March, 1995: The Major and the First Sergeant visit a Northern California militia group at a remote mountain cabin. While the others take target practice, the First Sergeant monitors law enforcement radio transmissions. When he learns a deputy sheriff and a fish and game warden are headed toward them, all four men leave, but the retired soldiers return and place a timed explosive device in the cabin. The bomb puts Deputy Sheriff Jerry Sampson in a coma. Warden Ethan Cooper carries his friend to the hospital.
April 19, 1995: Timothy McVeigh believes he detonates a bomb in a rental truck parked outside the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. 168 men, women, and children in a day care center die in the blast.
After the Murrah horror, the FBI investigates all prior unexplained explosions. Agent Bradley Gunn contacts Ethan Cooper and shows him a copy of a Phoenix city map found in McVeigh’s car. Seven federal buildings are marked. Gunn describes the FBI’s theory the militia group responsible for the Murrah Building plans to strike again on a much greater scale. He urges Cooper, a native of the Phoenix area, to return there and attempt to locate and infiltrate the militia group.
Cooper’s superiors approve the FBI plan. The FBI provides him with a fictional history and assigns attractive female agent, Donna McFarlane, to pose as his wife.
Cooper meets a Wickenburg gunsmith known as The Specialist. Cooper passes early tests and soon finds himself assisting The Wickenburg Phalanx in the robbery of an armored truck outside a Laughlin, Nevada, casino. Cooper is forced to shoot a guard.
Cooper assists the Phalanx in the accumulation of ammonium nitrate.
October 16, 1995: Cooper helps the militia derail Amtrak’s Sunset Limited in the Arizona desert near Hyder.
December 21, 1995: The Specialist calls Cooper to Wickenburg. It is time to destroy Phoenix. Wearing a UPS uniform, Cooper leaves Wickenburg driving a van full of explosives. His vehicle is the sixth of seven vans leaving at five minute intervals. His target is the Federal Court Building in downtown Phoenix.
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