The Veteran (42 page)

Max’s finger traced a fine line on the map.

“There’s a small secondary road. Runs from the Billings highway fifteen miles west of here, through the badlands to terminate here at Red Lodge, right at the neck of the Rock Creek defile. We drive them down in trailers through the night, mount up at dawn and go after him. Now I suggest we sleep for four hours and rise at midnight.”

Braddock nodded his agreement.

“One other thing. Major. I’m coming with you and so is Kevin. Time we both saw the end of the man who humiliated me today.”

Sheriff Lewis also had a map, and he had come to similar conclusions. He asked for co-operation from the town of Red Lodge and was promised a dozen mounts, fresh and saddled, for sunup. Jerry would refuel at the same time and be ready for takeoff.

The sheriff checked with the emergency service working on the interstate and was told they would have a clear road by four in the morning. He asked that his own two cars be allowed through first. He could be at Red Lodge by four thirty.

He had no trouble finding volunteers even for a Sunday. Policing a county of peaceable folk can be short of really eventful days, but a true manhunt usually set the adrenalin running. Apart from Jerry above him, he had on call a private pilot with a high-wing spotter plane and would have ten men with him for the ground pursuit. That should be enough for one rider. He stared long and hard at the map.

“Please don’t go into the forest, kid,” he murmured. “You I could be awfully hard to find in there.”

As he was speaking Ben Craig and Whispering Wind made it to the forest line and disappeared into the trees. It was pitch-dark under the canopy of the spruce and lodgepole pine. Half a mile in, Craig made camp. He relieved the tired Rosebud of her saddle, the girl, rifle and blankets. Among the trees Rosebud found a rill of fresh water and juicy pine needles. She began to rest and recover.

The scout lit no fire but Whispering Wind needed none. She curled in the buffalo robe and fell asleep. Craig took his axe and trotted away. He was gone six hours. When he returned he catnapped for an hour, then broke camp. He knew that some where up ahead was the creek where he had delayed the cavalry and the Cheyenne a long time ago. He wanted to cross it and gain the farther bank before his pursuers could come within rifle range.

Rosebud was fresher, if not fully recovered from her marathon of the previous day. He led her by the bridle. Despite her rest the strength was flowing out of her, and they had many miles to go to reach the safety of the peaks.

He marched for an hour, sensing his direction from the stars glimpsed through the treetops. Far away to the east, above the I sacred Black Hills of Dakota, the sun pinked the sky. He came to the first defile across his path, the precipitous gully called West Fork.

He knew he had been here before. There was a way across if only he could find it again. It took an hour. Rosebud drank from the cool water and, slipping and scrabbling for a foothold, they clambered up the far bank to the high ground.

Craig gave Rosebud a further rest and found a hidden place where he could stare down at the creek. He wanted to see how many were coming after him. They would be on fresh horses, that was sure, but something was different. These pursuers had strange metal boxes that flew in the sky like eagles beneath whirling wings and they roared like bull moose in the rut. He had seen these flying boxes over the badlands the day before.

True to their promise the emergency services cleared the interstate for traffic just after four in the morning. Guided by a Highway Patrol officer. Sheriff Lewis’s two cars threaded through the tangle of gridlocked vehicles to the head of the line and set off for Red Lodge fifteen miles to the south.

Eight minutes later they were overtaken by two large off-road trucks travelling at dangerous speed.

“Shall we go after them?” asked the police driver.

“Let them go,” said the sheriff.

The off-roads roared through the waking township of Red Lodge and headed into the canyon where the interstate bordered Rock Creek.

The gulch became narrower and the slopes more vertical, with a clear drop of five hundred feet into the creek on the right-hand side and the sheer face of the wooded mountains on the left. The hairpin bends became tighter and tighter.

The leading vehicle came round the fifth hairpin too fast and too late to see the freshly felled pine lying across the road. The body of the off-road made it to the southern side but the four wheels remained on the north. There were five men in the truck and they had ten legs between them. Four were broken, to which could be added three arms, two collarbones and a dislocated pelvis.

The driver of the second vehicle had a clear choice: to pull right and drop into the creek or pull left into the mountainside.

He pulled left. The mountain won.

Ten minutes later the least injured man was staggering back up the highway to seek help when the first tractor-trailer came round a bend. The brakes were still working perfectly. It stopped in time but jackknifed. Then the trailer, as if in silent protest at these indignities, rolled sedately onto its side.

Sheriff Lewis and his party of seven deputies had arrived in Red Lodge to be met by the local officer with a string of borrowed horses. There were also two Forest Rangers. One of them spread a map over the hood of a car and pointed to the landmarks in the Custer National Forest.

“The forest is bisected, east to west, by this creek, the West Fork,” he said. “This side of the fork there are tracks and campsites for summer visitors. Cross the creek and you are into real wilderness. If your man has done that, we will have to go in there after him. It’s no-vehicle country, which is why we have the horses.”

“How dense is it in there?”

“It’s thick,” said the ranger. “What with the warm weather the broadleaf trees are still in foliage. Then comes the pine forest, then the rock plateau all the way to the high peaks. Can your man survive in there?”

“From what I hear, he was born and raised in the wilderness,” sighed the sheriff.

“Not a problem, we have modern technology,” said the other ranger. “Helicopters, spotter planes, walkie-talkies. We’ll find him for you.”

The party was about to leave the cars and move off when a message came through from the sheriff’s office. It was a patch through from the air traffic controller at Billings Field.

“I have two big helos waiting for take-off,” said the man in the control tower.

He and Sheriff Lewis had known each other for years. They fished trout together, and there are few stronger bonds.

“I’d have let them go but they have been rented by Bill Braddock. They have filed flight plans for Bridger. Jerry says you have a problem down there. Something about the Bar-T wedding? It’s on all the morning news.”

“Stall them. Give me ten minutes.”

“You got it.”

To the waiting helicopter pilots the controller said, “Clearance delayed. We have an incomer joining the circuit.”

Sheriff Lewis recalled Jerry telling him about a skein of armed riders heading south from the ranch in pursuit of the runaways. They would logically have been caught by the darkness far from home and would have spent the night in the open prairie or at Bridger. But if they were recalled to the ranch, why not ride there on rested horses? He asked for a call to another friend, the head of the FAA in Helena. The official came on the line after being woken in his home.

“This had better be good, Paul. I like my Sundays.”

“I have a little problem with two runaways who have decided to head into the Absaroka Wilderness. I’m going in with a party of deputies and a couple of rangers to bring them back. There are some concerned citizens around here who seem to want to turn it into a turkey shoot. And the media will be along later. Could you declare the Wilderness area off limits for today?”

“Sure.”

“There are two helos at Billings Field waiting takeoff.”

“Who’s in the tower at Billings?”

“Chip Anderson.”

“Leave it to me.”

Ten minutes later the helicopters received a call from the tower.

“Sorry about that. The incomer turned away. You are cleared for take-off, subject to the FAA Exclusion Zone.”

“What Exclusion Zone?”

“The whole Absaroka Wilderness up to five thousand feet.”

In matters of air space and in-air safety the word of the Federal Aeronautics Administration is law. The hired pilots had no intention of losing their licences. The engines were switched off and the rotors slowly wound down.

Big Bill Braddock and his remaining ten men had arrived in the pre-dawn along the secondary road that approached Red Lodge from the north-west. Five miles from the town, on the edge of the forest, they unloaded the horses from the trailers, checked their weapons, mounted up and went into the trees.

Braddock also had portable transceivers and was in touch with his radio room at the ranch. As dawn lightened the canopy of trees above the riders he learned he had ten men being stretchered off the interstate in the middle of Rock Creek and another ten stranded at Bridger without air transport to bring them over the fugitives to the rock plateau. The major’s Plans One and Two were history.

“We’ll go get the bastard ourselves,” growled the cattleman.

His son, ill at ease in the saddle, took a swig from his hip flask.

The posse rode into the forest in a quarter-mile-wide chain, scanning the ground for fresh hoof marks. After thirty minutes one of them found the spoor, the marks of Rosebud’s hoofs and, leading them, the footprint of what could have been a moccasin. Using his communicator, he called the others over to join him. After that they followed as a group. A mile behind, Sheriff Lewis and his party rode in.

It took the sharp eyes of the rangers less time, ten minutes.

“How many horses does this man have?” asked one.

“Just the one,” said Lewis.

“There’s more than one set of tracks here,” said the ranger. “I count four at least.”

“Damn the man,” said the sheriff.

He used his transceiver to call his office and ask for a phone-through to Counsellor Valentine at his private home.

“My client is profoundly worried for this young lady’s safety, Sheriff Lewis. He may have mounted a search party. I assure you he is entirely within his rights.”

“Counsellor, if any harm comes to these young people, if either of them is killed, I’m going to be looking at murder in the first. You just tell your client that.”

He switched off before the lawyer could protest.

“Paul, this guy has kidnapped a girl and he does have a rifle,” murmured the senior deputy, Tom Barrow. “Seems we may have to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.”

“There’s a mass of statements that the girl jumped on his horse,” snapped Lewis. “I do not want to blow some kid away for a mess of broken glass.”

“And two kicks in the face.”

“All right, and two kicks in the face.”

“And a prairie fire, and a closedown of the interstate.”

“All right, the list’s getting a bit long. But he’s up there alone with a pretty girl, an exhausted horse and a rifle dated 1852. Oh yes, and a bow and arrow. We have all the technology, he has none. Keep a sense of proportion. And keep following those tracks.”

Ben Craig lay invisible in the undergrowth and watched the first horsemen arrive at the creek. From five hundred yards he could pick out the towering figure of Big Bill Braddock and the much smaller one of his son, who squirmed in the saddle to ease the chafing of his backside. One of the men beside Braddock was not in western clothes but in camouflage uniform, jungle boots and beret.

They did not have to scout around for the path down the 347 steep slope to the water, nor the path on which to scramble up the other side. They had simply followed Rosebud’s tracks, as he knew they would. Whispering Wind could not walk in her silken slippers, and Rosebud could not conceal her tracks in soft ground.

He watched them make their descent into the bubbling clear water and there pause to drink and splash their faces in relief.

No-one heard the arrows and no-one saw where they came from. By the time they had emptied their rifles into the trees above the far bank, the bowman was gone. Soft-footed and trackless, he slipped through the forest to his horse and his girl and led them on and upwards towards the peaks.

The arrows had found their marks, entering soft flesh, penetrating to the bone and snapping off the flint tips. Two men were down, yelling in pain. Max, the Vietnam veteran, raced up the southern bank, threw himself flat and scanned the undergrowth into which the attacker had vanished. He saw nothing. But if the man had still been there his covering fire would have protected the party in the creek.

Braddock’s men helped the injured back up the way they had come. They screamed all the way.

“We’ll have to get them out of here, boss,” said one of the bodyguards. “They need hospitalization.”

“All right, let them mount up and go,” said Braddock.

“Boss, they can’t mount up. And they can’t walk.”

There was no help for it but to cut branches and make two litters. When this was done another four men were needed to carry the poles of the makeshift stretchers. With six men and an hour lost, the Braddock party reassembled on the far bank, protected by the gun of Major Max. The four carriers began to tramp back through the forest. They did not know a travois would have been easier and saved more manpower.

The sheriff had heard the fusillade and feared the worst. But in this density of cover it would have been foolish to gallop for ward for fear of meeting a bullet from the other party. They met the stretcher-carriers coming back down the trail created by so many horses.

“What the hell happened to them?” asked the sheriff. The Braddock soldiers explained.

“Did he get away?”

“Yep. Major Max got across the creek but he was gone.”

The stretcher-bearers continued back towards civilization and the sheriff’s posse hurried forward to the creek.

“And you guys can wipe those smiles off your faces,” snapped the sheriff, who was fast losing patience with the young woodsman somewhere up ahead of him. “No-one is going to win this fight with bows and arrows. For God’s sake, it’s 1977.”