like the effects of EMP,” Brace said as he unlaced his combat boots.

Electromagnetic Pulse was one of the effects of a nuclear device exploded at high altitude. It would pretty much fry any unprotected electronics. It would explain why the helicopters stopped functioning in the blink of an eye. The lights he had seen may well have been warheads reentering the atmosphere, and the light certainly could have been a distant nuclear explosion.

“Did you see those lights off to the west?” He asked. “Quite a few of them, dropping slowly, trailing smoke.”

“I was facing east, sir,” Brace explained. “Could have been MIRVs and penaids you were seeing.”

Most missiles, Russian and American, were equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, MIRVs, basically a number of warheads that separated from the missile, entered the Earth’s atmosphere all headed for different targets. Penaids was a short form for penetration aids, tin foil, dummy warheads, the cast off shroud from the warhead housing, all designed to show up on an enemy radar and confuse any anti-missiles an enemy could fire. That must have been what he’d seen.

“It doesn’t make sense, the Russians weren’t making any noises, and sure as hell the Chinese wouldn’t pop off nukes. They don’t have enough of them to be able to take out a US counter response.”

McCallum was trying very hard to disagree with what Brace had said. If warheads exploding had been visible in Algonquin Park, in northern Ontario, that didn’t bode well for the rest of the planet.

“That may be, sir,” Brace nodded, pulling his own Kukri as well. They’d been on the same mission when a Gurkha patrol had been ambushed. Brace valued that blade just as much as McCallum valued his. “But someone lit off a bloody nuke, I’m certain of that.”

The two men swam out into the cold lake, until they found themselves in the middle of a slowly expanding oil slick. Without a word they dove under the water and started searching for the sunken wrecks of the helicopters. It was unspoken but both knew the recovery of the dead would have to wait until later, if at all. If a nuclear war had just begun, their main priority would be to get back to Base Petawawa. To do that they were going to need equipment, and the equipment they needed was on the helicopter. McCallum had most of the map of Algonquin Provincial Park memorized and knew their best chance would be to head north from Cedar Lake. They could easily reach the Trans-Canada Highway that ran over the northern edge of the Park early the next day. From there, he still wasn’t certain what course to take. For all he knew, Petawawa was nothing more than a smoking hole in the ground by now.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two