The Eleventh Commandment

Eleven fifteen. He thought about Maggie and Tara. If he managed to pull this off, it might just give them a chance to live in peace. Either way, he doubted if he would ever see them again.

Eleven seventeen. Connor slid open the trapdoor and eased himself slowly out of the confined space. He gathered his strength for a moment before swinging his legs over the girder and gripping it firmly with his thighs. Again, he didn’t look down as he began the slow forty-two-foot crawl back to the walkway.

Once he had reached the safety of the ledge, he pulled himself up onto the walkway. He held onto the rail for a few moments, steadied himself, and began a short series of stretching exercises.

Eleven twenty-seven. He breathed deeply as he went over his plan for the final time, then walked quickly towards the JumboTron, pausing only to pick up the empty Coke can he had left on the step.

He banged loudly on the door. Without waiting for a response, he opened it, marched in and shouted above the noise of the ventilation unit, ‘It’s only me.’

Arnie peered down from the ledge above, his right hand moving towards the trigger of his Armalite. ‘Beat it!’ he said. ‘I told you not to come back till the Presidents were off the field. You’re lucky I didn’t put a bullet through you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Connor. ‘It’s just that I noticed how hot it gets in here, so I brought you another Coke.’

He passed the empty can up, and Arnie bent down to take it with his free hand. As his fingers touched the rim of the can, Connor let go of it, grabbed him by the wrist and, with all the strength he could muster, pulled him down from the ledge.

Arnie let out a terrible scream as he came crashing over, landing head first on the galvanised walkway, his rifle skidding away across it.

Connor swung round and leapt on his adversary before he had a chance to get up. As Arnie raised his head, Connor landed a straight left to the chin that stunned him for a moment, then grabbed for the pair of handcuffs hanging from his belt. He only just caught sight of the knee flying towards his crotch, but deftly moved to his left and managed to avoid its full impact. As Arnie tried to rise to his feet, Connor landed another punch, this time full on his nose. Connor heard the break, and as blood began to flow down his face, Arnie’s legs buckled and he sank to the ground. Connor sprang on him again, and as Arnie tried to get up he delivered a blow to his right shoulder that caused him to go into spasms. This time when he collapsed onto the walkway he finally lay still.

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 Jumbo-Tron, 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.’