Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  They realize that Brother “Francisco,” like all the members of his secret Order, lives constantly under various pseudonyms. Anonymity, the manipulation of information, ruses, and worse can be extremely efficient forms of combat against the Devil, the Papacy has admitted. Especially in these troubled times when He knows so well how to present Himself in guises of honesty, loyalty, frankness, friendship, and peace. It is the visible paradox of the Mission of these soldier-monks whose very names are known only to the Most Holy Pontiff and the High Council of the Order: they must remain totally secret within their very community; they must use trickery against their own co-religionists. To remain invisible to the eyes of the Devil, it is said in the secret Order, we must remain invisible to the eyes of the Church itself.

  “The Holy Pontiff is aware of the dangers he himself faces: the Scriptures are very clear on this subject. The Devil would know how to lie in every possible way, especially by taking on the very face of the Savior, and thus his Temporal Body, the Church itself. ‘There is nothing to say he might not take my own place one day,’ he has said to us.”

  “It hasn’t taken the Pope’s place, but it has taken possession of the world,” answers Yuri without really knowing why, obeying an impulse that comes from the deepest part of his soul.

  The man accompanying Brother Francisco Alpini on this odyssey is one Brother Friedrich Ostermann. This guy’s been places, thinks Yuri, observing his suntanned skin, the deep lines etched in his face by tragedy, the eyes tempered in a still-blazing forge. The secret Order knows how to choose its members. Yuri senses a powerful empathy between the two men, of the kind that rises between brothers in arms, well before the first problem, the first battle, the first killing. They look out for each other, because each one knows the other is looking out for him. Basic doctrine of the Alpinis, muses Yuri, as of all the elite corps that have existed for as long as there have been wars, as long as the world has not been able to impose a Pax Universalis using an instrument like the Metamachine, omniscient and invisible. Now, with the Metamachine vanished, the few regional conflicts born of the Grand Jihad have ceded their places to the multiplication of neotribal wars, microlocal wars, wars from before the existence of nations, religions, politics. Which is exactly what is happening here, in the American northeast.

  Today, thinks Yuri, is their first day in New Jerusalem, not yet born but already threatened.

  “Our organization is legally clandestine, even in the eyes of ecclesiastical institutions. Our Order as such has been decreed in pectore. We are the secret service of the Papacy. We answer to no one but the sovereign Pontiff.”

  Then:

  “Our Order has transmitter-receivers in working order; we are able to communicate with our Superior Fathers, or with Opus Dei in the Vatican. This library just crossed the Atlantic during the worst part of the winter; now it will have to pass through a new terra incognita of which we know almost nothing, but we do know that this cargo is not only vitally important for its intended recipients—meaning yourselves—but that it is at high risk of attracting lusts of all sorts. We were warned that acts of maritime piracy would be standard during the crossing, but now that we are on land we really have no idea what is in store for us.”

  “Where we’re going,” Vernier replies simply, “the acts of piracy you refer to are child’s play. Welcome to America.”

  Alpini takes the opportunity to emphasize the situation on the other side of the ocean. “In Italy, the neo-Islamist offensive has begun again in the northwest. They’ve launched a huge operation against Genoa, and people say powerful naval forces are massing in the Balkans to retake Trieste and attack Venice again. This time, the Lombard army might not be enough. Naples hasn’t yet fallen in the south, but Puglia and almost all of Calabria did in just a few weeks … not to mention Sicily, which is now their sanctuary, just as it was centuries ago.”

  “Do you really think the Holy City is in danger?” Yuri asks.

  “Yes. We all think so. It is the most redoubtable warning in the Scriptures, the Mystery of the Holy Iniquity: during the End Times, the Church itself will be crucified. We just barely escaped the catacombs. Obviously, this mission has to be a success.”

  “Heavy Metal Valley County will dedicate all its resources to it, I assure you.”

  The Law of Bronze is with them, Yuri thinks. It will be the armor that protects the convoy and its contents. It will be the deadly steel in the service of these books from another world.

  Control: Observation of the truck. Thirty-eight tons, militarized Iveco, with seven-millimeter Kevlar armor on its vital parts—engine, lateral walls and rear door of the container carrier, cab doors. Assault-infantry model uncrushable tires. Securimax Plexiglas windshield. Container carrier solidly riveted to the platform; khaki base with green-brown-black camouflage paint. Inside: Two levels, separated by a horizontal aluminum wall. A main level that contains four rectangular containers lacquered with ultramarine paint, with the insignia of the Italian Aeronautica. Second level, narrow, less tall: other containers, smaller, green in color, marked “Evergreen,” boxes of steel-gray metal with a black cross imprinted on each side; jerricans, spare tires, suitcases, and duffel bags crammed with various objects. The library is distributed among the main containers on level one. The rest, above it, explains one of the Vatican men, are personal effects, necessities, gasoline reserves, ammunition, tools, mechanical parts, and a second complete, dismantled engine, as well as around twelve hundred Jerusalem Bibles, which weren’t planned to be included at the outset, but which Opus Dei insisted on adding at the last minute.

  Planning: The group is organized, given the main axes of the route to be followed and a rapid description of the Ameri-Canadian Northeast. Warned of the principal risks. The final goal is stated. A map is taken out, and passage points and access routes indicated.

  Strategy: They will pass through the Notre Dame Mountains; they will not go back down by the coastal road. They will avoid all the seaboard cities—Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, to begin with, but also Matane, Rimouski, Rivière-du-Loup, and Quebec, obviously. They will be driving at around a thousand meters above sea level; it will be mountainous, desolate; the roads have not been maintained for at least twelve years.

  It will be very tough.

  Chrysler never allows the slightest illusory hope to remain.

  That, he always says, gives reality a bit of a chance.

  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.