Connor tore off his long white coat, his shirt, tie, trousers, socks and cap. He threw them all in a pile in the corner, then unlocked Arnie’s handcuffs and quickly stripped him of his uniform. As he put it on he found that the shoes were at least two sizes too small, and the trousers a couple of inches too short. He had no choice but to pull up his socks and stick with his trainers, which were at least black. He didn’t think that in the mayhem he was about to cause anyone would recall that they had seen a Secret Service agent who wasn’t wearing regulation shoes.
Connor retrieved his tie from the pile of clothes in the corner and bound Arnie’s ankles tightly together. He then lifted up the unconscious man and held him against the wall, placed his arms around a steel beam which ran across the width of the JumboTron, and clamped the handcuffs on his wrists. Finally he took a handkerchief out of his pocket, rolled it up into a ball and forced it into Arnie’s mouth. The poor bastard was going to be sore for several days. It wouldn’t be much compensation that he would probably lose those extra pounds the SAIC had berated him about.
‘Nothing personal,’ said Connor. He placed Arnie’s cap and dark glasses by the door, and picked up his rifle: as he’d thought, an M-16. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, but it could do the job. He quickly climbed the steps to the second-floor landing where Arnie had been sitting, picked up his binoculars and, through the gap between the ad panel and the video screen, scanned the crowd below.
Eleven thirty-two. It had been three minutes and thirty-eight seconds since Connor had entered the JumboTron. He’d allowed four minutes for the take-over. He started breathing deeply and evenly.
Suddenly he heard a voice behind him.
‘Hercules 3.’
At first he couldn’t work out where the sound was coming from, but then he remembered the small two-way radio attached to Arnie’s belt. He snatched it off. ‘Hercules 3, go ahead.’
‘Thought we’d lost you there for a moment, Arnie,’ said the SAIC. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yep,’ said Connor. ‘Just needed to take a leak, and thought I’d better not do it over the crowd.’
‘Affirmative,’ said Braithwaite, breaking into a laugh. ‘Keep scanning your section. It won’t be long before Red Light and Waterfall come out on the field.’
‘Will do,’ said Connor, in an accent his mother would have chastised him for. The line went dead.
Eleven thirty-four. He looked around the stadium. Only a few of the red and yellow seats remained unoccupied. He tried not to be distracted by the scantily-clad Redskinettes kicking their legs high in the air directly below him.
A roar went up from the stands as the teams emerged from the tunnels at the south end of the stadium. They jogged slowly towards the centre of the field, as the crowd began to sing ‘Hail to the Redskins’.
Connor raised Arnie’s binoculars to his eyes and focused on the lighting towers high above the stadium. Almost all the agents were now scanning the crowd below, looking for any suggestion of trouble. None of them was showing any interest in the one location it was actually going to come from. Connor’s gaze settled on young Brad, who was peering down into the north stand, checking it row by row. The boy looked as if this was the nearest he’d been to heaven.
Connor swung round and lined the binoculars up on the fifty-yard line. The two captains were now facing each other.
Eleven thirty-six. Another roar went up as John Kent Cooke proudly led the two Presidents out onto the field, accompanied by a dozen agents who were almost as big as the players. One look and Connor could tell that Zerimski and Lawrence were both wearing bulletproof vests.
He would have liked to line up his rifle on Zerimski and focus the mil dots on his head there and then, but he couldn’t risk being spotted by one of the sharpshooters on the lighting towers, all of whom held their rifles in the crooks of their arms. He knew that they’d been trained to aim and fire in under three seconds.
As the Presidents were introduced to the players, Connor turned his attention to the Redskins flag which was fluttering in the breeze above the western end of the stadium. He cracked the rifle open to find, as he’d expected, that it was in ‘gun-box’ condition — fully loaded, off-safe, off-cocked. He chambered the first round and slammed the breech shut. The noise acted on him like the crack of a starting pistol, and he suddenly felt his heart rate almost double.
Eleven forty-one. The two Presidents were now chatting with the match officials. Through the binoculars, Connor could see John Kent Cooke nervously checking his watch. He leaned across and whispered something into Lawrence’s ear. The American President nodded, touched Zerimski’s elbow and guided him to a space between the two teams. There were two little white circles on the grass, with a bear painted inside one and an eagle inside the other, so the two leaders would know exactly where to stand.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said a voice over the loudspeaker. ‘Will you please stand for the national anthem of the Russian Republic.’
There was a clattering of seats as the crowd rose from their places, many of them removing their Redskins caps as they turned to face the band and choir at the western end of the field. The bandleader raised his baton, paused, then suddenly lowered it with gusto. The crowd listened restlessly to a tune few of them had ever heard before.
Although Connor had stood through the Russian national anthem many times in the past, he had found that few bands outside the country knew either at what tempo it should be played or how many verses ought to be included. So he had decided to wait for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ before he took his one chance.
When the Russian anthem came to an end, the players began to stretch and jog on the spot in an attempt to calm their nerves. Connor waited for the bandleader to raise his baton once more, which would be his cue to line up Zerimski in his sights. He glanced at the flagpole on the far side of the stadium: the Redskins banner was now hanging limp, indicating that there was virtually no wind.
The bandmaster raised his baton a second time. Connor placed the rifle through the gap between the triangular ad panel and the video screen, using the wooden frame as a rest. He swept the telescopic sight across the field, then focused on the back of Zerimski’s head, lining up the mil dots until it completely filled the centre of the rifle’s sights.
The opening bars of the American anthem struck up, and both Presidents visibly stiffened. Connor breathed out. Three... two... one. He gently squeezed the trigger just as Tom Lawrence’s right arm swung across his chest, his hand coming to rest over his heart. Distracted by the sudden movement, Zerimski glanced to his left, and the bullet flew harmlessly past his right ear. Seventy-eight thousand out-of-tune voices ensured that no one heard the soft thud as the inch of metal embedded itself in the grass beyond the fifty-yard line.
Brad, lying flat on his stomach on the lighting platform high above the executive suite stared intently down at the crowd through a pair of binoculars. His eyes settled on the JumboTron. The vast screen was dominated by a larger than life President Lawrence, hand on heart, lustily singing the national anthem.