"Oh, My God, They're Killing Themselves!" -- FBI agent Bob Ricks

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The agents watching held out one last hope. As the flames rose higher and higher, they remembered the school bus. A social worker sent in months before to check on the safety of the children had been shown an old bus, stripped of its seats, buried underground, to be used as a bunker. Maybe the children were safely sealed inside, agents thought. So the moment the faded red pumper trucks pulled in, the team leader grabbed his gas mask and his M-16 and led 16 men around the blaze to a concrete pit filled with thigh-deep water fouled with human waste and floating body parts. They waded forward through pitch darkness, saw rats swimming past them by the flashlights strapped to the tips of their rifles. They reached a door at the end that they feared might be booby-trapped; they crashed through anyway, into the tunnel that led to the bus. The air inside was sweet and cool, free of gas. But there was no one inside.

By the time the fire fighters went into the compound, only ashes and bones were left, and questions.

When it was all over, the questions belonged to everyone, every pundit and prophet and armchair analyst. Did it have to end this way? Did the feds just get restless and vengeful at the crazy people who had killed four of their colleagues? Were the Davidians in fact intending to come out in a matter of days? Above all, did the cult members really set out to burn themselves and their children alive? Or did the tanks knock down their camp lanterns, burst open the propane, accidentally tossing a spark onto the tinder? A mass suicide? A mass homicide? A ghastly accident?

In the days and long nights before the finale, the questions belonged to Janet Reno. A month into her job, Reno confronted a disaster she had done nothing to create. The drama in the Texas prairie began as she was still standing in the wings, mourning her mother and awaiting the Senate's confirmation. Reno grew up in the swamps where alligators still wander -- her mother used to wrestle them -- and for 15 years she was in charge of enforcing laws in a city where lawbreaking is a spectator sport. But nothing could have quite prepared her for the choices she faced that fateful week.

The FBI came to her on Monday with their plan, laid out in a wine-colored briefing book. That started a week of meetings, briefings, phone calls and more meetings in which Reno probed the motives and methods the bureau had laid out.

The officials had come to believe that time was no longer on their side. For one thing, the team leader told Time's Elaine Shannon, "we had run out of other plans." To an impatient audience, it may have appeared that all the officials had done for 51 days was stand and wait and watch. But members of the hrt, especially the snipers, had been on constant alert and were wearing down. "My very first concern was that the Davidians would exit the compound with a child in one hand and an AK-47 in the other," Coulson says. "The only civilian unit that can eliminate the subject without eliminating the child are hrt snipers. They can hit a quarter-inch target at 200 meters." That meant, of course, that they had any number of chances to take out Koresh. But the agency's rules of engagement forbid them to fire on anyone if they are not directly threatened themselves.

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