Incident at Big Sky
Page 13
Because the team was assembling in the open range foothills, north of the Spanish Peaks, he hoped the press would speculate that the SWAT assault was planned for the Hell Roaring Creek or Indian Ridge area.
In reality, the two choppers would lift the eleven-man team due west, past Cherry Lake and into the wild country north of Cowboy Heaven. In the previous three days, Johnny had received an almost constant stream of new reports concerning the Nicholses’ movements in this area during recent years.
One veteran elk outfitter, Rob Arnold, had reported that Don Nichols had a whole series of caches and gardens up those steep gorges. Once Arnold’s pack horses had gotten loose and had eaten Don’s turnip patch right down to the ground. In retaliation, Don Nichols had burnt Rob’s carefully stacked pile of winter firewood.
Dave Wing was back from fighting the fire in California. He’d given Johnny a thorough briefing on the Nicholses’ suspected routes, camps, and caches. As with the other sources, Dave’s leads all pointed to forested ridges above Cowboy Heaven, and to the densely timbered gorges that dropped steeply into Beartrap Canyon.
One real old-timer from Ennis, Ben Sheffield, told them he’d seen several of Don Nichols’s camps up above the Beartrap. “They’re funny places,” he had said, “sort of like the kind of camp a soldier in a war would make, you know, all hidden in the brush … just like Nichols don’t want no one knowin’ he’s up there.”
The country was a natural fortress. To the west, the massive granite cliffs of Beartrap Canyon stood like a rampart. The only access from this direction was up the nearly vertical ravines of Barn, Fall, and Beartrap Creeks, but these gorges rose almost two thousand feet in less than a mile from the Madison River rapids down in the canyon. In effect, the western wall was sealed by natural obstacles.
To the east, the open parkland of Cowboy Heaven quickly gave way to scrub forest, then thick timber. There were no trails from the summer pastures on the high plateau to the gorges dropping down to the Beartrap. The only access was through the timbered draws and small drainages of the feeder streams. But these routes could be easily blocked by a well-hidden sniper who knew the country. The Nicholses had chosen as their home turf some of the best natural ambush country in Montana.
The more Johnny learned about Don Nichols, the less surprised he was at Nichols’s preoccupation with security and geographic advantage. The guy was what the psychologists called a paranoid. Over the years, Johnny had attended his share of FBI and Law Enforcement Assistance training sessions on a variety of subjects, including psychological profiling of criminals. At the time, he’d found these courses interesting, but not readily applicable to his job in Madison County. He had grown up there and knew several thousand adults in his jurisdiction by their first names. But now those training sessions had some practical advantage. It wasn’t good enough to just say Don Nichols and the boy were “crazy.” You had to try to understand what kind of crazy they were.
Johnny was beginning to understand that Don Nichols was afraid of the normal world, that something bad had happened to Don when he was a little kid, and that this bad event or events—what the shrinks had called severe trauma—had eventually driven the old boy back up into the mountains where he had been happy with his real dad.
Once Don had staked out his territory up there, he did not want anyone trespassing. To keep people out, Johnny speculated, Nichols might have constructed a series of hidden sniper’s nests and observation posts where he could use his “people watchers.” And now events had acquired a kind of inevitable momentum of their own; the SWAT team was saddled up, ready to sweep that stretch of wild high country in the hopes of finding Don Nichols and his son on their home turf.
The night before, during one more nagging encounter with the press, Johnny had been asked about the chances of a shootout, should the SWAT team “flush out the suspects.” He had avoided spilling out his fears, even though the urge to voice his worry had been strong. He had to remember that he might be speaking indirectly to the Nicholses.
“We feel,” Johnny intoned dramatically enough to be certain of being quoted, “that, if they are confronted with a tactical force such as we have, they will surrender.”
The SWAT team, he added, was supported by an FBI-trained professional negotiator, Detective Chuck Newell. Once the team members had cornered their suspects, Chuck would be brought in to talk sense to them. In other words, the searchers had a good combination of resources and a high chance of success.
Obviously, the reporters liked the prospect of a dramatic confrontation in the forest, the wily “mountain men” cornered on a rocky ridge, the cunning, FBI-trained negotiator calling up to them through a bull horn. Such a scenario could last for hours, for days. A young reporter could make his or her career by covering such a hot event.
Johnny could not really blame the reporters. He’d never seen anything like the number of wild rumors and false leads that were mushrooming out of nowhere, often from perfectly normal local citizens. It seemed that men answering the Nicholses’ descriptions had been spotted all over Madison and Gallatin counties, over in Idaho, up in Canada, down in Wyoming, even as far away as upstate New York. His police log was filling up with dozens of such calls. Each one had to be checked, of course, and that was taking a lot of Under Sheriff Gary Dedman’s time.
One thing that Johnny did not want to do was to rile up the press any more than they already were. But, if officers were going to risk being shot up there, he also did not want to go on the record that the morning’s assault was what young Francos would have called “a piece of cake.”
“I think, however,” he concluded softly, gazing full into the camera lenses, “that the possibility of a shootout still exists.”
They bounced across the gray washboard. In the Big Sky minibus, there was just room for Jay, Johnny, and the eleven armed members of the Billings SWAT team. Up ahead, the dark bulk of the Spanish Peaks rose in the pale dawn. No one talked much; each man seemed preoccupied, staring out the misty windows, his automatic rifle gripped between his knees. Their dark green face paint, floppy bonnie hats, and mottled woodland camouflaged fatigues seemed to give them an unreal, television presence. They had become symbols, not people. It was as if they’d shucked off their human skins, and slipped on this standard Green Beret identity. They no longer even had names, Johnny mused, just call signs, “Fat Man” and “Striker,” and the others Johnny had scribbled down, but couldn’t now remember.
Johnny sipped cold coffee from a foam plastic cup as they chattered across this bad patch of road below Finnegan ridge. In half a mile, they’d turn south into National Forest land and the road would be paved again.
In the beautiful, windless dawn, the sky went slowly from mauve to faded eggshell blue. Here in the bottom land of Spanish Creek, the dew was thick on the juniper brush. Mist rose in tendrils from the cottonwoods along the creekbed. Outside, the world was silent, primitive. In the jolting bus, the men sat silently.
They bounced north across the bridge and onto the asphalt road. Abruptly the quiet was broken by the slapping rumble of helicopters. Johnny turned in his seat to see the two choppers cutting left, then angling off in a slow bank to set down directly ahead of them on the widest spot of the blacktop road. As they flared out for touchdown, their rotors blew up fine sprays of dew from the weeds.
At the back of the bus, someone began singing, “Into the air, junior birdmen.…” No one laughed.
Johnny stepped into the chill and stretched his legs, then ducked back into the front seat to grab his hooded hunting parka. One thing about getting so exhausted, it made a person cold, even on a relatively warm morning.
By the time he’d pulled on his parka, the SWAT boys had saddled up their web gear, loaded their weapons, and were standing by in two squads, one of five men, one of six. Johnny did not immediately realize that the men were ready, that there was certainly no reason to wait around here, wasting daylight. Then he saw the grim expressions on their painted faces.
“Good luck,” Johnny called, then pointed his finger at the choppers.
The first squad crouched low and trotted to the helicopters. Within a minute, they were airborne, Murray Duffy in the lead chopper, cutting due west above the brown foothills.
Johnny had his high-band radio raised, but he didn’t know what to say. He’d been too busy getting the first lift off to even think about consulting John Onstad up at the campground. “Choppers away,” he finally managed.
Onstad came back immediately, his voice distorted by the radio. “Johnny, where you at?”
“On the road, with the choppers,” Johnny replied. “Where you at, John?”
“I’m on the road.” Onstad paused, a little exasperated. “On the road where I was supposed to meet you, Johnny … at the campground, with the press.”
“Well …” Johnny noted the frustration in Onstad’s voice. The scene up there was easy to picture. There were seventeen reporters and cameramen, probably suspecting that Onstad had tricked them by acting as a decoy to keep them away from the SWAT team’s actual take-off point. “Well, John,” he repeated. “The choppers landed here. We’re all down here.”
The press did make it down from the campground to document the departure of the second SWAT squad. As Johnny had feared, the event threatened to degenerate into a first-class media circus, and the reporters’ cars and remote vans managed to block the wide level stretch of road that Duffy wanted to use as his runway.
Jay and Johnny had to act as traffic cops for a few minutes, waving cars and vans this way and that. By the time that was sorted out, the frantic cameramen were dashing about, towing their soundmen behind them.
Johnny stood by the open passenger door of Onstad’s car, talking to Murray Duffy on the high-band. He was too busy to take Onstad aside and review the details of the operation, which they had wearily plodded through the night before. And it was also unfortunate, but the reporters seemed to be blaming Onstad for the mix-up. They milled around his open car window, yelling angry questions at him.
At least this took some of the pressure off Johnny. He watched the second squad split into two and clamber aboard the two choppers for the second lift to the jump-off point, ten miles to the west. During the excitement of the press arrival, Johnny had lost some of his anxiety about a possible sniper attack on the SWAT team. Now that fear returned full-blown.
The youngest member of the team was a lanky blond kid with the unmistakable manner of a boy who’d been raised on a ranch. Johnny had managed the Ennis high school rodeo program long enough to recognize the type: an honest, open-faced kid who had plenty of heart and a lot of courage. But this boy had another quality; he was almost a spitting image of Johnny and Sue’s oldest son, J.T.
As the kid strapped himself into the front seat of Duffy’s chopper, he looked up at Johnny, smiled warmly, and shot him a jaunty thumbs up.
Johnny felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He realized it was completely irrational, but he suddenly felt that this kid would be Don Nichols’s first victim this silent morning.
Ten minutes later, the premonition had grown to the point that Johnny simply could not control himself. Even though the original operational plan called for Johnny to monitor the SWAT team’s sweep from the Spanish Creek campground, he had decided that he had to get closer to the action. If the team spooked the Nicholses, he wanted to be close by, so that he could be dropped in there and be the one who took the point.
Onstad and Chuck Newell, the negotiator, were keeping the press occupied on the other side of the car. Off to the left, Murray Duffy was setting down, empty again. The plan was for him to stand by here, while Mark returned to Bozeman in the second chopper.
But Johnny had other plans. No one seemed to notice while he grabbed his rifle and scooted low beneath the rotortips to clamber aboard Murray’s helicopter. A moment later, they were airborne, and Johnny could see the circle of startled faces around Onstad’s car.
He probably should have consulted with Onstad, but that would have meant wading through the press, and besides, something was overpowering his common sense this morning, driving him in a way he’d never known before.
The chopper rose and turned sharply right, to the west, to the Beartrap.
He realized they had a serious problem the moment Murray Duffy pointed out the landing zone (LZ) of the SWAT team’s jump-off point. They had landed and formed up on a grassy ridge surrounded by wooded hills, a piece of country that fit the description of the originally intended landing zone, north of Cowboy Heaven. But this ridge was on private rangeland, at least four miles south and east of the intended jump-off point.
Johnny boiled, giving in to the anger and frustration of the long week. Then he brought his feelings under control. In the misty dawn, the mistake had no doubt been easy enough to make, and he was not sure who had made the call, the pilots or the SWAT team leaders. What mattered was that the men had started their sweep from the wrong position. Their carefully plotted coordinates would all be wrong. Instead of working down the game trails past Rob Arnold’s camp and Don Nichols’s gardens, then on through Cowboy Heaven, the SWAT team would probably end up bushwhacking that thick country around Red Knob.
But he had agreed not to call them except in an emergency, so that the noise of the radio message would not squawk loudly through the forest, possibly provoking a sniper attack.
They set down on a rocky clearing overlooking the hills of the Spanish Creek range. For twenty minutes Johnny monitored static and broken messages passing among Onstad’s people back to the east. But there was nothing from the SWAT team. While they waited, a herd of seventeen bull elk, their antlers all in velvet, grazed out of the pine forest and across the edge of the clearing, no more than fifty yards from them. The animals did not seem disturbed by the presence of the men or their bizarre machine.
Finally, Johnny realized that he wouldn’t be able to contact the men on the ground from this far north. “Murray,” he said, “let’s swing north here, up around the top of the canyon and back to the TV tower.” Maybe, he thought, we can get a sight of them out in the open and risk a call.
Duffy had flown in Vietnam, years earlier than Francos. And Duffy knew ways of hugging the gullies and the canyon walls that would prevent them being seen and also mute the slap of the rotors.
As they dropped into the Cherry Creek draw, Johnny twisted in his seat to get one last look at the country the SWAT team was now sweeping. The sun was up now, and, just as Jay had reported, the day was going to be hot and dry.
Danny Nichols sat in the junipers, his legs open, the butt of his rifle resting easily on his right hip. He breathed slowly, but made no other movement. None.
There were a few flies, but nothing to really bother about. And the sun was hot. But Dad had always told him heat and cold were just mental perceptions, not actual facts.
“You don’t hear a spruce tree or a mule deer complain it’s too hot or cold, do you?” Dad would ask. “No, no, no. People come up here, and they complain. But them kind of people don’t belong here, do they, Danny?”
Those kind of people did not know how to sit so still in the trees that a deer or a whole family of grouse would just walk up and you could grab them, without wasting a bullet. Those kind of people were not patient enough, Dad said. They ran their lives according to the rich man’s clock. They thought sitting still for a few hours, so that the natural rhythm of the forest came back, was some kind of hardship.
The first time Danny’s dad had played the sitting game with him, Danny had gotten impatient, himself. But for the last few seasons at least, he’d gotten better at it than even Dad. And
now, of course, since the trouble with the girl, they weren’t playing games anymore.
Danny sat in the hot brush, moving his eyes, but nothing else, letting his senses sort out the flies and the sun from the information he absorbed through his eyes. That was how the Indians lived, Dad had explained, but white folks have forgotten how.
Well, we haven’t, have we, Dad?
No, Danny, but we’re not like regular white folks.
His eyes now told him that the soldier in the jungle suit, carrying that Vietnam rifle, would pass about ten paces from this clump of brush. The other, taller soldier, that they’d seen earlier, had already moved up the side of the ravine and was no danger. But this one might be a problem.
The man seemed to move pretty good, for one of those people who kept watches and calendars.
The soldier was close enough now for Danny to hear the man’s heavy, puffing breath. He was a big guy, with too much milkshake and french fries fat on him. Dad said all these people were drugged by the poisons the rich men made them eat. It was part of a rotten system, and you couldn’t fight it down there, you had to leave, to travel.
The soldier’s face was red, and all the stupid army war paint had washed away from sweat. But he wasn’t even sweating now, that’s how bad off he was. As the soldier passed the juniper bush, Danny could smell the heat stink. There were white circles of salt on the back of the man’s camouflaged shirt. He’d traveled a long way up here, and he was just about worn out.
It would be a while before he cleared the top of the ravine and joined up with the others. Danny sat in his place, conscious of his rifle, but immune to the flies and heat.
Time doesn’t really exist, Dad had explained. It’s just another artificial concept. A squirrel chattered up the slope. Locusts buzzed. The forest was returning to its natural rhythm.
Danny Nichols waited in his place, fifty paces from his silent father. In the forest, outside time.