"Worth a try," Henry answered. Others in the group readily agreed.

In the midst of the large crowd of shooters, all of whom had been listening intently, no one paid any attention to the man who left the group abruptly and began walking towards the parking area.

"Hello?" the Deputy Director of the ATF answered as he picked up the private line in his office in Washington. Working on Saturday's unheard of in this building Dwight Greenwell thought. But I like having the entire place to myself.

"It's Rivera, sir. In Kentucky. Something's come up here I think you should know about." "What is it?"

"Man from St. Louis at the shoot here knows the President's brother. Guy's name is John Parker. Some dealer-I don't know his name, but like all these guys here he shoots machine guns-this dealer was shooting his mouth off like they always do. He was going on in front of a big group about how he wished the President would change his mind on the gun thing. This John Parker was listening, and he gets the idea to get hold of the brother." The agent explained about the rough content of the speech Henry had made, and John Parker's plan to contact the President's brother in time to save the election.

"Shit, that'd be just what we need," Greenwell said after he had listened to his undercover agent describe what the two men had in mind. George Bush had given ATF a huge boost with his Executive Order banning imports of military lookalikes. His expected successor promised to be even more receptive to expanded ATF power. The President do an about-face and urge repeal of not only the import ban, but all the other laws we enforce, then win reelection? Greenwell thought. The prospect was not a pleasant one, especially in view of the current internal problems that plagued the agency, and the imminent threat of budget cuts. He sat contemplating all this when his thoughts were interrupted.

"Do we, uh, have anyone that could...intercept the FAX?" the agent in Kentucky asked after the silence became too much for him..

Goddamned fool Greenwell thought immediately. Breaking into the office of the brother of the President struck the Deputy Director as a good way to get his agency disbanded and himself a visit to a federal prison. Talking about it on the telephone was equally stupid.

"Everyone said you had a good sense of humor," the fed assured his undercover man, for the benefit of anyone who might be recording the call. "I doubt the President is going to reverse his position on the strength of some stranger's advice, particularly a gun nut, even if it does get brought to him by his brother." At least I hope he won't he added mentally. "If he is, there's nothing we can do about it anyway. Get back there and keep your ears open, though. This is exactly the kind of intelligence we need, to know what we're up against."

"Yessir," the man said, and folded up his cellular phone.

Dwight Greenwell sat back in his chair, thinking. Wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping, when it involved high-up politicos, was a very risky proposition. The hoped-for benefits almost never outweighed the potential for disaster. John Parker he thought, as he called up a screen on his computer. Haven't heard that name before. He tapped the name in on the keyboard and waited for his computer to find the file. No wonder. He's not a dealer. John Parker had a number of machine guns, but he had bought all of them as a private individual with a $200 tax stamp on each transfer.

What is it about these damned gun nuts? he asked himself. It was a question he contemplated daily, and it baffled him no less now than it had when he had first taken the job. He sat in his chair, thinking about what the undercover agent in Kentucky had told him, and decided to do nothing. A sitting President's businessman brother is one sleeping dog I'm going to let lie. His mind returned to the specter of budget cuts, and Greenwell smiled. A plan was well underway at ATF to solve that little problem.

Si* months from now, he thought happily, we'll get anything we ask for.

The night shoot was as spectacular as usual. The crew set out drums full of used printer's solvent with explosive charges in front. Railroad flares burned nearby.

At the 'Commence firing' command, thousands of tracers laced out into the night. Dynamite charges exploded and vaporized the liquid in the drums. The flares ignited it, and huge fireballs erupted one after another. The heat from the fiery explosions warmed the faces of the spectators two hundred yards away. The fires died out as the solvent was consumed, only to be followed by more explosions as other shots found their marks at the bases of the remaining drums.

"Just like a James Bond movie, huh?" Henry yelled happily. He was shooting belts of straight tracer in his 1917A1. The precise support of the muzzle end of the barrel and the constant stream of tracers made the watercooled Browning shoot like a laser. Henry hit four charges, causing an equal number of explosions.

Despite the magnificent display, John Parker was only half paying attention. He was thinking about the FAX he was going to send as soon as he got to his motel room.

October 12,1992 The President's brother stared at the FAX he had taken from his machine. The time-stamp showed it was sent after midnight Saturday night, when the office was deserted, and had come from the 503 area code. Bush checked and saw that 503 was Kentucky.

Parker, Gates & Co.

7700 Maryland Avenue

St. Louis, MO 63105

(314) 728-9000 FAX (314) 728-9013.

October 10, 1992

Mr. William H.T. Bush 120 S. Central Ave. Clayton, MO 63105

Dear Bucky,

It's worse than anyone ever thought. Today I was in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, attending a military show, shooting competition, and historic weapons demonstration that is held there semiannually. News crews and reporters from England, Belgium, Japan, and other countries were interviewing people. There were over 2,000 active participants in the shooting activities, and over 10,000 spectators.

Every person I talked to felt absolute betrayal on the part of the President regarding their individual rights. There wasn't one Bush/Quayle bumper sticker, campaign button, or T-shirt anywhere. Several Gulf War and Vietnam vets were looking at a restored White armored car when the election came up. One said, "I'd rather cut my throat than vote for Bush. No one stabs me in the back and keeps my vote, the son-of-a-bitch." These were Desert Storm vets!

I asked people what it would take to get them to vote to re-elect. The answers were remarkably uniform and amazingly simple. The President can still get another four or five million votes with the right program. I can lay it out for him to see in fifteen minutes, and it won't cost a nickel to implement.

Bucky, we need to see your brother or James Baker soon. I know the first debate is tomorrow night. He may say something that will lose these people forever, and won't be able to retract it. He can get the votes back, but he needs to see how. Call me 24 hours a day here, at home 747-2164, or my car 701-7332.

John Bucky Bush read the FAX over several times. It sounded like an idle fantasy. "Never known John Parker to blow smoke, though," he said under his breath. "Be a miracle if even I can get through right now. He picked up the phone and began to dial.

Bucky Bush's fears proved accurate. The White House was in a frenzy, and the President did not return his sibling's call. The brothers did not get together, even on the phone, until after the election. By then the issue was academic.

February 28,1993 "It's show time," ATF agent Steve Willis said to the driver sitting to his left as the truck pulled up in front of the door to the large complex. Willis was riding in the passenger seat of one of two longbed pickup trucks, each of which was towing a gooseneck cattle trailer. He flipped the selector lever on his suppressed Heckler & Koch MP5SD submachine gun from the semiauto position to full automatic.

The German H&K 9mm SD was one of the best submachine guns in existence. The integral suppressor added weight to the weapon and eliminated the gun's muzzle blast. Both the additional weight and the blast suppression reduced the subgun's recoil and made it one of the easiest-to-shoot full-auto weapons in the world.

Henry Bowman, like most serious NFA weapons dealers, owned several 9mm H&K submachine guns. He used these as 'demonstrators' for police departments, many of whom elected to order additional examples after they had seen how well the guns performed. Henry referred to his suppressed H&K as his 'girlfriend gun', because his girlfriends had always been able to roll cans with it or put an entire 30-round magazine on a man target after only a few minutes of instruction and practice. The German-made weapon was very popular with law enforcement on both federal and state levels, and was a much better choice for officers with low gun skills than larger machine guns such as the Colt M16.

Above the four-structure compound, three Texas Army National Guard helicopters circled. One of them, the command chopper, held Ted Royster, the head of the regional ATF office and the man who had overseen the Lawmaster raid. Royster smiled as he saw that the news crews were in position. He noted with satisfaction that the cattle trailers blocked the news cameras' view of the front door. He did not want what was about to happen next to be recorded on film. This'll make up for that fiasco in Tulsa he thought happily.

Up on the second floor of the building, Jaydean Wendel was taking a nap. She had just finished nursing her 11-month-old baby. The baby was now in its crib, and Wendel had dozed off in an overstuffed armchair. Nursing always made her sleepy.

As the two trucks with cattle trailers attached pulled to a stop in front of the main building, David Koresh opened the front door. He held his two-year-old daughter in one arm as he opened the door with the other. Koresh was a slender, bespectacled man, cleanshaven and with a full head of curly hair which reached almost to his shoulders. Koresh was thirty-two years old, which made him the same age as ATF agent Willis. Unlike Willis, Koresh carried no weapons. He glanced up in the sky at the circling helicopters, looked over at the two huge trailers attached to the pickup trucks, and grinned.

"Think you fellows brought enough pe-"

Koresh's comment was cut short as Willis poked the 1 5/8" diameter muzzle of the suppressed machine gun out the passenger side window of the pickup truck and squeezed the trigger.

Like virtually all members of tax collection departments, and the vast majority of law enforcement personnel (other than the FBI and Secret Service), Willis had minimal skill and experience with firearms. He was further hampered by the somewhat awkward left-to-right shooting position inside the cab of the pickup truck. Finally, Willis made the mistake common to people whose real-life experience with machine guns was largely limited to movies and comic books: he assumed that since he had a gun that fired twelve bullets per second, he could not fail to miss a man's chest at a distance of ten feet.

ATF agent Willis was excited. He hurried the shot, and he did not push against the weapon as he fired to counteract the muzzle's slight tendency to rise and move away from the shooter's body as the gun chattered away on full-automatic.

The first shot of Willis' eight-round full-auto burst hit David Koresh in the left side near his waist, also clipping his wrist. The second slug was twenty inches left of the first and a foot higher. It hit David Koresh's two-year-old daughter in the center of her chest, killing her instantly before exiting out her back and slamming into the far wall inside the building. The third bullet smashed through the doorframe just to the right of Koresh, splintering it. Shots four through eight stitched a rising, angled pattern of holes into the outside wall of the building.

The H&K's suppressor effectively eliminated the muzzle blast of the pistol-caliber weapon, and the cab enclosure of the truck shielded the distant news crews from the lesser sounds of high-pressure gas coming out the gun's ejection port. The half-dozen bullets slamming into the building at seven hundred miles per hour made a sizable racket, but the position of the cattle trailers blocked much of this noise from the newspeople who were about 300 yards away.

The residents inside the building, however, were only a few yards away, and they knew exactly what was happening. David Koresh, bleeding from his arm and still holding his dead daughter, jumped back inside the building and slammed the door.

"He shot us," Koresh gasped. "She's dead." Two of the other residents of the large building were standing near the windows, and had seen Willis fire the burst at David and his daughter. When they saw that the girl was obviously dead, they shouldered their rifles and fired at Steve Willis as he was getting out of the cab of the pickup. The two men from the Mt. Carmel religious group took the trouble to aim their weapons, and they killed the ATF agent instantly.

When David Koresh had been retreating back into the building after being shot, the livestock trailers had opened, discharging their cargo. One hundred armed tax agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had poured out onto the ground. They were wearing dark jumpsuits and tactical gear, and screaming at the tops of their lungs. They were not shouting words, but rather emitting the attack noises they had learned in the simulated assaults they had practiced during the previous weeks.

Most of the screaming agents began hurling concussion grenades at the windows of the compound. Before the attack, there had been brief discussion of issuing everyone on the raid fragmentation grenades, but that idea had been abandoned in favor of restricting their use to the specialized 'entry teams' assigned to penetrate the building and kill anyone resisting. It was fortunate for the ATF men and women that the decision had gone that way; about a third of the grenades the tax men were throwing were going wide of the windows, bouncing back off the building, and landing on the ground directly in front of the federal agents.

At the same time as the grenades were exploding on the first floor and the ground outside, men in the helicopters began firing down into the roof of the building. Jaydean Wendel was abruptly awakened by all the noise. Like all mothers with infants, she immediately thought of her baby.

"Huh? Wha...? Sweetheart, are you all ri-" The woman's half-awake thoughts were cut short by a 7.62 slug that tore through the ceiling and struck her in the top of the head. The bullet shattered her skull, penetrated her brain, and lodged against her jawbone, killing her instantly. Jaydean Wendel was the third person killed in the first thirty seconds of the assault.

The ATF agents from the first livestock trailer concentrated on the west wall of the building where the two trucks were parked. They threw grenades, took cover behind cars in the dirt parking area, and fired their pistols and submachine guns at the windows of the Mt. Carmel compound. One of the agents, Dan Curtis, pistols and submachine guns at the windows of the Mt. Carmel compound. One of the agents, Dan Curtis, shot 9mm pistol when he saw Koresh briefly through one of the first-floor windows. Curtis altered his aim and squeezed the trigger. He smiled as he saw Koresh spin and fall under the impact of the 9mm slug piercing his abdomen.

While the load of tax agents from the first trailer concentrated on the main entrance, some of those from the second trailer ran around the southwest corner of the building and threw ladders up to the second floor. An entry team commanded by Agent Bill Buford of the Little Rock, Arkansas ATF office was trying to get to the section of the building where they thought Koresh had his bedroom and a weapons locker. There was a shallowly-sloping roofed area over part of the first floor, and the ATF men threw two ladders up to it. Once they were standing on it, the second-floor windows would be at waist level.

"McKeehan!" Buford commanded, "You and those four ladder up to that window! Rest of you follow me." What happened next was captured by the news cameras of KWTX-TV and shown on news broadcasts hundreds of times around the nation in the following days.

Agent Conway LeBleu drew his gun from his belt holster when he was halfway up the aluminum extension ladder. His finger was inside the trigger guard when his foot slipped on a rung of the ladder. For a horrible instant he realized that he had come very close to shooting himself in the thigh. After hesitating a moment, the shaken agent continued his climb and made his way onto the roof. The agents massed on the projecting rooftop while one of them smashed the window, threw the curtain aside, and looked in to make sure it was clear.

"Shit, I hope those guys in the choppers watch where they're shooting!" one of the agents yelled. A man in one of the Army helicopters was now hosing down the roof of the compound with long bursts from an M60 belt-fed machine gun.

"Keep your head down! Guys in front are goin' nuts, too!"

"Okay, all clear! Let's move in!" Robb Williams, Todd McKeehan, and Conway LeBleu climbed through the window into what they had been told was David Koresh's bedroom. Their information was out of date. Koresh had moved to a different section of the compound some time before. Bill Buford led the other group through a different window into an adjacent section of the building.

Williams, McKeehan, and LeBleu moved cautiously through the darkened room. Their nerves were strung tight as they listened to the helicopter rake the roof with full-auto fire and heard the bullets ripping through the ceiling several rooms away. I wish that guy would stay up by the northwest comer instead of shooting so close to here Todd McKeehan thought as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Muffled sounds of gunfire from the agents in front of the building continued unabated. As he visually identified his two companions in the dim light, McKeehan subconsciously contemplated the body armor and ballistic helmet he was wearing. They're heavy enough, but will they stop rifle bullets coming through the ceiling? Maybe, if the wood and plaster is thick enough to really slow them down. Jesus, if it isn't, and if that guy up there in the chopper isn't care No one ever knew why the agent outside on the roof decided to throw the stun grenade into the room. Some who later saw the film footage would claim he must have thought the men inside had moved into other parts of the building and were no longer in the bedroom. Others would say that he knew the agents were wearing ballistic helmets, which would protect their ears from the concussion. Neither argument explained the logic of throwing a bomb into a room that was either empty, or occupied by your own men.

Three of the members of the religious group had just finished checking on the children's dormitory. They left the two dozen children huddled underneath their beds and were running towards the stairwell at the southeast corner of the complex when the grenade went off in Koresh's former bedroom.

When the grenade exploded, the tax agents inside the empty bedroom reacted instinctively. They all began firing their submachine guns blindly, spraying the dark room in all directions with 9mm bullets. Seven rounds came through the wall near the man who had thrown in the grenade, and viewers across the country saw him cringe as the holes appeared in the outside wall just a few feet from where he sat.

The aramid fiber ballistic armor that the agents inside the bedroom were wearing was designed to stop standard lead-core, copper-jacketed pistol ammunition. Like most body armor, it offered little or no protection against rifle bullets. It was rated to stop most 9mm handgun ammunition, and the H&K MP5SD submachine guns that the agents were firing at each other were chambered for this round. However, there was one problem: the tax agents were not shooting standard 9mm ammunition.

Fifteen years before, in an effort to develop a more effective 20mm projectile for air-to-air combat, an engineer at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal had come up with the idea of a bullet made of a hardened steel tube with the leading edge sharpened to a circular razor edge. During testing, this projectile bit into metal aircraft surfaces at angles where other rounds glanced off.

An offshoot of this development was that the concept was scaled down to handgun ammunition. The result was a 9mm bullet which acted like a tiny, spinning, razor-sharp cookie cutter which went through soft body armor, as one government engineer put it, 'like shit through a goose'. The feds were very excited about this finding, and commissioned a subcontractor to produce the specialized ammunition in limited numbers. The round was nicknamed the 'Cyclone' by federal agents that used it.

It was these Cyclone rounds that the tax agents inside David Koresh's bedroom were now firing at each other, and their MP5 submachine guns were each spewing them out at a rate of twelve per second. Bill Buford and the other men heard the chattering of the suppressed submachine guns in the other room, and saw bullets come through the wall in front of them. The sub-guns sounded like several electric typewriters.

"They've found 'em!" Buford yelled as he took cover behind an oak chest and looked for something to shoot at.

The three members of the religious camp knew that none of the residents were in that corner of the building. That meant that all the gunfire was coming from the raiders, and that there were a lot of them. The three men crept up the stairwell, dropped to their knees, and began firing their AR-15s upwards through the ceiling and wall towards the attackers. The sound in the enclosed space was ear-splitting, but the three men gritted their teeth and ignored it.

The defenders were shooting inexpensive Chinese NORINCO .223 ammunition in their AR-15s. This ammunition was uniform, reliable, and functioned well, but it did not have a steel core like the current military issue loading. Michael Platt had fired the same ammunition seven years before in his Ruger Mini14 during the Miami shootout with the FBI. There, the slugs had been stopped or destroyed on impact with a man's arm, and also on auto glass. At least two FBI men were still alive because of this lack of penetration.

At the Texas religious complex, penetration of the NORINCO round was even less than it had been in Miami. The barrels of the AR-15s that the three men were firing had l-in-7" rifling twists designed to stabilize military steel-core ammo. This twist spun the bullets almost twice as fast as the l-in-12" pitch of the Mini-14. The bullets exited the muzzle spinning at over 300,000 RPM, and the tremendous rotational force caused most of the slugs to break apart when they hit the wood-and-plaster wall. One fragment hit Bill Buford, and he grimaced.

With bullets now coming through two of the walls instead of just one, the men in ATF agent Buford's group started firing in all directions. One shot hit a defender in the thigh. He fell against the wall near the top of the stairwell, still clutching his AR-15. Then he pulled back as his two companions continued shooting.

Agent Buford ignored the burning pain of his wound and peered through a doorway, where he saw Robb Williams huddled behind an old safe. He's been hit Buford thought. More than once. Buford watched as Williams collapsed on the floor. Williams was dead, as were Conway LeBleu and Todd McKeehan.

"Pull back!" Buford screamed as a feeling of dread swept over him.

The raid was not going the way he had planned.

In six separate living rooms many miles apart, Henry Bowman, Irwin Mann, Thomas J. Fleming, Rufus Ingram, Curt Behnke, and Earl Taylor-Edgarton watched in utter horror at the spectacle on their television screens. All of them were appalled and sickened at the federal invasion of the Branch Davidian compound, which was the term the newscasters were using for the Mt. Carmel camp located outside Waco, Texas.

What on earth have the people in there done? all six of the men wondered.

It's just like the attack on us in '44 Irwin Mann thought as his stomach turned over. Tears came to his eyes as he watched the black-clad agents with their German machine guns and their coal-scuttle helmets attack the compound, and Irwin Mann was filled with a silent rage.

Why the hell are tax agents carrying submachine guns and grenades? Tom Fleming silently demanded as he clenched his teeth. What possible tax violation deserves sending in a hundred armed feds with guns blazing?

Henry Bowman, Curt Behnke, and Rufus Ingram were staring at the scene of ATF agents crouched behind cars parked in the dirt driveway in front of the Branch Davidian compound. Most of the feds were firing their weapons as fast as they could pull the triggers.