The Branch Davidians: Oh, My God, They're Killing Themselves!

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A few minutes past noon, FBI snipers say they saw a man in a gas mask cupping his hands, as though lighting something. Sage grabbed the microphone. "Don't do this to those people," he pleaded over the loudspeaker. "This is not the way to end it." He called out to cult members: If you can't see, walk toward the loudspeaker, follow the voice. An explosion rocked the compound, then another and another as ammunition stores blew up. The building shuddered, like the earthquake Koresh had foretold.

A short, rumpled lawyer named Danny Coulson watched it all on a TV monitor from the "submarine," the FBI's windowless command center in Washington. His FBI supervisors and Attorney General Janet Reno had been there following the progress all morning. Coulson's eyes were tired, black underneath, but he was hopeful by nature and still thought the plan would work. He founded the hrt, and he had been here before. When the first flames came, the room went dead silent. "Well, he's burning the arms," Coulson thought, "and he'll walk out and say, 'Prove I had automatic weapons.' " Then he waited for people to come pouring out.

The phone rang in the command center: No one is coming out. All Coulson could do was watch, and think about the children: "The strongest instinct is a mother's instinct for a child." Then word came from Waco that one or two people had been spotted outside the building and that agents, protected only by their helmets, body armor and green flight suits of fire-resistant Nomex, were leaving the safety of their armored vehicles and going after them.

Up in a back room in her gas mask, Ruth Riddle was clutching her Bible when she felt the heat rising around her. She worried that her yellow plastic sandals might melt, so she changed into running shoes and looked for a way out. She jumped down from a hole punched in the wall and stumbled forward, smoke coming out of her clothes. An agent spotted her, climbed out of his armored vehicle and ran to her, disappearing into a black plume. By the time he reached her, she was trying to get back inside with her friends and struggled to fight him off, apparently determined to find her way to heaven through hell. "Where are the kids? What did you do with them?" the agent yelled, but she just shook her head and said nothing as he dragged her to safety. And in those days people will seek death but not find it; they will long to die, but death will fly from them.

A man appeared on the roof, his clothes aflame, rolling in pain. Agents moved toward him, but he waved them off. He fell off the roof, and the agents ran over, tore off his burning clothes and got him safely inside the armored vehicle.

By now 30-m.p.h. prairie winds had sent the flames gulping through the compound. The fire raced through the big parlor, feeding on the wooden benches and the stacks of Bibles kept by the door. The chapel crackled as flames consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment from the messiah's rock-'n'-roll band and the wooden pew-like bleachers for his audience. Table after table in the cafeteria burned, and rows of children's wooden bunk beds upstairs, as the flames spread faster, through the attic that ( ran the length of the building like a wind tunnel. It burned fast because it was built on the cheap, a tar-paper, yellow-pine and plasterboard crematorium.