Ten thousand feet above Belgrade Airport, Johnny France had forced open the door of the Cessna and held it there until the forester could crawl into the front seat to jam his feet against the door panel.
Johnny then linked together several seat belts to make a Rube Goldberg safety harness, crouched at the edge of the open door and finally lunged into space, throwing his body completely clear of the cockpit.
He caught the wing strut all right, but, hanging there in the blue sunlight, his body blown back parallel to the line of flight, he was unable to loop his ankles over the jammed wheel strut.
Time did strange things while he hung outside the plane. When he moved, time seemed to stop. When he rested, hours seemed to roar by.
At some point, he managed to lock his ankles around the wheel. Now he had to drag the bulky metal joint into place. But he was pulling against an eighty-knot wall of wind, and he was tired.
At that point, Johnny had realized with a rush of fear that the only way he could get back into the cockpit was to pull the wheel down, so he could use it as a step.
After a long, exhausting time, the wheel strut began to move. Slowly it turned and locked into place. He twisted back through the half-open cockpit door with his last reserves of strength.
A local TV reporter had collared Johnny after they had safely landed. “What kind of guts,” he asked with breathless intensity, “did it take to climb out of that airplane without a parachute?”
Johnny was still battered by the prop wash and the strain of the ordeal. He thought a moment, then answered as honestly as he could. “A lot less guts than it takes to get killed in a belly landing.”
They were entering the pattern for Belgrade Airport now. On the instrument panel, the clock read ten past three in the morning. Johnny sat heavily in the passenger seat, watching the familiar strings of lights loop up toward him. He was worn down, dull with fatigue. Less than forty miles away, Don and Dan Nichols were sleeping beside a campfire, the source of that last steady, green hot spot on the Probeye. He had a reliable map position for that fire, right here on his Forest Service map. If he could make it back to Big Sky before dawn, he’d be able to assault their camp and capture the Nicholses before they moved on.
Johnny had quit smoking several years before, but now he longed for a cigarette in a way he never had experienced during the pangs of nicotine withdrawal. He had to make it back in time. He would hit that camp at dawn. Those guys had kidnapped a girl and killed a man in his county. And they weren’t just going to walk away free.
That afternoon, once they’d gotten the tree section from Ulerys Lake and had a positive I.D. on the Nicholses, Johnny had conferred with John Onstad and his detective deputy, Bob Campbell. Bob had proposed an interesting idea that Onstad clearly favored.
“Yellowstone County’s got a real good, FBI-trained SWAT team based in Billings,” Bob said. “We could get them over here tomorrow, and have them running grids up there by Wednesday.”
Johnny had listened patiently while Onstad and Campbell outlined the advantages of calling in the SWAT team from Billings. They’d been trained for just such a search and capture operation. They had modern, lightweight radios, and they were in damn good physical condition, good enough, Bob stressed, to really get up there and cover that high country.
Johnny had stated that he thought their suggestion was a “real fine idea.”
He’d called Gary Lincoln, the resident FBI agent in Butte, and Gary had forwarded Johnny’s official request to the proper authorities in the Yellowstone County police hierarchy.
The last Johnny had heard before leaving the command post to meet Corbin in Belgrade was that the SWAT team, equipped with jungle fatigues and automatic rifles, was due in Tuesday afternoon by chartered plane.
“Running grids” was all well and good. Tough young deputies in camouflaged fatigues, carrying mean-looking M-16s would please the media. Certainly, the citizens in Big Sky and down in Gallatin Canyon who felt most threatened by the two armed crazies up in the high country would feel good about the SWAT team. But Johnny was less optimistic than his colleagues from Bozeman.
First of all, a grid existed on a map, not in the real world of the timbered draws and ridges. Secondly, no matter how fit the SWAT team boys were, they’d never be able to cover all that country up there. And, third … maybe most importantly, the Nicholses, especially old Don, would no doubt treat the heavily armed Special Weapons and Tactics officers just as he’d treated poor Al Goldstein. Don Nichols would shoot when threatened. And he’d shoot accurately.
By accepting the SWAT team from Billings as a kind of stopgap, public relations effort, a politically acceptable move to appease the local citizens, Johnny knew that he might be condemning some dedicated young officer to death.
But, if he and Jay and maybe Brad Brisban or Merlin could get up those draws above the crime scene by dawn tomorrow, they could jump Don Nichols and his son before they had a chance to rub the sleep out of their eyes.
Unless.…
Larry Corbin banked the 182 over onto final. Outside the wide Plexiglas windscreen, strings of amber runway lights turned silently in the night.
Unless.…
The Nicholses just might be disciplined enough to set a predawn ambush, standing to at their camp, waiting for deputies to approach. Or worse, using their campfire as bait for an ambush.
If they were that smart and crazy, Johnny realized, tugging down on his seat belt for touchdown, then he’d be condemning himself or one of his deputies to death, not some kid from the Yellowstone SWAT team.
What kind of guts did it take to run a predawn assault on the Nicholses’ camp? A lot less, his mind answered, than sending some boy from Billings in to do it for me.
10
Madison Range
July 17–19, 1984
They parked Merlin’s Bronco on the dead-end spur of the Jack Creek Logging road. For ten minutes, Johnny and the two deputies waited for enough daylight to see the yellow plastic crime scene ribbons that marked the trail into the camp where Kari had been held and Al Goldstein murdered.
It was cold. Dew clung to weeds and wild flowers along the road’s edge. Their breath was steam.
“Okay … I guess,” Johnny muttered. He chambered a round in the mini-Ruger and slipped the rifle into the crook of his arm.
Beside him Merlin Ehlers and Brad Brisban went through the same “lock and load” ritual. As they used to say in all the old war movies, This is not a drill.
The military atmosphere was heightened by their semiautomatic weapons, their loose camouflage shirts, and by the clumsy weight of the armored flak jackets they wore.
They formed a very small army. Johnny had decided against trying to put together a large, well-coordinated assault on the “hot spot camp” above Moonlight Creek. After he’d gotten back to the command post from the airport, he had sat down in the big recliner in Jay’s living room with his maps and duty roster of deputies, to form his plan, then proceeded to slip into forty minutes of exhausted sleep.
When he woke, it was almost five. There was no time to form a large strike force, so he chose the two best men available, Merlin and Brad. He would have liked to include Jay Cosgrove, but Jay was already out on patrol. Besides, Brad and Merlin were good in the woods. They’d been over this same country the day before with their dogs, and they could picture the place marked as a hot spot on Johnny’s map.
Driving up from the command post, Johnny had told them his theory about the heat source: The Nicholses had no doubt decided to move at night, he said, and to hole up during the day. They’d left the crime scene yesterday morning at around eight and had probably laid a false trail back down toward Jack Creek, or up over the ridge to the Beehive Basin. Then, after dark, they’d ducked back south to make a hidden camp in the thick timber, only one draw above the south branch of Moonlight Creek.
He couldn’t be certain, but, “something pretty damn hot was pumping out infrared last night, right north of the c
rime scene.”
Brad and Merlin nodded with somber agreement. There sure as hell weren’t any stray backpackers up there, not so far off the trails, not after all the publicity and deputies guarding the trailheads. But there apparently had been a campfire, only six hundred yards due north of the Nicholses’ first camp.
When they reached the stream at the edge of the crime scene camp, Johnny signaled them to form an open V; once more, he chose the point. Before they entered the camp itself, each man released his weapon’s safety and double-checked to be sure his radio was turned off. Johnny did not want anyone’s radio suddenly breaking squelch to alert a hidden sniper. And he certainly did not want anyone fumbling with his rifle’s safety, if they came face-to-face with Don Nichols.
According to the ranchers and forest service people Johnny had spoken with the day before, Don Nichols was known as a man who didn’t believe in using a safety on a weapon. He also had a reputation as a “head shooter” of whatever game he hunted. Johnny could attest to that part of Don’s reputation.
Except for the yellow crime scene ribbons, the camp was just as they’d left it yesterday afternoon. There was dark matted blood in the pine needles where Kari had lain, and the shape of Al’s body could still be seen in the damp depression among the golden rod and columbines at the base of the big dead lodgepole with the bow snag. Just to be certain, Johnny bent to touch the charcoal in the three-stone fire ring. Cold, wet, and greasy. The Nicholses had not been crazy enough to return to this same camp.
They waited silently in the camp for a few minutes, each man trying to breathe as softly as he could. Then Johnny scanned the trees up the slope to the left of camp for maybe the thirtieth time. Then they moved out.
The gray geometry of deadfalls was even more confusing in this dawn halflight than it had been at midday Monday, and the cold dampness amplified the noise they made picking their way through the cross-hatch of dead branches.
Once more, Johnny realized that he had not carried a canteen. His mouth was so dry that his tongue was sticking to his teeth. But there was no way to overcome the discomfort. Few people, other than law enforcement officers, actual frontline cops, and combat soldiers realized that this kind of deal never got easy or routine. Television and war movies made it seem that way; that was probably the reason kids joined the Marines, or signed on as reserve deputies, for that matter. But, it just never got easy.
The guys who wrote police and war novels always stressed the rage of battle. No one ever said how lonely and frightening it was.
Johnny raised his open palm, and took cover behind a thick dead tree. His map was folded into a thin vertical wedge, the Jack Creek drainage. By his estimate, they’d come over five hundred yards from the crime scene, due north on Merlin’s compass heading.
He swallowed and leaned around the tree. The slope here was just about the right angle. To his left, he could see the same big area of young beetle-kill fir they’d passed on the way in the day before.
“Just ahead,” he whispered to Brad, then turned to pass the same message to Merlin.
Johnny moved away from the tree’s cover and negotiated a tangle of dead branches. Beneath his boots, the ground was spongy needles. A towering spruce rose among the lodgepoles, twenty feet ahead. Even in this gray light, he could see there was a clearing.
But this clearing held no secret camp. The rock pile rose above the jumble of thin deadfalls, like boulders among driftwood in the Beartrap. Merlin and Brad were out of the trees, crouching to scan the perimeter. Johnny stared at the huge slab of orange granite. This was the rock pile where the choppers had landed yesterday.
Then he sat down heavily on the granite slab, the fear and tension seeping away. Beneath his fingers, the surface of the granite was warm to his touch … not hot, certainly, but tangibly warmer than chill soil under the trees. This rock pile faced southwest. All afternoon, the granite absorbed the full heat of the sun. All night, the granite radiated that heat back to the sky. Infrared.
Johnny unfolded his map to its full width and took a rough eyeball bearing on the summits of Blaze Mountain and the Beehive. If he hadn’t been so tired, he would have laughed out loud.
He stared at the timbered ridge that ran northeast toward the Beehive Basin. There had definitely been that first, sudden green flare in his scope when they overflew that depression. His impression at the time was that the scope wasn’t working well … a glitch.
But now, as he stroked the residual sun heat in this stone, he understood that the Probeye had functioned perfectly.
The instrument had, indeed, picked up a heat source in that draw beyond the main ridge. Someone who didn’t know the country that well might have said the first hot spot had simply been another rock pile, but the green flare in the eyepiece had disappeared suddenly as the plane approached. Boulder piles did not turn themselves on and off like light bulbs.
“Well,” Johnny said, getting stiffly to his feet. “Kinda looks like a washout, boys.”
As Merlin called in their position to the command post, Johnny cleared his weapon.
That possible heat source in the Beehive Basin was probably two hours away by foot. He shook his head. Last night, he hadn’t been able to get any kind of bearing at all, not in two seconds. Bushwhacking their way up there now, just the three of them, would be a waste of time, and potentially dangerous. But somehow he knew the Nicholses had been up there last night. And now he had an idea which way they were headed. From everything Johnny had learned about Don Nichols, the dense mountain forest above the Beartrap was his real home. Not just the place where he went to camp out but his home territory, his turf. That was where Don Nichols was now headed, and that was where Johnny would have to hunt him.
The media was milling around again, just below the porch railing. Johnny cupped his hand over his ear and pressed the phone receiver hard against his head to block the noise of the nearby radio and the deputies in the living room.
“Bill,” he said, “I’m glad I caught you before you got that budget printed out.”
“What’s up, Johnny?” Bill Dringle asked. “How’s the manhunt going?”
Bill was a county commissioner with whom Johnny worked closely on the budget and fiscal matters of the Sheriff’s Department.
“Well,” Johnny hedged, not eager to spring his bombshell. “Bill, I’m gonna need at least another eight thousand to cover this deal we got going up here.”
In principle, Johnny’s budget had been approved and divided into line items two weeks earlier. Now he was asking for “at least” a five percent increase.
“Johnny,” Bill began, “I guess you’ve heard the old story about gettin’ blood out of a turnip.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I have.”
“I’ll have to talk to some people and see what we can do.” Bill sounded more frustrated than angry; “What’s going to cost so much, Johnny? Eight thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“Well,” Johnny ticked his finger against his thumb. “I’ve got overtime for the regular deputies, and we’ve had to call all the reserves out, Bill. Then there’s meal allowances and …” the list went on, mundane, unglamorous, absolutely vital. A patrol car used gasoline. A deputy was paid three dollars for lunch and five for dinner when he had to eat away from home. Some of the reserves were using their own pickups; they were all using their own horse trailers. They received reimbursement, as per an exact schedule.
In Madison County, there were five thousand citizens to support the Sheriff’s Department. Five thousand citizens did not provide a large, flexible tax base. Bill’s tax-reserve turnip surely did not have much extra blood to support Johnny France’s expensive manhunt.
“I’ll see what I can do, Johnny,” Bill added. “You see if you can’t catch those two pretty soon.”
“I’m working on it, Bill,” Johnny said.
Below the porch, a clot of reporters dashed down the gravel driveway to intercept a helicopter that thumped in for a landing. After fifty yards, t
hey slowed, then stopped. The chopper was from a TV station, not an official part of the manhunt.
Johnny was trying to grab an hour’s sleep in a darkened upstairs bedroom when they woke him. He was so exhausted that it took almost a minute for him to sit up on the bed. Jay Cosgrove had brought a report on Kari Swenson. She was still in the Intensive Care Unit, but they’d taken her off the critical list. And, almost as important, two of John Onstad’s detectives had been able to interview her.
J.J. Lane, Johnny’s best woman reserve deputy, was now on duty downstairs as the command post dispatcher, and Terry was relieved of that responsibility. Now all Jay’s wife had to do was provide food and coffee for twenty-some men, twenty-four hours a day.
Jay offered a coffee mug, and Johnny nodded his thanks while he scanned the report. The important points were outlined in brief, emotionless priority. Don and Dan Nichols had not raped Kari Swenson, according to her statements, to her doctors, and to the detectives.
The Nicholses had explained that they were “mountain people” or perhaps “mountain men” and that they wanted her to “try out” living with them for three or four days. They had told Kari that she would then probably want to become the bride or simply the “woman” of one of them. At some point, they had said that they had hidden camps in large, comfortable underground dugouts. They also had told Kari that they would shoot anyone who tried to rescue her.
They’d said that they would not be taken alive, and that she should warn law enforcement officers not to pursue them.
“Geez,” Johnny said. “They wanted to make her a bride? What’s that supposed to mean, Jay?”
Cosgrove shook his head. “Damned if I know, Johnny.” He flipped copies of the local newspapers onto the bed. “Ah, I think we got a little problem with the press.”
Johnny was up now, buttoning his stale shirt. He glanced at the dark headlines and the detailed follow-up features. Naturally, the Swenson kidnapping and the manhunt were the main topic.
“Read this paragraph,” Jay said, pointing to the bottom of the Bozeman Chronicle’s headline story.
Incident at Big Sky Page 11