|
May
3, 1993
''Oh,
My God, They're Killing Themselves!''
Waco
comes to an end
by
NANCY GIBBS
Reported
by Michael Riley and Richard Woodbury/Waco and Julie Johnson and Elaine
Shannon/Washington
The
sun didn't blacken, nor the moon turn red, but the world did come to an
end, just as their prophet had promised. The End drove up to their doorstep
in a tank, spitting gas, fulfilling prophecies. And if anyone wants to
harm them, says the Book of Revelation, fire pours from their mouth and
consumes their foes.
Buzzards
circled overhead and the wind blew hard on the day the Branch Davidians
died. Before the sun came up, state troopers went door to door to the houses
near the compound, telling people to stay inside, there might be some noise.
Over their loudspeakers, the tired negotiators called one last time for
David Koresh and his followers to surrender peacefully. Then they got on
the phone and told him exactly where the tear gas was coming, so he could
move the children away. The phone came sailing out the front door. They
will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them.
The
pounding began a few minutes after 6 a.m., when an armored combat engineer
vehicle with a long, insistent steel nose started prodding a corner of
the building. Shots rang out from the windows the moment agents began pumping
in tear gas. A second CEV joined in, buckling walls, breaking windows,
! nudging, nudging, as though moving the building would move those inside.
''This is not an assault!'' agent Byron Sage cried over the loudspeakers.
''Do not shoot. We are not entering your compound.'' Ambulances waited
a mile back; the local hospital, Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, was
on alert. But no one was supposed to get hurt. ''You are responsible for
your own actions,'' agents called out. ''Come out now and you will not
be harmed.'' Do not fear what you are about to suffer . . . Be faithful
unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.
Koresh
left his apartment on the top floor and stalked the halls. ''Get your gas
masks on,'' he told them. The masks would protect them for hours, even
days if they could manage to change the filters. Once equipped, people
went about their chores: women did the laundry, cleaned, or read the Bible
in their rooms, even as a tank crashed through the front door, past the
piano, the potato sacks and the propane tank barricaded against it.
Once
the shooting started, the agents abandoned their plan to target the gas
where it was least likely to hurt the children. The vehicles exhaled clouds
through the entire building, punching hole after hole through the walls
as the rounds of bullets rained down. Fleeing the gas, women and children
clustered in the center of the second floor, from which there was no exit.
Then suddenly the firing stopped, and a white flag emerged from the front
door.
''Outstanding!''
thought the leader of the Hostage Rescue Team. ''It's gonna work.'' Koresh's
chief lieutenant, Steve Schneider, retrieved the telephone, and the agents
felt a moment of hope. But the firing began again. Then the angel took
the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth.
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.
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.
The
snipers stood shifts around the clock at observation posts that were well
within the range of Koresh's .50-cal. sharpshooting rifles and M-60 machine
guns. ''All our positions were chip shots for them,'' says Coulson, ''an
easy head shot.'' The snipers kept their rifle scopes trained on the compound's
windows, watching as they were fortified for tripod-mounted machine guns
that could be fired by a man lying on the floor. ''I don't know if anybody
has ever spent any time staring through a scope,'' says one agent, ''but
I did it for 15 or 20 minutes, and it is terribly disorienting. These people
had been there for 50 days.''
The
cult leader had broken one deal after another, officials reminded Reno.
''There were never any real negotiations,'' says Jeffrey Jamar, the beefy
FBI agent in charge on the ground. ''We stayed in touch to avoid provocation,
but everything was done on his time -- he was in strict control.'' Negotiators
had learned that Koresh had a particular dread of jail, a fear of being
raped. ''He had all the wives, food and liquor he wanted,'' Coulson says.
''Inside, he's God. Outside, he's an inmate on trial for his life. What
was he going to do?''
They
had tried to break him down, switching tactics midway through the siege.
At first they were respectful. That approach got 37 people out, including
21 children, before it stopped working. Then their tone switched to disdain,
even mockery, and the harassment campaign of lights and noises began. ''It
was not there just to irritate them and make their lives miserable,'' said
agent Byron Sage. ''It was to keep them on guard, to keep them so they
weren't at a fine-honed edge.''
To
make their tactical case, officials had to depend on their intelligence
from inside the compound, but as Koresh grew more paranoid it was harder
to gather. The atf had an undercover agent inside before the original raid,
but his shooting skills on the target range may have aroused suspicion.
After negotiating to send in milk, magazines and a typewriter, they tucked
in tiny listening devices as well to help them monitor Koresh's moods.
But cult members were said to have found the bugs and destroyed them.
So
they had to rely more on the hours of conversations and the letters Koresh
occasionally dictated to be sent out to the besieging forces. The FBI brought
these to a team of experts they recruited, who drew a psychological portrait
of an ever more menacing figure, one who believed himself invincible.
Over
the weekend of April 10, Koresh sent the FBI two letters from God, which
Time has obtained, neatly penned on lavender notepaper by one of his 19
wives. ''I AM your God,'' he wrote, ''and you will bow under my feet. Do
you think you have the power to stop my will?'' The ominous letters persuaded
the psychologists that Koresh would come out only on his own terms, probably
violent ones. ''It is hard to believe that Koresh will abdicate his godhood,''
the experts concluded, ''for a limited notoriety and time behind bars.''
It
seemed at times that Koresh was playing with them. His mother had hired
a fancy lawyer for him, and just as the feds were deciding they had to
move, Koresh was deciding that he was eager to talk. Dick DeGuerin is a
renowned defender of infamous Texans, a lean, boyish-looking ex-prosecutor
known among defense lawyers as ''Clint Eastwood'' for rescuing high-profile
figures from impossible fixes. He has a gift for winning his clients' trust,
and it seemed to be working with Koresh. They talked for hours inside the
compound, sharing chicken a la king and apple juice and macadamia nuts,
for which Koresh had developed a taste during his days recruiting followers
in Hawaii. DeGuerin told his client that the government did not have much
of a case against him -- an impression the negotiators did not contradict.
What they heard from the lawyer helped convince them that the Davidians
wanted to come out. All the FBI needed was to open the door and yank.
A frontal
assault was out of the question. They suspected that the entire place was
booby-trapped; they knew the sect had powerful weapons and night- vision
scopes, sentries guarded the windows around the clock, and whenever agents
approached in tanks, cult members held up the children in the windows.
The strategists talked about using a water cannon, but rejected the idea.
First, they didn't have an armored fire truck. Second, the blast of water
was as strong as a wrecking ball and might cause the building to collapse
on the children inside. Finally, water would destroy evidence.
The
idea, instead, was to pump in the gas and create enough chaos to distract
anyone intent on either firing back or orchestrating a mass suicide. Perhaps
those who were wavering would come out.
That
was the plan FBI Director William Sessions and his top deputies put together
for Reno on Monday morning. She wanted to see everything, asked hundreds
of questions: Why go now? What is he likely to do? Is this the best way
to go? On Wednesday night she called in members of the Army's elite Delta
Force to ask their opinions. Her questions always came back to the children.
FBI officials explained that the longer the siege lasted, the more the
children would suffer. ''Children are like hostages,'' Koresh had told
one negotiator, ''because they're too young to make decisions.''
And
indeed he seemed prepared to treat them that way. When negotiators asked
him to send out videotapes to show the youngsters were safe, Koresh was
happy to oblige. The tactic worked brilliantly for him. Agents were wrenched
by the pictures, and even more profoundly engaged after Koresh began putting
the children on the telephone. ''Are you coming to kill me?'' a tiny voice
would ask. ''Those kids' faces, you can still see them,'' says FBI agent
Bob Ricks. ''They are precious, innocent children, controlled by a madman.''
Koresh
would use food as a weapon, even on his own children. The cult had stockpiled
enough Army rations to last for months, but Koresh dispensed them all.
His favorites usually had the first claim, like the members of his rock
band, and his Mighty Men, the term referring to the warriors who fought
under King David in the Old Testament. So for the ultimate task, the fight
to the death, the warriors would be fed. The weak, the vacillating and
the helpless would grow weaker and weaker, unable to split off if given
the chance.
Reno
continued to press about the dangers of exposing people to gas. Anesthetic
gases might knock people out, but there was no guarantee that they would
wake up, ever, especially the small children. Strong men would be knocked
out last, or not at all. The FBI brought in a leading specialist on the
toxicology of tear gas, whom Reno debriefed for hours. She approved the
use of tear gas only after being assured that the form the FBI was using
was not permanently harmful, carcinogenic or a possible cause of birth
defects.
The
idea, officials said, was not to provoke one major showdown, but to gradually
increase the pressure. Even as the debate in Washington progressed, the
Hostage Rescue Team was sending in Abrams tanks to close in on the compound,
closer and closer. Anything lighter, Koresh had threatened to blow ''40
feet in the air.'' Then the FBI began removing the fence. ''Everyone on
scene said that's the most provocative thing we can do,'' says an official.
''If we touch that fence, we stand a chance that there will be some kind
of violent response. So we thought long and hard. But we removed it, and
there was no action.'' The only rise the FBI managed to get out of Koresh
was last Sunday, when an armored vehicle towed his precious black Camaro
to make room for the next day's attack.
Above
all Reno needed to know how Koresh would react to being pushed and whether
the others inside would follow him, even unto death. Koresh held over them
all the power of the Apocalypse; he was the Lamb of Revelation, who alone
could open the seven seals and foresee the end of the world. FBI agents
made some effort to get a handle on the theology at work, but scholars
have been trying to explain these passages for centuries with little success.
Among those they consulted was Phillip Arnold, a specialist in apocalyptic
faiths whom Koresh respected. He was happy to serve as theological bait,
a means of helping Koresh get his message out to the world and thereby
bring about a peaceful resolution.
In
the crucial sixth chapter of Revelation, Koresh found his timetable. The
bloody raid on Feb. 28 signaled the opening of the fifth seal. The Bible
instructed that they ''rest a little longer, until the number would be
complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters,
who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed.'' Which
merely meant that after a short time had passed, their time to die would
be upon them. So Arnold and his colleague James Tabor from the University
of North Carolina at Charlotte worked to sell Koresh on a less threatening
interpretation.
On
April 8 the theologians went on a Dallas radio show and tried to persuade
Koresh that the prophecy had not yet been fulfilled. They dwelt on a verse
in Chapter 10: ''You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations
and languages and kings.'' That was probably where Koresh got the idea
of writing his own explanation of the meaning of the seven seals. His final
letter was in sharp contrast to the earlier fire and brimstone. This one
was addressed to DeGuerin and dwelt more on distribution rights and other
bookkeeping matters. ''I hope to finish this as soon as possible and to
stand before man to answer any and all questions regarding my actions,''
he wrote. On the night before the immolation, the FBI sent in milk for
the children and typewriter ribbons for the author.
Indeed,
the desire to spread the message was so strong that it helped persuade
agents that Koresh did not mean to end his life. Reno had to balance conflicting
reports about whether the Davidians were prepared for a mass suicide, the
one finale she hoped to avoid at all costs. Four times negotiators asked
if Koresh planned to kill himself, and four times he denied them. ''If
I wanted to commit suicide,'' he told them, ''I would have done that a
long time ago.'' Agents pointed out that Koresh had backed away from the
brink before. On March 2, when he was supposed to surrender, he arranged
to strap grenades to his body, come out and blow himself up in front of
TV cameras. All the preparations were made, he kissed the children goodbye
in the chapel -- and then, at the last moment, ''chickened out,'' Ricks
said.
But
there was also plenty of evidence pointing the other way. Fully a year
ago the U.S. embassy in Australia, where many cult members had lived, sent
Washington a cable about the cult, warning that the Davidians would never
allow themselves to be taken alive. As members came out of Ranch Apocalypse,
they confirmed the planning; a 12-year-old girl told the audience on the
Phil Donahue show how they were taught to put the barrel of a gun in their
mouth. The feds took the possibility seriously: they collected enough anticyanide
kits to provide a lifesaving dose for every child and a few of the adults,
and the medics of the HRT kept them at the ready at the forward command
post.
Reno
finally reached her decision on Saturday night. The Attorney General convened
top aides in her fifth-floor conference room and demanded that the FBI
once again justify its operation. ''Is this the best way,'' she asked,
to prod Koresh without aggravating the situation? ''What would happen if
we don't do it?'' What was the risk of losing more lives both inside and
outside the compound? She shook her head in horror as an FBI official offered
a graphic description of human waste being thrown outside in pails. There
was some discussion of child abuse, at which point Reno asked the FBI,
''You mean, slapping them around?'' They said yes, and talked about the
''ongoing pattern of young girls in there being sexually abused.'' At around
7:15 p.m. she approved the operation. By 7:40 Saturday night Reno went
home.
The
following night she called the President and briefed him on the plan. They
talked for about 15 minutes, as Clinton asked about the timing, the possible
pitfalls and whether the military had been consulted. ''I said that if
she thought it was the right thing to do,'' he said later, ''that she should
proceed and that I would support it.''
In
the morning, as the assault began, reporters asked Clinton if he knew what
was happening. In fact, Clinton had been briefed periodically on the progress
in Waco from the start, by Reno's predecessor Stuart Gerson and by her
deputy Webster Hubbell, a close friend of the Clintons'. ''I was aware
of it,'' he said. ''I think the Attorney General made the decision.'' Pushed
further, he added, ''I knew it was going to be done, but the decisions
were entirely theirs.''
Then
he vanished. At about 1 p.m., after the fire broke out, White House communications
director George Stephanopoulos kept a safe distance from the issue at his
regular daily briefing for reporters: ''It's a decision by the Attorney
General and the FBI.'' Like everyone else, the White House spent the afternoon
waiting and watching to see if anyone might survive. But after the smoke
cleared, Clinton, never camera shy, remained in the shadows. The White
House released a statement one paragraph long. ''The law-enforcement agencies
involved in the Waco Siege recommended the course of action pursued today,''
it said. ''I told the Attorney General to do what she thought was right,
and I stand by that decision.''
While
a normal politician's instinct, as disaster burns around them, is to run
for cover, Reno drew herself up tall, 6 ft. 2 in. tall, and went on national
television to say, The buck stops with me, I take full responsibility,
it was my decision, I approved the plans, until journalists and pundits
and pols were breathless at the audacity of it, an act of political self-immolation.
She was everywhere on the evening news and the talk shows, declaring that
after hard thought she had reached the best judgment she could and that
''based on what we know now, obviously it was wrong.''
She
lost her temper only when reporters suggested that she was covering for
the President. ''I don't do spin stuff,'' she said, ''and I'm not distancing
anybody from anything.'' But by the time Larry King came round, she still
hadn't heard from her boss. ''They kept missing each other,'' was the official
White House explanation. The next day Stephanopoulos began to retreat from
the retreat as best he could. Clinton rejected calls for Reno to resign
just because ''some religious fanatics murdered themselves,'' and called
for investigations at Justice and the Treasury Department. The House Judiciary
Committee announced it would hold hearings as well.
At
the scene of the carnage, forensic experts tiptoed through still smoking
ruins, amid popping ammunition and exploding cans of fruit. They removed
one soft, crumbling body after another, laying them in body bags side by
side for removal in a refrigerated truck. Tiny orange flags fluttered everywhere
that bodies had been found -- nine of them clustered at the central cinder-block
bunker, with a weapon still visible mounted on top. On the main flagpole,
where Koresh liked to fly his Star of David flag, the Texas and ATF flags
flew at half staff.
Throughout
the week family members issued scorching assessments of the FBI's performance.
''There were law-abiding, God-fearing people in there,'' said Koresh's
mother Bonnie Haldeman. ''They didn't hurt anybody.'' The most damaging
blasts came from those who had made it out of the compound. Survivors spoke
out, either on their own or through DeGuerin and Schneider's lawyer Jack
Zimmerman, to challenge the official version of what happened. ''There
was never any suicide plan,'' protested Renos Avraam, a 28-year-old London
native who had lived in the compound for more than a year, ''and never
any order to destroy the compound. We intended to come out.''
As
the week progressed the FBI had to back off certain claims: that they had
fresh evidence of child abuse, that they had actually seen a cult member
lighting the fire, that some victims were shot by fellow Davidians for
trying to flee. ''The Justice Department is pressing emotional trigger
buttons,'' charged Zimmerman, who had worked side by side with DeGuerin
trying to end the standoff. ''It's a public opinion-generated effort.''
The
survivors tell a harrowing story of the final hours. At noon, Avraam told
his lawyer, ''many of us were toward the front when a tank ran into a corner
of the building and it basically collapsed. Then someone shouted, 'A fire
has started!' The black smoke was intense. I couldn't see.'' Some speculated
that the tanks punctured the propane tank barricading the door, sending
flames speeding through a storage room full of gallon fuel containers for
the lanterns, lighting the hay bales and other debris. Children and others
in the outside rooms fled them for interior areas, but within minutes these
were ablaze too. David Thibodeau, one of the Mighty Men, told his mother
that he tried to run upstairs to get to the children, but the way was blocked.
''People had no time to get out. The fire spread very fast,'' says Avraam,
who escaped by diving out a window.
FBI
agents who watched the hideous finale from ground zero adamantly dismiss
the notion that they somehow started the inferno. ''I saw three fires almost
simultaneously,'' insists Sage. ''There's no question but that it was not
started by the tanks in front of building. That's ridiculous. I saw the
tanks at different points from where the fires were.'' He, like others,
had no choice but to stand and watch. ''I can't tell you what was going
through my heart,'' he says. ''A combination of anguish, reflection and
absolute anger for David Koresh. Because the bottom line here is that with
complete and unthinking malice he had murdered all those people.''
Officials
at Justice braced themselves for the backbiting. Privately, counterterrorist
experts in other branches made no bones about what they would have done
differently. ''I wouldn't have pumped gas in there,'' said one official,
''and I wouldn't have called them first.'' Others charged that the mistake
was not only in tactics, but in attitude. ''This wasn't a normal hostage
situation,'' said a Justice official. ''Not only were they there, they
were willing to do anything for this person.'' A congressional aide put
it differently: ''They acted like they thought they were talking to another
bank robber. Instead, they were talking to someone who was dealing in a
parallel universe.''
Critics
were especially blistering on the subject of the FBI's impatience. ''When
you look at this, I think you not only need to understand the psychology
of cults but you need to understand the psychology of law < enforcement
as well,'' said a congressional aide. ''They had been challenged, more
than four of their agents had been killed, there was the day-in, day-out
appearance of impotence in a profession in which control is so important.''
Theologian
Arnold laments that the FBI did not take the underlying religious issues
more seriously. The pull of faith was so strong that some Branch Davidians
who escaped wished they had instead been consumed by the flames. ''They
took that to be a big joke, all that talk about the seven seals,'' he says.
''The seven seals was his language, and if you didn't speak that language,
there was no way of showing him what he had to do.''
But
Jamar and other agents scoff at the notion that either scholars or family
members could have succeeded in getting anyone out. ''We could have spent
seven months allowing this all to happen.'' As for the Bible experts, ''they
could have argued religion with him for hours and it wouldn't have done
any good. You going to talk someone out of being the Messiah? It's a lot
to give up.''
In
the end, even the fiercest critics could not deny that it was Koresh who
placed 25 children in harm's way, who preyed on people who were weak and
lonely and hungry for certainty. Certainty he gave them, and abundantly.
He was certain of his vision of good and evil, certain of his special insight
into the deepest mysteries of faith, certain of an afterlife that promised
glory for those who had suffered for their souls. If he is right about
that, and there is any justice in it, Koresh has not seen the last of the
flames. And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of
fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will
be tormented day and night forever and ever. |