Grand Junction (41 page)

And the reality is this.

The Notre Dame Mountains, on the border between Maine and New Brunswick. Around nine hundred meters high on average. But they stretch for more than four hundred kilometers.

Tall, rocky peaks intercut by wooded valleys, vast expanses of marshland, peat bogs covered with fuzzy reeds, sand pits; vast wildlands studded with the vermilion tints of
Cornus canadensis
, the royal blue–purple of viperina, the rusty brown of chaparral bushes, blue-green toothed leaves surrounding the violet blossoms of thistles, the pointillist sparkles of orange hawkweed and the gold brilliance of broom in yellow clumps, thick and compact. And dozens of lakes. Like the one whose shore they are hugging right now.

The vegetation is strange here, born of the climatic disruptions that have been happening since the beginning of the century. Pines, cypresses, acacias, cedars, olive trees—typical of Mediterranean flora—intermingle with more lush subtropical species, succulents, cacti, banana and palm trees, clumps of Nordic dwarf pines, stands of firs, groves of maples, birches, red and white lodgepoles, clusters of beeches, profusions of green oaks, and sudden stretches of arid tundra, drier than the semidesert steppes they will also be crossing at times. The whole forms a sort of western-hybrid landscape, a kind of dreamlike Colorado that has been magically created by the combining of the deserts of middle America and
Canada, the Arctic blizzards, and the storms driven in from the North Atlantic.

Beauty refuses to give up, thinks Yuri.

The truck has difficulty navigating the deeply rutted roads. The military turbodiesel has to use all its horsepower to bring the cab across the pits, while dealing with the added nuisance of thick pools of mud. The main road leading to Lake Témiscouata and Cabano is blocked for hundreds of meters by a long series of landslides. They have no choice but to avoid Route 232 and go through the countryside. Through the desolate mountain landscape. They will probably not be able to cross La Trinité-des-Monts on time, much less Saint-Esprit.

The glacial waters of Lake Ferré, whose southern shore they are following, glitter like silver under the sky, which is deepening to twilight indigo. The crenellated peaks of the Notre Dame Mountains are hit full on by the last golden rays of the sun, while the surrounding land is shadowed slate blue. It is all breathtakingly beautiful.

Yuri does some rapid mental calculations. With their capabilities under “normal” conditions, it will take them around two hours to travel the next ten kilometers—if everything goes well.

They won’t come into view of the huge Lake Témiscouata before nightfall.

Chrysler would never take the risk of driving with headlights so close to the Maine–New Brunswick border. He will order the convoy to stop, wherever it might be at the time.

They are barely a third of the way through their mountain crossing. They are losing time. Far too much time. The time might end by losing them.

Chrysler’s plan received general approval. It was simple, and promised to be efficient as well.

“We’ll take the same route going, or nearly the same, as coming, according to local conditions. We’ll test it and make note of the problems we come up against. That should make the work easier.”

It was a good plan, a very good plan, like all Chrysler’s plans.

There’s only one problem: now, during the return trip, they have thirty-eight tons and five meters more of chassis to deal with. The plan didn’t really take this detail, essential as it is, into consideration.

Lake Ferré sparkles like a bowl of watery stars, a galaxy of crystals
drowning in a cloud of liquid gold. The sky is filled with straggling clouds flying in all directions, capturing the many frequencies that irradiate the high atmosphere. The mountains look like blocks of diamond waiting in the darkness for a thousand-year-old trap. Beauty is still resisting, thinks Yuri. Nothing is lost.

At dawn the following day they take to the road as rapidly as possible, and the morning is still pale in the sky as they follow the shores of the Lac des Aigles, whose turquoise waters ripple gently in a fresh breeze from the north. From the peak of one of the high buttes that overlooks the lake, Yuri can see the four-winged shapes of a few abandoned windmills that now turn only at the whim of the winds. The continuous movement of their blades gracefully brushes the light azure of the sky. Lower down, in the valley, he can see the spidery architecture of the old high-tension lines of Hydro-Québec, giant pylons in constructivist totems, taut cables still crossing space but transmitting nothing. Technology, it seems, is incapable of displaying its intrinsic beauty except at the moment of its extinction.

Beauty is following them, Yuri thinks, because the Law of Bronze is with them.

They are still in the region located within the confines of Maine, Quebec, and New Brunswick; everyone is on maximum alert. Later—early in the afternoon, if all goes well—when they cross Lake Témiscouata and Notre-Dame-du-Lac to rejoin Rivière-Bleue and Route 289, it will be even worse. And even more dangerous, especially on 289. They tested the route on the trip out. No problems then, but on this road that follows along the Maine border at a few miles’ distance, in the county of Aroos-took, there are numerous, fiercely determined bands of highwaymen.
If we run into a code red during the trip
, Chrysler has said,
it will be then
.

For Campbell, this means that they will be crossing a war zone. They will shoot on sight without notice. They will take no prisoners and crush anything that moves.

It is an ethic that has proven itself. It is the ethic of the Territory.

He, too, will shoot on sight, without notice, and he will crush everything in his path, and anyone who tries to bar their path.

The library will get through. The library will reach safe harbor in Grand Junction.

The library is protected.

They have a shield. The shield of the Law of Bronze. The Law that knows no borders, no jurisdiction. The Law that applies everywhere, to everyone, with the same strictness.

God created men, and Samuel Colt made them equal
, goes an old saying from the American West.

Route 289. There it is. They have passed Lake Témiscouata, then Cabano and Notre-Dame-du-Lac, practically deserted. Now they are driving as fast as they can through the American county of Aroostook. The mountains dominate the wide river that already, here at Rivière-du-Loup, is turning into an estuary that will become a gulf farther on. The sun has begun its daily journey toward the horizon, and the way is no worse going than it was coming, though the truck cannot go any faster than forty kilometers an hour. The speed of a column is that of its slowest member, an ancient military rule that Chrysler Campbell knows perfectly.

They must at all costs get away from here before nightfall; they must get as far away from Maine as they can; they must follow Route 289—patiently, but quickly. They must gain every possible second under the permanent pressure of a calculated risk. Eyes glued to his binoculars, Yuri must not miss a thing. They are the advance men; nothing can escape them.

They must get through.

Route 289 runs along the Maine border for approximately twenty miles, then swerves toward the river.

That is where it becomes complicated, especially with the truck. First they have to go down to Lake Pohenegamook, and then turn full south toward the Quebecois county of Kamouraska to Route 287 and then the two state highways in decent condition that succeed it, RD 109 and RD 209. Then they will arrive in the Estrie via the Bois-Francs, toward Thetford Mines, Asbestos County, and straight toward the region east of Sherbrooke, between Magog and Lac-Brome, before heading south of Cowansville and reaching Lake Champlain.

That is the plan. It was tested successfully on the way.

Chrysler is very specific: all that means is that the plan worked on the way, and that it has a chance of working on the way back. It is in no way a sure thing.

They stop to refuel near a small, deserted town called Saint-Athanasius. They follow a row that will take them to another row, and then to 287.

They are putting some distance between themselves and Maine. Slowly but surely. With his usual strictness, Chrysler reformulates his orders: no coastal roads, ever. Road gangs, river thieves, highways and intercity expressways without exits—better to risk the mountain expedition at the American border. None of them believes the convoy to be in any real danger here; thieves from Maine and New Brunswick are looking elsewhere, toward Quebec or Montreal.

“You think they might declare war?” Yuri asks, innocently.

Campbell gives his frank, deep laugh, one that chills the blood under the present circumstances. “Of course they’ll declare war; that’s all they know how to do. That’s all they’re good for. ‘War,’ though—I should really say tribal infighting, strictly animalistic, no internal solidarity, no trust in anyone, ever … compared to that, the Territory is paradise.”

“Think we’ll make 287 before tonight?”

“The roads are in pretty iffy condition, as you’ve seen. I’m no weather forecaster. It’ll depend on the truck. And the two guys driving it.”

They reach Route 287 just as the sun sets behind the mountains. They can’t risk turning on the headlights. Chrysler orders the convoy to park immediately on the side of the road. They followed the plan, and they’ve come out all right.

They still have to spend one more night hidden behind the trees on the side of the road; then, tomorrow, during the day, they will leave the mountains behind, arrive quickly in the Estrie, and then be in sight of the Territory.

They followed the plan, and the plan followed them.

The noise of the Italian truck is metallic, clear, bright; it doesn’t have the deep heaviness of North American engines. A coloratura soprano against a baritone in a Wagnerian choir. Yuri realizes that the difference between two civilizations can be found in the nuances of sound between two machines more than in the customs of their people or the style of their architecture.

The convoy is on the road again; dawn has just broken. Beauty is already showing her face, too, wreathed with a blue-white halo. The highest peaks of the Notre Dame Mountains are pale yellow, glazed with the translucence that signals the arrival of the sun. Yuri spends a few moments
contemplating the progressive play of the waking light on nature before raising his combat binoculars to his eyes, amplified vision, multi-frequency treatment, laser telemetry–equipped, “intelligent” selection and acquisition of targets, multifocalization on targetable points, numeric coding of information. The world is no longer beautiful or bestial; it is parametered, calculated, truer than nature.

They drive RD 109 and then 209, which are directly connected to each other; they are halfway through the mountains, in the Chaudière-Appalaches region, skirting glacial lakes that shine like mirrors under the blinding light of the new-risen sun. The high peaks, covered with the multiclimatic mixture of American flora, gleam with silvery light.

They drive. The convoy is in good order. Yuri and Campbell are three kilometers in the lead; the road is in good shape. They will be able to make up part of the lost time.

Yuri observes the nature around them, binoculars riveted to his eyes like prostheses newly but permanently attached to his body.

They drive, sometimes at up to eighty kilometers an hour, the best speed they have made since their departure from Sainte-Anne-des-Monts.

Yuri contacts the two other vehicles regularly to make sure everything is okay.

Everything is okay.

They drive. They leave the county of Kamouraska and enter that of L’Islet, rounding the point of Lake Saint-Anne. In twenty miles or so, state road 209 will connect to the larger Route 216, and they will undoubtedly be able to go even faster.

They drive. Every minute puts the Maine border farther behind them.

Chrysler’s plan has worked perfectly.

They drive. The morning light plays on the various plant and mineral textures that mark the changing landscape.

They drive. The engine growls deeply, continuously.

They drive. The world is staggeringly beautiful.

They drive. And suddenly, Yuri screams in the cabin:

“STOP!”

They stop. Cleanly, at the edge of a wooded area opening onto a vast plateau grooved with ravines and scattered with heavy blocks of stone.

And everywhere on the plateau, their backs to the convoy, walking toward the river, are hundreds of men. Men in urban-camouflage uniforms
of gray and black. Armed to the teeth. And with them are various civil and military vehicles.

The rear line must be three hundred meters away.

Hundreds of men. Maybe more than a thousand.

Yuri barely takes the time to confirm what his binoculars are telling him before ordering Chrysler to back off—“Good God, faster”—into the shelter of the woods from which they have just emerged. He seizes the radio microphone. The language of the Territory takes control of his brain, it is a state of absolute emergency. “Code red. Total stop. Vehicles under cover immediately.”

“Who are these guys?” Chrysler demands.

Yuri jumps out of the pickup and walks through the underbrush toward the clearing. From behind a bare, ancient maple he observes the crowd of men through his binoculars. Campbell sees him run back toward the truck at top speed.

“They saw the truck coming. They’re turning back toward the road!”

Chrysler doesn’t hesitate for a second. The roar of the engine makes the air shiver like thunder above the streets where the last men are fighting. Yuri hears himself screaming into the radio in the language of the Territory, the language of militarized zones exploding from his throat: “Junction to all units; code red. Maximum speed. I repeat: code red, maximum speed.”

“Canadian unionists,” he says as they drive at almost a hundred kilometers per hour along the side of the plateau where dozens of men are running in their direction, shouldering their firearms, while several all-terrain vehicles execute half-turns with difficulty amid the ravines and boulders.