Free Deceptions by Michael Weaver

word.”
    Durning heard a click as the chief executive came on the line.
    “Hank?”
    “Yes, Mr. President.”
    “I know you’re on top of this, but all I keep thinking about are the twenty-seven women and children in that compound.”
    “I’m thinking about them, too, Mr. President. And I promise you. This will not be another Waco, Texas.”
    “What about the five o’clock deadline?”
    “I’m going to fly down there right now. I’ll either have them out before five or call off the siege.”
    “Then we’re taking the mass suicide threat seriously?”
    “After the Branch Davidians, Mr. President, how could we
not?”
    When he hung up, the attorney general told the pilot they would be heading for Huntington, West Virginia. Then he called FBI
     Director Brian Wayne, his oldest and closest friend.
    “It’s me, Bri. I’ve just spoken to Artie and the president, so I know most of it. How bad was this morning’s shooting?”
    “A state trooper and two of my agents took hits. Nothing fatal. But who needed it?”
    “What about the Olympians?”
    “No reported casualties, but they probably took a few, too.” Wayne’s voice was flat, morose.
    “Who fired first?”
    “I’m afraid our people.”
    “Didn’t they have orders not to?”
    “Yeah. But they’ve been out there nine days now. Everyone’s getting impatient.”
    “Impatient for what? To kill or to die?”
    The FBI director was silent.
    “I don’t like the suicide threat,” said Henry Durning. “It’s probably just a copy-cat bluff after what happened at Waco, but
     we can’t take that chance. So I’m going down right now.”
    “I’ll meet you.”
    “There’s no need for you to go, too.”
    “Yes, there is,” said Wayne.
    The attorney general’s plane landed at 1:00 P.M. at Huntington Municipal Airport, where two state troopers were waiting with a car on the tarmac.
    They drove through curving mountain roads at a steady fifty-five-mile-per-hour clip and arrived at the besieged religious
     sect’s compound at about 1:40.
A sylvan feast gone bad,
thought Durning. Slowly, he got out of the car and looked around.
    The Olympian site lay out of rifle range in the middle distance, a sprawl of barns and outbuildings clustered about a large
     central structure, where an estimated forty-three men, women, and children were barricaded against a small army of county,
     state, and federal officers. Standing bareheaded in the summer sun, Durning felt himself turn cold.
    How do these things happen ?
    He knew, of course. Knowing was part of his job. Yet no two of these often deadly confrontations were ever entirely alike.
     In this instance, the trouble began when about fifty agents, troopers, and sheriff’s deputies raided the Olympians’ communal
     compound to serve a search warrant and arrest their leader, the Reverend Samson Koslow, on weapons charges. In the resulting
     shootout, two FBI agents and five of the religious cultists were killed and many more were wounded. Since then, until this
     morning’s violence and the announced suicide deadline, the tension-filled standoff had held for almost nine days.
    The scene along the dirt road where the attorney general’s car had stopped might have been part of an extended country carnival.
     Colored lights flashed everywhere. Tents were scattered across the fields. Media vans, ambulances, and fighting vehicles stood in unmoving convoys.
    Durning saw the big, converted recreational vehicle that served as the FBI command post and started toward it. He waved away
     a growing crowd of reporters and photographers who had recognized him, and they backed out of his path a step at a time. They
     shot pictures from all sides and shouted questions that were never answered.
    When Durning entered the command post, Brian Wayne was already there, along with some of his top, on-site brass.
    “Give us a few minutes,” the FBI director told his agents, and they left him alone with the attorney general.
    Durning