In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  “One of your guys is still in there, and he’s hit bad,” Caulder told Brooks. “He’s spitting up pink foam.”

  The backboard proved awkward and tipsy, especially as gunfire thundered through the woods. Finally Caulder cursed and told West to help him stand. “You can’t walk,” West said.

  “Bullshit. I’ve got one good leg. Just get me up.”

  Supported at both shoulders, Caulder gritted his teeth and hopped, still trailing blood, the remaining twenty-five yards to the bridge. The ambulance was another twenty yards beyond that. It had been unable to get closer with all the cruisers parked near the bridge, but lawmen came running to help—Gerry Marcou, Sam Sprague, Todd Bogardus, several others. Standing sentry at the ambulance was Dean Hook. At the CP, Jellison had ordered his men to clean the ammunition out of Hook’s deer rifle, but since then the constable had taken the liberty of reloading.

  Caulder was laid on the backboard again, a man at each corner. One of those was Todd Bogardus, who had his shotgun on a sling over his shoulder. As Bogardus lifted his corner, the gun slipped and nearly clubbed Caulder in the eye. When this happened a second time, the trooper took action. “Hey, give me the fucking gun,” he said.

  “You want the shotgun?”

  “Yeah, just give it to me, okay?”

  Caulder was carried that way out of the woods and up a rise in the dirt road to the ambulance. Reporters had arrived by then, and an Associated Press photographer captured a shot of Caulder as he was hustled into the back of a Colebrook ambulance. The photo showed Caulder rolled on his side and his right hand clutching that shotgun, its barrel erect as the flag over Iwo Jima.

  The next day newspapers all over the country would run that photo, often with captions about the spirit of the wounded trooper who refused to relinquish his weapon, even as he was taken from the field. “Yeah, except it wasn’t my weapon,” Caulder said later. “And all I was doing was trying not to get cold-cocked.”

  In the emergency room of the Weeks Memorial Hospital in Lancaster, doctors found that Caulder had not been hit in the thigh, as he thought, though he did have an exit wound there. Instead, once they cut off his blood-soaked underwear, they found he had been shot in the scrotum.

  Kevin Jordan and John Wimsatt were still nosing around Maidstone when they heard over the radio that shots had been fired, officers were down. They sped past the hayfield where they had talked to those farmers and saw that the next turnoff had to be the place: cruisers parked along the guardrail, cops spaced out as sentries in case the gunman forded the brook and broke out of the woods. Frank Prue was there, and so was Mike Doucette, who asked Jordan if he had a ballistics vest on. Jordan said no. Doucette pulled the steel back panel out of his own vest for Jordan to stuff inside his shirt.

  They arrived moments after Jeff Caulder had been whisked away to Lancaster. The woods were quiet, and had been for fifteen minutes or so. When Jordan and Wimsatt got to the bridge, they found West and several others throwing together a plan for rescuing Pfeifer.

  They talked. It was thought a good possibility that Drega was on the run again, but no one was going to bet his life on it. Jordan and Wimsatt, along with two Vermont troopers in plainclothes, were assigned to a back-side detail that would climb the ridge, as the Hooks had done, and come over the top behind Drega’s position. West, Brooks, Batchelder, Marty Hewson, Sam Sprague, and Amos Colby would go in after Pfeifer.

  Jordan’s group set out first, advancing warily to that fork in the road and then turning right to the back of the ridge. In the woods they fanned out to intervals of thirty yards and climbed in a staggered sequence—one man moving while the other three provided cover.

  This was the twenty-seven-year-old Wimsatt’s first shooting incident, and not only did he lack a vest, he felt like an easy target in his light Fish & Game river driver T-shirt and the sort of blue jeans Drega was described as wearing. When he wasn’t moving, Wimsatt grabbed handfuls of dirt and scoured them into his clothes. He was a skilled hunter, like Jordan, and he felt glad at least to be in the woods. If he had to be in a gunfight, Wimsatt thought, let it be here.

  On their way to the ridge crest, they learned there were already other cops on the hill. Wimsatt heard someone shout, “State police, freeze!”—and a reply to the effect that they were both state police. We’re in a nest of hunters, Wimsatt thought, with no one wearing orange. By the time they reached the crest, where there was still no glimpse of the cruiser through the slope’s tangles of spruce and hemlock blowdown, a New Hampshire State Police helicopter was working back and forth overhead, as was a chopper from WMUR in Manchester.

  Jordan’s blood was hammering in his ears. It was hard enough to hear as it was, without the clamor of these choppers. And now it was impossible to pick up the movements of other people in the woods. Jordan had Wimsatt within sight to his left. Enraged, Jordan signaled him to find cover and stay put. They’d have to be like deer hunters in blinds, waiting to see what came to them.

  Jordan crouched behind a thick white pine. He still couldn’t see the cruiser. Nor could he see Pfeifer or the men still pinned behind the berm, though somehow—despite the choppers—he could hear Pfeifer’s moans. The sound made Jordan blink back tears. It also pricked another sort of rage, making him wonder why Drega—if he was still on the slope—didn’t just finish Pfeifer off. The bastard must be using him for bait, he thought.

  If so, Drega was about to have his way. Jordan could glimpse a short stretch of the tote road along the creek, and there it was: Amos Colby’s county sheriff’s Jeep Cherokee, its tailgate thrown open, slowly backing down that road.

  Jordan didn’t think it was much of a plan. Surely there was a SWAT team on the way, but Pfeifer might not last that long. Neither Jordan nor anyone else could think of anything better. Colby in particular had had his doubts, but here he was just the same. Jordan watched the Jeep’s slow progress and whispered a prayer, please God, that Amos wouldn’t panic.

  Somebody said they heard on the radio that Drega had been seen fording the Connecticut. The woods were still quiet. It was also possible that Drega had finally turned his gun on himself, as he should have done in the first place. Sam Sprague hoped that Drega was dead, but he’d settle for him being gone.

  The son of an art dealer (his father) and a mother who did proofreading for the New York Times, Sprague had siblings who were all in education or medicine. He thought law enforcement might be more interesting, though, and he answered an ad in the newspaper for a job with the Enfield, New Hampshire, Police Department. He was a cop in Enfield and Claremont for eight years, rising through the ranks, but he also liked to hunt and fish, and envied the more regular work schedule of a conservation officer. He was hired by Fish & Game in 1995, at age thirty, in the same month as Wayne Saunders. Earlier that day he had questioned his “interesting work” theory while washing shit out of a bear trap at the agency’s Twin Mountain fish hatchery. No doubts about that now.

  The plan for getting Pfeifer was to go in with something like a tank platoon—that is to say, Amos Colby’s beloved Jeep, followed by a number of men in vests and carrying big guns. Colby was at the wheel of the Jeep, and he’d been warned once already about going too fast as he backed down this road. Of course he wasn’t driving a tank, and an AR-15 could drill through that driver-side door like it was so much cardboard.

  So Colby could be forgiven for wanting to be quick about it. But the men crouching and moving behind the Jeep—West with a shotgun shooting rifled slugs, Steve Brooks with an M14 out of Ben Batchelder’s trunk, and Sprague with a .257 deer rifle—didn’t want to get left behind. Border Patrol agent Marty Hewson was at the rear fender with an M16. Moving parallel to the road and a short distance up in the woods was Bogey—Todd Bogardus—with the shotgun that had threatened Jeff Caulder.

  Once they reached the bend that opened into the clearing where the cruiser was parked, Sprague saw the men pinned to the berm—Robinson with a hand on Major and then Albright and Haase, all presse
d to the ground like marines on a hostile beach. Pfeifer lay on his side in the road, an easy target, his Beretta held with both hands to his chest as if in prayer. He was alive—Sprague could hear him cough and spit blood.

  They didn’t stop at the bend—they just kept going. West didn’t signal Colby to halt until the tailgate of the Jeep was nearly on top of Pfeifer. Once he did so, rapping on a window, Colby put the Jeep into park and rolled out of it, down to the road and against the berm, with his sidearm drawn.

  “Okay,” said West, leaning his shotgun against the rear bumper and stepping from behind the cover of the Jeep. “Let’s pick him up and put him in the truck.”

  Brooks followed, taking hold of Pfeifer by the vest and managing with some difficulty to pry the Beretta out of his hands, while West took his feet. Pfeifer was only semiconscious and too heavy for the two of them. Sprague tipped his rifle against the Jeep and came around to help. He took Pfeifer’s feet, and West grabbed at his belt.

  Sprague would remember that first shot feeling like a hard cuff on his right ear, and so loud that Drega seemed just a few feet away. Sprague knew the sound of rifle fire on a shooting range, the pinging whine a bullet makes as it flies to a target somewhere else, but he found the roar of a round headed straight your way to be wholly different. Pfeifer, in his haze, felt himself dropped to the road with a bloody, rib-rattling thud.

  Sprague didn’t know if he’d been hit when he fell with the others around Pfeifer. In a tangle of limbs and weapons—West had his shotgun, but Sprague’s rifle was on the far side of the Jeep—they scrambled to the berm, dragging the agonized Pfeifer by his boots after them.

  Somehow the second shot, Sprague thought, was even louder and closer than the first.

  Kevin Jordan had no doubt he was about to die. He was behind a tree and planted into the ground, but a hailstorm of ordinance—shotgun slugs, rifle and pistol bullets—shrilled through the leaves overhead, slicing off branches and shivering into tree trunks. It was inevitable, he thought, that something would come in low enough and smart enough to find him. He trembled in equipoise between being and nothingness, and his fright swallowed him whole like a whale.

  The barrage progressed in fits and starts—and then it was over. Jordan couldn’t begin to count how many shots had been fired or guess how long the shooting had lasted. But it had concluded with two simultaneous reports, the crack of an assault rifle and the artillery blast of a shotgun. A moment later, Jordan heard Colby’s Jeep rumbling back up the tote road and finally a few more bursts of rifle fire.

  Then a species of silence settled into the woods that—outside the whump-whump of the choppers in the sky—seemed to have its own pulsing timbre, as if it were ringing in decibels beyond human hearing.

  That odd silence settled over Jordan and his sheltering pine like a quilt. He waited. Five minutes? Ten? Maybe more? When at last he lifted his head high enough to see some piece of the clearing at the bottom of the ridge, he glimpsed a gray squirrel moving placidly, in a squirrel’s idle fits and starts, across the grass.

  John Pfeifer was conscious enough to feel—and remember—the scalding hot shells that rained on his face as they ejected from the chamber of Steve Brooks’s M14. Pfeifer groped for his Beretta, but it had disappeared. From bad to worse, he thought.

  By then Chuck West had an idea of where Drega might be. He had glimpsed two muzzle flashes out of the corner of his eye, and while others laid suppression fire up the slope, he shifted a step or two to the left of where he had dropped behind the berm—he didn’t want to pop up in the same place where Drega might have seen him. Then he eased his shotgun over the berm and sighted toward that spot.

  He saw someone behind the thickest trunk in that part of the slope, a tree with sight lines to the whole breadth of the clearing. Whoever it was had on a blue denim shirt and was holding something black in his hands. West watched him slip just a bit and scramble for footing.

  Steve Brooks had seen him too. He remembered shooting woodchucks on his parents’ dairy farm in Colebrook. The woodchucks weren’t as smart as Chuck West—the trick for Brooks was to just wait a minute, and sooner or later the varmint would pop out again in the same spot it had before.

  During a lull in the shooting, Brooks heard West yelling up the slope for Drega to surrender, that he was surrounded. Something came back in reply. “And at that time, I remembered some of the words Drega said,” Brooks recounted later during his debriefing. “I mean, some of them were understandable, but I don’t know now—I can’t remember what he did say. And I do remember that, seeing Drega, I raised my rifle.”

  The gunman had stepped out from behind the hemlock again, in that same place, the AR-15 trained in their direction. “It appeared to me Drega was yelling something to us, but I was unable to distinguish what he was saying,” West would write in his report. “It was evident that he was not going to surrender. With the totality of the circumstances, I felt I was justified in using deadly force.”

  Brooks aimed at the blue shirt above the ballistics vest and shot four times in quick succession. West drew a bead on the gunman’s center mass and fired one slug. The two men dropped at once behind the berm, and then Brooks had second thoughts. Someone had just shouted from the woods above for them to watch what the hell they were doing, and Brooks remembered seeing a trooper’s Stetson on the guy he had fired at. West was sure they had the right man, but Brooks remembers him yelling up the slope, “Who’s wearing a blue shirt?”

  No one answered. The seconds ticked off, and West looked down at Pfeifer suffering at his feet. He grabbed him by the vest and said, “Let’s get this guy out of here.”

  Sam Sprague, who had emptied his .40 Beretta, was still incredulous that he was alive and unhurt. Could he be that lucky again? He thought about leaving home that morning, and his casual, complacent farewell to his wife and two little boys. That was unforgivable. With winter in his blood, he went again to help with Pfeifer, as did Brooks.

  Marty Hewson was in back of the Jeep, covering the men at the tailgate. This time Pfeifer was lifted and thrown head first, like a golf bag, into the back. Amos Colby, whose hair had been blown back by the second bullet Drega fired, climbed once more into the driver’s seat. Sprague snatched his deer rifle off the Jeep’s fender and dove into the creek.

  The Jeep lurched into drive, and Robinson leaped from the berm with Major, Albright following. Rob Haase had his hand on the tailgate, shielding Pfeifer with his body as he ran limping behind it. Hewson fired several times in the direction of that hemlock as they retreated. Colby went slowly enough for everybody to keep up, but fast enough to get the hell out of there. The road was rough, humped with old blowdowns, and Pfeifer groaned with every jolt.

  West and Brooks remained a moment, ready to fire if they had to. Once the Jeep cleared the bend, they saw men moving through the trees at other places on the slope. Covering each other, they gathered discarded weapons—Caulder’s M16, Pfeifer’s M16 and Beretta—and headed back to the bridge.

  Cops had sifted into the woods from all directions, once Drega opened fire. Among the first was Chuck Jellison, who led six other men into the trees across the road from the CP. He asked Paul Fink to take the point position as they advanced.

  “Our small group got on line fast and moved slowly forward, looking from side to side, trying to see movement—anything to alert us to the bad guy’s position,” Fink would write in his report. “Behind me I could hear Lt. Jellison, in low tones, telling everyone to take it easy and spread out on line while at the same trying to get a handle on the situation. He was just great, and if he told me to walk across the water, I wouldn’t have hesitated a millisecond.”

  Border Patrol agent Dave Perry had reported to the CP after abandoning the search at Maidstone and was a member of that group. Perry had heard two officers were down, but no one could say which ones. Perry knew John Pfeifer was in the middle of it, though. Perry remembered sending Pfeifer to the presumed safety of the CP because he himself had
wanted a chance to confront Drega and avenge Scottie. It’s funny—no, it’s terrible, he thought—how things work out sometimes.

  Steve Hersom—the New Hampshire trooper who had met Chuck West at the Dennis Pond turnoff and then had thrown a scare into Paul Fink—had gone in earlier with a Vermont trooper, John Sinclair. They had entered from that same general direction, approaching the cruiser from the opposite side of Black Creek. They got there in time for the second exchange. Hersom had also picked out the guy in the blue denim shirt and had drawn a bead on him with his shotgun, but then he heard somebody yell that there were cops on the ridge, and he wasn’t certain enough to shoot.

  When the Jeep took off, Hersom jumped the creek and ran briefly behind it alongside Rob Haase. Hersom looked down at Haase’s bloody boot and said, “Man, you gotta take care of that.” Then he and Sinclair turned back to the clearing—either to reengage with Drega or to finally secure the cruiser. They took a step beyond the bend and heard Kevin Jordan whistle from near the top of the ridge. Then they saw him waving.

  “Approximately twenty feet further, the bank on the east side of the road curved to the east,” Sinclair would write in his report. “As the other side of the bank became visible, Trooper Hersom said, ‘Man down on the bank.’ There was a trooper’s Stetson lying on the bottom of the bank. The subject appeared to have rolled down the bank and lodged against a tree approximately 15–20 feet from the bottom of the bank. The subject was lying on his back with his head facing in a northerly direction. I observed a black automatic-type weapon on the bank approximately 5–10 feet above the subject.”

  Hersom was afraid this was a friendly-fire victim. With Sinclair and Jordan covering him from opposite directions, he climbed the berm and went up the slope saying, “It’s okay—you’re going to be all right.”

  Then Hersom saw that this guy was not going to be all right. Sam Sprague was still in the creek bed with his deer rifle. “Steve gets up there and says, ‘He’s 10-2. He’s 10-2,’” Sprague said during his debriefing. “I was just kneeling at the side of the road with my rifle pointed at the woods. Steve, I saw him reaching, and he grabbed some ID out of the guy. He was trying to read something, and he said, ‘Carl Drega.’ He said, ‘That’s him. That’s the guy.’ So Steve starts yelling, ‘We got him. He’s dead. He’s dead!’”