by John Bromley
“Well, we never go anywhere without taking at least some, ‘cause you never can tell,” Hendricks answered, telling Dirk nothing he didn’t already know. “A large part of the ordnance is blanks, for the war games, so I don’t think we’ve got much of the real deal. Guaranteed, nowhere near enough to repel these guys,” he added unhappily.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“So, who are these guys, anyways?” Hendricks asked.
“The Secret Service,” Dirk replied.
“Since when do they have tanks?” Greg asked, greatly surprised.
“They took them from the Army, ‘cause they ‘needed’ them,” Dirk replied, mimicking the ingratiating tone of the enemy officer. He was upset about being attacked, of course, but even more distressed about being shot at by what he considered to be his own tanks.
Dirk arrived at the command post, went inside briefly to retrieve an item and then came back out. “We got three things to do,” he said, ticking off the points as Hendricks listened attentively. “First, get the blank rounds out of all the guns and tanks and replace them with as much real ordnance as we have. Second, have the men spread the tanks and heavy guns as far apart as they can, so they can’t all be hit by one or two shots.”
“And, what’s the third thing, lieutenant?”
“This,” Dirk answered, indicating the flare gun he had gotten from the command post. He held it up and fired a red flare into the sky.
“Let’s hope there’s someone out there to see it,” Hendricks said, and Dirk nodded in agreement.
Someone had, and now…
“All right, men, let’s get ready to move out,” Jim ordered. While the troops gathered their weapons and other belongings, Angela gave Jim one final kiss, accompanied by the whispered admonition, “Come back to me.”
“I’ll do my best,” he promised.
When he looked around the room, he found that Mike was receiving a similar parting gift from the lovely Cynthia. She kissed him on the lips and on both hands before joining Angela on the side of the room. The women were looking down, but Jim noticed that they both had tears in their eyes.
The soldiers opened the front door of the house and started out, but were immediately forced back into the entryway. A rifle shot struck the house just to the left of the door, followed by several others. The sentry in front peered out and signaled back to Jim that the Secret Service execution squad had indeed decided to “drop by.” At least a dozen men were pressed against the side of the neighboring building, covering the front of the “Second White House.” One or two at a time would fire shots at the Army men, then retreat around the corner of the house. Without waiting for orders from Jim or Buck, the soldiers returned fire, and soon a full-fledged gun battle was underway. The men in the doorway knelt down so their comrades behind them could shoot over them. They tried to synchronize their return fire with the shoot-and-scoot motion of the enemy troops, but were not having very much success. The execution squad members were trying very hard not to establish a pattern of emergence.
“Is there a back door to this place?” Jim asked urgently. A woman nodded, and indicated where it was.
“Buck,” Jim told his XO, “you take four men out the back and out-flank these guys from the left. Get behind them, if you can.” Buck nodded, selected his unit, and followed the woman to the back door.
“The rest of us—“
Jim never had a chance to finish this thought. He and his troops watched in amazement as one of the women in the room pushed her way through the knot of Army men. She stepped through the open front door and walked across the porch.
“Hold your fire!” Jim ordered. He could see the commander of the enemy unit issuing the same order to his men.
“Hi, guys,” she said gaily, waving to the Secret Service troops. Every one of them pointed their guns in her direction.
“I’m not on your list,” she continued, descending the porch steps. When she reached solid ground, she spoke again in the same carefree manner.
“I’m part of the Stork program. There are paying customers out there who want me.”
She stopped walking and looked at the executioners defiantly.
“You can’t shoot me.”
She was wrong.
They could.
And three of them did.
CHAPTER 32
Lt. Dirk Tedeschi, having fired the signal flare, turned to Sgt. Hendricks.
“Let’s get started. We've got at most two hours, if we can trust those bastards down the road.”
“Which I doubt,” Hendricks added.
“Right. So, we need to see how much real ammo we actually brought with us.”
“If any, since we're here for ‘war games’,” the sergeant added despairingly. “You did notice, I hope, that they brought a whole lot, enough that they could waste some just getting our attention.”
“I did,” Dirk replied. “Their first round sailed over my head as I went down the road and landed south of the camp, though they could just as easily have placed in right where we're standing.”
Tedeschi and Hendricks left the command center and headed out into the compound, looking around them every few seconds, checking for any more incoming rounds. So far, all was quiet on the eastern front. Either the enemy commander's word, or their luck, was holding; the pessimistic Sgt. Hendricks tended to believe the latter.
They went to the area in camp where the ammunition for the lighter arms was stored and searched among the crates, drawing questioning stares from the men working there. Without offering any explanation for their curiosity, they proceeded to the ammo dump for the mortar and tank rounds, and made a similar check. The results were not heartening.
“If we've got enough real ammo to hold those guys off for ten minutes, I'll eat my hat,” Dirk commented glumly.
Stunned silence followed the cold-blooded murder of the slightly ditzy, but definitely innocent, woman. Jim was trying to work out in his mind a fitting way to avenge this girl’s death, as were all the troops, when one of the men decided that the situation required immediate and decisive action.
Standing near the door, Peter spotted a bush diagonally across the pathway from the house. Intending to execute a flanking maneuver of his own, he yanked a weapon from the hands of the startled soldier in front of him. He raced down the porch steps, as fast as a man of his considerable bulk could. Carefully stepping around the body of the former Stork woman, he then hit the ground shoulder-first, planning to make it to his destination by rolling under the anticipated enemy fire. When dizziness overcame him, he stopped for a rest, and quickly realized three things. First, the enemy had not resumed firing. Second, he saw, to his chagrin, that he was still a good five feet from his projected hiding place. Finally, he noticed that the object in his hands was in fact not a gun but a flower, an orange-and-white lily with a long stem, which had been given to the soldier by an admiring female.
Dizzy or not, armed or not, Peter felt he was committed to this course of action, and with great determination, he tried to initiate another roll. Unfortunately, the ground sloped slightly upward at this point, and he had a lot of trouble getting started. Using every ounce of strength he could muster, he finally rolled an additional two feet, at which point he gave up, rose to his hands and knees, and crawled the final yard or so to the “safety” of the bush.
While trying to catch his breath, Peter listened for any noises coming from the enemy line. He heard only one thing, and it was not gunfire.
It was laughter.
The execution squad soldiers were actually laughing at him. Peter was filled with shame at the thought that his attempt to pull off a “heroic” maneuver had done nothing more than provide the enemy with some comic relief. But… he was wrong.
It had also provided Jim with something he desperately needed at that moment—a diversion.
Seeing that the enemy troops' eyes were looking in Peter's direction, Jim nudged Mike and pointed to the three men that had chosen
to become the innocent woman's executioners.
“Fire!” he yelled to his own soldiers, and while they did, he and Mike concentrated their attention on the murdering goons. They all went down, but only one of the three was able to perform the elaborate death dance seen so often in the movies in those days.
The rounds from the Army soldiers caught the bad guys off-guard, but they regrouped quickly. The firefight resumed, but did not last long. Within seconds, the Secret Service men began falling, as shots rang out from behind them. Buck and his men had successfully completed their flanking maneuver.
The enemy squad was now caught between Jim's “rock” and Buck's “hard place.”
Jim prepared to issue orders for surrender to the cornered and cowering Secret Service men, but didn't get a chance. The words he planned to speak came from an entirely unexpected source.
“Drop your weapons!” Peter shouted from across the path. He stood up from behind his bush and advanced menacingly toward the enemy soldiers. He still held his lily, but he was brandishing it in two hands as though it were an axe, and he was about to chop down a tree, or behead someone, with it.
One of the captured soldiers dared to chuckle at this spectacle. Buck raised his pistol and shot the man dead on the spot.
“Any one else think this is funny?” he demanded.
Suddenly, none of the goons could find any humor in being held captive at flower-point. The rest of them quickly took the hint and placed their guns on the ground.
When the men were disarmed, Jim led his men out to collect the surrendered weapons. Taking one of the guns, he walked over to Peter.
“That ‘roll’ maneuver you just did, Peter, was either the bravest thing I’ve seen in a long time—”
Peter’s eager face lit up like that of a child who had just dressed himself correctly for the first time.
“—Or the stupidest.” Peter now looked totally crestfallen, like a child who had just put both shoes on the same foot.
“I’ll decide later,” Jim continued, trying not to smile, “but either way, I’d say you earned this,” and he presented Peter with the captured automatic weapon. The young engineer was awe-struck, and reverently accepted the gift from the colonel. He then surprised Parker by quickly examining it in the right places to determine its load status and readiness to fire. Satisfied that it did indeed contain ammunition, he came to “attention” and did as he had seen other soldiers do, placing the gun against his left leg, stock on the ground, barrel in his left fingers. This left his right hand free to render the best salute he could. While it was not very good, Jim knew the emotion it conveyed was genuine, so he saluted in response. He then smiled and offered his hand, which Peter shook heartily.
Sam followed behind the other troops and, as Jim and Mike watched, he walked up and down the line of men, as he imagined a death-camp commandant would have done with his prisoners in the days of Hitler and his “master race.” He inspected them, rubbing his fingers through smudges of dirt on their uniforms, noting imaginary “imperfections” in their facial features, and ridiculed them with expressions of disgust.
“Do you know who I am, son?” he asked of the second man in line. The man didn’t answer, and Sam spoke again as he continued his “inspection tour.”
“I’m Sam Swenson. I believe every one of you boys has been ordered to shoot me on sight. Ain’t that right?”
The captured men looked at their fellows and found unanimous agreement.
“Well, here’s your chance,” he said, standing before them with his arms spread. Feigning surprise, he then added, “Oh, wait... you can’t—you boys got no guns.”
Chuckling at their helplessness, he chose a man at random. “How long have you been assigned to this place, son?”
The man hesitated but decided that answering would not compromise anything. “Five months,” was the sullen response.
“Where was your previous assignment... Gordon?” Sam asked, reading from the soldier’s nameplate on his tunic.
“Michigan,” agent Walter Gordon replied.
“And where would you like your next posting to be?”
Gordon’s expression softened somewhat, as he stared into the distance, imagining himself stationed somewhere in the mountains, or near a lake, or at the beach, or...
“Wrong!” Sam loudly interrupted him before he had said a word. He and all his compatriots looked questioningly at each other.
“Don’t you boys get it?” Sam asked. “For you, there is no ‘next posting’!”
“Hmpf,” snorted one of the prisoners in disbelief. Sam was on him instantly.
“You doubt me, asshole?” he yelled in the man's face.
His voice got quieter, despite the fact that he addressed his next questions to the group as a whole.
“We’ll just see. Any of you make friends with guys on other squads?”
“Yes, I did,” was the defiant reply from the “asshole,” with general agreement from his peers.
“Any of them move on to new postings?”
“Yeah,” said just as confidently.
“And… do you ever hear from them now? Phone call? E-mail?”
“Well,” the disbeliever hedged, “They’re probably too busy with their new jobs—”
“Text message?” Sam pressed. “Good old-fashioned letter? Postcard? Anything? Ever?”
Sam expected no answer, and got none. He returned his attention to the “asshole.”
“When you were first stationed here, who was your first victim? One of the women?”
He paused, then added, “Or was it, maybe… a member of another Secret Service unit?”
For the first time, a look of concern crossed a few of the faces.
“Let me guess, boy—near the end of your training, they called you in and gave you a ‘special assignment’, right?”
No response, but no denial, either.
“See, I’ve seen how these things work. Infiltrated one of your training centers one time and listened in on some of these ‘private chats’. And yeah, you ain’t the only boy who got one, not by a long shot. They told you something like this: you were wonderful in training, so you have the ‘opportunity’ to help the Secret Service by flushing out a bad guy who had ‘somehow’ infiltrated your ranks, right? Even wrote his name down for you. So, who was your victim?”
When the agent made no response, Sam grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him forward until the two men were less than two inches apart.
“I’m getting tired of your attitude, punk. What was the name?”
“His name was… Barlow, I think,” he finally confessed after a lengthy pause.
“And what did this guy Barlow do, that you had to take him out?”
“I was told he was a capital criminal.”
“You were ‘told’, so you just… found him, and…” Sam made a shooting motion with his fingers. The man nodded.
“Good thing,” Sam said, releasing the man’s shirt. “I knew Barlow. He deserved to die, but not for the reasons they gave you. If you hadn’t killed him, I would have.”
“What about you?” he asked the next man in line. “Your first assignment—not a woman, I’m sure, so what was his name?”
“Snellenburg, and they gave me a picture,” was the reply.
“Capital criminal, and you had to off him, right?”
Hesitant nod.
“Doesn’t it strike any of you as odd that the Secret Service, the protectors of the President, the outfit you boys are supposedly so proud to be in, has so many ‘capital criminals’ in it?”
The concerned looks were becoming more numerous.
“And you?” he continued up the line. “Your first execution was a capital criminal named…?”
“Fritterson,” after another pregnant pause.
This got the attention of a man several places up the line. The name obviously meant something to him.
Sam noticed. “Describe him,” he told the man, as Fritterson’s friend looked
on earnestly.
“Tall, gangly… wavy black hair… handlebar moustache…”
“That’s enough,” Sam said, seeing the look of dismay on the listener’s face, as he realized that his “reassigned” friend and the dead capital criminal were one and the same.
“What's the primary directive in this place?” Swenson continued, as though lecturing a class. “You oughta know—one of your boys told it to me many years ago. ‘Nobody ever leaves’, right?”
Despite the coolness of the spring afternoon, sweat was becoming evident on several foreheads.
“’Nobody ever leaves’,” Sam repeated, walking up and down the line. “The women don't leave... the men who come in courtesy of Stork don't leave...”
Sam suddenly got back in Mr. Asshole's face again.
“What makes you think you get to leave?”
Mr. A. had no answer for that.
“Well, me and the boys here are going to leave, right now. If any of you want to live to see your twenty-fifth birthday, you’ll do the smart thing and come with us. ‘Cause I guarantee you, right now there’s a bunch of new recruits out there being given ‘opportunities’ to hunt down ‘capital criminals’ named Gordon, and… Wentz, and… Vernon,” as he read random nametags from the men in line.
The invitation was rhetorical, of course—the troops were going with the Army men whether they wanted to or not, but most of them believed what Sam had said, and were eager to escape the certain death which awaited them. Jim and the rest of the troops gathered their own weapons, along with those recovered from the captives, and headed for the building which housed the tunnel entrance. On the way, Jim caught up with Sam.
“You actually saw these ‘hit-squad’ assignments?”
“Nah,” Sam replied, “just making it up. Seems like I hit the nail on the head, though.”
“When I get to be President,” Jim told him, “I’m gonna want you for my Secretary of State.”
