The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

  Buttoned into the thigh cargo pocket of McBraden’s pants were two bottles of pills. One of them contained a prescription sleep aid called Ambien—Rod had heard of that drug, but had never used it. The other carried twenty tablets of Dexedrine, a speed-type drug that Rod knew very well from his drug-peddling years. Once handed out like candy by doctors to anyone who wanted them, these had become virtually extinct in the United States in the late 1970s.

  “What’re these pills for?” He asked McBraden. McBraden looked sullen and didn’t answer. He’d passed into the whipped-dog phase of suffering, where his mind simply gave up, and he chose to endure his agony in silence—Rod had seen it before.

  Rod sliced the lace that held McBraden to the pine’s trunk, and yanked him to his feet by one arm. He didn’t give the terrorist back his trousers, but marched him in only his boxer shorts back to M-28. On the shoulder of the highway, he tied McBraden’s hands more securely behind his back. Then Rod kicked the back of McBraden’s knees so that he fell to a kneeling position on the rough gravel. His pistol was tucked into Rod’s own waistband. Its two spare, fully-loaded magazines were in the thigh pocket of his trousers.

  It occurred to McBraden then that the man standing behind him might shoot him in the back of his head with his own gun. McBraden squeezed his eyes tightly shut, wondering if it would hurt much.

  The same thought passed through Rod’s mind as he gazed at McBraden’s scalp. But he couldn’t do it. The memory of the man he’d already killed, almost without conscious thought, would haunt him for the rest of his days. It was a soul-soiling sin that he could never undo, and he hated that he’d never again be able close his eyes at night without seeing the man’s face. No, he couldn’t execute this poor excuse for a human being who knelt in front of him, no matter how richly he deserved it.

  The first vehicle to approach them was a semi-truck loaded with jackpine logs. As Rod figured he would, the driver slowed at the unusual sight of a man at the side of the road in his underwear, but he didn’t stop the truck. Following behind him was a late-model Hyundai Santa Fe. Rod flagged him down. The driver was a portly, balding man with a well-dressed, handsome woman of a similar age next to him. Rod opened the driver’s door.

  “Get out,” he said. “I need your car.” He shoved the Beretta within inches of the man’s nose to emphasize his meaning.

  Glenn Hueker was a Yooper, born and raised, and he lived here in this mostly desolate part of the United States because things like this didn’t happen around here. His initial response was to take umbrage at being carjacked. But his wife Anna was looking very frightened, and that muted his sense of outrage. Glenn got out of the car with his hands above his shoulders, palms facing Rod, like he’d seen in a thousand movies. Anna did the same.

  “You got a cell phone?” Rod asked Glenn.

  “Yes,” Glenn answered simply.

  “Good. Call 911, and tell them that your car was stolen at the intersection of 28 and 123. Tell them you’ve got a terrorist with you.”

  The occupants of the Hyundai looked confused at first. Then it dawned on them that Rod wasn’t referring to himself, but to the half-naked man who was trussed and on his knees beside them on the shoulder of the road.

  Rod handed Hueker all of the Canadian money and all but a $100 of the American money. “This is for your troubles.” He said. Then before they could utter a reply, Rod jumped behind the wheel, threw the Hyundai in gear, and sped off in a cloud of dust and gravel.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE DESTINATION

  Aziz stared intently into the van’s rearview mirror. He’d picked up a police tail when he blew through a speed trap at Moran, on M-123. The speed limit changed suddenly from sixty-five to fifty miles per hour for a mere one hundred yards, and there was often a county deputy parked there to enforce it. The cop was two cars back, and Grigovich had noticed two officers in the cruiser. Both those cops would be dead before they reached the van if they decided to stop them.

  Fortunately, the cruiser continued on when Aziz turned off on Interstate 75 toward the Mackinac Bridge. Grigovich breathed a sigh of relief and took his hand from the butt of his Desert Eagle. He willed himself to relax and breathe evenly. He wasn’t afraid of being shot—he had no doubt that he and Aziz could have taken out both cops before either had time to clear his holster. But they were so close to their objective now, and there had been enough snafus already. They didn’t need even one more thing to go wrong.

  Aziz felt the same. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was quarter to seven in the morning. Enough time to check into a motel and get some real sleep before they began the tricky procedure of assembling their bombs. For all its power, the C4 plastic explosive they carried was pretty stable stuff. They weren’t going to insert the blasting caps or connect the detonators that would trigger them until the bombs were mounted under the bridge’s towers. More than one holy warrior had inadvertently blown himself up in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Aziz wasn’t about to add himself to the list.

  He drove up to the toll both on the north end of the bridge, and handed the female attendant a $10 bill. While she made change, he engaged her in small talk.

  “Are the painters still workin’ on the bridge?” He asked in his best Midwestern accent.

  She smiled at him, doubtless mistaking his olive skin as Native American, probably from one of the nearby tribal casinos. “When aren’t they working on the bridge? The outside lane is closed for about a mile in the middle—you have to drive on the grating—but you have two lanes most of the way across.”

  She handed him his change, and he put the van in gear. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said as he pulled away.

  Aziz drove the five-mile span of the Mackinac Bridge a little slower than the posted forty-five miles-per-hour speed limit. A lot of tourists drove white-knuckled across the bridge, petrified at being four hundred feet above the Straits of Mackinac, with only a waist-high rail to prevent them from going into the icy-cold waters below. Seeing someone driving under the speed limit might be suspicious anywhere else, but here it just brought an amused grin to the faces of bridge patrol personnel.

  But Aziz wasn’t afraid of heights; neither was Grigovich. Their mission demanded that none of them be fearful of working at almost four hundred feet when planting their charges. Aziz was driving slowly so Grigovich could snap photos of painters and other maintenance workers with a digital camera. They’d been sent plenty of reconnaissance information, including photos, by Brenda Waukonigon and a few Middle Eastern sympathizers—none of whom knew about the whole operation—but Aziz wanted up-to-date photos, as well.

  As the woman at the toll booth had said, maintenance of the bridge was an ongoing and never-ending process. As she’d predicted, the bridge’s midpoint was blocked in the outside lane on both north- and southbound sides, with all manner of trucks and heavy equipment. Maintenance workers were in a hurry to get the span ready for the upcoming Bridge Walk, and especially to make it presentable for the governor. Security was heightened, but so was activity; there appeared to be less concern for the governor’s safety than there was for his approval.

  Aziz and Grigovich had made no reservations at any of the motels in the area. That was a wild card in their strategy, but it was probably a safe bet that one of the tourism-dependent hostelries in Mackinaw City would have a vacancy. According to the literature Aziz had gathered on the area, the only times they had been filled up was once or twice during the St. Ignace Auto Show, which had been waning in popularity in recent years, and once in 1995, when the bridge had unofficially been damaged by a tornado, stranding travelers on both sides for almost twenty-four hours. The way that the damage caused by the tornado had been covered up, and the local media squelched, showed that the First Amendment was conditional at certain times. It almost made Aziz giddy to think how his operation would cause the American government to reveal its tyrannical rule over its citizenry.

  Aziz didn’t want a room at a seedy motel; he wa
nted it to be mid-priced, busy enough for them to be just faceless guests, but not too expensive for a working-class man to stay there. He found it at the Hammond Inn, a fairly decent-looking place within walking distance of Mackinaw City. More than a dozen cars and trucks occupied the parking lot, even a couple of motor homes. Aziz pulled into the entrance.

  He got out of the van and walked through the frosted-glass front door of the office. Grigovich waited in the van, pretending to be busy with the radio. Aziz noticed a single security camera mounted inside a plastic dome in the office’s ceiling when he walked in. No matter; his face wouldn’t show up in any of Interpol’s files. It might later, after he’d done what he meant to do here, but by then he’d have returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero of Islam, and untouchable to America.

  The somewhat attractive woman at the front desk was probably in her early forties. Her hair was meticulously coiffed, and her eyes were maybe just a little too accentuated with makeup. There was an excess of concealer around the crow’s feet at the outer corner of her eyes. She was trying to hide her age. She appraised his dark skin and Arabic features approvingly, and he smiled at her as warmly as he could. She was hot to trot, probably divorced at least once. He might be able to use those weaknesses to good advantage.

  But she was also a motel check-in clerk in a Podunk town that thrived on tourism. If she’d been doing that job for any length of time, she’d probably developed an ear for accents, and an eye for detail that would shame a forensics detective. Applying his best Midwestern accent, Aziz made small talk as he filled out the motel registration as Jaime Johnson.

  “What’s all the hubbub in town?” he asked, feigning ignorance.

  “Why it’s the annual Bridge Walk, silly. You mean, you’ve never been here for that? Why, it’s one of the highlights of summer in our beautiful city,” she said with noticeable pride.

  Her own accent held just a hint of southern drawl, probably from one of the Carolinas. It was muted by having lived several years in northern Michigan, but Aziz also had an ear for dialects, and to him it was clear. It was also clear that she considered herself a pillar of this community, and she was probably well-informed about local happenings.

  “Oh,” he said, “I wondered why there was so much commotion on the Mackinac Bridge.”

  “Oh that. . . . They’re always working on the bridge, painting and whatnot. They’re especially busy now, finishing up for the Bridge Walk. My nephew works there at a toll booth, and he says the state police have been all over it for the last couple of days. The governor is the first one across, you know, and the troopers are making everything confusing.”

  She held out her right hand. “My name is Becky,” she said sweetly. “If you need anything . . .” She looked at the registration card. “How do you pronounce your first name?” she asked, looking earnestly into his eyes.

  Aziz smiled a friendly, wide grin that showed his white teeth, “Jaime,” he said, pronouncing it ‘High-me.’

  “All right, Jaime,” she said, shoving her right hand toward him with a big smile, “If you need anything at all, you just let me know, okay?”

  He took the hand she proffered, and kissed it with his best affectation of a Hollywood romantic. She blushed. Aziz noted that there was no wedding ring on her left hand. She was probably divorced, and from her flirtatious manner, she was open to romance.

  “Thank you, Becky. Do you have a room facing Lake Huron?” It was a question that she might have expected from a visitor. But it was no coincidence that a room facing the lake was also out of sight of the office. He didn’t want this busybody taking notes of their comings and goings.

  “Why sure, Sweetheart,” she said, reaching for a magnetic-card room key from the numbered cubbyholes behind her. “Checkout is at 10 AM. Like I said, if you need anything else, you just let me know.”

  “Thank you, Becky. You can bet I will.” There was no one else in the office to see him check in, and he might have need of this woman’s knowledge of local goings-on.

  He went back to the van. “How’d it go?” Grigovich asked.

  “No problem, Peter. The clerk’s name is Becky, and she seems to take an interest in everything that happens in this town. She’s also on the make. We may be able to use her.”

  He drove around to room thirty-four. They pretended to be busy in the van until an elderly couple had gotten into their sedan and driven away. Then they quickly took their backpacks inside the room they’d rented.

  The room was dark. Aziz didn’t want to open the drapes, so he clicked on a lamp between the twin beds. Grigovich threw his satchel onto one of the beds, and unzipped it. The plastic explosive was foilwrapped in its original packaging. The blasting-cap detonators were isolated in a folding case, each of them tucked into its own recess in a foam liner. The paired blasting-cap wires were carefully twisted together at the ends to short them electrically. If they weren’t kept shorted together, even a static spark might set them off, and accidental detonation of thirty pounds of C4 was something he didn’t want to even think about.

  Aziz opened his own case. Inside were two Pelican-brand, folding plastic briefcases, his own and that cowardly McBraden’s. He laid them side-by-side on the other bed and opened them. Each was lined top and bottom with Styrofoam. Nestled securely into recesses in the Styrofoam were two softball-size spheres of fuel-grade plutonium. Each sphere was encased in polyurethane plastic to help prevent radioactive contamination.

  Aziz produced a palm-size Radalert Geiger counter. He waved it over the spheres of plutonium. He didn’t need to do it; he already knew what the results would be. He just liked to see the radiation that was being emitted by them.

  He’d originally wanted to set his charges at the top of the bridge’s towers. But the only entrances to the bridge’s tower elevators were through oval, submarine-size hatches that were normally padlocked and chained shut. He had thought long and hard about how they could gain access to these portals, but there just was no way to do it without being seen and questioned by bridge authority cops. Even at night, the bridge was just too well lit to get into them unseen. And any use of the tower elevators that carried riders almost to the top was registered immediately at the state police post at the northern end of the bridge.

  Instead, he’d opted to mount his bombs to the underside of the bridge. Below the road surface, there was chain-link fencing hung to serve as scaffolding for maintenance workers. Nothing had changed with the loss of two of his team, except that now he and Grigovich had more work to do.

  Thirty pounds of C4 placed in two separate bombs between the towers, a little over a mile apart, would collapse at least part of the roadway between them. The plan was to detonate the plastic explosive when the first walkers—including Michigan’s governor—reached the second, most northerly bomb.

  With any luck, the initial explosions would kill more than a hundred people, including the governor, and cause the hikers in-between the bombs to fall into the straits below. The rest would climb over one another in panic. The timing of the explosions would be precise, because the detonating devices were a pair of cell phones; the current that passed through them when they rang would trigger the blasting caps. In the same way crowds of people had become renowned for trampling one another at soccer games and music concerts, Aziz expected them to shove each other over the precipice of the broken bridge by the dozens.

  The most glorious part would come later, after they’d triggered the bombs. The powerful charges would turn the plutonium encased in the bombs to aerosol. Heavy particles of plutonium dioxide would then rain down onto the bridge, the cities of Saint Ignace in the Upper Peninsula, and Mackinaw City in the Lower Peninsula. The prevailing westerly winds should carry—or so he had been informed—the radiation as far as Mackinac and Bois Blanc Islands. The real effects of breathing vaporized plutonium wouldn’t be immediate, but in a day or so—probably before authorities even thought to check for radiation—there would be an epidemic of radioactive pneumonitis and oth
er respiratory problems. For years after that, there would be outbreaks of lung cancer, especially among the very old and the very young.

  Then there were the psychological repercussions. The bridge could be repaired in just a few months, but the radiation would linger much longer, and the terror it inspired would continue for years. No one would be able to drive across the five-mile span without wondering if it were structurally sound, and whatever authorities claimed, travelers would forevermore think of the bridge as being radioactive. Fish from the waters below would be considered inedible, and tourism would suffer a blow from which it’d never recover.

  The United States government would probably try to hide the fact that the explosions were radioactive. But two days after they occurred, every media outlet from Facebook to CNN would receive a previously prepared press release Aziz had written about the attack. When Fox News and other media ran their own Geiger counters over the area, they’d indict authorities for trying to cover up a national disaster, and for endangering the lives of tens of thousands of not only Americans, but other nationalities who routinely crossed that bridge. The ensuing finger-pointing would probably extend all the way to congress. Maybe even the president. The thought of causing such chaos made Aziz brim with savage delight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WRONGLY ACCUSED

  Shannon Elliot was visibly shaken from seeing all those dead bodies at the river, but she was also relieved at not finding her husband among them. It was fully dark now, but she’d turned her headlamp to its lowest setting, unconsciously keeping the terrible sight around her beyond view.

  “Mrs. Elliot, are you going to be okay? Shannon . . .” Colyer touched her shoulder.