The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

“Agent Colyer? You said you wanted to be kept in the loop. . . . This might not mean anything, but the city janitor just reported finding a set of coveralls marked JACKSONVILLE PAINTING when he was emptying the trash in the public restrooms here. Out of curiosity, we ran a Geiger counter over them, and the forensics boys say that they’re radioactive. Not dangerously so, but a lot more than they should be.”

  Colyer got a chill. “Listen, Dave, that probably means the man we’re looking for is in Mackinaw City right now.”

  “You mean Rod Elliot?”

  A sudden flush took Colyer by surprise. “No, you idiot, not Rod Elliot. I mean whoever blew up the bridge. The person driving the first vehicle to crash the roadblock on the bridge ramp.”

  “Not Rod Elliot?” Williams asked dumbly.

  Colyer took a deep breath. “Listen close, Dave. Rod Elliot is involved in this mess, but he’s probably not the bomber. In fact, I think Elliot might be on our side, and he’s after the bomber, same as us.”

  “Oh,” Williams said, his mind trying hard to change and assimilate this new and contradictory information. He’d heard from other officers that Colyer wasn’t a team player, and now he wondered why he was trying to convince him that this known murderer might be innocent. What was this game Colyer was playing?

  Colyer picked up on the coordinator’s confusion and disbelief, and he knew he was getting nowhere. These guys had a target in mind, and they were zoned-in.

  “Listen,” Colyer said, “I want you to put out the word that if Elliot is spotted, he is not to be harmed. We need his testimony, and I want you to consider him a necessary witness for the prosecution. He is not to be harmed. Do I have your word on that?”

  “Yes,” Williams said, “you have my word.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  BUSINESS AS USUAL

  There seemed to be little real change to business as usual in Mackinaw City. The only noticeable difference was that traffic was now restricted to police and military vehicles, and there was a loosely enforced curfew that required everyone to remain in an assigned location for at least the next ten hours. Most residents and business owners knew each other, and were treated as comrades by local authorities. Most tourists seemed to ignore the curfew. In fact, the gift stores and the usual tourist traps were busier than ever. Everyone seemed to want a souvenir of the disaster, and prices rose to reflect demand. Aziz shook his head in disgust.

  The buses to and from the hospital decontamination centers in Cheboygan and Petoskey were running throughout the day and night. Once a person was declared radiation free, he or she was free to leave the quarantined zone; but the cleansing process was untested, having never been used before. There were innumerable wrinkles that made it deucedly slow, and there weren’t enough buses to handle the transportation demands.

  When Aziz emerged from the safe house, he was showered, rested from a four-hour nap, and dressed in new clothes. Like almost every American community, Mackinaw City harbored Friends of Islam, people who would offer safe haven and succor to dispossessed freedom fighters like himself. Aziz carried a coded list of them in his wallet so that he could find safe harbor from the authorities, even a vehicle, no matter where he went. Many of the most helpful weren’t even Islamic; they were just discontent with the American government, and they spanned all ethnicities and walks of life. He grinned inwardly; American citizens, in general, were more concerned with free-range chickens, peanut allergies, and undrinkable tap water than they were with a potential terrorist living next door.

  Aziz had changed the carrier for his bomb from a shoulder bag to a Jansport daypack provided by his host; it should be easier to carry and less noticeable among the backpack-wearing tourists and bicyclists here in Mackinaw City. Still, a cursory inspection by a curious National Guardsman would reveal the daypack’s contents to be suspicious, even if the ammunition can weren’t identified immediately as a bomb, so Aziz kept the Ruger revolver tucked into his waistband where he could reach it quickly. He still had no intention of sacrificing himself in a fireball if that were avoidable, but he did mean to use this last bomb. Its cost had been high—both in terms of money spent and in lives lost—in getting it here.

  The sidewalks of Mackinaw City were crowded with people who were afoot, visiting restaurants to get their daily meals, and just meandering in and out of gift and other shops. The fudge shops were doing a handsome business, and, Aziz thought wryly, that it was no wonder that Americans were the fattest people in the world. Many pedestrians were carrying backpacks, usually by only one strap slung over a shoulder the way they’d seen cool actors do it in the movies, and just about everyone carried a satchel or bag of some type. He was just one more apple in the peck, and no one seemed to pay him any mind.

  His plan was to enter the Fort Michilimackinac tourist site at its entrance directly under the ramp leading onto what was left of the Mackinac Bridge, and then nonchalantly stroll over to the old Mackinac Point lighthouse tower that stood to its left. Visitors were permitted to ascend the long spiral stairway that led up to the beacon room of the tower, but relatively few wanted to exert themselves enough to make the climb to its glassed-in pinnacle. There, at the top of the lighthouse, he’d arm his bomb, and leave it, still inside the daypack.

  When he was past the blast radius, safe from shrapnel—he figured about a half mile—he’d hit the speed-dial number on his cell phone that would trigger it. The explosion should take out much of downtown Mackinaw City, killing hundreds, and injuring hundreds more, while a fresh aerosol of plutonium contamination would taint dozens of square miles for decades to come. The devastation might be greater than he’d dared hope for, now that authorities were inadvertently trapping people at ground zero. In the mass confusion and hysteria that would ensue, it should be easy for him to slip away.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  PURE LUCK

  Rod’s nose throbbed painfully. It was still bleeding a little from his having shoved two pencil-size sticks as far up his nostrils as he could stand, and then smacking the bridge hard between the heels of both hands. It was an old football player’s remedy for realigning the bridge of a broken nose and opening occluded nasal passages. He’d read about the process in an antiquated first-aid handbook, but never had the occasion to actually try it until now. He was glad that he’d done it out of sight inside a bathroom stall, because the pain had been blinding, and it had made him yelp out loud. He’d almost lost consciousness; but after spending a minute to recover from the tunnel vision and intense pain, his rostrum was straight again. He wiped a trickle of blood from his upper lip with a piece of tissue paper and plotted his next move.

  Along with thousands of other displaced people, Rod headed to the waterfront refugee camp. He was never going to find a single man in this vast crowd. What was he thinking? Rod’s heart sank like a rock to lodge heavily in the pit of his stomach. He was done for; the sheriff’s department and the prosecutor would only be too happy to hang all the murders and the bombing on him; they needed to blame someone, at least to save face in the press. The real mastermind behind all this mayhem would simply disappear and strike somewhere else, while Rod served the rest of his life in prison for that man’s crimes. He’d be blamed for the murders he’d committed, as well as for those he had not. But at least the authorities would have their demon to parade before the public. That was all that really mattered to them, anyway.

  Rod was almost at the line waiting to sign in at the refugee camp when his attention was grabbed by a familiar-looking man with a daypack walking across the street. He blinked and looked again. No way. It was the terrorist that he’d been following. His mind wasn’t playing tricks; he’d remember that murderer’s face from the Betsy River for the rest of his life.

  The terrorist wasn’t heading for the refugee camp, though. In fact, he was heading away from it, in exactly the opposite direction. Why had he returned to the area?

  Most disturbing, what was he up to? Rod had to know. He crossed the street to follow t
he terrorist. Rod didn’t want to get too close, he didn’t want the younger and more able man to spot him and make a break for it. In his present condition, Rod was pretty sure who the winner of that footrace would be.

  Maybe it was the hunter in him, but Rod had an unfathomable desire to learn what the man was up to. The National Guard truck was still patrolling the streets, blaring its amplified message for citizens to vacate them. The warnings went largely unheeded by diners and shoppers anxious to take home a memento. It would take a while until the warning became a threat, enforced by troops. Rod decided to disregard its message, as well. He let the terrorist get a one-block lead, and then followed as carefully as he was able.

  The man Rod was stalking seemed to window shop in each store he passed by. But he wasn’t looking at himself or the merchandise on display there; he was studying his surroundings in the reflection. He turned completely a couple of times, as if suddenly remembering to look back at something. This guy was cautious; he was expecting to be tailed. His backward glances weren’t overly suspicious to a casual observer, but it might make anyone who was overtly following give himself away. It almost worked; Rod almost jumped behind cover when the man turned to look back. But Rod had taken many a deer by walking past the critter when it thought he hadn’t seen it, then turning to shoot the animal when it had let its guard down. He was sure the Arab hadn’t recognized him, but he figured him for a clever man. Rod wasn’t about to underestimate him.

  When the man stepped into the entrance to Fort Michilimackinac State Park, Rod turned down a side street. Safely out of sight, he leaned against a wooden fence and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. It was a given that he had to follow the terrorist into the park, but first he wanted to at least attempt to envision what his objective might be. Rod had been a step behind the entire time, and he couldn’t help but feel some of the blame for the devastation that was visible to him even now. He felt a cold hollow in his heart when he gazed on the sight of the broken bridge for the first time after the bombing. It must have been a powerful explosion to have done so much damage.

  Of course. That was it. This guy had the second bomb McBraden had told Rod about in the backpack he was carrying. He meant to blow up Fort Michilimackinac. No, that wasn’t it. Who would even care if he blew up an old wooden fort? From what Shannon had told him when he’d called her, the bomb was probably dirty. The terrorist would want it to detonate in a place where it would do maximum damage. He’d want to plant it somewhere up high, where prevailing northwesterly winds would carry radioactive contamination as far as possible.

  Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse would be the place to plant a dirty bomb, Rod thought. Just east of the Mackinac Bridge, it was a popular tourist attraction. The old lighthouse keeper’s quarters had been kept just as they were a hundred years ago, complete with a nicely made-up brass feather bed, and a fully dressed mannequin in uniform seated at an oak desk. The quarters were attached to a beacon tower with fifty-one steps. About eighty feet in the air, Rod figured.

  It had been several years since he’d been there himself, but he recalled that although there was a paid tour guide, the building was often left unlocked and open to the public. It would be easy to leave a backpack bomb in the beacon room, where it might not be discovered for a couple of days—especially in the chaos that existed on both sides of the Straits right now.

  Rod still had about $80 of the $100 he’d confiscated from McBraden. The ticket counter inside the entrance under the bridge was still taking money from tourists, and there seemed to be no shortage of visitors who wanted to get in. Most of them weren’t interested in seeing the usual sights; they just wanted to get an unobstructed view of the broken suspension bridge, heedless of the radioactive dust that they were undoubtedly breathing.

  The authorities would surely close this place to the public within the next day, Rod thought, but profit was king in these small, tourism-oriented communities, and they were making hay while the sun shined. Besides, what was a little more radiation in a town that had been quarantined anyway? Rod didn’t know who he thought was most pathetic, the business owners who placed profit above their own safety, or the tourists who would’ve fought each other to be closest to a mushroom cloud.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  FOOLING THE FOOLS

  Aziz was surprised to see that the ticket counter inside the welcome center under the ramp that led onto the Mackinac Bridge was operating as if nothing had happened. Judging from the number of tourists who were present, his bomb hadn’t affected them at all. He knew otherwise, because the talk on the street in Mackinaw City had been predominantly about radiation and what its effects on the population might be. Yet these people didn’t seem at all concerned that they were exposing themselves to probable lung cancer; they were actually paying to get closer to the source of radioactive dust. These Americans were nothing if not lasciviously greedy.

  The employees inside the welcome center were easily discernible from the tourists because they were dressed in eighteenth-century period costumes. After pretending to browse racks of postcards and other paraphernalia for several minutes, he approached the ticket counter and spoke to a middle-aged woman wearing a frilled bonnet and a gingham dress. Her contemporary, metal-framed eyeglasses ruined the illusion she tried to portray.

  “Hi,” he said, flashing her a bright, toothy smile.

  “Hello Sir,” she replied, “what can I do for you today?”

  “I’ve got a thing for lighthouses,” he answered with an accent that would have been traceable to southern Ohio. “A friend told me that I can’t miss seeing the old Mackinac Point Lighthouse. And,” he added with a wry grin, “it looks like I’m going to be here a while.”

  “Yes Sir,” she replied with assumed sympathy, “I’m sorry for the inconvenience. We’re all still in shock over this terrible act of terrorism.”

  Aziz faked a cough to hide his amusement at this woman’s obviously canned attempt at public service. She would probably apologize for the inconvenience of an asteroid strike. Anything to keep those tourist dollars flowing into her cash register. By Muhammad’s beard, what would it take to panic these damned people?

  “The tour guide for the lighthouse didn’t come in today. His brother was one of the bridge workers who passed away when the bomb went off. He called in sick.”

  This was surreal. This woman was divulging private information about employees to cover the failings of her business. Aziz hid his contempt.

  “Darn,” he said, “this was going to be one of the highlights of my trip to the north country. I really wanted to see that lighthouse,” he said wistfully.

  “Oh,” she said, leaning closer and looking from side to side as if confiding a secret to him, “you can still see the lighthouse. The door to the ladder leading to the beacon room has to be kept locked for insurance reasons, but you can view the keeper’s quarters. The outer door is unlocked.”

  “Hey,” Aziz exclaimed with feigned Midwestern enthusiasm, “I’ll be grateful for what I can get. It would be nice to get a few pictures from the beacon room, but I’ll take it.”

  “I’m so sorry, Hon. But at least you’ll have the place mostly to yourself. I don’t think more than a dozen people have gone to that side today. They all go to the fort side.”

  “Thank you,” Aziz said with a grin.

  He walked to the east exit and went out. The woman was right; there were four people, two preteen kids and an adult couple who were probably their parents. They didn’t seem to be interested in the lighthouse, they were taking digital photos of the bridge, as if it were the tourist attraction they’d come to see. Aziz grinned at them as he passed. They half-smiled back nervously, as though embarrassed to be photographing memories of a disaster.

  Aziz never looked up or looked back to see the SWAT sniper suspended above his head. Neither did the family of four, who headed back into the welcome center when Aziz came out. In fact, Biff the sniper barely paid any of them more than a passing glance, eit
her. He didn’t expect trouble, and everyone he’d seen today looked boringly harmless.

  When he reached the light keeper’s quarters, Aziz found the door unlocked, just as the woman had said it’d be. Once inside, with the door closed behind him, Aziz did look back, scrutinizing the open space around the building through its glass. It was then that he spotted the sniper on a scaffold suspended from the underside of the bridge. Worth noting, but not a hindrance to his plans. He should be able to plant the bomb and make good his escape without the sniper ever being the wiser. At least not until the millisecond when he was killed by the explosion; that thought made Aziz chuckle to himself.

  Aziz listened carefully for a full minute before he was convinced that there was no one else inside. Then he turned his attention to the door that opened onto the spiral stairway that led to the top of the lighthouse tower. From the wallet in his back pocket, he took a pick and a tension bar. By maintaining torque against the lock cylinder, he was able to depress its five locking tumblers one at a time, and hold them there under pressure until the cylinder was free to turn. After less than a minute of fiddling, he felt the lock cylinder rotate. He tried the doorknob; it turned freely, and the door swung open.

  The stairs rang with a hollow, metallic sound as he ascended them. Light shone in from windows in the wall of the tower, illuminating the otherwise dark staircase. He was slightly out of breath when he reached the top. He was bent over at the waist, trying to get his wind back, or he might have seen that another man had exited the welcome center, and was approaching the lighthouse at a fast walk.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  SHOWDOWN

  Rod watched as the man he was pursuing entered the welcome center, under the Mackinac Bridge. He counted off two minutes on his wristwatch before heading for the entrance himself. Just before he reached the door, he saw the man through the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from the park. Like Rod had calculated, he was exiting the east side, and was walking toward the Mackinac Point Lighthouse. He still had his backpack, and Rod was willing to bet that it contained an explosive device similar to the one that had already devastated the bridge.