The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

  They’d met at a seminar about wild wolves migrating from the Upper Peninsula to the Lower. It had been love at first sight; that sounded hokey to him even now, but it had been true. For the first time in his life, he’d felt truly accepted by a woman. For the first time, a relationship had been based on more than just sex. Shannon made him understand what the poets and singers were trying to convey about romance in compositions that he’d always thought were corny. For the first time, he’d understood what love really was.

  The trio of survival students he was scheduled to take out this time seemed to be a good-enough bunch. The two men were engineers who’d worked together at the same firm. The woman was wife to one of them, and sister to the other. Aside from necessary medical contact information, Rod didn’t think their personal details were any of his business, but he was sure that he’d learn all about them during their week together. The forest had a way of bonding people, making them divulge aspects of their lives that they’d normally never tell strangers. He’d experienced that with almost every survival class he’d ever taught.

  He read over each medical dossier and signed liability waiver, still thinking that he really was getting too old for this. They’d scheduled their outing to coincide with the Labor Day weekend. Survival classes never got cancelled on account of bad weather, so the timing didn’t really matter to him, except that it would happen during the best part of the UP summer. Bugs would be minimal, and the nights would be the warmest they’d be all year.

  Early autumn was the nicest part of the summer on Whitefish Point, for more reasons than weather. Most wild plants were in blossom, every species of animal was actively preparing for the onset of winter, and the wild blueberries and huckleberries for which Whitefish Point was known were in full abundance. It promised to be a fun outing, but he wondered if maybe a growing number of aches and pains were telling him that this might be his last time.

  Chapter Three

  THE FBI

  “Good morning, Melanie.”

  Melanie Grunier looked up from her desk in the anteroom of the small office to smile at Special Agent Thomas Colyer as he removed his jacket and hung it on the coat tree near the door.

  “Good morning, Tom,” she replied. “How was your evening out?” Last night, Colyer had celebrated his fifteenth year of marriage by taking his wife Lanie to the crab buffet at the Ojibwa casino in Brimley. There wasn’t a lot of night life in the Upper Peninsula, and casinos offered most of it. At forty-nine years old, with just over five years to go before he could retire with a handsome pension, he was just as happy to be away from the bright lights and excitement of the big city.

  “Very good, as always. I’ve never had a bad meal there yet.” He noted a pile of paper in the tray of his fax machine. “How long has that been there?” he asked with the jerk of a thumb.

  “Must’ve come in sometime during the night.”

  Colyer exhaled forcefully. There was quite a pile there, and the cover sheet was marked “Eyes Only.” Pretty unusual for boring old Sault Sainte Marie. Like so many cops, he had specifically requested assignment here, where nothing major ever happened. The little city was a confluence of almost every type of law enforcement officer, from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to city cops, and living here should have been an ideal situation for anyone who wore a badge.

  But after spending three years here, he felt like he’d been duped; this seemingly quiet border town had converted an old Strategic Air Command base in nearby Kinross to a prison when it had been shut down by the air force. Even worse, from his perspective as a law officer, the city fathers had seen fit to entice convicts’ families to relocate and take up residence in the old servicemen’s quarters. For that reason alone, this place teemed with crime as much as any major population center. The university had become a target for dealers of every kind of recreational drug, and impromptu meth labs had been busted in every place, from motel rooms to national forests. Street violence was rampant, and there was more smuggling across the Canadian border than was let on. This wasn’t the sedate Yooper town it was supposed to be.

  Colyer flipped past the cover sheet, and read the body of the fax message. Nothing specific; it was just a blanket warning that had been issued to all border town FBI offices. A Soviet-era submarine had been intercepted by a Navy Los Angeles-class attack sub. The USS Hardwick had picked up the diesel off Iceland, and identified it as a fourth-generation Amur, one of the boats being sold wholesale by Russians to any third-world tyrant with enough money to buy one.

  The Hardwick had quietly trailed the diesel until it surfaced off the east coast of Canada. The sub had let off a small, fast boat with four men in it, and the Hardwick had video-recorded the incident. But being an international matter, Washington, DC had to be involved. By the time Washington had contacted Canadian authorities to strategize, the small boat had almost certainly landed on Canadian soil.

  While the report went through various channels, the Hardwick’s captain had tailed the mystery submarine halfway back to Iceland. At that point, the unidentified submarine had executed a standard Russian “Crazy Ivan” maneuver, kicking her rudder fully starboard and coming around fast to face her bow toward the American boat.

  Trained to counter this well-known Soviet-era turn, the Hardwick’s skipper had ordered an all-stop. The sonar on the diesel sub must have been updated with the most sophisticated hardware, because the American boat had been detected immediately from nine-thousand yards. Before the Hardwick could coast to a stop, the other boat’s outer torpedo doors had slid open and her forward tubes flooded. The Hardwick went to “battle stations” fast, as two torpedoes were launched toward her.

  Thinking quickly, the Hardwick’s skipper had ordered “full ahead.” Its nuclear-powered engines drove the boat forward in a surge of speed, presenting as small a target as possible as it closed with the pair of oncoming torpedoes. When the torpedoes had armed their warheads, the Hardwick launched “bubbler” countermeasures from either side of her hull.

  Drawn to the sudden, violent disturbance of the countermeasures, the torpedoes had veered away from the American sub and detonated. The Hardwick had then opened her own torpedo doors even before the explosions stopped reverberating. Her captain had requested and received permission from COMSUBLANT, the command center for submarine forces in the Atlantic, to respond with lethal force as soon as the enemy had launched its torpedoes. With a firing solution computed and torpedoes ready to fire, sonar reported the Russian sub had flooded its ballast tanks and was crash-diving. The Hardwick gave chase, but sonar reported that it sounded as if the entire boat had been flooded. That was confirmed when the boat smashed with uncontrolled force against the sea bottom.

  Colyer dropped heavily into his chair and tossed the sheaf of papers onto his desk. The file contained only a brief summary of events, but the veteran FBI agent knew that it was implied that he should advise local and state authorities to be on the lookout for at least two people most likely traveling west. A lot of planning and a whole lot of money had gone into getting a submarine to make a delivery of personnel off the coast of Canada. The apparently suicidal scuttling of the boat pointed to a fanatical refusal to be taken alive, probably religiously motivated, and probably Muslim. Nutcases came in all flavors, but most Christian extremists weren’t so eager to die for their beliefs, and Muslim countries had been buying fleets of surplus Soviet submarines in recent years.

  Colyer felt that something very big was about to happen. It would almost certainly be a terrorist attack, and most likely not on Canadian soil. An attack on Canada would hardly raise an eyebrow in the international community. New York? Probably not. Ever since the Trade Center fiasco, security there was tighter than a gnat’s asshole. Niagara Falls? Maybe. Lots of people there . . . but how to get enough victims in a single place to make a meaningful impact?

  Colyer sat back in his chair and pressed his fingertips together. He made a long exhale. It would help to have some idea of what the int
ended threat might be. A bomb—in that case, the target would probably be a crowded building. Maybe a chemical attack. The boys in DC had been expecting some sort of nerve-agent pesticide fog for a long time. Or fifty-five gallon drums of cyanide salt dumped into the sewer system of a major city, which would produce cyanide gas through manholes and grates. It was routine to monitor steel-hardening corporations that bought the stuff by the pallet.

  He swiveled his chair to stare out the only small window in his office. This was the tough part of the antiterrorist game; there were just so many potential threats out there. About all he could do was wait and see. But by then it was usually too late to do anything but pick up the pieces.

  Chapter Four

  CROSSING WHITEFISH BAY

  Waves from Lake Superior lapped like liquid sighs against the sandy beach of the Canadian side of Whitefish Bay. Fifteen miles to the south, on the American side, was the projected landing point, near the lighthouse. Except for an occasional iron-ore freighter, marine traffic was almost nonexistent on Whitefish Point. Even the American Coast Guard mostly ignored this easy entry point, complacent in their knowledge that no one would ever try to illegally enter either country from there, when all they had to do was drive across the International Bridge at Sault Sainte Marie. Even pleasure boat traffic was nil, because except for the fishing docks at Whitefish Point, there wasn’t a slip within fifty miles. There was no place to get fuel, and not even a grocery store within a dozen miles.

  Aziz and his crew wasted no time retrieving and loading a second Zodiac from the dense brush where the now-dead Brenda Waukonigon had hidden it on the Canadian shore. Grigovich parked the truck in a stand of hardwoods at the end of an old logging road in the low mountains of southern Ontario. Across the bay, he could see the forested sand dunes of Whitefish Point silhouetted against the night sky, and the tower of the now-defunct lighthouse at its end.

  Grigovich came trotting back down the road toward where the other three men waited, already seated in the boat. With him he carried the truck’s license plate and the aluminum VIN tags from its dashboard and engine manifold. He’d drop them over the side of their boat when they reached deep water. It would be several days before someone found the brush-covered pickup, and several more before it could be identified. Only Aziz knew all of what they were about to do, but he calculated that the job would be done well before anyone could figure it out. Aziz was pretty smart, Grigovich thought.

  The drive here along Highway One from Canada’s eastern coast had been uneventful. There had been no trouble with the pickup the Indian girl had provided, and only once had a Mountie given them more than a passing glance. That Canadian cop had followed the four men in their rusted, half-ton Ford for about ten kilometers before exiting the freeway. Lucky for the cop, because the team had prepared for that event; they’d simply kill him and drive away. By the time anyone even began to formulate a theory about that, Aziz and his team would have left the country.

  It appeared that their decision to avoid back roads where a curious cop might pull them over just because they were strangers had been a sound one. By alternating their times behind the wheel and driving straight through, they’d made the approximately twelve-hundred kilometer drive in less than twenty-four hours. There had been no stops at motels where a clerk might have remembered them. There had been no bathroom stops except at filling stations, where they bought packaged food that could be eaten while driving. All the sleep that any of them had gotten had been in the truck. Each man carried a bottle of prescribed Dexedrine in case he needed to stay awake, and Ambien for forcing himself to sleep if he needed it. The prescriptions were legitimate, and would pass muster if the police checked them. But they’d never find the doctor, because he’d taken a position at a hospital in Cairo, Egypt.

  Now, Aziz thought, was the time to divulge all the details of the intended operation. All of them knew that they were going to make a political statement to the Great Satan, and Grigovich and Richarde must have deduced from the fifteen kilos of C4 plastic explosive that each of them carried that it involved blowing something up. McBraden hadn’t the slightest inkling of what was contained in the fifteen-kilo sealed and padlocked fifty-caliber ammunition can that he was carrying. Aziz carried an identical ammunition can. Now was the time for Aziz to let each member of his team in on the nuts and bolts of what they were about to do.

  Aziz squatted on his haunches on the remote beach, and motioned the other three to come close. When they were squatted next to him, he said without preamble, “Our target is the Mackinac Bridge on Labor Day.” The Mackinac Bridge, a five-mile-long suspension bridge, had connected Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas since Eisenhower was president. Aziz knew it was the busiest stretch of Interstate 75 in the United States—especially on Labor Day. During the annual Bridge Walk, tens of thousands of Michigan residents and visitors, led by the state’s governor, filled the bridge’s northbound lane. With projected casualty rates that would make the World Trade Center disaster look like a minor tragedy, the Bridge Walk would be the perfect time and place for Aziz to strike a meaningful blow for his brand of Islamism.

  The other three looked quizzically at their leader, and he continued, “Paul and Peter are carrying conventional plastic explosives. Timmons and I are carrying fuel-grade plutonium. Our objective is to bundle the plutonium in plastique, and place two bombs, one mile apart, on the stanchions below the bridge’s roadway under cover of darkness. When we detonate the bombs by telephone at the height of Michigan’s annual Bridge Walk on Labor Day, the plutonium will become aerosol. The fallout should be carried on prevailing winds to Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island, as well as onto the Americans walking the five-mile span of the bridge. If the wind is favorable, we might even irradiate the Upper Peninsula community of Saint Ignace and Bois Blanc Island. Immediate casualties should number up to three-thousand, with thirty- or forty-thousand more suffering the effects of radiation sickness for years afterward. The bridge should remain impassable to commerce for at least a month, with a severe, negative impact to America’s economy.”

  He paused, waiting for the gravity of his disclosure to settle into the minds of his comrades.

  McBraden was first to speak. “My mom and dad are on the Bridge Walk every year. . . .” His voice trailed off under Aziz’s hard gaze.

  “I’ll say this one time, McBraden. You’re either with us or against us. At this stage of the operation, there can be no backing out.”

  McBraden lowered his eyes, because he knew what Aziz was implying. He’d known the kind of people he was dealing with when he’d been smuggled into Afghanistan without a passport and trained in the black arts of terrorist warfare. But while his Arab masters had been teaching him to manufacture bombs and handle various weapons, he’d been too caught up in the camaraderie he hadn’t known since his high school days to let himself believe that there was a sinister end to his lessons.

  Aziz paused to let his words sink in. The same applied to every one of them. He’d personally bleed the carotid artery of any man in this group, and leave him to die in the woods, if he even suspected that man wouldn’t carry out his part of this mission. Aziz had murdered before he’d reached puberty, and many times after, and the act had always brought him pleasure beyond any sensation that he’d known. He wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if it became necessary. Right now, he needed every member of this team, but if one of them faltered . . .

  “Okay,” he said, “that’s the mission. Are there any questions?”

  There weren’t. The question was rhetorical; he’d just told them what the mission entailed. And he’d made it abundantly clear that while each member of his team was important, no one of them was considered invaluable. All that mattered was the objective, and the closer they got to accomplishing their goal, the greater the need for unconditional loyalty from each of them.

  “Okay,” Aziz said. “Let’s go.”

  Just as they’d drilled a thousand times before, each man clambered t
o his assigned corner of the boat, and snapped his backpack into place with quick-release buckles and straps. When the bags were secured, each of them announced his readiness with a single word: “Clear.”

  Aziz pulled the Generation Two Nite Owl Starlight monocular headgear over his eyes. Crossing from the Canadian shore to Michigan’s Whitefish Point would typically be an uneventful, forty-five-minute trip. But the American Coast Guard sometimes patrolled this narrow waterway without running lights, and they’d probably been alerted about the submarine in the North Atlantic. The invaders also needed to be watchful for American Border Patrol vehicles, whose presence had increased since 9/11. It was unlikely that anyone had yet pieced together a cogent picture from the puzzle fragments, though.

  The team had no way of knowing the fate of their submarine, but Aziz had known that it would almost certainly be detected by coastal defenses; probably an American hunter-killer attack sub. They were very good. For that reason, Aziz had handpicked a captain and crew who were willing to trade their lives to holy Allah for the good of this mission. Aziz had to assume that all of them were now dead, their vessel scuttled as planned, and now on the floor of the North Atlantic. The thought of their sacrifice didn’t sadden him; it only filled him with anger, and renewed his determination to see the job through.

  Aziz pushed the electric starter on the Evinrude 150 horsepower outboard motor. It fired immediately, its silenced exhaust making little more than a high-pitched hum, as he backed stern-first from the shore. When the water had deepened enough, he shifted to forward gear, and the Zodiac came around smoothly. He pushed the throttle to maximum, and the four men ducked their heads against the slipstream.