—
Three minutes later,they were rolling, on their way to a pre-scouted baseball field outside the tiny town of Ferguson, south of Marshalltown. The field was off the road, down a lane, and they could park where a row of oversized SUVs couldn’t be seen; they’d be less than a mile from the target farmhouse. The trip was short and dusty, through an ocean of cornfields. The ballpark was empty, and they parked, got out of the vehicles, gathered to talk and go over the attack plan one last time.
They would wait until Andy Bergstrom showed up, then move.
Lucas and a Secret Service agent named Mark Kenyon would bail out of the convoy a half mile from the farmhouse, cross a barbed-wire fence, and walk through a cornfield and up a hill to the copse where Anderson was hidden with his binoculars. The three of them would circle around the hill to another cornfield that extended right up to the farmhouse’s backyard, which included an old machine shed and the remnants of a barn—the barn’s superstructure was gone, but the basement walls still stood.
They would sneak up behind the machine shed, if that seemed feasible, and act as a blocking force. The other five cops would approach from the front of the house, jamming up the driveway. They would talk to the people in the farmhouse with a bullhorn; andMcLeod would call the county sheriff’s office to inform the sheriff of the operation.
When they were all again satisfied that they knew every minute of the plan—McLeod had taken them over it a half dozen times—they stood around.
“Christ, I didn’t know Iowa could get this hot,” said Jamal Barshim, looking up at the sun. “This is like the fuckin’ Amazon.”
They spent forty-five minutes sweating heavily, and then Anderson called: “Got a blue pickup.”
“Load up,” McLeod said.
Anderson, a few minutes later: “It’s Andy. Boy is out on the porch with the women, now they’re all going into the farmhouse.”
McLeod: “Go.”
—
Lucas bailed outof the Expedition, carrying a shotgun from his gear bag and a bottle of water, and Kenyon climbed out of the following Suburban, with an M4 and a bottle of water, and they waded through knee-high weeds in the ditch, carefully crossed the barbed-wire fence into the cornfield, and began walking through the eight-foot-high field corn toward the hill where Anderson was waiting. The corn might as well have been buttered, and yellow pollen stuck to their clothes and faces and slid down their necks, the green corn leaves cutting at their hands as they pushed through the field. The field was a half-mile wide and they could see nothing until they emerged from the far side.
The corn ended at the base of the small knoll. There was no fence, and no sight line to the farmhouse, so they scrambled up, a cow watching them from a pasture on the other side of the knoll, and atthe top, in the middle of a stand of several scrubby trees, Anderson was eating a chicken sandwich and watching the house.
“Ready?” he asked. “You guys are sweating like pigs.”
“Thanks for letting us know,” Kenyon said. And, “Pigs don’t sweat. They don’t have sweat glands.”
Anderson ignored that and said, “I haven’t seen any movement since they went inside. I scouted a path down to that shed.”
They followed him off the knoll, past the corner of the cow pasture, through another cornfield, where they were walking blind again, to emerge behind the machine shed. They crossed another fence. Anderson was carrying a shotgun, and he and Lucas pumped shells into the chambers of their guns, and Kenyon popped the charging handle on the M4.
Lucas called McLeod and said, “We’re behind the machine shed, ready to go. Come on in.”
“Moving now.”
Lucas said, “Soon as they show up, Lanny, why don’t you take the right side of the house, I’ll move up behind the barn. Mark, you take the left side.”
“Sounds good.”
—
They heard thetrucks coming, saw the cloud of dust following them on the dry gravel, and Lucas flashed on the Lucinda Williams song “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” The trucks burst into the driveway, blocking the two pickups. McLeod was out in a minute and on the bullhorn: “Boy Bergstrom, Andy Bergstrom, come out. We have officers in the back, you are surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”
One minute later, a woman opened the back door and stuck her head out. Lucas, with the butt of the shotgun on his hip, stepped away from the barn so she could see him. She did, and pulled back inside and slammed the door.
Then came the boring part:
After twenty minutes of shouting back and forth, the Bergstroms came out with their hands in the air. They were cuffed, and though they said the women had no weapons, McLeod, Weed, and Lucas carefully entered the house, simultaneously, front and back, and found the two women in the kitchen, where they had been making bean-and-bacon soup in a large kettle. Steam was still coming out of the kettle and it smelled terrific.
Jiminy Katz saw Lucas and poked a finger at him: “You’re the sonofabitch who sold the bottles to us.”
“I did,” Lucas said. He rubbed his forehead. The headache had not gone away.
“That was a shitty thing to do,” Katz said. “I trusted you. I thought you were a good-lookin’ guy. I gave you five hundred dollars.”
