ELEVEN

BILLY DEGAN DRESSED QUICKLY in camouflage shirt and pants, pulled up his olive-colored socks, and laced his black military boots one rung from the top. They’d talked one more time the night before about wearing body armor, but it was going to be a scorcher that day, a long hot one under the relentless August sun. Besides, if things went badly, the vests they brought weren’t likely to stop the kinds of bullets Randy Weaver and his family would fire.

This was the way Degan spent much of his adult life, waking up in some out-of-the-way place, putting on cammies, and heading out in the field, preparing to catch the worst of it. It was tough on his wife, Karen, and his two teenage boys, but it was just what he’d always done. A Marine from 1972 to 1975 and still a member of the Reserves, Degan had joined the marshals service in 1978 and immediately volunteered for the SOG team. He was singled out because of his military training and unflappable personality and was always called upon for the most dangerous and sensitive missions. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989, he led a SOG mission to St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands, quelling riots and keeping an eye on the local police, who were randomly looting homes and businesses. For his leadership, he was given the highest honor a deputy marshal could receive, the attorney general’s Distinguished Service Award. The next year, he was given the Marshals Service Director’s Special Achievement Award for rounding up fugitives during a drug crackdown in Washington, D.C.

Degan knew that Coop was backing away from the Special Operations Group, backing slowly out of the life. Degan was nearing retirement, and it had to be tempting for him, too—spend more time with his wife in the neighborhood where he’d grown up, coach his kids’ hockey teams, throw down a couple of beers, and keep an eye on the neighbors’ houses when they went out of town. But for now, he was still in the middle of the life, and even though this wasn’t officially a SOG mission, it was one of the strangest and most challenging jobs he’d ever been on.

Bill Degan put his Camel Club lighter and a pack of Kool cigarettes into his pants pocket, next to his remaining spending money, three one-hundred dollar bills, a ten, and three ones. At the sink, he filled his camouflage canteen with water. His digital watch showed 2:30 a.m.

Degan stepped outside the condo, into thin, mountain air. The night sky was cloudless, the stars in the east just starting to fade before the suggestion of sunrise. The other deputies were coming out of the condo in the same standard-issue camouflage clothing and loading supplies into the two rigs. They loaded green canvas bags filled with cameras, film, batteries, medical equipment, night-vision goggles, ammunition, and all the machine guns. They left the sniper rifle behind.

Cooper had slid a yellow T-shirt over his cammies, and the other guys followed suit, so that locals who saw them driving toward the cabin wouldn’t make them for federal agents. They tested their radios one more time, the tiny earpieces in place, mouthpieces in place, the sheriff—the switch and wire that keys the microphone—slung down their sleeves and bound with rubber bands to their wrists. Satisfied, they split up, climbed into the blue minivan and the white Jeep Cherokee, and started on their way, into the heavy darkness that precedes dawn. Roderick eased the white Jeep down the winding mountain road to the highway, the minivan following closely. At the highway, they turned north and drove through pastures and forest, strobed by the moonlit shadows of deep timber and steep hillsides. They left the van at Sheriff Whittaker’s house in Bonners Ferry, piled into the Cherokee and headed back through the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. They crossed the Ruby Creek Bridge in the dark, their headlights catching the root-lined banks of the narrow dirt road.

At the Raus’ house, still a mile from the Weaver cabin, the deputy marshals pulled off the road, slid their night-vision goggles over their camouflage masks, grabbed their machine guns, and started out on foot. Through his goggles, Degan’s first views of Ruby Ridge were glowing and eerie, like watching a black-and-white television through an aquarium. The wooded brush was thick, and the deputies stuck to the rough access road, following Roderick, who had been up the mountain two dozen times already and who best knew the mission and the bluff they were approaching.

They walked quickly up the eroded dirt road, almost a mile below the Weaver cabin, until they came to a Y, where the trail split into two legs, one veering up a hillside across from the Weaver cabin, the other winding up Ruby Ridge and ending at the Weaver driveway. Roderick, Cooper, and Degan headed straight; Hunt led the other two camouflaged agents up the other trail, to watch the cabin from the other hillside. Roderick’s group walked under a canopy of fir and tamarack trees, into a field of waist-high weeds and a thinning forest. For the first time, they could see the crown of rocks behind which the cabin was built.

Roderick pointed to one of the outcroppings, from where the family could see anything coming up the road or the driveway. “That’s where they respond to when a car approaches,” Roderick said. They crept around the wooded hillside, Roderick pointing out other areas: the fern field, the lower garden area, good places for watching the house, good spots for snipers. The sun was starting to come up and so they took off the night-vision goggles and backed down the hill again. At the Y where the two trails met, Roderick led Degan and Cooper on the trail toward the observation post, where the other three deputies were waiting for the family to come outside so they could photograph them. The sun was climbing in the sky—closing on 9 a.m.—but clouds were blowing in from the southwest, slipping over the Casçade Range and into nearby eastern Washington. As they walked, the deputy marshals talked into their microphones about spots with good vantages of the family, places where snipers could hide later. At the hillside surveillance post, they held up binoculars and spotter scopes to watch the family—like viewing a play from balcony seats a quarter mile away. Sam, a rifle in his hand, patrolled the compound, and later Kevin joined him. Hunt adjusted the enhancer on the 600-mm camera lens and fired off pictures that froze the family forever on their last peaceful morning: Sam and Kevin, rifles at their shoulders, talking in the clearing past the outhouse; Randy, who had shaved his hair off like a skinhead, walking with Striker; Rachel walking to the outhouse. Each family member had a code name that corresponded with smoke jumpers; that way, if anyone found the deputies’ radio channel, they might think they’d come across traffic from state firefighters. And so, when Vicki walked outside the cabin and started pacing—like some ghost in her long, white nightgown—Hunt fired off pictures and said into the radio that he saw “the assistant crew chief.”

At about 9 a.m., Roderick, Cooper, and Degan backed away from the ridge, where Hunt and the others were hiding, sneaked back down the road to a stand of birch trees, and slid back into the woods to get even closer to the house. Degan moved behind a rock 200 yards from the cabin, and Roderick and Cooper edged in behind a tree fifty yards closer. They were separated from the cabin by a crease in the two hills, a low spit between their vantage point and the cabin’s.

“I want to see what the dogs will respond to,” Cooper said.

Roderick grabbed a baseball-size rock and threw it into the wash between them and the cabin, but it plunked down harmlessly and the dogs didn’t alert. He tried again. Still, nothing. They spent about twenty minutes there, watching the cabin, and then they backed away from the closest observation post and began walking down the hill. They moved along the tree line, and Roderick pointed out places to hide snipers during the undercover phase of Northern Exposure. By 10:45 a.m., they were done for the day and were walking down the hill to meet the other deputies at the Y in the road when the radio crackled.

VICKI WEAVER STOOD in her white nightgown, framed by the doorway, looking out over the trees that surrounded their cabin. At night, they tied one of the smaller dogs down at the garden, to keep the deer away, and that morning, Sammy—lightly freckled, with a slight overbite, his hair shaved to a quarter of an inch—walked down there and brought it back up. It was about 8:00 a.m., and the family was getting on with the business of a normal day. They took turns walking to the outhouse and then grabbed breakfast when they were ready. That morning, it was potatoes and fried eggs.

Vicki’s long black hair fell to the middle of her back as she crouched down with Elisheba, who was learning to walk. She would make it five or ten feet before tumbling cheerfully over. She was teething, too, and she fussed a little as Vicki rocked and nursed her. The older children began their daily unscheduled routine of chores and playing. The weather had been in the nineties for more than a week now, but the nights were cooling off, and Vicki hoped the long, sweltering summer was about to break. The herbs and vegetables couldn’t take much more sun.

The Weaver kids dressed and took their turns in the outhouse. Kevin had stayed with the Weavers for a couple of weeks, but he was about ready to leave for a farming job in Washington State. He’d been to Spokane earlier in the month, and his mom had been worried that Kevin would be in danger with the militant Weavers.

“Mom, don’t worry,” Kevin had said. “Nobody’s going to shoot anybody.”

He woke up that morning on the porch, rolled up his sleeping bag, and talked with Sammy about working on the cabin they were building. He shared a smoke outside with Randy, their rifles resting on their shoulders or under their arms as they talked. Randy came out first in a flannel shirt but went inside and changed to camouflage, a holstered pistol on his waist, a shotgun in his arms. The dogs had been yapping all morning, and Vicki yelled at them to shut up.

A little before eleven, Sammy and Kevin walked out of the cabin with their rifles and began strolling down the driveway, Striker running in front of them. Sara walked a few steps behind them, and Randy ran out of the house to catch up to the kids, his feet slapping on the packed-dirt driveway. Rachel came last, skipping, a rifle over each shoulder. Near the base of the driveway, Striker alerted on something, a cold bark that meant he’d caught a whiff, just enough to send him nosing off into the woods, half-interested in whatever he’d found. Randy, Sam, and Kevin walked quickly after the dog, as they always did. This time, Randy said later, he hoped the dog was chasing a deer or an elk. It would be valuable meat for the long winter ahead.

With the shotgun under his short, sinewy arms, Randy ran along the dirt road that traced the top of the steep, forested meadow. “You cut down,” he called to Kevin and Sammy. “I’ll take the logging road.” Kevin cradled his bulky 30.06 hunting rifle as he jogged through the field grass, down the hill. Sammy, not even five feet tall and eighty pounds, ran with his lightweight .223 assault-style rifle, a.357-caliber handgun on his waist, jumping rocks and fallen branches as if he was playing war.

From the rock outcropping near the cabin, Vicki watched Sara and Rachel walk back up the driveway and saw Randy and the boys chase the dog until they were out of sight. She listened for a second—always concerned when one of the dogs started in—but then she turned and walked back to the cabin, bent over and picked up a rock, and casually kicked at the summer dust.

DAVE HUNT HAD FINISHED putting his camera equipment away and had gone for a little walk to see where Mark Jurgensen should build his undercover cabin. He came back and was watching the Weaver cabin over the shoulders of Frank Norris and Joe Thomas—the three marshals standing in a line—when he saw Kevin, Sam, and Sara walk off the knob and down the hill, probably to work on Kevin’s cabin. Hunt saw Randy run after them, followed by little Rachel. Vicki walked back toward the cabin.

“There’s a vehicle!” Thomas said into the radio.

Hunt listened. He didn’t hear anything. Then he heard the dog bark, and the family began running down the hill. God, no. “They are responding,” he said into the radio. “They are responding.”

“Give me a body count!” Roderick called back on the radio. Thomas answered him. Only Vicki was walking back to the cabin; all the others could be coming toward the marshals.

Dave Hunt had done enough ‘coon and rabbit hunting to know when a dog got a hot trail. When the barks picked up in intensity, he began to get nervous. This couldn’t happen on his case. “Get the hell out of there,” he muttered to himself. It was probably no more than five minutes, but to Dave Hunt, it seemed to take hours, Roderick calling his position in to them, the dog’s bark getting farther from Hunt and—it figured—closer to Roderick, Degan, and Cooper.

“DOG’S COMING! Pull back!” At first, Roderick thought they could take cover, and he slid behind a tree and looked back up the hill, where he saw Striker, with Kevin Harris running behind the big yellow Lab, break over the top of the hill, one hundred yards away, aiming straight for them. He realized it could all be coming down right then, but he also thought they could still get away without a gunfight. Torn with adrenaline and fear, the deputies ran alongside the logging road, from one stand of trees to another, twigs and branches crackling under their footsteps and the woods full of confusion. They stopped and turned several times, covered each other, and hoped the dog would turn back.

Instead, the dog was gaining on them. The Weavers usually stayed at the rock outcropping; why were they coming so far down the hill?

“We’ve got to take this dog out,” Roderick said. “He’s leading everybody to us.”

Over his shoulder, Cooper saw flashes of yellow between the trees, shadows and movement behind the dog that he took for people. Ahead, he realized they’d have to run through a clearing before they reached the next stand of trees. They’d be wide open for fire from above. He realized that he and his buddies might not get away.

“This is bullshit,” Cooper said into his radio headset. “We’re going to run down the trail and get shot in the back. We need to get into the woods.” The dog barked and bayed and still chased them. The marshals fanned out and stopped in the woods, breathing heavily and listening for the rustling of brush and timber. They hopscotched down the hill, shuffling sideways and taking turns as the last in line, covering the retreat of the others.

Cooper told the others to go ahead a little bit and he would take care of the dog if it got too close. He had the 9-mm machine gun with the silencer, and he hoped the Weavers wouldn’t hear the metallic clank when he took the dog out. Roderick and Degan made it to the canopied tree line while Cooper continued running sidestep, keeping an eye on the trees where he could hear the dog barking and the crackle of men running behind it. Then it all seemed to happen at once, Cooper seeing someone on the higher trail, the one above them, and the realization that they had fallen into an ambush. He yelled at the man on the upper trail, “Back off! U.S. marshal!” Roderick saw him, too, and yelled at him. Cooper heard the dog bark, turned, and saw it growling at him. He pointed his rifle at the dog, but it ran right past him toward Roderick. Cooper didn’t shoot the dog, and when he looked back at the trail, Randy Weaver was running away.

In his peripheral vision, Cooper saw Degan duck into the woods and so he ran behind him. Thirty or forty feet inside the tree line, Degan jumped behind a big stump. Near him, Cooper spied a hole protected by a rock, and he dove into it. The dog was still barking, and Kevin—dressed all in black—and Sammy—in jeans and a flannel shirt—were walking along the trail, coming closer, almost to them. From his stump, Degan saw Kevin and Sam—who was the same age as his youngest boy—walk right past them. When the boys were past, Cooper relaxed a little, thinking they might be safe.

And then several things happened in rapid, foggy succession—the dog moved toward Roderick, Degan rose on his knee to identify himself, and in a thicket of who-shot-first stories, both sides agreed that everything just went to hell.

IT HIT RANDY as he ran back toward the cabin: They had run smack into a Zionist Occupied Government ambush. He had been at the fork in the logging road when a man covered head to toe in camouflage clothing had stepped out from behind a tree and yelled something at him.

“Fuck you!” Randy Weaver had yelled back. He had run about eighty yards back up the road, toward the cabin when he heard the first shots—sharp cracks echoing through the timber. Sammy and Kevin were down there!

“Sam! Kevin! Get home!” He fired a round in the air from his 12-gauge, double-barrel shotgun. He loaded another shell, but he was too eager and he pushed it in too far and jammed the shotgun. He drew his 9-mm handgun and squeezed off three more rounds. “Sam! Kevin!”

He heard his boy’s voice. “I’m comin, Dad!” There were more shots down the hill, someone yelling, a burst from all directions, like the air was being torn in half.

KEVIN HARRIS WHEELED AND FIRED his 30.06, hitting Billy Degan square in the chest.

Larry Cooper saw his friend knocked backward and saw his arm fly up like a kid asking a question in school. He laid a line of fire right back at Kevin Harris, who fell like a sack of potatoes.

“Coop, Coop, I need you.”

“I’ll be there, Billy, as soon as I get ‘em off our ass. Hang with me.” He squeezed the switch on his hand and called for Roderick in his radio. “Get up here, Artie! Billy’s been hit!”

But Roderick had his own problems just down the trail. The dog had run up to him, and Roderick had shot it in the back so it wouldn’t lead the family to them. Sammy had appeared in front of him, saw that Striker had been shot, and yelled, “You son of a bitch!” Sammy had fired at Roderick. Another round of fire seemed to come from the woods and Roderick dove and bounced, feeling something graze his stomach, just as a bullet tore through his shirt and came within a breath of hitting his chest. The shots seemed to come at him from all directions.

Up the hill, Cooper fired another barrage, darted over the brush, and found Degan a few feet behind the stump he’d chosen for cover, lying on his side, his left arm still in the sling of his machine gun, his right hand up in the air. Cooper cradled his friend, who looked up at him with misting eyes and made a couple of chewing motions and gurgling sounds.

“Come on, Billy, help me and we can get behind the rocks and we can take care of this.” Cooper kicked his pack off and threw it into the brush. He had to stop the bleeding somehow. He felt with his left hand for the entry wound but couldn’t find it, so he started dragging his friend back to safety. Degan wouldn’t budge. It was quiet and still for a moment, just the last traces of smoke, the awful echo of gunfire.

Billy pointed to his mouth, which was full of blood, and Cooper remembered that his father had done the same thing right before he died, only a few months before. Coop pulled Billy close. He put two fingers on the side of his neck, found the carotid artery, and felt the last three beats of his best friend’s heart.

VICKI WEAVER HEARD THE GUNFIRE just as she made it back to the plywood house, the place that Yahweh had shown her might be safe from all this.

There was gunfire in the woods all the time. Those who lived up there didn’t even flinch at a few rifle shots on a late summer morning. But these reports sounded different, volleys cracking and popping and echoing along the walls of the ridge, and there were so many, it was clear more than one gun was being fired.

Sara heard the shots and the yelling, grabbed her .223, and ran to the rock outcropping. Vicki and Rachel joined her, watching the woods frantically. A few minutes later, Randy broke through the tree line, panting and afraid.

“What happened?” Vicki yelled.

“We run into an ambush!”

And then Kevin came through the trees and up the driveway, wailing and shaking so much, Randy didn’t recognize him.

“That’s not Kevin!” Randy yelled.

“Yes it is!” he cried.

“Where’s Sam?”

Kevin didn’t want to tell them.

“Did you see Sam?”

“Sam’s dead.”

And then, Randy would remember, the family just went “plumb nutty.”

AT THE OBSERVATION POST, the other three deputies heard screaming, heard someone yell “U.S. marshal,” and then a loud pop. A few seconds later, there were a couple more shots, and Norris and Joe Thomas turned to Hunt. “Let’s go,” Hunt said.

They began running through the woods to the base of the hill. They heard more gunfire down below—six, maybe seven shots—and then Roderick came over Hunt’s radio. “Dave, get Frank down here! Billy’s been hit! He’s hurt bad!” Hunt worked with his radio as he ran, trying to get a forest service channel. “Mayday!” he called. But he couldn’t raise anyone, and the other two deputies passed him while he fiddled with the radio.

Norris, the medic, didn’t know the hill very well, and he turned back to Hunt. “Dave, you gotta get me down there.”

“I know.” They made it to the fern field below the Weaver cabin, puffing and gasping. Hunt crashed through the deep brush, protecting his face with his arm. And then a barrage of rifle fire cracked around them, Hunt saw the other two deputies go down and figured they’d been hit. The only one without a machine gun, Hunt dropped to his knee with his 9-mm pistol and looked for a puff of smoke to show him where the shots had come from. But he didn’t see anything. He rose, saw the other two were okay, motioned them ahead, and followed along the trail into the heavier brush and trees.

They strode toward the Y in the road, tense, their weapons pointed in front of them. Hunt was in the lead again, moving too quickly, his pistol braced at eye level, like a TV cop. Near a stand of trees, the camouflaged Larry Cooper rose up on one knee and motioned the others off the trail and into the woods.

Inside the trees, Frank Norris immediately saw Degan on his back, facing the trail, his head rolled back, eyes slightly open and glazed over. Norris dropped down next to Degan, pulled a twig from his open mouth, inserted an airway in his throat to keep the passage open, and gave him two quick breaths of CPR. Degan’s blood-filled lungs gurgled with the bursts of air, and Norris tried to find a pulse. Nothing. The medic ripped open Degan’s shirt and saw a nickel-size hole between his chest and his collarbone. There was no blood on the outside of the wound. He rolled Degan over and saw that his back was covered in blood. The shot had gone right through him.

“Dave, get Billy and drag him over here,” Cooper said.

“Give Frank a few more seconds,” Hunt said.

Norris shook his head and keyed his radio. “Billy’s gone.” He picked Degan’s wire-frame glasses off the ground and found a marshal’s badge hanging on a low tree limb.

Norris and Hunt dragged Degan over behind a rock and then kept their guns trained on the tree line in front of them. They circled around Degan’s body, protecting it. Later, in court, Cooper and Roderick would testify about what had happened: Degan stepped out and said, “Freeze, U.S. marshal” and identified himself with his badge. Then Kevin Harris just turned and shot him in the chest, without provocation. Cooper fired back, dropping Harris. Farther down the hill, Roderick said that after the shooting started, he turned and shot the dog to keep anyone else from finding their position. And then both sides had fired back and forth.

Now, lying with Degan’s body in the woods just off the trail, they agreed someone needed to go for help. “I’m staying with Billy,” Cooper said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Roderick said.

“Dave, you’ve got to get some help.”

Hunt didn’t want to go, but Cooper insisted. “Nobody knows how to get out of here except you. Take Frank with you.”

Hunt said Norris should stay, in case they needed a medic. “I’ll take Joe with me.”

Just then, a woman screamed on the hill above them like a siren: “Yahweh! Yahweh!” A man yelled: “You son of a bitch!” and what sounded like a child’s voice: “You tried to kill my daddy!” Cooper figured they’d found Kevin’s body, right where he’d dropped him. “I guess Kevin bit the bullet,” he said to Roderick. There was another round of gunfire. And then more eerie screams, most of them indecipherable, except: “Stay the fuck off our land!”

THE FAMILY WAILED AND FIRED their guns in the air. Randy just kept reloading and firing, until Vicki stopped him and then they just cried and yelled. The bastards had killed their only son.

Kevin’s recollection of events was completely different from the marshals’. Kevin, back at the cabin, explained that he and Sammy had been chasing the dog, when a man camouflaged from head to toe stepped out of the woods and shot the dog in the back. And then Sammy lost it. “You killed my dog, you son of a bitch!” he yelled. Sammy fired at the marshals, one of whom opened up on him, hitting his right arm and practically tearing it off at the elbow. “Oh shit!” Sammy had screamed and turned to run away, but the marshals kept firing at him, so Kevin had wheeled and shot one of the marshals to protect Sammy. Another marshal had shot at Kevin, just missing him. But as Sammy ran away, one of the marshals shot at him and a bullet tore through his back and dropped him face first on the trail. Kevin scrambled to his feet, turned, and ran back to Sammy’s body. He couldn’t find a pulse so he ran back to the house.

Randy and Vicki sobbed as they walked down the trail and found Sammy’s body. They called for Kevin to help them. Randy picked the boy up. He was so light. They carried him into the birthing shed, stripped his clothes off, cleansed his body, and covered it with a sheet. They prayed over Sam, cried, prayed to Yahweh, and tried to contain their anger. They crouched with their rifles on the rocks for a while, waiting for the other marshals to come finish them off.

DAVE HUNT BARRELED THROUGH heavy brush and timber, over fallen trees and scarred ground. He didn’t want to run on the trail because he was afraid Randy was above it, waiting to pick them off as they ran away. Finally, after running forty-five minutes through heavy forest, Hunt and Joe Thomas broke through the woods into Homicide Meadow, near the Raus’ cabin. Ruth Rau was standing on the porch, and from the road, Dave Hunt yelled at her: “Call 911! Get the sheriff!” She disappeared into the house, and Hunt climbed the steps to her log cabin, exhausted. Thomas took up a position on the road, in case Weaver’s friends came barreling up to help him or in case the family tried to get away.

Inside the cabin, Hunt tried to catch his breath as Ruth Rau thrust the telephone into his hands. “Get your kids and get out of here,” he said to Ruth. He quickly told the sheriff’s dispatcher what had happened: “I got one officer dead. I got more pinned down. I need help quick. I want the state police. I want all the help that I can get! I gotta go back in for more officers that are trapped.”

Then Hunt dialed the marshals headquarters in Washington, D.C. He tried to outline the problem as professionally as possible. “This is Operation Northern Exposure. We got one dead, others stuck on mountain.” The marshals dispatcher was confused, and Hunt nearly lost it. “I need to talk to somebody who cares, right away!”

Tony Perez got on the phone, and Hunt was never so relieved. Perez was the one they all emulated, the steady and quiet leader of the enforcement division, a man with all the qualities that made a good deputy marshal, the qualities Billy Degan had. But even Perez sounded flustered as Hunt explained what had happened. There was a firefight, he explained. The marshals had been ambushed, and the other guys were up there with Degan’s body still. But, Hunt said, he hadn’t heard any gunfire for quite a while.

“Dave, I want you to stay on the line,” Perez said, while he and Duke Smith, the deputy director of operations, fired up the marshals service crisis center and began notifying Justice Department officials. When federal agents passed on what had happened, they said the marshals were “pinned down” and “receiving fire.” That version of events would continue to make the rounds at the Justice Department and would have tragic consequences.

In Boise, meanwhile, Hunt’s marshal colleagues took a harried report from him, misunderstood some of it, and filed an affidavit for arrest warrants on all the adults in the Weaver cabin, saying they’d fired from a pickup truck at the deputy marshals.

For hours, the breathless Hunt talked on the phone, repeating what had happened and what was new. “Local sheriff has SWAT team on the way to the scene, which is no longer taking fire,” Hunt said. “Team was trying to pull out when Weaver’s dog alerted. Team drew multiple volleys of fire from the house. Degan was struck in the chest. Return fire killed one of Weaver’s dogs. The rest of the team is still located in the mountains, but not under fire, unable to withdraw without exposing themselves to hostile fire.”

He urged the brass to set up a plan to get the other guys out of the woods. The marshals officials wanted to move slowly, cautiously, and they hinted that perhaps the surviving deputies should pull back, leaving Degan’s body for the time being.

But Hunt was a Marine, and Degan was a Marine, and Marines don’t leave their dead behind. He also knew that he could never get Roderick and Cooper to leave the body. That won’t work, Hunt said. By late afternoon, state and federal officers began showing up in the Raus’ meadow, and Hunt was ready to go up and rescue his colleagues. A sheriff’s deputy and a couple of border patrol agents wanted to fill a four-wheel-drive Jeep with tires, for protection, drive up the hill and bring the deputies down. But at headquarters, Tony Perez and his boss, Duke Smith, wanted to move slowly, didn’t want any more casualties. Up the hill, Roderick concurred. For all they knew, the family could have them completely surrounded and might be waiting to gun down whoever came up there.

At the Raus’ cabin, Dave Hunt tried to stay calm. In between phone calls, he paced and smoked on Ruth Rau’s porch, talked to Roderick, Cooper, and Norris on their fading radios, and stared off into the woods, wishing he could do something. There was gunfire in the distance, across the valley, and Hunt figured they didn’t have much time before Weaver supporters stormed the mountain. In fact, one of Sammy’s skinhead friends tried to get through the meadow with his mom, and Hunt sent them back. Hours passed, and Hunt was going crazy.

Finally, with the sun going down, the ten-man Idaho State Police Crisis Response Team showed up, ready to begin the extraction. Joe Thomas begged to lead the team up there and said they needed to bring someone with them who knew the way. Finally, the SWAT commander agreed. Thomas—who had been up there only once himself—turned to Hunt and asked, “When I get up there, which way do I go?” After gathering the right equipment and a short briefing by Hunt and Thomas, the CRT left the meadow. It was almost 9:30 p.m.

Hunt ran in, got on the phone, and told headquarters that the SWAT team was on its way. The official on the other end of the phone said they’d reconsidered and wanted them to hold off on the rescue mission. Still assuming the deputies were under fire, they said they wanted to wait until they had an armored personnel carrier to get their men out.

Hunt walked outside to see if he could still call the CRT team back. It was dark now, and there were dozens of officers just waiting around. Hunt told a couple of marshals that headquarters wanted the CRT to wait. “You tell ‘em to go to hell, Dave,” one of the retired marshals said.

ON THE MOUNTAIN, the afternoon turned cold, the clouds moved in, the temperature plummeted, and the rains started. The batteries for the team’s radios were going dead, and Cooper, Norris, and Roderick had trouble picking up Dave Hunt. They crouched in the heavy brush, buffeted by icy rain, their muscles strained and cramping, exhausted from being constantly on guard. Cooper didn’t know how much longer they could make it.

“Dave,” he rasped into his radio. “If you don’t have someone up here by four-thirty, we’re picking Billy up and moving out.”

They didn’t take any more fire, but that afternoon, an airplane flew over and the deputies thought they heard gunfire from the top of the hill. There was still no help at 4:30, so the three marshals tried to carry Degan’s body down through the forest. But he was wet and slippery, the brush was matted and thick, and weighed down by wet, heavy clothes, Degan’s 200-plus pounds wouldn’t budge. They took off his belt, tied it around his chest, and tried to drag him to the trail. That didn’t work either. Drenched with rain and sweat, they put plastic cuffs on Degan’s wrists to keep his arms from dragging the ground and slowing them down. Cooper tried to reach under Degan’s shoulder to pick him up, but he felt the hole in his buddy’s back, and his hand came back covered with blood. He was afraid that if they kept trying to carry Billy to the trail, they were going to pull his arm right off. They pushed and pulled his body closer to the trail, hid him in some brush, and collapsed on top of him in the rain, waiting for help.

“IT’S CRUMMY WEATHER,” Vicki said between sobs. “We better get inside.” In the cabin, Randy, Vicki, Kevin, Sara, and Rachel cried, prayed, and talked about what had happened. Even though the marshals had shot Sammy, Kevin said, he was sorry he had had to kill one of them. But for the most part, the family was angry. The ZOG bastards had ambushed them! They kept an eye out for more troops, and Sara expected, any moment, to see an army come up the driveway and begin blasting at them. They could see trucks and cars in the valley and could hear the rumble of engines everywhere, pinballing off the canyons and foothills, which distorted the noise so that it sounded as if the rigs were right on top of them.

Most of the day, they were too grief-stricken to do anything, but finally the family started gathering blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags and laying them out on the floor. They started bringing food and fresh water into the house and preparing for the attack. But what were they going to do without Sammy? There was no talk of surrender. The agents from the shadow government had started this war and—even if they let the family live—now they would frame Kevin and the Weavers for murder, just like they’d framed Randy on the gun charge. More likely, the government would just gun them all down, the way they’d killed Sammy, with a bullet in his back as he ran away.

Mixed in with the anger, Sara Weaver was afraid. Every noise hit her like a shock of electricity, and every creak of the flimsy cabin made her think of the end. And, just when she got the anger under control and could face the fear, she’d think of Sammy and start crying again.

After wailing and yelling in the afternoon, Vicki was quiet and ashen-faced, distant. She and Sammy had been especially close, and Sara watched her mom climb the narrow staircase up to the sleeping loft with Elisheba. That night, Randy, Kevin, and the girls checked their guns, watched out the windows, grieved over Sam’s death, and prepared to be surrounded. Vicki—whose visions had led them to this place and who had only ever wanted to protect her family—crawled into bed and stayed there all night, holding her baby and her Bible.

IT’S THE WAY seasons changed in North Idaho, not gradually, but like someone slamming a door. A day that started August-sunny had become wet, windy, and cold, and Cooper and Roderick were already miserable by the time the rain began to freeze and turn to a wet snow that covered the ground with a white, watery sheen. At 9:26 p.m., almost eleven hours after the first shots were fired, the Idaho State Critical Response Team finally left the Raus’ meadow to bring the deputies in from the forest. In cloud-covered darkness, with Joe Thomas in the lead, each member of the state team put his hand on the shoulder of the guy in front of him and moved slowly through the wet, black woods. Only two of the ten Critical Response Team members had night-vision goggles, and they tried to guide the others up the mountain.

It took them two hours to travel the same distance Hunt and Thomas had run in forty-five minutes. When they reached the exhausted deputies, they were huddled together in a triangle, lying across Degan’s body, pointed away from each other and keeping their eyes on the woods around them. The deputy marshals held out a small infrared penlight, visible only to someone wearing night-vision goggles.

“There they are!” said one of the CRT members.

Roderick told one of the Idaho state police officers what had happened. “I shot the dog,” he said. The CRT posted sentries on the trail while they worked on getting the deputies out.

The state police officers tried to push Degan into the canvas bag—called a jungle stretcher—and Cooper stepped in to help, even though he was tired and cramping. Degan was bigger than any of the men trying to move his body. He was lying downhill on a steep piece of ground and rigor mortis had left his arm cocked up by his head. The men couldn’t get a good enough hold on him to get him in the bag. Finally, they loaded him. When the state police tried to carry the jungle stretcher, Cooper stepped in and grabbed the straps on one end. Degan was going down the mountain the same way he came up, with his best friend.

But several times, the wet, overloaded canvas stretcher slipped, and Degan slid out onto the ground. Finally, they put him in another body bag and finished carrying him down the trail. It was slow and torturous, but the drained Cooper refused to allow anyone else to carry the front of the body bag. They reached the meadow forty-five minutes after midnight.

“I need an ambulance!” Roderick screamed. The meadow was filled now, with spotlights, cars, trucks, and dozens of state and local cops, federal agents, and officials. They loaded Billy on a gurney and slid it into a van. Roderick and Cooper tried to climb into the van with the body, but the FBI agents said no, they couldn’t go with him.

Instead, the five deputy marshals were handed over to Mark Jurgensen, the deputy whose undercover operation was supposed to lead to Randy’s arrest. Jurgensen rode with them in a prisoner van to the Bonners Ferry hospital emergency room, where a doctor took their blood pressures and temperatures and gave them all some Tylenol capsules and something to settle their stomachs. Between them, the three deputies on the hillside had had nothing to eat except a granola bar that they’d split. They hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before.

The deputies kept their guns because of rumors that Weaver’s supporters would try to storm the hospital. They called their wives and told them they were okay. After Cooper had finished talking to his own wife, Jurgensen approached him.

“Mrs. Degan doesn’t want to put more on you than you can handle, but she wants to know if you’ll call her.”

Of course he would. Cooper called Karen Degan and explained what had happened, how Billy had died trying to keep anyone from being hurt.

Finally, twenty-four hours after they’d started, the marshals drove back to their condominium at the base of Schweitzer. They talked about the vehicle that Thomas had heard and wondered where the noise had come from. They reminisced about Degan—Cooper and Roderick telling stories about him that brought half-smiles and pained laughter. They cried some. Mark Jurgensen joined the deputies at the condo, took their machine guns, emptied them, and counted the number of rounds they’d fired. Hunt, Thomas, and Norris hadn’t fired at all. Roderick had fired once, and Cooper had fired two three-round bursts. Then he examined Degan’s gun. Cooper said he was certain that Degan had never fired a shot.

There were seven rounds missing.