The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

  He was glad the road came to a dead end, because the heavy suspension of the big Dodge he was driving didn’t allow Rod to drive as fast as the van he was chasing. The terrorist was pulling away from him, but he couldn’t drive any faster; he was bouncing into the truck’s ceiling now. The van took the right fork, the long one leading back to the beaver dam. It was more than three miles long, if Rod remembered correctly. Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources had filled in the mud holes he remembered, so that even cars could negotiate that two-track. Even so, his top speed driving it was no more than ten miles an hour.

  In the van, Aziz smiled to see his pursuer steadily becoming smaller in his rear-view mirror. With one hand, he withdrew a cell phone from a button-down shirt pocket under his coveralls. He pushed the speed dial button, and then punched a single digit on its keypad.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  MURDER ON THE BRIDGE

  Colyer had been driving back to the Sault when his car radio informed him that there was a commotion on the Mackinac Bridge. In fact, it sounded like it was a goddamned disaster. Radio traffic was, of course, cryptic, to help stymie the hundreds of citizens who routinely monitored police calls on a Radio Shack scanner.

  It didn’t appear that Central Dispatch was all that clear about the details, anyway, but the woman on the mike seemed agitated. Whatever was happening had caused enough uproar to close the bridge to all traffic. That alone made it a big deal.

  Colyer rummaged through the Charger’s glove box for the magnetic-mount red strobe that identified his vehicle as a police car, and stuck it to the roof. He seldom used the thing; he hoped that it still worked. The light responded with bright flashes of red when he plugged it into the receptacle. He stuck it onto his roof and sped toward Saint Ignace. He looked at the digital clock on his car’s CD player; almost 2 AM. It would be another forty minutes before he got there, even if he drove like a madman, and a deer or moose didn’t jump out in front of him.

  During the long drive, Colyer mulled over again what had happened so far, trying to put it all together into a cogent picture. It had all begun with that unusual incident with the diesel submarine off the coast of Canada, he was certain of it. The abandoned Zodiac boat at Whitefish Point probably had something to do with whoever the submarine had delivered to the east coast of Canada. The abandoned Zodiac also had some connection to whoever had committed the murders on the Betsy River. But what was Rod Elliot’s connection to all of this?

  Colyer tended to think that Elliot’s part in all of this was purely incidental: He’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But local police seemed to have a hard-on for anyone who’d done time in a penitentiary. A belief that he’d be blamed for what had happened would cause a man to avoid reporting what had happened, and Rod’s silence wasn’t helping anyone put together an intelligent picture of what was going on. Colyer really needed to know what Rod Elliot knew, and why this survival instructor should have apparently taken up with the men who’d landed on Whitefish Point.

  Or was he pursuing them? If that were the case, then why? Colyer’s time with Rod’s wife Shannon hadn’t led him to believe that the man was any kind of hero. If anything, he was a bit antisocial and introverted; a man who’d seen enough trouble in his life to want to avoid more. Not the kind of man who’d risk his own life by chasing after known killers.

  Unless he thought he had a good reason. Maybe he was trying to clear himself. Maybe he believed that he was in a corner. No man was more dangerous than when he thought he was cornered, and no man was more likely to act illogically than when he could see no way out of a predicament. That sounded like a profile that might fit Rod Elliot’s behavior. If Elliot thought that he had nothing to lose, he could be a danger to outlaw and lawman alike.

  When Colyer arrived at the Mackinac Bridge, the scene he encountered was one of sheer anarchy. Interstate 75 was road-blocked at the first exit to Saint Ignace on the northbound side, and all the tollbooths at the bridge were blocked by police vehicles. He was stopped by a state trooper there for just a moment, but the trooper acknowledged his ID without an argument, thankfully. He suggested that Colyer could find a place to park at the visitor center. Colyer took his advice. Then he stepped out of the Charger to take stock of the situation.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he asked a state trooper who was hurrying by.

  “Captain Jameson. Over there,” the trooper said, pointing his index finger at a tall, gray-haired man who looked to be in his mid-sixties and stretched thin at the moment. He was surrounded by lesser-ranking officers, who all seemed to be asking him questions at the same time.

  Colyer walked over and introduced himself, brushing past the crowd of querulous troopers. There appeared to be no time for politeness, and rank had its privileges.

  “Captain Jameson, I’m Special Agent Thomas Colyer of the FBI,” he said, extending his right hand.

  Jameson shook his hand, glad to be interrupted, and sorry, for once, to be the person in charge. “I’m Ed Jameson, Agent Colyer. How can I be of service to the FBI?”

  “Just bring me up to speed about what occurred here, Sir,” Colyer said.

  Jameson told Colyer what he knew. It wasn’t much. He related the story of the failed roadblock; how the two vehicles that had managed to smash through it had then eluded the rest of the surprised police long enough to disappear, probably onto one of the many side roads that led into Mackinaw State Forest. How, at least, one of the escapees had stabbed a man to death on the scaffolding below the bridge’s roadway. Jameson described the horrific stab wound in detail, the way there’d been bits of the victim’s heart muscle found outside the wound on the man’s clothing. Jameson seemed more than repulsed by the nature of the crime.

  Colyer was thinking more clearly—or maybe he was just more calloused from what he’d already seen in the past twenty-four hours. He requested to see the body, which had thankfully already been removed from the scaffolding—Colyer really hated heights. No one had identified the victim yet, but they were sure that he wasn’t on the list of maintenance personnel who were cleared to work on the bridge. How he’d gained access to the scaffolding under the bridge, what he’d been doing there, and why he’d been killed were some of the questions Jameson and his men were looking to answer.

  Jameson led Colyer into the state police plaza at the northwest end of the bridge. There, in a conference room turned temporary morgue, was the body of Peter Grigovich, laid-out, naked on a collapsible Stryker cot. Colyer pulled back the purple sheet that covered the cadaver’s head and inspected the single knife wound in its chest. Jameson was right; it was a terrible and obviously fatal wound. At one of the narrow edges of the wound, flesh had been pulled outward.

  Colyer tried to envision the blade that would have caused such a wound. It would have had backward-facing serrations along the blade’s spine. This type of serration would resist being withdrawn when it was stabbed deeply into flesh. Yet, it seemed to have penetrated easily. Not a dirk or dagger that was designed for use as a weapon. Maybe a survival-type knife, one with a serrated back that was meant to work as a saw.

  It also didn’t fit the profile that the victim had been stabbed only once. Most knife murders, both premeditated and crimes of passion, involved multiple stab wounds. Whether he (or she) meant to be so precise or not, the single stab wound in this man’s chest was perfectly sited to cause immediate death. It had probably been inflicted by someone who knew how to render the victim harmless with one blow.

  “Well?” Colyer looked up. Jameson was staring into his eyes. He seemed genuinely anxious to hear the FBI agent’s thoughts.

  Colyer replaced the sheet. He looked pensively at Jameson.

  “Well, it was efficient, no doubt about that. The assailant seemed to know what he intended to accomplish.”

  “You think it was premeditated, then?”

  “I think it was intentional. Do you have any idea of what the motive might have been?”

  “No,�
� Jameson said, looking at the floor. “We haven’t even identified the body yet. What we do know is that he wasn’t cleared to be where he was when he was killed.”

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  “There was one man, middle-aged, gray beard. He overpowered the bridge patrol officer who rappelled down to investigate, and then he escaped in a welder’s truck. We’re pretty sure he was driving one of the vehicles that ran the roadblock. We think he’s the one who did the stabbing. We know he’s armed and dangerous, but we don’t have an identity on him, either.”

  The man that Jameson was calling armed and dangerous was Rod Elliot, Colyer was sure. And this man laid out on the cot before him was almost certainly one of the men who’d landed at Whitefish Point. He didn’t have enough evidence to make more than an educated guess about anything, but it was pretty clear to him that Elliot wasn’t in cahoots with these guys.

  “I’d like to inspect the site where this man was stabbed,” Colyer said.

  Jameson nodded compliance, and led him out of the room. Colyer was glad to leave; this room was starting to give him the proverbial creeps. They walked outside the building and Jameson said, “I’ll see if I can find an officer to drive you onto the bridge. That way you’ll go right to the correct place . . . it’ll save you having to look for it.”

  The scene he’d wanted to investigate revealed itself to him almost as soon as they’d walked out to the parking lot. As Colyer and Jameson watched in astonishment, the far tower was engulfed in a ball of red flame and black smoke. The roadway around it heaved upward in a massive wave, as if it were flexible, and then shattered into huge chunks of asphalt and steel that flew outward and upward from the structure. Trucks and cars flew upward in slow motion, and then tumbled back downward into the Straits below. He saw the bodies of people fly outward, too, and his gut wrenched as he watched them cartwheel downward to the water. Then the shock wave and noise hit them, traveling at the speed of sound. Colyer could actually feel the heat of the blast on his face, felt his hair blown back from its force. The earth trembled under his feet, and he took a step backward from the push of a tremendous shock wave.

  “Oh my God . . .” Jameson stuttered.

  “Holy fuck,” Colyer exclaimed in spite of himself.

  Winds cleared away the smoke in less than a minute, leaving a scene of carnage and destruction that was only too visible to Colyer from more than two miles away.

  “Oh my God,” Jameson repeated.

  Screw waiting for an officer. Colyer ran up to a patrol car and ordered the officer to get in and drive him to the scene. The officer, with a dazed look on his face, looked askance at Jameson. Colyer shoved him out of the way and seated himself behind the steering wheel of the already running car. He threw the transmission into gear and punched the accelerator pedal. The cruiser’s powerful V-8 engine responded with a low growl and a squeal of rubber on asphalt.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THROUGH THE WOODS

  Rod heard the explosion from more than five miles away. Even in the deep forest, it rumbled and shook the earth with a vibration that he felt through the truck’s steering wheel. The boom sent a chill like ice water down his spine because he knew that one of the bombs that McBraden had told him about had exploded. That was the sound of people dying, and knowing that filled him with a remorse equal to any he’d ever known.

  When Rod caught up with the van, it was abandoned at the end of the two-track. He remembered the years before the Department of Natural Resources had decided to ‘improve’ this road with bulldozers to make it more accessible to the telephone workers who maintained the underground line it paralleled. Before that, it had required a pretty gnarly four-wheel-drive to reach this dam, where French Farm Creek exited from the lake’s western end and drained into Lake Michigan. It was ironic that now a car could not only get through, it could actually outrun a truck because its whipped-cream suspension absorbed bumps more gently. Rod rubbed the back of his neck; he’d probably gotten whiplash from bashing his head into the Dodge’s ceiling so many times on the way here.

  He didn’t pull up next to the van. As soon as he’d broken into the clearing where it was parked, he jammed the accelerator to the mat and braced himself against the steering wheel. The brush-guarded, front end of the truck hit the van on its side, crushing the panel door and actually pushing the vehicle sideways onto two wheels. If the man he was chasing had hopes of hiding inside and ambushing Rod when he pulled up, Rod wanted to throw a monkey wrench into that strategy.

  Almost before the truck had stopped moving, Rod was out the door with the 50-caliber Desert Eagle in his fist. Using the truck door for concealment—he knew that a bullet would punch right through it—he waited several long minutes while he scrutinized the van and the woods around the parking area intently. He’d taken too many deer to make the mistake of being the first one to expose himself. He kept the gun’s Tritium sights in front of his eyes wherever he looked, his trigger finger ready to squeeze off an aimed round at anything that moved.

  Nothing moved. Not in the van, not in the woods. Robins resumed their chirping, and frogs started croaking again. He let out a long exhalation—how long had he been holding his breath? He ran around to the opposite side of the van and jerked the door open, ready to shoot anything that stirred inside. No movement. Whoever had been inside had left; Rod hoped that there had only been one person.

  The van had been pushed a foot sideways when he’d rammed it. The tires on the driver’s side were still about two inches in the air. When he looked at the ground, he could see where the driver had opened the door and jumped out just before Rod had arrived. The grass had twisted under the man’s feet as he spun about and ran for the woods along the North Country Trail. There had been only one person in the van. That made him feel a little better; the last two days had taken a lot out of him, and he dreaded taking on multiple opponents.

  The trail beyond French Farm Creek was hiking only, and as such, it wasn’t used much—there weren’t a lot of backpackers in a world of dirt bikes and ATVs—so the man he was chasing couldn’t avoid leaving a discernible trail. His would probably be the only tracks on it.

  Rod studied the trail closely for about fifty yards, almost willing it to reveal personal characteristics about the man he was tracking. One hundred-forty pounds, size 9 shoe. The tread identified the boot as a Timberland Chorocura hiking boot—not top of the line, but definitely a boot that he’d recommend for the backcountry; Rod had a pair of them at home. The man’s stride showed a tendency to walk heel-toe, typical of someone who spends a lot of time walking in the city, on flat surfaces. He lacked the loose, duck-footed gait of an experienced woodsman; he occasionally caught his toe against exposed tree roots and other natural protuberances. His rearmost heel came down first, and he rolled straightforward onto the ball of his foot when he walked; he was off-balance, unused to rugged terrain.

  There was a difference in the depth of the boot prints from when the man first disembarked from the van, and when he shouldered his bag. About thirty pounds, maybe a little more, Rod figured. Pretty heavy for a clumsy shoulder bag in the backwoods, and especially if the objective was to move fast away from pursuers. Rod’s own full-size backpack carried everything he needed to survive indefinitely, and it would have tipped the scales at less than twenty pounds. This man was loaded heavy, and Rod doubted that he was lugging food and shelter. He cringed to think what the man might be carrying.

  He seemed to know where he was going, too. After a quarter-mile of meandering generally southward, the trail intersected another that ran east and west. The woods were swampy and shaded back there, but Rod’s pursuee didn’t miss a beat, he turned right without a pause. He wasn’t running blindly; this guy knew where he was going, and he doubtless had a plan. He must’ve had a map. Or maybe he was from around here; Rod didn’t like the thought of that.

  After another quarter-mile, he made a hard left, onto the North Country Trail. Three miles from the Carp Ri
ver. Almost no one hiked this hilly, swampy trail, even though that was the purpose for which it existed. Most locals were afraid of it, because if you needed medical assistance in the middle of it, you were going to wait a while. It was routinely patrolled at either end to keep dirt bikes and ATVs from tearing it up, but the miles in-between were mostly ignored by authorities. Hardly anybody wanted to chance running into trouble that far back in a wilderness.

  The guy Rod was following was moving fast. Too fast. Rod could barely keep up with him, let alone catch him. The going was made slower because he had to be constantly alert for any sign that the man he chased might have left the trail to lie in ambush. Rod had killed more than a few whitetails along this trail; if it were easy to ambush a deer, it would be doubly simple to bushwhack a man. That was the greatest danger of man-tracking, and it had happened more than a few times. A tracker who trailed any dangerous or wounded game needed to keep his attention divided, yet keenly focused on his surroundings at all times.

  The plus side was that this guy would almost certainly stick to the trail; the woods were thick here, and there was no access to the Carp River until he’d nearly reached Cecil Bay Road, where it crossed. There was nothing but a scattering of houses along Cecil Bay Road for miles in either direction. He seemed to have a map of the trail system, judging by his apparent sureness, but he was miles from what most people would consider civilization. Where was he going?

  The call of crows echoed from up ahead, and a flock of the big, black birds rose above the treetops about a mile down the trail. They’d probably been feeding together, probably on a deer carcass, when something had suddenly spooked them. If Rod had been a betting man, he’d wager, two to one, that the birds had fled at the approach of the man he was chasing.