The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

  In fact, Bill had already begun to complain about “pinch points” in his obviously unworn hikers. Sue and Shawn had apparently heeded at least some of the advice he’d given in his emails and phone conversations; both of their boots looked like they’d been walked in for a few miles. Bill’s new Raichle boots were top of the line, but he clearly thought himself too well educated to take advice from a dumb hick who lived back in the woods—after all, how smart could anyone be who actually chose to live in these boondocks?

  Rod noted the ill-concealed air of superiority in his client, but he didn’t take it personally; he’d endured worse from the people who hired him. Most clients were never going to find themselves in a genuine wilderness survival situation anyway. In fact, most would never find themselves in the woods again. For a majority of them, his wilderness survival course was on the same level as any other exotic adventure vacation.

  But Bill Morgan’s egotism that he was smarter than the man he’d hired to ostensibly be his teacher would bear watching. The nuts and bolts of wilderness survival were alien to most people, urban or not, and a refusal to listen to an expert denoted the potential to do things that were self-destructive—like picking up a bale-handle pot off the campfire with bare hands, when it was hot enough to brand skin. Or just slipping and falling on dew-dampened Reindeer Moss. Rod had seen it happen more times than he could recall, usually to the same type of folks who were convinced of their own intelligence. But common sense depended on a person’s background experience and frame of reference; he’d seen for himself that it wasn’t only a hillbilly in a city who was out of his environment and apt to do stupid things.

  Sue Morgan picked up on Rod’s wry amusement with her spouse. “Is there any poison ivy around here?” she asked.

  Rod could see that she was being more apologetic for her husband’s arrogance than she was being curious. He favored her with as kindly a smile as his experience-hardened face could muster, and said, “Not much in this terrain. I’ll let you know if I see some. Are you allergic to poison ivy?” He asked the last question loudly enough to be overheard by the other two and watched their reactions.

  The three of them looked at one another, and the two men shrugged. “I don’t know,” Hennesy said, “I’ve never had poison ivy before.” He looked at Bill Morgan, “You?”

  Morgan shrugged again. “Me neither.”

  “Well, I have,” Sue said. “When I was a teenager, I had such a bad case that I couldn’t go to school for two weeks. My mom said that I’d caught it on the wind.”

  Rod grinned at Sue with genuine sincerity. “The reaction comes from direct epidermal contact with oil on the leaves. Don’t worry,” he said, “I promise to warn you if anything comes along that’ll hurt you.”

  He himself was immune to everything in the woods. Like some of his childhood friends, he’d suffered through plenty of long, miserable bouts with aquatic parasites in his youth to be at least resistant to them. But he’d seen enough people, friends and clients, who’d suffered from allergies to know that they could range from uncomfortable to life-threatening, and were never to be taken lightly. Some people had become deathly ill from things they didn’t even know they were allergic to. Those people were the reason he made capsules of over-the-counter diphenhydramine antihistamine a permanent part of his first-aid kit, and carried an illegal prescription-only epinephrine styrette. No one was going to die on his watch if he could prevent it. Especially not someone as genuinely nice as Sue Morgan.

  “Okay,” Rod said, “we’re here. Let’s make home for the evening. The first thing on our itinerary is to set up camp and build a fire. Then we’ll learn to build a debris shelter.”

  They dropped their backpacks where he indicated, then walked to the bank of the river to survey their surroundings and stretch their tired limbs.

  “Oh, what a gorgeous place,” Sue Morgan said.

  “This is awesome!” her brother exclaimed.

  Even Bill Morgan was impressed; he exhaled a little sigh of contentment in spite of himself as he looked up and down the river. “This is a pretty cool place,” he said.

  Rod said nothing, but the slightest upturn at the corners of his mouth revealed that he knew this pretty little campsite on the Betsy River would have that effect on these first-time visitors. Only the rarest of people was immune to the charm of this forest.

  Shawn Hennesy slapped his neck. “There are a few mosquitoes here, though,” he said, grimacing at the squashed remains in his palm.

  Rod grinned, “That there are. Thank goodness it isn’t hot and sunny, or they’d be joined by horseflies and deerflies. Here,” he said, reaching down to pluck a frilly leafed plant from the shoreline. “This is yarrow. Smell it. It contains natural pyrethrins, basically the same stuff found in commercial flea sprays and shampoos. Crush the plant and rub the juices onto your skin. It’ll help to keep the bugs away.”

  All three of the survival students immediately started gathering the plants to follow his instructions. Rod smiled to himself as he dug out a shallow excavation for their camp fire. Then he raked together a fistful of dried grasses in his splayed fingers and struck a shower of hot sparks onto them with his flint-and-steel fire tool. The tinder flamed instantly, drawing an impressed “ooh” from one of the men—he couldn’t tell which one, because his attention was focused on the tinder. Rod added shreds of birch bark and small twigs as the fledgling fire began to flare in the prepared fire pit.

  This was the first and last fire he’d start during the course. Not only was daily fire-making a part of real-world survival training that every client should know how to perform in a number of ways, but experience had taught him that there was a relaxing component to fooling with an open fire. From watching his students, he’d figured out years ago that there was considerably more than just heat within the embers of a campfire. Poking coals and rearranging wood seemed to have some sort of therapeutic effect on the most troubled soul, so he let clients maintain the camp’s fire as much as possible.

  When the fire had grown to a crackling blaze, he began unstrapping and laying out the shelters he’d buckled to his clients’ backpacks. One of the first lessons he taught them was constructing shelter against the elements from whatever materials an environment offered. But at the end of a day, nearly everyone opted to sleep in the bug-screened, watertight, zipper-doored, folding domiciles he’d strapped onto their packs. His personal bivouac shelter was a five-pound Observer from the Canadian company Integral Designs. Shawn carried a four-pound Eureka! Zeus bivy; Bill’s pack had a two-person Kelty Acadia that provided enough floor space to sleep him and Sue comfortably. They could sleep in a debris shelter that he showed them how to make, but he’d be in his bivy at night, and he was betting they would be, too.

  When the tents were up and situated in places that were selected to guard against rain runoff and “widowmaker” dead trees that were infamous for dropping large pieces of deadwood onto the heads of unsuspecting lumberjacks, he led the trio into the woods to search for shelter materials. With the exception of fast-growing bracken ferns that served as the shelter’s rain repellent outer covering, no living plant materials were needed. He set Sue and Bill on the task of cutting free bundles of useful ferns with a machete and leather gloves to protect their hands, while he and Shawn chose the main beam and wall supports from dead saplings and limbs. Without leather gloves, fibers in the ferns’ stalks could slice unprotected fingers like a razor.

  Having built hundreds of debris shelters, he was always impressed that they withstood the full brunt of a UP winter with as little damage as you’d expect in a quality stick-built home. Livable shelters from previous classes dotted the forests around here; they didn’t have satellite TV or central heating, but he liked to leave them there for lost deer hunters and such, who might be happy to have a roof on a cold and stormy night. Bears and other animals frequently found moving into one preferable to building their own dens. He smiled to himself at the memory of backing out of one of the
m in a hurry when he came face-to-face with a striped skunk who’d taken up residence there. Lucky for him that skunks were reluctant to use their spray defense in an enclosed place where they’d victimize themselves.

  Chapter Seven

  THE ENCOUNTER

  Grigovich froze. His piss stream involuntarily stopped. He stood staring while drops of urine splattered onto his boots. Bill Morgan stared back, equally surprised. The Kershaw machete Rod had provided him for the class was gripped in his leather-gloved right hand. In his left hand was a handful of ferns, held by their stems like a bouquet of flowers.

  His nerves already stretched taut by the murder of the girl, on top of the stress of their mission, Grigovich grabbed for the big Desert Eagle 50-caliber pistol that he carried tucked into his waistband. Morgan’s eyes went wide at the surreal image of a large man standing before him, penis hanging down from one hand, his other hand on the butt of a huge handgun.

  Morgan freaked. He turned and ran blindly in the opposite direction, not caring which way he was heading, so long as it was away from the gun.

  “Stop!” Grigovich shouted, pulling the large automatic fully from his waistband. His command seemed to have the reverse effect on Morgan, who only ran faster.

  Almost of its own volition, the big pistol’s Tritium sights appeared before Grigovich’s eyes, and the gun rocked back in his hand as the woods echoed with a booming report. The large-caliber bullet struck Morgan between his shoulder blades; he lost control of his legs and pitched forward onto his face. His mind knew that he’d been shot, but his body felt no pain. He was helpless to stop his forward momentum as his face plowed into the thick bed of pine needles that lay on the ground. He felt the impact, knew that his nose had been injured. He registered the fact that one eye socket was filled with dirt, but he could do nothing about it. Then Bill Morgan died.

  Grigovich stared dumbly, the Desert Eagle hanging loosely in his hand, a wisp of white smoke curling upward from its barrel. His ears still rang, and he could smell the odor of burnt gunpowder. He hadn’t meant to pull the trigger; it was just an automatic reaction brought on by adrenalin.

  Aziz was first on the scene. He could hear Richarde and McBraden close behind.

  “What the fuck have you done?” Aziz shouted, his voice trembling from barely controlled anger. “Can’t you even take a piss without fucking killing someone?” He put his own Ruger Security Six revolver to Grigovich’s temple. “You’ve jeopardized our entire mission, you stupid fucker.”

  “I’m sorry, Philippe,” Grigovich muttered, trying hard to fish in his mind for a justification that might explain what he’d just done. “He surprised me and I thought he might have a gun. . . .” His voice trailed off. That excuse sounded lame in his own ears.

  “Shut up,” Aziz said. He thought fast. “We’ve still got a job to finish. Let’s at least hide the body. This guy probably wasn’t out here by himself. McBraden, you said you know these woods. Where do we hide this carcass?”

  “If we had a shovel, I’d say dig a shallow grave, and then camouflage the hole with forest duff. But grave-digging wasn’t one of the contingencies we’d planned for, was it?” McBraden shot Grigovich a dirty look. “More important, I’d say, is to put as much distance between ourselves and this body as quick as we can. Let’s cover this guy with brush to make him hard to find, then haul ass away from here.”

  Aziz wasn’t happy with that plan. It was oversimplistic. Someone was going to come looking for this guy, probably within minutes. As far as he could see, McBraden’s value to the team was limited to having grown up while riding a snowmobile or four-wheeler through these woods. When it came to crunch time, he was proving to be about half the expert woodsman that he’d bragged he was.

  “Enough,” Aziz spat harshly. “Find out how many more there might be and then kill them.”

  The other three looked at him in surprise, as the very real gravity of what Grigovich had done and what Aziz was demanding sank into their brains. McBraden was wrong; they couldn’t simply hide this body and then run for the Mackinac Bridge. This guy wasn’t out here alone. His clothing showed no signs of discoloration or wear, and his boots weren’t well-creased at the break points. They were new. The man was a tourist. And since he was back here in the deep forest around Betsy River, not only did it make sense that he wasn’t alone, it followed that he’d probably been part of a group led by an expert woodsman. That expert had to be found and dispatched before he made it out and alerted authorities.

  “Quickly,” Aziz hissed in a low tone through tightly locked front teeth. “Spread out and find the rest of them. They can’t be that far away. This guy looks like he was making something. Hurry, we need them all.” There was a cruel meaning in the way he said he wanted them all together.

  They left Morgan where he laid, plowed face-first into the forest floor. Richarde and McBraden drew their automatics. They didn’t have to open the actions of their pistols to see if they were loaded the way American actors always seemed to do in Hollywood movies. Their Spetnatz-style Russian training in Afghanistan made it second nature to have a live round in the chamber ready to fire. Grigovich replaced the magazine in his Desert Eagle with a fresh one, bringing it once again to full cartridge capacity. With a hand signal that showed spread fingers, Aziz silently told them to split up and search between here and the river for this man’s companions.

  Chapter Eight

  THE ESCAPE

  A gunshot. Its loudness and short, sharp boom indicated that it had come from a short-barreled pistol. The survival instructor’s brain went into self-preservation mode instantly, because years of experience had impressed upon him the value of immediate reaction. Whether it was the overhead crack of a widowmaker limb, or getting his kayak off Lake Superior at the first sign of a blow, swift response had saved his life more than once over the years.

  His alerted mind worked at furious speed. A pistol shot back here spelled trouble. This region was closed to hunting this time of year, and almost nobody hereabouts hunted with a handgun. Besides, voices usually didn’t echo through the woods until after a kill had been made. The voices he’d just heard had preceded the shot, and there were sounds of feet moving fast through the bush.

  Rod screamed to Sue and Shawn, “Move! Get your asses to the road, like I showed you, and don’t stop till you reach town!”

  They both just stared at him. He didn’t have time to wait until they regained enough of their mental faculties to comply before Grigovich and Richarde burst from the underbrush. Shawn Hennesy turned to face them, his mouth open wide with fear and surprise at the sight of two armed men charging toward him. Before Hennesy could utter a syllable, both gunmen had fired bullets into his chest. His mouth still open in astonishment, he gasped once and fell backward onto the ground, dead before his body had fully collapsed.

  Sue was frozen, stunned at seeing her younger brother shot lifeless before her eyes. But Rod’s survival instinct caused him to react like a deer, sprinting immediately for safety behind the concealing brush. Grigovich fired two rapid shots at his disappearing figure. Aziz fired once, the reports of their pistols sounding loud but flat in the sound-absorbing forest.

  They both missed. As Rod knew from having grown up as a meat hunter with no extra money and a limited ammunition supply, shooting at a fast-moving animal in the woods amounted to a waste of rounds. It generally meant that you were desperate, too, because you’d blown any chance you might have had for getting a clean second shot. A serious hunter who was out to put dinner on the table for a hungry family concentrated primarily on tracking and stalking skills, and then on putting a well-placed bullet into a stationary victim that had as little chance of dodging it as a hunter could manage.

  “Son of a bitch,” muttered Aziz. Compared to the sand and rock terrain that he was accustomed to, to him this area was a thick, green nightmare where large man-eating animals lurked behind every tree and bush, especially at night. It was one thing to die willingly in a glorious Hol
y fireball, but to be ripped apart slowly and painfully by the jaws and claws of a bear or wolf held a genuine terror for the Arab. He’d never in a million years admit that probably baseless fear to the others, but he was already dreading their first night sleeping in the woods.

  Richarde held the terrified Sue Morgan at gunpoint while McBraden joined Grigovich and Aziz in the search for Rod in the baffling greenery of Lake Superior State Forest. The undergrowth was especially impenetrable near the banks of the Betsy River, and McBraden rightfully figured that that was where a man who knew these woods would probably look for a hiding spot.

  Although he’d calculated that the man would head into the thickets, knowing that didn’t make it any easier to locate him. McBraden knew that he wasn’t the expert outdoorsman he let others believe he was, but he’d been hunting deer and grouse in these woods with his dad often enough during his childhood to know that finding anything that was trying to remain unseen was nearly impossible. Most of what he and the others were doing were beating the bush, hoping to pass close enough to their quarry to frighten him into flight. He’d done the same a hundred times in his youth, when the entire group at their annual deer-hunting camp had “run the swamp” in an armed skirmish line.

  No such luck, this time. They all listened closely for any sound of flight; rustling leaves and ground duff, snapping twigs. . . . It was impossible to move silently through these woods. Anything in motion up to a dozen yards away was sure to reveal itself. On the other hand, something as big as a moose could conceal itself if it remained stationary. And if this guy was armed, the tables could turn on them in a matter of seconds.

  McBraden was the closest thing they had to a tracker, according to the stories he told, and that was the prime reason Aziz had chosen him to be a member of his terrorist squad. But although all of them could see signs of something having passed through the greenery, none of them could be sure that any of the disturbances had been created by the man they were after. In the dense, concealing foliage and dust-dry ground debris that wouldn’t register a clear boot print, McBraden just didn’t have the skills to follow whatever trail their quarry might have left behind.