Howell's followers had been armed ever since the shootout with George Roden, and they remained vigilant against the return of his thuggish friends. Even though by 1993, Mt. Carmel was a virtual armory, its guns were no match for smart missiles and Stealth bombers. On the plane of material life, the conquering Messiah was outgunned, and he knew it. He expected to lose any confrontation with the government, or, if he won, to secure his victory only by supernatural means.
"...There [are] 20,000 chariots parked all around this world..." he warned the FBI during the Waco siege. "I'm talking about the chariots that come from heaven, God's chariots...I'm talking about my army." When the Merkabah came over the horizon, Koresh would trounce history's best-armed police squad!
Howell/Koresh's picture of himself was mainly just words. It described what he, in flights of wild imagination, wanted to be. His material performance was far more modest, beginning with the question of his first love. For several years he visited her now and then, to offer her a queenship in his verbal kingdom. But she always turned him down. In time he resigned himself to the reality that his kingdom would not be of this world.
"In the flesh, as a human being, he at first thought that God would give her back to him pretty quick," recalls Clive Doyle. "But as time went on, as he saw from the Scriptures that he was going to be killed, he began to see that wouldn't be until he came back."
According to Revelation, in the End Time, 144,000 true believers are to be gathered by the Lamb, and after them "a multitude without number." His first love, Vernon came to believe, would certainly be among them. She would be his again, though "not in a personal sense," Doyle points out.
Not only did Howell conclude that the young woman would be "his," but legions of other women he admired would join her. One was rock star Madonna, promised to Howell, Doyle says, in a vision. "I think that David prayed over her, that she would not be his any time soon," the faithful disciple recalls. "Whenever a new person came into Mt. Carmel, they always brought a lot of headaches, and Vernon knew that with somebody like Madonna, he was going to have a lot of ironing out to do."
In the theology that Vernon Howell came to espouse after 1985, the Messiah was to be a lover and a fighter; but like Jesus, he would realize his full stature only across the divide of End Time.
The element of surprise
"I knew they were coming before they knew they were coming."
-David Koresh
Robert Gonzalez was a cop, just as Koresh suspected. "Gonzalez" was an alias, the name that the former high school football coach, Special Agent Robert Rodriguez, 42, had taken while gathering information undercover inside Mt. Carmel for weeks. He had dropped into Mt. Carmel that morning to make sure than nothing out of the ordinary was underfoot. It was his job to confirm that it was safe for "Showtime" to begin.
Parts of Rodriguez's testimony about what he saw and heard that morning indicate that, inexplicably, Koresh knew plenty about the impending raid. "He turned and told me the ATF and the National Guard were coming," Rodriguez swore under oath.
"I went to the window," Koresh explained, "and I says, 'Robert,' I says, 'it's up to you now'....And I turned around and he just--his eyes were real big and everything....And he goes, 'what do you mean?' I says, 'Robert, you know what I mean....We know they're coming.'"
Rodriguez was nervous. "I said to myself, 'He knows.' I felt I was in danger. I just knew he had been tipped off," he later testified. "I told myself, 'Relax. Don't give yourself away.'" Rodriguez was especially anxious because, to make sure that he wasn't inside Mt. Carmel when the raid began, his commanders had told him to return to the undercover house by 9:15 a.m. It was already past nine.
Koresh, according to the report Rodriguez gave, extended his hand to his visitor and said, "Good luck, Robert." Steve Schneider opened the front door for his exit and Rodriguez went out in a sweat: "I said to myself, 'They were going to shoot me in the back.'"
Rodriguez walked toward the parking lot, less than 25 yards from the front door. As he got near, for some reason, the pickup's burglar alarm went off. It sounded like a siren. Rodriguez blazed down Mt. Carmel's driveway, flashing his headlights as he neared its end. Parking outside the undercover house, he ran to the telephone, gave a report to a superior who was posted there, then dialed the command post. "Chuck, they know. They know," he blurted to the raid's commander, Charles Sarabyn.
The ATF's report on the affair says that Sarabyn, instead of ordering the raid aborted, "asked Rodriguez a series of questions from a prepared list provided by the tactical planners: Did you see any weapons? Was there a call to arms? Did you see them make any preparations?" Rodriguez responded in the negative to each question. Then Sarabyn asked what the people in the compound were doing when Rodriguez left. Rodriguez answered, "they were praying."
