Andy McNab - Agressor

I looked through one of the bullet holes in the side of the cattle trailer that had been our home for the last five days. The darkness of the Texas prairie was criss-crossed by searchlight beams. The AFVs circled the target buildings like Indians around a wagon train, Nightsuns bouncing wildly. The psyops guys were still making life a living hell for those trapped inside. The media had got it right. We were trapped on the set of Apocalypse Now.

The compound, as the Feds were calling the Branch Davidians' hangout, comprised a mishmash of wooden-framed buildings, two three-storey blocks and a large rectangular water tower. In anyone else's language, it would have been described as a religious community, but that wouldn't have suited the FBI. The last thing they wanted was for this operation to smack of persecution, so compound it was.

There's a ten-day rule when it comes to sieges; if you've not resolved the situation by then, the shit has really hit the fan. And we were pushing the envelope five times over. Something had to happen soon. The administration wasn't looking too clever as it was; with every new day that passed, things just got a whole lot worse.

The ear-piercing, gut-wrenching screams suddenly stopped. The silence was deafening. I peered through the bullet hole. Three or four AFVs were clustered near the car park. Intelligence from ex-members of the cult had suggested that since storage space inside the buildings was at a premium, a lot of them kept their belongings in the boots of their vehicles.

The first AFV lurched forward, ploughed through the fence and kept straight on going. I gave Tony another nudge. 'Fucking hell, look at this.'

Tony sat up.

'They're crushing all the cars and buses.'

'What the hell are they trying to do?'

'Make friends and influence people, I guess.'

We watched the demolition derby while the water boiled.

As soon as the last vehicle was flattened, the AFVs spread out again. They started to circle, the Davidians' fresh laundry embedded in their tracks. Almost immediately, the screams of the animals boomed out again from their loudspeakers.

People were on the move outside our trailer, making their way to and from the array of shower cubicles, toilets and food wagons that had sprung up on our patch of the seventy-seven-acre tented city. An army may march on its stomach, but US law enforcement drives there in a stretch limo and gets paid overtime.

There was no shortage of bodies to be catered for. SWAT teams, FBI hostage rescue teams, federal marshals, local sheriffs; the place was teeming with them. No fewer than four Pods were sprinkled around the compound. Alpha Pod was right next door to our trailer; the other three had their own command set-up, and, as far as we could make out, were doing their own thing. There were more chiefs than Indians on this prairie, that was for sure, and nobody seemed to be in overall charge. To make matters worse, they all wanted to be, and every man and his dog was clearly itching to fire up the biggest and ugliest military toys they could get their hands on.

This operation had all the makings of a weapons-grade gangfuck, and there was a rock-festival-sized audience gathering to witness it. Hordes of shiny, aluminium-skinned Airstreams, clapped-out Winnebagos and bog-standard pickups lined the road the far side of the cordon. The rubberneckers were coming from miles around for a good day out, sitting on their roofs, clutching their binos, enjoying the fun. There was even a funfair, and stall upon stall selling everything from hotdogs and camping gas stoves to Davidians: 4, ATF: 0 emblazoned T-shirts [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of].

This was certainly cowboy country, in more ways than one. Waco was about a hundred miles south of Dallas, and home to the Texas Rangers' museum. Everybody I'd seen at the funfair seemed to be wearing a Stetson. Everybody apart from the Ku Klux Klan, that is. They'd turned up three days ago, offering the FBI their help getting in there and killing all them drug-taking, cult-loving child molesters.

Tony and I sank back down and finished off our brews while I got the kettle on for the next round. It was the highlight of the day.

Muffled speech and laughter came and went along the outside of the trailer. I smelled cigarette smoke. The cocking of weapons and ripping of body-armour Velcro signalled the change of shift. By my reckoning there were at least three hundred police officers on-site, with vehicles to match. Most of them were in BDUs [United States Army battledress], and carrying enough weaponry to see off a small invasion.

I also knew that the Combat Applications Group – Delta Force – had a team here somewhere. Delta had been modelled on the same squadron and doctrine set-up as the Special Air Service in the 1970s. They were probably doing much the same as we were, stuck at one of the Pods, being told jack shit about what was going on and sleeping rough in a trailer. I hoped so, anyway.

We all knew that it was illegal for the military to act against US citizens. The Posse Comitatus Act banned it from domestic law enforcement, and 'domestic' included a three-mile stretch of territorial water. There was only one exception to the rule: President Clinton had signed a waiver allowing law officers on drugs interdiction operations to use military vehicles and personnel to combat the forces ranged against them. In other words, the ATF and FBI had a Get Out Of Jail Free card, and judging by the Abrams tank parked up across the way, it looked like they intended to play it at the first available opportunity.

David Koresh and his fellow Bible-bashers couldn't have known what they were letting themselves in for when they resisted the original attack by the ATF almost two months earlier.

The water boiled. I tipped Nescafe into two mugs and poured. You couldn't move for catering wagons round here, but I didn't fancy joining the breakfast queue now the night shift was over. Apart from anything else, it meant venturing out into the cold, and I liked to put that off until the sun came up.

I hung on to Tony's brew as he faffed about, trying to unzip. He rubbed his eyes and groped around for his glasses in the glow from the stove. He was all right, I supposed. He was thirty-something, with the kind of nose that made it look like his forefathers came from Easter Island. His hair was brown, and style-wise he'd gone for mad professor. Either he didn't have any idea what he looked like or, more likely, he just didn't care; because he was one, his head so full of chemical formulae he didn't seem to know what day it was.

There were nine thousand or so eggheads employed by DERA [Defence Evaluation and Research Agency], and Tony was one of them. You didn't ask these guys at exactly which of the eighty or so establishments up and down the UK they worked, but I was pretty sure, given why he was here, that he wouldn't be a complete stranger to the germ warfare laboratories at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

I'd looked after boffins like him before, holding their hand in hostile environments, or escorting them into premises neither of us should really have been in, and I tended to just let them get on with whatever they had to do. The less I knew, the less shit I could be in if things went pear-shaped. These sorts of jobs always tended to come back and kick you in the bollocks. But one thing always puzzled me: Tony and his mates had brains the size of hot-air balloons, and spent their whole lives grappling with the secrets of the universe – so how come they couldn't even get a decent brew on?

The RAF had flown a big container in with us to Fort Hood, then had it trucked on-site, and Tony carried the keys. He seemed pretty much a pacifist, so maybe it just contained enough fairy dust to make everybody dance out of the building, but I doubted it. The FBI had been pretty keen to have access to Charlie's siege surveillance devices, but the inside of Tony's head was what they really wanted. His business was advanced gases; he seemed to be on first-name terms with every molecule on the planet. What's more, he knew how to mix them so precisely that they killed, immobilized, or merely incapacitated you to the point where you were still able to crawl.