“Aerial surveillance of the area last night by an airplane equipped with an infrared scope, which detects heat on the ground, located a small campfire. Onstad said deputies would try to locate the fire today.”
Johnny nodded pensively. “Yeah, well.…”
“Kind of shoots down using that scope again,” Jay said. “I mean, once the Nichols boys hear about that on the radio, they aren’t likely to build another campfire … not at night.”
Again, Johnny nodded.
“We’ve got a lot of reporters around, Johnny,” Jay said, pointing toward the front of the house. “They’re getting into a kind of feeding frenzy with this stealing a bride for the mountain man stuff coming out and all.”
Johnny was on his feet, slipping on his heavy shoulder holster. “First amendment, Jay. Not much we can do to stop the reporters asking questions, and John Onstad, just like me, has got to be available to answer those questions. He runs for office, same as I do, and we both have to let our people see that we’re doing something.” He smiled another hard, humorless grin. “In a deal like this, we got two sets of problems … catching the criminals, and convincing the citizens that we’re doing our best to catch the criminals.”
“Well,” Jay conceded, “the press is doing its best to spread the word, that’s for sure.”
Johnny stood tiredly at the dresser, leafing through the accumulated reports.
“Hell,” he muttered, “you see this?”
The Gallatin County department had received a call, from the antiterrorism office in the Pentagon, asking whether Kari Swenson was to be a competitor in the Olympic Games, scheduled to begin in two weeks in Los Angeles. Apparently, they thought her kidnapping by men in “military fatigues” might be an act of international terrorism directed toward our Olympic athletes.
They had been assured, Johnny read, that the biathlon was a winter event.
Johnny hitched up his holster, smiling now with real amusement. “Wonder how much snow those fellows think they get every summer in Los Angeles.”
He was still laughing as he went down the stairs; then he saw the size of the press mob out front. This deal was getting too big, he realized, and it’d get a lot bigger if they didn’t catch those two crazies soon.
Johnny France had dealt with the press before, but never on this scale; network correspondents did not cover the race for Madison County Sheriff, traffic accidents in Virginia City, or loose stock on the Norris Hill Road. The newspaper report about the Probeye scope might be just the tip of the iceberg. For sure, he realized, he was going to have to watch what he said in front of these reporters. He certainly didn’t want to be accused of holding out on them, and definitely did not want to get into a situation where he’d try to manipulate them. That could backfire on you, real fast. But he just wished he had more experience on managing the PR side of a deal like this.
Once more he stared out the window at the milling reporters. Well, he thought, there aren’t any deals like this one. What we’ve got here is a one-time-only case, and there aren’t any rules to go by.
It was stuffy in the crowded conference room. John Onstad had scheduled the meeting with the concerned citizens of the Big Sky area for three that afternoon, but people were still pouring into the community center at quarter past. By three-twenty, all the folding chairs had been taken, and it was standing room only at the back of the hall. About half the people here were summer residents, and the rest local working people.
Almost from the start of the meeting, Johnny was aware of the sensitive political issues involved. The boundary line separating Madison and Gallatin counties ran north-south, right down the middle of the Big Sky resort complex. Big Sky’s Mountain Village and ski complex lay in Johnny’s county, the larger Meadow Village and commercial complex was in Gallatin County.
The crime had occurred in Madison County, but the Spanish Peaks, where the Nicholses might now be hiding, were almost equally divided between the two jurisdictions. Therefore the tasks of the two sheriff’s this hot afternoon presented several potential conflicts.
John Onstad’s job was to assure his tax paying, and voting, citizens that every effort was being made to protect their lives and property—and, of course, their businesses that depended heavily on the short summer season.
Johnny’s responsibility ultimately was to catch the men who had committed serious crimes in his county. And he certainly did not want to reveal tactical secrets that might jeopardize the success of the manhunt, just to convince a local motel owner that he wasn’t going to lose any more business. As the meeting progressed, the inherent conflict in their two positions came close to surfacing.
Once the preliminaries had been waded through and everyone had been given the bare-bones facts about what crime had actually occurred, the names of the victims, and the names of the suspects, the two sheriff’s took turns detailing the actions they had taken to seal off the mountain area and, eventually, to capture the criminals.
As Johnny expected, Onstad stressed that the Nicholses appeared to be bottled up, that they were surrounded by heavily armed officers, way up there in the isolated Jack Creek drainage. He assured the audience that these two criminals posed no threat to life, or to commerce in the valley.
Johnny tried to skate around the topic of just exactly where the criminals might be holed up. There were enough reporters in the conference hall, he realized, to assure that everything said here would be repeated on television and radio in a matter of hours.
Once more, TV cameramen were having a field day with his big .44 magnum in the shoulder holster. But today, they also had John Onstad’s camouflage shirt to provide exciting “visuals.”
One older summer resident—maybe a retired lawyer, judging by his articulate, but nagging, manner—tried to pin Johnny down as to what resources he had committed to the actual search and capture, not just to sealing off the Madison Range.
Just before the meeting, Johnny’s senior deputies had brought in their initial reports of the interviews they conducted that morning among the ranchers who leased pasture in the Cowboy Heaven and Beartrap areas and several outfitters who knew that country well. Johnny now had definite leads on the most promising potential hideouts. But the old gentleman’s question gave Johnny a chance to send a misleading message up to his quarry.
“Don and Dan Nichols,” Johnny said, speaking loudly for the microphones, “have spent the past twelve summers up in the high country.” He paused to allow the print reporters to scribble their shorthand. “They’ve lived up there continuously since last August … almost a straight year. They know this country real well, sir. Until we get some more information, it would be nearly suicidal to send my people in there after them.”
People rose with more questions. It was parry and thrust again, a repeat of yesterday’s press briefing.
At one point, Johnny said that Don Nichols “fashions himself a Daniel Boone type. I’m surprised his weapons are as modern as they are.”
In reality, Johnny was not surprised at all, but he hoped the word would filter up to those dense pine forests that he was underestimating the Nicholses’ disciplined resourcefulness.
As the inevitable drudgery of the meeting ground on, Johnny thought once more of the sudden green blossom in his Probeye scope the night before. That had to have been their campfire up high in the Beehive Basin.
Without question, they were moving north, back toward the Beartrap and the primitive elk and grizzly country above Cherry Lake.
Citizens rose in the glare of the camera lights, some to ask sincere questions, some in hopes of five seconds of taped glory on the Six O’Clock News.
Johnny listened to their words, but his mind was elsewhere, roaming back through all the years he had hunted mule deer and chased stray calves up in those high summer ranges above the Beartrap. It was about as wild and thick a piece of back country as you could find in Montana. But that’s where they were headed, he knew it now, right down in his bones.
Later
that afternoon at the command post Johnny got a new batch of interesting reports. There was more evidence of the Nicholses living in the general area of the Beartrap Canyon and Cowboy Heaven. A reliable outfitter had seen their gardens of turnips and carrots, growing in spongy creek bottoms that stayed wet all summer. Cowboys had reported signs that somebody had been taking pancake mix and other staples from the food reserves left behind at the cow camps in the high summer pastures leased from the Forest Service.
When we make our push, Johnny decided, it’s definitely going to be up in that country.
The next report didn’t help him in his immediate tactical problem, but it certainly gave him some insight into the mentality of his two suspects.
Jay had answered a complaint from Jim Allison, the foreman of the Jumping Horse Stock Ranch. At least eight head of cattle showed up missing on his weekly count, Jim said, up there in the high pastures of the Jack Creek and Mill Creek drainages. Then his boys had found several cows and calves that morning, shot dead at close range. Not butchered or mutilated, just shot.
When Jay found the carcasses, they were pretty rank. He estimated they’d been dead five days, maybe a week. But he had been able to confirm that the cattle had all been shot with a single, small-caliber bullet, right between the eyes.
“Looked like a .22 to me,” Jay said. “Same as they shot the girl with.”
“Not cut up at all?” Johnny asked. “They didn’t even take the liver or anything, a little slice of steak?”
“Nope,” Jay said. “And something else is weird. They were all cows and heifer calves … every one of them was female.”
Johnny had spent the first twenty-one years of his life on local ranches. He knew the value of a cow and calf better than most people. He also understood that Don Nichols fully realized the outrage such an act would cause among the ranchers in the valley.
It’s a challenge, Johnny thought, a crazy kind of damned macho challenge.
By that evening, the next day’s scheduled arrival of the Yellowstone County SWAT team had leaked to the press. Just before dark, a herd of impatient reporters had formed a delegation and had bullied their way right up, onto the porch. Johnny went out to talk to them.
He was slowly becoming accustomed to shouted questions and blinding minicam lights, and learning that he couldn’t answer everyone who yelled at him with a full-length statement. Apparently, the reporters didn’t want a detailed briefing, just a summary, some “visuals” and a few quotes.
First off, he confirmed that there was, indeed, a Special Weapons and Tactics team in Billings. But, he said, there were SWAT teams from other areas under consideration, as well. In any event, he continued, he planned to use a “good-sized force of men” who would be ferried into the target area by helicopter and four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was, Johnny told them, to be a “military-style assault” on the Nicholses’ camp.
“Can you tell us when?” someone shouted.
“Soon,” Johnny replied.
“As early as tomorrow?”
Johnny paused. Full disclosure was about to cut into operational security. “Well … I kind of don’t like to talk about that. I—”
“Could it be as early as tomorrow?”
“What about the hideout, Johnny?”
It amazed Johnny how quickly reporters put themselves on a first-name basis with cops, they had never seen before.
“Well,” he said, “we have their hideout pinpointed, but I just can’t discuss the details.”
A lopsided white moon hung above Lone Mountain. Johnny patiently warded off the reporters’ probes and thrusts. Up in the high country the Nicholses would be getting ready to move about now. If they had a radio they would soon be hearing that the sheriff of Madison County had their hideout surrounded—which might not be so bad, after all. He wanted to goad them on their way, back to their familiar haunts—their gardens, supply caches, and underground dugouts, up above Beartrap Canyon.
Early the next afternoon, the media’s feeding frenzy reached a new pitch when the Yellowstone County SWAT team arrived at Huntley Lodge, the main hotel of the Big Sky resort complex.
To the disappointment of the cameramen, there were not a lot of “sexy” visuals. The Billings policemen and sheriff’s deputies who made up the eleven-man team did not leap from the Big Sky minibus in camouflaged tiger suits, with their faces blackened, and their M-16s cocked and ready. In reality, they did not look like hardened professionals.
In Johnny’s eye, they appeared to be a collection of perfectly normal young guys in T-shirts and jeans. A few sported Airborne tattoos and macho mustaches, but the majority looked to be exactly what they were: young family men from a small Montana city. None seemed to be anything like a hard-core old tracker who could just sniff the breeze and accurately predict that the Nicholses went thataway.
It had become clear to Johnny that Onstad thought the Billings SWAT team was a heaven-sent answer to the vexing tactical problem of catching two murderous psychopaths who just happened to know the high country far better than the men on his force, or, for that matter, far better than anybody.
The SWAT team provided a tangibly reassuring presence. Everybody knew about SWAT teams from television; these men were “trained by the FBI.” They were experts in a bewildering variety of martial skills and tactics. They were heavily armed, and they could move with stealth. In short, to John Onstad the boys from Yellowstone County were a comfortably modern solution to a nasty police problem.
Johnny had never had to serve in the military, but he understood a fundamental military principle that Onstad and his subordinates seemed to be overlooking in their optimism at the SWAT team’s arrival. In an assault on an entrenched, hidden enemy defending high ground he was familiar with, the clear advantage lay with the defenders, no matter how well trained and equipped the attackers might be.
The day before, Johnny had told the citizens of Big Sky that sending his people into the trailless country of the Spanish Peaks would be “suicidal.” Sending these young guys from Billings up there wouldn’t be much different. A flak jacket might not protect a man from Don Nichols. Johnny could not publicly admit his fears; he had to remain as visibly sanguine as Onstad. But he knew there was a good chance that one or more of these young fellows was going to be shot if they managed to flush out the Nicholses in the morning.
Earlier that day, Johnny had talked with Dan Cummings, the manager of the Windy Waters Ranch, near Indian Trail, just north of the Spanish Peaks. Dan had seen the Nicholses up there several times.
“It’s funny, Johnny,” Dan said on the phone. “Those boys have a way of disappearing if you happen to ride up on them. Don’t ask me how they do it, but they sure can vanish.”
Now Johnny stood in the entrance of the Huntley Lodge lobby, watching the SWAT guys load their gear onto a luggage cart. One lanky young fellow in a checked shirt smiled at him; another short, stocky boy with a military tattoo waved. Johnny’s fame from rodeo days, and his current reputation as a gutsy cop’s cop, had evidently traveled as far as Billings.
Nichols would not let these young officers just march right up in their tiger suits and put the cuffs on him and his boy. From what Johnny was learning about Don Nichols, the man’s mind simply did not work that way. If threatened, he would shoot, and Johnny knew how well Don shot.
In the end, of course, the massed firepower of the SWAT team’s automatic weapons would prevail.
But which one of these boys would be hit by Don’s first bullet?
11
Madison Range
July 19–23, 1984
Johnny managed to get in almost four hours of uninterrupted sleep Wednesday night. But when Jay woke him just before three Thursday morning, Johnny was still exhausted. Like a robot, he dragged his legs off the bed and reached for the inevitable mug of black coffee.
“How’s the weather?” he asked.
Jay went to the window and bent his tall frame to peer outside. “Lots of stars, Johnny. Looks lik
e the moon’s set already.”
“We could sure use a little rain, Jay,” Johnny said. “There’s just not going to be anything for those SWAT boys to track up there today.”
“Well, don’t bet on rain. The weather report says hot and dry.”
As they drove through the chill darkness to Huntley Lodge, Jay briefed Johnny on the final schedule for the dawn SWAT operation. Murray Duffy from Central Helicopters had called to confirm the 0500 ETA to pick up the SWAT team from the road, near the bridge across Spanish Creek. Duffy’s son, Mark, would fly the number two helicopter. They both had high-band radios.
Merlin Ehlers and reserve deputy Steve Orr had spent the night in a hidden observation post at the TV transmitter site on the west side of Beartrap Canyon, opposite Cowboy Heaven. Their position gave them a pretty good line of sight into the country above the granite cliffs to the east. They had called in at 0250 to report no sign of a campfire.
“Yeah, well … I didn’t really figure they’d see one,” Johnny said. “I suspect the Nicholses are traveling these nights, not building campfires.”
The men of the Billings SWAT team had apparently gone to bed early, Jay reported. They’d gotten up at 0230 and were just now finishing breakfast.
Finally, the press was scheduled to assemble at the Spanish Creek Campground at 0500, under the watchful eye of John Onstad. The media had been a real pain in the neck about this SWAT operation. On the one hand, they all agreed to follow any ground rule he set down about not jeopardizing the security of the assault plan, but then they’d insisted that they all have access to the landing zone up at Spanish Creek, where Johnny planned to load the team aboard the helicopters. Johnny had hedged on that one, but he’d flat refused to allow interviews of the SWAT officers.
These men certainly did not want to meet the press, and they sure as hell didn’t want to discuss the routes and targets of their all-day sweep. Since the previous afternoon, when Johnny had briefed the team members, the reporters had been playing cat-and-mouse games, trying to provoke a leak which would tell them where the SWAT team was headed.
Incident at Big Sky Page 12
