by Dave Barry
We looked up at the sky, which was full of kites, all sizes and kinds—birds, bats, butterflies, fish, serpents, squids, angels, planes, rockets, random shapes—swooping around in the wind. They went on and on, all the way across the Ellipse. But I didn’t see anything that looked like…
“A butt!” said Matt, pointing. “Over there!”
I looked, and there it was, hovering at the far end of the Ellipse—a set of naked buttocks the size of a UPS truck.
We ran, dodging through the crowd, until we were under the butt, where a lot of people were taking pictures of it and selfies with it hovering behind them. A few yards away were the guys flying the butt. They looked like college students, which makes sense, from what I have heard about college students.
“Wyatt!”
I turned and saw Suzana running toward me, with Victor behind.
“We found them,” she said.
“The Gadakistan guys?”
“Yeah. They’re over there.” She pointed. I looked and spotted them through crowd, maybe fifty yards away. The big guy was pretty easy to pick out.
“Where’s the dragon kite?” I said.
“It’s still on the ground. Guess what else they have.”
“What?”
“A little portable TV. Victor snuck close and got a look. It’s tuned to C-SPAN.”
“What’s C-SPAN?” said Matt.
“It’s a TV channel that shows government things,” said Suzana.
“Why would anybody want to watch that?” said Matt.
“Well, I can guess why these guys want to,” said Suzana. “They’re watching to see when the president and the Gadakistan leader, whatshisname…”
“Brevalov,” said Victor.
“Right, him,” said Suzana. “They’re gonna watch C-SPAN and see when they come out of the White House for the press conference in the Rose Garden. That’s when they’ll launch their kite. Except we’re going to stop them.”
“By telling the police?” I said.
She shook her head. “They won’t believe us. Look at what happened when we told Mr. Barto and Miss Rector.”
“Yeah, but now they can see the Gadakistan guys, right there. So they’ll know we’re telling the truth.”
“Wyatt, they’ll see two guys with a big kite. On a field full of people with big kites.”
She had a point.
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to watch them until they’re getting ready to put their kite up. Then we’re going to jump them.”
“Jump them.”
“Yes.”
“As in physically jump on them.”
“Yes.”
“Suzana, the one guy, he’s big. He’s really big.”
“Yes, but there are four of us. We jump on them and yell and just generally make it impossible for them to fly their kite. The police will probably come, and they might even arrest us, but at that point it won’t matter, because they won’t be able to launch their kite in time. The only thing I’m worried about is Cameron. We don’t see him here, and we don’t know where he is.”
“He called me,” I said.
“Cameron did? When?”
“A little while ago. He was using Matt’s phone.”
“Where is he? Did he get out?”
“I don’t know. Before he could tell me anything, the battery died.”
“But he must be out of that house, right? If he called you?”
“I guess. But here’s the thing: He said we made a bad mistake.”
“What? What mistake?”
“The battery died before he could tell me.”
“Well do you have any idea?”
“Maybe he meant we shouldn’t have let them get the laser jammer back.”
“You think?”
“I can’t really come up with anything else that would be really bad. Like blow-up-the-White-House bad.”
Suzana nodded. “That makes sense. We really have to stop those guys.”
“Then we really better get going,” said Victor. “Because they’re about to launch their kite.”
We all looked through the crowd. Victor was right: the big guy was holding the end of a rope attached to the dragon and backing away. The little guy was standing next to the dragon, fiddling with it.
“Come on!” said Suzana. As usual, she didn’t wait to see if anybody agreed with her. She just took off running. As usual, the rest of us followed her. She was running like a crazy person, waving her arms and yelling. People were getting out of her way. I was sprinting as hard as I could to keep up, zigzagging through the crowd.
Then I heard a yell and, out of the corner of my right eye, saw something coming at me.
I was tackled and landed facedown, hard enough to have the wind knocked out of me. Someone was sitting on my back, shouting “Thief!”
The taxi driver. The maniac must have been looking for me and Matt. He was not in a good mood.
I rolled sideways and managed to get out from under him and stagger to my feet. He grabbed my arm and was still shouting about me being a thief. I was trying to talk to him, but I couldn’t catch my breath. Matt and Victor had stopped and were yelling at him to let me go. There was a lot of yelling going on. A crowd of people had formed around us; I think they were confused about what was happening. I was yanking my arm as hard as I could but the taxi driver, who was a little guy but strong, would not let go. I was still gasping for air, trying to explain that I would get him his money if he would just let me go for a minute so I could go help my friend. But he had me in his grip, and I felt totally helpless as well as breathless, knowing that I had messed up yet again, and left Suzana out there taking on the bad guys all alone.
Except she wasn’t. I found that out when I heard her yelling “GET OUT OF THE WAY,” and then saw her bust through the crowd headed straight for me and the taxi driver.
You have probably never heard of hong fo. It’s a martial art, like karate, kung fu, and tae kwon do, except supposedly harder to learn and just generally more martial. Well it turned out that, in addition to everything else, Suzana was a student of hong fo, and although she was fairly new to it, she had learned an attack move, involving both punching and kicking, named The Raptor, after those really mean dinosaurs with like nineteen thousand teeth that ate a bunch of people in Jurassic Park. Suzana executed The Raptor on the taxi driver, who never saw what was coming. One second he was gripping my arm and calling me a thief, and the next second he was lying on the ground holding his head.
“Come on,” said Suzana. She grabbed me and pulled me through the crowd. People were getting out of her way, and I didn’t blame them.
“Who was that guy?” she called over her shoulder.
“A taxi driver,” I panted, still trying to get my breath. “We owe him eighteen seventy-two. Plus tip.”
“You didn’t pay him?”
“We didn’t have enough money. You don’t have twenty bucks you could lend me, do you?”
She looked back at me. It was not an admiring look. “Now? Are you serious?”
“I just thought—”
“LATER!” She was already running again, and once again I was following her. We’d lost Victor and Matt, who were stuck back in the mob around the taxi driver. Up ahead, to the right, the big guy—who was wearing some kind of headset with a microphone—had stretched the rope to its entire length. To the left the little guy, who was also wearing a headset, was lifting up the body of the dragon and then lowering it over himself, so only his legs were showing.
“You grab the kite!” Suzana shouted, pointing toward the little guy. “I’ll get him.” She veered toward the big guy. Just her. Alone. I don’t think I ever felt lamer than at that moment, turning left toward a guy who was no bigger than me while Suzana turned right and ran full speed straight toward a guy the size of a building.
But I did turn left.
The big guy started running with the rope, pulling the dragon. While at the same moment
the little guy, under the dragon, ran along with him. They were heading into the wind. I could see the dragon starting to lift.
Suzana, who like I said is a very fast runner, caught up with the big guy and launched herself into the air, planning to execute The Raptor. She looked pretty good right up until the moment when she hit the big guy. She bounced of him like a Ping-Pong ball colliding with a cement truck. The big guy kept right on running with the rope. I’m not sure he even noticed that Suzana Raptored him. It was shocking to see. Suzana actually failed at something.
Which meant now it was up to me.
Except I’m not as fast as Suzana, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get to the little guy before he launched the kite. He picked up speed, and the big dragon lifted higher; I could see most of the little guy’s body now. In a few seconds he’d let go of the kite, and I’d be too late to grab it. I veered right a little, trying to get the best angle. Just a few feet to go…
Then the little guy shouted something and the dragon suddenly rose, and I knew I wasn’t going to get there in time.
Except he didn’t let go. He stayed inside the dragon and rose with it, his legs off the ground now, dangling down. In an instant I realized what their plan was: The little guy was going to ride the kite over the White House fence. He would operate the laser thing to jam the White House defense missiles, and detonate the bomb, or whatever they planned to do.
Unless I stopped him.
I still don’t totally believe what I did next. Later on I saw a video of it, taken on a phone by a guy at the kite festival, and if I do say so myself it was pretty impressive. I sped up, took two long steps, and dove forward like a football player making a tackle, and somehow I managed to get my arms around the little guy’s legs. He screamed something in Gadakistani—probably not “Nice to see you again”—and kicked hard with both feet. It hurt, but I hung on. That was the good news. The bad news was, the dragon kite was still rising.
It wasn’t rising as fast as before, and it was wobbling, but it wasn’t coming down. We were swooping across the Ellipse, with me holding on desperately, partly because I wanted to bring down the kite, but also because I didn’t want to fall to the ground. The little guy was yelling and kicking, and I felt myself slipping down his legs, until I was barely clinging to his ankles, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer.
Which was when I felt somebody grab me. I felt a pair of arms grab my legs, and the weight of another person pulling me down. Somehow I managed to keep my grip on the little guy’s legs. But the weight of two bodies hanging on to him was more than he could handle. Suddenly he screamed and fell out of the dragon. I guess I screamed too as the three of us crash-landed, the little guy in front of me, and me on top of the person who tackled me.
Guess who it was?
Here’s a hint: The first thing he gasped out, after we stopped tumbling on the grass, was “Thief!”
That’s right. Despite being Raptored by Suzana, he was still after his fare. Of all the taxis in Washington, I had managed to get into the one being driven by the world’s most determined lunatic. He was lying on the ground, looking pretty beat up, but he was not giving up.
“Where is my money?” he gasped.
“I’ll get you your money, okay?” I said, getting up. “Just wait a minute.”
At this point a bunch of things happened really fast.
First, the dragon came down. The big guy had seen me pull the little guy out of the kite, so he stopped running and brought the kite in for a landing near where the three of us fell. Then he started running toward us.
Also running toward us were Suzana, Matt, and Victor. Behind them a bunch of people were drifting toward us, because this was probably the most exciting thing that ever happened at a kite festival. I know I was excited. I felt like, for the first time in this whole insane class trip, I did something right. Suzana didn’t stop the Gadakistan guys. I did. I was feeling good. I was thinking maybe everything was going to be okay after all; maybe I was even going to be kind of a hero. The Kid Who Saved The White House. Maybe I would even get a medal!
This was assuming the big guy didn’t kill me first. He got to us in a hurry, but ran past me and knelt down next to the little guy, who was lying in the grass, moaning. They talked in Gadakistani, then the big guy stood up and came over to me and shouted, “You have broke his arm! His arm is broke!” His face was all red and sweaty, and he looked like he was going to pick me up, wring my neck, and punt my lifeless body over the Washington Monument, which I think he could probably do.
“Good!” said Suzana, arriving just in time.
The big man turned to her. “Good? Good? Why is good?”
“Because now you can’t blow up the White House.”
The big guy stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your kite, and the bomb you have in there.”
The big guy shook his head. “Is no bomb.”
“Then your missile. Or whatever you were planning to use.”
He was still shaking his head. “You are fools,” he said. “You are children. You do not know what you have done.”
“Well, we’ll see about that when the police get here,” said Suzana, pulling her phone out of her pocket.
“No!” said a voice. We looked over and saw Cameron running toward us, waving his arms. “Don’t call the police!”
“Why not?” she said.
“Because we had it totally wrong,” he said, puffing to a stop. “I tried to tell you on the phone but the battery died. I ran all the way here to tell you. We’re totally wrong!”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I pointed at the two Gadakistanis. “Aren’t these guys—”
“These are the good guys, Wyatt! The bad guys are at the White House right now, and they’re about to kill the president!”
We were gathered around Cameron—me, Suzana, Matt, and Victor, all of us totally confused, along with the big guy, who looked mad. He was still wearing a headset with a microphone. He had a miniature portable TV clipped to his belt, showing the C-SPAN broadcast of the White House press conference with the president and the Gadakistan leader, Brevalov. The little Gadakistani guy was still lying on the ground, moaning; his headset was on the ground next to him.
The lunatic taxi driver was sitting on the ground also not looking great, having now been both Raptored and landed upon. He was staring at me, but for the moment not saying anything. I think the big guy made him nervous. I wasn’t paying much attention to him, because like everybody else I was trying to follow what Cameron was saying.
What he told us was this:
After the Gadakistani guys captured him, he managed to make friends with them, and the reason—believe it or not—was Worm Wrangler, which is this phone game that has like seventeen thousand levels and is very addictive. The Gadakistanis—whose names were Woltar (big guy) and Lemi (little guy)—had discovered Worm Wrangler on Matt’s phone. They’d never seen it before, which tells you how backward Gadakistan must be, and they started playing it, and of course they got addicted. By the time Suzana and I rescued Matt and they captured Cameron, they were totally obsessed with it. But they were stuck on this one level (the one where the worm is attacked by vampire snails) and it was making them crazy because they couldn’t get past it. So they broke down and asked Cameron to help them, and fortunately he had beaten that level so he showed them what to do. They were really grateful, and that kind of broke the ice.
They told Cameron they were sorry about capturing him, and they would let him go soon, but they couldn’t risk having the police find them before they completed their mission. Cameron asked what the mission was, and they said they were members of the Dragon Head rebel group, and they’d been sent to save the U.S. president.
“That’s what they were trying to do just now when you guys showed up,” said Cameron. “They were trying to keep the president from being assassinated.”
“Assassinated by who
?” said Suzana.
“Brevalov,” said Cameron. He pointed at the little television, which was showing the press conference, with the president standing next to a guy with a beard. “Except that guy isn’t Brevalov. That’s a guy who had plastic surgery to look like Brevalov. He was sent here on a suicide assassination mission by the real Brevalov.”
“Why?” said Victor. “I thought Brevalov was friendly to the United States.”
“NO!” said the big guy, Woltar. “He pretends to like America, but he hates America. He is crazy. He wants to start war with America. He thinks many nations will join him. Crazy! We try to warn America, but nobody believes us. They think we are enemy. So we try to stop Brevalov. But now…” He pointed at Lemi, moaning on the ground. “Is no hope.”
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” said Suzana.
“Suzana,” said Cameron. “These are good guys. I believe them.”
“You hardly know them!” said Suzana. “Just because they played Candy—”
“Google picture of Brevalov,” interrupted Woltar.
“Why?” asked Suzana.
“Do it.”
Suzana got out her phone and tapped the screen. A few seconds later she had an image of a bearded guy. “Okay,” she said.
“Look at ear. On right side.”
Suzana spread her fingers to zoom in on the picture. I leaned over to see. His ear looked normal to me.
“What about his ear?” said Suzana.
Woltar unclipped the portable TV and handed it to her. “Now look at this man who says he is Brevalov.”
We all looked at the screen. It took a few seconds before they showed the bearded guy, but when they did, he turned to look left, and we could see his right ear clearly.
A little piece of the ear was missing. It wasn’t much, but it was clear: There was a V-shaped notch.
“Is not Brevalov,” said Woltar. “Is assassin.”
“Oh, man,” said Matt. “And we stopped these guys from stopping the assassin. We really screwed up.”
My stomach felt like it had a hole in it, because in fact I was the one who’d stopped them. Way to go, Wyatt! Way to go yet again, somehow, some way, manage to make everything even worse.
