Whitefish Bay was an historic refuge for ships whenever Lake Superior grew rough. Known as “The Graveyard” by merchant seamen who earned their livings transporting iron ore and other goods across it, Lake Superior had killed more sailors than any other of the Great Lakes. Fully half of the graves in the cemetery on Whitefish Point were marked by a simple aluminum placard that read “Unknown,” their occupants mariners who’d washed ashore and were given a decent Christian burial without ever being identified. Some of those in caved-in plots were probably Americans from an era prior to the time when everyone was identifiable by computer, and some were doubtless Canadian.
The distant shore along Whitefish Point was dotted with only sparse lights. There were few year-round residents there, most of them Indian fishermen who netted the whitefish for which this area was known. There were numerous resort homes that sat empty most of the year—to the men in the boat, their owners were the enemy, rich Americans with lavish incomes that they used to suppress and enslave their own people, while gobbling up clearly dwindling resources. Having themselves been victims, Grigovich and Richarde hated these types of hedonistic, superior-acting Americans most of all. McBraden, who had associated with the wealthy elite through his father, as he enforced the laws they told him to—and ignored those they told him to—hated them only slightly less. He’d seen for himself how above the law people with money could be. Aziz simply hated Jews, Americans, and Christians, in that order.
The water was calm, and the trip across Whitefish Bay was relatively uneventful. To the north, in American waters, there was a westbound cargo ship. The maritime shipping chart carried by Aziz identified it as the SS Humphries, an American-flagged, iron ore carrier on its way to Wisconsin. They passed a mile astern of her, as anticipated, and there was no sign that the Humphries had detected their passing.
The only real unknown in the landing on Whitefish Point were the so-called “owl people.” This group of visiting biologists and biology students gathered near the lighthouse each summer night to erect fine nets that ensnared owls. Funded by numerous universities and foundations, the eclectic group was charged with identifying and banding the various species of owls found around this haven for migratory wild fowl. There was no way for Aziz and his companions to know where the owl people would gather from one evening to the next.
The muted glow of a map on McBraden’s iPad clearly showed the outline of the Point, and the few roads that traversed it. He could zoom in to magnify points of interest, but he would have liked if it were real-time, instead of just dated satellite photos. They’d already decided that the best landing place would be slightly past the point, on its north shore. There was an almost unused, township campground there, blown over with beach sand that had buried the outhouse-type public restrooms halfway up their doors. It wasn’t a popular place with tourists or locals. Ironically, some of their best reconnaissance photos had come from Facebook and other internet sources.
Even without a GPS, they could take a visual bearing from the flashing lighthouse beacon. A tourist attraction now, its continued operation was merely symbolic; even recreational boats were guided by satellite now. To the right of it, relative to their own course, was a federally protected, endangered, migratory-bird preserve. The owl researchers might be there, so Aziz stayed well offshore as he followed the coastline around the point to the township campground.
The wind was stronger on the north shore, and the water choppier. He killed the motor and scanned the beach with a night-vision binocular, while Grigovich did the same with optical binoculars. It was difficult to survey the beach from their small boat as it bounced on the waves, but neither man saw any indication of movement.
Aziz restarted the motor and ran the Zodiac at full speed toward the beach. They made ground in less than two minutes, but he maintained full throttle until the boat was completely out of the water, and the propeller stalled from churning against wet sand. With practiced precision, the four men leaped from each corner of the boat. Grunting a little, they carried the half-ton load across the beach and into the underbrush, leaving as little sign of their passing as possible. Strong breezes along the windward-facing shore should blow over and fill in whatever drag marks and tracks they’d left within a day. Until then, they could hope that none of the few skilled trackers who still existed there would enter onto the nesting preserve and notice their activity.
Chapter Five
THE DRAGNET
Colyer hung up the phone and then pinched the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. You’d think that the nexus of federal, state, and local police authorities that this town represented would produce at least one cop with sufficient brainpower to comprehend the potential gravity of this situation, he reasoned to himself. Of all the police agencies represented here in Sault Sainte Marie, only Immigration and Customs Enforcement had seemed to do more than pay passing interest to his phone call informing them of possible terrorist activities. The rest seemed to blow him off as someone with paranoid delusions from an agency that they had little to do with on a daily basis.
But even as he imagined that local and state police units across the Upper Peninsula were circling their ears with their forefingers to demonstrate how crazy they thought the FBI must be, he used his authority as a federal agent to issue an All Points Bulletin. He couldn’t force any of these officers to do their generally boring jobs with more enthusiasm, but he could create a paper trail that enabled him to assign blame if they let the terrorists slip through their fingers. Maybe that would help to motivate them to be on their toes.
He groaned as he looked at a map of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There were almost three hundred miles of open border here, with just one FBI Agent and a couple of hundred various police officers to cover it. It didn’t help that most of the cops he’d spoken with seemed to think that he was overreacting. So few real crimes happened here that the judicial system made front-page news of minor occurrences that more urban environments would hardly note.
It was such an ironic situation; the confluence of police agencies in Sault Sainte Marie ensured that every minor infraction was punished with extreme severity. Yet, when a real and potentially grave threat arose, it was considered too remote a possibility to be taken seriously. Even his contacts at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ontario seemed to think that it was a stretch to imagine that a rogue submarine in the North Atlantic had any importance to their area of interest.
To give his frustrations a rest, Colyer opened his laptop computer and punched up his personal email account. There was a message from his wife Lanie asking how his day was going, and if he felt okay. He smiled to himself. So many men and women he’d known searched their entire lives for the kind of romance he’d found with this cute little brunette. Without thinking, he ran his fingertips over the framed photo of her that graced his desk. She had short hair in the photo, kind of a page boy that framed her elfish face perfectly.
He loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone. She’d been a smalltown, local cop when he’d met her on a kidnapping case in Illinois sixteen years ago. She’d been totally enthralled by the strapping FBI agent from Saint Louis, and he’d just wanted to get laid. Somehow that mutual attraction had blossomed into a white-hot romance, and that had led to their marriage a year later. Lanie under went a full hysterectomy their second year of marriage, so they’d never had children. Neither one of them were saddened by it, however; based on visits with their families, they both figured their lives together had probably been better for it.
When he’d answered Lanie’s email, Colyer typed in the sixteen character password needed to access his agency account. The first file to make an appearance was the international police blotter update. He figured it was a part of his job to give it at least a cursory perusal every day. Mostly it was a glossary of mundane petty crimes that had no bearing on his job as a federal agent, but occasionally something popped up that helped to solve a bigger crime.
Like today. . . . T
here, a one-paragraph mention of a not-inexpensive Zodiac boat being found by tourists walking along the shoreline near Whitefish Point, west of here. Attached to it was a powerful and apparently new outboard motor. Neither boat nor motor had identifiable serial numbers. When a local deputy had finally gotten around to responding several hours after it’d been reported, he’d tried the motor. It had started right away.
Curious. The boat was well off the beach and haphazardly concealed. Whoever had put it there had tried to make it difficult to find, yet they hadn’t put a lot of time or effort into its concealment. He Googled the boat to get a retail price: more than $5000. The fuel-injected outboard motor that was attached to its stern sold for more than twice the price of the boat. Total weight of the craft and motor was almost 800 pounds, so it hadn’t been dragged off the beach by just one man, and probably not by two. Presuming that the boat had been carrying some sort of meaningful payload, there were probably three or four occupants, obviously stout, fit, and probably young.
Not too young, though, because a boat and motor that cost as much as a new car weren’t usually kids’ toys. There were some well-to-do resorters along the coastline of Whitefish Bay, but this seemed pretty cavalier for even the richest of them. No one had reported a boat stolen, and a resorter wasn’t likely to leave his own boat stashed in the brush along a national lakeshore.
Colyer pinched the bridge of his nose again. He was getting a headache. He reached into a desk drawer and retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen. As he twisted the cap, he wondered at the apparent abandonment of such an expensive watercraft in a region where the annual income of the average year-round resident was well below the poverty line established for the rest of the nation.
He would’ve liked to have reviewed the scene when it was first reported. Local cops had found no reason to treat it as a crime scene. The boat hadn’t shown up on a hot sheet, so local deputies had simply trailered it off the beach to an impound yard here in Sault Saint Marie.
It was probably nothing, but this incident irritated something in Colyer’s brain; it just didn’t make any sense, and he was accustomed to finding logic in everything. From his computer he accessed the police report that was written by the deputy in charge. To his credit, the young deputy, who’d probably been assigned the task of retrieving the boat because it was mundane, had overreacted by dusting it for fingerprints. Nothing had been done with those prints as yet, but they were available, part of the evidence gathered at the scene.
He punched up the digitized fingerprint images from the agency’s Combined DNA Index System. There seemed to have been no attempt by their owners to conceal them, although some of the existing prints looked like they were smudged over by someone wearing gloves. Probably someone whose hands had gotten cold; probably while the boat had been on the water. Maybe at night, because this was the warmest time of year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The CODIS system returned only one match. Timmons McBraden, the son of a retired sheriff, who’d quietly undergone treatment for a heroin addiction in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The wording of the official record left Colyer with an impression that the elder McBraden had exerted his influence as a sheriff to cover up the incident, but there’d been no way to stop his son’s prints from being entered into the national CODIS database—he’d apparently tried, though.
Timmons McBraden had dropped off the map two years ago. No work history, no known address—not even a cell phone bill. Now that was reason for Colyer’s intuitive mind to grow suspicious. No one could survive in America today without leaving some trace of his existence. Even homeless street bums had cell phones.
Whoever they were, the other occupants of the boat weren’t known criminals. Although he wasn’t supposed to do it without consulting one of the international agencies first, he ran the only other pair of identifiable fingerprints through the International Criminal Police Organization, or INTERPOL. He knew that his log-on would be registered and recorded, and that he’d surely be asked some pointed questions about it by his own supervisors, but he needed to satisfy his own curiosity.
Nothing. No matches. Still, his brain nagged. An abandoned boat was suspicious enough, but there was more to this, he knew it. None of the police agencies he polled seemed to be concerned, though. ICE and Border Patrol acted as if he’d been alone here for too long without a vacation. In fact, he had to wonder if that weren’t true. Still, maybe he’d better check out the boat at the impound yard in Sault Sainte Marie, then maybe drive to Whitefish Point and check over the place where they’d found it.
Chapter Six
THE SURVIVAL CLASS
“Do you think there are any bears around here?”
Rod grinned. He heard that question every time he taught a survival course.
“Sure there are,” he said, “and wolves and coyotes, and even the odd cougar. But I’d be more concerned about other dangers—the most fearsome predators in these woods have six legs.”
His survival students didn’t believe him. They never did. He could see in their eyes that their heads were filled with television docudramas that touted the dangers of wild animal attacks. Based on his decades of real-world experiences, some of which had nearly killed him for a variety of other reasons, the danger posed by wild animals was so negligible that it could be ignored. He permitted his clients to carry their sidearms if it made them feel safer, but he himself carried no more weight than he needed, and a firearm had proved itself to be just extra pounds that he didn’t need to lug.
Rod ran a critical eye over this most recent survival class. Bill Morgan was an electrical engineer who worked for Schneider Electric, the manufacturers of the Square D circuit breakers found in most homes across America. Shawn Hennesy, the man who’d asked about bears, was his brother-in-law and brother to Sue Morgan, who was the third student in this survival class. Rod didn’t like taking less than a full class of five people—as many as he felt comfortable with. Smaller classes paid less. And he wasn’t generally amenable to taking women, because they complicated things. For one thing, the camp “pee tree” had to be farther away from the main camp, for the sake of decorum, at least.
But Sue Morgan seemed a likable enough sort, pleasant to talk to, and not unpleasant to look at. Maybe a tad wide at the hips from having borne the three grown, successful sons and daughter she mentioned frequently during conversation, but she was a well-maintained, middle-aged woman. Her permed brown hair was colored to hide the gray, and she was carefully plucked and manicured. Sue was what many young men would call a MILF.
Her brother Shawn was production manager at a metal stamping plant that fabricated Square D circuit-breaker boxes from sheets of steel. That was how Bill and Shawn had gotten to know one another, and it was how Bill and Sue had first met at a Christmas party in Chicago twenty-seven years ago this year. When Bill Morgan had approached Shawn with this idea about getting away from the city of Southfield, Michigan for a week of survival training in the Upper Peninsula, he’d jumped at the chance. He needed wilderness survival skills like he needed astronaut training. But it sounded like an enjoyable few days of respite from a terrible, boring life that had become a series of awful days.
It was seven miles to their first campsite on the Betsy River. Rod kept an eye on his clients to make certain that it wasn’t too much for any of them. He’d had a few clients who hadn’t been able to make the entire leg of that trek, especially when they were on snowshoes in winter. During one or two of those times, he’d feigned exhaustion or some sort of joint injury, and made camp right on the spot. Probably a few of his more perceptive clients had caught on to his ruse to help them save face, but none of them had ever called him on it. And Rod had learned that consideration for the self-image of his clients was as important to their overall well-being as learning to navigate with a map and compass.
These three were in better than average shape, though. Like most young executives, Shawn and Bill owned a paid membership to a gym where they lived, and proudly proclaimed to
him that they worked out three times a week. Sue was a full-time mother and wife who sold Mary Kay cosmetics in her spare time, and subscribed religiously to Jillian Michaels and almost every other aerobic exercise system. None of the three were work-hardened, but they seemed fit enough.
Per usual, Rod had set up a phone interview with each one of them in order to instruct them about clothing and footwear, even socks and underwear. Here in the UP, there could be snow every month except July, and every rain shower was cold enough to induce a potentially terminal case of hypothermia. It was all pretty routine: for example, no cotton, because it absorbed lots of perspiration and precipitation; it lost its “dead air” insulating qualities when it was saturated; and it dried very slowly. Cotton was wonderful material for a bath towel, but lousy for thermal long johns.
Another common problem was footwear. Most of his survival students bought a new pair of hiking boots just for his class. Most students were used to what he termed “street” shoes, slip-on types and sneakers that were fine for walking on a mostly flat concrete-covered environment, but offered little in the way of ankle or arch support, and had little traction. They’d probably never again wear the unfashionable lace-up boots he demanded that every client have in the backcountry.
The most common, most immediate problem after that was that the boots they showed up wearing were almost always new and not creased at the natural break-in points of their feet. Rod’s own well-worn boots practically walked themselves, as he liked to say, but his clients caused him to include moleskin and Guard-Tex tape in his first-aid kit to treat foot abrasions and blisters on the trail. He always recommended beforehand that clients walk at least five miles in their new boots before putting themselves into the do-or-die situation of the Lake Superior State Forest. But he’d had to insist that more than a few of them walk in water to saturate and soften the leather, then wear the boots until they dried; sort of an accelerated, break-in technique.
The Mackinac Incident Page 4