"More?" he asked. "Does the little babe want more pictures? Okay, but first we have to change your little diaper and give you a little bath to get you all clean before bedtime. Let's go get your bath started, little stinkbottom," he said, carrying the giggling little girl upside down towards the changing table in the other room. He folded up the instant camera and carried it in his free hand.

After disposing of the soiled diaper and bathing Rachel, Arthur Bedderson wrapped her up in a fluffy towel and carried her to the bedroom. The little girl threw the towel aside and turned around in a sort of pirouette.

"An X-rated session, huh?" Bedderson commented as he unfolded the camera and prepared to shoot some more pictures. "We'd better stick to family-oriented shots. I don't think they'd believe it with a two-yearold. Maybe if you were ten."

"Pic-ture," she said happily when she saw her father holding the camera.

"Okay, little smiler," Bedderson said, moving in close and framing his daughter's face in the viewfinder.

The autofocus SLR camera bounced an infrared beam off Rachel's face and the lens adjusted to the fourteen-inch distance. Bedderson snapped off two pictures and set them at the foot of the bed. "That's all for now," he announced. "Got to save the rest of the film." He handed the photos to his daughter. "Take these into the kitchen and put them on the breakfast table where Mama will see them when she gets home tomorrow. Then I'm going to put you in bed." Rachel grabbed the prints and ran off naked towards the other end of the house. When she came back, Bedderson took her upstairs, put a diaper on her, then returned to his study. This time he locked the door before sitting down at the computer.

After a few marginally satisfactory attempts, 'B.I.' Bedderson hit on a combination of settings on his photomorphing program that gave him startlingly good results. A CD-ROM of public-domain clipart had given him a number of photos of girls between the ages of eight and ten. Copies of the magazines Shaved Clean, Barely Legal, Asian Sluts, and Anal Biker had provided images of small-bodied, flat-chested, nude women without pubic hair. The pictures in the last magazine showed women being penetrated by male subjects. The morphing program combined these into pictures of nude ten-year-olds. Bedderson's color inkjet printer using purpose-made paper turned out photo-quality prints of the computer-generated composite images.

"Nowfor the final test," Bedderson said as he laid the first print out on his desk, held the Polaroid over it, and pressed the red button. The results were what Bedderson had expected. The focal plane of the Polaroid was ten inches from the print. This distance was proportionally different, compared to the size of the subject, than the camera-to-subject distance that had existed when the magazine photos had been taken. Since the print was laid flat, the focal distance to the center of the print was considerably shorter than it was to the sides of the image. The Polaroid photo looked just like what it was: A picture of a picture.

"Not done yet," Bedderson muttered to himself. Like most serious shooters and ballisticians, he had a facility with math, numbers, and objects in three-dimensional space. What he knew he needed to do was digitally alter his final computer-generated image so that each pixel would appear to be the same distance from a point that was exactly over the center of the image. That dimension had to be the same as the distance from the center of the print to the Polaroid's film plane.

After two hours and fifty minutes of manipulating the program inputs, he had what he needed. The color printer ejected a picture that appeared slightly concave. When Bedderson laid it on his desk and copied it with the Polaroid, the proper geometry of the image was restored. Arthur Bedderson studied the final result, then took another instant photo, this time intentionally moving the camera slightly after the autofocus mechanism had done its job. This made the picture very slightly out-of-focus, and rendered the image even more realistic. The final result was better than Arthur Bedderson had dared expect.

"Better living through technology," he whispered as he applied the same digital distortion to the other morphed images and sent them to the color printer. In another ten minutes, Arthur 'B.I.' Bedderson had a short stack of Polaroid photos of nude ten-year-olds in blatantly sexual poses.

'Bad Influence' Bedderson was not normally bothered by unpleasant tasks or distasteful photographs, but the last computer-generated image made his skin crawl. He had used a photo of a tiny young woman on her back with her feet held up around her head, being anally penetrated by a large, hairy, well-endowed man whose face was not visible. The young woman in the magazine had had a look of sexual ecstasy on her face. Bedderson had digitally grafted on a new head from a clipart shot of a child crying because she had dropped her ice cream cone. What had been tears of frustrated disappointment became, in the new setting, a look of abject terror and excruciating pain. The final Polaroid result was even more horrifying.

Arthur Bedderson picked up that photo and two others by their edges, and slipped them into an envelope. The other photos and all the prints he wrapped in newspapers, carried over to the fireplace, and burned. The envelope with the three Polaroid photos went into his gun safe.

Bedderson encrypted all internal data from his morphing program, including all the intermediate steps he had used, before saving it to his computer's hard disk. Then he went to bed, but sleep was a long time coming.

Back at home from the library, the first thing Taylor Lowell did was sit down at his computer and log onto a web site. After a few false starts, he found some discussion about the mysterious Wilson Blair and his advice to those who were unwilling to endure more government in their lives. The next time Lowell looked at a clock, it was 2:07 a.m.

After he got in bed, it took Taylor Lowell over an hour to fall asleep. That was not unusual, for in recent weeks he had been consumed with anxiety. Tonight, however, his insomnia was caused by a mind thoroughly occupied with planning an important task.

July 30 "Dwight, I've got to handle this now. I've got a press conference this afternoon."

"Mr. President, Wilson Blair was not acting of his own free will."

"Maybe not when he made that tape, but the drugs and the counterfeit money are a real problem for this administration, even ignoring the blank warrants. And Blair said you arranged for it all." "Mr. President, I had no knowledge whatsoever that Wilson Blair was manufacturing evidence." "Kenneth Lenstrom, formerly of the Secret Service, and Herbert Salvest, who used to be at DEA, tell a different story. But that's not the issue. You are responsible for the actions of your men, Dwight." "Mr. President, I-"

"I expect your resignation on my desk by tomorrow at noon. Dwight, please don't make me publicly fire you."

"Need a hand?"

'That's okay. It isn't as heavy as the Unrestricted guns I used to shoot in competition." Curt Behnke carefully laid the 28-pound rifle on the sandbags and prepared to push a dry patch through the bore from the breech end. It was still fairly early in the morning, and there was not even a hint of wind in the air. At the Missouri gunsmith's suggestion, the two men had started out at first light to make the most of their first day of prairie dog shooting. With the Wyoming man helping, Behnke had just finished making sure that all four of his light rifles were properly zeroed at 250 yards.

Curt Behnke stowed his cleaning rod, removed the rod guide from the receiver, sat down on the stool, and squinted at the target frame he had set up in the distance. It was 500 meters away, according to the rangefinder. Five hundred forty-seven yards he thought. That ought to be far enough to get an idea of whether I've been wasting my time.

"Tell me about what you've got there," Orville Crocker asked the old man.

"Long range gun I built up," he said, opening one of two hinged plastic boxes next to the gun. Inside were thirty-seven fired cases unlike any others on the planet, made for a rifle that was one-of-a-kind. "Six millimeter on a .348 case. Probably burn out the barrel in a few hundred rounds, but right now I got a load stays under an inch at three hundred yards, which is all the longer my range is in Missouri, and it's the flattest shooting rifle I've ever built." He took out a screwdriver and made sure the scope mounts were tight.

"A couple of these crazy guys in Precision Shooting magazine wanted to shoot Idaho rockchucks out at a half-mile and beyond. They talked the custom bulletmakers into ordering special dies and extra-long jackets to make real long varmint bullets," he explained. "Hundred grains and up in .243" diameter, with boattails and long, fifteen-caliber ogives, instead of a normal eight-caliber radius. Don't lose velocity as quickly or drift as much in the wind. Now they're making low-drags in .22, .25, 7mm, .30, and .338 calibers, but the 6mm has the most choices.

"Hitting out at those crazy ranges, you got to have an accurate rangefinder. Estimates won't work. If you misguess the range by twenty percent on a shot at two hundred yards, you'll be off by an inch and a half. Misguess the range by twenty percent on an eight hundred-yard shot and your bullet will miss by four or five feet. So you also need a scope with exact click adjustments of known value. It gets to be a miniature version of what artillerymen do," Behnke said with a smile. "Most folks shooting 6mm low-drags use the .284 case, to get enough velocity with heavy bullets. I thought I'd see what something even bigger would do." He handed Crocker a fired case from his box.

The shiny brass had started life as an unfired .348 Winchester case. The .348 was a cartridge for which only one factory rifle had ever been chambered: the Model 71 Winchester lever action, introduced in 1937 and discontinued in 1956. Browning had made a limited run of reproduction Model 71s in 1992 for fanciers of the obsolete weapon.

Behnke had selected the .348 case as the basis for the long range cartridge he had designed because it was the 'fattest' commercial cartridge case made by a domestic manufacturer. This meant that for a given powder capacity, any cartridge based on the .348 case would be shorter than one made using another parent case. Match shooters had shown through constant experimentation that short, fat cases created more uniform combustion than long, skinny ones. The .348 was also of 'rimmed' design, which made for a strong case head and had allowed Behnke to sort the brass by rim thickness.

Two months earlier, Behnke had fitted an old 6mm barrel to a match action and chambered it with his special 6mm-.348 reamer. Then he had measured a thousand factory Winchester .348 cases and obtained a little over three hundred with exactly the same rim thickness. He had necked these down using a die he had made, seated a primer in each, put in a small charge of fast-burning pistol powder, filled the rest of the case with Cream-of-Wheat, and fired each case with the gun's muzzle pointed towards the sky. The result was several hundred formed brass in this special caliber.

Using a wall-thickness checker he had made, Curt Behnke had found a hundred forty-seven cases whose wall thickness at the case body varied less than .001". He had then put each of these cases on a mandrel in his lathe and turned their necks so that the wall thickness of each case neck was exactly .014", then trimmed each case so that the overall length of each one was exactly 2.080". Behnke had deprimed all 147 cases, cleaned them with carbon tetrachloride, and drilled the flash holes to the same size. Finally, he had weighed each of the finished cases. Thirty-seven had weighed exactly the same, and these had been set aside. Fifty-eight were within two-tenths of a grain, and this was close enough to use for load development. The rest had gone in the trash.

Behnke had removed the barrel he'd used to form the cases, and chambered and fitted a Hart match blank to the Hall 'Express' single shot match action. Then he had removed the barrel and sent it to a firm in Illinois called 300 Below, which specialized in cryogenic tempering of metal parts. This company had slowly brought the barrel to negative 318 degrees Fahrenheit, held it there for eleven hours, and then slowly brought it back up to ambient temperature. The procedure removed all internal stresses from the steel, and also made the material more wear-resistent. Behnke had read of the process in Precision Shooting, and tried it himself, sending the company one of his best-shooting barrels, and a mediocre one. Both were markedly more accurate after cryogenic tempering. When Behnke saw the improvement, he made sure that every rifle he built from then on got a cryogenically treated barrel.

The gunsmith had then epoxied the Hall action into a heavy Lee Six fiberglass stock with a 4" wide forend, screwed the barrel back in, fitted a scope rail to the receiver, mounted a scope, and begun working up loads for the rifle. He had used a laborious technique that called for thorough cleaning after each round fired to 'break in' the bore. Curt Behnke was now about to demonstrate the results of all this work.

"What's your load?" Crocker asked as Behnke sat down at the bench.

"Case full of some slow-burning surplus ball powder Henry got for me, and a 115-grain Berger bullet. Velocity's over 3700, which is marginal for the strength of these thin match jackets. I molycoated the bullets, which seems to make them shoot a little flatter at long range, but I mainly did it to cut down on fouling and make the bore last longer. I molycoat all my match bullets now."

"I wondered why they were that dull grey color."

"That's NECO's lab-grade moly. Tumble them in steel shot with just a pinch of the stuff to coat the bullets. Then some lab-grade carnauba wax, with more shot in another tumbler, to keep it from rubbing off on your fingers. They're really slick now, boy." Crocker smiled as he watched Curt Behnke unscrew the steel scope caps, pull the Unertl target scope to the rear to make sure it was seated, and settle in behind the rifle. Behnke plucked a cartridge from his second box, slid it into the loading port, and closed the bolt.

"When the barrel was brand new and the rifling at the throat was dead sharp, sometimes the bullets would come apart in the air about fifty, a hundred yards out. The moly seems to help. Still does it once in a while, especially when it gets hot." The gunsmith was referring to how the bullet's thin copper jacket, stressed from being engraved by the rifling, would sometimes rupture under the rotational force of being spun at 350,000 RPM as it left the muzzle. When it did, the bullet would leave a blue-grey trail of vaporized lead as it disintegrated in mid-flight.

Behnke touched the trigger as he stared over the top of the rifle without looking through the scope. The gun thundered and slid back three inches on the sandbags. "The fouling shot held together," he said with a nod. "Now for the group." He opened the bolt, extracted the fired case, and put it back in the box with the other second-quality brass. Then he selected five rounds from his box of thirty-seven and laid them carefully on the folded towel next to the butt of the rifle.

In the no-wind conditions, Curt Behnke fired carefully and let the barrel cool between shots with the bolt open. His aiming point was a five-inch black dot on a three-foot-square piece of butcher paper tacked to the folding target frame over a quarter mile distant.

"Too far to spot my shots from here," Behnke said, standing up. "We'll have to drive down." "How 'bout I take the truck and one of the walkie-talkies, tell you where you're hitting. Then I'll move over to the side a bit and you can adjust your sights while I spot for you."

"Okay."

Orville Crocker closed the tailgate and the camper's rear window, climbed into his GMC, and drove off across the prairie. Two minutes later he was staring at the butcher paper from ten feet away, and he could not believe his eyes. Three of the five shots were almost touching. The other two enlarged the group so that it was just a little too big to be covered by a quarter. Crocker hit the Transmit button on the portable radio.

"Ah, it looks like an inch, maybe an inch and an eighth," he said in wonder.

"Where is it?" Curt Behnke came back.

"Oh-uh, right. You're about, uh, nine inches low and three inches right. I'll move over to the side." Crocker put the truck in Reverse and backed ten yards away. A minute passed, and then there was a loud crack that startled the Wyoming native, and a quarter-inch hole appeared a half-inch from the center of the black spot. A moment later the rolling boom of the muzzle blast echoed in cab of the truck. In half a minute, a second bullet cut the target, almost touching the first. Thirty seconds after that, there was a third distant boom, but no supersonic crack and no hole in the paper.

"That one make it to the target?" Behnke asked on the radio.

"No."

"Okay, give me a minute, and I'll try one more." Cracker waited, and was rewarded with a crack-boom. "How do those three look?"

"Dead center, it looks like from here. Want me to go check?"

"Yeah. I've got the bolt out. Go ahead." Cracker dropped his truck in Drive and pulled up to the target frame.

"Your group's about a half-inch high. Windage is perfect. Three shots in well under an inch. Looks like about three-quarters. Want to shoot some more?"

"No, we'll save the barrel for prairie dogs."

"Okay, I'll pack up the target." Cracker lowered the walkie-talkie and stood staring at the two unbelievable groups for a long moment. Then he began carefully pulling down the butcher paper and disassembling the target frame.

"Hildebrandt, ATF," the black-clad man said, extending his right hand. "Local office. Kellogg here is my partner. Ruiz and Figueroa," he added, cocking his head towards the two men slightly behind him. "They've just come up from Denver."

"Trey Mullins," the FBI agent answered. He had hesitated just a fraction before taking the ATF man's hand, and was staring at what the ATF agents were wearing. All four men wore black "ninja" outfits, black combat boots, black body armor, and carried black machine guns. On their heads were knit black ski masks, pulled up and worn like caps for the moment. Mullins was thinking about how hot the four men were likely to be before too long.

"You've confirmed that Cracker is out shooting on the Pertzborn property?" Hildebrandt asked. "We've checked his house, and no one's home." Trey Mullins forced his face to remain expressionless as he developed a mental image of that little scene.

"Talked to some folks who saw his truck headed that way," Mullins lied. "I phoned Pertzborn's house, but there's no answer," he added, which was the truth. "Whether Cracker's still up there now..." He shrugged and let his voice trail off.

Trey Mullins had never liked the idea of being involved in any ATF action. After CNN's bombshell video footage of the day before, the four ATF men were about as welcome in his office as a wheelbarrow full of plutonium. The notion of an armed, unannounced raid on a man who was an alderman in his community struck Trey Mullins as very bad public relations. To execute this raid while the man was out on someone's ranch plinking with his Thompsons looked to Mullins like a good way to initiate another Ruby Ridge disaster. He had spoken with his friend Alex Neumann on the phone, and although Alex had sympathized with his old partner, he'd explained that there had to be cooperation betwe en the agencies. Neumann had told him to provide backup only, and that is exactly what Trey Mullins intended to do.

"We'll find him," the ATF leader said confidently. "You going like that? On a deployment?" Trey Mullins looked down at the cotton work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots he was wearing. He shrugged.

"I'll have on my windbreaker. I'm just going to stand in the background, remember? This is your boys' show." Agent Hildebrandt gave a look of mild disapproval, but said nothing. "Let me go sign out a rifle," Mullins said, "and we'll get going." The FBI man walked into the other room and unlocked the gun rack. He lifted out the Brown Precision bolt action rifle, which was the most accurate weapon in the Cheyenne office. The rifle had a Remington 700 action, Douglas barrel, and fiberglass stock. An AWC suppressor was screwed onto the threaded muzzle. The rifle had originally come with a night vision scope, which Neumann and Mullins had immediately replaced with a more conventional Leupold variable optic. Once in a while they used the NV scope by itself for midnight observation, but neither man had ever envisioned an occasion where they'd want to shoot someone from a long distance in secret after dark.

The sound suppressor was another matter. The moment Mullins fired the .308 and discovered that it had the report of a little .22 rimfire, he'd fallen in love with the glass-stocked rifle. Agent Mullins had grown up in western ranching country, and subscribed to the rancher's "Three S" creed regarding wolves: Shoot 'em, Shovel 'em, and Shut up. The noise-suppressed rifle was tailor-made for wolf control. Any wolf that got within two hundred yards was as good as dead if Trey Mullins had the suppressed .308 handy. Agent Mullins was well-liked by the ranchers he knew.

The AWC suppressor which made this possible was about the size of two frozen-juice cans, and made the gun a foot longer and much less convenient to transport and carry. However, the one time Trey Mullins had taken it off, he discovered that the rifle's point of impact changed radically. The gun was equally accurate; shooting off his coat thrown over the hood of the car, Mullins had still put his three shots in 1 1/4" at 100 yards. The group, however, was almost a foot above and to the right of where he had expected to see it. When he'd screwed the suppressor back on, point of impact returned to the point of aim. From that moment on, the suppressor had remained attached.

Hildebrandt's look of disapproval at Mullins' casual civilian garb changed to one of pleasure when he saw the suppressed sniper rifle the agent carried under his arm. Trey Mullins picked up his blue nylon FBI windbreaker, adjusted his cowboy hat, and opened the door leading out of the office.

"Let's go."

"Man, this little seventeen is great!" Orville Crocker said happily as he walked up to the vehicle. He had just connected with yet another prairie dog at over 300 yards. "Maybe I ought to have you build me one of these." The day before, Crocker would have considered a fifth of a mile an absurd range at which to expect to hit a prairie dog with any rifle, let alone one that weighed only nine pounds. He was still amazed that it could be done with a gun whose recoil was so slight that the shooter could watch the bullet strike through the scope. The rifle he was shooting was chambered for the wildcat .17 Mach IV, a case made by reforming .221 Fireball pistol brass to the smaller neck size and sharper shoulder. Most of the . 17s Curt Behnke had built had been chambered for this custom cartridge. The .17 Remington was the only factory round which fired .172" bullets, and while it had slightly higher velocity than smaller-cased .17s, Behnke had never achieved the stellar accuracy with the bigger case that he had with the Mach IV.

"It took me a long time before I was willing to believe a .17 could keep up with a good .22 centerfire varmint rifle. Twenty years ago, nobody made a decent .17 barrel, and there weren't any match-grade bullets because no one made match jackets. Now Ed Shilen and Ken Johnson make .17 barrels just as good as their .22s, and Walt Berger talked J4 into doing a big run of match jackets."

"Are the benchrest shooters using .17s now?" Crocker asked.

"No, those guys take the barrel off and throw it away if the gun won't stay under two-tenths, and the little .17s won't quite average that, no matter how careful you are." Behnke was referring to the center-to-center group size, in fractions of an inch, for five shots at a hundred yards. "But three-tenths is plenty good for prairie dogs." He squinted in the bright sun. "If you really want me to build you one like that one you're shooting, I can rebarrel the .223 you were using this morning. Only drawback is you won't be able to buy match bullets at your local gun shop, like you can with a .22 centerfire. And you'll need to make your own cases, but I can get my grandson to form as many as you want while I'm fitting up the barrel."

"Let's keep that .2231 shot earlier the way it is, and build up a second gun," Crocker said as he chambered another round. "Like you said before, the .223 is the most sensible caliber. And I mean, if you lived out here, would you want to own just one prairie dog rifle?"

Hooked after half a day the old gunsmith thought as he answered with a laugh. A man after my o wn heart. "Better watch it. Next thing you know, there'll be a dozen of them in your gun cabinet. You ready to take a break?"

"Sounds good. It's about time to clean the rifles, anyway."

Guess I already got him trained about cleaning, too Curt Behnke thought. He had impressed upon Orville Crocker the necessity of keeping a match rifle's bore free of copper fouling. Some prairie dog shooters would let a gun go fifty and even a hundred rounds before scrubbing the bore, but Behnke's long years of match competition had made cleaning a religion. It was what made the difference between hits and near misses out at four hundred yards.

"Let me handle the cleaning chores. You can stop me if I do anything wrong."

"All right. And while you're doing that, I'll prep some cases for the big gun. You can take some more crazy long shots off the bench this afternoon. Maybe we can find another good long range spot after lunch." "Can't wait," Crocker said. He had made one kill at over five hundred yards that morning, and was still marvelling at the event.

Curt Behnke smiled as he stood by the tailgate and opened the bottom drawer of the machinist's chest he used for a shooting kit. He took out his loading tools and began reassembling thirty-seven more rounds of ammo for the 6mm-.348.

"I've never been on this part," Orville Crocker said as he and Curt Behnke approached the foot-deep stream in Cracker's truck. "Want to go farther?"

"Sure. We can always come back."

"Right." Crocker put the truck in low gear and took his foot off the gas, letting the engine do the braking as the truck's front wheels dropped down into the stream. The thick steel rear bumper scraped loudly on the rocky ground as the rear wheels followed.