"Looks like it's going to be a hot one. You guys going to wear body armor along with all that camo gear?" one of the group asked.

"Screw that. It's a big enough pain in the ass we got to lug around all this other shit every day, 'specially in the heat."

"That's the truth."

The six deputy marshals all decided to forego body armor that day.

What was going on that morning was nothing new. Federal marshals from the U. S. Marshal's Service had been spying on the Weaver house for eighteen months, ever since Weaver had failed to show up for his court date in February of 1991. For the first year, the Weaver 'mission' had been run by the northern Idaho office of the U.S. Marshal's Service.

In March of 1992, however, control of the federal operation was handed over to the Marshal's Service headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, two thousand miles away. In that month, Deputy Marshal Arthur T. Roderick, Jr., a member of the Marshal's Service's Special Operations Group, was sent from Arlington headquarters to Idaho to take command of the Weaver operation.

Roderick was heading a six-man unit. He had split the group into two three-man teams. One team's job was to watch the Weaver cabin from the distant vantage point of a mountain peak. The other team, which included Roderick, planned to penetrate the dense woods immediately below Randy Weaver's house.

The other two members of Roderick's team were William Degan and Larry Cooper. Although Roderick himself had made over two dozen clandestine trips to the area around Randy Weaver's cabin in the past six months, Degan and Cooper were new to this part of the operation. Roderick's plan was to move an undercover agent onto the land adjacent to Weaver's, and, over the next few months, have him gain Randy Weaver's confidence. Degan and/or Cooper were potential choices for this role, and Roderick intended to familiarize them both with Weaver's property and the land around it.

"All set?" Arthur Roderick asked.

"Yeah, I guess."

"Hope it doesn't get too hot, with all this gear."

The three men on the penetration team wore camouflage over their entire bodies. On their heads were night vision goggles. In their packs they carried still cameras, movie cameras, and electronics gear for surveillance. Clipped to their harnesses were secure-voice radios. Roderick, Degan, and Cooper each carried both a pistol and a machine gun. Roderick and Degan had Colt Ml6s, while Cooper's machine gun was a 9mm with a sound suppressor. Between the three of them, the marshals were carrying four NFA weapons-three machine guns and a silencer. None of the three men had filled out any registration forms or paid any taxes on any of the four NFA weapons they carried, nor were any of the agents special (occupational) taxpayers.

Randy Weaver had been under constant federal surveillance for eighteen months. The cost of this operation would exceed what the government would spend on intelligence-gathering before the invasion of Haiti.

Federal agents carrying machine guns and over $50,000 worth of surveillance gear (but no search or arrest warrants) were once again about to invade Weaver's property. All this was due to the feds' claim that a piece of wood had been 3/8" too short, and Weaver had not paid a $5 tax on it.

The appalling irony of this situation was lost on Deputy Marshals Roderick, Degan, and Cooper. "Oh, shit," Larry Cooper said. The three of them were in the woods below the Weaver family's cabin. It was a little before 11:00 in the morning, and a dog had just started barking.

"Must've caught our scent," William Degan said.

"Let's get out of here," Arthur Roderick suggested. "Your machine gun has a silencer," he said to Cooper. "You shoot the dog." The three heavily armed deputy marshals began to run down the hill.

"Sounds like Striker's found a deer," Kevin Harris said to Sammy Weaver. Harris was a twenty-five-yearold logger, a family friend who spent much of his time at the Weaver cabin. Sammy and Kevin grabbed their rifles from the wall rack and ran out the door towards the sound of Sammy's yellow Labrador retriever.

As the dog approached, the three feds crouched down in the heavy brush and remained still. They were all but invisible, for they wore not only camouflage clothing from head to toe, but also camo face paint. The three men watched as the dog approached.

The yellow lab was much more of a pet than a guard dog. Striker had been around people all his life, and because of the constant federal surveillance, the land around the Weaver cabin had been loaded with traces of human scent for over a year. The dog had a good nose for birds and animals, but human scent did not set him off. Striker had started barking not because he had smelled the deputy marshals, but because he had heard them moving through the brush below the house. Now they were silent.

Roderick, Degan, and Cooper watched as the dog approached where they were hiding. Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris followed about sixty yards behind the yellow Lab.

No point in shooting now Cooper thought as the dog walked past the hiding place and continued down the mountain. The Lab was no threat, and the 9mm machine gun Cooper carried, even with its sound suppressor, would easily be heard by the two approaching young men. Best to wait here until they all go away Cooper told himself as he watched the dog walk away from him and his two companions. Larry Cooper was completely unprepared for what happened next.

Why doesn't he kill it? Deputy Marshal Arthur Roderick thought as the Labrador passed by their hiding place. Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris were almost to the three agents when Roderick stood up, flipped the selector lever of his M16 to 'semi', shouldered the rifle, and shot Weaver's dog in the rear. The animal yelped once loudly enough to be heard over the rifle's tremendous muzzle blast, then died. Its spine had been shattered by the high velocity rifle bullet.

"Sammy! Kevin! What's going on?" Randy Weaver shouted from above when he heard the shot.

Sammy Weaver and Kevin Harris were taken utterly by surprise as the sound of the .223 blasted in their ears. The Weaver boy had been watching Striker, and when he saw his dog killed, he whirled towards the source of the shot and instinctively fired two quick rounds from his rifle in that general direction, then ran towards the cabin. Neither shot hit anything other than brush.

"I'm coming, Dad!" the boy yelled. He had taken three steps before two rifle bullets slammed into him. The first struck him in the upper arm, very nearly severing the limb from his body. The second hit him in the back. Sammy Weaver's legs carried him two more steps before he fell on his face, dead. He had just recently turned fourteen.

Randy Weaver, up on an adjacent logging road, was carrying a shotgun when he heard the shots ring out. A shotgun was useless at that distance, so he started firing the weapon in the air as he ran towards the cabin. He hoped to distract the feds from Sammy and Kevin and allow the two boys to escape. Randy Weaver did not realize that his son was already dead.

Kevin Harris watched in horror as the boy he had known for nine years died before his eyes. Instinctively, with his rifle held at waist level, Harris fired from the hip at the man who had killed Sammy, then turned and ran. Kevin Harris proved to be more proficient at point shooting than his young friend had been. The bullet hit Began in the rib cage, smashing several ribs and exiting behind his armpit. The bullet caused massive trauma and hemmorhage into Degan's lung, killing the man. Kevin Harris made it back to the cabin safely.

As a terrified Roderick and Cooper stayed hidden in the bushes, the weather turned colder and it started to rain. The two deputy marshals huddled by the body of their dead companion, shivering in the cold rain as they waited for someone to come save them. Finally, after nightfall, an Idaho State Police SWAT team rescued the two men and recovered the dead marshal's corpse.

When sworn testimony was taken, Roderick and Cooper would repeat their initial statements that they had made to the FBI. The two men said that Harris had fired the first shot, hitting Degan in the chest, and only after Harris had killed their fellow marshal did the two feds return fire.

There would be several problems with this claim: The first was that both 14-year-old Sammy Weaver and his yellow Labrador had been shot from behind. The second was that if Harris had fired the first shot of the firefight, killing Began, it was certainly an odd response for Roderick to shoot the dog and let the young man who had just killed his partner get away.

The final and most troubling fact that did not square with the marshals' claim was that seven pieces of .223 brass would be found next to where Began's corpse had fallen. These fired cases had come from Began's M16 which, according to Deputy Marshal Cooper's sworn testimony, had been set on 'semi-automatic' when Cooper later picked it up. William Began had fired seven shots before he died. Many would claim that Began could only have fired these rounds before Kevin Harris fired the single shot that tore through Began's chest and killed the marshal. Others quickly countered that Began had held his fire, then pulled the trigger of his weapon seven times as fast as he could before falling down dead.

Another deputy marshal, a man named Jack Cluff, would do his part to exonerate Marshals Roderick and Cooper by giving the Salt Lake Tribune yet another version of what had happened on that morning. In an article that the Utah newspaper published two weeks later, Cluff explained that after Began had been shot, Roderick and Cooper '...dove into a natural depression in the ground...held their guns overhead and cranked off rounds blindly in front of them. Presumably, Samuel Weaver was killed in the exchange.'

Though Cluff would fail to mention it, presumably the dog was also killed in this panicked spray-and-pray maneuver. Cluff would also fail to mention how he came by this proprietary knowledge about the incident, given that he was not present when the shooting occurred.

Midnight was approaching as Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris went back down the mountainside to retrieve the body of Randy's 14-year-old son. Randy wrapped the body in a sheet and the two men carried it up the hill then laid it out in a shed near the cabin. As Randy looked at the mud- and blood-stained corpse, he thought his heart would break.

Randy Weaver did not realize that things were about to get a lot worse.

August 22,1992 This is not good at all FBI Agent Alex Neumann thought to himself as he surveyed the mountainous terrain around him. Neumann was a member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, pronounced 'hurt'. He had been with the Bureau for eighteen years, and he had never seen anything like what was happening now. More than three hundred law enforcement officers from both federal and state agencies had swarmed into the area since Marshal Degan had been killed the previous morning. These agents that surrounded the Weaver residence wore camouflage clothing and face paint, and were armed with machine guns and sniper rifles.

Along with the hundreds of armed police agents was an impressive array of vehicles and other equipment. There was a huge command post set up on a neighbor's property, complete with satellite links, communications trailers, motor homes, and wall tents. There were fourteen Humvees, two armored personnel carriers, three 2 1/2-ton cargo trucks, two medevac helicopters, one Hughes surveillance helicopter, two army field kitchens, six water trailers and four field generators. The aerial photos that the agents were using had been taken by an Air Force F-4 Phantom pilot.

/ don't want to be a part of this Neumann told himself for perhaps the tenth time. No way they're going to get out alive now. All-wood cabin up on the hill...sun ought to be out before long...everything'll be dry in a few days...this many agents... The man felt an overwhelming sense of dread about what was to come. I don't want to be here when they burn this guy and his family alive.

The HRT man was thinking of the 1974 raid in California, when he had only been with the Bureau for three months. There, the Bureau's final assault on the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army had resulted in the fiery deaths of five people. He was also thinking of 1983, when tax protester Gordon Wahl of the Posse Comitatus had been burned to death by the Bureau. Neumann was remembering the courses the FBI gave its agents on the use of fire to burn out adversaries.

Maybe I can get a lateral transfer to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Take a few cuts in benefits if I have to. I'm getting too old to watch this kind of shit any more.

As it turned out, although Alex Neumann was right in his prediction of disaster for the family on the hill, his fears of fire that morning were premature. Randy, Vicki, their three daughters, and Kevin Harris were indeed surrounded by hundreds of agents. Up on the mountain they had some freedom of movement, however, and were not completely trapped in the cabin. The FBI did not elect to burn them out.

Alex Neumann would have to wait another six months before the Bureau would once again demonstrate its expertise with incendiaries.

Special Agent Lon Horiuchi of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team in Quantico, Virginia, was settled in behind the scope of his bolt action, .308 caliber police sniper rifle. The gun rested on sandbags and was aimed at Randy Weaver's cabin, about 200 yards away. It was close to six o'clock in the evening. Horiuchi and the other FBI snipers had been watching the Weaver cabin for several hours, waiting for a target to present itself. He had already been given clearance to shoot.

Randy Weaver sat at the kitchen table. He was thinking of his son, whose body lay in a shed outside. He heard one of his two remaining dogs barking, and instinctively thought of Striker, Sammy's yellow Lab who was also dead.

"Sounds like he's behind one of the sheds," Kevin Harris said to his friend.

"Probably smells Sammy," Randy Weaver said forlornly. He stood up and took a deep breath. "I'm going to go check. To make sure Sammy...make sure Sammy's body's okay."

"I'll go with you," Harris said.

"Me too, Dad," Sara Weaver insisted. "I want to see Sammy one more time." Randy Weaver started to protest, but Vicki, who was nursing their youngest daughter, ten-month-old Elisheba, cut him off. "Let her go, Randy."

Her husband nodded. Sara Weaver, who at sixteen was Randy and Vicki's eldest child, followed her father and Kevin Harris out the cabin door.

"Cleared to fire," came the FBI order when Randy, Kevin, and Sara came out of the cabin and started hurrying towards the shed. One FBI sniper waited until Randy stopped at the door to the shed, then the federal man pulled the trigger. Randy Weaver was reaching up to unlatch the shed door when the sniper's bullet creased his right armpit and slammed into the shed. Randy's other hand flew to the site of the wound as the muzzle blast rang out over the mountainside.

"Daddy! Get back in the house!" screamed Sara Weaver as she grabbed her father and began pushing him back towards the cabin. Kevin Harris followed quickly after his two friends.

Vicki Weaver, still nursing the ten-month-old she cradled in one arm, held the kitchen door open for Randy, Sara, and Kevin.

"You bastards!" Vicki screamed as the last of the three, Kevin Harris, ran past her into the kitchen. It was then that Agent Horiuchi of the Hostage Rescue Team pulled the trigger and fired the shot that would make him famous.

The bullet struck Vicki Weaver squarely in the temple. Brain matter and large skull fragments were blasted out the opposite side of her head as the heavy .30 caliber slug exited her skull and continued on, tearing through Kevin Harris' left arm and smashing two of his ribs before finally lodging in his chest. Vicki Weaver's corpse collapsed on the floor, clutching the baby in a rictus of death.

Sara Weaver turned at the sound of the impact and took in the grisly scene. Her mother was obviously dead-part of her head was gone. Kevin Harris' arm was torn open and he had a bad-looking chest wound. He was doubled over, trying to get his breath, for his lung was collapsing. Her father, Sara believed, was seriously wounded from Horiuchi's first shot. Sara Weaver looked for the baby, and realized Elisheba was under her mother's lifeless body, still clutched in the dead woman's arms. Sara grabbed her mother's corpse by the shoulder and pulled it over enough so that the baby would not be smothered, and then rushed to her wounded father.

In a space of thirty-six hours, federal agents had killed Randy Weaver's wife and also his son. The FBI would claim that Horiuchi had been authorized to shoot because when Randy, Sara, and Kevin had come out of the cabin, they were about to open fire on a surveillance helicopter hovering overhead. One problem with this claim was that several government witnesses testified that when Horiuchi fired the shot that creased Weaver's armpit, Randy Weaver was reaching to unlatch the shed door. He was not and could not have been shooting at a helicopter.

The killing of Vicki Weaver was much harder to justify. The two men and the girl had been running into the relative safety of the cabin, and they had already gotten inside when Horiuchi fired his fatal second shot. No one could claim that the three were doing anything aggressive-they were simply running for their lives.

Furthermore, Randy Weaver had been the first one in the door. No one could make a credible claim that the hostage rescue specialist had been shooting at him. The official report would be that Horiuchi had been trying to shoot Kevin Harris in the back as he ran into the kitchen, but had been late with the shot and then jerked the trigger. That was why the agent had shot the nursing mother in the head: purely by accident. It was also pure luck that Kevin Harris had been seriously wounded in the process.

"What do you suppose they're doing up there?" one of the agents asked as he looked up the hill at the cabin. "Why don't they come out? The mother's dead. You'd think they'd give up."

"I'm getting tired of standing here in this rain," his friend said. "Let's see if we can get a rise out of anyone up there." The agent cupped his hands to make a megaphone for his voice.

"Vick-eee, oh, Vick-eee! What are you going to cook us for breakfast tomorrow, Vicky? Your husband loves it when you cook for him, doesn't he? Have you got enough for everybody? Vick-eee..." The agent shook his head and chuckled. "Guess it's not going to work."

"Try again later," his friend suggested.

I hate this job Alex Neumann thought as he stood in the cold night rain and watched the scene in front of him. He was standing by the barricaded Ruby Creek bridge, four miles below the Weaver cabin, where dozens of state and federal officers faced an angry mob of area residents and friends of the Weavers. Included in the group were Kevin Harris' parents.

The situation was more volatile than anything that Neumann had experienced in eighteen years with the FBI. The feds had set up the barricade that morning to deny access to the Weaver property, and had evicted over thirty nearby residents from their homes, some of them at gunpoint. The people absolutely hated the massive federal invasion. They were demanding answers, and they weren't getting any. Thank God they don't know about the dead boy Neumann thought. Yet.

The veteran FBI man stood up straight in the cold rain and kept his face from showing any of what he felt inside.

He had not yet heard about what had happened to Vicki Weaver five hours earlier.

September 19,1992 "Good afternoon, my name's Henry Bowman, and I'm an alcoholic."

"Hi, Henry!" a chorus of people replied simultaneously. I swear that's the most moronic part of this whole organization Henry thought with an inward smile. But I guess I'd miss it if they didn't do it. Maybe. He cleared his throat and went on. There were about twenty people seated in front of him in the church rectory.

"It's been a while since I came to a meeting. A couple things have happened lately that made me realize it would be a good idea to find one and go. One of them was that I'm the sponsor for this young guy who just got out of a chemical dependency program at one of the hospitals, and he wanted to talk to me about something they'd gone over in class. One of the counselors was talking about secrets-secrets about things in our past we're ashamed of. He was saying to the class that these things have a lot of power over us mainly because they're secret, not because of what they are.

"Anyway, this kid told me that some of the people in his class had volunteered to tell some secrets about themselves, and after they did, they seemed to feel a lot better for having done it. Only he couldn't bring himself to, in front of all of those people. So he asked me could he tell me his secret, which would be easier for him than 'fessing up in front of a whole bunch of people, some of them women. I guess I was kind of a practice run." Most of the people in the room laughed at that comment.

"I said 'sure', and was hoping it would be something interesting, because it had been a slow day, but he ended up telling me about how he'd stolen something worth about ten dollars from someone a long time ago and he was really ashamed because the person was his best friend. We talked about it some, and he seemed to feel a lot better, and if I was disappointed because his secret was really boring, I tried not to let on." A few more people chuckled at that.

"After I hung up, I got to thinking about the whole 'secrets' thing, and did I still have any. Came to realize there was one. I'd never thought of it in the way this kid had, because it wasn't something bad I'd done to somebody while I was drinking. It was something that happened to me twenty-one years ago, when I was cold sober and my drinking consisted of maybe a glass of champagne at Christmas."

Henry Bowman went on to tell the group about the summer night in 1971 that he had been gang-raped while out running. He told the story quickly and without embellishment. He was surprised at how easy it was. Maybe the counselor at that program is on to something Henry thought. When he finished the story, several people were looking at the floor. There was one woman, however, who could not take her eyes off Henry.

"That was twenty-one years ago. It was the real start of my drinking, and I was just lucky that someone took me to an AA meeting before I got into some disaster that couldn't be reversed.

"After I got sober, I started teaching personal self-defense classes, using what I had learned. I told all of my students about what happened. Only thing is, I lied. I told them it was a severe beating, which it definitely was, but I left the sex part out of it. The classes were a success, and I have received letters over the years from former students saying that what they learned from me kept them alive and unhurt when they were attacked.

"Thing is, why did I lie? It wasn't because I'd done anything wrong. I hadn't committed a crime. You could argue that it wasn't my duty to air dirty linen in public, except I didn't tell anybody what really happened, not for over twenty years. Not until right now.

"I haven't had a drink for seventeen years. Some things are happening right now that make me feel powerless-very much like the way I felt that night in 1971-and I really wanted a drink last night." Henry paused and shook his head.

"I take that back. I didn't want one drink last night, I wanted a full bottle of gin, and about a quart of fresh tonic water, and a whole lime to slice up, and a place to drink it with no phone and no television. But I knew if I did that, I'd have the same set of problems today, along with a great big new one: losing twenty years of sobriety. So I ate an ice cream cone instead, and came here tonight."

One by one, many of the people in the group thanked Henry for what he had said, and related something they had gotten out of hearing it. Several told secrets about themselves. Henry thought they were all pretty mundane, except for one member's confession that after he had been fired from his job for drinking, he'd had a printer run off some labels for a wear-reducing engine additive, slapped one on a can of lapping compound, and sent it off with a "here's your free sample" letter on dummied-up Valvoline letterhead to his ex-boss. The man's Mercedes had gone almost a whole week before the entire engine was ruined.

"You sure your boss didn't keep a bottle of gin in his desk?" Henry asked when he heard this story. "I wouldn't dump some strange crap in my engine if the letter that came with it was from God Himself." "I'd like to speak with you for a few minutes," the young woman said to Henry. "I haven't had dinner yet, and the coffee shop down the street has good milk shakes, if you like ice cream." Henry smiled.

"Sure, I could go for that. I'm sorry, if you said your name before, I didn't catch it." "No, it's only my fourth or fifth meeting here. We've never met, and I didn't say anything tonight. My name's Cindy. Cindy Caswell." The two shook hands and Cindy led the way out the door.

"There's a secret I have that I wasn't quite ready to tell the whole group," Cindy said after they had been seated and had ordered their food. "I think you might understand, so I'd like to talk to you about it." Henry nodded his head and Cindy Caswell told him about her abduction and subsequent three-year ordeal in Las Vegas.

When she got to the part about Fat Tony Farratto, she told Henry that her last 'assignment' had been an overweight man who'd had a heart attack during sex. She said she'd taken the considerable sum of money he'd had in his pocket (which was true) and managed to get out of town before anyone knew he was dead. Cindy Caswell was not about to confess to murder, not to someone from an AA meeting, or to anyone else. She did, however, mention the date of the event, and Henry Bowman made a mental note of it.

"So, you went through all that for three years straight in Las Vegas, but didn't start drinking until you got back here?" Henry asked after the waitress brought his milkshake and Cindy's hamburger. He was reserving judgment on the story the girl had just told him. Alcoholics tended to lie when it suited their purposes, just like the rest of the population.