Aim True, My Brothers

by William F. Brown

  On the television screen, President Wagner had just stepped up to podium, smiling and waving to the crowd. The last few dignitaries took their seats in the rows behind him, and the band went into its final flourish. Now! Al-Bari thought as he turned toward the bench and the first mortar shell. Wagner put his hand on the podium and adjusted the microphone. Now, Al-Bari exulted! The time has come for my revenge.

  Barnett was only partway there, when the rear door of the camper suddenly flew open and a dark, bare-chested man leaped out the door. He was screaming at them, legs spread and knees bent as he dropped into a solid firing position with a short, black MP-5 submachine gun in his hands. He held it at waist level, pivoted, and began shooting. Before Barnett could react, Frank Daniels staggered forward and fell on the gravel, as the stones around him were kicked up by a hail of bullets.

  With Barnett’s long strides, he was past Daniels’s limp form before he could return fire and the distance was closing rapidly. In that split second, Barnett recognized the man at the door of the camper from his photograph. It was the missing Egyptian Embassy clerk, Hafez Arazi. Well, clerk or not, the man had a submachine gun in his hands and he looked like he knew how to use it. Barnett was on the move, however, running fast, and he had the advantage of shooting at a stationary target. Their eyes met in mutual terror, but Barnett already had his Uzi pointed at Arazi, while the Arab was still turning. Short bursts, hell, Barnett thought. That guy’s trying to kill me! Barnett pulled his trigger first and his Uzi was set on full automatic. Such was the fine line between living and dying. The chattering stream from Barnett’s Uzi struck first. It stitched a red line across the Arab’s bare chest and slammed him backward into the camper’s doorway, his finger still on his trigger.

  Unfortunately, Barnett never saw his target go down. As his own bullets struck, a series of hammer blows from Arazi’s gun knocked his own legs out from under him. It was like running full speed into a knee-high brick wall, Barnett later thought. He flew forward and tumbled through the air; rolling, sprawling, and puzzled as to why his body was doing this to him. Like slipping on a banana peel, how stupid was it to fall down now? He crashed to the ground like a broken doll and rolled into a drainage ditch. He found himself face down in the mud, hands and face cut and scraped by the gravel, dazed. I must get up, he thought. I must get up and stop them! Raising his head, he saw the camper was still a hundred feet away, and it might as well be on the other side of the moon.

  As Al-Bari watched the television set above his head, the scene on the reviewing stand suddenly turned to bedlam. Almost in unison, the Secret Service agents around the podium reached for their earpieces and seemed to bristle. Two of them rushed forward, lifted the President by his arms, and began running off the platform with him between them. Behind them, the first rows of dignitaries rose and began heading for the exit stairs themselves, some walking, some running, and some ignoring the stairs altogether and jumping to the ground.

  The TV screen immediately panned out and focused on Louise Taylor, who stood at the rear of the seating area, listening to her earpiece. The studio anchorman’s voice came on, puzzled. “Louise, do you have any idea what is happening down there? It looks to us like they are evacuating the stands.”

  “That’s exactly what is happening, Peter, but no one has…” Louise began to say as a fat man in a rumpled blue suit dashed in, threw her over his shoulder, and ran off camera.

  “Louise? Louise?” Peter kept calling to her, but got no reply.

  From his pilot’s seat, Kamal Bashari watched the scene unfold through the helicopter’s Plexiglas wind screen. Still holding onto the cyclic and collective controls, he tried in vain to shout a warning before Daniels went down, but that was hopeless. Worse, the windscreen of the Jet Ranger shattered as a fresh burst of bullets meant for Barnett missed, but hit the helicopter. Suddenly punched back into his pilot’s seat, Kamal looked down to see two neat, red holes in his chest, and shook his head. He groaned as he covered the wounds with his hand. Surprised and shocked, he felt blood begin to pump between his fingers and flow down his shirt. After all the combat he had seen in the Egyptian Army against insurgents along the Sudanese border, radicals from the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamists in the Sinai and the Nile River valley, not to mention numerous attempts on the Ambassador’s life, how fair was it for a man like him to die like this in an infidel country?

  Barnett looked up to see the first gunman, Arazi, in a heap in front of the door and he was not moving. That was when a second man appeared in the rear doorway. It was Ibrahim Al-Bari, but the scene in front of him was turning hazy. Barnett raised his hand and wiped his eyes. Looking around, he saw his Uzi lying fifteen feet away. Got to get it, he thought, but his legs would not move. Rolling onto his side, he looked down and saw three red stains on his right leg. Blood? There was no pain, but could he have been shot? He laid his head back down on the ground and chuckled. Well, that was a lot better than being clumsy. Looking back up at the camper, the haze began to clear. Al-Bari moved. Behind him, Barnett saw the mortar; and Al-Bari was moving toward it! Got to stop him, Barnett swore with a new determination.

  That was when he remembered he had fallen on a heavy lump in his jacket pocket. Reaching inside, he got a firm grip on the hand grenade and brought it up in front of his face. He raised his head and pulled out the pin. Rolling onto his left side, he took a deep breath and hurled it as far as he could with his fading strength. It flew through the air — a tumbling black dot against the blue sky.

  Ibrahim Al-Bari ignored the chatter of gunfire outside and concentrated on the television screens. Panic had now seized the reviewing stand. The fear was immediately picked up by the much larger crowd sitting in the chairs in front of them. This was the moment he had been waiting for. The Palestinian saw the Secret Service agents — those arrogant young men wearing the sunglasses and hearing aids, as if they were fooling anyone — running, carrying Wagner at a full speed off the reviewing stand. Too late, he laughed as he picked up the first big mortar shell. You cannot run far enough or fast enough to escape my vengeance now!

  Barnett watched the hand grenade land on the gravel, bounce a few times, and roll to a stop a good ten feet short and to the right of the camper’s rear door. He wanted to scream, but for a long second all he could do was stare helplessly as the grenade lay there. Suddenly the small black ball erupted in a blinding flash that shook the ground beneath him.

  Lifting the shell with both hands, Al-Bari had just turned toward the mortar tube when the jarring explosion from Barnett’s hand grenade rocked the camper. He was thrown off balance and sent sprawling backward. The mortar shell slipped from his hand, bounced on the floor, and rolled out the back door as he fell heavily to the floor. His head struck the corner of one of the new cabinets. Dazed, he picked himself up and blinked to clear his vision. Reaching down again, he picked up another shell from the side bench. “You are too late,” Al-Bari laughed aloud at them. “Allahu Akbar! God is great and you are all too late!” he shouted as he lifted the shell toward the muzzle of the mortar.

  Looking up as the smoke cleared, Barnett saw the white camper’s rear end had been dented and peppered by the explosion and shrapnel, but it was still there and so was Ibrahim Al-Bari. The grenade had knocked the Palestinian down and bloodied him; but the man got up, looked back through the rear door at Barnett with angry eyes, and turned back toward the mortar.

  Kamal heard Barnett’s hand grenade explode, and looked up. The scene before him was becoming a dark blur, but he saw the grenade had fallen well short. The explosion may have rocked the camper, but it had not really damaged it. Through the open rear door, he could see a man standing by the mortar tube once again. It was that bastard Ibrahim Al-Bari with a mortar round in his hands. The man was going to win. He was going to drop the round down the tube and fire the mortar. That shell would probably kill not only the American President — whose life meant absolutely nothing to Kamal Bashari — but it could also kill Ambassador Fawzi —
whose life meant a great deal to him.

  That made Kamal’s decision surprisingly easy. In two well-practiced movements, he opened the helicopter’s throttle to maximum rpm, pushed the cyclic stick forward and pulled up on the collective. The tail section rose and the helicopter shot forward, hugging the ground and charging straight at the camper, nose down and tail high like an angry scorpion.

  Eddie Barnett also saw Ibrahim Al-Bari through the camper’s rear door, still alive and very much in control, picking up another mortar round. That was when Barnett remembered the inconsequential 38-caliber snub-nose police revolver in the holster under his left arm. He rolled onto his side, pulled it out, and pointed it toward the open door of the camper. The doorway was a hundred feet or more away, well beyond the range at which one could reasonably expect to hit anything with the small street gun. Still, Eddie was a decent shot and a .38 slug carried a wallop if he was lucky. Besides, what choice was there? He pulled the trigger and kept pulling it until the hammer came down on empty cylinders. Barnett groaned and then collapsed back into the ditch with the sure knowledge that he had failed. All the weeks of work, the deaths, and now the pain had been for nothing. In the last brief second before everything went black, Eddie heard a deafening, thumping roar pass directly over him, pelting him with stones and dirt, but he was past caring as he passed out.

  Across the river at the Secret Service field headquarters, they heard what was clearly the chatter of automatic weapon fire and breaking glass, followed by a sharp explosion on the radio. “What was that? What’s going on, Hastings?” Marchetti shouted, turning to look from face to face, seemingly incapable of understanding. “Hastings, what’s going on?” The gunfire stopped as suddenly as it started, overtaken by an eerie quiet as the loudspeaker fell silent.

  A few seconds later, they heard a chant softly begin, “Allahu Akbar. Basmillah Al-Rahman…”followed by harsh, bronchial coughing and the sudden roar of a large engine.

  “It’s a radio,” Hastings answered. “Somebody left his microphone open.”

  “Who? Who the hell is that?”

  Marchetti stared at the speaker again, “Allaahumma Inee. Allaahumma Inee As a Luka Bi-Ismika,” they heard, until it was drowned out by the loud roar of an accelerating helicopter engine, a violent crash, and a loud explosion. Then, the pilot’s microphone went dead and the loudspeaker suddenly fell silent.

  “Who is that?” Hastings asked, as he stepped to the window and looked east toward the York River and the Gloucester shore beyond.

  “It is three very brave men who just did your job for you, you pompous ass!” Hastings told him.

  Ibrahim Al-Bari saw movement from the corner of his eye, and he could not help himself. His eyes turned and his head followed as he found himself staring out the camper’s open rear door at a huge, red and white object hurtling at him, blades flashing in the sunlight, accompanied by the rapidly accelerating roar of a turbine engine. They might kill him, he thought, but they were too late to stop him. The helicopter bore in on him with its nose down and tail high, attacking like an avenging angel, but it could never get there in time to stop him from firing the shell. This day was his! With the mortar shell in his right hand, the fingers on his left hand found the mouth of the mortar tube. “Yes!” he screamed.

  He raised the shell higher and was about to drop it, when a 38-caliber bullet caught him in the right shoulder, spun him around, and dropped him to his knees. The heavy mortar shell fell from his hand onto the floor. “No! No!” He had failed on that empty road in Northern Israel, but he would not fail again. Ignoring the pain, he reached down with his left hand and picked up the mortar shell again. “No!” he screamed as the pitch of the helicopter’s engine reached a crescendo. He got the base of the shell inserted into the mortar tube and let it drop just as the hellish apparition of the onrushing helicopter filled the doorway. Smiling, he saw the shell disappear down the barrel. Allahu Akbar! God is great! Allah was on his side, he knew; and Allah would never let him fail, not here and not now.

  But he was wrong. He was the one who was too late! A second too late.

  The helicopter’s rotor blades slashed through the thin body panels on the side and rear of the camper as if they were made of paper. They ripped the roof open and struck the mortar tube, knocking it sideways just as the shell fired. At over a hundred miles per hour, the nose bubble of the machine crashed through what had been the rear doorway like a giant snowplow. For that long, eternal second, Ibrahim Al-Bari could look directly through the helicopter’s shattered Plexiglas windscreen at the pilot, now only a few feet away. For that brief moment, he knew he was looking into the face of God. Carried on by its own momentum, the heavy helicopter smashed into him and the mortar tube, tearing it loose from the floor mountings, and smashing everything into the camper’s forward bulkhead.

  As the helicopter hit the solid supports of the truck chassis, the force knocked the vehicle thirty feet forward into the line of trees. The four jacks underneath the camper dug deep furrows into the ground until the nose of the helicopter stopped and the tail section carried on, propelled by its own momentum upward and over, flipping the long body of the machine onto its back, where it crashed down on what was left of the camper and the truck. The tangled wreckage lay there for a brief second before it was blown apart in a series of explosions. The heat from the exploding gas tanks detonated the remaining mortar shells one at a time, creating a spectacular show of orange and black fireballs as flaming aviation gas and body parts shot upward toward the deck of the bridge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Yorktown, Friday, October 19, 2:30 pm

  Returning to the podium almost thirty minutes later, President Wagner paused until the large crowd slowly returned to their seats and settled down. He saw that most of the faces were looking up at him again, hopeful, loyal, and confused, relying on him to make some sense of it all. He waved and tried to smile, as he looked around, focusing on individual people to establish some degree of personal contact, as they taught him to do. Smile, he thought, as he tried to remember where he was in his speech. Unfortunately, it was impossible to put the shocking events on the other side of the river out of his mind. If the audience in front of him knew what had really happened, they would not get it out of their minds, either.

  “I am very sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen,” Wagner said in a confident, reassuring voice. “I am told there was a serious airplane accident just across the river, but it appears everything is under control now.” As with most of the others in the crowd, he could still see a column of oily black smoke rising above Gloucester Point. They had just rushed him off the podium the first time when a blinding flash and a series of sharp explosions threw chunks of dirt, tree branches, and metal into the air, followed by a large orange and black fireball. The explosions went on for the better part of a minute, even shaking the ground on this side of the river. An airplane accident? To the President, it sounded more like an artillery barrage, and it would to anyone else in the crowd who had served in the Army. Fortunately, that never included any of the pool of White House reporters who had made the trip. Sooner or later, even those dumb asses would figure out that his story was bogus. Hopefully, he would be long gone from here by then, and his Press Secretary could sword fight with the bastards. The press! They were never told the truth, because they wouldn’t recognize it if it stepped on their toes. Take the Middle East — it was too complicated for their one-liners and ‘news at 6:00’ sound bites, so dealing with reporters was one part of the job from which Wagner took little pleasure.

  Focusing on the crowd once more, he said, “Naturally, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the emergency services people who are across the river at this moment working the accident scene. Under the circumstances, I’m sure you can understand the reasons for our brief delay.” Wagner realized his hand trembled slightly as he flipped the cover of his folder and let his eyes scan the crowd again. “Turning now to the substance of my remarks th
is afternoon, the time has come to discuss a subject which is as critical to our nation’s future today as the victory here at Yorktown was to our Founding Fathers…”

  Eddie Barnett groaned, licked his parched lips, and frowned. Slowly, the brain was regaining consciousness, but the body knew best and fought hard against it. The body had grown accustomed to lying here in bed all safe, warm, and comfortable. Waking up would mean remembering, and remembering would bring back all the pain.

  “It looks like the sedative is wearing off,” he heard a woman’s voice say. ‘He should be coming out of it fairly soon now.” The words sounded far away, echoing, as if they were coming from the other end of a long tunnel, and they did not register. To him they were background noise, like a radio or TV set playing quietly in another room, and the words had nothing to do with him. Whether he liked it or not though, he was waking up. The space around him in the great unknown outside his closed eyelids grew successively brighter. He fought against it, but one of his eyes finally opened, against his will. Traitor! Traitor! His body screamed and just as quickly, the eye slammed shut again with the painful awareness that it was looking up into the bright sunlight, which was streaming in through the open window next to his bed.