Free Deceptions by Michael Weaver Page B

dead and wounded, the Olympians would be seeing this by now as a holy war provoked by a repressive
     government.
    The attorney general pushed through high grass under a cloudless sky. He walked steadily past the agents, troopers, and deputies
     positioned along the government perimeter. He could feel their eyes on him.
    My army.
    Yet at one particular point, Durning came near to feeling more like a halfback who had caught a forty-yard pass and was running
     another fifty yards for the longest touchdown in the history of the team.
    Then he was past the last of their positions and there was only the heavy part ahead, with the steel-shuttered windows showing
     clear, and the gun muzzles aimed at him through their firing ports, and the solid, half-round logs of walls that could stop
     any rifle bullet made. But most especially there was the knowledge that at any second, depending upon the unpredictable impulses
     of fanatics steeped in a dogma of death and dying, he could be blown away.
    Durning just stared straight ahead, kept placing one foot infront of the other, and tried to read the air. Until, at a distance of about fifty feet, a massive door swung open and he
     saw the Reverend Samson Koslow waiting to greet him.
    A thin, middle-aged, shaggy-haired man with tired eyes, Koslow might have been the third-generation West Virginia miner he
     had started out as, with the coal dust freshly scrubbed from his face. Dressed in faded denim, he stood in the center of the
     open doorway, not moving from the spot until he had taken Durning’s hand.
    “Bless you for coming,” he said.
    Then Durning was inside, the door was closed and bolted, and he smelled his own excitement. When he turned, there was a world
     to see.
    The compound’s central building was cavernous, a great enclosed space in which the Olympian sect’s forty-three surviving men,
     women, and children had gathered to either live or die. Riflemen were on watch at the windows and gun-ports. Clusters of children
     were gathered in a far corner, shepherded by young women. Wounded lay stretched out on bare floors and bloodstained mattresses.
     The bodies of a man and woman were arranged side by side on a table. Candles burned at their heads and feet, and kneeling
     figures circled them in silent prayer.
    There was barely a sound, except for that of a baby crying. Dimly, Henry Durning wondered if it was the same child he had
     heard earlier on the telephone.
    At last he saw the worst, and his heart pounded and his mouth turned to flannel.
    He counted four of them altogether, one against each of the outside walls, where they stood like markers in a cemetery. Each
     made up of its own deadly conglomerate of dynamite and wires and detonators and five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline. Set off
     in concert, they were instant doomsday, total do-it-yourself obliteration.
    Very serious stuff, thought Henry Durning. If he’d had any doubts about the declared deadline before, he had none now.
    Koslow touched his arm. “Come,” he said, and led Durning to a small wooden table beside a window.
    A fragile, gray-haired woman brought two cups of water,set one before each of them, and walked away. Since their water had been cut off for days, Durning knew exactly how precious
     each cup was.
    “All right,” said Samson Koslow. “You’re here. You see us as we are. Nothing is hidden. So do we live or die?”
    “Too many have died already. I want no more dying.”
    “Then you’ll fold your tents and leave us in peace?”
    “It’s not that simple, Reverend.” Durning’s voice was soft, his tone and manner patient. He might have been speaking to a
     child. “There are still laws against shooting government agents.”
    “Not if the shooting was in defense of our lives, our liberty, and God. Not if the raid on our compound was unwarranted and
     unlawful. And certainly not if the attorney general understands justice as well as he understands the law and is willing to
     act