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The police, meanwhile, have had a measure of success handling the militia throng--or at least dividing them. Gainer met with J.J. Johnson, a former militia leader from Las Vegas, and Jack McLamb, the former Phoenix, Ariz., cop who helped negotiate the end to Ruby Ridge. The two had flown in to protest the police barricade. Gainer apparently impressed them. At a "Free Shirley Allen" rally attended by 200 protesters, Johnson and McLamb remarked that the police were doing a fairly good job, a concession that promptly brought jeers from the crowd. Said a machete-bearing visitor: "McLamb is a Trojan," using a common militia term for traitor. "There are some people who will not accept the truth or the facts," says Gainer of the protesters. He attributes his success with Johnson and McLamb to a fashionable current in police ideology. "If community policing has taught us anything, it's communication."
As the standoff wears on, some locals are wearying. It has already cost about $450,000, a figure greater than the amount spent by state police on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year. A few critics note that it would have been cheaper and easier to storm Allen's farm, or just shoot back at her when she fired off two shots at the police. "It would have been justifiable," says Gainer, but he argues that it would open the police to the common criticism of moving too aggressively. "Bottom line," he says, "everybody has to be patient in this. I've never been forced to put a price on a save." And so the surreal siege goes on.