The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘How can they hear, with all that noise?’ he asked.

  ‘Never mind, Ben. They have ways.’

  So did the frontiersman. He eased the old Sharps from its sheath and slipped in one long, heavy-grain round. To get better vision, Jerry had dropped to 600 feet, just 200 yards up. He hovered, slightly nose down, gazing for another small clearing they might have to cross. The man below him sighted carefully and fired.

  The heavy slug tore through the floor, went between the pilot’s spread thighs and made a starred hole in the bulbous canopy past his face. Seen from the ground the Sikorsky performed one wild, crazy circle, then hauled away to one side and upwards. It did not relent until it was a mile to one side and a mile high.

  Jerry was screaming into his microphone.

  ‘Paul, the bastard just drilled me. Right through the canopy. I’m out of here. I have to go back to Bridger and check the damage. If he’d hit the main rotor assembly I’d be a goner. The hell with this. The gloves are off, right?’

  The sheriff heard none of this. He had heard the distant boom of the old rifle and seen the helicopter giving a ballet performance up against the blue sky; he had seen it head for the horizon.

  ‘We have the technology,’ murmured one of the rangers.

  ‘Stow it,’ said Lewis. ‘The boy’s going inside for years. Just keep moving, rifles at the ready, eyes and ears alert. We have a real manhunt on here.’

  Another hunter had heard the rifle shot, and he was much closer, about half a mile. Max had proposed that he scout forward of the main party.

  ‘He’s walking a horse, sir, which means I can move faster. He won’t hear me coming. If I get a clear shot I can bring him down with the girl several feet away.’

  Braddock agreed. Max slipped away forward, dodging quietly from cover to cover, eyes ahead and to each side, covering the bush for the slightest movement. When he heard the rifle shot it gave him a clear line to follow, about half a mile ahead and slightly to the right of his trail. He began to close in.

  Up ahead Ben Craig had holstered his rifle and resumed his march. He had but a half-mile left to go before the forest gave way to the rock sheet known as the Silver Run. Above the trees he could see the mountains coming slowly closer. He knew he had slowed his pursuers but not turned them back. They were still there, still following.

  A bird called, high in the trees behind him. He knew the bird and he knew the call, a repeated toctoc-toc that faded as the bird flew away. Another responded, the same call. It was their warning call. He left Rosebud to graze, moved twenty feet off the trail left by her hoofs and trotted back through the pines.

  Max flitted from cover to cover, following the hoof marks, until he came to the clearing; with his camouflage uniform and black-streaked face he was invisible in the gloom beneath the trees. He studied the clearing and grinned when he saw the glitter of the brass cartridge in the middle of it. Such a silly trick. He knew better than to run forward to examine it, and take the bullet from the hidden marksman. He knew the man must be there. The too-obvious bait proved it. Inch by inch he studied the foliage on the other side.

  Then he saw the twig move. It was a bush, a large and dense bush across the clearing. The gentle breeze moved the foliage, but always the same way. This branch had moved the opposite way. Peering at the bush he made out the faint tawny blur six feet above the ground. From the previous day he recalled the fox fur trapper’s hat on the rider’s head.

  He was carrying his preferred weapon of choice, the M-16 carbine: short-barrelled, light and utterly dependable. His right thumb slipped the catch silently to ‘automatic’ mode and then he fired. Half a magazine tore into the bush; the tawny blur vanished, then reappeared on the ground where it had fallen. Only then did Max break cover.

  The Cheyenne never used stone war clubs. They preferred hatchets, with which they could slash sideways and downwards from a horse’s back, or throw with accuracy and speed.

  The flying axe hit the major in the right bicep, shearing through the muscle and shattering the bone. The carbine fell from a nerveless hand. He stared down, white-faced, and pulled the axe from his own limb and when the bright red blood gushed, clamped his left hand over the gash to staunch the flow. Then he turned and ran down the path whence he had come.

  The scout let drop from his left hand the fifty-foot thong with which he had tweaked the branch, recovered his axe and his hat and ran on to find his horse.

  Braddock, his son and remaining three men found the major leaning up against a tree, breathing deeply, when they caught up.

  Sheriff Lewis and his party had heard the fusillade of carbine fire, the second that day, but quite different from the fugitive’s single-shot rifle, and rode in fast. The senior ranger looked at the shattered arm, said, ‘Tourniquet,’ and broke open his first-aid pack.

  While he dressed the mangled flesh and bone Sheriff Lewis listened as Braddock told him what had happened. He stared at the rancher with contempt.

  ‘I ought to arrest the lot of you,’ he snapped. ‘And if it wasn’t for the fact we are one hell of a long way from civilization, I would. As of now, you butt right out of this, Mr Braddock, and stay out.’

  ‘I’m seeing this thing through,’ shouted Braddock. ‘That savage stole my son’s girl and has seriously injured three of my men—’

  ‘Who should not even have been here. Now, I’m going to bring this boy in to face charges, but I am not looking for any fatalities. So I want your weaponry, I want it all and I want it now.’

  Several rifles swung in the direction of Braddock and his party. Other deputies collected the rifles and handguns. The sheriff turned to the ranger who had done his best for the major’s arm.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Evacuation, quickly,’ said the ranger. ‘He could ride back with an escort to Red Lodge, but it’s twenty hard miles, with West Fork in the middle. A tough ride, he might not make it.

  ‘Up ahead is the Silver Run Plateau. The radios should work there. We could call up a helo.’

  ‘Which do you advise?’

  ‘Helo,’ said the ranger. ‘That arm needs surgery without delay or he’ll lose it.’

  They rode on. In the clearing they found the discarded carbine and the cartridge. The ranger studied it.

  ‘Flint arrows, a flying hatchet, a buffalo gun. Who the hell is this guy, Sheriff?’

  ‘I thought I knew,’ said Lewis. ‘Now I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well,’ said the ranger, ‘he sure ain’t an out-of-work actor.’

  Ben Craig stood at the edge of the forest and stared ahead at the shimmering flat plain of rock. Five miles to the last, hidden creek; two more across the Hellroaring Plateau and a last mile up the face of the mountain. He stroked Rosebud’s head and her velvet-soft muzzle.

  ‘Just one more before the sun goes down,’ he told her. ‘One more ride and we will be free.’

  He mounted up and urged the horse into a canter over the rock. Ten minutes later the pursuers reached the plateau. He was a speck on the rock face a mile away.

  Clear of the trees the radios functioned again. Sheriff Lewis made contact with Jerry and learned the fate of the little Sikorsky. Jerry was back at Billings Field and had borrowed a larger Bell Jetranger.

  ‘Get down here, Jerry. Don’t worry about the sniper. He’s over a mile away, out of range. We have an emergency evacuation. And that civilian volunteer with the Piper Cub? Tell him I need him and right now. I want him over the Silver Run Plateau, no lower than five thousand feet. Tell him he’s looking for a lone horseman heading for the mountains.’

  It was past three and the sun was moving west towards the peaks. When it slipped behind Spirit Mountain and Beartooth Mountain the darkness would come fast.

  Jerry and the Bell got there first, clattering out of the blue sky to land on the flat rock. The major was helped aboard and one deputy went with him. The police pilot took off, radioing ahead to Billings Memorial to ask for a landing in the parking lot and
major surgery and trauma teams to be on standby.

  The remaining riders set off across the plateau.

  ‘There’s a hidden creek he probably doesn’t know about,’ said the senior ranger, moving up beside the sheriff. ‘It’s called Lake Fork. Deep, narrow, steep-sided. There’s only one way down and up the other side that could be passable for a horse. Take him ages to find it. We could close up and take him there.’

  ‘And if he’s waiting in the trees, with that rifle sighted on us? I don’t want to lose one or two of you guys to prove a point.’

  ‘So what shall we do?’

  ‘Hang loose,’ said Lewis. ‘He has no way out of the mountains, not even down into Wyoming, not with air surveillance.’

  ‘Unless he marches through the night.’

  ‘He has an exhausted horse and a girl in white silk wedding slippers. He’s running out of time and he ought to know it. Just keep him in sight at about a mile and wait for the spotter plane.’

  They rode on with the tiny distant figure in their view. The spotter plane came just before four. The young pilot had had to be called from his work in Billings, where he had a job with a camping store. The tops of the trees that clothed the steep banks of Lake Fork came into view.

  The voice of the pilot crackled out of the sheriff’s radio set.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘There’s a lone rider up ahead of us, with a blanket-wrapped girl mounted behind. Can you see him?’

  The Piper Cub, high above, winged off towards the creek.

  ‘Sure can. There’s a narrow creek over here. He’s entering the trees.’

  ‘Stay clear. He has a rifle and he’s a crack shot.’

  They saw the Piper climb and bank over the creek two miles ahead.

  ‘Right. But I can still see him. He’s off the horse and leading it down into the creek.’

  ‘He’ll never get up the other side,’ hissed the ranger. ‘We can close up now.’

  They broke into a canter, with Braddock, his son and his remaining three gunmen with empty holsters coming behind them.

  ‘Stay out of range,’ warned the sheriff again. ‘He can still fire from through the trees if you get too close. He did it to Jerry.’

  ‘Jerry was hovering at six hundred feet,’ the pilot crackled over the air. ‘I’m doing one hundred and twenty knots at three thousand feet. By the by, he seems to have found a way up. He’s climbing out onto the Hellroaring Plateau.’

  The sheriff glanced at the ranger and snorted.

  ‘You’d think he’s been here before,’ said the bemused ranger.

  ‘Maybe he has,’ snapped Lewis.

  ‘No way. We know who moves up here.’

  The posse reached the rim of the canyon, but the screen of pines blocked the vision of the exhausted man tugging his horse and its burden out on the other side.

  The ranger knew the only path down into the creek, but the hoof marks of Rosebud showed that their quarry knew the same. When they emerged onto the second plateau the fugitives were again a speck in the distance.

  ‘It’s getting dark and fuel is low,’ said the pilot. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘One last circle,’ urged the sheriff. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He’s made the mountain. He’s off and leading again. Climbing the north face. But it looks like the horse is breaking down. It’s stumbling all over the track. I guess you’ll have him at sunup. Good hunting, Sheriff.’

  The Piper turned in the darkening sky and droned away back to Billings.

  ‘Do we go on, boss?’ one of the deputies asked. Sheriff Lewis shook his head. The air was thin, they were all sucking in the oxygen, night was falling fast.

  ‘Not in the dark. We camp here till daylight.’

  They made camp in the last of the trees above the creek, facing the mountains to the south, so close in the fading light they seemed to tower above the specks on the rock that were men and horses.

  They broke out thick, warm sheepskin jackets and pulled them on. Bundles of old dead branches were found beneath the trees, which soon burned bright and warm. At the sheriff’s suggestion Braddock, his son and his remaining three men camped a hundred yards away.

  It had never been intended to spend the night so high on the plateau. They had not brought bedrolls and food. They sat on horse blankets round the fire, propped against their saddles, and dined on candy bars. Sheriff Lewis stared into the flames.

  ‘What are you going to do tomorrow, Paul?’ asked Tom Barrow.

  ‘I’m going to go forward to the mountain alone. No guns. I’m going to fly a flag of truce and take the loudhailer. I’m going to try to talk him down from that mountain, with the girl.’

  ‘That could be dangerous. He’s a wild kid. He might try to kill you,’ said the ranger.

  ‘He could have killed three men today,’ mused the sheriff. ‘He could have, but he didn’t. He must realize he can’t protect the girl up there in a siege. I figure he probably won’t shoot down a peace officer under a white flag. He’ll listen first. It’s worth a try.’

  Chill darkness wrapped the mountain. Pulling, hauling, tugging, urging and pleading, Ben Craig led Rosebud up the last stretch and onto the shelf of flat rock outside the cave. The horse stood trembling, eyes dull, while her master took down the girl from her back.

  Craig gestured Whispering Wind towards the old bear cave, untied the buffalo robe and spread it for her. He eased off the quiver with its two remaining arrows, took the bow from his back and laid them down together. He unhitched the rifle sheath and laid the weapon beside the bow. Finally he loosened the girth and removed the saddle and the two bags.

  Relieved of her burdens, the chestnut mare took a few steps towards the scrubby trees and the sere foliage beneath them. Her back legs gave way and she sat on her rump. Then the front legs buckled. She rolled onto her side.

  Craig knelt by her head, took it on his lap and stroked her muzzle. She whinnied softly at his touch and then her brave heart gave out.

  The young man too was racked by tiredness. He had not slept for two days and nights, hardly eaten, and had ridden or marched nearly a hundred miles. There were things yet to do and he drove himself a little further.

  At the edge of the shelf he looked down and saw below and away to the north the twin campfires of the pursuers. He cut branches and saplings where the old man had sat and made a fire. The flames lit the ledge and the cave, and the white silk-clad figure of the only girl he had ever loved or ever would.

  He broke open the saddlebags and prepared some food he had brought from the fort. They sat side by side on the rug and ate the only meal they had had together or ever would.

  He knew that with his horse gone the chase was almost over. But the old vision-quester had promised him that this girl would be his wife, and that it was so spoken by the Everywhere Spirit.

  Down on the plain the conversation among the exhausted men withered and died. They sat in silence, faces lit by the flickering flames, and stared at the fire.

  In the thin air of the high peaks the silence was total. A light zephyr came off the peaks but did not disturb the silence. Then there was a sound.

  It came to them through the night, borne by the cat’s-paw wind off the mountain. It was a cry, long and clear, the voice of a young woman.

  It was not a cry of pain or distress but that wavering, ebbing cry of one in such an ecstasy that it defies description or repetition.

  The deputies stared at each other, then lowered their heads to their chests and the sheriff saw their shoulders twitch and shake.

  A hundred yards away Bill Braddock rose from beside his fire as his men sought not to catch his eye. He stared at the mountain and his face was a mask of rage and hatred.

  At midnight the temperature began to drop. At first the men thought it was the night chill becoming colder due to the high altitude and thin atmosphere. They shivered and drew their sheepskins tighter. But the cold went through their jeans and they huddled closer t
o the fire.

  Below zero and still falling; the deputies looked at the sky and saw thick clouds begin to blot the peaks from sight. High on the side of Mount Rearguard they saw a single speck of a fire; then it faded from view.

  These were Montana men, accustomed to the bitter winters, but the last ten days of October were too early for such cold. At one o’clock the rangers estimated it was twenty degrees below zero, and still plunging. At two they were all up, thoughts of sleep gone, stamping to keep the circulation going, blowing on hands, hurling greater piles of branches onto the fire, but to no effect. The first fat flakes of snow began to fall, hissing into the fire, diluting its heat.

  The senior ranger went over to Sheriff Lewis, teeth chattering.

  ‘Cal and me reckon we should move back to the shelter of the Custer Forest,’ he said.

  ‘Will it be warmer there?’ he asked.

  ‘It might be.’

  ‘What the hell is happening here?’

  ‘You’ll think me crazy, Sheriff.’

  ‘Indulge me.’

  The snow thickened, the stars were gone, a freezing white wilderness was moving towards them.

  ‘This place is the meeting point of the Crow lands and the Shoshone Nation. Years ago warriors fought and died here, before the white man came. The Indians believe their spirits still walk these mountains; they think it is a magical place.’

  ‘A charming tradition. But what’s with the damn weather?’

  ‘I said it sounded crazy. But they say that sometimes the Everywhere Spirit comes here too, and brings the Cold of the Long Sleep, against which no man can stand. Of course, it’s just a weird climatic phenomenon, but I think we should move out. We’ll freeze before sunup if we stay.’

  Sheriff Lewis thought and nodded.

  ‘Saddle up,’ he said. ‘We’re riding out. Go tell Braddock and his men.’

  The ranger came back through the blizzard a few minutes later.

  ‘He says he’s going to pull into the shelter of the creek but no further.’

  The sheriff, the rangers and the deputies, shuddering with cold, recrossed the creek and rode back across the Silver Run Plateau to the dense pines of the forest. The temperature inside the trees rose to zero. They built more fires and survived.