Some people, particularly those with little interest in firearms, would later puzzle over the oddity that a man who felt he needed a weapon for home defense would choose a 120-year-old cap-and-ball black powder revolver for the purpose. They would correctly point out that even a 100-year-old revolver would have been a far better choice, as 1870 was the period when cartridge weapons came into common use and replaced guns that used loose powder, round balls, and percussion caps.

Ken Ballew had a loaded cap-and-ball antique instead of a 20th-century Colt or Smith & Wesson for a very simple reason: he did not at that moment own a more modern handgun. Ken Ballew, the Washington Post pressman and part-time Boy Scout troop leader, did own a modern shotgun for bird hunting. He was primarily a collector of antique arms, however, and he had a fine collection of 1840s-era cap-and-ball revolvers in addition to the one in his hand.

The Ballews lived in a middle-class, integrated apartment building. There had been a burglary or two in the area, but violent crime was not a major concern for most residents of Silver Spring, Maryland. In fact, Ken Ballew had not kept any loaded firearm available for protection when he had been single, for he had viewed risks from criminals as minimal. It was only under the contract of marriage that he had recognized his obligation to guarantee another person's safety.

He had thought of buying a Smith & Wesson, but monthly bills and other financial concerns had delayed that event. That was the reason that when the 27-year-old Scout leader ran naked and dripping wet towards his living room, prepared to protect his wife from whoever was breaking into their apartment, he was carrying a gun that had been made approximately fifty years before the first airplane, thirty years before the first telephone, eighteen years before the abolition of slavery, and two years before the birth of his own great-great-great-grandfather.

As soon as the door crashed open and the plainclothes raiding party poured into the Ballews' living room, Lou Ciamillo had his Walther PPK in his hand. His arms were extended and his pistol was pointed at the entrance to the narrow hallway that led to the rest of the apartment.

Ken Ballew came running down the hallway and Ciamillo put the front sight of the PPK on his head, but he held his fire until he saw that the man was armed. This was the reason that when Lou Ciamillo squeezed the trigger of his PPK, several shots had already been fired by other participants in the raid.

Ballew collapsed as shots continued to ring out in the apartment. The nude man's last act was to pull the trigger of his antique revolver, discharging the weapon at a distance of ten inches into a bookcase nearby. Then his brain function shut down and he collapsed behind a partition in the hallway.

Ciamillo watched Ballew fall behind the partition, which was made of concrete blocks. It was a perfect letoff he thought. I know I hit him. The deputy sheriff's adrenaline was pumping, but he held his fire as the federal agents continued to pour bullets at the man's body.

The painful noise of the shots was still ringing in his ears when Lou realized that some of the sound was coming from a nearly nude woman who had run to the side of her fallen husband. She was screaming, and Ciamillo started to step towards her, but a federal agent rushed past him and pulled her away from her husband's body. The agent immediately began to recite Sara Louise's rights to her, but she was hysterical and obviously did not hear or understand a word of what was said.

Ballew's wife cringed in fear, and Ciamillo suddenly realized something that troubled him greatly. She doesn't know we're cops. Not a single one of us is in uniform. The agent who had read Sara Louise her rights pulled handcuffs out of his pocket, then shoved the woman out the door. Ciamillo turned away and stared at the inert form on the floor. One of the feds was giving the body a casual glance as he hurried into the other room.

Lou Ciamillo took measured, even breaths. He felt his heart pounding in his chest, and willed the organ to slow down. He looked around the modest apartment, trying to take it in, as scruffy-looking federal officers and other plainclothes police agents swarmed through the small area. The feds were busy tearing the place apart, searching for evidence. Ballew's wife, wearing only panties and handcuffs, was still screaming hysterically and trying to get back in the apartment to be with the body of her husband.

"Pay dirt!" Ciamillo heard an agent yell from what he would later learn was Ken Ballew's study. "Look what we got here!" He walked proudly towards his supervisor.

The man was carrying several dummy hand grenades of the type that were sold at Army surplus and hardware stores, usually alongside the canteens, flashlights, and ammo cans. Lou knew what real grenades looked like; he and his father had set off dozens of live ones out in the country when he was a boy. He could instantly tell that these grenades were inert; they had no detonators, their bases were drilled, and it was easy to see that they were empty. One of them was glued to a piece of wood and had a numbered tag hanging from its handle. Ciamillo watched as the agent ripped the wood from the grenade and tossed it aside. He stepped over and looked at the piece that the agent had discarded.

The words COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT-PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER were embossed on a plaque attached to the piece of stained pine. Ciamillo smiled, then quickly sobered as he watched the federal agents racing around the place, pulling out drawers and turning things over. One was coming down the hallway carrying a side-by-side twenty gauge.

"Write this up, too," the man said, grinning and holding the eighty-dollar bird gun as if it were a million bucks worth of stolen jewels.

"I found these," another man announced. He was holding aloft a thin cardboard box about the size of a book of paper matches, yellow with blue and red printing on it. Ciamillo recognized it instantly as a box of Winchester primers for reloading shotgun shells, available for less than a dollar at any gun or hardware store.

The bad feeling Lou Ciamillo had felt earlier came back with multiplied intensity. Who are these assholes? Lou wondered, not for the first time that night. Why the fuck do they care about reloading supplies and flea market junk? Who's the guy we just killed? And what did they want him for?

Lou Ciamillo was about to find out the answers to at least some of these questions.

"Tax agents?" Lou Ciamillo demanded in an outraged whisper. The other Montgomery County police officer put his hand on his friend's arm and tried to reassure him.

"We thought you knew, Lou." Ciamillo slapped the hand away.

"Thought I knew? There were more than twenty of us! We killed that guy!" Ciamillo was apoplectic. "Two dozen armed men dressed like a bunch a biker trash an' carryin' a battering ram raid a guy's apartment and kill him, an' now you tryin' to tell me the feds leadin' the raid were just a bunch of pencil-pushing assholes from the ATF? Those guys are s'posed t'be checkin paperwork, for Christ's sake!" His mouth hung slack as he waited for a reply. When none came, he went on, his voice rising in the process. "What did they have on him? Huh? Tell me that- what the fuck did they have on him?"

"Ah...they did say they found a four-inch piece cut off a shotgun barrel," the policeman answered lamely.

"And I'll bet it came off that little side-by-side 20-gauge I saw one a them assholes carrying. Barrels were at least twenty inches long, looked more like twenty-two. I'd bet my badge that gun's legal." Ciamillo stabbed his finger angrily at the other officer before continuing.

"And even if the poor bastard had cut the thing down below eighteen, so what? So he's made an NFA weapon, and under the National Firearms Act of 1934, he owes the IRS two hundred bucks tax on it. You ever owe the IRS two hundred bucks, Hal?"

"Take it easy, Lou."

"Fuck taking it easy! You weren't one a the first guys in the door like I was, and you didn't pop a cap at that poor bastard because a them tax assholes. Answer my question-you ever owe the IRS two hundred bucks? I sure as shit have. Think maybe the tax men should bust your door down when you and your wife are standin around naked, and put a few slugs in you, 'cause they think maybe you owe 'em two hundred bucks?"

"Of course I've owed the IRS two hundred dollars," his friend said soothingly. "But those were ATF agents, Lou. They're a part of the IRS, but you and I both know they don't do income tax work. They're alcohol, tobacco, and firearms."

"Right!" Lou exploded. "And they're a alcohol, tobacco, and firearms tax agency! They go around and make sure all the fuckin tax seals are pasted on the goddamn whiskey bottles and cigarette packs. You think it'd be fine if Agent fucking Neal rounded up some local cops to go bust in on the guy owns the Camel cigarette company? Bust his door down with a battering ram and kill him comin' outa the shower, on information from a 'reliable informant' that he had cigarettes under his bed and he owed two hundred bucks tax on 'em?"

His friend made no reply, but lowered his eyes.

"Got to be guns? Okay-how 'bout the 'reliable informant' tells 'em Sturm, Ruger hasn't paid the government its eleven percent excise tax on a batch of .357s. Think the ATF guys should go break into Bill Ruger's house in the middle of the night? He's probably pulled a gun or two out the back door of the plant for his own use, and they'd be ones made after the Civil War. Maybe twenty-six guys wouldn't be enough. Hell, maybe they should fuck breaking down the door, an' just bum him out." Ciamillo shook his head in disgust, then exploded in frustration.

"Jesus! I can't believe they even let those stupid tax cocksuckers carry guns at all!" He suddenly thought of something, and his eyes narrowed.

"Who's got the warrant? I wanta see what's listed on the fuckin' search warrant!"

Lou Ciamillo was not yet aware of several things. First of all, Ciamillo did not know that the search warrant for Ballew's apartment was, for the most part, still blank. The time would be filled in as '8:31 p.m.', the last legal minute of daylight on June 7, as the blank warrant had specified that the search had to be conducted during daylight hours.

Items to be searched for would also soon be filled in, but not as 'short-barreled shotguns', for a measuring tape would reveal that the barrels on Ballew's gun were well over the 18" minimum. Instead, 'hand grenades' would be written in the proper place on the warrant, in keeping with the nature of what was seized.

Weeks later, the agency would be forced to admit that dummy grenades were not a registerable item on which tax was due. This admission would occur when a number of citizens around the country would produce proof that after passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act, they had applied to the ATF to register inert grenades identical to Ballew's, and that their applications had been returned to them rejected, with the written statement that such items were not subject to registration and taxation by the Federal Government.

Undaunted, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms division of the Internal Revenue Service would then, three weeks after the raid, retrieve the box of shotshell primers and some paper caps for a toy cap pistol from the police department storage locker. They would produce these items as evidence that Ballew intended to make live grenades without paying the tax on them, thus justifying their raid. The ATF agency would be forced to admit that a dummy grenade successfully jerry-rigged with a shotshell primer and some black powder would explode the instant the handle was released, not five seconds later, but the feds would insist that this minor fact was not relevant to their case in any way.

Second of all, Ciamillo did not know that Kenyon F. Ballew had not been killed in the raid. Ballew was at that moment in a coma and hooked up to life support systems at a local hospital, and would remain attached to them until his condition stabilized.

Third, Ciamillo did not know that only one of the nine bullets the raiders had fired had hit Ballew. When that single bullet had struck Ballew between the eyes, it had penetrated his brain and lodged in his cerebral cortex, instantly causing permanent paralysis and brain damage. Ballew had fallen behind the reinforced partition, and the concrete blocks had stopped the four additional shots the federal agents had fired at his unconscious body. Ken Ballew was not dead (merely paralyzed and brain damaged) after being shot between the eyes at ten feet, and this was because the one bullet that had hit him was from a .380 automatic. The .380 auto is a weak cartridge that was designed in 1908 for use in small pocket pistols for women. No police department in the entire United States issues .380 automatics as duty sidearms for its uniformed officers, but many officers carry a .380 of one make or another when off-duty because of the gun's small size.

The last thing that Lou Ciamillo did not yet know, but would eventually learn, was that of the twenty-six IRS agents and local police officers participating in the disastrous raid on Ken Ballew's apartment, only one of them had been carrying a pistol chambered for the .380 automatic cartridge. Had Ballew been shot in the brain with a more-powerful .38 or .357, he would almost certainly have been killed. Furthermore, no one would have ever been able to determine which man had fired the fatal shot, since all of the other shots fired that night had been one or the other of these two calibers.

As it was, there was only one gun from which the slug now in Ken Ballew's brain could have been fired. This fact would be learned when Ballew's condition was such that the doctors could finally extract the copper and lead projectile and give it to the police for examination.

The bullet that left the Washington Post pressman, Scout leader, and antique arms collector permanently paralyzed and brain damaged had been fired from a Walther PPK, and that PPK was currently resting inside the waistband of Lou Ciamillo's pants.

August 6,1971 "Listen to this shit: 'Secretary of the Treasury John B. Connally said he had reviewed the investigative report and concluded "that the actions of the law-enforcement personnel in executing the search warrant for the Ballew apartment were legally proper under the circumstances'." Bernie Sutter put the newspaper down and snorted in derision. "The fix is in."

Henry Bowman glanced over at the man, but said nothing. Bernie was the proprietor of Sutter Sport Shop, a small, cluttered gun store in middle-class Overland, which was in North St. Louis County.

"Well, of course," said Thomas J. Fleming as he looked up from the 1887 Belgian service revolver he was examining. "Twenty-six armed men dressed in old clothes? Thai's the logical team to assemble when you know you're up against a shrewd adversary." He went on rapidly.

"Look-Ballew had a reinforced door, right? Thai's an indication he was commit-ting crimes behind it. He sent his wife into a separate part of the house; that was probably so they could sucker the feds in a pincer maneuver. They had all their clolhes off; obviously, this was to distract the officers. And the police know their own limitations- they know that their shooting skills are well below those of private citizens. They had to have twenty-six on their side, to give themselves a chance that someone would hit the man they were trying to kill. And as you can see, their strategy worked to perfection: They fired nine shots at ten feet, and just as they had hoped, one of them hit Ballew. The raid went perfectly. Not a single police agent was injured."

Thomas J. Fleming was two years out of the University of Chicago School of Law. Slender, dark-haired, clean-shaven, of medium height, and wearing glasses, Tom Fleming was the proverbial 'man who could disappear in a crowd of one'. That was true, however, only so long as Tom Fleming did not open his mouth. As soon as he started speaking, anyone listening could not avoid recognizing the tremendous store of energy the man possessed, nor were they likely to miss his biting wit. it would also be obvious t hat Fleming understood the Constitution belter than most lawyers, and that he absolutely despised governmental infringements on his civil rights. 'There's only one real reason to become a lawyer,' he had been known to say to close friends in private. 'That's so nobody can fuck with you.' He returned his attention to the 19thcentury Belgian revolver.

"I wonder what the Treasury Department would consider 'acting improperly'? another regular, Stokely Meier, threw out.

"Using a nuke. Maybe," Bernie said glumly.

Sutler Sport Shop in north county was very different from Goodmans for Guns in downtown St. Louis. Whereas the Goodman brothers' clientele tended to be well-heeled owners of finely made arms, Bernie Suiter catered to middle-class patrons who were looking for military surplus rifles or secondhand Colls and Remingtons, and who spent a large fraction of their shooting dollars on ammunition. Stokely Meier, Henry Bowman, and Max Collins were three of a small number of St. Louisans who regularly visited both stores.

Since Henry had turned sixteen 2 1/2 years before, he had become a regular visitor to the store, which was twelve miles from his house. A lot of high-volume shooters congregated there.

Tom Fleming was one of these, and he had been patronizing Sutter's since the age of eight. His father, Thomas Albert (T.A.) Fleming, had died when the boy was eleven. From then until he acquired his first car shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Tom Fleming had made the eight-mile trip to the gun shop on his bicycle. Fleming especially liked the fact that Bernie Sutter would put guns in layaway. Up until the law change in 1968, Sutter did this even for customers that weren't yet old enough to drive. He'd keep the customer's money clipped to a file card with the gun's description written on it in the store's safe until the full amount was attached. Most of Fleming's steadily-growing collection had been acquired from Bernie in this fashion.

Whereas Henry's favorite sporting arms were, in no particular order: long-range rifles, elephant guns, and .44 magnum revolvers, Fleming gravitated towards military rifles and handguns, especially the .45 Automatic Colt. Both young men liked machine guns, although unlike Henry Bowman, Tom Fleming did not own any full auto weapons on which the NFA branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had bestowed its governmental blessing.

Furthermore, Fleming owned no cannons at all; when he had been in junior high school, long before the 1968 Gun Control Act reclassified military arms over .50 caliber as 'destructive devices', Fleming had 1968 Gun Control Act reclassified military arms over .50 caliber as 'destructive devices', Fleming had foot, 110-pound weapon home from the freight depot on his bicycle. By the time he got a car, college was looming, and owning a Lahti was long forgotten.

"This guy Ballew must have been doing some other stuff that isn't in the paper," threw out a local skeet shooter who bought his shotgun shells at Bernie's. "I can't believe our own government wo uld do something like this, even by accident. Come on-twenty-six agents? They'd never put that many cops on some guy's apartment if he really was just a collector of old cap-'n'-ball guns We're not getting the whole story."

"Are you nuts?" Tom Fleming exclaimed. The Belgian revolver was forgotten as he turned to face the man. "Haven't you read any history, like maybe what happened in Germany in the 'thirties?" Fleming was currently involved with a woman he had first met in college. She was slender, vivacious, and possessed of a remarkable sex drive. She was Jewish, and one entire branch of her family had been executed in Buchenwald.

'This is the United States," the skeet shooter said with slight irritation.

"Which of course makes us immune to any violations of our civil rights," Tom Fleming immediately replied with a voice that dripped sarcasm. "Listen," he continued, his tone changing to one of exposition, "for the last hundred years, cops have known it was okay to beat on people, and sometimes kill them, as long as they only beat on and killed colored guys.

'Then, starting a few years ago, cops learned they could beat on and kill not only colored guys, but also white guys, as long as the white guys had long hair, ratty clothes, no jobs, and were out in public bitching about Vietnam.

"Now, in addition to colored guys, and white guys that have long hair, ratty clothes, and no jobs who are out protesting in public, the cops have learned it's OK to beat and kill white guys with short hair, nice clothes, and good jobs, inside their own homes, if the white guy owns guns." Fleming took a breath and raised his index finger. He realized he was lecturing again, but it was a habit he had a very hard time resisting. The others in the shop were giving him their full attention.

'"When they came for the trade unionists, I did not stand up, for I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the gypsies, I did not stand up, for I was not a gypsy. When they came for the Jews...' well, you know the rest," he said, not wanting to take up more time with the lengthy quote. "Finally, they came for the Lutheran minister, but there was no one left to stand up for him, and he ended up in a concentration camp because he didn't think his rights were in danger."

"Look, a bunch of stumblefuck cops hit the wrong apartment on a bad tip," the skeet shooter said in reply to Fleming's quote. "That's a lot different than the military carrying out the direct orders of the chief executive, which is what happened in Germany."

"Maybe so, but we've done that here in America, too."

All heads turned towards the young man who was standing by the display case holding a newspaper and a thick hardcover book. Henry Bowman met their gaze, and then the skeet shooter spoke up. "That National Guard mess at the college was the same thing-a bunch of trigger-happy cops, not the army."

"Interesting you should say that, Sid," Tom Fleming said. "As a matter of fact, the National Guard is part of the standing army; they take their orders from the President, and they can in fact be sent into combat outside the country, which is why National Guard service qualifies as military service." Fleming smiled at Henry Bowman, but Henry shook his head.

"I didn't mean Kent State," Henry clarified. "I was talking about General Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower. Patton and Eisenhower were majors at the time. MacArthur sent the tanks in to drive American war veterans out of Washington. Then he led his troops to where twenty thousand unarmed veterans were camped, and he burned them out. He set fire to their camp while they were still in it, and his soldiers shot veterans that resisted."

"The Bonus Army..." Fleming said softly. Sid the skeet shooter was looking quizzically at both Tom Fleming and the young man that had told the bizarre story about General MacArthur. Henry saw his expression and spent the next ten minutes explaining about the Bonus Marchers and what had happened to them. Everyone in the room was shocked, but not surprised.

"This Ballew thing makes me think maybe we should all listen to Mr. Forsyth here," Henry said finally. He was holding up his copy of The Day of the Jackal, which had recently become a national bestseller. "Been reading this the last few days, and there's a detailed description of how to procure the birth certificate of someone who died as a child, and create a new identity."

"Yeah, I heard about that," Tom Fleming said. "You're right, maybe we should all be out scouring smalltown graveyards."

"Yeah." For a few moments, no one spoke.

"So how do you know so much about it?" Sid asked finally. "The Bonus Army, I mean?"

"My great-uncle was one of them. MacArthur's soldiers broke his arm, and he was badly burned in the fire. Infection set in, and a doctor at a Veterans' hospital in Pennsylvania cut off his whole arm, but it was too late, and he died a couple of days later." The skeet shooter nodded, then looked around awkwardly. No one much felt like talking any more. It was Fleming who broke the silence.

'Tom Fleming," he said, smiling and extending his hand. "I've seen you in here before, but I don't think we've met. Are you that guy Bernie's been telling me about who shoots claybirds with an elephant gun?" "Only when I get lucky," Henry replied with an embarrassed smile.

"I got to talk to you about this," Fleming said quickly as he stepped over to the counter where Henry was standing. "I've run a bunch of training courses for cops, and I'm having real trouble getting them to hit anything that's moving, even if it's three feet away and the size of a refrigerator." He began to use his hands to diagram the problem. "Now, when you shoot stuff out of the air like that-say it's moving sideways, not away from you-is it better to..."

By the time their conversation ended forty minutes later, Tom Fleming and Henry Bowman were good friends. They were also the only two there that day who would remember the short discussion about new identities.

August 14,1971 Jesus, I hate this sometimes Henry Bowman thought as his feet pounded the gravel. He had never been more than an average runner, and getting tossed off an overturning hay truck the previous summer and breaking his left leg in two places hadn't helped. / told that moron I should drive and he should be up top Henry thought, remembering the event. With the aid of some surgical steel, Henry's leg had healed without complications, although it still felt a little different than his right one. He had even been able to play rugby this past spring. Every time he did, though, Henry wished he had more speed. It was always frustrating to be unable to catch a rival player that had the ball.

Henry doubted that running out to the highway every night during summer break was going to make him much faster, but he hoped his endurance would increase. That would help, and not just on the rugby field. Ought to be able to carry more ammo up the mountains out in Idaho he told himself as the burning in his lungs increased. Lug the Lahti around better, too. He was approaching the turn-off that led towards a recently-constructed subdivision. Henry always took the turn and sprinted the final five hundred yards to complete his workout, then walked back home to cool down.

When Henry left the main road, the telephone pole that marked the end of his three-mile run came into view over a quarter mile off of the highway. Henry commanded his legs to pick up the pace. It was after eleven, and traffic in the area was nonexistent at that hour. Going out at night was the only way Henry could make himself run regularly during the summer months. Late as it was, the temperature was well over eighty degrees.

Henry Bowman's final effort was at a six-minute-mile pace. This was all he could muster, even knowing the end was less than a minute away. The increased wind on his face and chest felt good, but did little to actually cool him off in the August heat. Almost there, slowpoke he told himself as sweat filled his eyes and blurred the image of the phone pole less than a hundred yards distant. He felt a faint exhilaration in addition to his exhaustion, and was reminded of the punch line to the old joke: It feels so good when I stop.

Henry Bowman wiped the sweat out of his eyes and pumped his arms in the final push, commanding his legs to maintain the sprint that was threatening to make him collapse. You fuckin' weenie he cursed himself silently. Half the guys on the team wouldn't even be breathing hard yet. He pounded out the last few steps, slapped the pole, and forced himself to walk rather than flop down in the gravel. His eyes were squeezed shut and blood was pounding in his ears, and this was why Henry Bowman did not realize that he was not alone.

"Hunh..?" Henry grunted in alarm as the four men hit him almost simultaneously and drove him into the trees beside the road. For the barest instant Henry thought he was hallucinating that he was actually in a rugby game. He opened his mouth to yell, but before any sound could come out he was slammed face-first into the trunk of a maple tree. The pain was so great Henry was certain that his nose had just been broken, though in fact it had not. He collapsed facedown in the grass and twigs as one of the men drove a knee between Henry's shoulder blades, forcing air from Henry's lungs and pinning him to the earth. Henry felt that he was suffocating, and he fought off an overpowering urge to vomit. Had he known what was going to happen next, however, he would have encouraged that reflex.

Henry felt his gym shorts ripped away and all of a sudden he realized in absolute horror what was about to happen to him. An image of the ravaged young blonde-haired girl from three years before appeared, unbidden, in his mind. He flailed out with his one free arm, but the man on top of him grabbed his wrist easily and twisted his arm until an audible 'pop' signaled that he had dislocated Henry's right shoulder. The man chuckled when it happened.

Much later, Henry would decide that it was really the man's laughter that made it so awful, but at that instant, the pain was worse than anything Henry Bowman had ever felt in his life. It was several orders of magnitude greater than what he had experienced when they had slid him onto the sheet of plywood out in the alfalfa field the year before, with his leg at a funny angle and an evil-looking bulge at the side of his calf muscle.

The combination of pain, physical exhaustion, and lack of oxygen to his brain started to induce unconsciousness in Henry Bowman. So this is what dying feels like was Henry's last thought as a blackness began to swallow him whole.