The people he worked with who knew, or even suspected, what he did wanted no part of it. On bases like this people avoided him. They didn’t make eye contact, didn’t make idle conversation. They treated him like he was some big scary monster or unstable psychotic who could erupt into violence if you looked at him the wrong way.
Conor didn’t see himself that way. He was a working-class guy whose unique set of life experiences allowed him to do jobs others couldn’t. He didn’t see anything wrong with that. Life was about finding your niche and making the most of it. He’d found his. He could stomach things that bothered most everyone else. That didn’t make him a bad guy. In fact, it apparently made him an extremely valuable guy in some circles.
The hangar was empty except for a RHIB, a rigid-hulled inflatable boat, sitting in a rolling cradle.
“This is ours,” Shani said, taking off her pack and lowering it to the ground.
“I thought we were meeting our pilots here,” Conor said. “That boat doesn’t require a pilot. You leave something out in the briefing?”
Shani laughed. “You’ll love the next leg of the journey.”
Conor didn’t ask what she meant. Though the presence of the boat concerned him just a little, he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that. Instead, he located the restroom and headed in that direction. He’d needed to go for so long that his eyeballs were bobbing in his head.
When he returned, Shani was standing inside the RHIB. She was slipping her pack into an enormous dry bag.
“On the way home, remind me not to drink three cups of coffee before a seven-hour chopper ride,” he announced.
“They had piddle packs onboard,” Shani said, referring to the urine collection devices pilots used on long hauls.
Conor frowned. “Well, how am I supposed to enjoy a good wee with you ogling my man bits?”
Shani raised a single eyebrow at him. She started to respond when a man dressed as a pilot entered the hangar. “We’ll get back to that.”
The pilot approached and glanced into the RHIB. He noticed Conor hadn’t yet placed his own gear into a dry bag. “Sir, you’ll probably want to go ahead and stow your gear. Sometimes there’s a little spray. Once the gear is in the dry bag, lash it down securely. Sometimes shit happens.” He had a ruddy face, his eyes hidden by sunglasses, and spoke with a Texas accent.
Conor glared at the man. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely up to speed on where we go from here.”
“Our orders are to perform a MEATS insertion at a set of coordinates roughly corresponding to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.”
“Don’t tell me...” Conor began.
“Yessir.” The pilot grinned. “Marine External Air Transportation System.”
“This fucking gig gets better by the hour,” Conor groaned. “I prefer to step out of choppers, not drop out of them into little boats.”
“There’s no reason to be concerned. You’re in good hands, sir,” the pilot said. “We’re going to strap this craft to a Pegasus CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then we have a roughly eighty-mile flight to our insertion point. Once there, we’ll carefully lower this little boat into the water and delicately place you two inside with the latest and greatest Troop Insertion System. Should you feel comfortable doing so, you’re welcome to fast-rope down. If that’s not your thing, we are hoist-equipped and can place you down as gently as an egg in a mother bird’s nest.”
“You could always ride the eighty miles in the boat, Conor, but it might be a tad chilly,” Shani offered.
“Throw me that dry bag and let’s get on with it,” Conor growled.
4
In a little under two hours the chopper slowed to a hover south of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The crew chief swung into action, directing the chopper down until the RHIB was floating.
“Showtime!” he called to his passengers. “You’re on!”
Shani unbuckled her harness and clipped into the tether system. She glanced out the door and then back at Conor. “It’s not even twenty feet. You seriously going to make them winch your fat ass down there?”
Conor leaned around her. “You can skip the hoist but I’ll still need a descender. I’m too out of practice to rope down and I’m not breaking an ankle if I slip.”
Shani gave him a look like she had a few comments to make but she choked them down. They had work to do.
The two removed their headsets and slung their weapons. They’d already slipped on harnesses of nylon webbing prior to departing the hangar. Shani didn’t need hers. She deftly latched onto the rope with her gloved hands, twisted her leg into it, and roped down smooth as butter. Upon landing, she cleared from the rope and gave Conor a thumbs-up.
The crew chief attached an abseiler to Conor’s harness with a carabiner. This particular descender had a mechanical lever that allowed him to control his rate of descent. When the rope was threaded through the device, Conor confirmed that he was satisfied with the rigging. He nodded at the crew chief and stepped off the deck.
Conor’s adrenaline spiked as he hung in the air over the boat, but everything worked as it was supposed to. Below him, the outboard engine kicked to life. He was on the boat in seconds, landing gently. He unclipped the abseiler but retained the carabiner and harness. The crew chief began retracting the line.
Conor unslung his weapon and set about unhooking the four hoist lines with Shani. They deftly unpinned the shackles, Shani on the bow, Conor at the stern. When they were free, Conor signaled the chopper crew and they began to ascend. The pair watched carefully as the shackles swung wildly at the end of their hoist lines. Despite their bump helmets, no one wanted to be clocked in the head with one of them.
Shani took the helm. The thrum of powerful rotors disappearing into the distance was replaced by the rising whine of the outboard. It was cold on the lake. Although certainly not as cold as it would be in a month or two, the wind and the spray made for an unpleasant ride.
“We need a southwest heading!” Shani called.
Conor consulted a button compass on the band of his watch and pointed.
Shani swung the craft in that direction. “There’s a route programmed into your sPad. Bring it up and keep me on track.”
Conor’s heavy coat was strapped against his body by the harness he’d been wearing in the chopper so it took him a moment to find the device in a pouch on his web gear. A retractable lanyard kept it secure in case he dropped it. He powered up the device and opened the navigation app. The menu allowed him to find the pre-programmed route Shani was referring to.
The boat showed up on the screen as a green arrow. They were slightly to the right of the red line that indicated their route. Even though they were headed in the same general direction Conor had to assume that the route was chosen for a particular reason. They might need to stick to it as closely as possible.
“Bear left until I tell you to straighten out!” Conor yelled.
Shani nodded and did as he instructed.
Studying the map on the tiny screen, Conor saw they’d been dropped in an area of Lake Superior mostly concealed from the mainland by the islands of the Apostle Island National Lakeshore. They were headed southwest between Basswood Island and Madeline Island.
Conor held the device up so Shani could see it. “That point to your four o’clock is called La Pointe. You need to swing around that and head east. Keep this spit of land, Long Island, to your right.”
Shani nodded.
Conor could see that Long Island wasn’t really an island at all, but a narrow, four-mile-long extension of the mainland that stretched out into the water. That spit of land blocked nearly two-thirds of the entrance to Chequamegon Bay.
“It’s fucking cold!” Shani said.
Conor was shielding his face with his hand. “No kidding. At least on land we’d be moving and generating some heat.”
Not far past where Long Island rejoined the mainland, Conor began looking for the entrance to the Bad River. Shani
slowed and studied their route. Conor pointed out landmarks as they powered in. They were now on reservation land. According to their briefing, people regularly fished this area, but once you went further upstream the lower Bad River was not a welcoming environment. Trespassers, if they were lucky, might be greeted with thrown bottles. Less fortunate trespassers got worse. Under the current state of lawlessness in the country at large, it was hard to predict how an interloper might be handled.
They saw no other boats on the water. It seemed unlikely that locals in canoes or kayaks would come this far downriver. It would be a long paddle back upstream. Though the river was navigable for several miles, they didn’t go that far. They didn’t want to be seen or take a chance on their motor being heard. They weren’t interested in locals noticing them and passing on stories about the strangers in the fast boat seen flying up the river.
They’d barely gone a mile when their route steered them off the main channel, through a gap in the bank and into a remote slough. It was harsh, unwelcoming country but beautiful at the same time. Conor could imagine it would be a nice place to survive when it was warmer. A man could feast on wild rice and other forest edibles, traps and trotlines could provide meat and fish, and there was enough wood to fuel a woodstove for more winters than a man could live.
“The route ends here,” Conor pointed out. “Park it.”
Shani gunned the boat up onto a muddy bank, then Conor jumped from the bow and tied the boat off to a tree. The pair wasted no time. They wanted to get some distance between them and the boat in case the engine had drawn any attention. They dumped their gear from the dry bags onto the shore, placing their rifles on top of the packs, removed the flight harnesses they’d worn on the ride in, and stuffed those into the dry bags, rolling the tops closed.
After Shani stashed the dry bags in the RHIB, she removed a roll of camouflage netting lashed inside. She and Conor worked together to thoroughly cover the entire boat. They exchanged no words, each knowing exactly what needed doing. With that completed, they searched the area for brush and limbs that would further hide the boat.
“That should do,” Shani said.
Conor slung his pack onto his back and took up his rifle. He slapped the bottom of the mag to verify it was firmly seated, then racked the charging handle as he walked, chambering a round. He confirmed there was brass in the chamber and made certain the safety was where he needed it to be. A few steps behind him, Shani was going through the same routine with her rifle, an olive-green Tavor.
“That the TAR-21?” Conor asked, referring to the Israeli Defense Force standard-issue Tavor.
She shook her head. “CTAR. Compact version. I see you’re still rocking your good old American M4.”
“Not hardly,” Conor said, offended. “This is one of my personal projects. An M4 in .300 Blackout with an integral suppressor. I got tired of lugging a suppressor around and worrying about it changing the point of impact if I added it to my rifle in the middle of a fight. The integral suppressor doesn’t add any additional length to the rifle and I don’t have to worry about removing it. It’s got a three-position happy switch so I can bump it up to full-auto if the mood strikes.”
“No burst mode?”
“No,” Conor replied. “I gave up on three-shot bursts when I built my first rifles. It makes the innards unnecessarily complicated. Full-auto is a much simpler mechanism and you can get the same burst effect with good trigger control.”
Shani gave him a glazed-over look. “I wouldn’t trust my life to something you cobbled together in that junkyard of yours.”
Conor frowned. “I wouldn’t trust my life to anything I hadn’t gone over with a fine-tooth comb, both inside and out.”
“That include me? You’re trusting your life to me right now.”
Conor’s eyes went wide. “Bloody hell, woman!”
She laughed at his discomfort, pulling out her sPad since they were out of sight of the boat. Conor did the same and they brought up the land nav route. “It’s a little under two miles to Mumin’s compound.”
Conor looked around them. “I’m surprised they found buildable land in this part of the reservation. Nothing but mucky swamp around here.”
“Our intel says they didn’t find buildable land, they made it.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Dozers, dirt, and drainage.”
“Sounds like a feat of engineering I’d like to see. Let’s get moving.”
5
The Bad River area was remote terrain. A person lost in those woods would have difficulty navigating their way around if they wanted to stay dry. The ground was full of false promises. What looked like dry land would swallow you to your knees. What appeared to be a path to freedom would dead-end at a river you couldn’t ford. It could be a hellish trap for anyone who got turned in the wrong direction. With temperatures below freezing, getting wet could mean death by hypothermia if you weren’t able to get warm and dry out.
There was no detailed mapping of the area available to the general retail market. The place was off-limits to the public, the terrain only familiar to the locals who traditionally hunted the area. Shani and Conor were blessed with a rare and highly detailed topo map that allowed them to navigate the area, compliments of an intelligence agency satellite. While the scale and the topo rendering weren’t perfect, it was good enough to allow the two to plot a route that kept them on dry ground.
They walked slowly, exchanging point occasionally to keep their minds and eyes fresh. The hardwood trees had lost their leaves, which enhanced sight distances but made for a crunchy ground cover. They stepped carefully but it was far from silent. They kept their rifles raised and their awareness jacked up.
The songbirds were gone from the region but there was still life. Squirrels were at work, noisily going about their day. Cardinals flitted from tree to tree. Several varieties of ducks paddled around silently. They even saw a Bald Eagle at one point.
Conor was the one who spotted it. He pointed it out to Shani and did a small first pump. “America, baby.”
She rolled her eyes.
Even with a map it was slow going. The only trails were game trails and beasts that preceded them hadn’t the courtesy to clear the way for them. Frequent deadfalls were blocking the trail. The fallen hardwoods weren’t such a problem. While they could usually duck beneath those and navigate their way through them, the conifers were more difficult. The needle-bearing trees had dense branches that snagged at their gear as they tried to duck around them. It was frustrating in the already challenging terrain.
The first physical sign of Mumin’s compound came in the form of altered watercourses within the swamp. This was one of those things the Environmental Protection Agency would have fined them for if it was anywhere but reservation land. The EPA consulted with tribes to assist them in environmental matters but the final authority was the tribal government. If Mumin greased those wheels and spread enough money around, no one would question him carving deep channels into the swamp to enhance drainage.
That wasn’t the only sign Conor and Shani were approaching the facility. The navigation app on their sPADs had the ability to layer maps. When they overlaid the satellite photo of Mumin’s compound onto their map of the Bad River area, they could see they were on the very fringes of the area he’d improved for construction.
Nearing his property, the going became easier. There were forest roads likely constructed by the heavy equipment that built the site. Massive root balls had been pulled from the earth and tossed to the side by excavators with hydraulic claws. There were bristling slash piles of cleared brush. Some of the hardwood stumps terminated in clean cuts, the timber either harvested for sale or cut for firewood.
Shani and Conor walked side-by-side at this point, figuring twice as many eyes reduced the chances of walking into a trap or triggering some type of alarm. Soon the construction access road joined with a more highly-traveled road. Stone had been applied to it at some point but the sur
face was mostly dirt and the compacted mulch of the deep forest.
Shani studied the ground. “Tractor and ATV tracks mostly. Some are fresh. They’re still using this road.”
Conor studied the map. “We need to go right. We should stay to the shoulder so we can drop over the bank if we hear anything. You take one side. I’ll take the other.”
“We should be getting close, right?”
Conor tapped the display on his sPad, using a measurement function to calculate the distance between two points. “Just over a thousand meters.”
Shani looked toward the sky. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”
“Good enough. We can find a spot and settle in. Maybe come up with a plan for tomorrow.”
Conor headed toward the left side of the road, Shani to the right. The path was nearly as wide as a two-lane country road. The surface was flat and compacted but the edges weren’t dressed. There were no smooth shoulders. Toward the edges, the road terminated in clumps of rocks and brush, then dropped steeply down to the level of the swamp. The road grade itself was probably twelve feet higher than the level of the surrounding forest.
Not having spent much time in the northern forests, Conor was impressed by the beauty. It would have been a pleasant place to vacation in better times. He could see himself canoeing the waters of a place like this, fishing for lake trout and walleye. He’d camp on lakeshores at night and fall asleep to the sound of loons. Perhaps he still could one day.
There was an explosion in the brush in front of him. Conor whipped his rifle to his eye and flipped the safety off. Only discipline and years of training prevented him from firing at the escaping bird.
“Bloody hell!” he hissed. He caught Shani smiling at him from her side of the road, which pissed him off.
“Ruffed Grouse, I believe,” she said.
“Should call them fucking Claymore birds,” he mumbled. “They blow up in your face like a bomb.”
Northern Sun: Book Four in The Mad Mick Series Page 3