Then the tracks abruptly turned off to the right, deep into the swamp. The sight prompted Rod to dive off the trail on its opposite side. His stomach felt tight as he lay prone behind a moss-covered knoll. The fifty-caliber was gripped tightly in his sweaty fist as he peered into the shadows. At any second he expected a fusillade of bullets to come his way. He watched and listened carefully, because it wasn’t impossible that an attack could come from behind him.
When nothing happened after several endless minutes, he crept quietly through the shaded woods parallel to the trail for about fifty yards, keeping to cover as much as he could. Nothing. No movement or noises that were out of the ordinary; just the sounds of squirrels and birds going about their business without regard to a foreign presence.
He’d been had. The man’s footprints came out of the woods and back onto the trail just a few yards ahead of where he rejoined the path himself. The man Rod was pursuing had used this ploy to delay him and to lengthen his own lead. He must have feared that Rod was catching up to him. He seemed to be tiring.
Back on the trail, Rod pushed himself even harder to regain the precious few minutes he’d lost. His whole body hurt, especially his feet and hips. He’d been pushing himself hard, and his strength had long ago been expended. All that he had left was a toughness borne of many years of knowing increasing pain from arthritis and a generally aging body. He popped two more of the Dexedrine tablets he’d appropriated, and added three ibuprofen caplets to take the edge off. He washed them down with the last swig from his water bottle. He shook the emptied container balefully; he had to find water soon. He was sweating like a pig, and a bladder infection was the least he could expect from dehydration.
When the man’s tracks turned off into the woods again, Rod made a quick decision to ignore them, counting on the action to be another trick. He broke into a clumsy lope; his feet ached, his knees hurt, and his hips sent sharp pains through him at every step. He wanted to get some distance from the point where the tracks turned into the woods, just in case this wasn’t just another attempt to slow him down.
Rod gambled wrong this time. He caught a movement from the side of trail opposite where the tracks had gone into the woods. It was followed by a flash of light and the report of a gunshot. Rod felt the bullet hit him, heard the thud of it hitting something solid. He felt no pain, but he fell to the side of the trail, opposite from where the bullet had come. He rolled purposely to the trunk of a large white pine, and got to his knees behind the trunk. His left hand still gripped the fiftycaliber; he hadn’t lost the gun.
A man burst from the bushes and onto the trail. His feet pounded the dusty path, raising small clouds as he ran fast in the direction he’d been going before he’d laid this ambush. Almost by itself, Rod’s pistol pointed at the fleeing man and squeezed off a round. He missed, and the running man disappeared around a bend in the trail.
After the man had gone, Rod wondered how badly he’d been wounded. There was no pain, but he’d heard and felt a bullet hit him. He’d never been shot before, but he’d read accounts of people who’d received serious, even fatal gunshot wounds without feeling any pain. He unshouldered his backpack, and then ran his hands over his entire body, feeling for wet spots, and looking at his hands from time to time. He found no blood. It appeared that he hadn’t been hit at all.
But the bullet had struck something. He looked at his backpack. Sure enough, there was a neat, round hole in one side of the main sack where a bullet had entered, then a frayed, outward hole on the other side where it had exited. Casualties inside the pack consisted of his first-aid kit and the blade of his Power Eagle survival knife. The blade hadn’t broken, but there was a hole through its sheath and a circular mark on it where a bullet had impacted.
For just a moment, Rod counted his lucky stars. Then anger replaced fear; this was the third time this murdering son of a bitch had tried to kill him in the past two days. Rod didn’t know where he was heading, or if the Mackinac Bridge had been saved or not, but this guy was a stone-cold killer, and he’d ruined Rod’s life. He needed to be put down as much as any rabid animal.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
AFTERMATH
When Colyer braked the cruiser as near as he dared to the broken edges of the bridge’s roadway, the scene was ugly and chaotic. Dead bodies littered the roadway, some with missing limbs, many burned black. As awful as the scene before him looked, he couldn’t help thinking that it could have been far worse if the bomb had detonated in the midst of the Labor Day Bridge Walk. He came to the awful realization that that was when it had been intended to go off. He didn’t know why yet, but this explosion was premature; something had forced the bomber’s hand.
Several police officers were already on the scene, trying to bring order to a situation that couldn’t be brought to order. He turned as the scream of an ambulance siren warned of its approach to the tollbooths at the bridge’s northern end. A patrol car backed up to let it through. The ambulance slowed down only slightly as it shot through the tollbooth. It sped along the broken bridge’s roadway and stopped about ten yards from where Colyer had parked. Colyer wondered just how much the explosion had damaged the substructure. Could the added weight of emergency and law-enforcement vehicles cause more of the roadbed to cave in?
As if to answer his unspoken question, a hundred square yards at the bridge’s center gave out with a low groan and broke free, plunging toward the straits below, taking a half-dozen vehicles with it. It struck the water with such an impact that Colyer could feel the vibration through his feet. He watched in horror, praying that there hadn’t been people on that section when it collapsed.
Another cruiser squealed to a stop next to Colyer’s, and Jameson jumped from the passenger door.
“Oh my God,” he said yet again. “What the hell happened?”
Colyer just looked at him and didn’t answer. It was obviously a rhetorical question.
Without a word, Colyer got into the cruiser and drove back to where his own car was parked. He drove the Charger, its roof-mounted light still flashing, back to within a hundred yards of the edge of the caved-in roadway. He exited the car carrying a small briefcase, which he sat on the hood of his car. Inside the case were a number of forensics instruments, like a tape measure, pocket microscope, and instant glue for raising fingerprints. On a hunch, he removed a small rectangular device that resembled a large, handheld calculator and turned it on. A lighted panel of digital numerals appeared. He faced the direction of the explosion and waved the instrument through the air in front of him.
The Geiger counter went wild. Its digital display showed a variation of radiation that measured from several hundred micro-Sieverts to more than a thousand. One Sievert was enough to cause a victim’s gums to bleed and his hair to fall out. More than one Sievert could be fatal. The effects became worse the longer a victim was exposed.
Colyer knew that this situation had to be handled prudently, and by someone with more political horsepower than he wielded. Right now, though, he was thinking more as a human being than as an FBI agent when he decided that his first priority was to get everyone off the bridge. Including himself.
Colyer turned to Jameson and said, “Captain, we have to get everyone off the bridge. Right now.”
“Why?” Jameson asked, looking into Colyer’s eyes suspiciously. “What do you think is going to happen? Is there another bomb?”
“I don’t know,” Colyer answered truthfully. “There might be. In any case, I’m assuming responsibility for this incident until someone who outranks me arrives on the scene. And, right now, I want everyone who’s still alive off this bridge.”
Jameson knew that Colyer wasn’t telling him the whole truth. He’d been a cop for more than twenty years, and he hadn’t bucked his way up through the ranks by having dull instincts. The state of Michigan had been granted full authority over the operation and upkeep of the bridge itself, but this was also an interstate highway, and the explosion was clearly an act of terro
rism. That put it squarely under the jurisdiction of the FBI. He could get into a pissing match with Colyer about who was in charge now, but it wouldn’t do him or his career any good. Egos aside, Colyer seemed to know something about this that he wasn’t willing to talk about.
“Okay,” Jameson said, “I’ll put the word out for paramedics to just get the injured off the bridge as soon as possible. How about the dead?”
Colyer looked him in the eye. “Leave ’em. I want every person who’s been on that bridge since the explosion to go straight to the hospital, and I want them to stay at the hospital, even if they weren’t injured by the explosion. That includes me and you. Close every road leading into Saint Ignace and Mackinaw City from twenty miles away, and man those roadblocks with officers brought in from beyond that distance.”
Jameson wasn’t stupid. This FBI man was saying that he wanted everyone who’d been exposed after the blast to be quarantined. That meant that this was more than just a terrorist bombing. It was a “dirty bomb,” and it had spread some kind of chemical, biological, or nuclear contaminants. It was then that he noted that the device in Colyer’s hand was a Geiger counter.
“All right, Inspector,” Jameson said with a look of worry. “I’ll put the word out for everyone to evacuate to the hospital and stay there. I won’t say why, but there’ll be a lot of questions from my men who want to go home after their shifts.”
“Please just trust me on this one, Captain Jameson. You can draw your own conclusions, but I’m not at liberty to divulge more than I’ve said. Not yet.”
“Just tell me one thing,” Jameson said, still looking into his eyes for some sort of clue, “Is there a reason I should tell my family to get out of Saint Ignace?”
“No,” Colyer answered, “they’ll have to stay here and report to the hospital with the rest of us.”
Jameson pulled his cell phone out of a breast pocket and punched in a number. While he was passing along Colyer’s instructions, Colyer called Washington on his own cell phone. First, he laid the iPhone into a scrambling device and plugged it into a port in the bottom of the phone.
His boss in DC didn’t waste time. When Colyer told him what he knew, and what he thought he knew, the conversation took a dead serious turn. The Bureau had been anticipating this type of dirty bomb attack for years, and the only real surprise was its location—no one had even considered the Mackinac Bridge as a potential target. Now, in hindsight, it seemed so ridiculously obvious. . . .
Colyer didn’t speak to anyone except his immediate supervisor. He didn’t need to; his encrypted report was digitally recorded so that it could be passed along to the joint chiefs and the president. That this had happened was a matter of national security, and it went beyond top secret. The bombing was serious enough in itself, but if the American people were told that they’d been terrorized with a radioactive weapon, there might well be a nationwide panic.
There was no way to cover up the fact that the Mackinac Bridge had been bombed; too many people had seen it happen. And, although casualties from the explosion had been considerably less than they might have been, too many people had died. Official protocol dictated that the bombing be made public, and the emergency management team that already existed in every county had to be called in to implement a predetermined plan.
That wasn’t going to happen, not in real life. Already, the fear that every bridge in the country could be similarly targeted was likely to disrupt commerce at a national level. If the citizens who kept the United States in operation on a day-to-day basis thought that there was a possibility that they might be irradiated too, they’d doubtless change their ways of life. Phobias and paranoia would abound; many Americans would quit their jobs to flee to remote locations, depriving society of the necessary services they rendered. Truck drivers would stop delivering goods, factories would lose employees who produced those goods, and consumers would stop buying—a survivalist-type who moved to a cabin in the woods wasn’t likely to purchase new carpeting or a luxury car. It was imperative that John Q. Public not be made aware of what Colyer’s Geiger counter had revealed. Not yet.
Whatever story Jameson had told his troopers and the medical personnel on the bridge, it was working, because nearly everyone had gotten off the structure. Colyer watched as ambulances and police cruisers alike took the exit into Saint Ignace, where they’d all report to the hospital to undergo testing and decontamination procedures.
Captain Jameson approached him and said in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Well, Agent Colyer, we got the word to everybody, and the bridge should be completely cleared in about ten minutes. I had to field a lot of questions, but nobody knows the whole truth. Come to think of it, I don’t know the whole story myself—think you’ll be able to enlighten me about what the hell happened any time soon?”
Colyer grinned at him humorlessly. “As soon as my bosses say that I can, Captain. Any word on the tallies of dead and wounded?”
“Twenty-seven confirmed dead, and thirty-three wounded. We’re expecting to find as many as a dozen more bodies, but I’d say we got off easy. The explosion was probably from a military-grade, high explosive, rather than a homemade fertilizer bomb. Very powerful, and not very large physically; picked up cars and threw them like softballs for fifty yards. Probably anything within twenty-five yards of ground zero was vaporized. The boys in forensics think that the bomb might have been planted under the roadbed.”
Colyer jammed both his hands into his pockets and exhaled forcefully through pursed lips. He knew that in the grand scheme of things, it could have been worse, but it couldn’t have been worse for the people who’d died in the initial blast. For them, the world had ended today. Whether the death toll had been a dozen or a thousand, it would’ve made no difference to the people who were fatalities, or their loved ones.
Chapter Thirty
THE TRAIL
It was getting too dark to see clearly when Rod decided that he wasn’t going to catch up with the man he was trailing. Using the headlamp in his backpack was out of the question, because all the other guy had to do was wait for the light to come down the path, and then shoot an inch below it. That would end Rod’s pursuit quickly enough.
The pain in Rod’s joints had become almost excruciating. Overexertion and the fact that he was taking speed to provide artificial energy had a lot to do with that. He was too damn old to be teaching survival classes, and he was, for sure, too old to be chasing terrorists through the woods. He still had the iron weight of fear in his gut from the bullet that had come too close to hitting him. By God, he was no hero, but his hatred for this murderous son of a bitch, a man he’d never met, was becoming boundless. Rod didn’t want to die—and he knew that this man wouldn’t hesitate to kill him at the first opportunity—but something more intense than his own self-preservation was driving him.
Rod dared not strike a fire. He really wanted one, not just for warmth, but for the cheer and bug-repellent properties it provided. The mosquitoes in this swamp were thick and voracious tonight. He’d found some tansies growing in a low, wet depression along the way, and he’d stuffed a bunch of the plants into his pocket in anticipation of the night. He pulled them out of his pocket now and rolled them between his palms until they’d become a wet, pulpy mass. Then he applied the spicy-smelling plant juices to his face and hands. The onslaught of mosquitoes lessened immediately, and he knew they’d be deterred for hours to come. He shoved the mass of crushed plant material into a breast pocket to further discourage the bugs.
He hoped that the man he was after had stopped for the night. And he hoped that the mosquitoes were eating him alive, too. When he recalled what this slimeball had done to poor Sue Morgan, no amount of pain and suffering were great enough for him.
At least he had his headnet. It was a simple homemade, baglike affair he’d sewn from a yard-size piece of no-see-um netting. Worn over his head—Shannon liked to kid him about hiding his face by wearing a bag over his head—it served not only as an effect
ive barrier against bloodsucking insects, but as an excellent diffuser of bright sunlight when he was snowshoeing. It was also ideal camouflage when he hunted deer.
As the sun set, Rod was getting hungry, and he thought it would be wise to carbo-load before the night chill set in. He rummaged around in his backpack for another snack bar, only to be disappointed to find that he’d already eaten them all. He sighed. Time to get into survival mode. He dropped down into the wet lowlands at one side of the trail and put on his headlamp. He pointed the light at the ground and adjusted the LED to its lowest setting.
Before long, he’d located a patch of blue violets. He pulled the small succulents up and ate them where he found them. There was also a patch of common plantain; a little stringy when eaten raw, but palatable enough. He wished he was closer to the river so he could fish and catch crawdads, but then he’d also need a fire to cook the parasites out of them. Oh well, so long as he staved off hypoglycemia, he was halfway through the night.
After more than thirty-five years in the woods, Rod wasn’t scared of the dark. Ordinarily, he could tell what species of animal was moving about in the woods just by sound of its passing. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances, and every noise made Rod jump. Every sound from the darkened woods became the harbinger of a bullet aimed at his heart. Maybe it was the Dexedrine he’d been taking, but he couldn’t get to sleep. His nerves were frazzled, and every joint in his overworked body ached.
Chapter Thirty-One
DARKENED WOODS
Aziz was having a tougher time than Rod. Like most people, he was scared of the dark—even if he wouldn’t admit it—and he was doubly frightened of spending a night alone in the shadowy, moonless woods. In his stressed mind, every noise was the sound of the killer survival instructor taking careful aim at him. Or maybe getting ready to pounce from the shadows with a razor-edge knife. He’d seen this maniac bastard all but behead Richarde, and he was pretty sure that he’d done-in Grigovich as well. Maybe he’d even gotten McBraden. This survival instructor was as crazy as those portrayed in the movies, and these woods were his turf. He could probably take out Aziz any time he wanted. He was probably laying in the shadows right now, just waiting for the time of his choosing.
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