by Alan Gratz
Another horn sounded, and the halftime float rumbled to a stop. Of course! That was just the two-minute warning. We had two minutes of clock time—lots more if they kept running the ball out of bounds and took a thousand commercial breaks like they usually do during the Super Bowl. That would buy us ten, fifteen minutes tops. But as little as two minutes if they stayed in bounds and called no time-outs.
We had to get out of here.
I could see in Darius’s eyes that he’d thought of something. He tried to say it through the bandana tied around his mouth, but I couldn’t hear a thing over the roar of the crowd and I couldn’t see enough of his mouth move to read his lips. After a second, he rolled over so his back was to me and started tapping his bound hands against the floor.
Our code! Not the Code of Honor. The secret code we’d used on the walls between our rooms at night. I watched his hands tapping away, but I had as much trouble reading them now as I had when I’d watched him on the al-Qaeda video. I remembered Mickey rapping out the sounds as I closed my eyes. I did the same thing now. I closed my eyes and put my ear to the wooden floor of the float. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
I frowned. Darius was tapping out the code for pretending to go to sleep. Was he seriously suggesting we just close our eyes and wait for the inevitable? I opened my eyes and shook my head angrily at him. He gave me the tap again, then rolled back over.
Then I got it. The way we always pretended to sleep when our parents checked our rooms at night was to roll over. Darius just wanted me to roll over!
I rocked and rolled over again. Moments later, I felt Darius’s hands on the ropes that bound me. Our wrists were bound so we couldn’t untie ourselves, but our hands were free enough to untie each other. As he loosened the ropes, I pulled and twisted my hands and at last they came free. I quickly rolled back over and untied the ropes that bound Darius’s hands. Then we bent over sideways in the short crawl space to untie our feet, and ripped the gags from our mouths. We were free!
The crowd roared—something big had just happened in the game. We didn’t have much time.
“I’ll look for the timer!” Darius yelled in my ear. “You find the way out!”
MY HEART WAS RACING. I CRAWLED AROUND UNTIL I found an access panel in the bottom. It was barred, but not too strongly. I kicked at it with my heels until the outside latch snapped and the trapdoor swung open. I could see a well-lit gray concrete floor below.
More music boomed from the field. Something by U2. A TV time-out? I hoped so. I waved to Darius, and he crawled over to me.
“I found the timer!” he yelled in my ear. “There’s no off switch, and I don’t know if I can pull out the wires without setting it off! We have to clear the area first!” He pointed to the hole. “Security guard!”
I nodded, understanding. This was no time for heroics. We needed to get word to the stadium authorities, and pronto. I climbed down through the trapdoor and slithered out from under the wheeled float. Darius followed me.
I helped Darius to his feet beside the float. We were in a concrete staging area below the stands. The corner of one of the end zones was visible a hundred yards away through two big open doors. Adam was out there, I suddenly realized. He and his mom and dad and somebody else they had decided to take with them instead of me.
What do you know, Adam, you were right, I thought. I made it to the Super Bowl after all.
The space where we stood was packed with people. Gaudily dressed dancers, kids with flags and banners, five different college marching bands, people in puppetlike animal costumes, tech guys and roadies, cameramen, people with headsets and clipboards shouting positions at the performers.
And then there was me and Darius, dusty and rumpled, blinking in the light. But at least I was in jeans and a T-shirt. Darius wore dirty white robes, and was scrawny and bearded, looking like the terrorist everyone believed he was.
“All right, people, twenty seconds to showtime!” a woman announced through a bullhorn.
Twenty seconds!
I spied a security guard among the sequined masses, and Darius and I pushed our way toward him. His eyes raked over us with a deeply suspicious look.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are your access passes?”
“There’s a bomb on the float,” Darius said without preamble. “You have to get all these people out of here!”
The security guard looked panicked. We’d used the b-word, and you never used the b-word unless you really meant it.
“You—you’re that soldier,” the guard said, recognizing Darius. “From TV! And you’re his brother!” He fumbled for his gun, drew it, and aimed it at us. “Don’t move! Don’t you move! I’m calling this in!”
Frustration overwhelmed me. No! We were trying to save people! “You don’t get it—!” I started to say, but Darius put a hand to my chest and stepped in front of me.
“Yes! Good! Call it in!” Darius said. “Tell them there’s a bomb in the float! Tell them to clear the stadium!”
Darius was right. It didn’t matter what they thought of us right now. It didn’t matter if they zip-tied our hands and feet and strung us up on a pole. We could explain everything later. All that mattered right now was getting everyone out of the way of the bomb.
The security guard kept the gun pointed at us with one hand and reached for his walkie-talkie with the other.
“1-5-1 to dispatch. 1-5-1 to dispatch,” he said.
A shot boomed behind us, and a red bullet hole appeared in the middle of the security guard’s forehead. With a stunned look, he fell down dead on the floor.
SCREAMS. PANIC. SHOUTS. THE STAGING AREA became absolute pandemonium as the performers and stage crew pushed every which way to get out. Darius pushed me to the ground right before another shot rang out, the bullet hitting a woman in front of us in a marching band uniform. More screams. More panic.
I turned, trying to see where the shots were coming from. There—on the float. A roadie with a gun.
Darius saw him, too. He grabbed the fallen security guard’s gun. “Stay down!” he told me, and he threw himself into the mayhem, going for the shooter.
I stayed down. The timer on the explosives had to be set to go off some time during the halftime show, which was supposed to start any second now. I could crawl back inside the float and try to disarm the timer, but how? If Darius, a trained Army Ranger, couldn’t do it, neither could I. Not alone. I needed help.
Help. Mickey Hagan was just a phone call away! I dug through the dead security guard’s pockets, trying to ignore for the moment that I was digging through a dead security guard’s pockets.
He had to have one … yes! A cell phone! And there was no password code to enter. A trusting security guard. What were the odds?
My thumb hung in space over the phone’s screen as I tried to remember the phone number Mickey had given me. I’d memorized it. But the chaos, the gunshots, the screams … Was the first part 359 or 395?
I couldn’t—I didn’t—
I reared back to hurl the phone against the wall in frustration.
No. Relax. Breathe, I told myself. This is what Dane warned you about. The anger. You can control it. I let the sound of my own pounding heart rise in my ears, let it push out all the screams and yelling and shooting. No distractions. No doubts. No second guesses.
I punched in the number and brought the phone to my ear.
“Consolidated Services,” a woman answered.
No! I’d dialed the wrong number! I hung up, my hands shaking. Any second now, I expected the C-4 behind me to explode, blowing me and everyone else to smithereens. I tried to clear my head again, block out all the distractions, and punched in the number I thought I’d memorized.
“Consolidated Services,” the same woman answered.
Damn it! I pulled the phone away from my ear and almost mashed the end-call button, but suddenly I had a thought. I brought the phone back to my ear.
“I need to talk to Mickey Hagan,” I told the woman.
“One moment,” she said.
SHE WAS TRANSFERRING ME! EITHER I WAS ABOUT to get some other Mickey Hagan who was vice president of Consolidated Services’s marketing division or something, or Consolidated Services was a front number for a CIA operator.
“Hagan,” said that familiar Irish voice.
“Mickey! It’s Kamran. Listen. We don’t have a lot of time.”
I hurriedly explained about the Super Bowl and the bomb. If I got out of this alive, there would be time to tell him about everything else.
“Find cover and stay on the line,” Mickey told me, all business. “I’m going to make some calls.”
I looked around for a place to hide. There were more floats, more stage equipment, but none of those was going to survive that blast. I needed to be out of this area, out of the stadium, far, far away.
Another shot exploded, and another security guard went down. The room was finally clearing, and in the wake of the stampeding performers, I saw three more security guards down on the floor, all shot dead. But where was Darius? I ran through the maze of floats and fallen band instruments, looking for him, worried I’d find him bleeding on the floor like the rest. But there he was on a big float designed to look like a football helmet. He was spinning, turning every which way to try and find the shooter.
Who was climbing up behind him.
“Darius! Look out!” I called. Which was stupid, because the shooter heard me, too. The roadie turned and shot at me. He missed, and I dove for cover behind a giant speaker. More shots. I felt the bullets hit the speaker behind me, heard them smashing the vinyl and wood. Then there was a cry and a thud, and I peeked out to see Darius wrestling with the shooter on the bottom of the float. He had leaped onto the shooter from above.
I had to help. I stuffed the phone in my pocket, snatched up the first weapon I could find—a trumpet, which hardly qualified as a weapon, but I had no choice—and ran for the platform like a safety homing in on a wide receiver. The shooter still had his gun, and Darius had the shooter’s arm stretched out wide, protecting himself the same way Dane had taught me. But it wasn’t protecting me. The gun went off in my direction and I ducked stupidly, like I could actually dodge a speeding bullet. I kept moving, though, bobbing and weaving, trying to avoid the swaying barrel of his gun. When I was finally close enough, I hit the shooter in the head with the business end of the trumpet. The blow knocked him out cold, and he dropped his gun over the side.
“Thanks—but we still have a bomb to worry about!” Darius said.
Right. The bomb. Mickey!
I pulled the phone back out. “Mickey! Mickey, are you there?”
“Kamran! Yes,” Mickey said. “I need you to get out of there. I’ve got a bomb squad on the way.”
“There won’t be time!” I told him.
“All right,” Mickey said. “I’ve got someone on the line to help defuse the bomb. Is anyone else—”
“Hands in the air!” someone shouted, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Half a dozen stadium security guards wearing flak jackets and black ball caps had just run in the room and were pointing their pistols at me. They couldn’t see Darius. He was around the other side of the float, and he ducked down to stay hidden.
“Put your hands in the air, now!” the guard shouted again.
“Kamran,” Darius whispered, meaning I should do what he said.
I groaned and raised my hands, the bomb ticking away steadily behind me.
THE SECURITY GUARDS ADVANCED, GUNS POINTED straight at us.
“You Kamran Smith?” the lead guard asked.
“I—yes,” I said. I’d forgotten that people knew me, that my face had been on TV, on the Internet, all this time.
The security guard lowered his weapon and signaled the others to do the same. “CIA says he’s good,” he told his men. “Make sure everybody else is out of this area. Now!”
I couldn’t believe it. The guards ignored me and ran off, some checking the people on the ground, others making sure there was no one left in the surrounding rooms and corridors. I glanced at Darius, still hiding behind the float. We didn’t know if the CIA had cleared him or not.
The lead guard climbed up on the float shaped like a football helmet. “This the shooter?” the lead guard asked me as he pointed to the unconscious guy.
“Yeah,” I said. “I, uh, knocked him out with a trumpet.”
The security guard bound the man’s wrists with a zip tie and hauled him away, and I remembered that Mickey was still on the phone.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry. Guards showed up. But they knew who I was. That was fast.”
“Told you, I made some calls,” Mickey said. “Kamran, who else is with you? Dane? Aaliyah? Jimmy?”
He still didn’t know that Dane was dead. Or that Jimmy had sold us out. And Aaliyah—was she dead, too?
“No,” I said. “Just Darius.”
Mickey was silent for a moment. “Kamran, I need you to tell me straight now: were you right about him? Do you trust him? Is Darius one of the good guys?”
I glanced at Darius, still crouching behind the float to hide from the guards.
“Yes,” I was able to say at last. It was an amazing relief, even here, in the midst of all this madness.
“All right, then,” Mickey said. “I want you to put Darius on the phone, and then I want you to get out of there.”
“But—”
“You’re to do anything and everything I tell you. Do you remember me saying that, lo these many moons ago? And you nodded, which I took to mean, ‘Yes, Mr. Hagan, I will, under penalty of death, do every last thing you tell me to without question or argument.’ Now give the phone to Darius and get yourself clear. He’s an Army Ranger. He signed on for this. And if worse comes to worst, I’d like to send at least one of the Smith boys home to your parents in one piece.”
I wanted to argue, but I knew he was right. And precious seconds were ticking away.
“It’s for you,” I said, handing Darius the phone.
“Yes?” Darius said. He listened for a moment and stood up straight. “Yes, sir,” he said. If Mickey could have seen him salute, Darius would have. Through the beard and dirty robes, I could finally see the soldier underneath again. Darius ran for the float we’d crawled out of. “Yes, sir,” he said into the phone. “Yes, sir.”
Darius disappeared underneath the float. Mickey had told me to get out of there, and every cell in my body was screaming for me to do just that. But I couldn’t leave Darius there without trying to help. But what could I do? If I crawled up inside the float I’d only be in his way.
I spun around, looking desperately for anything I could do to help, and saw the truck attached to the float. Of course! I could drive the float out onto the field. Get it out from under the bleachers. If the bomb did go off, it wouldn’t take a quarter of the stadium with it.
I jumped inside the open cab. It wasn’t a regular truck—it was a special car for hauling stadium sets around, like a bigger, beefier golf cart. I flipped the on switch and pressed the gas pedal, and the truck started to move. Slowly. Very, very slowly. It was like driving one of those cars at an amusement park that have a rail down the middle so you can’t drive off the course. I kept nudging forward in my seat, urging the thing on like a horse, trying to get it to move faster. Come on come on come on.
The truck emerged from the tunnel and into the giant stadium. I’d been to University of Phoenix Stadium for Cardinals games before, but I’d never been down at field level. From the ground, the placed looked enormous. Five levels of seats swept up and away from the field, and two hundred feet above me the giant white trusses that held the retractable roof stretched from one end of the building to the other. Straight ahead of me on the other side of the stadium was the five-story-tall scoreboard, the giant Cardinal mural above it replaced with the Super Bowl logo.
The timer on the scoreboard said there were only five minutes left in the halftime break. If the Black Widow had timed the explosion for right
when the halftime show was ending, right when the fireworks went off and the confetti shot into the air and everybody was standing and cheering, Darius had less than five minutes to defuse that bomb or we were finished.
LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES. I DIDN’T KNOW HOW MUCH of the explosion was supposed to reach the stands, but all those performers and bands and all the fans who would have been on the field to dance around during the halftime show would have been dead. It would have been horrible—and a hundred million people would have watched it on TV.
But even if the bomb exploded now, we had already foiled the Black Widow. The game had been postponed, the halftime show was canceled, and fans were streaming toward the exits. The scoreboard was asking people to leave in a slow and orderly fashion due to a gas leak in the stadium. A gas leak! Well, I supposed that was better than telling them there was a truckload of plastic explosives driving out onto the field.
The tow truck attached to the float moved achingly slow, but I had at least hit the grass of the field. Come on come on come on, I told it. I glanced at the scoreboard again. Less than four minutes!
Out of the corner of my eye I saw somebody coming down the aisle in the lower stands, not going up. It was a camera crew! Some TV crew was trying to get closer for a story.
“No! Get back!” I yelled, waving my arms. “Get back!”
But they kept coming. I glanced at the scoreboard. Three and a half minutes. If they got too close, the blast would kill them.
“Get back! Go away!” I shouted, but they couldn’t hear me. They were closer, though, and I recognized the reporter leading the cameraman down the steps. It was Emily Reed, the pretty ESPN commentator, wearing a knee-length red skirt and a white blouse.
Emily Reed.
When I was little, my parents took us on a vacation to the beach at Rocky Point, a resort town in Mexico. I was so little I wasn’t supposed to go into the water by myself, but I saw Darius doing it and charged in on my own. The waves weren’t very big, but I was tiny, and the seawater swept over me, tumbling me end over end, filling my eyes and ears and lungs and dumping me back on the beach a spluttering, wailing mess.
