by Jess Walter
Randy and Vicki sobbed as they walked down the trail and found Sammy’s body. They called for Kevin to help them. Randy picked the boy up. He was so light. They carried him into the birthing shed, stripped his clothes off, cleansed his body, and covered it with a sheet. They prayed over Sam, cried, prayed to Yahweh, and tried to contain their anger. They crouched with their rifles on the rocks for a while, waiting for the other marshals to come finish them off.
DAVE HUNT BARRELED THROUGH heavy brush and timber, over fallen trees and scarred ground. He didn’t want to run on the trail because he was afraid Randy was above it, waiting to pick them off as they ran away. Finally, after running forty-five minutes through heavy forest, Hunt and Joe Thomas broke through the woods into Homicide Meadow, near the Raus’ cabin. Ruth Rau was standing on the porch, and from the road, Dave Hunt yelled at her: “Call 911! Get the sheriff!” She disappeared into the house, and Hunt climbed the steps to her log cabin, exhausted. Thomas took up a position on the road, in case Weaver’s friends came barreling up to help him or in case the family tried to get away.
Inside the cabin, Hunt tried to catch his breath as Ruth Rau thrust the telephone into his hands. “Get your kids and get out of here,” he said to Ruth. He quickly told the sheriff’s dispatcher what had happened: “I got one officer dead. I got more pinned down. I need help quick. I want the state police. I want all the help that I can get! I gotta go back in for more officers that are trapped.”
Then Hunt dialed the marshals headquarters in Washington, D.C. He tried to outline the problem as professionally as possible. “This is Operation Northern Exposure. We got one dead, others stuck on mountain.” The marshals dispatcher was confused, and Hunt nearly lost it. “I need to talk to somebody who cares, right away!”
Tony Perez got on the phone, and Hunt was never so relieved. Perez was the one they all emulated, the steady and quiet leader of the enforcement division, a man with all the qualities that made a good deputy marshal, the qualities Billy Degan had. But even Perez sounded flustered as Hunt explained what had happened. There was a firefight, he explained. The marshals had been ambushed, and the other guys were up there with Degan’s body still. But, Hunt said, he hadn’t heard any gunfire for quite a while.
“Dave, I want you to stay on the line,” Perez said, while he and Duke Smith, the deputy director of operations, fired up the marshals service crisis center and began notifying Justice Department officials. When federal agents passed on what had happened, they said the marshals were “pinned down” and “receiving fire.” That version of events would continue to make the rounds at the Justice Department and would have tragic consequences.
In Boise, meanwhile, Hunt’s marshal colleagues took a harried report from him, misunderstood some of it, and filed an affidavit for arrest warrants on all the adults in the Weaver cabin, saying they’d fired from a pickup truck at the deputy marshals.
For hours, the breathless Hunt talked on the phone, repeating what had happened and what was new. “Local sheriff has SWAT team on the way to the scene, which is no longer taking fire,” Hunt said. “Team was trying to pull out when Weaver’s dog alerted. Team drew multiple volleys of fire from the house. Degan was struck in the chest. Return fire killed one of Weaver’s dogs. The rest of the team is still located in the mountains, but not under fire, unable to withdraw without exposing themselves to hostile fire.”
He urged the brass to set up a plan to get the other guys out of the woods. The marshals officials wanted to move slowly, cautiously, and they hinted that perhaps the surviving deputies should pull back, leaving Degan’s body for the time being.
But Hunt was a Marine, and Degan was a Marine, and Marines don’t leave their dead behind. He also knew that he could never get Roderick and Cooper to leave the body. That won’t work, Hunt said. By late afternoon, state and federal officers began showing up in the Raus’ meadow, and Hunt was ready to go up and rescue his colleagues. A sheriff’s deputy and a couple of border patrol agents wanted to fill a four-wheel-drive Jeep with tires, for protection, drive up the hill and bring the deputies down. But at headquarters, Tony Perez and his boss, Duke Smith, wanted to move slowly, didn’t want any more casualties. Up the hill, Roderick concurred. For all they knew, the family could have them completely surrounded and might be waiting to gun down whoever came up there.
At the Raus’ cabin, Dave Hunt tried to stay calm. In between phone calls, he paced and smoked on Ruth Rau’s porch, talked to Roderick, Cooper, and Norris on their fading radios, and stared off into the woods, wishing he could do something. There was gunfire in the distance, across the valley, and Hunt figured they didn’t have much time before Weaver supporters stormed the mountain. In fact, one of Sammy’s skinhead friends tried to get through the meadow with his mom, and Hunt sent them back. Hours passed, and Hunt was going crazy.
Finally, with the sun going down, the ten-man Idaho State Police Crisis Response Team showed up, ready to begin the extraction. Joe Thomas begged to lead the team up there and said they needed to bring someone with them who knew the way. Finally, the SWAT commander agreed. Thomas—who had been up there only once himself—turned to Hunt and asked, “When I get up there, which way do I go?” After gathering the right equipment and a short briefing by Hunt and Thomas, the CRT left the meadow. It was almost 9:30 p.m.
Hunt ran in, got on the phone, and told headquarters that the SWAT team was on its way. The official on the other end of the phone said they’d reconsidered and wanted them to hold off on the rescue mission. Still assuming the deputies were under fire, they said they wanted to wait until they had an armored personnel carrier to get their men out.
Hunt walked outside to see if he could still call the CRT team back. It was dark now, and there were dozens of officers just waiting around. Hunt told a couple of marshals that headquarters wanted the CRT to wait. “You tell ‘em to go to hell, Dave,” one of the retired marshals said.
ON THE MOUNTAIN, the afternoon turned cold, the clouds moved in, the temperature plummeted, and the rains started. The batteries for the team’s radios were going dead, and Cooper, Norris, and Roderick had trouble picking up Dave Hunt. They crouched in the heavy brush, buffeted by icy rain, their muscles strained and cramping, exhausted from being constantly on guard. Cooper didn’t know how much longer they could make it.
“Dave,” he rasped into his radio. “If you don’t have someone up here by four-thirty, we’re picking Billy up and moving out.”
They didn’t take any more fire, but that afternoon, an airplane flew over and the deputies thought they heard gunfire from the top of the hill. There was still no help at 4:30, so the three marshals tried to carry Degan’s body down through the forest. But he was wet and slippery, the brush was matted and thick, and weighed down by wet, heavy clothes, Degan’s 200-plus pounds wouldn’t budge. They took off his belt, tied it around his chest, and tried to drag him to the trail. That didn’t work either. Drenched with rain and sweat, they put plastic cuffs on Degan’s wrists to keep his arms from dragging the ground and slowing them down. Cooper tried to reach under Degan’s shoulder to pick him up, but he felt the hole in his buddy’s back, and his hand came back covered with blood. He was afraid that if they kept trying to carry Billy to the trail, they were going to pull his arm right off. They pushed and pulled his body closer to the trail, hid him in some brush, and collapsed on top of him in the rain, waiting for help.
“IT’S CRUMMY WEATHER,” Vicki said between sobs. “We better get inside.” In the cabin, Randy, Vicki, Kevin, Sara, and Rachel cried, prayed, and talked about what had happened. Even though the marshals had shot Sammy, Kevin said, he was sorry he had had to kill one of them. But for the most part, the family was angry. The ZOG bastards had ambushed them! They kept an eye out for more troops, and Sara expected, any moment, to see an army come up the driveway and begin blasting at them. They could see trucks and cars in the valley and could hear the rumble of engines everywhere, pinballing off the canyons and foothills, which distorted th
e noise so that it sounded as if the rigs were right on top of them.
Most of the day, they were too grief-stricken to do anything, but finally the family started gathering blankets, quilts, and sleeping bags and laying them out on the floor. They started bringing food and fresh water into the house and preparing for the attack. But what were they going to do without Sammy? There was no talk of surrender. The agents from the shadow government had started this war and—even if they let the family live—now they would frame Kevin and the Weavers for murder, just like they’d framed Randy on the gun charge. More likely, the government would just gun them all down, the way they’d killed Sammy, with a bullet in his back as he ran away.
Mixed in with the anger, Sara Weaver was afraid. Every noise hit her like a shock of electricity, and every creak of the flimsy cabin made her think of the end. And, just when she got the anger under control and could face the fear, she’d think of Sammy and start crying again.
After wailing and yelling in the afternoon, Vicki was quiet and ashen-faced, distant. She and Sammy had been especially close, and Sara watched her mom climb the narrow staircase up to the sleeping loft with Elisheba. That night, Randy, Kevin, and the girls checked their guns, watched out the windows, grieved over Sam’s death, and prepared to be surrounded. Vicki—whose visions had led them to this place and who had only ever wanted to protect her family—crawled into bed and stayed there all night, holding her baby and her Bible.
IT’S THE WAY seasons changed in North Idaho, not gradually, but like someone slamming a door. A day that started August-sunny had become wet, windy, and cold, and Cooper and Roderick were already miserable by the time the rain began to freeze and turn to a wet snow that covered the ground with a white, watery sheen. At 9:26 p.m., almost eleven hours after the first shots were fired, the Idaho State Critical Response Team finally left the Raus’ meadow to bring the deputies in from the forest. In cloud-covered darkness, with Joe Thomas in the lead, each member of the state team put his hand on the shoulder of the guy in front of him and moved slowly through the wet, black woods. Only two of the ten Critical Response Team members had night-vision goggles, and they tried to guide the others up the mountain.
It took them two hours to travel the same distance Hunt and Thomas had run in forty-five minutes. When they reached the exhausted deputies, they were huddled together in a triangle, lying across Degan’s body, pointed away from each other and keeping their eyes on the woods around them. The deputy marshals held out a small infrared penlight, visible only to someone wearing night-vision goggles.
“There they are!” said one of the CRT members.
Roderick told one of the Idaho state police officers what had happened. “I shot the dog,” he said. The CRT posted sentries on the trail while they worked on getting the deputies out.
The state police officers tried to push Degan into the canvas bag—called a jungle stretcher—and Cooper stepped in to help, even though he was tired and cramping. Degan was bigger than any of the men trying to move his body. He was lying downhill on a steep piece of ground and rigor mortis had left his arm cocked up by his head. The men couldn’t get a good enough hold on him to get him in the bag. Finally, they loaded him. When the state police tried to carry the jungle stretcher, Cooper stepped in and grabbed the straps on one end. Degan was going down the mountain the same way he came up, with his best friend.
But several times, the wet, overloaded canvas stretcher slipped, and Degan slid out onto the ground. Finally, they put him in another body bag and finished carrying him down the trail. It was slow and torturous, but the drained Cooper refused to allow anyone else to carry the front of the body bag. They reached the meadow forty-five minutes after midnight.
“I need an ambulance!” Roderick screamed. The meadow was filled now, with spotlights, cars, trucks, and dozens of state and local cops, federal agents, and officials. They loaded Billy on a gurney and slid it into a van. Roderick and Cooper tried to climb into the van with the body, but the FBI agents said no, they couldn’t go with him.
Instead, the five deputy marshals were handed over to Mark Jurgensen, the deputy whose undercover operation was supposed to lead to Randy’s arrest. Jurgensen rode with them in a prisoner van to the Bonners Ferry hospital emergency room, where a doctor took their blood pressures and temperatures and gave them all some Tylenol capsules and something to settle their stomachs. Between them, the three deputies on the hillside had had nothing to eat except a granola bar that they’d split. They hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before.
The deputies kept their guns because of rumors that Weaver’s supporters would try to storm the hospital. They called their wives and told them they were okay. After Cooper had finished talking to his own wife, Jurgensen approached him.
“Mrs. Degan doesn’t want to put more on you than you can handle, but she wants to know if you’ll call her.”
Of course he would. Cooper called Karen Degan and explained what had happened, how Billy had died trying to keep anyone from being hurt.
Finally, twenty-four hours after they’d started, the marshals drove back to their condominium at the base of Schweitzer. They talked about the vehicle that Thomas had heard and wondered where the noise had come from. They reminisced about Degan—Cooper and Roderick telling stories about him that brought half-smiles and pained laughter. They cried some. Mark Jurgensen joined the deputies at the condo, took their machine guns, emptied them, and counted the number of rounds they’d fired. Hunt, Thomas, and Norris hadn’t fired at all. Roderick had fired once, and Cooper had fired two three-round bursts. Then he examined Degan’s gun. Cooper said he was certain that Degan had never fired a shot.
There were seven rounds missing.
TWELVE
TWO HOURS AFTER THE GUN BATTLE, the Justice Department was scrambling. In the crisis center on the eleventh floor of the marshals’ headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, computers, telephones, fax machines, teletypes, and videocassette recorders hummed, spreading the horrible news that one of their best had been killed. Tony Perez and G. Wayne “Duke” Smith—the number three man in the service—worked the phones, gathering intelligence about the shoot-out from Dave Hunt, who tried to remain calm as he told them the marshals weren’t taking any more fire, but that they were in danger and needed to be rescued. A map quickly went up on the wall and a telephone call went out to Mike Johnson, the U.S. marshal for Idaho.
“Where the hell is this place?” someone from headquarters asked Johnson.
“It’s at the top of Idaho,” Johnson said, “right by Canada.”
In Washington, the director of the U.S. Marshals Service, Henry Hudson, met with FBI brass, told them one of his deputies had been killed, and repeated that two others were “pinned down.” After the meeting, FBI officials briefed director William Sessions and the head of the bureau’s criminal division, Larry Potts, who decided to call in the Hostage Rescue Team, from Quantico, Virginia. The head of that team, Richard Rogers, gathered his top three aides, loaded a helicopter and other supplies in the FBI’s private jet, and left for Idaho to set up the details of the mission before his team arrived.
The marshals service’s Duke Smith needed a ride west, and so he met Rogers at the FBI airstrip. On the jet, they sat down together to figure out what to do.
By that time, the overstatement of danger had reached high levels in the Justice Department, coursing through offices, faxes, and telephones like a virus. Hours after Hunt made it clear that the deputy marshals were no longer taking fire, one of his bosses told FBI officials they were “still pinned down by gunfire.” The same bad information was relayed through a series of top-level meetings, working the Justice Department into a bureaucratic frenzy over William Degan’s death.
The version of events spreading through the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service had the Weaver’s dog discovering the deputy marshals and the family chasing them through the woods and gunning down Degan, who stepped out to demand their surrender and was killed without firing a sh
ot. Some officials believed Weaver and Harris had fired from a truck and that the deputies took a round of automatic weapon fire from the cabin. Most critically, officials thought the surviving marshals were caught in an ongoing firefight and were pinned down by the Weaver family. Randy Weaver, they believed, was a highly trained Green Beret and Aryan Nations member who might have booby-trapped his mountain with bombs and grenades.
In reality, the situation was hazy at best, and much of the information being spread around Washington was simply wrong. There was no truck, no automatic weapons. Even if Degan was killed before Roderick shot the dog, he had fired seven shots himself, possibly before he was hit. There was every indication the Weavers didn’t know what they were chasing (Vicki strolling back to the house, Kevin and Sammy walking along the trail). There was no evidence that Randy Weaver had any more than a glancing affiliation with the Aryan Nations or that he had shot at anyone or had booby-trapped anything. The federal officials flying to Idaho knew nothing about Sam Weaver being killed or the dog being shot. But the biggest mistake they made was to overestimate the “ongoing firefight,” since the actual gun battle had lasted only minutes, and Hunt said clearly there had been no gunfire for hours. The misperception that the Weavers had the marshals “pinned down” and were firing automatic weapons at them from the house would color everything that happened for the next two days, as the government’s fear of the Weavers began to gather its own momentum, a landslide of blunders, bad information, cold decision making, and eventually, cover-up.