WHO ARE THEY?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

FOR MUCH OF LAST WEDNESDAY, TERRY LYNN Nichols busied himself with a few simple chores around his newly purchased two-bedroom house. He asked to borrow Etta Mae Hartke's ladder so that he could fix a loose metal vent on the roof. "I said it was O.K., if he put the ladder back," Hartke, 76, recalls. "When I looked, it was back where it was supposed to be." He had cable television installed, telling the Cablevision worker he was glad the TV was finally hooked up so he could "keep up with the Oklahoma bombing." And one of the last times any of Nichols' neighbors in the small farming town of Herington, Kansas, saw him, the dark-haired 40-year-old was tending to the small front yard outside the faded blue house with the white shutters. "He was spreading fertilizer on the lawn with his bare hands," says the person who lives directly across the tree-lined street. "I thought it was peculiar."

A few hours later, Nichols climbed into his blue GMC 4 x 4 with its AMERICAN AND PROUD decal on the rear window, and drove 10 blocks to the police station to meet with officers. Within minutes, word spread through the town of 3,000 that a man who may have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing was in the hands of Herington's five-man police department. Farmers in mud-caked boots, some holding small children in their arms, planted themselves across from the police station and stared mutely. Students just let out of school arrived and stood in clusters six deep. Some climbed into the beds of pickup trucks to get a better view. "Bring him out," they chanted. "Kill the creep."

At the same time, 200 miles away in Perry, Oklahoma, another restive crowd had gathered. When choppers started dropping down a few blocks from the town square, the word ricocheted fast from courthouse to post office to school: one Timothy James McVeigh, wanted in connection with the bombing in Oklahoma City, was somehow in their jail, right here on the fourth floor of the Noble County Courthouse. Said David Deken, 17, who was in English class when he heard the news: "We were just saying a few minutes before that these guys better not set foot in Perry, and suddenly, well, here he is." As the blank-faced, orange-clad McVeigh was led out through the crowd in leg irons and handcuffs, cries of "Baby killer!" tore the air.

Such rage may only deepen in the days and weeks to come, as more is learned about these men and their involvement in the nation's worst terrorist action ever, a crime that last week had left an official toll of 65 adults and 13 children dead and at least 100 still missing in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Although Nichols and his brother James are being held as material witnesses, their friend and associate McVeigh was charged, under Title 18 of U.S. Code, Section 844, with bombing a government building. According to the complaint filed by the FBI on Friday night, McVeigh was known by a co-worker to hold "extreme right-wing views ... and was particularly agitated about the conduct of the Federal Government at Waco, Texas, in 1993"--so agitated, in fact, that he had visited the site. Indeed, as more details emerge, April 19--the date of last week's bombing and the anniversary of the apocalyptic fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco-has only gained in infamy, intricately bound as it is to the mythologies of homegrown zealots like McVeigh.

Meanwhile, federal investigators are now focusing their attention on Kingman, Arizona, where McVeigh lived in a trailer park for five months last year with a pregnant girlfriend. During that period, officials say, a small bomb exploded in a residential area, damaging the windows of some houses but causing no injuries. Government agents are examining soil samples and fragments from the area for clues that may link the Arizona explosion to McVeigh. According to the New York Times, authorities were alerted to the Arizona connection when they tracked the paperwork on his 9-mm Glock handgun. McVeigh had filed a complaint against the manufacturer and documents there provided a Kingman listing as his return address. Areas around the Arizona town have been used for explosives training by the Arizona Patriots, a right-wing group that produces radio shows and tapes denouncing the Federal Government.

A sense of guilty introspection swept the country when the FBI released sketches of the suspects, distinctly Caucasian John Does 1 and 2. Immediately after the Oklahoma blast, some politicians and commentators had fingered Islamic terrorists as the most likely culprits, fueling anti-Muslim sentiment and triggering calls for tougher anti-immigration measures. The feds suggested that the Does, as McVeigh seems to bear out, were members of a right-wing citizen militia targeting government agencies housed in the Alfred P. Murrah Building. Although Oklahoma police authorities were schooled in the hate groups blooming like some deadly nightshade on the fringes of society, they had always had a hard time seeing these loose organizations as a danger. "People just weren't willing to listen," admits a senior official. "We would attend training seminars with East and West Coast departments and come back trying to convince our own powers that be of a potential catastrophe. But it just fell on deaf ears."

Nevertheless, the manhunt moved swiftly and efficiently for the team of federal and local investigators dealing in twisted truck parts, traces of ammonium nitrate in the wreckage, and forged car-rental documents. Luck played a role as well: in spite of the composite sketch resembling him that was broadcast nationally as early as Thursday afternoon, John Doe No. 1 almost got away.

McVeigh checked into the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kansas, on Friday, April 14, signing his own name in the register and giving the Decker, Michigan, address of James Nichols. During his stay, McVeigh rented a Ryder truck and parked it in the Dreamland lot far from his room, No. 25. He checked out on Tuesday, the day before the bombing.

His whereabouts and activities during the next 24 hours are still unknown, but at least three witnesses say they saw him on Wednesday morning outside the federal building in Oklahoma City.

An hour and 20 minutes after the bombing, McVeigh was pulled over for driving without license plates outside Perry, Oklahoma, 60 miles from Oklahoma City. When Oklahoma state trooper Charles Hanger noticed that McVeigh was wearing a shoulder harness bearing a Glock semiautomatic pistol, which turned out to be loaded with hollow-point bullets, the trooper arrested him on state charges of carrying a concealed weapon, driving without tags and driving without insurance. McVeigh was taken to the jail at the courthouse.

For two days, authorities kept McVeigh in jail, not connecting their quiet, uncommunicative prisoner with the police sketch. No one inquired about the young man, who asked only when he would be getting out. Five minutes before he was due to go before the Noble County court on Friday morning, where he might have walked away on $500 bail, district attorney John Maddox received a call from the FBI telling him to hang onto the prisoner.

Few of the people who knew McVeigh from his hometown of Pendleton, New York, about 15 miles northeast of Niagara Falls, recognized him from the composite sketch. And some of his classmates and teachers from Starpoint High, where McVeigh graduated in 1986, would have nominated him as least likely to be the bomber. "He wasn't a troublemaker at all," says Wendy Stephany, while Cecelia M. Matyjas, his tenth-grade geometry teacher, remembers how "the kids used to pick on him." Schoolmates sarcastically voted the taciturn McVeigh "Most Talkative." Still, he showed initiative: he charged the neighborhood kids admission to a haunted house in his basement and ran small gambling casinos on his front lawn. One neighbor thought McVeigh "would go somewhere."

Those who came into contact with McVeigh more recently, however, tell a more disturbing tale. According to the Associated Press, he joined the Army after high school and served as a Bradley vehicle gunner and sergeant during the Gulf War. "He was a good soldier. If he was given a mission and a target, it's gone," said James Ives, another sergeant in McVeigh's Army infantry unit. He worked himself hard on his own time, hoping to qualify for the Army Special Forces. After he failed to make it, friends say, McVeigh, already a loner, became increasingly frustrated. His politics veered far rightward. He claimed that the Army had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks. He was distraught over the 1993 destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and, about that time, bought a TEC-9 semiautomatic assault weapon, a gun banned by law last year. Those who knew him in Michigan said McVeigh was always armed. But Linda Haner-Mele, 35, his supervisor at a security company in the Niagara Falls area, where he worked briefly, insists to Time, "He was a follower, not a leader. He'd do whatever you asked him, but he didn't have any ideas of his own. That's why I don't believe he could have set this all up."

John Doe No. 2, however, appears to be still at large. And Terry Nichols' role in the crime, if any, is still unclear. But Terry and his brother James do know McVeigh. According to residents of Decker, McVeigh spent some time in the area several months ago, living with James Nichols in his neat, two-story, white frame farmhouse. According to Randy Izydorek, 26, a neighbor and acquaintance of the Nichols', McVeigh "deals in guns and goes to a lot of gun shows. My dad and I have seen his car loaded down with them a couple of times." McVeigh, say officials, may have met Terry Nichols while in the Army.

Many who know the Nichols brothers, who grew up not far away in Lapeer, insist that they cannot be connected with the bombing. "I just can't believe they could have done something like this,'' says Mike Innes, 35, a dairy farmer who buys feed from Nichols and lives only a few miles away. Innes and others described James Nichols as a good, hardworking organic farmer in a ragged rural area where the work has got increasingly tough and the small crop and dairy farms are being gobbled up by larger owners. "Jim Nichols works as hard as anyone I know," says Dan Cooper, who lives one mile down the two-lane blacktop, adding that for the past few weeks Nichols has been busy preparing the farm for the spring planting.

These neighbors acknowledge that Nichols was no great fan of the government; he refused to participate in federal farm programs, for instance, and aired complaints frequently at local school board or township meetings. "They feel there's too much government intervention in every aspect of your life," Izydorek explains. The Washington Post, however, reported a more grisly version of Nichols' activities: neighbor Dan Stomber claimed the brothers, along with McVeigh, were amateur bombmakers who would call him over to watch them set off bombs made with "household chemicals and plastic jugs, mostly."

It was their antigovernment convictions that led at least McVeigh, and quite possibly Terry Nichols, to search for comrades among the young and growing Michigan Militia, a right-wing antigovernment brigade founded in April 1994 that now claims to have brigades in 66 of the state's 83 counties. Terry told Izydorek he was a member of that group, as well as another national confederation who call themselves "patriots." John Simpson, a militia member and skilled-trades worker at General Motors, denies the Nichols' involvement with the Michigan Militia, which claims some 12,000 members. "[Terry] came to one of our meetings and wanted to talk about a tax revolt, having to have a driver's license and eliminating the government," Simpson told Time. "We did not believe in his tactics-particularly the stuff about a revolt."

Whether the Michigan Militia's activities are quite this innocent is arguable. While dressing in camouflage gear and holding training retreats and rallies may be their main pursuits, it is clear that the members, along with those in similar groups throughout the country, nurture a profound paranoia about the Federal Government even as they express their deepest patriotism. Bureaucrats, militia members believe, are responsible for gun-control laws, like the 1994 Brady law and assault-weapons ban. The militias especially blame the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for the movement's twin tragedies: the deaths of white supremacist Randy Weaver's wife and son in a 1992 Idaho confrontation and the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians' compound in Waco, Texas, that resulted in the deaths of 82 cult members, including leader David Koresh. Mark Koernke, a prominent militia member who produces videos promoting patriot ideas and goes by the radio talk-show moniker of "Mark from Michigan," told assembled crowds at a Militia of Montana rally in Spokane, Washington, last December that Waco is a call to arms. "We don't have a choice," he said. "The next time this happens, we will be armed to the teeth . We are not going to be reading history; we are going to be making history, and that's exciting."

Although the Michigan Militia, along with members of other groups, has moved quickly to repudiate any connection with McVeigh or the bombing, the significance of the date on which it took place--April 19--was not lost on those familiar with the patriot movement. Says Ron Cole, a former leader of the Branch Davidian sect who describes himself as a patriot: "It's a date that has a significance like no other day of the year." On April 19, 1775, the Battle of Lexington--the opening salvos in America's Revolutionary War--began. On April 19, 1993, the siege at Waco ended in flames and despair. On April 19, 1995, Richard Wayne Snell, a member of the white supremacist group The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, was executed for the murder of a Jewish businessman and a black police officer. And when Timothy McVeigh rented the Ryder truck, he used a forged South Dakota driver's license on which the date of issue was listed as April 19, 1993. "He probably meant that he woke up on that day," says Cole. "I can see his perspective on that."

Though much is still not known about the men behind the deed, what is clear is that the very institutions they despise--the FBI, the ATF--were able to mobilize their forces with astonishing efficiency. The investigation depended, certainly, on serendipity, but it also proceeded with teamwork and precision When news of the blast came, disbelief turned rapidly into a blur of activity. Pentagon aides rushed to telephones to issue instructions. One of the first orders, State Department and Pentagon officials tell Time, was to begin immediately monitoring the passports presented by passengers wishing to travel overseas from airline terminals at Oklahoma City's airport. The FBI did not want a repeat of the Ramzi Yousef debacle, when the accused mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing managed to flee the U.S. just hours after that attack.

As in the New York case, a car fragment proved crucial: this time, the vehicle-identification number of a rented Ryder truck that ultimately delivered some 4,000 pounds of explosives was found at the site of the blast. That clue gave investigators in Oklahoma the start they needed. From there, it was a simple routine to trace the truck back to a Ryder outlet in Junction City, 270 miles from the site of the attack. The feds arrived in Junction City around 8 p.m. Wednesday, got a description of the two men who had rented the truck, and the hunt for the John Does was on. By Friday, McVeigh was in federal custody.

The search for clues continues. Though hampered by rain and the instability of the Oklahoma building, forensics experts sifted through rubble in search of bodies and fingerprints. Meanwhile, some militia activists took to the airwaves and the computer networks to denounce last week's violence, while others continued down their paranoid paths. At Paladin Arms, a gun shop in Boulder, Colorado, the business in AR-15s, AK-47s, Uzis and an assortment of ammo has picked up. "There's a fear that Clinton and Reno will take advantage of the tragedy to restrict freedoms and pass further crackdowns on weapons," says owner Bob Glass. "People feel it will be used against them." And Joseph Nee, a Colorado militia leader, distanced himself from the "scumbags" responsible for the bombing, then suggested it was all a "federal setup to make the militia look bad." With the anger stirred up by their fellow travelers, members of the extreme right are certain to face their toughest scrutiny yet. --Reported by Edward Barnes/Herington, Adam Cohen/New York, S.C. Gwynne/ Perry, Michael McBride/Decker, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington, Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by EDWARD BARNES/HERINGTON, ADAM COHEN/NEW YORK, S.C. GWYNNE/ PERRY, MICHAEL MCBRIDE/DECKER, ELAINE SHANNON AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON, JOSEPH R. SZCZESNY/ DETROIT AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER