[“We are prepared to face an arsenal,” Perkins said.
[Perkins also said he has no way of knowing how long the standoff will continue. According to the Associated Press, it was not immediately clear whether he was acting as the government’s chief negotiator.]
Authorities have established a federal command post on the mountain consisting of at least nine tents, a fleet of military vehicles, several U-Haul trucks, a fire truck, helicopters, and hundreds of police and support personnel. The standoff includes agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, U.S. Marshals Service deputies, the Montana State Police, the local Border County Sheriff’s Department, and members of the Huddleston town police.
The duration of the siege has done nothing to abate the groundswell of support for Ables in and around this tiny Northwestern hamlet. Local residents, members of various Christian Identity sects, neo-Nazis from neighboring states, and thrill-seekers from all across the country continue to gather daily at the police barricade, heckling vehicles leaving the scene and local police officers posted on the bridge, and occasionally making racist remarks or chanting pro-Aryan slogans.
Ables and his family moved to this remote northern Montana community from Chicago several years ago. The area is not far from the headquarters of the Church of Christian White Aryan Resistance (WAR), considered to be one of the largest and most active white supremacist organizations in the United States. A delegation of that group late yesterday delivered hate literature to the police barricade at the foot of Paradise Mountain.
Ables has previously denied any association with WAR.
Through it all, Ables, 41, has gone from being a religious and racial extremist to a folk hero among his neighbors. Residents help by delivering mail and groceries up to the fugitive’s cabin, which has no electricity or telephone service.
Neighbors described Ables as proud and self-sufficient, someone who before the standoff would take a group of local children fishing.
“Glenn’s a man of morals,” said Deke Belcher, 77, a neighbor of Ables, who said the FBI and federal marshals should leave the mountain and its residents alone. “He was provoked,” said Belcher.
Office
Sheriff Blood entered the command tent and tipped his hat to the agent at the first desk, telling her who he was. She was the no-nonsense type, with a disapproving look and a voice that wore glasses. She seemed more like an agent than a woman, just as the men there seemed more like agents than men. There were two genders on the mountain, agents and everyone else. She inspected the newspapers in his arms, perhaps for a weapon of some kind, aside from the gun he was wearing on his hip, then directed him to the rear of the tent. He tipped his hat to her again and moved on.
The inside of the tent itself was something. A bright, serious place, with agents clicking things into computer keyboards and a general droning noise caused by all the various voices speaking into telephones and radios and to each other all at once. The main attraction stood wide in the center of the tent, a glass or clear plastic half-wall visible from both sides and somehow glowingly lit from within. An agent in black-rimmed glasses was sketching onto it with a kind of crayon pen, adding to the elaborate color-coded diagram overview of the mountaintop and Ables’s entire compound, complete with distances and heights and more. It sure did beat drawing maps in the dirt with a stick. Blood felt as though he were in the control room of a submarine heading into war.
There were voices inside the canvas office in back, one of them excited. Blood stopped and debated going in, but there was only the draped flap of canvas and no solid place to knock, so he pushed aside the canvas drape and entered.
The voice that was getting worked up belonged to Perkins, the most animated Blood had yet seen him. He was saying, “I’m up there with twenty newspaper people and no cover and he comes out of nowhere tearing after a Jeep full of neo-Nazis? You know what that was? That was an embarrassment. Fagin is reckless and I don’t like it.”
Banish was sitting behind a desk inside, Perkins standing with his back mostly toward Blood. Neither acknowledged the intrusion, so Blood stepped fully inside. There was a crooked-arm fluorescent lamp poised like a vulture over the paper stacks on Banish’s desk, and a telephone next to a walkie-talkie standing in a battery charger, and electrical wires trailing back under the separating canvas wall. A windbreaker jacket and a pair of boots and a pitcher of water were set on a small wooden stand in the shadowed corner behind.
Banish said, “He did what had to be done.”
Perkins was standing between two metal folding chairs set in the cramped area before the desk. “I want to know how they got up there in the first place,” he continued. “The press almost got a show up there they never would have forgotten. I’m standing there feeding these scribblers your answers, and all of a sudden there’s a stopped Jeep and marshals everywhere. And an AP photographer clicking away. And me ending up looking like an ass because I don’t have a clue as to what the hell is going on. Five kids with swastikas on their faces, semiautomatic rifles, and I’m left holding the ball. That was humiliation.” Perkins jabbed at the air before him with his finger.
Banish didn’t seem concerned. In fact, he seemed almost bored. “The crazier they appear, the more patient we come off as being,” he said. “Anything else?”
Perkins stood there before Banish, clearly fired up now, hands going from fists to open palms and back to fists again at his sides, over and over. It was somehow a personal thing with him. “Do you understand the vantage point they would have had?” he said. “Like fish in a bucket. We’re vulnerable up here. Can you see that at all? Do you realize how close we came?”
“Fagin has secured the surrounding mountains,” Banish said, still more interested in the work on his desk. “It was an unfortunate incident, but we will benefit from it in the long run, and learn from it.”
Perkins nodded, not at all satisfied. “That’s it, then,” he said. When he received no answer, he went stiffly out past Blood without even a look.
Banish closed his eyes. There were bright pink sores on either side of the bridge of his nose, from a pair of half-glasses overturned on the stacks of reports on the table before him. He appeared to be having a rough time of it. His cheeks, neck, and chin were roughened with a thick peppery stubble, and the harsh light from the lamp looming over his desk washed his skin pale.
He rubbed the sore marks on his nose, then reopened his eyes and put his glasses back on. He picked up a sheaf of papers and continued reading. Blood came ahead to the desk. “Are those my newspapers?” Banish said without looking up.
Blood set them down. “And a fresh batch of these pamphlets.”
“Anything else?”
Blood said, “I was out behind enemy lines earlier. I counted cars. Ninety-eight of them now, from eight different states, and one license plate from Heaven.”
Banish nodded dismissively. “We have someone out taking down plate numbers,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Well,” Blood said, “now that you ask.” He pulled a piece of paper from his coat pocket. “Here’s a thing that seems to be getting a lot of play down there. Raising a good stink, as far as stinks go.” He presented him with a copy of a letter. “I’m sure you can verify the handwriting. It’s from Glenn Ables to the pastor over there at the WAR church, dated two years ago this past July. That would place it right before his original arrest. You can read it for yourself. He says an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent visited his cabin and tried to strong-arm him into becoming an informer.”