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We crab-crawl backward out the closet door.

Stone is shouting into the secure phone, “Nothing changes with you people. Listen to what I say. I want it printed in every newspaper. I want it read on TV. My true manifesto! The truth of what the American people need to know about the fascist abuses of the FBI. I have it all right here.”

Megan and Sara enter the kitchen, tear-stained, clutching the dusty emergency backpacks. McCord is plucking weapons from the suitcase of horrors.

Megan says, “Are we out of here?” as Sara shouts, “Oh no!”

Through the window we can see the small white horse has wandered from the barn. He is thirty yards from the house, tearing the leaves off tomato plants.

“Screw me. We left the damn stall door open,” says McCord.

“What about Sirocco?”

“She’s still tied.”

Megan is transfixed by the stranded foal. “The baby.” She drops the backpack.

“Leave him be,” warns McCord. “He’s fine where he is.”

Dick Stone slams down the phone. “Lying bastards.”

With a high, piercing whistle, the window implodes, and flash-bangs pop all around. The acrid choke of tear gas sends us crawling from the room.

I push Sara into McCord’s arms. She is stunned, resisting.

I’m screaming, “The safe room!” but they can’t hear me, and I can’t see through swollen eyes.

More shrill canisters. More lightning bangs.

McCord has overpowered the girl and is dragging her toward the Room of Unfinished Dreams as a huge explosion throws everyone in the house to the floor.

Someone says in a faraway voice like a tinny old recording, “The barn’s on fire!”

Where is Stone? Where is Stone?

The floor is hot. I grope forward, trusting that McCord and Sara have made it to the sewing room, where SWAT will breech the windows and the twisted bamboo blinds at hostage-rescue speed.

Where is Stone?

Peering through the smoke I find the wretched shapes of two older, slower people feeling their way through the fractured debris of the front hall. Behind them is the closet and the tunnel of escape. Ahead, through gaping holes where the front door used to be, helixes of orange flame are exploding from the outbuildings. The white foal is zigzagging blindly through the yard in terror.

Megan is struggling to get out. She has to save the foal. Stone pins her arms and drags her backward. She kicks at him. They fall over the heap of junk from the closet, sprawling on top of each other. She fights free and crawls toward the open hole, turning her head to shout something at Stone. Her hair has begun to smolder. A curtain of heavy charcoal smoke falls between us. Scraps of incinerated paper fly on whirls of heat like fiery demons. Stone is up, hopscotching across the gently burning floorboards, bellowing at Megan, who is just out of reach. The faraway old-fashioned voice says, “The baby,” and she stumbles through the shattered opening into the fresh air, Dick Stone close behind.

My guess is there was never going to be negotiation. And this wasn’t another mistake like Waco. The mission was to massacre every living being on the farm. The tactical commanders took orders from Deputy Director Peter Abbott, who was willing to risk scrutiny to be certain the terrorists—and everything they knew—were eliminated.

Snipers are trained to cultivate patience. They are told, “You have one opportunity. Make it count.” A team of two elite shooters with tripod-mounted AR-10s had the front door sighted up the past five hours, their breath moderated like one wave after another in a tide that never breaks, still as the leaves, infinitely enduring. When Dick Stone reels into the luminous circles of their scopes scuttling with Megan in the shattered doorway, they take the shot, a calm, straightforward release of two high-powered bullets. At the same instant, Megan pops up in front of Stone and inadvertently becomes the target. The two bullets simultaneously penetrate her left cerebral hemisphere.

Just like that. The heavy guns, familiar as big brothers, kick hard into the curve of their shoulders, but the