The Mackinac Incident

by Len McDougall

  He forced himself to remain calm as he paid the middle-aged lady behind the counter the admission fee required to see the lighthouse. She explained to him that access to the beacon tower’s staircase was denied because there wasn’t a tour guide on duty today, and she seemed a bit surprised that he didn’t express more interest in that fact. Indeed, he didn’t seem to be all that interested in the lighthouse in general, although he clearly felt an urgency about getting to it. In light of the terrorist bombing that had occurred yesterday, Rod’s behavior seemed to be more than a little shifty in her perception.

  Rod picked up on the woman’s suspicion, and he knew that it was well merited. He was exhausted, he looked like he’d gotten as little sleep as he had, and his clothing was dirty from miles on the trail. He looked pretty scruffy. But there was nothing he could do about that. She handed him a cardboard ticket and told him to have a good day, but Rod could see that he’d established a germ of apprehension in her mind. He departed the welcome center a little more purposefully than he should have, anxious to find the terrorist before he could trigger another explosion. The closer he got to the man, the more certain he became that that was his objective.

  In his hurry to get to the lighthouse door, he also failed to see the SWAT sniper stationed over his head. But Rod’s brisk pace and the backpack he carried didn’t escape the sniper’s attention. A lot of people wanted to see the old lighthouse, but not many of them were in a rush to gain the experience.

  As he’d been told, the door leading into the living quarters was unlocked. He turned the knob slowly and entered cautiously. He closed the door behind him as quietly as he could, keeping its doorknob fully turned and its latch retracted until the door was fully closed, then releasing the tension against it slowly to allow the latch to seat into its recess with as little noise as possible. As the door slipped almost silently shut behind him, Rod turned his attention to the adjacent room, which held the door to the tower stairway. He crept into the room silently, listening for any sounds of movement.

  He thought he heard footfalls ring against the wrought-iron stairs that spiraled upward to the beacon at the top of the tower. The stairs were behind a door that Rod had been told would be locked, but as he continued to listen, he was sure that someone was climbing them even now. It had to be the terrorist, and his reason for getting to the top was absolutely clarified in Rod’s mind now. He was planting a second bomb.

  Rod tried the door that opened onto the staircase, but the terrorist had locked it behind him. The lock and the key that fit it were manufactured by Schlage, and the keyhole accepted the same blank as Rod’s house key. Employing a trick he’d learned years before, during his own time in state prison, Rod slid the house key from his pocket into the keyhole in the doorknob. He kept a constant, firm clockwise torque against the door knob while simultaneously applying force in the same direction with the key as he slid the key’s teeth back and forth to depress the tumblers inside the lock cylinder. The concept was easier to explain than the action was to accomplish. He’d learned it from a fellow prisoner who could open almost any lock in just seconds using only a bent paper clip.

  Rod had never had that convict’s adroitness with locks, but he understood the principle. It took him a couple of minutes to locate and depress the lock cylinder’s tumblers, especially since he was trying to do the job while making no noise. After a few attempts at wiggling and jiggling, the lock cylinder gave, and the doorknob turned. The door opened, and Rod stepped warily into the tower room, his gaze drawn fearfully upward, the Desert Eagle 50-caliber clutched in an already sweating palm.

  The first explosion from Aziz’s 357 magnum rang off the wrought iron stairway before Rod had climbed even five of the fifty-one steps above him. Aziz was a practiced marksman, but the gritty double-action trigger pull of his revolver was causing him to pull slightly to one side, and trail dust that had penetrated the revolver’s inner workings didn’t make it smoother. He cocked the hammer for the next shot, but shooting past so many obstructions was more difficult than merely shooting targets at a gun range.

  This redneck bastard who’d followed him all the way from Whitefish Point had been doggedly trying to drive him insane the whole way. And now the asshole quite literally stood on the ladder that was Aziz’s only avenue of escape. How in hell had he gotten the locked door open? Aziz meant to kill this irritating infidel. He fired twice more, and again the slugs were deflected by some part of the metal stairway that lay between them. He could hear them whining as they ricocheted off the brick walls of the tower silo. Caution was thrown to the winds, displaced by pent-up fury as Aziz recalled how this son of a pig had used a short sword to nearly decapitate Richarde in the woods at the Betsy River. He fired twice more, not even seeing a clear target this time.

  Rod was no hero. He ran out of the tower after the second shot and stood pressed against the wall of the light keeper’s quarters, breathing heavily. Sweat beads dotted his forehead, and his chest heaved as if he’d just run a mile. He’d seen the man just as he’d fired the first round; the gun was a big silver revolver. It looked like a cannon to him. He’d fired four—no, five rounds. Rod tried to think how he might use that knowledge to his advantage, but that still left one round unfired.

  He heard the clinking of spent cartridges as they rattled down the stairway. The guy upstairs had just reloaded, probably from a speed loader that replaced all six shells at once. Rod wasn’t going back in there.

  Still, he couldn’t let this murderous son of a bitch get away, either. Rod’s will to survive argued that it wasn’t his responsibility to bring this evil man to justice; that was the job of people who made a lot more money than he did. Besides, Rod had his own eggs in hot water. Why should he even care what this terrorist had done to a state whose laws prohibited him from ever voting or owning a firearm? It wasn’t his fight.

  But this was his fight. The man above him had made it his fight when he’d maimed and killed everyone in Rod’s survival class. He involuntarily squeezed his eyes shut tight at the memory of seeing Sue Morgan tortured, and then simply shot through the forehead like a pig going to slaughter. When he opened his eyes again, they were wet with tears. Yes, this was his fight; maybe his alone. This wasn’t a man on the stairs above him, but a dangerous, rabid parasite who needed to be removed from this world for everyone’s sake.

  Rod wiped his eyes on a dirty sleeve until his blurred vision became clear. He still didn’t fancy exposing his body, so he adopted the spray-and-pray technique that grunts had used in Vietnam. He shoved his pistol arm through the staircase doorway and fired blindly upward. He spent a full clip with no apparent results. He ejected the magazine and replaced it with a full one. He snapped the pistol’s slide back and chambered a new round. Then he emptied that magazine the same way.

  The noise made by the 50 caliber was deafening within the confines of the brick silo. Rod’s ears were ringing loudly when the pistol stopped firing and he changed magazines for a third time. During the intermission, he heard the roar of the terrorist’s revolver returning fire, and it occurred to Rod that it would be his luck to be hit by a bullet as it careened off the walls. He slapped the last magazine into the butt of the Desert Eagle and started firing upward into the tower again. The gun fired five times then went empty—it was a short magazine, and Grigovich hadn’t loaded it to capacity.

  Shit. Now Rod’s stomach went cold. He was unarmed except for his knife, and his hand went to its hilt automatically, even as the old axiom about bringing a knife to a gunfight forced its way through his mind. The revolver roared twice more, and Rod pressed against the wall to one side of the doorway. His luck was holding per usual; in the heat of the moment he’d expended all of his ammunition, and the enemy was still firing.

  Then he remembered the little Colt 32 in his pack. He’d forgotten that he was still wearing it. He unclipped the belt and shrugged off the shoulder straps. The gun was in an outside pocket. He found it in the second compartment he looked, and hope
washed back into him as he held the pistol in his hand. It felt puny compared to the big Desert Eagle, but it was a whole lot more comforting than his knife in this situation. Rod stuck his arm into the tower silo again and pulled the trigger. This time, he’d count the rounds he fired, and save at least one in case he needed a close-up, aimed shot.

  The first round didn’t fire; the firing pin hit the cartridge’s primer with a dull click. Who knew how long this gun had ridden in the Hyundai’s glove compartment without being fired? Rod had seen that problem before. He jacked the slide back to eject the dud, and chambered the next round. He stuck his arm back into the silo and fired one round.

  This time, he was rewarded with the sound of something falling down the stairs. Without thinking, he stuck his head through the doorway to see, and stared right into the muzzle of the other man’s revolver, fifteen feet up on the stairway. The bullet hit Rod low in his abdomen. It felt like he’d been punched hard in the stomach. Rod fell back against the door jamb as the hiking boot Aziz had thrown down the stairs clattered to a halt.

  Before the terrorist could fire again, the low sights of the Colt appeared before Rod’s eyes, and yellowish flame spat from its barrel. Its first shot hit the welded-pipe railing that Aziz was using to rest his gun hand. The Colt kept firing of its own accord, and at least two of its bullets found their mark in their target’s chest. Aziz curled into a ball and fell down the stairway to its bottom, where he lay sprawled face up with staring eyes that could no longer see. Incredibly, the man had numerous bullet wounds that ranged from superficial to mortal. How he’d continue to return fire was a mystery.

  Rod fell back against the door jamb, feeling more tired than he’d ever felt in his life. He felt his back, and was horrified when his hand felt a large, bloody hole where the 357 bullet had exited. Unless he got to an ambulance in the next ten minutes, it was probably a fatal wound. In that case, he thought wryly, it was a fatal wound. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to embrace his beautiful wife just one last time. Tears sprang to his eyes at the thought of how much she’d endured to be at his side throughout the years, and he suddenly felt very lucky to have known the love of such a great lady for even a day.

  Still clutching the Colt in a hand that seemed to be losing its grip, he turned the knob on the outer door and stepped out into bright sunlight. He blinked his eyes against the glare, and thought that maybe, just maybe that nice lady at the ticket counter would call an ambulance, and he’d live through this.

  Then something he didn’t see slugged him hard in the middle of his chest. He sat down hard on the grass as his eyes blinked, trying to comprehend what had hit him with such tremendous force. Rod’s ears vaguely registered the echoing report of a high-powered rifle, and his half-blinded eyes saw the sniper, a hundred yards away, cycling a fresh round into the action.

  “I’ll be damned . . .” Rod said aloud. Then he fell onto his left side and the world went black around him.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  PARTING

  The March air was cold and driven by a stiff wind as Colyer stopped at the tollbooth to give Caesar his due before pulling onto the southbound lane of the newly repaired Mackinac Bridge. This would be his first trip across the span since it was reopened to traffic two weeks prior. The state of Michigan had commissioned a lot of work to the bombed structure over the past winter, and the governor had promised that the repaired portions were even safer and stronger than the original had been. He needed to reassure the public in every way possible, Colyer thought, because no matter what their elected officials said, there was a pretty large faction of the citizenry who refused to even come near the irradiated bridge.

  Yet, the fact that the bridge had been the target of the first radioactive dirty bomb assault in the nation’s history created a cult following. Apparently, there were enough strange people who thought it was cool to visit the site of a terrorist attack, in this case, one that might have been much worse than the World Trade Center disaster. Colyer shuddered to think what would’ve happened if both bombs had detonated at the height of the Bridge Walk. Michigan would have lost its governor, several congressmen, and probably several thousand of its voters in one fell swoop. A full two miles of the bridge’s center would have collapsed into the Straits, and radiation levels would have been double what they were.

  Even now, the incidence of respiratory ailments and lung cancer had increased a hundredfold among residents in the vicinities of Mackinaw City, Saint Ignace, and Mackinac Island. People were selling their homes at less than they owed, and new construction, once a booming business in this underpopulated part of the country, had fallen to none at all. Nobody was moving into the area, and nobody wanted to live within fifty miles of the Mackinac Bridge. The Department of the Interior and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources had exhausted their budgets to buy out landowners who wanted to move, adding their lands to public holdings, but there were thousands more who wanted to leave. As with every disaster, natural or man-made, the reach of governmental assistance fell far short of reaching everyone who needed it.

  The second bomb had been found at the top of the Mackinac Point Lighthouse, and the Nuclear Emergency Search Team had been able to defuse and safely remove the device with no further mishap. Local cops had been quick to blame Rod Elliot as a key player in the terrorist attack, and the murders on the Betsy River. But it seemed apparent to Colyer that he’d, in fact, been instrumental in foiling both the timing of the attack, and the placement of the second bomb. It seemed clear that Elliot had been responsible for two of the killings, but both of those victims had been terrorists—he’d almost certainly had no part in the murders of his survival students. And he’d delivered McBraden to the authorities—that wasn’t the act of a terrorist’s ally. All in all, Elliot looked more like a hero than a villain, but a lot of locally sensitive questions were being answered just by dumping blame on a dead man. As always, local politicians were less interested in finding the truth than in absolving themselves of blame.

  Shannon Elliot knelt alone on the bank of the Betsy River. With both her hands, she held a simple urn with Rod’s ashes inside. She bent her head and closed her eyes, causing a tear to be squeezed out to run down her cheek. She wasn’t praying so much as reflecting on the good years she’d spent with a man who’d loved her more deeply than she knew how to describe, and who’d treated her like she was the most important thing in his life. And she wasn’t mourning, except to acknowledge a sadness that there would be no more days with the man that she’d loved more than her own life. Rod had lived every day of his existence, and he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to feel sorrow over his passing. He would have wanted his loved ones to sit around a fire, reminiscing and telling stories about his life.

  Shannon dumped the ashen remains of her husband on the flowing water. She paused a moment in silence as the sluggish waters carried them toward mighty Lake Superior. Then she rose and wiped her palms against the thighs of her denim overalls. She had stories to tell.

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