to their families.
All in all it had been a routine trip - it was the manner of transport to the place that proved to be unbearable, yet painfully necessary. He just wished someone had told him that shock absorbers were not standard equipment on Free Canadian Army halftracks.
As part of the joint agreement, the Kejimkujik Station could not be approached by air. This rule was instituted because should someone want to free the prisoner it would be a relatively easy operation to track a flight in and out of the deep forest and thereby determine the jail's top-secret location.
Thus all access to the prison had to be made by land vehicle, and the noisy, uncomfortable, spine-wrecking halftracks were the best means available for following the twisting, always changing, barely marked passage into the deep woods that surrounded Kejimkujik. Many times during the trip, Yaz mused that perhaps a more deserving punishment for the famous traitor would be to force him to make the torturous journey several times a week.
A warm, dry, if bare, cell seemed like paradise in comparison.
Yaz spotted the smoke about fifteen minutes after pulling out onto the paved highway.
It was a tall column of black and gray directly to his south, a mushrooming plume that seemed frozen in the cool Nova Scotia summer night. His first reaction was to
55
dismiss it-the smoke was probably nothing more than a small woods fire, burning somewhere near his destination of Yarmouth. There had been a lightning storm a couple of hours back, and it wasn't unusual for a stray bolt to set a small patch of the dry forest aflame.
But the closer he got to Yarmouth, the more he knew something was wrong. As he came within fifteen miles of the town, he saw that the smoke plume rising over the tops of the trees in the distance was actually being fed by several fires, possibly as many as a half dozen, and that the columns of sparks and ash shooting into the air were blue and green in color, indicating that more than wood was burning.
Instinctively, he gunned the old halftrack up to its top speed of 40 mph.
Still, it took him more than fifteen minutes to drive to the top of the hill that lay on the outskirts of the town where he would have an unobstructed view of Yarmouth.
When he got there he was horrified to discover that the entire town was in flames.
Twenty heart-wrenching minutes later, Yaz was barreling the halftrack through the burning streets of the seaport city, feeling like he was driving through a bad dream.
The destruction was beyond description. It appeared as if every structure in the postcard seaport-from the small brick buildings in the center of town to the hundreds of fishing shacks and houses down near the water-was either burned to the ground or still on fire. What was more, the town was still being rocked by a series of explosions, telling Yaz that the small fuel storage depot next to the town's docks was going up.
And everywhere, he saw bodies.
Even for a combat veteran like himself, it took a while before Yaz could determine just what had happened. A novice might have assumed that the fuel depot-it contained a good amount of highly volatile jet fuel-had exploded and set fire to the rest of the town. But Yaz knew
56
better. He recognized the telltale signs of many fires individually set: Rows of houses were in varying degrees of burning, as if someone had run along the street torching them in a methodical fashion. Plus, most of the bodies were in the street, indicating that the victims had some kind of warning-albeit a short one-before disaster struck. Even worse, not all of the corpses were smoldering black skeletal wrecks. Judging from the number of bashed-in skulls, some had apparently been clubbed to death.
But the most dastardly clue was the smell. On top of the sweet odor of wood smoke and the stink of jet fuel burning, the unmistakable scent of napalm-jellied gasoline used in aerial bombs-was thick in the air.
Washington, DC
Thirty
All in all it had been a routine trip - it was the manner of transport to the place that proved to be unbearable, yet painfully necessary. He just wished someone had told him that shock absorbers were not standard equipment on Free Canadian Army halftracks.
As part of the joint agreement, the Kejimkujik Station could not be approached by air. This rule was instituted because should someone want to free the prisoner it would be a relatively easy operation to track a flight in and out of the deep forest and thereby determine the jail's top-secret location.
Thus all access to the prison had to be made by land vehicle, and the noisy, uncomfortable, spine-wrecking halftracks were the best means available for following the twisting, always changing, barely marked passage into the deep woods that surrounded Kejimkujik. Many times during the trip, Yaz mused that perhaps a more deserving punishment for the famous traitor would be to force him to make the torturous journey several times a week.
A warm, dry, if bare, cell seemed like paradise in comparison.
Yaz spotted the smoke about fifteen minutes after pulling out onto the paved highway.
It was a tall column of black and gray directly to his south, a mushrooming plume that seemed frozen in the cool Nova Scotia summer night. His first reaction was to
55
dismiss it-the smoke was probably nothing more than a small woods fire, burning somewhere near his destination of Yarmouth. There had been a lightning storm a couple of hours back, and it wasn't unusual for a stray bolt to set a small patch of the dry forest aflame.
But the closer he got to Yarmouth, the more he knew something was wrong. As he came within fifteen miles of the town, he saw that the smoke plume rising over the tops of the trees in the distance was actually being fed by several fires, possibly as many as a half dozen, and that the columns of sparks and ash shooting into the air were blue and green in color, indicating that more than wood was burning.
Instinctively, he gunned the old halftrack up to its top speed of 40 mph.
Still, it took him more than fifteen minutes to drive to the top of the hill that lay on the outskirts of the town where he would have an unobstructed view of Yarmouth.
When he got there he was horrified to discover that the entire town was in flames.
Twenty heart-wrenching minutes later, Yaz was barreling the halftrack through the burning streets of the seaport city, feeling like he was driving through a bad dream.
The destruction was beyond description. It appeared as if every structure in the postcard seaport-from the small brick buildings in the center of town to the hundreds of fishing shacks and houses down near the water-was either burned to the ground or still on fire. What was more, the town was still being rocked by a series of explosions, telling Yaz that the small fuel storage depot next to the town's docks was going up.
And everywhere, he saw bodies.
Even for a combat veteran like himself, it took a while before Yaz could determine just what had happened. A novice might have assumed that the fuel depot-it contained a good amount of highly volatile jet fuel-had exploded and set fire to the rest of the town. But Yaz knew
56
better. He recognized the telltale signs of many fires individually set: Rows of houses were in varying degrees of burning, as if someone had run along the street torching them in a methodical fashion. Plus, most of the bodies were in the street, indicating that the victims had some kind of warning-albeit a short one-before disaster struck. Even worse, not all of the corpses were smoldering black skeletal wrecks. Judging from the number of bashed-in skulls, some had apparently been clubbed to death.
But the most dastardly clue was the smell. On top of the sweet odor of wood smoke and the stink of jet fuel burning, the unmistakable scent of napalm-jellied gasoline used in aerial bombs-was thick in the air.
Washington, DC
Thirty
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