By two that afternoon, the officers at the observation post on the west side of Beartrap Canyon were worried that the SWAT team had strayed too far south of their intended search area. Months later, these same officers would note the irony that the “lost” SWAT team had almost stepped on Danny Nichols, hidden in that brushy draw. But Johnny and his deputies at the TV tower had no way of knowing this then. They did know, however, that they’d been unable to make radio contact with the team. Occasionally, they would pick up a garbled transmission that might have been the SWAT officers, but there was no way to be certain.
One sure way to reach them, of course, was to fly over there in Duffy’s chopper. But Johnny had been hesitant to resort to that maneuver, for fear of tipping their hand to the Nicholses. But when he heard that they were out of the woods and that they seemed to be on the side of Red Knob, it became clear that they’d missed their main objectives by at least four miles. Rather than broadcast this disappointing news to the world via the reporters’ police scanners, however, he bit the bullet and told Murray Duffy to fly him across the canyon.
The SWAT team was resting in the shade when they got to the LZ on the northern slope of Red Knob. Some of the boys looked all right, but the rest were just beat. After a brief map conference, Johnny realized that these men had already put in over twenty miles of trailless humping since they shoved off from that ridge, just after dawn. It was tough to ask more of them that day, but he knew he had to try.
If they agreed, he began, he’d have Murray ferry them up north of Cowboy Heaven, three at a time. Then they could work their way south and west, down past Goose Creek and through the top of the wooded ramparts, in the area of known gardens where he suspected Don Nichols had established his dugout and hidden camps. A hunter named Ron Bruno had reported seeing a dugout camp two years before, hidden in a stand of quaking asps near the Goose Creek gorge. This dugout had a canvas flap across the mouth, and had been carefully camouflaged. That was a prime target that Johnny wanted the SWAT team to find.
The SWAT team leaders consulted among themselves. “Okay, Johnny,” the leader said, “we’re here to do the job, so let’s do it.”
Once more, the men boarded the waiting helicopter. But several of them were limping now from blisters and twisted ankles, and some had that pale, waxy look that meant heat exhaustion wasn’t too far off.
As the first lift clattered off into the hot sky, Johnny glanced around the shady circle at the remaining men. They were somber, silent. No one had to say it, but they all understood that three noisy chopper lifts along that ridge was going to broadcast their presence and probably their intentions to the Nicholses. If there had been the danger of a sniper attack earlier, there was a menace of one now.
The SWAT team came down into Beartrap Canyon, four hours later. They had made no contact. They had found no tracks. One officer had discovered an abandoned turnip and rutabaga garden, in a small draw up on the top, a hidden garden, cut from a stand of young fir. It looked “pretty damn dry,” he said, as if it hadn’t been tended in a long time.
When the men broke out of the brushy ravine north of Barn Creek and found themselves on the trail above the fast-moving Madison River, several guys dropped their web gear and weapons and just flopped into the cool shallows. They lay there for a while, not moving as the chill water washed across their bodies. One man who saw the sight was reminded of dead soldiers he’d seen in an irrigation ditch, a long time before in Vietnam.
Back at the parking lot of the power plant in upper Beartrap Canyon, Johnny helped the men load their gear into the cars. They had the slack stares and slow reactions of people at the edge of their physical limits.
The press had made its way to the power plant, but even the eager young TV reporters did not seem inclined to badger the SWAT team for the details of their fruitless day’s work.
To Johnny France, the next three days acquired the spastic and fractured texture of a fever dream. The standard division between day and night had been so shattered by the manhunt, that he found himself thinking an event that had occurred an hour earlier had taken place days before, or, worse, that leads his deputies had processed early in the manhunt were actually new information.
It became difficult for him to follow the true sequence of orders and the various subinvestigations proceeding around the Big Sky command post. His sleep debt had reached the point where sleep was no longer possible. For at least two days, he didn’t even try to go to bed, but just took a few minutes unconscious absence where he happened to be sitting.
Early that weekend, Jay Cosgrove came off patrol and entered his living room, looking for Johnny. He found both Johnny and John Onstad, each sitting in recliners at either side of the bay window, a big relief map spread between them on the coffee table. Each man was dead asleep. Out cold, slack down to his bones with exhaustion.
Another deputy witnessed the scene. It reminded him of a command bunker at a fire base in Pleiku Province he had once entered to deliver a message to the CO during the Tet Offensive. The captain and two sergeants were slumped across the map board, as if an enemy assassin had struck. But, like the sheriffs, those men had been ambushed by physical and spiritual exhaustion, not a knife or bullet.
Certain moments of the manhunt’s final days, however, made a vivid impression on Johnny. At dawn on Friday, he flew up to the Jerome Rocks. They left the Big Sky airport over near Cameron with the stars still bright, and climbed into a pastel dawn up at 12,000 feet. There’d been a report from a hiker of a camp near Marcheta Lake where the man had seen meat hanging in green canvas bags strung from a pine tree.
They throttled back and slid into a shallow glide, due east, into the pale golden eye of the sun. They skimmed the trees above Chiquita Lake and glided over the ridge to Marcheta. Below them, a cow moose stood in the shallows, weed dripping from her slow jaws as she gazed up at this strange, whistling intruder. As they passed above the smooth, grape-blue water, a large cutthroat trout splashed free of the surface and hung there for a moment, surrounded by ruby droplets.
Johnny stared tiredly at the scene. Then he closed his eyes when the pilot gunned the throttle to climb out of the basin. There had been no campfire, no humans, but Johnny was beginning to understand something of Don Nichols’s attachment to these mountains.
On Saturday, a six-man FBI Regional SWAT team slipped into Big Sky, dressed in civies, unnoticed by the press. Johnny and Onstad briefed them, and they left that afternoon with Dave Wing to carry out a night sweep, all the way from the Cherry Creek Cow Camp through Cowboy Heaven.
The next morning they returned, gray with fatigue, limping and silent. They had seen nothing. They had found no signs or tracks.
Even while the FBI team was staging for their night sweep, however, Johnny was preparing the ground for a long pursuit. When he met the press that night, he projected pessimism that was only half feigned.
The Billings SWAT team, he said, “checked a lot of country and found no traces, no evidence that the Nicholses are still here.” He waited until the reporters had absorbed that information, then hit them with his bombshell.
“I feel definitely that they have left the immediate area and are moving from mountain range to mountain range.”
“But,” he added, “I know that we will catch them. It may not be this year, and it may not be next year, but we will catch them.”
Saturday afternoon, Johnny called Governor Ted Schwinden to request National Guard support.
“Sir,” Johnny said, “I could sure use a big Huey helicopter, maybe two, and I could sure use about a battalion of guardsmen, with maybe a trained recon unit to relieve my deputies down here on this deal.”
The phone line hissed faint static while the governor considered Johnny’s request.
“I have to disappoint you on this, Johnny,” Governor Schwinden finally answered. “I hope you’ll understand, but I just can’t go calling up the Guard every time we’ve got a law-enforcement problem that’s tough to handle loca
lly.”
Johnny swallowed some coffee and nodded. “Yes, sir, I do understand.”
On Sunday, Johnny got a call from Ron Alles, a U.S. Marshal in Billings. Mr. Alles made Johnny an offer that managed to raise his hopes to a point higher than at any time during the manhunt.
Ron Alles was a member of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Special Operations Group, the SOG, an outfit which he pronounced “sog,” as in “soggy.”
The SOG, he explained, had been recently formed; they were very well funded and equipped, and their leaders were just looking for a worthwhile large-scale operation to test the outfit’s strengths and weaknesses.
Since Madison County Attorney Loren Tucker had been astute enough to seek assistance from the U.S. Attorney in Billings, based on the possibility that the Nicholses had fled across the state line to avoid arrest, the federal SOG might be authorized to assist the local manhunt.
“Look, Johnny,” Alles said, “I don’t want to butt into your business up there, but we’ve been looking for an operation to use as a training exercise.”
“Fine,” Johnny said, “I’m listening, Ron.”
“We’ve had some pretty good success, but that operation you’ve got going in those mountains sounds like it’d be great for us to train on.”
“Yeah, well … we’ve certainly been learning a thing or two this week.”
“I’d like to fly in there tonight with a couple leaders of the SOG and check out what we can do for you.” Alles paused. “Johnny, if we decide that this operation is good for our purposes, we’ll bring in more officers and special equipment than you’ve ever dreamed of.”
“Call when you’ve got a flight number, Ron. I’ll meet you myself.”
Monday morning was gray, clammy. The cloud deck was well below the shoulders of Lone Mountain. Johnny hiked into the crime scene with Ron Alles, and the two SOG leaders. One of the marshals was from Louisiana, one from Chicago. Unlike Ron, the two men did not have much firsthand experience in mountains, certainly not in mountains like this.
On the way from the dead-end logging road to the crime scene, one of the SOG leaders became disoriented and wandered off.
The officers spent a lot of time in the clearing, staring at the Nicholses’ three-stone fire ring and the tree where they’d chained Kari. They gazed at the gray crosshatch of deadfall lodgepoles. They studied their maps, talking quietly among themselves.
Back at the command post, the three marshals conferred for quite a while, alone on the corner of the front porch. Finally, Ron Alles came in to speak with Johnny France.
“Johnny,” he began, “you’ve got some impossible damned country up there.” He shook his head, as if stymied by visions of those gloomy tangles of deadfall. “We’d love to just saturate these mountains with officers and choppers, but … I think you realize that we could come up here with a thousand men, and we’d just end up getting spread too thin in this country you’ve got.”
Johnny nodded his glum agreement. Right now, the thought of a thousand fresh, well-financed federal officers, supported by fleets of helicopters, was a gleaming fantasy.
“Johnny, we’ve got a good budget, but not that good. Once you’ve got these people better pinpointed, once you’ve got them sort of bottled up … then we’ll spend the bucks and come in here like Gang Busters, but we got to take a pass right now, Johnny,” Alles concluded. “Right now, it just won’t work.”
Outside, the clouds were even lower. Johnny had been up here exactly one week, but it felt as if he’d been born in this room and surely that he would spend the rest of his days here.
Sue France opened the front door and stood on the porch when she saw Johnny’s headlights round the corner. It was after ten o’clock and the boys had been watching a M*A*S*H rerun when they heard the car.
“Well,” Todd said, “Dad’s home. Let’s give him a hand with his gear.”
“No,” Sue said. “Just let me talk to him first, okay?”
He walked with an undisguised limp to the rear of the Eagle and stood, staring vacantly into the open hatchback, as if he couldn’t decide which equipment stayed and which he must carry into the house with him tonight, as if the mere thought of one more decision was too much right now for him to face.
On the ten o’clock news from Bozeman, Sue had heard the report that the manhunt was officially over. She had seen Johnny’s exhausted face on the videotape, patiently explaining that the pursuit would continue, but at a much lower level. Sue remembered the pain and despair in his eyes.
He climbed the front steps slowly, cradling an armful of weapons and ammunition pouches.
Sue reached out to touch his face. “The boys will help you with the rest, Johnny.”
He nodded absently, acknowledging both her touch and her words. “Good … real good, Sue. I sure can use some help right now.”
PART 3
Pursuit
12
Madison County
Late July, 1984
The kidnapping, murder, and subsequent manhunt had so altered the pattern of France’s daily life that he found it difficult to return to his normal routine, once he had come down from the Big Sky command post.
The business of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department and the commercial life of the county, however, continued at their normally hectic summer pace. This was peak season for the river guides and trout-fishing outfitters. Ranchers worked around the clock, irrigating the hay crops on which their annual profit depended to a great degree. As Johnny told people, this was, indeed, great “summer country.” The obvious corollary was that Madison County, like most of Montana, was literally obliged to make hay—and money—while the sun shined. Few tourists drove their Winnebagos through the January snowdrifts to sample the delights of chicken fried steak or cream of broccoli soup at Bettie’s Cafe. The hay that the ranchers were now able to wrest from their parched, chalky fields would keep their pregnant cows alive through the frigid void of the seven-month winter.
And everyone from ranchers to motel owners to white-water guides depended to some extent on the sheriff’s department to patrol the roads, help out at accidents, investigate petty crimes, round up loose stock on the highways, and generally maintain law and order, so that the tourists would have a pleasant stay in the recently subdued mountain frontier. Between July Fourth and Labor Day, the two-month tourist bonanza reached its peak. So did the rate of car crashes, drunk driving arrests, break-ins and vandalism, not to mention an increase in the year-round problem of bar fights.
To police the whole county, Johnny had himself and seven regular deputies, around the clock. In theory, there were reserve deputies to supplement his force. But many of them were ranchers and outfitters for whom prolonged extra duty would be a real financial burden. That was a moot point, however, because he’d already overspent his annual budget for the reserves during the week-long manhunt, and he couldn’t get too much more blood from Bill Dringle’s budgetary turnip.
The net result of this situation for Sheriff Johnny France was that he found himself in a complicated and frustrating position. The more he brooded on Don and Dan Nichols—and there were probably not ten waking minutes in his day when he didn’t think of them—the more convinced he was that they were still up in the mountains, working their home country from the Beartrap east into the Spanish Peaks. But Johnny simply did not have the human or financial resources to maintain a massive law enforcement pressure on that area. If he was going to catch them, he knew, it would be through cunning and not through any kind of large, brute-force operation.
Part of Johnny’s strategy of cunning was based on the assumption that Don Nichols did carry an AM transistor radio, and that news reports on the progress of the pursuit would reach him each day. There was no way to be certain, but Johnny decided to continue his deceptive use—he hated to think of what he did as manipulation—of the news media. Since he had neither unlimited numbers of men nor vast reserves of money, he had to use whatever free resources were availab
le.
So Johnny continued to foster the idea that the Nicholses had slipped through the dragnets of mounted deputies and heavily armed SWAT teams and had fled the area. Probably, he suggested, they were now working their way north through the mountains of Idaho, en route to Canada. This strategy had several advantages, and several distinct disadvantages. Loren Tucker, the county attorney, could legally request continued federal assistance, based on the sheriff’s official statements that the Nicholses had become probable interstate, maybe even international, fugitives. This meant that Johnny would have men and special equipment from the FBI available to augment his own home-town resources. And, of course, when the news that the FBI was searching for the Nicholses up on the Canada border reached Don Nichols in his dugout above the Beartrap, he might just lower his guard a notch and start doing things like building smoky fires or leaving tracks.
The disadvantage of this maneuvering was predictable. If the Nicholses had simply walked out of the mountains, crossed several miles of flats over the Tobacco Root or Beaverhead Range—right through Sheriff France’s roadblocks and patrols—and were now halfway to Canada, then Johnny France would look like an incompetent fool at best, and derelict in his duty at worst.
This was a personal and political risk that Johnny was willing to take, but which John Onstad apparently wanted to avoid. Now that the two sheriff’s were out of the joint command post and back at their respective county seats, Onstad’s statements to the press acquired a different slant from Johnny’s. Onstad and France were consulting each other on a daily basis, but they clearly had begun to keep their own council as to the way they handled the press. Toward the end of the initial manhunt, Onstad said in an interview with Karen Datko of the Bozeman Chronicle that his department “may be able to determine in four or five days” whether the Nicholses were still in the area. Meanwhile, he said, his deputies would conduct daily mounted patrols in the Spanish Peaks and West Fork areas.
Incident at Big Sky Page 14