I promised Danny strawberry shortcake, he told Roy, and I always try to give the boy what I promise him.
That night, Danny Nichols stayed at the Kitsons’ house. After Roy’s wife had gotten the boy a bath and a clean set of clothes, Roy tried to cheer him up. But the little kid with fine blond hair and surprising brown eyes sat morosely by the window, staring up at the dark mountains, like a cub separated from its mother. He had a pair of ex-Navy binoculars that his father had let him keep when the sheriff had taken custody.
“What do you look for with the binoculars, Danny?” the sheriff’s wife had asked. “Grizzlies? Elk?”
The boy turned his dark, serious gaze on the sheriff. “With the what?”
“With the binoculars, Danny,” Sheriff Kitson tapped the glasses. “That’s what they call these here things.”
“No,” the boy said, angry and confused. “They’re called ‘people watchers.’”
Johnny drove the patrol car on the dark curves of Route 191, north along the Gallatin Canyon toward Bozeman. In a plastic trash bag beside him he had a collection of smaller Ziplocs containing the evidence that he’d recovered from the crime scene that morning. He hunched over the wheel, staring into the bright cone of the headlights, as the dark trees and rocky canyon wall flowed toward him out of the moonless night.
The Gallatin County crime lab would fingerprint Al Goldstein’s pistol and the walkie-talkie, then run tests on the packs and spent shell casings they’d found in the clearing.
Once that chore was completed, Johnny was scheduled to meet a Forest Service detective named John Marsh at the airport in Belgrade. Johnny had reserved a Cessna 182 and a pilot named Larry Corbin to fly him over the Beehive Basin and Moonlight Creek area. Earlier that day, Bob Morton had suggested this tactic, but, at first, Johnny had almost rejected the idea. After what he’d been able to piece together about the Nicholses, however, he thought the dangerous flight in the middle of the night might actually be worth the risk.
John Marsh was going to lend him a piece of hi-tech hardware that would have surely pleased even John Onstad. The gadget was an infrared accumulator scope, an electronic viewer called a Probeye that could locate the “hot spots” of campfires from the air. The more Johnny thought of the plan, the more he liked it.
Don Nichols was definitely weird, but he just might not prove impossible to understand. Johnny was beginning to realize that Don had spent so much time in those mountains that he felt invulnerable up there. That would account for their camping so close to Ulerys Lakes, after they’d grabbed Kari, and his sense of invulnerability would also explain why they’d chanced building a fire in that three-stone fire ring in their camp.
Well, tonight Don and Dan Nichols were again camping somewhere up in those draws or on the ridges. They had to eat, so they probably had a fire going. According to Bob Morton, the Probeye scope could pick up the residual heat of a campfire, even hours after it had burned down to ashes.
And, if he did find a hot spot, Johnny could be reasonably sure that it was the Nicholses’ campfire; all the legitimate backpackers had been accounted for and warned off.
Johnny drove like a robot, letting the car find its own comfortable speed around the curves. He was beyond normal fatigue now, in a kind of exhaustion where there was little danger of falling asleep at the wheel. His body was functioning autonomously, and his mind was pulsing with the collective images of the strangest day of his life.
Al Goldstein’s face was there, as were Kari’s pain-bright eyes and the glare of the camera lights.
But the picture of the morose little boy, clutching his binoculars, rose now to eclipse the other images.
“People watchers.”
What kind of a man, he thought, would convince his eight-year-old son, whom he supposedly loved so intensely, that a pair of binoculars were called “people watchers”? That surely wasn’t normal, or healthy, or whatever you wanted to call it. Don was sick, he now realized, badly twisted by the events of a troubled life.
But Johnny could not muster any pity for Don Nichols. Whenever he tried, Al Goldstein’s swollen features blossomed behind his eyes. Don Nichols had progressed from watching people through navy surplus glasses to sighting on a man’s face with a telescopic sight and firing a bullet through his living flesh and bone.
The black canyon walls slid by. Off to the right, Johnny sensed the dark flow of the Gallatin River. In an hour, he would be up in that blacked-out plane, using a people watcher of his own.
9
Madison Range
July 17, 1984
They were flying at 12,000 feet, on a compass heading of 335, northwest from the lights of Big Sky, toward the unbroken darkness of the Spanish Peaks Wilderness.
Johnny was in the rear portside passenger seat, the chill bulk of the Probeye against his chest. For the past five minutes, Larry Corbin had been climbing, a tight spiral above the lights of Huntley Lodge. Now they were about to make their first pass above Beehive Basin.
Johnny unlatched the Plexiglas window and the cold propwash blasted into the cabin of the Cessna.
“Okay, Larry,” he said into his headset. “I’ve got the window locked open, and I’m gonna stick this thing out now. Keep her straight and level.”
The Probeye was bulky, about half the length of a wastebasket, with thick handles on each side and a nylon safety strap that John Marsh had made Johnny promise to keep looped around his neck at all times.
“If I drop her out the plane window,” Johnny had joked at the airport, “this old strap’ll pull me out with it.”
“If you drop her,” Marsh had answered in the same vein, “you’d better go after her, Johnny. I hate to tell you what that son-of-a-gun costs.”
On the flight south from Belgrade Airport, Johnny had followed Marsh’s checklist of operating instructions. The Probeye worked on some obscure electronics principle that involved circulating supercold liquid nitrogen across an “accumulator lens.” When the circular lens was pointed toward infrared heat sources, the images of these “hot spots” appeared in an eyepiece that reminded Johnny of a small television screen.
Once the battery pack had been turned on to start the cold gas circulating and he’d adjusted the brightness of the viewing screen, there was nothing else for him to do. You didn’t focus the Probeye; you simply pointed at a heat source and waited. Supposedly, this thing had worked well in Vietnam, up on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the Air Force could spot the heat of enemy truck engines and cooking fires right through the triple canopy rain forest.
There was, however, one special requirement of the infrared scope that had a direct impact on their flight tonight. The Probeye was only accurate within a thousand feet of low-intensity heat sources like campfires. Naturally, that meant that they must fly a course only 1,000 feet “AGL,” Above Ground Level. But the Beehive Basin was exactly that, a basin, a deep glacial depression among steeply rising peaks. The FAA chart they were using stated in bold red letters:
13,000 MSL
That meant, of course, that flying below a minimum flight level of 13,000 feet was not safe, especially at night, especially on a black, moonless night like this one. But Marsh had been very clear about the thousand-foot maximum range of the Probeye, and also about the instrument operating best in the darkest, coldest hours after midnight.
So Johnny and his pilot were obliged to fly a very careful course, northwest from the bright landmarks of the Big Sky lights, five minutes at seventy knots airspeed on a True compass heading of 335. Then they would turn back on the reciprocal course of 155, throttle back for a quiet approach, and glide down to an altitude of 9,000 feet. This would give them their thousand-foot range above the black slopes and draws of the Moonlight Creek and Beehive Basin area where the Nicholses might be hidden.
And, in theory, this route would also keep them well clear of the dark stone summits of the Beehive, Blaze Mountain, and Gallatin Peak that formed an invisible rampart, directly ahead. To assist in their na
vigation, Johnny had positioned Jay Cosgrove in his Blazer down on the Jack Creek logging road. Jay’s bright headlights gave them a triangulation point due west of Big Sky. The only problem with this system was that the north corner of the triangle, the part that could kill them in a fractured second, was hidden in the moonless dark.
Johnny thrust the bulky instrument into the cold slipstream and bent over the eyepiece. The Probeye weighed over fifteen pounds, but there was no easy way to brace it on the vibrating edge of the window. In order to get the proper angle for the accumulator lens, he had to support the full weight before his face, as if the device were a bloated Polaroid.
As Johnny gripped the handles and squinted into the eyepiece, he realized that he should have worn gloves. The outside air temperature at this altitude was around forty; the seventy-knot wind-chill factor was going to make holding this damned thing very long an unpleasant job.
In the eyepiece, the world was a pale green, watery shimmer. There were no solid lines or dimensions, just wavering, chalky ripples. Before the flight, they’d set the sensitivity controls to eliminate false readings; in principle, only valid heat sources would appear, and he couldn’t reasonably expect to see anything—if see was the right term—before they dropped down to their thousand-foot AGL search altitude.
“About a minute to the turning point,” Larry Corbin called.
Johnny hunched uncomfortably in the cold prop wash, squinting into the electronic ghostscape.
Then, as Corbin banked south, a dazzling, lime green blossom burst at the scope’s right corner.
“Hold it,” Johnny shouted. “I’ve got it … it’s right there.”
But Corbin could not “hold” his turn. Instead, he did the right thing by adding left rudder and skidding around in a tight three-sixty.
As the plane flattened out of the bank, the bright green pulse faded in the scope, then disappeared. Johnny swore softly. If the Nicholses were down there, it looked as though they had heard the plane and doused their campfire.
“Can you put her back in a bank over the spot we just passed?” Johnny realized that he was almost pleading. He was tired and groggy, but he certainly wanted to catch those two murderers down there.
“Okay,” Corbin called, “I’ll try.”
Again the plane banked sharply left. Johnny scanned aft in the dark wind, then forward.
Bingo! The green neon flower blossomed, even brighter this time, once again forward of his window.
As he pressed his face to the soft rubber eyepiece, he felt the plane banking through its turn. The glowing hot spot in the scope remained steady. But the plane was definitely turning, so the image should also move. Gripping the handles to steady the Probeye, Johnny raised his face to see where the lens was pointing.
He sagged, embarrassed and angry at his mistake. The lens was aimed directly at the bulbous metal cowling of the port landing gear. Engine exhaust blasted back to heat the wheel cover, causing the cowling to glow brightly in the infrared spectrum.
His campfire hot spot was four feet from the window.
“False reading,” Johnny muttered. “Let’s head south again.”
On the fourth or fifth pass above the Beehive Basin at a thousand feet AGL, Johnny got a sudden green flare in the scope. The image was bright and ragged; it lasted for maybe two seconds. But he was sure he’d gotten a good heat-source image because the afterglow took several seconds to fade from the screen.
“Swing her back around, Larry,” he yelled, forgetting he had a headset on.
But there was no repeat. They orbited the dark Beehive Basin for ten minutes while Johnny fiddled with the sensitivity controls of the Probeye and angled the scope back and forth in the chill wind.
Nothing, not even a glimmer.
“Well,” Johnny conceded, “must have been a glitch or something. Let’s work those draws to the south there, closer to the crime scene.”
As they droned south toward the headlights of Jay’s Blazer, Johnny forced his mind free of that fading green afterglow. No sense thinking about that. Must have just been some kind of a false image, something wrong with the electronics.
The blacked-out plane flew south in the darkness, toward the shallow draws above Moonlight Creek.
A thousand feet below, under the shelter of an overhanging pine, Don Nichols and his son stamped down the dirt and gravel they had heaped on their campfire when they first heard the low-flying airplane. It was better to risk smoke by lighting a campfire in the morning, than to have that plane spot the coals they had carefully banked before bedding down.
Traveling at night was hard, but they had no choice. And it would probably be at least a week of night marches before they got back to the Beartrap, where they belonged.
Johnny’s arms were cramping badly, but every time he tried to rest the weight of the Probeye on the windowframe, the engine vibrations made the viewing screen dance with the neon worms of false images. He had no choice but to accept the pain stoically through his exhaustion, to try to separate his mind from his aching body.
They were flying low circles now above the black void of the Jack Creek drainage. From this altitude, the summits to the north were faintly outlined against the cold bands of the Milky Way. But this visibility offered a false sense of security. Down here below 9,000, they might be pushed by invisible winds to drift into the surrounding ridge. He guessed they’d been flying for over two hours, and he knew they’d have to pack it in pretty soon. Then suddenly the screen lit up.
“Steady,” he called to Corbin. “Now, bank left … hard.”
The heat source swelled to fill the center of the scope, a wide, pulsing green flower.
“Mark your position, Larry,” he said into his head set. “We’ve got a winner.”
Corbin throttled back even more, and the plane hung in a steep, slow bank, less than a thousand feet above the headwaters of Moonlight Creek.
Johnny’s face was out in the slipstream now. The frigid wind revived him, and he blinked hard, forcing his eyes to focus. As the plane spun in its tight orbit, the ghostly green hot spot seemed to breathe, to flare and puff like a bed of coals remaining from a late night campfire.
“You getting our position, Larry?”
“Pretty good,” the pilot answered. “We’ve got Jeffers in the valley bearing … 285 True, and the Big Sky ski lifts at.…”
Larry Corbin noted the bearings to known landmarks, using his accurate gyro compass.
A few minutes later, he told Johnny that he was confident of their present position, “… give or take a couple hundred yards.”
Johnny was still halfway out the window in the buffeting slipstream, gazing at the pale lime hot spot in his scope. There could be no doubt about this one. Without question, there was something hot down there, and he knew it had to be a campfire.
“Climb out of here slow, Larry,” he called. “I don’t want them to hear us.”
Flying back to Belgrade, Johnny stowed the Probeye in the backseat and climbed forward over the seat top to sit beside Larry Corbin.
They were back at a safe 14,000 now, well clear of any nearby summits. Around the small plane, the night was silky black. The lights of Three Forks and Bozeman spread before them, marking the north end of the Gallatin Canyon. Johnny was excited about the mission’s success; they had a positive fix on a large heat source, less than a mile due north of the crime scene itself.
He rubbed his numb hands against his numb cheeks and thought for a moment about coffee.
“Kinda cold out there,” he muttered.
Larry Corbin chuckled in the faint glow of the instrument panel. “People at the airport say you kind of like hanging out of airplanes, Sheriff.”
Years ago, in the sixties, when Johnny had just broken into flying, he’d been involved in a bizarre mishap that had ended up landing him with a reputation as a daredevil.
He’d been flying with Tom Westall, his original flight instructor, in a brand new Cessna 210. Tom had a contract to fly
as a “bird dog” guide plane for a flight of Forest Service spray aircraft, heavy old World War II torpedo bombers assigned to dump insecticide along the western slopes of the Madison Range.
They had a young government forester with them to do the actual spotting, and Johnny had just come along for fun, and for the chance to take the controls of Tom’s fancy new airplane.
But there was not much fun that afternoon. Early in the mission, one of the spray plane pilots called them on the VHF to announce that their right main landing gear had failed to retract properly, and that the wheel strut was out there “flappin’ around like laundry.”
This Cessna was one of the first to be equipped with retractable landing gear, and Tom muttered about damned hydraulic systems always causing problems, as he went through the emergency recycle procedures. They tried just about every trick Tom knew—and that was a considerable bag of tricks—but the gear remained where it was stuck out at an awkward angle, like a crippled limb.
Having exhausted known remedies, Tom flew up to Belgrade Airport near Bozeman and threw the light plane through a series of high-G aerobatics that seemed almost to jar the engine off its mounts.
The stuck gear remained stuck.
By this time, the FAA was in on the act, and Tom was fielding a series of exasperating questions from “groundpounders” down in the tower. Finally Tom demanded that somebody contact the Cessna factory in Wichita to see what they suggested.
“Ask ’em if I can belly land this plane all right,” Tom added in disgust.
The word that came back from the Cessna people was not promising. This model had a tendency to flip over on belly landings; and there was a bad record of fatalities for such mishaps.
Johnny had been watching the way the wheel strut behaved out in the slipstream. He’d eyeballed the angle between the wheel and the wing strut. Ah, maybe, Tom, he’d offered, I can crawl out there and kind of kick it down.
Kick it down?
Yeah, well.…
Incident at Big Sky Page 10