‘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 Valentino 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 500 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 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.