Incident at Big Sky

by Johnny France

Everybody had a rifle and a sidearm, and they all carried radios. Johnny looked around at the men. They were dressed in a motley blend of uniforms and blue jeans. But each had his badge prominently displayed.

  “An open point’s probably the best assault formation,” Johnny suggested.

  The others nodded somberly. No one seemed in the mood for small talk.

  “Let’s keep an even interval,” Onstad said, chambering a round in his rifle. “We draw fire, the point man can drop back and we can give him cover fire.”

  Again, the men nodded their grim acceptance.

  Johnny checked his watch. Only 10:50. It seemed like he’d been up here flying around for hours. He licked his lips and rubbed the sweat from his forehead. He’d left his canteen in the chopper. Well, that could wait. There was no sense stalling.

  Bob Pearson took the point. Nobody asked him; he just slid down the hot boulders and took up the central position. The others filled the flanks, then stepped as quietly as they could into the hot shade of the forest.

  Johnny was on Pearson’s left, about twenty yards behind him. As Schwalbe had reported, the country was thick, and visibility was terrible. There was a combination of healthy mature trees and thousands of thinner beetle-kill and gray blow-down deadfall. But Pearson had the streambed, and they were able to move with a steady pace, relatively quietly. Whenever someone stumbled or snagged the cracking branch of a deadfall, they all paused and waited until the chickadees and jays started calling again.

  The flies were bad. Mosquitoes whined about their sweating faces. But nobody lowered his rifle to wave off the bugs.

  Johnny’s mouth was terribly dry. His ankle throbbed, but he gazed into the cross-hatched gray jumble of dead timber with a concentration he’d only been able to achieve at times of extreme danger. He was acutely aware that they were nearing the camp clearing. At this actual moment, one of the killers might have Johnny’s face in the crosshairs of his telescopic sight.

  He shook his head, both to flick off a biting fly and to banish the fear that was rapidly rising toward panic. This was what being a lawman always came down to. The gold badge, the uniform, the wide gray Stetson, the pearl-handled .45 … that was all well and good. But none of those fancy decorations mattered at a time like this.

  What mattered was what a man did, not what he said, not the way he looked. In less than five minutes, they would be on the crime scene. Ten minutes from now, he could be dead. Or the killers could be dead. Or they might find the girl already dead. Or they might find the killers barricaded behind some logs, holding a cocked pistol to the girl’s head.

  He dreaded a hostage situation with the wounded girl as the pawn almost as much as he did facing a hidden sniper. But he knew such a situation was possible, even probable, if there was an organized group of crazy Nazis out there in the trees, not just some old fanatic and his mixed-up son.

  The timber opened up some here, and he could see ahead. Off to the left, the ground rose to meet a ridge, and there seemed to be a similar hillside climbing to the right. Beneath Johnny’s feet, the ground was soft with springy bear grass, almost level. They were nearing the end of the draw, and he guessed the camp clearing would be right beyond the next stand of dense timber.

  Johnny caught Bob Pearson’s eye through the brush and raised his hand to signal a halt. If someone had to be on the point here, it was Johnny’s job. This was Madison County, and he was sheriff. Scanning the ground ahead for broken branches, he took several deep breaths, licked his lips, then moved forward. But the open “V” formation had strung out to a line-abreast now; it was hard to say who had the actual point.

  When he had assumed the lead, the others followed, their weapons ready.

  Somewhere to Johnny’s right, a radio broke squelch with a loud squawk. A robber jay screamed, flapping brightly above.

  “Help me, please …” The girl’s voice was weak, close ahead in the brush.

  Johnny punched off the rifle’s safety and plunged ahead. Men were running to his left and right. The dead branches crashed beneath his boots. He was across the soggy moss of the streambed. Sunlight cut through the green ahead.

  “Help … me.” Her voice was even weaker.

  Suddenly, there was the clearing, bright with sunlit bear grass, the pleasant little “park” that Jim Schwalbe had described.

  The line of armed officers burst through the trees and across the exposed clearing to take cover.

  As he dashed through the sudden crowd of deputies, Johnny tried to scan the surrounding trees for the old man and the boy. Nothing, just gray deadfall and bright green foliage.

  “Here,” the girl pleaded. “I’m over here.”

  Onstad’s deputies were crouched behind trees, their rifles angled out to cover the perimeter. They all waited, maybe a minute, maybe less. No sound. If the killers were using the girl as sniper bait, there was only one way to find out for sure.

  Sheriff Onstad and Sheriff France stood up full height and dashed together across the clearing to the jumbled shape on the ground.

  Johnny slung his rifle and bent to pull back the bloody fold of the sleeping bag. Kari’s face was horribly pale, her lips tight and blue. She could be dying, right here and now. But there was a solid, unflickering strength in her eyes.

  “You’re here,” she whispered to them.

  Her blue T-shirt was stuck to her chest, sodden with dark ocher bloodstains. She lay on her left side, curled like a sleeping child. With the bag peeled back, Johnny could see the spreading bloodstains low on her back, above her right kidney.

  The two sheriff’s exchanged glances. The bullet had gone right through her, and there was bound to be serious internal hemorrhage. But there was little they could do here to help her. And, every minute they waited for a hidden sniper to make his move threatened her chances of survival.

  Johnny rose and spoke clearly into his radio. “Twenty-five-eight, 25–1 … Jay, get that chopper in here with the stretcher. We found her and she’s alive.”

  “Ten-four,” Jay Cosgrove replied. “He’s on his way.”

  Johnny knelt again and hovered above her, helpless, waiting like John Onstad across from him. Working delicately with his big fingers, Onstad plucked a splintered twig from Kari’s tangled red hair.

  “The helicopter’s coming, honey,” Johnny said, stroking her forehead. “We’re going to have you out of here real soon.”

  Kari gripped his hand. Her fingers were like cold bone. “I’m all right,” she said, then lost her breath and wheezed, a dry, crackling gurgle.

  Once more, the two men exchanged a glance. Lung shot. They would have to be very careful when they moved her.

  “They shot that man.” Kari’s face was smeared with tears, dried blood, and crusted sweat. She nodded to her right. “His name is Al … they shot …”

  “It’s okay, Kari,” Onstad said gently. “Everything’s okay. We’ll take care of him.”

  Johnny unslung his rifle and strode across the clearing to a thick dead lodgepole with a naked gray snag rising from its roots like a giant’s longbow.

  Al Goldstein lay on his back, his arms extended, his hands open, palm up. His eyes were half closed, clouded in death. His face was swollen and black. His lower jaw jutted at a terrible angle, broken by the impact of the rifle bullet. There was a lot of dark blood. And insects.

  Johnny muttered a soft curse.

  At the open neck of the checked lumberjack shirt, the dead man’s flesh looked young, tanned and strong. But he was not asleep. He was dead forever. Murdered.

  Johnny turned and studied the clearing, noting for the first time the three stones of a campfire ring and the logs lying near it. That was where they’d chained her. He scanned the surrounding trees, searching for the probable angle of the rifle shot. After a moment, he looked back at Al’s shattered face. When the old man fired, Al’s head must have filled his entire scope.

  Time passed. Finally, Johnny looked away from Al Goldstein. A square automatic pistol lay in t
he columbine stalks, about two feet from Al’s right hand. A black walkie-talkie lay a similar distance from his right hand.

  Johnny studied the scene a moment, then returned to Onstad. “Dead,” he said softly. “About four hours maybe. Doesn’t look like anybody’s touched him.”

  Onstad was about to answer when they heard the clatter of the helicopter.

  Johnny bundled the soft folds of the sleeping bag around Kari’s throat. “Sweetheart,” he said. “We’re going to have to hurt you when we lift you into that stretcher.”

  Kari nodded, her eyes hot in her chill, waxy face. “Don’t worry. I’m all right.”

  Johnny bit his lip. He could see the pain she was in. This kid had incredible guts and discipline. There were a lot of questions he should be asking her right now. How many men were there? Had they raped her? But Kari could not speak without pain, and probably without worsening the wound. He had to limit his questions to the vital minimum.

  “Can you tell us how long they’ve been gone?” Johnny asked. “Did you see which way they went?”

  “They’ve been gone a long time,” Kari said. She tried to breathe, but again her voice became a sickly wheeze.

  “That’s okay, Kari,” Johnny said. “We’ll talk to you later, in the hospital.”

  Kari shook her head, her eyes shining with angry determination. “They packed their stuff … right after they shot Al—” Her head inclined to the left. “That’s the way they went out of camp … down the stream there.…”

  The chopper’s rotors clattered above them. Bob Pearson was standing in the most open spot, his rifle held above his head to signal Francos. Now the rotor-wash blasted up twigs and dead needles. The metal-mesh casualty litter descended into the clearing, spinning slowly on its steel cable.

  “Sorry, Kari,” Johnny shouted above the engine whine. “This is gonna hurt.”

  He took her shoulders and John Onstad lifted the foot of the sleeping bag. In one long motion they had her off the ground and in the litter. Kari stared into the sky, her eyes filled with the pain. But she did not cry out.

  Working quickly, Onstad and Johnny buckled the nylon straps to secure her in the basket. Johnny squinted up into the sunlit rotorblast, trying to judge the clearance among the branches. This clearing was badly overhung by trees. It was going to be dicey getting her out. Almost as an afterthought, he reached down to cover her face with the soft edge of the sleeping bag.

  Kari gripped his hand with her chill fingers. “Thank you,” she said, her voice suddenly strong.

  The litter spun as it rose, lazy, glinting in the sun. Only ten feet short of the treetops, the foot end of the stretcher twisted into the dead limbs of the big lodge-pole that stood above Al Goldstein’s body. With a clatter and a shower of twigs, the litter jammed hard against the branch. Then Francos applied more throttle, and the litter slammed along the dead limbs, to strike the trunk. For an awful moment, it looked as if Kari would be crushed between the branch and the tree trunk, then the branch snapped. The litter shot up and the dead limb crashed to the forest floor, barely missing the startled deputies.

  The slapping rotors faded. No birds sang around them. The five men stood in the clearing, their ears echoing with the engine blast.

  After a while, the deputies who had been guarding the perimeter came forward to stare with silent anger at the body lying in the wild flowers beneath the thick lodgepole.

  8

  Madison Range

  July 16–17, 1984

  That afternoon Johnny took over Jay and Terry Cosgrove’s log house as the command post for the manhunt. The house stood alone on a grassy hillside above the gravel road to the trailhead, the last building in Big Sky’s upper village. Like many of the handsome homes in the resort community, the Cosgroves’ house was custom-made, built on a large scale with picture window views of Lone Mountain from the living room and den. A wooden staircase cut down the steep slope, connecting the front porch and the double garage below.

  This staircase, Johnny soon realized, would be an effective barrier to the news media, if the manhunt dragged on very long. Seated at Jay’s dining room table, a jumble of radio messages held down by coffee cups before him, he could see the reporters milling around the driveway. Television remote-broadcast vans had replaced the initial station wagons. Already, there had been one dispute about a late arrival’s microwave dish blocking a competitor’s antenna.

  The reporters had assembled below for a five o’clock briefing. He was trying with limited success to keep them away from the house, sealed off by the preliminary roadblock he’d established below. But he was learning that they had ingenious, sometimes insidious ways of sneaking up here.

  The layout of the property, however, offered natural lines of defense. If they made it past the roadblock, they’d have to get by the deputy at the end of the driveway, then past the men on the porch. These barriers also shielded Johnny and John Onstad from most of the distractions and noisy bustle endemic to any large police operation. Here in the dining room, the clattering choppers and squawking radios were less of an insistent presence, constantly reminding them that hours were slipping by with the suspects still at large. They’d both been in law enforcement long enough to realize that the chance of catching criminals diminished proportionally to the length of time that passed from the commission of the crime.

  Johnny was tired. It was almost five, but the draft of the official announcement was only partially written. Every time he tried to complete it, one of the deputies would barge in with some authentically urgent message or request.

  Beside him, Terry Cosgrove manned the police radio, acting as a relay when needed for the deputies deployed up on the trailheads and at the roadblocks in the valleys. John Onstad worked in the living room, hunched over a big map of the Gallatin National Forest, as he briefed his key deputies on the placement of roadblocks and vehicle patrols.

  Johnny rose, then reluctantly sat back to his task. He had to go before the cameras and microphones with very little information, but if he didn’t give the media something to chew on, they’d just spread whatever rumors they could pick up.

  The phone rang, and he waited while Terry took the message; maybe it was Deaconess Hospital in Bozeman, and there’d be some news on Kari’s condition. She’d been out of surgery for over an hour and in the Intensive Care Unit. John Onstad’s detectives had been able to interview her briefly and had called back with a fairly detailed description of the two suspects. But Kari had been too weak for them to press her hard for a full report.

  The call was just another press query, this one from Salt Lake. He was always amazed at the ability of distant reporters to track down an obscure phone number only hours after a major crime.

  Before continuing with his press release, Johnny leafed through another yellow pad to make doubly sure he had covered all his bases, that he had indeed deployed his men effectively and that he’d done everything possible to assure the security of the local people. The roads were sealed by armed reserve deputies at all the trailheads and public campgrounds. John Onstad’s people had spread the warning to stay out of the mountains among the residents of the Gallatin Canyon. Johnny, himself, had spoken personally to Bob Morton of the Forest Service about alerting backpackers in the Spanish Peaks trails.

  Jay Cosgrove, Brad Brisban, and Merlin Ehlers had been up in the Moonlight Creek area since one, working that entire draw with Bear, Brad’s German shepherd, and Merlin’s Doberman, Gypsie Lady; in fact, they’d called in a few minutes earlier to announce finding a smeared Vibran bootsole print in the mud. The crime scene itself was secured. Johnny had taken his pictures and walked off the gunshot measurements before strapping Al Goldstein’s body into the same metal litter that had lifted Kari out an hour earlier.

  There really was not much more he could do right now. In the morning, of course, all his and Onstad’s reserves would be in place, and they could hit that country with more dog patrols, aerial searches, and ground sweeps. Now, he could on
ly wait, hoping that they had, indeed, covered all the exit points.

  But the plain truth was that the two killers had gotten a four-hour lead on them that morning, and four hours gave them plenty of time to find a hiding place deep in the woods, all to hell and gone up those drainages. He did have the area sealed, but he certainly did not have any miraculous plan on how to find those two up in that wild country.

  But the press would surely ask him about his immediate plans, that and the identity of the two criminals, of course. Scowling at the meager lines on the pad, he picked up his ballpoint once more and read:

  23-year-old Carrie Swenson …

  He crossed out “Carrie” and wrote “Kari.”

  23-year-old Kari Swenson, a world-class Biathlete, was abducted on July 15 while on her daily run. On July 16, two persons from the Big Sky Resort Area involved with a search for Kari, came upon a camp where two men dressed in military-type fatigues were holding Kari captive.

  At that time, the individuals in fatigue-type dress …

  Johnny bent over the pad. He had to hurry, but words never came easily, much less now. He had not eaten anything since his toast in Bettie’s Cafe, almost twelve hours earlier. He wiped the exhaustion from his eyes and tried to focus on the yellow pad.

  The meeting that morning in the cafe seemed like something that had happened months earlier. As he tried to summarize the terrible events of this long day, the image of Al Goldstein’s grotesquely swollen face rose in his mind.

  “The deceased, Alan Goldstein,” Johnny read, trying to keep his voice loud enough for the microphones that they jabbed at him, “was transported to facilities in Bozeman, also by helicopter.”

  “What about suspects?” a reporter yelled from the crowd jammed up against the porch railing.

  Johnny saw that the young man was not local; then, with a tired sag in his chest, he realized that several of the cameramen facing him were network crews. They must have chartered planes to get there so fast. He cleared his dry throat. The words he was speaking would be on the CBS Morning News and Dan Rather tomorrow night. One network minicam focused on his shoulder holster and the butt of his big .44 magnum “make-my-day” gun. Slavishly, several other cameramen took the network guy’s lead.