by John Bromley
“I think I got you on distance,” Dirk said, with a fake show of pride.
“Well, I wasn’t really warmed up,” Buck rationalized, playing along. “Next time, I’ll try harder.”
True to his word, on his next turn, Buck Keller claimed to have cleared eight feet in the “Jared toss.” Dirk pooh-poohed the effort, and easily equaled the distance with his subsequent throw.
A few throws later, Buck noticed a place in the field where an artillery shell had blasted a hole in the ground deep enough to strike the water table, and that the area west of the crater had turned into a mud puddle. When it was his turn again, he unceremoniously threw the presidential offspring into the slop, face first.
Buck went over and took hold of the back of the man’s shirt, standing him up roughly. His face, and the front of his pretty black uniform, were both covered in reddish brown mud.
“Are you ready to cooperate yet?” he asked the young man, who merely glared back at him.
Buck shrugged, and indicated that the game should continue.
“You can’t expect him to feel like cooperating when his uniform is all dirty,” Dirk playfully scolded his superior officer. He noticed that the water on the other side of the crater was much cleaner because it was running through grass, and since it was his “turn,” he tossed the commander into that puddle. When Dirk stood Jared up the same way that Buck had done, they both noticed that while the young man’s face was quite bruised from landing on it so many times, at least his uniform was clean again, although soaking wet.
Buck tousled the commander’s wet hair, as though he were a good little boy, and said condescendingly, “Not to worry, son—at the rate we’re going, you won’t have to put up with this more than about, oh, another hundred times.”
CHAPTER 35
Jim surveyed the situation, and did not like what he saw. Peter had taken out the troublesome machine gun, but now two new developments had occurred.
A television news crew had arrived and had set themselves up on the south side of the field of battle, slightly nearer to his camp than the Secret Service’s position. The on-screen person was outside his news van, and seemed to be calling the action the way a sports announcer would at a football game.
Jim did not like having civilians in the vicinity of a battle. He felt responsible for their safety, even if they knew, as these people surely did, the inherent danger of the situation, and voluntarily placed themselves in jeopardy anyway. Moreover, given the “rumor” that “Parker, the national hero” was involved and the unusual circumstances surrounding this battle, he knew that this live TV feed would be picked up by practically every station in the country, and would preempt other broadcasts.
Great, he thought—every mistake I make is going to be shown on national TV.
On top of that, the few tanks he had seemed to have suddenly gone out of control, their gun turrets spinning wildly back and forth. His tank commanders had to suspend fire while they frantically tried to diagnose and correct the problem. Jim made a quick check to the east through his binoculars and saw that, fortunately, the same problem was plaguing the SS tanks, and their guns had also, of necessity, fallen silent.
Sam couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Mike’s virus had caused the Secret Service tanks to lose all firing directional control. Their gun turrets were rotating back and forth in a seemingly random fashion. Unfortunately, the Army tanks were suffering the same difficulty.
He picked up his phone and called Jim.
“Your tanks are on the same radio frequency as the SS tanks,” he informed Parker.
“Is that you, Sam?” Jim asked urgently. “It’s about time—”
“Yeah, it’s me and Mike,” he interrupted. “Sorry we’re late—we were building us a computer virus—”
“A what?” Jim wanted to know.
“Never mind—tell you later. Anyway, we’re the ones making the tanks go screwy. Can you change your tanks’ computers to work on a different frequency? Take it down about twenty hertz, and they’ll be good as new.”
“You sure?”
“Trust me,” Sam said confidently.
“I do,” Jim replied without hesitation. He hung up the phone and ordered his tank commanders to check into the possibility of doing as Sam as instructed. They seemed confident that they could do it, but it would take time. Jim reminded them that this was a luxury that they did not have.
While Jim waited impatiently for the computer fix, he kept an eye on the enemy artillery. The SS tanks were valiantly trying to overcome the problem that Mike’s virus was causing them, with little success. The driver would turn the lower half of his tank to counter the movement of the gun turret, in an effort to keep the gun pointed at the Army, but as soon as he turned one way, Mike adjusted his virus to make the upper half spin in the opposite direction. In addition to keeping the tanks from shooting at Jim’s men, this was certainly producing some very dizzy tank drivers.
Jim’s attention was diverted from the SS tanks when Buck and Dirk came into view, force-marching the President's son between them. Jim was surprised, to say the least—not so much that Buck and Dirk had been able to capture him, but that Daddy Thompson had allowed his pride and joy to be on the field of battle at all.
“Good work, Buck. Well done, Dirk,” he congratulated his men on their achievement and initiative. “Take ‘Lord Fauntleroy’ here to the command tent. I'll be there in a few minutes.”
“I’m not telling you nothing,” the boy spat out, glaring at the officers.
Buck, who had the SS commander by the shirt collar, gave him a rough shake. “That's no way to talk to your superior officer,” he reminded him.
“Nobody’s my superior,” the young Thompson said, fixing his beady eyes on Parker. “Especially not a dead man.”
Jim ran his hands up and down his arms, then across his body. “Sure feel alive.”
“Not for long,” Thompson said confidently.
Jim pointed with his thumb. “Take him in there anyway. If he won’t tell me what I want to know voluntarily, I’ll beat it out of him.” Jared suddenly felt a little less cocky when he saw the colonel’s expression, which told the young man that Jim was speaking literally.
Buck began to drag the First Son away, but almost immediately all the officers, including Jared, found their attention drawn toward the south. An unexpected sound was issuing from that direction.
Jim was on his phone immediately. “Sam, sounds like we got a jet coming in, and I'm betting it ain’t one of ours.”
“Aw, c’mon—that’s not fair!” Buck protested. He turned a dejected face toward Jim, but did not let go of Jared. The young man gave a satisfied smile, as if he had personally planned this development.
Jim heard only a curse from Sam, followed by Sam and Mike conferring as they moved frantically between laptops and the electronic frequency finder. Meanwhile, the jet became visible, and was rapidly closing on their position. Jim found himself holding his breath, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did. Mike and Sam were unable to work the same kind of magic on the fighter that they had with the tanks, but fortunately they didn't need to. The plane passed overhead at an altitude of about a thousand feet, without firing or releasing bombs, and continued on to the north at full speed. The only movement on the ground was the TV cameraman, tracking the jet across the sky for his audience.
Jim breathed a sigh of relief, but knew they were hardly out of danger. He got back on the phone.
“Were you guys able to get anything from that fighter?” he asked Sam.
“Yeah, I think we got something,” Sam replied, “but it’s gonna take us a minute or two to figure out what it is.”
“Well, make it fast,” Jim said. “I think that was just a reconnaissance pass, to get the lay of the land. My gut tells me he’ll be back in a minute or so, with guns blazing.”
“I’d get your boys under cover, Jim,” Sam replied, “just in case.”
Jim’s gut on
ce again proved to be right. It was no more than two minutes later that they all heard the jet again, this time coming in from the north. But Sam had homed in on a radio frequency, and if it belonged to the fighter, then he indeed “had something.”
“Whatever you got, now’s the time,” Jim told Sam.
Sam pushed his button.
The results were quite satisfying. The fighter had been descending for its bombing run, but now it suddenly banked sharply to the left. It made two complete circles in the sky, spiraling downward the entire time. When Sam and Mike released control of the automatic pilot, the aircraft was still north of the Fourth’s position and heading west at full speed, at an altitude of about twenty feet. The pilot had less than a second to react before the fighter would slam into the Wall itself.
He couldn’t, so the plane did, with a jarring explosion.
Jim and his men saw the fireball from the downed plane, but from their location, they couldn’t tell exactly what, if any, damage had been inflicted on the Wall by the crash. Shortly after the main explosion died away, Jim could hear a series of smaller blasts, and asked Sam what he thought those might be.
“Well, if the plane shot clear through the Wall—and that’s a possibility, with seven-hundred-year-old concrete, no matter how thick it is—it would have landed in the mine field right behind it. Now, most of those mines are very old, and either they’re very sensitive, or they won’t work at all. Sounds to me like that’s what happened, and those mines are setting each other off.”
“So maybe, if we’re lucky,” Jim replied, “we have a hole in the Wall, and the mine field is clearing itself out for us. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Definitely something we need to check out real soon,” Sam agreed.
Jim turned his attention back to the TV truck at the south edge of the field. Dirk saw where he was looking, and mentioned that he and Buck had heard Jared speak to his father about a “news crew.” This got Jim thinking, and not just about their safety.
Obviously, he realized, these guys didn’t just “happen” to be here. Maybe not “everyone” was watching, but he knew the President himself was, since he was ultimately the “brains” behind the attack. Indeed, it seemed that Thompson was so confident of victory that not only had he allowed his son to help “lead” the offensive, but had “invited” the press to bear witness to his glorious triumph, and the continued invincibility of the Thompson rule.
Well, two can play at that game, Jim thought—if he could create the right situation. He seemed to remember someone once saying “the pen is mightier than the sword.” This could be the ideal time to put that theory to the test.
For that to happen, though, the TV people had to remain alive. The Secret Service soldiers had opened fire on the news crew, in an attempt to prevent the fact that their tanks were not operating at peak efficiency from being broadcast.
He ordered his men to provide “suppressing fire,” while he wildly pointed at and signaled to the TV crew that they should come in his direction as fast as possible. They saw him and obeyed, but the cameraman tried to run with the camera still on his shoulder. Jim made a cutting motion across his throat, telling the man to turn the camera off, so he could run faster with it. When they arrived at Jim’s location, he directed them to the relative safety of the command tent. They went in, and Jim made ready to follow, but was intercepted by one of his tank commanders, who told him that Sam’s requested frequency change was ready to be implemented.
Jim stuck his head into the tent. “Is that camera off?” he asked the TV men. When they nodded, he told them to “keep it off for a few minutes.”
“OK, but our newsroom is calling me, wondering what happened to our feed,” the reporter told Jim. “What should I tell him?”
“You don’t tell him anything yet,” Jim replied, “but don’t worry—you’ll be back on the air in a few minutes, with the story of your career.”
Jim told Buck to have the tanks make the frequency change. “You know what to do after that.”
“Yes, sir,” Buck said. He turned away and Jim went back into the tent.
As the TV technician powered his camera back up, the reporter, whose name was Miguel Johnson, asked Jim if he would appear on TV and answer a “couple of questions.” Jim pretended to consider this request for a moment; in reality, of course, speaking to the TV audience was the reason he had summoned the TV people to his tent.
“Colonel Parker, we appreciate your taking time out during an obviously busy day to talk with us.”
The sounds from nearby explosions made Johnson cringe with fear. Gunfire had resumed, but Jim’s trained ear could tell that most of the impacts were now taking place on the Secret Service side of the field. Jim knew that his tanks were back on line and that Buck had begun to “fire at will.” A smile of satisfaction crept across his face.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Johnson,” he replied when he could be heard above the din of the battle, “but we’ll need to keep this as brief as possible.”
“Absolutely,” Johnson replied. He paused a moment to allow the sound of an incoming mortar round to fade away, then asked, “Colonel, it was our understanding that you and the rest of the Fourth Battalion were deployed here to conduct war games. Are you saying that this is not what’s happening out there right now?”
“That’s correct, sir. Those sounds we hear in the background are from real live artillery shells. Believe me when I say, we are all in danger right now.”
The camera pointed at Johnson, who was involuntarily crouching, trying to stay out of what he thought might be the line of fire. “Even here, in this command tent?”
“Especially here at this moment. You are in danger whenever you’re with me, because I am the primary target in this conflict.”
“What do you mean, Colonel?”
“The people firing at us are members of the Secret Service.”
This information caught Johnson completely off-guard. He tried to recover as his training dictated, but the best he could come up with was, “Are you sure, Colonel?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Johnson. We have communicated with them face to face, and they have made their intentions clear. They want our surrender, but more than that… they specifically want me.”
“But… why would they want you?” Johnson was having a hard time coming to grips with this scenario.
Jim replied, showing as little emotion as he could, “I suggest you ask the President why.”
This threw Johnson for another loop. “The President? Why would—”
“The Secret Service exists to protect President Thompson, doesn’t it?” Jim interrupted. “You should ask him why he thinks he needs protection from me. I mean, I’m just a soldier doing my job. And my job is to protect the country—all of us—from all dangerous forces; those outside our borders… and those within.”
“It sounds like this whole thing is one giant misunderstanding,” Johnson ventured.
“On the contrary,” Jim replied, speaking directly to the camera and by extension, the man in the White House watching him, “I think the President and I understand each other very well.”
“Well,” Miguel Johnson said, noticing a definite undercurrent of hostility in Parker’s voice, “maybe we could get the President to talk to us. In the meantime, Colonel, do you have time to tell us your side of the story?”
“I’d be more than happy to do that, Mr. Johnson.”
C’mon… take the bait, you son of a bitch, he thought.
CHAPTER 36
In all parts of the country, the saga of the “Battle by the Wall,” as one intrepid news anchor had quickly named it, was unfolding live on TV. The men watching it, alone in their homes or in pubs with their friends, were at least as confused as the reporter Johnson. They asked themselves and each other, was Colonel Parker saying that the Secret Service had mounted an armored assault just to capture him? The Colonel Parker, the national hero? If he had indeed suddenly become a criminal, then somebody better hav
e a damn good explanation. And, since Parker had offered to tell the national TV audience his side of the dispute, most men felt that the “somebody” who needed to explain things was Thompson himself.
Almost immediately, they got their wish.
The technical director of the national news show suddenly cut away from Johnson’s live remote and returned to the network studio, seconds after Colonel Parker said he’d be “happy” to give his point of view. The anchorman, Rocanumara “Rocko” Stanton, a fine gentleman of Scottish and Japanese heritage, was caught completely off-guard, as he unexpectedly found himself on-camera, with the phone on his desk ringing. He looked uncertainly to his left, where his stage manager was urgently signaling him to answer the phone. He picked up the handset, identified himself and the network, and listened to the caller for about ten seconds, expressing total shock the entire time. When Rocko lowered the phone, he announced to the national audience, “I’ve just spoken with the President, and he has asked to be patched through to our man Miguel Johnson. We, of course, will honor his request.”
He was exaggerating, but everyone knew it. Clearly, the President had done all the talking and, as most people knew, Thompson never “asked” for anything—he “ordered” it.
Rocko had a brief exchange with his stage manager. “Can we broadcast the President’s voice?”
“He didn’t say we could,” was the faint off-camera response.
“He didn’t say we couldn’t, either.”
Turning back to the camera, he editorialized, “I would expect that the next thing we hear will be the President using his famous powers of persuasion to bring a peaceful end to this unfortunate situation.” He said this mostly for self-preservation; he knew, as did most people, that the President neither had nor needed “powers of persuasion”—you either agreed with him, or you died. Sometimes “agreement” was irrelevant—you died anyway. He had heard of this happening more than once.
