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SCMP Reporter

ERIC Rudolph is spending an extremely hazardous and stiflingly hot summer in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Among his daily dangers as he camps out in some of the United States' wildest terrain are deadly copperhead snakes, black bears and wild boar.

 They are the kind of natural hazards that can only be described in their full glory by local folk - such as a neighbourhood police chief, who put it in especially colourful terms last week.

 'There are rattlers big enough up there to puke up a buck deer,' the officer told Newsweek.

 But for a locally renowned, and now nationally infamous, survivalist like Rudolph, it is unlikely to be the snakes that get him in the end. His most pressing wildlife concern right now is coming in the shape of bloodhounds - FBI bloodhounds.

 Rudolph, who stars on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List for his suspected involvement in the Atlanta Olympics bomb and deadly attacks on abortion clinics, is leading more than 200 crack federal agents on a wild goose chase through the densest terrain they have ever had to face.

 It is almost certainly the authorities' most intense manhunt in recent years - and while the Feds may have enormous strength in numbers, they face one crippling disadvantage: they are playing away, while their quarry is on his home turf.

 If any drama was headed for a potentially bloody climax, this is it: the army-trained, heavily armed Rudolph is thought by his acquaintances to be likely to go down firing, and his pursuers fear that if they ever chance upon his hiding place it may be surrounded by booby traps.

 'People are saying they'll never take him alive, and I think that too,' said a local, Willie Brown. 'He doesn't want to go to prison.'  If authorities had any lingering doubts that capturing Rudolph might be a tough assignment, they lost them when they received a videotape sent to them by his elder brother, Daniel, two months ago.

 Talking to the camera, Daniel said 'This is for the FBI and the media', before thrusting his arm into a power saw and chopping off his hand in protest. Agents have no doubt that such radicalism also runs in the younger Rudolph's blood.

 This area near the North Carolina-Tennessee border, to which the Rudolph brothers moved with their widowed mother from Miami in the early 1980s, might boast some of the South's most stunning landscapes, but it is also home to something much less attractive: a local populace whose down-home, fundamentalist Christianity has increasingly acted as a moral cover for some distinctly right-wing and un-Christian opinions.

 This is the heartland of Christian Identity, a loose movement whose members preach hatred for abortion, homosexuality and other liberal causes, and are in close contact with the racist Aryan Nations organisation.

 Some of the area's fundamentalists see no problem with taking direct violent action to further their beliefs - even, it appears, supposedly mainstream church leaders. One local clergyman said last week that he supported any local people who might be helping Rudolph escape capture.

 He said of the fugitive - who stands accused of killing two people and injuring others with his bombs: 'I doubt he will be found to be an unprincipled killer'.

 The allegations against Rudolph have, of course, not yet been proved, although he was identified running from the scene of a February abortion clinic bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and the North Carolina plates of his pick-up truck were traced to him. But whether he is found dead or alive, Rudolph's case appears to inhabit the ugly grey area where conservative Christianity meets right-wing terrorism.

 Since the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, the government has pushed millions of extra dollars into investigating the new phenomenon of domestic terrorism as perpetrated by right-wing, 'patriotic' militias. But although agents have identified several well-organised militia groups, and arrested some members on conspiracy charges, it has since transpired that much of the violent activity - Oklahoma included - has been the domain not of large groups but of smaller units and lone anti-government individuals with no obvious affiliations.

 This is, investigators suspect, because the ringleaders of some of the well-known right-wing groups, such as Aryan Nations, have been urging followers to adopt a practice dubbed 'leaderless resistance' - dispersing into much smaller units, or taking violent action individually, in order to escape the notice of government agents, who had been proving adept at infiltrating the extremist movement.

 Whether such instructions have any bearing on cases such as Rudolph is not clear - but what is transparent is that individual terrorists working on their own often do not show up on the FBI's radar screen until they have already struck.

 There is ample evidence that Rudolph has long been involved in the kind of ultra-conservative activism which makes him a prime suspect. Under his mother's strong influence, he moved in Christian Identity circles, and is also said to have attended services of the Church of Israel - which preaches that whites are God's chosen race.

 By his early teens, Rudolph's thoughts on racial matters were already taking shape. When his high-school teacher asked pupils to write an essay on the Holocaust, Rudolph's effort was a treatise asserting that it never happened.

 As a child, Rudolph also honed his skills as an outdoorsman, learning the lie of every tree and every hollow in the local hills and woods. After a short spell in the army, he returned to the area and worked on and off as a carpenter.

IT is around this time - summer 1996 - that the first of his alleged crimes, the pipe bomb in the Olympic Centennial Park, took place.

 Then followed bomb attacks on a gay nightclub and an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and finally the Birmingham clinic bombing last February, which killed a security guard.

 Rudolph has been on the run ever since his truck was identified in the Alabama blast. Investigators have been amazed to discover he has barely moved from his home territory ever since.

 The first sighting came two weeks ago, when he turned up at the food store of a former neighbour, asking for supplies. When the shop owner declined, Rudolph is said to have returned two days later, broken into the store and stolen six months' supply of food. A description given by the retailer to police clearly identifies Rudolph, albeit a tanned, grizzled, and unshaven version.

 The bloodhounds that agents hope will lead them to Rudolph caught a scent of their prey around a week ago, and the men closed in, believing they had their man. But as so often before, he managed to disappear, melting into the forest and making his escape - leaving his pursuers with a growing, if grudging, respect for his astounding survival skills.

 While the chase continues, Rudolph's former neighbours and acquaintances are being deluged by the national media, and seem split on whether the fugitive is a villain or local hero. T-shirts glamorising his flight from justice have been selling briskly, the most popular bearing the slogan 'Run, Rudolph, Run'.

 People willing to speak out against the alleged crimes appear to be in the minority. Even those who suspect his guilt look at the sight of a lone man being hunted by 200 of law enforcement's camouflaged elite, and cannot help but back the underdog.

 Rudolph is an underdog who can only delay his inevitable defeat. How long that will be is a drama that is fascinating the nation.



Eric Rudolph, on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list for his alleged involvement