The Mackinac Incident Read online

  It was on the reservation that they ran into trouble. A rusted old Chevy pickup truck filled with Cheemookamon rednecks had run their car into a ditch near Naokoming Creek. When her father jumped from their hopelessly mired vehicle to confront the three white men who smelled of whiskey and beer, they’d descended on him in a gang, beating him with their fists, cursing, and kicking him when he fell to the ground. Brenda tried to help her father, but one of the drunks felled her with a hard fist to the side of her head. When she regained consciousness, they were gone, and her father was dead. He was killed by asphyxiation and internal bleeding when a fractured rib punctured his lung. He died from choking on his own blood. Brenda still cried herself to sleep at night, thinking of how he must have suffered before he died.

  But Amos Waukonigon was just a drunken Indian, and a Canadian citizen to boot. The Yankee police hadn’t looked very hard for his murderers, and whoever they were, they probably still walked the streets of America. Meanwhile, the orphaned Brenda was forced to return to Ontario, where she lived with an aunt ever since. When Brenda met Philippe Aziz at an anti-American rally a year ago, she was willing, even eager, to join a cause against the Yanks she hated.

  When she secured their craft to the dock pilings, bow and stern, the four men threw their heavy satchels onto the dock and jumped out after them. Aziz grabbed her and pulled her to him, kissing her hard on the mouth. She felt a stirring in her loins from the embrace of this dark and exotic man, just as she always had since their first meeting. For his part, there was no love, only sexual passion. She didn’t mind; it was enough. Their shared passion was a mutual hatred of Americans.

  “I couldn’t get us a car,” she said in Canadian-accented English. “But I got an extended-cab pickup truck with four-wheel drive. It’ll haul your gear, and it should be comfortable enough for the four of you to ride in. Besides, I think you might need the four-wheel drive. I drove it here myself.” She jerked her head toward the back wall of the boathouse, where she’d parked the truck.

  Aziz took her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length, as if admiring her. “I’m sure that you did well,” he said. “Did you get all of the other items?”

  “Yes, I got you a Garmin GPS loaded with the most current highway maps, and the iPad that Timmons asked for. There are four, fully loaded backpacks, each of them packed with dried food enough for three days, and each of them weighing fifteen kilos.”

  “Did you get the guns?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with obvious pride at the accomplishment. “A Desert Eagle 50 caliber for Peter,”—she looked appreciatively at the well-muscled Bosnian—“two 9 millimeter Glocks for Tim and Paul, and for you, my love, the Ruger Security 6 you requested, in 357 magnum. One box of fifty cartridges for each gun, two extra magazines for each of the automatics, and two speed loaders for your revolver.” She handed him a briefcase with the guns inside. She intentionally brought no holsters for any of them; having a holster only defeated the purpose if one of them got searched by a policeman and had to throw his gun away.

  Aziz nodded his head. “Good. Is everything untraceable?”

  “Yes, the guns are orphans. I bought them all from the wife of a private collector who died recently. The truck was purchased from a farmer in British Columbia. It’s registered to a man who passed away last month. It’s a solid beige Ford F-150, the most common pickup truck in North America, in the most hard-to-remember color. There’s a nylon jet bag with two changes of clothes in it—civilian and BDUs—for each one of you.”

  “You’ve done well, Brenda,” Aziz said. He pulled her to him again with his left arm. But the embrace was hard enough to be brutal this time. In Aziz’s right hand was an ESEE Knives RAT-6 survival knife. He drove the razor-sharp blade, edge upward, forcefully into the girl’s soft solar plexus, pulling her forward onto the blade while he twisted the handle, making sure he made a wide hole in her heart. She gasped, struggling against him in an effort to pull herself back from the blade. But it was too late, blood was pouring into her abdominal cavity from the hole Aziz had rent in her heart’s ventricle. She stared over Aziz’s shoulder, directly into Peter Grigovich’s eyes, and whispered in a failing voice, “Help me. . . . Please.”

  Aziz felt blood spurt from the knife wound, hot against his hand. He smiled cruelly; he liked it. Aziz pressed harder, keeping the pulsing blood mostly inside her convulsing body as his hand helped to seal the outside of the wound. He held her until she went limp, less than a minute later, then he released her lifeless corpse to fall into the water. The tide was going out, and her body immediately began to drift out to sea through the boathouse door.

  Grigovich stared at the girl’s receding body while Aziz knelt on the dock and washed her blood from his hands. Grigovich fancied himself a tough man, but Brenda Waukonigon’s wide, frightened eyes locked onto his own as they glazed over with the veil of death disturbed him deeply. He knew that he’d never forget that awful sight. He also knew that if he showed what he was feeling to the others, he would join her. They’d simply carry on with three members, instead of four. It was one of the contingencies they’d trained to meet.

  Chapter Two

  THE SURVIVAL INSTRUCTOR

  Well, wouldn’t that just frost your ass? Only he, Rodney frigging Elliot, could lay some damned thing down for one second, and then turn to find it gone. The blood rose in his neck until it started to throb. Every time he tried to accomplish even the most minor chore, there was some goddamned, mother . . .

  “What’s the matter, Rod? Lose somethin’?”

  He looked up from where he knelt on the concrete barn floor amid scattered gear and backpacks. He was only half worked up into a fine rage when the fires of his frustration were quenched by the approach of a pretty blond woman with mischievous blue eyes and a smile that had always made his chest feel a little tight. In her hands was a cup of steaming, hot coffee.

  After a whirlwind romance that led to a decade of living with the most incredibly beautiful woman he had ever seen, Rod still found the mere presence of his wife, Shannon, to be like a soothing balm whenever he was pissed off about something. And he was often pissed about something. Shannon liked to joke that he was a triple-A personality.

  He took the steaming mug she held out to him, and answered in a gruff, slightly embarrassed voice, sweeping his other hand across the array of equipment spread before them.

  “Aaahhh . . . I’m just ‘bitchin’ because I can’t find that stupid MSR water filter that was right in front of me a minute ago. . . .” His sentence trailed off, because there in his outstretched fist was the item he’d gotten so worked up over losing.

  Rod looked sidewise at Shannon, who was grinning with that look of hers that said, “You’re a dumbass, but I love you anyway.”

  He grinned sheepishly and said, “Y’know, I’m getting too old for this stupid survival instructor stuff.”

  She pulled him to her by his collar, and kissed him on the cheek. “No you’re not. Fifty-five is not old today—besides, I’m older than you.”

  “Yeah, two months.” He appraised her muscular, athletic form with an eye that remained appreciative of it even after a decade. She still possessed the womanly attributes that got him excited; maybe more than ever. Even now he felt a stirring of lust.

  It must have shown in his eyes, because Shannon grinned even more widely in feigned surprise, then pushed him away. She said, “You’re a dirty old man,” and walked away.

  “Wait,” he called after her, “you said I wasn’t that old.” He pointed to his distended trousers, “And what am I supposed to do with this tent pole?”

  She called back over her shoulder, “You erected it. You take it down.”

  His anger dissipated, Rod turned back to assembling the backpacks he was issuing his clients for their weeklong survival class with him along the wild Betsy River in Lake Superior State Forest. They were three thirty-something professionals from Chicago, a husband and wife, and her brother. He had interviewed e
ach by phone, advising them on clothing, footwear, and personal items. As with every survival class, he had a full medical and personal dossier on each member, and he felt he knew the three students without having ever met them. When it came to wilderness survival, he didn’t like surprises.

  Each of the backpacks they’d be carrying was tailored as closely as possible to have a mass equal to no more than one-third of its bearer’s own weight. They’d be humping them through rugged backcountry for up to seven miles a day, and excessively heavy packs resulted in injuries. When medical assistance might be more than half a day away, he really wanted to avoid the need for a paramedic.

  Rod had taught wilderness survival classes for almost twenty-five years, the last eleven of them in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Whitefish Point, jutting northward into Lake Superior, twelve miles from the tiny village of Paradise, was a good environment in which to teach his type of real-world survival. An average twenty-three feet of snow fell during the six months of winter, with ambient temperatures occasionally falling below 235°F. During the non-snow months, mosquitoes, several species of blackflies and midges, deerflies, stable flies, and the UP’s infamous horseflies—said to require killing with a knife or a gun—were more voracious than those in the Amazon rain forest, due to their short breeding period and life-span.

  Rod’s no-nonsense approach to wilderness survival training was popular with some law enforcement and most military personnel, but especially with sport hunters who had enough real-world experience to know the difference between fact and fiction. Like any self-employed professional outdoorsman, Rod always needed money. But Rod had no compunction about recommending that casual survival wannabes seek training with another survival instructor. A student who thought that he already knew what he was doing usually wasted Rod’s time arguing about every little thing, and those who expected some sort of magical enlightenment weren’t there to learn survival at all. Rod wasn’t there to debate or to elevate anyone’s consciousness; he was there to teach his clients how to not die in the woods.

  His own survival training was almost a cliché. Originally from Saint Clair County, in Michigan’s Thumb area, Rod was born to Jane Mitchell, a twenty-year-old farm girl from Imlay City and Michael Elliot, a twenty-four-year-old army private from Port Huron. Square dancing was popular then, and that was how Jane met Michael and later became pregnant. Because it was considered the right thing to do in those days, they rushed into marriage three months later. Rodney was born first, then his sister Margie two years after.

  It had been a failed union from the start. With her husband stationed in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, the naïve and lonely Jane had been easy prey for a nineteen-year-old bad boy named Melvin James. His ebony hair, sexy spit curl, and rebellious attitude made him irresistible. Michael abruptly divorced her as soon as he learned from his own parents that Jane was not only cheating on him, but actually living with Melvin.

  For his part, Melvin came to see Jane’s son and daughter from her previous marriage as a guaranteed source of income from the Social Services Department. Every month, she received a healthy sum from the state for their welfare, and would do so until they were eighteen years old. That was all Melvin cared about, as far as Rodney and his sister Margie were concerned. The two children were merely beer money and a source of rent when Melvin was down on his luck.

  Worked like a slave when he wasn’t in school, with plenty of physical abuse thrown in for good measure (his mother didn’t object when her second husband beat and kicked her kids), Rodney’s lust for nature had sprouted at age ten. His stepfather, fearful of Rodney’s birth father, had moved the entire family three hundred miles north to Charlevoix, Michigan.

  Young Rodney had become entranced by the dark-skinned people who lived in nearby “Indian Town.” These communities of tar-paper shacks inhabited by Native Americans descended from the Ojibwa, Odawa, and Potawatomi tribes were common to almost every northern Michigan town in those days. Generations of racial bias had kept the Indian bloodlines mostly pure, and the tribe members were generally spurned by their white neighbors. The Indian elders, some of whom remembered pulling stumps with mules, had provided a welcome and fascinating escape for Rodney from the hardships of being at home. He remembered them as poor but honest people who didn’t give or rescind their friendship lightly, and who always treated children with kindness.

  But while the elders held to a tradition of passing down what they had learned to their young, Indian youngsters who were being raised in the white man’s schools rebelled against the traditional ways. To them, an eagle feather was worthless, but wearing Levi’s blue jeans garnered respect from their peers. Where once an Indian teen had sought wisdom from the grandfathers, he now yearned for cars, music, and other trappings of white society. With few students who wanted to learn from them, the elders had grudgingly accepted a white Scots-Irish boy who seemed fascinated by their culture.

  That was when Rodney had developed an obsession with wilderness survival. He learned to run a trapline and hunt raccoons for fur when he was twelve years old. He’d tube-skin the carcasses, sometimes cape them completely, leaving claws, nose pads, and even whiskers intact. When he had a dozen or more salted pelts in the freezer, his stepfather would take them to a local furrier and sell them for drinking money—Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, a brand Rod still hated to this day. Even though young Rodney never saw a dime from the sale of his furs, trapping them had meant getting away from his abusive stepfather, often for days at a time, in the solitude and serenity of nature. It had been worth it.

  During those first few years, there were many times when Rodney found himself caught in a blizzard, or some other dangerous situation in the woods he was sure he wouldn’t survive. His first winter outing—alone, because no one would go with him—had resulted in frostbite so severe that skin peeled from his fingers and toes for the following weeks, like he’d been badly burned. He’d suffered from hypothermia, encountered hordes of biting bugs, and been lost at night. He’d even survived being bitten by a Massasauga rattlesnake when one took shelter in his old Korean War era sleeping bag. He was convinced he was a goner that time, but after lying alone in the woods for three days—no one even reported him missing—he’d somehow found the strength to hike six miles back home.

  Between having a natural talent for survival and a tribe of good instructors, he had honed his woods craft skills to a fine edge. By the time he was fourteen years old, his abilities had begun to earn the derision of some full-grown hunters and other sportsmen, who had, in fact, begun to fear his growing skills. For Rodney, the objective wasn’t to achieve some macho image, but to learn self-sufficiency in the place he loved most of all. He was reassured knowing that no matter what happened, his loved ones would never starve or freeze to death.

  Rodney was the first to leave home and managed to survive in society by lying low, working hard, and fooling people into thinking that he was older than he was. When Rodney’s sister Margie started to show the first signs of womanhood, their stepfather took notice. After several years of physical and sexual abuse, she ran away to their birth father, and charged their sick, son-of-a-bitch stepfather with statutory rape, which finally resulted in his imprisonment. Even after getting away from his family, it seemed that a black cloud hung over Rodney’s head everywhere he went. At twenty-two years old, he’d gone to prison for his part in an ill-fated convenience store robbery. When he emerged after serving only three years, it was with a changed attitude, a trade school certification in drafting, and enough college credits to claim an associate’s degree in statistical process control. He figured that his main reason for turning to crime in the first place had been stupidity caused by a lack of viable options; having lived among the human animals that society kept behind prison walls, he swore to never be without options again.

  He had become a maverick—a mercenary, really—after his parole. Beginning at a United Technologies automotive plant in Traverse City, Rod had bucked his way up from dimmer swit
ch assembler to quality technician in less than two years. Over the next twelve years, he worked his up to quality control manager, and then further widened his areas of expertise by working a year at several different manufacturing facilities.

  Never did he stray too far for too long from his beloved northwoods, though. They were his refuge when the burdens of life got too heavy, his solace when sadness was overpowering, and a place of solitude when his mind got too noisy to think straight. His weekend escapes to the forests and swamps of northern Michigan kept him sane when the world around him grew more insane.

  Regardless of how much he accomplished, the state never let him forget the fact that he’d been in prison; that single transgression would haunt him for the rest of his days. He couldn’t vote; it was illegal for him to own a firearm; and he was forever restricted from holding a number of job positions. He still avoided driving around Charlevoix, because every cop who saw him would find a reason to pull him over.

  The final blow came when it became clear to him that no matter how hard he worked, no matter how much of an expert he was, he’d never get any farther on the career ladder unless he regressed to being a liar and a cheat. The only difference was that now he was expected to commit crimes with an ink pen. Disillusioned at finding that the pillars of society were as bad or worse than the people with whom he’d done prison time, he’d relocated to the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula as soon as he could get free of his obligations.

  It was near the village of Newberry that he’d met his soul mate, Shannon. He was working as a freelance wolf tracker for biologists from a local tribe—the irony of a white guy tracking for Indians wasn’t lost on him. Shannon was known locally as the “Wolf Lady” because she had a weird fascination with wild canids, and had actually obtained a legal permit to raise gray wolves.