"Sharper drop-off than it looked," Behnke said in surprise as they bumped across fifteen feet of stream bed and climbed up the opposite side.

"Think it messed up your sight settings?" Crocker asked, worried.

"No, no, not in foam hardcases. I was just thinking of your bumper."

"That's what it's for," Crocker said as he accelerated down the track worn in the prairie over the years by other vehicles before him. A long, rolling hill topped with a rock outcropping rose up in the distance. It was over a mile away. The path through the sagebrush aimed straight for the hill, then veered left around it at the base. "Shall we go up there, see if we can get any good long-range shots down the other side of that hill?"

"That's a good idea. It's easier to use the rangefinder on any kind of downward angle than it is on the flat.

Prairie dogs don't stick up much." Got to see if maybe Henry will sell me that Russian gadget Behnke thought. Best piece of equipment a long-range shooter could ask for, next to his rifle.

"Good point." Orville Crocker drove on, then brought the truck to a stop where the path bent left around the hill. He cut the wheels right, put his truck in low gear, and engaged the shift lever for the transfer case. Then he eased out the clutch without touching the accelerator. The GMC 3/4-ton began to idle up the gentle slope.

"I always take it easy out in the middle of nowhere," he explained. "Lot of guys would race up here in twowheel-drive. You spin a wheel, and one of these rocks can cut your tire right to the cord. Not so easy when it's dry, like now, but it can happen 'fore you know it, especially right after a rain." Curt Behnke nodded. Minutes went by as the truck slowly made its way up the hill. When they got to the rock outcropping, Orville Crocker drove around and parked on the far side of it, with the nose of the truck aimed west, in the direction away from where they had come.

"Now let's see what we've got in the cooler," the younger man said as he opened the back of the truck. "Ham and cheese on rye sound good? And what do you want to wash it down with, Coke or iced tea?"

"I'll take a Coke," Curt Behnke said absentmindedly. He was using the 7x26 binoculars to check the area below them for dog towns. "Looks like we got some real barrel stretchers west of us. Six hundred yards to the nearest one, looks like." He chuckled. "Watch that rangefinder make a liar out of me."

"I'll set up the portable bench," Crocker offered. It worried him when the old man started doing any kind of heavy lifting, even though Curt Behnke didn't seem to show any strain.

"They're over on the other side of this creek."

"How deep is it?"

"Less than a foot, I'd say."

"Want me to get out and check?"

"Nah, I can see from here," Hildebrandt said quickly as he took his foot off the brake. Trey Mullins opened his mouth to suggest that they all get out of the van to lighten the vehicle, but it was too late. The undercarriage scraped noisily as the front wheels dropped into the creek bed. The driver reflexively took his foot off the accelerator, and the van slowed to a crawl just as the dragging stopped and the rear wheels neared the edge of the short drop-off. Before Agent Hildebrandt had the presence of mind to speed up, the back of the van dropped eight inches and there was a loud, jarring clunk as the van's rear bumper landed on the rocky creekbank. The driver stepped on the gas pedal, but the engine just revved freely. Both rear wheels were spinning in the water.

"Shit."

"You'd better get out and push," the driver said. "Four of you should be able to get this thing unstuck." Trey Mullins and three ATF agents clambered out of the van and got behind it up on the rocky bank of the creek. Try as they did, the van wouldn't budge.

"Let's find something to put under the wheels," Hildebrandt said as he got out of the van. The men searched the area, but there was nothing suitable to plug the seven-inch gap between the tires and the slippery bottom of the creek bed. The largest loose stones were fist-sized at best.

"Got a pry bar in there?" Mullins asked in a voice that showed he did not hold much hope for an affirmative answer. The lead agent shook his head. Guns were the only tools the ATF agents had brought. "We'll have to go find Crocker on foot, then. Use his truck to pull us out."

"What if he doesn't have a chain in his truck?" Agent Ruiz asked.

"Then we'll drive and get one," Mullins said with just a hint of exasperation in his voice.

"Let's try piling up those smaller rocks, first," one of the others suggested. "Before we have to go off on a long hike." The agents set about gathering up the stones and trying to wedge them en masse under the tires.

"Get behind and push, when I give it the gas," Hildebrandt said as he climbed back into the cab. Sweat was beginning to soak his body armor and black clothing. There was a very slight wind blowing to the west, but it helped only a little. "Get ready," he said as he started the van's engine and dropped the lever into Drive. "Okay...now!" The driver took his foot off the brake and pressed down on the accelerator. A bubbling whine cut through the air as the left tire spun on the wet stones and the pile collapsed. The wheel spun impotently as the right remained stationary.

"I think you broke an axle," ATF Agent Kellogg said. Trey Mullins rolled his eyes.

"The van's just got an open differential," he corrected. "No limited-slip."

"Whatever, it's not going to work," Hildebrandt said. "Let's get going. Hoods down, men. We're deploying."

Curt Behnke paused with his sandwich held halfway to his mouth. "You hear that?" he asked. "Sounded like a car winding out. Or something," Crocker said with a scowl as he turned his head. Both men walked to the side of the rock outcropping and looked out over the path from which they had come. "Van's stuck in the creek, looks like," Curt Behnke said as he reached for the little seven-power binoculars he wore around his neck. He lifted them to his eyes and adjusted the focus. "Hm."

"What is it?"

"Take a look," Behnke answered, pulling the carry strap over his head and handing the binoculars to the younger man. He was frowning. "See what you think. That's over a mile off. I'll get the big set." The old gunsmith walked back around the rock outcropping towards where Cracker's truck was parked.

Crocker steadied himself against one side of the gap in the rocks and turned the focus wheel with his finger. "Oh, Christ," he breathed softly. What he saw looked for all the world like four men dressed in black with black hoods over their heads, carrying short weapons of some sort. They were followed by a fifth man in a dark jacket and cowboy hat holding a gun that was longer than the others. Reflexively, Crocker stepped back and to his left, concealing himself behind the upthrust rock.

"Let's try these," Curt Behnke said as he set the camera tripod down. Attached to the top of it were a large pair of observation binoculars weighing twelve pounds. They had 100mm objective lenses, and were fitted with 45 degree eyepieces for more convenient use while on a mount. Behnke loosened the tripod's head and adjusted the position of the big twenty-power glasses until he had the five men in his field of view. There was almost no mirage present, for it was the middle of the afternoon, and the hottest part of the day was past. Through the binoculars, the hooded men looked like they were about 130 yards away. The gunsmith's eyes narrowed as he stared at the five of them walking along the path worn in the prairie. Black hoods and machine guns he thought. After what was not quite a minute but seemed much longer, Curt Behnke looked up from the twin eyepieces.

"Take a look. You'd be better at identifying the guns they're carrying than I am." He stepped back to let Orville Crocker have his position behind the big glasses.

"Suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5s," Crocker said softly after a few seconds. "The four in black are ATF, I'd bet anything on it. The fifth man has a scoped bolt action with a suppressor screwed on the muzzle. I don't know who he is. Local, maybe." Crocker gave a long sigh. "It's me they're after."

"The fifth man is FBI," Behnke corrected. "I saw him turn around and his jacket has 'FBI' in big white letters across the back." He closed his eyes and spoke very carefully. "Why are they coming after you, Orville?" Now he's going to tell me he's one of the fellows who's been doing all this killing.

"I had my annual compliance check yesterday, right before you got here. I didn't want to talk about it, so I didn't say anything to you." He rubbed the bridge of his nose, where his shooting glasses sat.

"The field agent they sent out was this black woman who I don't think had ever touched a gun before. I wasn't thinking about that at the time, though. Anyway, she picked up a Mauser 712 Schnellfeuer and pointed it at me. Not on purpose," Crocker said quickly. "She was probably just looking at it, but I haven't had a gun pointed at me since Vietnam, her finger was in the trigger guard, and I just went ballistic." Oh Lord Curt Behnke thought. So you drew your gun and shot her.

"I slapped the barrel to the side and twisted the gun out of her hand," Crocker continued, nervously glancing past the edge of the rocks at the approaching men. "She had these real long glued-on fingernails, like a lot of black women wear. You know-the kind with the little fake diamonds stuck to them? Anyway, her finger was on the trigger, like I said, and when I twisted the gun out of her hand, it tore that big long nail off. She screamed bloody murder and called me a few things you don't hear on television, even if you got cable. Maybe I said something-I don't remember. She got this kind of crazy look on her face, and said Til fix you' or something like that, and stormed out.

"I guess I should have called the Cheyenne ATF office and told them what happened, but..." He looked at the ground. "Probably would have made things worse." Crocker licked his lips. "We better pack up and drive down to where they are." He started to step towards the truck, but Curt Behnke put his hand on the younger man's arm, stopping him.

"Is what you told me really all that happened?" Behnke asked. Orville Crocker considered the question.

"I guess it's possible I broke her finger, but I don't think I did. I've broken a few fingers in the last thirty years-couple of them mine and one on someone else. You usually hear it let go. I'm pretty sure it was just her nail torn partway off. But that can hurt like a bastard, too."

Assassination team. I can't believe I'm seeing it Behnke thought in amazement. Time was, I'd've called a man crazy if he came up with a notion like that the old gunsmith said to himself. Not now. Curt Behnke was remembering the news footage he'd seen from Waco, and the description of what had happened at Ruby Ridge. He was also thinking of two helicopter gunships on his friend Henry Bowman's property.

"Those men are coming here to kill us," Behnke said slowly. "I might not say that," he continued, "if there were only two of them, or even three, and they weren't wearing those hoods, and they didn't all have silencers on their guns. But what else would four men be doing with silenced submachine guns and their faces covered?"

"I don't know."

"That fifth man is there for backup," Behnke found himself saying. "I'm sure of it." The gunsmith squinted. "The thing that doesn't make any sense is why anyone carrying a pistol-caliber weapon would be crazy enough to climb up a hill out on the wide-open prairie after a couple of fellows with varmint rifles. There's absolutely nothing for any of them to hide behind." Orville Cracker's jaw dropped suddenly.

"They don't know we've got varmint rifles," he said immediately. "In fact, they don't know that you're here at all. They think I'm alone."

"How can that be?"

"ATF knows the guns I've got from checking my records every year. They're all handguns and submachine guns. All pistol-caliber stuff, except my Lahti. The only rifles I've got are a couple of twenty-twos." He glanced past the rocks. The five men were still a long ways off.

"But you're out here shooting prairie dogs."

"Nobody knows that. This is my first time. But I have been out here at Doug's place several times before, shooting machine guns. Thompsons, mostly. They're my favorite, and he likes 'em, too. Folks in the area know that." He looked down at his feet. "I can't tell you how sorry I am I got you into this. Why don't I just show myself, and wave my undershirt, or something?" Behnke considered the suggestion. Nowhere to hide he thought. They need his truck, to pull their van out.

"They're all on foot," the gunsmith agreed. "I guess I could take your truck and go for help. But with no witnesses there'd be no reason they couldn't shoot you and say you attacked them." He paused, considering. "We could both pack up now, and drive away..." His voice trailed off. Run away from this two-bit assassination team? Behnke found himself thinking.

"But I'm not going to do that," he finished. "Help me bring the shooting bench and my gear over around on this side," he said briskly. "Then you can get in your truck and drive out of here if you want." Orville Cracker saw the look on the old man's face and shook his head.

"I think I'll stick around."

"Then grab that old army blanket from the truck," Behnke told his friend. "Gun needs a fouling shot," he said in reply to Cracker's puzzled look.

The two men wrapped the blanket around the front half of the barrel and folded it over. Behnke put on his earmuffs, lifted the heavy rifle off the sandbags, carried it to the cab of the vehicle, and climbed in. With the butt sticking out the passenger window and the wrapped muzzle over the middle of the front seat, Behnke chambered a round, closed the bolt, and pulled the trigger. There was a muffled whump and a snowstorm of wool scraps flew inside the cab and out the driver's window where the gun had been pointed.

Behnke climbed out of the truck and returned to the shooting bench.

FBI Agent Trey Mullins cocked his head. He thought he had heard something. A shot, perhaps. If so, it was a long ways off. Miles, maybe. He looked to where the others were, more than fifty yards ahead of him. None of the ATF agents appeared to have noticed any sound. Then he saw the head man stop and turn around.

"You coming with us?" the ATF leader yelled, pulling down the opening in his hood to better expose his mouth. Agent Mullins was standing at the spot where the tire tracks of Orville Cracker's truck left the dusty path. The four ATF agents had begun to head up the gentle slope, following the apparent course of the vehicle.

"I'm going to hang back here, I think," Mullins called. "In case he comes driving around the side of that hill before one of you can cut him off."

"Good idea," the ATF man yelled with a nod, then told his three companions to spread out on their long uphill march. The grade was very gentle, but all four men were already sweating heavily in their black ninja suits, ski masks, and body armor.

"Looks like that last guy is staying put. About where we turned off."

"He's the only one that really bothers me," Behnke answered, chewing his lip. "Hand me the rangefinder." Cracker uncased the binocular-shaped instrument and handed it to his friend. The device was a Russian copy of a British unit made for artillery battalions. A few had come into the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Henry Bowman had snapped this one up in 1994. It employed a capacitor, a rechargeable battery, and a high-powered infrared laser. Behnke switched it on, pulled the cap off the front lens, and adjusted the power setting to its lowest level. The unit had a maximum range of 25,000 meters, or about sixteen miles.

Behnke rested his elbows on the shooting bench and looked through the eyepieces. The right side held the optics and imposed a reticle, which could be illuminated for night use, on the magnified target. The left side contained the LED electronics, and was black at the moment. The gunsmith centered the reticle on the tiny figure in the distance and pressed one of two buttons on the top right side of the rangefinder with his right index finger. He held it down until a small green light appeared, seen by his left eye. Then he released the button.

Pressing the button had sent current to the capacitor, and the green indicator had told Behnke when it was fully charged. Releasing the button discharged the capacitor, sending a two-million-watt laser pulse of infrared light towards the target. The pulse lasted about seven nanoseconds, and the laser spread very slightly with distance. IR-sensitive electronics in the front of the unit caught the reflected scatter from the first object the laser beam contacted. An internal quartz clock had started running at thirty million cycles per second when the laser fired, and shut off when the reflection returned. The rangefinder performed the necessary math in less than a millisecond, and red LED numbers appeared in the left eyepiece of the unit. Damn Behnke thought as he looked at the digits. They told him the FBI sniper was 1065 meters away. He repeated the process twice and was rewarded with a reading of 1070 and then another of 1065. Five meters was the smallest increment the rangefinder could display.

"Eleven hundred seventy-five yards," he said, doing the math in his head. "Never tried a shot that far away." He bit his lip. 'Target's bigger than a prairie dog, though."

"Here's the computer," Cracker said as he unfolded the laptop and put it on the shooting bench. It, too, was on loan from Henry Bowman.

Many men in their eighties had an aversion to joining the computer age, at least on a personal level. Curt Behnke, the self-taught machinist, was inherently comfortable with numbers, however, and embraced any technology that increased the precision of his work. Both his lathe and mill now had electronic spars mounted on them with digital readouts for all axes. Behnke had immediately seen the virtues of a trajectory program that would calculate exterior ballistics based on the exact set of prevailing conditions. After using the laptop computer in the field for several hours the day before, he had vowed that as soon as he returned to St. Louis, he would outfit himself with just such a setup.

After the computer booted itself up, Behnke called up the ballistics program which had been written by a ballistician named Pejsa and began entering data. Because the program did its calculations based on the range in yards, Behnke did the conversion from meters in his head from the Russian rangefinder's figures. He had an exact ballistic coefficient for the 115-grain Berger bullet he was using. A month earlier he had fired the rifle over two different chronographs set exactly three hundred yards apart, and had determined exact velocities at both ranges. From these figures, and with known temperature, pressure, and humidity values, another Pejsa computer program had derived the projectile's precise drag coefficient.

"Need the barometer," Behnke said to Crocker. His friend retrieved it from the truck and gave him the current reading. "Same as yesterday," the gunsmith said as he typed in the number. "Don't have a humidity gauge, but it's dry. I'll call it ten percent." He rechecked all the figures he had entered, used the rangefinder once more to be sure the FBI sniper had not moved, and hit RETURN on the keyboard.

"Thirteen and three-quarters minutes more elevation from my five-hundred-meter zero," he announced. "Bullet will drift about six inches for every one mile per hour of crosswind." Behnke pulled a calculator from his shirt pocket and typed in some numbers. The Unertl target scope used external click-type micrometer adjustments, and the shift in impact depended on the spacing between the front and rear mounts. When Curt Behnke had machined the mounting rail, he had tried to get a spacing that would yield .200" of adjustment with each click of the windage and elevation knobs. Range testing on a grid after the rifle was completed revealed that the actual value was .194" per click.

"Seventy-one clicks elevation," he declared, and carefully began to turn the knob counterclockwise. "Make sure those binoculars are lined up exactly over the barrel," the gunsmith told Orville Crocker as he settled in behind the rifle. "Just like yesterday."

"Hang on, I'm not set up exactly right," Crocker said quickly.

"Take your time, I'm not going to shoot just yet," Behnke amended. "Not 'til those four are a little closer. In case they decide to all run in different directions."

"Oh. Right. Okay, I'm all set." Crocker had positioned the tripod as Behnke had told him, and aligned it so that the FBI agent was slightly below the center of the big observation binoculars' field-of-view. "You asked me yesterday why I use an old two-inch Unertl on this gun, instead of a more modern scope with internal adjustments."

"Yeah, and I can see your point now-about how you need more elevation adjustment for real long shots." "It just occurred to me, do you know the story behind the Unertl Optical Company? It's...appropriate, you might say."

"I don't," Crocker answered, glancing nervously through the binoculars.