FOURTEEN

SHOOT ME!” the man yelled at federal agents. Wild-haired and leaning, a can of Budweiser in his thick, laborer hands, the mechanic walked from the old highway toward the Ruby Creek bridge, glaring across the police tape at federal officers with machine guns. “If you don’t shoot me tonight, I’m going to come back and shoot you tomorrow! I’m a Vietnam vet and I’m on Randy’s side, just like all these other people out here.”

It was 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, the bars were closed, and cars trolled up and back on the old Naples highway, along the wide curve, their headlights tracing the line of trees and the faces of tired federal officers, who stood on the bridge, behind a yellow police tape that suddenly didn’t seem quite as authoritative. The Vietnam vet wandered away from the tape and toward Bill Morlin, the reporter who’d broken the Weaver story five months earlier. Morlin had never covered a story quite like this. The government kept them three miles away from the cabin and—going on the third day of the standoff—hadn’t even held a press conference yet. The reporters and photographers slept in their cars, at the roadblock, expecting shooting to break out any minute between the angry mountain people and the flak-jacketed federal officers. This was as tense as he’d seen the roadblock, and Morlin carefully approached the drunk veteran, who said the standoff was the fault of the government, which sent Weaver to Vietnam and then ignored him when he came back. The Idaho woods were full of Vietnam vets like Randy, he said, guys who couldn’t cope with the real world.

“You put a strand of ivy on the wall, then come back twenty years later and it’s covering the whole wall,” he said. “So you don’t have to ask why there are men like Randy up there.”

The mechanic said he’d met secretly with a group of other veterans, and they would retaliate if the government killed Randy and Vicki. First, they would destroy microwave and telephone communication facilities on Blacktail Mountain, near Sandpoint and at a place called “the pit” near Naples. Then the federal agents would be caught on that mountain with no way of getting help from the outside, and they’d be easy targets for the mechanic and his army of one hundred vets, who weren’t going to let a brother from Vietnam hang like that. The protesters listened to his little press conference and nodded in agreement; they had no idea that Randy Weaver had never been to Vietnam.

FORTY-SIX HOURS AFTER THE SHOOT-OUT with deputy marshals, a secret microphone built into the telephone picked up the whining of a dog. The tiny mike also transmitted muffled voices and footsteps inside the cabin that Sunday morning. But when FBI negotiators at the base camp in Homicide Meadow rang the telephone in Randy Weaver’s yard, they got no response and presumed the family still wouldn’t leave the cabin to pick up the phone.

They had to presume because, strangely, the cabin was left unattended by the FBI from 8:00 p.m. Saturday to mid-morning on Sunday. Finally, at 10:00 a.m., Lon Horiuchi and the other snipers got back into position on Ruby Ridge, nestling behind rocks and trees on the hillside overlooking the cabin again. The APCs rumbled back up the ridge, too, stopped on the driveway below the cabin, popped open their hatch doors, and released fourteen camouflaged agents, who crept with machine guns along the hillside just below the cabin, checking for mines or other booby traps. They secured the springhouse and the other distant outbuildings and found cover in case shots came from the house or the woods behind them. While Horiuchi and the other snipers kept a close eye on the cabin from 200 yards away, the assault teams closed the perimeter and surrounded the point from forty or so yards away, on downslopes below the cabin’s line of sight. They also kept watch on the woods behind them, in case any of Weaver’s supporters made it past the other lines of law officers on lower points of the ridge.

When the assault teams were in place, the lead APC groaned up the rest of the driveway, around islands of boulders and card-house outbuildings, finally parking thirty feet from the front door of the cabin, on the side that opened into the kitchen, the side without the spectacular view, the side where Vicki Weaver had been standing when she was killed.

The hatch opened again, and this time, HRT Commander Richard Rogers spoke through the loudspeaker.

“This is the FBI,” Rogers said. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver. Come out with your hands up, unarmed. You will not be hurt. We want to take you into custody and put you into the legal processes of our system.”

No answer.

Rogers said they needed to set up some sort of communication with the FBI, to find a way to end the standoff.

Every fifteen minutes, the FBI agents rang the telephone. “Pick up the phone, Randy,” said the hostage negotiator, Fred Lanceley, who took over the megaphone from Rogers. “We aren’t going to hurt you. It’s just a telephone.” Lanceley knew from his briefings that when Randy heard the dogs bark, he sent his children out to see what it was. He hoped Randy might do the same when the phone rang. “You can send out one of the children. It’s safe, Randy.”

The assault agents could hear muffled voices and a baby crying, but there was no answer to the negotiator. Lanceley tried Vicki Weaver again.

They rang the telephone in the yard thirty-four times, about every fifteen minutes, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The curtains didn’t even rustle. Finally, in the afternoon, a van drove up to the base of the bumpy dirt driveway and stopped well below the cabin, its back doors thrown open so a ramp could be lowered to the ground. Inside the van, a technician punched commands into the remote-control computer and then the robot walked out.

It didn’t walk so much as roll, on rubber tracks like those of a bulldozer. It was a modified bomb disposal robot, like a big, rolling trashcan or R2-D2 from the movie Star Wars—a silver barrel with mechanical arms coming out of the top and sides and loaded with every manner of hardware: cameras, floodlights, microphone, amplifier, and receiver.

One arm ended in a single-barrel shotgun.

DAVE HUNT HATED EVERY MINUTE of this waiting. The rain had stopped, the high clouds were in the process of burning off, and it was incredible how quickly the mud turned to dust. Hunt’s chest and head throbbed with a cold that had fed off his exhaustion and two days of drizzle. Hunt watched camouflaged FBI agents with their M-16 rifles getting ready to go into the woods and saw FBI officials walk right past himself, Roderick, and Cooper as if they were invisible, as if they’d screwed up and were of no help now that the FBI was here to bail them out. Finally, the three deputy marshals walked over to the Hostage Rescue Team command post, stuck their heads into the tent, and listened as the agents were briefed by HRT officials. It was tough for Hunt to listen as they went over the information he’d spent eighteen months gathering—”Vicki Weaver is the spiritual strength”—and some intelligence—”there might be booby traps and explosives”—that he’d long ago dismissed. They treated Randy Weaver as if he’d had some special guerrilla training in the army, like some stereotypical Green Beret who built bombs out of nothing and had flashbacks of Vietnam.

For more than a year, Hunt had been telling people that Randy had never served in Vietnam. He had some demolition training, but he was really just an equipment operator, a ‘dozer driver, not some kind of killing machine. Hunt knew Randy was dangerous all right—not because of his ability to build booby traps and bombs—but because of his unbending beliefs.

Hunt’s surveillance photos hung on the walls of the off-white HRT tent, so the FBI agents could familiarize themselves with the terrain, the cabin, and the targets. The pictures sparked something else in Hunt, a feeling of incompleteness. He was, above all, an enforcement deputy, the guy charged with bringing in the fugitive. And his fugitive was still up there. For eighteen months, he’d imagined the conversation he’d have with Randy Weaver—”We need to get this thing straightened out before it gets out of control …”—and that Randy would walk down the hill with him peacefully. Now, one of the marshals was dead and Hunt was stuck here, watching FBI agents with machine guns getting ready to crawl into the woods to bring in his fugitive.

Outside the tent, the flow of men and materials continued into Homicide Meadow. Two Huey helicopters landed in the meadow, which was close to bursting with green tents and military vehicles. It might seem like overkill to someone on the outside, but Hunt knew how difficult it would be to cordon off this entire mountain, especially against armed people who knew where every logging road connected with every cattle trail, people who might find a way through the brush and timber to the Weaver cabin.

They paced outside the command post trailer for a while, watching all the activity. Hunt just wanted off the mountain. He wanted to go home to his wife and get some sleep, instead of pacing around this hot, dusty field, kept in the dark about what was going on. Finally, sick of the wait, Hunt, Roderick, and Cooper left Homicide Meadow to catch a flight to Boston for Billy Degan’s funeral.

FIFTY-FOUR HOURS. Fred Lanceley wrote out the things he wanted to say to the Weavers and ran them past the other two negotiators. At the van where they controlled the robot, Lanceley and the head of the HRT, Richard Rogers, talked about where to proceed next. They spent most of Sunday negotiating through the robot’s loudspeaker (“Don’t worry about the robot. Randall? Why won’t you talk to us? Why won’t you let us talk to Vicki?”), and there hadn’t been so much as a peep from the cabin.

“Yeah, I think we can wait this guy out,” Lanceley told Richard Rogers. “But I think it’s going to take a long time.”

Sunday evening, Rogers decided to create some space for the armored personnel carriers to move and to clear the line of sight for the snipers and assault team members. He told the agents to start by moving the birthing shed, and so they drove an APC over to the small, barnlike building to push it out of the way. But just before the APC rolled over it, Rogers stopped the agents and sent a handful of assault team agents to make sure the shed was empty. It had dawned on him that, the night before, one of the family members could have hidden in the shed and planned to ambush the FBI agents around the cabin. Camouflaged HRT assault team members crawled and dashed serpentine-style over to the little building, slammed up against the sides, burst through the door, and poked their machine guns inside, red-laser targets knifing through the darkness.

Flashlights lit the eight-by-fourteen shed, which was like the attic in an old house that had been turned into a bedroom—a small, self-contained living quarters lined with dark insulation. Just inside the door were cupboards on the right side, bumping into an elevated bed and a nightstand with a plant in a wide-based jar. Bags of clothes and old tennis shoes were piled against the other wall. On the bed was something big, wrapped in a clean white sheet. After checking for booby traps, the agents got closer, unraveled the sheet, and found a boy, stripped naked, his body cleaned and wrapped in a green sheet. He was a little boy, not even five feet tall, seventy or eighty pounds, with a T-shirt tan. He was uncircumcised. There were bruises on his knees and shins, like someone who runs through the woods a lot.

“I have found the body of a young white male,” an agent said over his radio.

In the van, Fred Lanceley heard the radio transmission and was stunned. My God, he thought, Weaver is killing his own kids.

“Randy, we found the body of a young man,” Lanceley said over the robot’s amplifier. He asked what arrangements Randy wanted to make with the body. “I understand you have strong religious convictions,” Lanceley said, “and I don’t want to violate them. Please communicate your wishes to me by just speaking up.”

Nothing.

They wrapped the body back up, put it in the APC, and drove it to another shed, farther away from the cabin, where a deputy coroner looked at the boy and determined he’d been shot in the arm and the back. And then they took Samuel Weaver away.

Sunday night, the spotlights came on with a “thunk,” like the closing of a door, and lit the front of the house eerily, like a Christmas Nativity scene in front of a church. They were the only electric lights for almost a mile in any direction.

“YOU KILLED my fucking wife!” Randy yelled at the door. Glaring white light painted the cabin walls, seeped through seams in the curtains, holes in the walls, and cracks in the doors, like flashlights probing the dim cabin.

On the floor, Sara couldn’t stomach the idea of them having Sammy. The whole family had cried when the voice talked about moving Sammy’s body. They were going to take his body away, cover up the fact that he’d been shot in the back by the marshals, and probably try to pin Sammy’s death on Randy or Kevin.

Sara felt the spirit of Yashua, the one the pagans call Jesus, the Messiah of Saxon Israel, moving in her and giving her strength. Huddled on the floor with what was left of her family, she hoped the cowards would try to storm the house, so she could at least get a shot at one of them. More likely, they would use tear gas to lure the whole family outside and then gun them down. But she was prepared for that, too. When it happened, she would put Elisheba someplace safe, check her gun, then burst out the door and start firing at anything that moved.

“Mama, Mama.” Elisheba sobbed. She wanted to be nursed again, and she fussed over the milk, water, and apricots that Sara and Rachel tried to feed her.

Sara was busy—the way Vicki would have been. She got almost all the food out of the kitchen, changed Kevin’s bandages, cleaned his pus-filled chest and arm, and dumped the last of the hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which fizzed again with infection. The rags putrefied quickly, and the stench of his arm and chest was getting to all of them, a horrible reminder that he probably wouldn’t live, and a glimpse of what was in store for the rest of them. Sara remembered her mother’s herbs, and when the hydrogen peroxide was gone, she used the herb goldenseal to help get rid of the infection.

They were in the middle of their third night without any real sleep, jigsawed around the living room in a pile of blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags, behind couches and chairs. They listened to a radio and talked in low whispers about what the feds would do next; they guessed a raid or tear gas or a firebomb. The thing they didn’t expect was the constant psychological warfare, which was—in many ways—worse than anything the feds could’ve done physically.

“Good morning, Mrs. Weaver,” the negotiator called out. “We had pancakes this morning. And what did you have for breakfast? Why don’t you send the children out for some pancakes, Mrs. Weaver?” That had started the whole family sobbing.

The spotlights were another cruel stroke, blurring the time between day and night and keeping the whole family from sleeping, until Sara’s head bobbed forward, and she snapped awake and wondered whether a few minutes had passed or a few hours, whether she’d heard something outside or something in a dream, whether she was alive or whether Yashua had finally taken her away. Everything ran together: the phone ringing every fifteen minutes, urging them to come out and die; the tanks tearing up the ground around their cabin and circling them like sharks; the constant, unnerving drone of Fred, the negotiator. Maybe they were trying to make the family snap so they’d come out of the cabin firing their guns and the ZOG agents could claim they were justified in killing them all. Or maybe it was just torture, making sure they suffered plenty before shooting them all in the back and then claiming that Randy had killed his own family.

And now their latest trick was this robot they were always talking about. Don’t be afraid of the robot. The robot is just so we can talk to you better. Randy knew exactly what it was for—to punch a hole in the house and shoot gas in, to kill the family or drive them into the open where they could be plugged by the fucking snipers. Randy held his rifle up and said he was going to start shooting if the robot came any closer.

“Back off!” Randy yelled. “You’d fucking better back off or it’s all over!

SEVENTY HOURS. Fred Lanceley arrived at the command post at 7:47 a.m. on Monday and found out that—just twenty minutes earlier—Randy Weaver had yelled something. He was cussing and screaming, the other negotiator said, and possibly even preaching. Much of it was unintelligible, but one thing was clear. He wanted the robot moved. Damn. Lanceley had missed his chance.

“Randy, I’m sorry I missed what you had to say,” Lanceley said. “Please, tell me what you wanted to talk about?” The negotiator pleaded with Weaver to talk, to say anything, but he got no response. “We just don’t understand, Randall. We’ve done everything you asked us to do. We’ve cooperated the best we know how. We backed the robot off when you said back off.”

Frustrated, Lanceley resumed his usual speech about how the Weavers should pick up the telephone. He warned them when helicopters and APCs moved around the cabin and just tried to keep the family calm. Besides being a negotiator, Lanceley believed he understood human nature. He had a bachelor’s degree in psychology, master’s degrees in business and criminal justice, and was almost done with his psychology doctorate. The marshals’ intelligence reports had included a psychiatrist’s evaluation of Vicki that indicated she was the backbone of the family and would do anything—perhaps even murder her own children and then kill herself—to keep the family from being broken up. So Lanceley tried Vicki again, spending several hours trying to reach her.

“Vicki, how’s the baby?” Lanceley mispronounced Elisheba’s name. “I share your concern about Elizabeth. I need to know if there’s anything that can be done for the baby. Milk? Diapers? Food? If you need anything, all you have to do is call out, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Nothing.

This was becoming one of the most frustrating cases he’d ever worked. That night, he broke into some deep conversations about death and about having the courage to face adversity, hoping to make Randy see how serious this had become and to sober him up and make him take some responsibility for his kids’ safety.

Nothing.

WAYNE MANIS TOOLED ALONG the old Naples highway and looked for the turnoff to Ruby Ridge. The friendly FBI agent from Coeur d’Alene had been off the white supremacist beat ever since he’d helped break The Order in the mid-1980s. But like every other federal agent in the West (and many from the East), he’d been called to help cordon off Ruby Ridge. Manis would’ve come sooner, but he was on another remote mountain in north-central Idaho, twelve hours away, trying to build a horse corral at a hunting camp in a driving snowstorm. He and another agent had driven back to Coeur d’Alene on Sunday, got the message about the Weaver case, and immediately set out for Boundary County. Now, Monday morning, Manis eased through Naples and into the foothills of the Selkirk Mountains. In the back of Manis’s red Jeep was a 9-mm machine gun—the same gun he’d used in the siege of Order leader Robert Mathews’s home on Whidbey Island.

Manis rounded the corner near Ruby Creek and couldn’t believe what he saw. There were cars and pickup trucks everywhere—perhaps eighty vehicles, lined up along this little country road for nearly a mile. And the scene at the roadblock itself was even more stupefying.

Along the left bank of the road, a few feet before the Ruby Creek bridge, huge, white satellite news trucks hummed, their big dish antennae pointed away from the mountain. There were two dozen reporters and photographers working the roadblock, with their own portable outhouse. On the other bank of the dirt road, fifty protesters held signs—”Government Lies/Patriot Dies” and “Death to ZOG”—and yelled at the trucks and cars that were allowed through the roadblock. To Manis, the people looked dirty, like homeless stragglers just shouting and raising hell. He’d never seen such a concentration of angry racists.

They yelled at him as he drove through the roadblock, “Leave them alone!” Manis shook his head as he passed dozens of federal and state agents in bulletproof Kevlar vests and jungle hats.

As he rattled up the hill toward the command post, Manis expected to find a sedate mountain operation, with perhaps a half-dozen officers standing around in a field. Instead, he found a military camp. The road broke through the woods and into a meadow, where a Red Cross van was serving chow and hundreds of cars and trucks were parked on one end, covering a section of the meadow as big as a football field. Huge military-style tents, stuffed full of army cots, were set up everywhere. A barn had been converted into a staff office, a place for meetings and briefings and even a steno pool with secretaries, typists, and computers. Across an old horse trail from the barn was the command post, a forty-foot travel trailer with an awning coming out of it.

Manis stared all around the meadow. This was about the same size as the contingent of federal officers that had battled The Order on Whidbey Island.

“IT APPEARS as if Samuel Weaver was killed during the initial exchange of gunfire, but that can’t be definitely stated until the autopsy is completed,” said Gene Glenn, the special agent-in-charge of the Weaver operation. In a field on the federal side of the Ruby Creek bridge on Monday, newspaper, television, and magazine reporters from around the country fanned out in front of Glenn and Mike Johnson, who conducted the first press conference since the shoot-out began. Glenn said they’d just discovered the body the night before. He said nothing about Lon Horiuchi’s two shots.

“Samuel’s death is a tragedy, as is the death of Deputy Degan. I emphasize we are taking and will take every reasonable precaution to avoid further loss of life or injury,” said Glenn, his gray, earnest face cocked sideways and his hound dog eyes turned down at the corners. “However, it must be understood that Harris and Weaver have been charged with serious crimes and they pose an immediate threat, not only to law enforcement officers, but to the community as well.”

Johnson would go one step further. “What bullet killed Samuel Weaver is still under investigation. It’s a possibility shots came from Harris’s weapon.”

VICKI’S PARENTS, DAVID AND JEANE, and her brother, Lanny, had made it to North Idaho by Sunday night at 8:00 p.m., 1,500 miles in twenty-four straight hours of driving. The next morning, they’d driven to Bonners Ferry, where they met with the county prosecutor, Randall Day, who told them to go back to Sandpoint to wait for instructions from the FBI.

The Jordisons found a motel across from the parking lot where Randy had last met with Kenneth Fadeley. They checked into a second-floor room and waited for the FBI to show up. In the afternoon, an agent finally did show up, a friendly middle-aged man with a deep Texas accent who asked them to make an audiotape for the agents to play on top of the mountain to coax the family down. On the tape, they all pleaded with Randy and Vicki at least to protect the children, and they said the Weavers wouldn’t get their story out unless they surrendered.

The FBI agents visited their motel room several times, asking questions about the cabin. Once, an agent wanted David Jordison to draw him a map showing where all the furniture was located. Julie Brown, who flew out to be with her family in Idaho, couldn’t believe what they were asking. “What if you use this map to raid them and something happens to someone in the family? How will my dad live with that?”

They needed the map, the FBI agent explained, to figure out where the booby traps were.

“Aw, you fools,” David said. “They have a baby. Are they going to booby trap their house with a baby running around inside?” Another time, FBI agents warned the Jordison family that they believed Vicki had shaved her own head and had become suicidal.

After the agent left on Monday, the Jordisons turned on the television news. Once again, the Weaver story led the local news, as a somber anchor said fourteen-year-old Samuel Weaver had been killed.

David Jordison sat down on the bed. He couldn’t believe it. He thought about the mountain streams he and Sammy used to fish, the four-inch trout he’d find, the trails they’d go on, and the birch walking sticks Sammy was always bringing him. My God, he thought, they killed a little boy. David had never thought too much about government before, but now he was baffled. Maybe Vicki was on to something. After all, the FBI had just been in their room. Why hadn’t they told him Sammy was dead?

In Jefferson, Iowa, Randy Weaver’s mother, Wilma, answered the telephone and a reporter asked for her reaction to Samuel’s death. She set the phone down and told Randy’s father, Clarence, that, apparently, Samuel had been killed. Slowed by old age, Randy’s parents had never visited Idaho, and they hadn’t seen Samuel in nine years. Wilma returned to the line and asked why no one from the government had called to tell them. Of their sixteen grandchildren, said the elderly woman, Samuel was the only one who would’ve had their last name.

“I was just writing him a letter to tell him that and tell him how proud I was of him,” said Wilma Weaver. “I guess I won’t mail it.”

THEY HANDED OUT extra plastic handcuffs, and the camouflaged agents at the roadblock strapped them to their belt loops and turned to face the crowd. Half-a-dozen agents bolstered the presence at the highway and officers who had leaned casually against the aluminum railings of the Ruby Creek bridge now stood at attention, watching the crowd with darting eyes.

It took only a few minutes for the word to spread that Sammy Weaver was dead.

A pretty, college-aged woman with red hair stepped forward from a mess of yelling men in cowboy boots and baseball caps. She held up a sign that read “FBI—Rot in Hell.” The shouts and taunts started in again, and the crowd pressed toward the roadblock, leaning across the tape and screaming phrases as familiar as the chorus to a song: “Baby killer! Baby killer!”

When a reporter asked about the dead marshal, Vicki’s friend Jackie Brown spit through her tears, “I hope they get a dozen more.” They had murdered Sammy. But at least, Jackie said, Vicki and the girls were okay.

Construction crews waiting to get past the roadblock were taunted by protesters who didn’t think they should be helping the feds. “Shame on you! Shame on you!” yelled a woman in a T-shirt that read “Leave ME Alone.”

One man with a goatee held a “Death to ZOG” sign high over his head and preached at the driver of a semitruck waiting to haul railroad ties up the hill: “How much do you have to be paid to compromise your people? … How many dead patriots will you bury? How many will you put dirt in their faces and watch them and their families cry as you sat by and you drove the truck? You drove the truck! Walk away! Wipe the blood off your hands now! Stand up and be a man! Don’t fight for a system of tyrants!”

The driver, unlike the television crews, ignored the man.

By Tuesday, the protesters had covered their campsite with a blue tarp and were cooking cheese sandwiches and bacon over a barrel stove. Foot traffic flowed from the Swiss innkeeper Lorenz Caduff’s nearby Deep Creek Inn, which quickly became home base for protesters and reporters alike.

“Sir,” a skinhead asked, “are we allowed to come in here?”

Lorenz said anyone was welcome in his restaurant. “I have a Korean housekeeper, and there’s a black reporter here. If you are polite and nice, you can come in.”

The Swiss chef served up scrambled eggs and roast beef sandwiches and listened to the conversation, shocked when he heard that government agents had shot a little boy in the back. He just couldn’t understand it. He sent his own wife and kids to Sandpoint, to keep them out of trouble. “They have killed a boy? Why is this?”

At night, the protesters gathered around the television crews filming live shots and warmed themselves in the bright lights, listening to the tired TV reporters to make sure the “Jews Media” reported the story correctly. People continued to show up at the roadblock: white separatists joined by Randy’s neighbors, bikers, woodsmen, grandparents, and Vietnam vets like the guy in a Jack Daniel’s T-shirt that very nearly stretched all the way over his substantial beer gut.

Television lights glinted off the shaved domes of about a dozen skinheads—two separate troops from Las Vegas and Portland who had called their various sponsors and been advised to report for battle in the great race war in North Idaho. Fresh off their success in a race riot in Denver, the Vegas skinheads—resplendent in their classic storm trooper jackets and slick-shiny heads—jumped right into the fray, launching glowers and derisive cheers of “Baby killer” at federal agents. One of the Vegas skinheads claimed to have hidden their guns in the woods.

The Portland skinheads kept more to themselves until Tuesday afternoon, when five of them piled into a Jeep Cherokee and drove back toward Naples, then turned down a back road that led to the canyon behind Ruby Ridge. As the Jeep moved toward the back side of Randy’s cabin, a helicopter appeared over the tree line and hovered above the skinheads. They turned down another dirt road and state police and ATF cars raced up behind them, lights flashing. The Jeep stopped and Lance Hart—the ATF agent who’d arrested Randy Weaver—warned the young men to step out of the Jeep one at a time.

“Get on the ground!” The agents pushed the young men to the ground, handcuffed them, and searched them. They found a carload of guns and ammunition, and a sign that read, “Whites Must Arm.” One of the skinheads wet his pants while they were being stopped. Federal agents had been watching them since the day before, when they’d gone to a gun shop, bought rifles and ammunition, and asked how to get to Randy Weaver’s cabin. They were taken into custody and charged with possession of a concealed weapon, a charge that was later dropped.

At the roadblock, some of the Vegas skinheads were defensive and pointed out that they had weapons, too, and they would use them if it became necessary.

“We are here to let people know that those people behind the yellow line are our enemies,” said Johnny Bangerter, a twenty-three-year-old skinhead who looked like an angry Curly from The Three Stooges and who was the second cousin of the governor of Utah. “Every federal institution and government is our enemy because of its action of killing a child in cold blood. We are ready to fight, and it could be a bloody one. This is going to be a second revolution in America.”

NINETY-SIX HOURS. Given enough time, people will find a rhythm for everything. The APCs moved up and down the ridge, running over the gunshot body of Striker—which no one had bothered to move—twenty-seven times. There were reports that a federal officer had put up a sign that read: “Camp Vicki.” By Tuesday, Lon Horiuchi and the FBI snipers and assaulters—working in twelve-hour shifts—crouched more comfortably on the hillsides around the cabin, the tension gradually displaced by boredom. They were still alert but were no longer running only on adrenaline. Chickens milled around the yard, while the family’s remaining dogs, which had long since given up barking at the military vehicles, wandered down to assault team agents who stood next to wilting flower gardens and who scratched the dogs’ ears and petted them. In the coming days, agents closer to the cabin began noticing a rancid smell coming from the house. Some of the more experienced agents knew what it was. There was someone dead inside the cabin.

Fred Lanceley showed up for work that morning and decided to lighten it up a bit.

“Randall. This is Fred. Good morning. I thought you might like to know that we are taking care of your dog, the one with the mismatched eyes. The last time I saw him, he was eating a big plate of spaghetti. We are calling him J.R., because he looks like one of the guys that works with me. Let me know if Elizabeth needs anything. Over the next few days, I hope to demonstrate to you, to Mrs. Weaver, to Kevin, that despite all that’s happened, everything is being done to insure that this situation ends without further violence.”

The weather had cleared for good, and the FBI agents snuck glances at the incredible view, the glacial valley played out before them in soft greens and browns, roads and houses small-scaled by all that was undeveloped. It was a startling view, a reminder that in some places, civilization is still subject to the flow of wilderness.

Down below, FBI agents had begun investigating the scene at the Y and were surprised to discover seven shell casings from Degan’s gun spread along twenty-two feet, meaning not only did he fire his weapon, but he may have been moving when he did it. Along with Samuel Weaver’s death, it was another indication to FBI investigators that the marshals’ initial version of the shoot-out was not the whole truth. It also appeared the family wasn’t as dangerous as they’d first believed. They still hadn’t fired out of the cabin. The rules of engagement—which, until this point, would’ve allowed the snipers to kill Kevin and Randy again if they saw them—were changed back to the normal rules.

To Lanceley, the clear, warm Tuesday morning—five days since the shoot-out—seemed like a good time to talk about religion. Their intelligence showed that Randy fancied himself quite a preacher, and so Lanceley probed that for a while, like a dentist looking for a cavity.

“Randall, I’m from Virginia, and until a few days ago, I had never heard of your religious beliefs and convictions, and even today all I know is the government’s version of what they say are your religious beliefs. I would like to hear from you, you know, what’s going on here. What’s happening? I just don’t understand. Randall, these people aren’t going away. It may take a few days to demonstrate that to you, but tell me what’s happening. Let’s discuss the problem and see if you and I and Vicki and Kevin can work it out.”

Nothing.

EVERY TIME THE ZOG AGENTS mentioned Vicki’s name, it was clear to the family what they were trying to do. They knew damn well they’d killed Vicki, and they were just showing the rest of the family how the standoff was going to end and making it clear that no one was getting out alive.

“Did you sleep well last night, Vicki?”

Always that coy, smart-ass tone. And every time they said her name, every eye in the cabin went to the blanketed body beneath the kitchen table, lying graceless in her own blood on the wooden floor.

Randy had screamed at the door on Sunday that Vicki was dead, and ever since then, the feds had turned that against the family, using their own grief to try to destroy them. Randy wasn’t going to give them any more information. He was done communicating.

The Beast’s agents had crawled underneath the cabin during the night again, fastening their fucking listening devices to the floor. Randy pounded with his feet and the noises stopped, but all night Randy and Sara sat up with their weapons, waiting for the devils to try again.

Kevin seemed to be more alert, but his wound was still infected and oozing, and he was in pain. Sara crawled past her mother’s body into the kitchen and brought back several bowls of cold green beans. When she gave a bowl to Kevin, he tried it, then asked if she could warm it up. At least he was feeling better.

They listened to the news on the radio, took turns going to the bathroom in a portable toilet they had inside the house, kept themselves clean, and talked about how to get their story out, how to keep the government from covering up the murders of Sammy and Vicki. It seemed hopeless to Sara.

Another sleepless night moved hazily toward dawn, and Sara resumed her prayers to Yahweh, wishing she’d listened better to her mother’s explanation of how to discern His will. She would give anything to have her mother’s guidance.

And then—sometime before sunrise—the negotiators started in again. At least once every hour, day or night, they tried. It didn’t matter to them.

“Is there anything we can do? Please let me know.”

Clearly, Sara thought, the feds wanted them to get no sleep at all. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold out. Her eyes played tricks with her in the closed-up cabin, and her exhaustion was cut with rage until she wasn’t even sure what she would do next.

The voice said, “Behind every strong man there is a good woman. Mrs. Weaver, please support your husband by coming out. I want to resolve this situation peacefully. I’m sure you want the same. Are the children all right? Can we get some milk for Elizabeth? Let me know if I can be of any help just by calling out.”

Sara glared at the door through teary eyes and prayed that Yahweh just get it over with and allow the ZOG devils to firebomb the cabin.

FRED LANCELEY LISTENED TO THE REPORT from the graveyard shift negotiator on Wednesday, who—at 4:30 a.m.—had appealed to Vicki again but had gotten no response. They were getting nowhere. Meanwhile, Rogers and the others were still working on assault plans, faxing them back to headquarters for approval. The pressure to assault the cabin was building, just as it had when it was Dave Hunt’s case. Lanceley figured that if he didn’t get some response from the Weavers soon, the HRT would have to go tactical, firing tear gas into the cabin or raiding it with agents. If he only knew what was going on inside the cabin. Agents had only gotten two microphones tentatively attached to the side and bottom of the cabin, because whenever they tried someone stomped on the floor. The listening devices didn’t seem to pick very much up—mostly muffled voices and the chirps and whistles of a couple of pet parakeets.

The robot seemed like the best way to get close enough to the house to hear what Randy had to say. As he always did, Lanceley told the Weavers about the next move they were making, so they didn’t panic when the activity began again. “Randall, I can understand your concern about the telephone, and I can also understand why you might not want to step out on the front porch. So here is what they are going to do. The robot will go to the window on the right side of the porch. The grippers will try to punch the phone through the window and the glass will break. After the telephone is delivered, the robot will back off. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

Lanceley sat up and smiled. In fourteen years as a negotiator, he’d never heard profanity that sounded so beautiful. “Randall, this is a good opportunity for a dialogue. Let’s you and I start talking?”

Randy said something the negotiator couldn’t understand.

“I can’t hear you, Randy.”

The rest was like bad radio, breaking up on Lanceley. “Get out of here … this kike son of a bitch … you fucking pig … lying mother-fuckers.”

“Randall, I still can’t hear you.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

At least it was an opening. One hundred and twenty-four hours into the standoff, Fred Lanceley leaned forward and spoke clearly and slowly. “Randall, I can understand your anger, but you and I have got to try to resolve this. Let’s you and I—Let’s you and I see if we can resolve this. Let’s you and I—Let’s you and I see if we can start something anew right here.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”