"I know it's been a long time, but we're down to the wire here. You have my authorization to do whatever it takes. Am I being too vague?"

"No, sir. Ah, there's been some talk about...encouraging Judge Potter to tell more about this Mr. Jones..." "And that's what it will stay, Alex. Talk."

"Yes, sir."

"We'll have at least one more meeting of the whole group. I believe it's scheduled for the eighth." "Ah, Mr. President?"

"Yes?"

"Forensics should be done long before then, and I will have already given you their findings. If they turn up anything major, do you want me to give a full report in the meeting, or should we keep it private? Sometimes I'm concerned about leaks."

"Everyone in the group realizes the gravity of what we're facing, Alex. That negotiation session with Jones is in a week, and after that, everything is apt to be out in the open for all the historians anyway. At this point, I'm inclined to have everyone in the group know what we're working on. Better that than risk being accused later on of holding Star Chamber proceedings in secret. You get a specific lead on one or a few suspects, keep it confidential. Otherwise, let's be aboveboard."

"Yes, Mr. President. And I can't tell you just how ashamed I am I let you down on that FAA killing." "That's all right, Alex. Pitchers throw no-hitters once in a while, but nobody bats a thousand." "Uh, sir? Agent Neumann?"

"What is it? We got a read on what brought down the chopper?" Alex Neumann asked quickly.

"Uh, no, sir," the agent in the doorway said, looking uncomfortable. "They're still picking it apart, but no firm conclusions yet. Maybe in a few more hours. Uh, that wasn't what I came to tell you. They found the four ATF agents assigned to pick up that guy Crocker out in Wyoming," the agent said. Alex Neumann saw the man's expression and prepared himself for the worst.

"And my partner, Trey Mullins?"

"Yes, sir. They found him, too. They're all dead."

The words hit Alex Neumann like a hammer blow straight to his chest. He had told himself that his friend Trey was probably dead, but the news about the third helicopter had driven the Wyoming case from his mind. Now, in the midst of the anticipation that the third aircraft might yield some solid clues, came the blunt realization that his worst fears were true.

"How?" Neumann managed to say.

"Shot," the younger man replied. "Beyond that, they don't know yet." There was a long pause before Alex Neumann finally spoke.

"Have them call here or FAX me a report as soon as they have anything."

"Yes, sir." The agent turned on his heel and left the office. Alex Neumann sat and stared vacantly at the FAXes and reports strewn across his desk. He suddenly became acutely aware of how detached he had been from the entire investigation. Alex had shed no tears for the dead ATF agents. He had seen Dwight Greenwell as a sterling example of a small-minded man in a position of power, and had viewed the whole mess as a challenging puzzle.

With the killing of his friend and partner Trey Mullins, Neumann's mindset changed dramatically. At another time and under different circumstances, he might have focused his anger on the root cause of the problem. As it was, with his position on the task force, the President's one-week deadline, and the growing and understandable us-versus-them attitude of federal agents, Alex Neumann's response was emotional and predictable: I'm going to get the people that are behind this.

Perhaps it was due to his police instincts, or maybe it was because the one piece of good news had come just the day before word of Trey Mullins' death. In any event, Alex Neumann was convinced that the solution to the mystery would be found in the submerged helicopter.

"This is one for the books, Alex," the leader of the forensic team said. "You're damn lucky the chopper crashed in the water. If it had hit the ground and burned like the other two, we'd never have figured it out." "What can you tell me, Smitty?"

"The helicopter broke up when it slammed into the water at maybe a hundred miles an hour or so. Virtually all of the damage to the aircraft was from this impact. The man in the right seat, however, was killed by an explosion. ATF Agent Jaime Hernandez was literally blown in half at the chest level."

"A bomb? Where was it?"

"You might call it a bomb," he said with a humorless smile. "The pathologists told me that when it went off, it was inside his body."

"What?"

"The National Guard pilot was killed at the same time, by the same explosion. That helicopter was shot down by a single explosive round from a U.S. 20mm cannon. The projectile came through the right side of the helicopter and blew up as it was entering Agent Hernandez, somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder. His body contained most of the blast, but those antiaircraft slugs are much too heavy to be stopped by one human. We found this lodged against the bone in the Guard pilot's left shoulder." He handed Neumann a short steel cylinder about 3/4" in diameter and less than a half-inch long, with a groove running around it. One end was jagged and melted-looking.

"That's the base of the bullet. It carried through and killed the pilot. Here's what it looked like before it hit." The forensic pathologist handed Neumann an unfired projectile. It was not quite three inches long, .80 caliber, with a conical aluminum nose cap which contained the detonator. The body was painted yellow for an inch in front of the copper drive band, with the lot number and the designation M246 printed at the bottom of the yellow segment. In front of the yellow section was a 1/4" brown stripe, and the remaining 3/16" behind the nose fuze was painted red-orange.

"Thermite firestarter," the man went on, "that's what the military guys call it. Mass spectrometer test of the residue we got out of the corpse confirms it. Same stuff they found from the other two wrecks. Here's the loaded round." He handed Neumann a 20mm Vulcan cartridge.

"Any doubt?"

"None."

"How many of these rounds hit the helicopter?" Neumann asked.

"That's the only one, to the best of my knowledge. I only examined the cockpit area and the corpses myself, but I asked that same question, and the other boys went over every inch of every part they recovered, which was maybe 98% of the aircraft. No evidence of any other round impacting the helicopter. A one-shot kill."

"Thanks for the quick work-up, Smitty," Neumann said distractedly. "Okay if I keep these?" He held up the unfired projectile, the loaded round, and the jagged base fragment.

"You got more juice than the Director on this one, Alex. A guy in Ordnance scrounged up the new bullet and the whole cartridge for me, so they're no big deal. But that other one killed four people. Do me a favor and sign it out, so it's not my ass if you lose it."

"I need to know what guns could fire this cartridge," Alex Neumann said as he held out the Vulcan round. "Anything that's ever been made, and the smaller and more portable, the better. Experimental stuff, foreign prototypes, whatever. We're looking for something that could be carried and quickly aimed by one man. And I need to know yesterday."

"Yessir."

"And when you find that out," Neumann continued, "see if any have been reported stolen from government depots."

"I'll get right on it," the ordnance man said, turning the Vulcan cartridge over in his hand to examine it as he spoke.

He had no way of knowing that Alex Neumann had asked him to solve the wrong problem.

"Here's a FAX for you, sir. It's marked 'Urgent'." Alex Neumann took the papers and saw it was the preliminary report on the deaths of Agent Mullins and the four ATF men. Focus here, guy he thought. You can get back to the mystery 20mm later. Work the problem in front of you. He stared at the drawing of the scene where the bodies had been found, and began to silently scan the sterile-sounding words. His brows knitted together in an expression of perplexity.

All head shots, with one of the ATF agents from Denver also shot in the back. Neumann stared at the diagram and blinked when he saw the distances that were marked. Five dead men spread out over an area half a mile wide, and only one of them fired his weapon. Neumann read further, and the report became even more bizarre. He picked up his phone and dialed the number of what up until recently had been his office.

"Cheyenne FBI, Masters speaking," came the voice on the other end.

"Masters, this is Alex Neumann in Washington. I've got your FAX in front of me." ' "Yes, sir."

"It says here Agent Kellogg fired 173 rounds out of his H&K, and died with seven rounds left in his gun. According to the position of the body and the fired brass, you're saying he was shooting almost due west, and the only cover in that direction was some rocks four hundred yards away. And Trey was eight hundred yards behind him."

"That's basically correct, sir. That bunch of rocks was the only substantial cover for well over a mile in any direction. It is possible that two or more shooters were spread out and all wearing camouflage amidst the sagebrush. They remained motionless, and were undetected by Mullins and the four ATF agents until it was too late. If that is not what happened, then that bunch of rocks was the only place the shooters could have been."

"That puts the closest agent a quarter mile away and Trey almost three times that far. How the hell is that possible? Were they killed somewhere else and dumped out on the prairie?"

"Forensics says no. Lots of blood soaked into the ground by every corpse. The coyotes had picked the bodies over pretty bad before we got to 'em, but forensics says there weren't any tire tracks or anything leading up to or away from them. Course, it's been a few days, and what with the wind..." Neumann could almost hear the man shrug over the phone.

"They were all killed where they stood, is the way we're reading it. There's a couple things not in that preliminary report, sir. We did find some tire tracks behind the rocks, and a bunch of footprints. Whoever made them mussed them up, or maybe it was the wind, but it looks like at least two people were up there, probably more."

"They leave anything behind? Gum wrappers, beer cans?"

"Found one used cleaning patch, and that's it. It's been sent off for analysis. Other than that, zip. Oh, another thing. The guy who was shot twice? The bullet that hit him in the back is the one that killed him. Forensics says the one in the head came second, while he was lying on the ground. They think he was shot in the back while he was running away from the rocks. Second shot, in the head, was to make sure."

"But that's..." Neumann paused to consult the diagram of the crime scene. "...Six hundred yards!" "Tell me about it."

"Agent...Kellogg," Neumann said, again consulting the FAX, "was the only one who fired his gun, and he fired it quite a bit. Does anyone there have an explanation for that?" There was a long pause, and then Masters cleared his throat.

"Ah...sir, we've got a dozen theories and not much else. A local cop thinks Mullins was killed first. His theory is that the shooters planned to kill all five agents, and the textbook way to do that is to shoot them in order, farthest one first."

"If that's the plan, wouldn't you wait a little longer? The closest one was still over four hundred yards away."

"His guess is that Agent Mullins wasn't advancing along with the ATF agents. He was staying in one spot. The agents all knew that the shooters were up in the rocks, and ATF went after them, but Mullins hung back, at what he thought was a safe distance."

"That's quite likely. I told him personally that he was there to provide backup only."

"Well, that jibes with the way he was dressed-jeans, cowboy boots, cowboy hat and a windbreaker. No body armor. He was also carrying a silenced .308 sniper rifle. Chamber was empty.

"Anyway, the way this cop thinks it might have played out is that one or more of these guys maybe has his rifle sighted in at five hundred yards, so they wait 'til the four are right around that range. Then one of the others shoots Mullins and gets lucky. The ATF guys hear the shot, but they don't turn around to look at their backup because they think he's way out of range. Then the fellows up in the rocks open up on the four ATF agents. They kill Hildebrandt and Ruiz, Figueroa starts to run, and Kellogg starts shooting back. Figueroa gets hit in the back, Kellogg takes it in the head, then they give Figueroa a finisher." Masters took a breath.

"Before you say anything, sir, I know it's full of holes. I checked some ballistic tables, and a .30 caliber sniper rifle like the one Mullins had, even if it was dead on the money at 500 yards, you'd s till be a foot and a half high at 400 and three feet low at 600. Twelve hundred yards? No one makes a table that goes out that far, but it wouldn't surprise me you were fifty or a hundred feet low at that range. But with this deal, every one of the five dead men was head-shot like the gun was sighted in just for him. Haven't even mentioned wind drift." Masters paused, then went on.

"Five shooters, each one just happens to have his gun sighted in at exactly the range of one of the agents? We actually had someone suggest that as a theory."

"How many shooters do you think there were?" Neumann asked.

"Had to be more than one, to have three agents killed before the other two knew what was happening. Two or three is the consensus here. More than that runs into big logistics problems."

"Was Cracker one of them?"

"Don't see how he could have been. He's not saying a word, but I think that's just on principle. We got a warrant and went through every inch of his property. He's got a couple dozen machine guns and a cannon, but not a single scoped centerfire rifle to his name. Now, I know that doesn't mean shit, in and of itself, but the folks we've questioned have all talked him up as a machine gun shooter. All of a sudden he's a worldclass thousand-yard rifleman? Hard to feature. Tires on his truck are far from new, and they don't match the tracks we found out on the prairie. ATF thought he was out there, and he may have been out on the prairie shooting machine guns at some point, but sir, those five men weren't killed with Thompsons."

"What about the bullets? You must have recovered some."

"Fragments. Got vaporized lead and little bitty flecks of jacket material, like you'd expect with high velocity varmint rounds."

"So who did kill those men?"

"Only theory anyone's come up with is that the ATF agents heard shooting up in the rocks, thought it was Crocker, and closed in. Instead of Crocker, it was some men who were out shooting prairie dogs with their varmint rifles."

"Prairie dog hunters."

"Yes, sir. They saw four guys coming towards them in black suits and hoods, carrying machine guns, and they panicked."