The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Let’s start this private tour at the old Green Room,” suggested Randall. “I want to orient myself starting from the entrance to the so-called secret passage that ain’t so bloody secret, the famous Trap Door.”

  Farrell led them around the rear of the stage, where a wide and cavernous bay with a linoleum floor was stacked high with props, furniture, speakers, music stands, chairs, and other impedimenta. He pointed to the left. “That door there is a passageway under the stage itself, that leads into the orchestra pit,” he said.

  “Can we get a dekko?” asked Randall.

  “Wait a bit, until the camera moves away,” said Farrell, nodding up at the silvery metallic box with the red light on the wall, which was fanning the area. “That’s the only one in this backstage area, which is a bit of luck,” he said. “If you can keep your eye on it, and you can see when it hits the far left traverse and starts to swing back, there is an interval of about fifteen seconds when the far right of the backstage is out of vision, and vice versa. There’s usually enough junk piled up back here so someone who is nimble enough to dodge around and go to ground and hide when the camera swings onto them would be able to get across the entire floor here unseen. That the kind of thing you guys are looking for?”

  “The very thing,” replied Randall. The camera slowly swung away.

  “Now,” said Farrell. They moved quickly over to the door beneath the rear of the stage. Farrell shoved on the bar, the door opened, and they entered a small passageway with a linoleum-tiled floor and painted cinderblock walls, illuminated by dim fluorescent lighting.

  “No lock on the door?” asked Lockhart with interest.

  “No alarms either, now,” said Farrell. “They removed the lock on this side some years ago because the orchestra musicians and stagehands were constantly going back and forth, losing their key cards, and the alarm register was on a printout, so we’d use up a whole roll of paper almost during one rehearsal with all the swiping and alarm records. The employees and musicians were constantly complaining about having to swipe in on both ends, and so the company compromised and removed the lock and the alarm on this door to quit their bitching, and also to save some paper and records keeping in the control room. But the far end door, the one that actually goes into the orchestra pit, will be keycard-locked during the ceremony to prevent assorted weirdos from getting into the theater area and jumping in front of the cameras, although that end will not be alarmed. Want to get a look-see into the orchestra pit?”

  “Mmm, don’t think that will be necessary,” said Randall. “The plan doesn’t call for any Volunteer actually to enter the theater seating area or the lobby except possibly myself, when we figure out how to take down those cameras.”

  “That’s going to be a problem,” admitted Farrell. “They won’t even let me into the control room while the show’s running, even if I could figure out some way to explain being off my post. The control room is sealed from five-thirty on, when we go live. Nobody gets in or out except Marvin Hagerman, the company VP who will actually be running the show. I am damned if I can see any way to do it other than just plain smash into the control room and trash the place and everybody in it.”

  “Mmm, well, we’ll keep that as a last resort,” said Randall. “Let’s also leave that part of our tour for last. Where will you be on the night?”

  “In charge of the main entrance detail, the metal detectors, and so forth. Usually it’s a pretty good gig because you get to see all the celebs come in, although VIPs needless to say aren’t put through the metal detector. Pity we can’t get one of the stars to bring in some guns or explosives.” Lockhart and Randall looked at one another, but said nothing. “If you can work the front door in somehow, I’m your man, or if you need me somewhere else, I can try to make up some reason to switch off posts, or get somewhere I need to be, but it would be a bit iffy,” said the guard sergeant.

  “Got it,” said Randall. “In the meantime, it strikes me that this passageway here would be an ideal jumping-off point for when I yell lights, camera, action. You’ve worked an actual Oscar night here before?”

  “The last three,” said Farrell. “I was one of the guys who managed to drag Brittany Malloy’s butt-naked ass off the catwalk last year and stop her from jumping off. FYI, she wears falsies and she’s got needle tracks on her arm. I was also one of the guys who taped her mouth and dragged her through the Trap Door to the Royale, so I’m familiar with the Trap Door on both ends.”

  “Any Centurion people have the swipe card for it?” asked Randall.

  “There is one in the security control room, but it’s under lock and key in the arms locker, and it’s inserted in a slot that’s alarmed if someone tries to take it out,” said Farrell. “Only the shift commander has authorization to remove it. I don’t have occasion to use it in the normal course of my job, I’m not senior enough to get into the arms locker, and I don’t see any way I could extract it without getting caught.”

  “What else is in the arms locker?” asked Lockhart.

  “Five fully automatic M-16s with special BATFE permits, one thousand rounds of ammunition, eight sonic stun grenades, a tranquilizer rifle and three darts,” said Farrell.

  “A tranquilizer gun?” asked Randall in astonishment.

  “That’s for use when somebody has to be taken down, but they’re too valuable to the studios to shoot or tase,” said Farrell. “Usually some big star who’s stoned or drunk out of their mind, to the point where they’re completely out of control. We would have used it on the Malloy chick last year, but we were scared she’d fall off the catwalk and upstage the Best Picture presentation in every sense of the term. Her bra and panties raining down on stage was bad enough. If you’ve seen enough, let’s go.” Farrell peeped out of the door and watched the camera. “Now.” They moved swiftly across the floor and made it through an archway into a carpeted corridor before the camera swung around and caught them. “Okay, that’s the Green Room, or was up until this year,” said Farrell, pointing to two large double oaken doors. “It’s locked, and the doors are alarmed. It will be locked on the night as well, to make sure the celebs don’t sneak in there and start doing bad acts, but stay out front and be seen to behave like the studios want ’em to. There are no cameras in this hallway, though, which was to make sure the big shots could show their butts in privacy when there was a Green Room. The Trap Door is here.” He led them down a short side corridor and showed them the steel door, with a blinking red electronic box of black steel. “There’s the swipe lock.”

  “It’s locked now?” asked Lockhart.

  “Yes,” said Farrell.

  “Right,” said Randall. “So let’s assume we’ve got our team this far, and we’re inside the building. Show me how to get from here back to that orchestra pit passageway unobserved.” Farrell retraced their steps back to the open archway that gave into backstage.

  “The camera is right above this entrance,” he said. “All you have to do is lean out a bit and look up, and since you’re directly under the camera, you won’t be seen. And . . . now!” They easily made it back to the passage under the stage and inside the corridor before the camera swung back.

  “That was no problem, but what if there are people back here on the night who see our guys?” asked Lockhart.

  “There shouldn’t be,” said Farrell. “One of our security procedures is that during the actual ceremonies, after the opening number, this area is off limits. The dressing rooms for the dancers and revue talent are one floor down in the basement, and they’re soundproofed. We don’t let anybody get this close to the stage during the ceremonies themselves, and if we see any gate-crashers or drunks on the cameras we come back here and hustle them out before they can do anything that disrupts things, or start yelling obscenities that can be heard onstage, or anything like that.”

  “No guards back here?” asked Randall.

  “There will be a man on the catwalks, but he will be watching the stage and the audience, and also
the access doors up there to make sure we don’t have any more Brittany Malloy incidents,” said Farrell. “He won’t be looking down here at all and could only see the back part of backstage anyway, even if he leaned over. Make sure you stick close along the rear curtain here, and he won’t be able to see you even if he’s looking this way.”

  “If there’s anyone down here, and they see the team gaining entry, then they’re SOL. That’s what silencers are for,” said Randall grimly. “Now we need to do a walk up to the third floor corridor and those projection booths. Which way?”

  “Stairwells on either side of the backstage,” said Farrell. “Remember, the theater itself is in an oval shape, and the corridors leading from each of those stairwells to the projection booths are pretty much identical on both sides of the building, north and south. Okay, camera’s to the left, now.” They left the corridor. “I need to warn you that there are cameras in the stairwells and in the corridors, and we’re going to be seen. Like I said, those two mopes in the control room probably won’t take any notice since I’m with you, but you need to kind of act like air conditioning mechanics if we meet anybody.”

  They met no one. They got to the third floor, turned right down the plum-carpeted hall, and reached the short side corridor leading to the north wall projection booth. “Can I get inside this booth?” asked Lockhart as they ducked down the hall.

  “I figured you might want to, and so I disarmed the locks and alarms on both of them before you guys came in tonight,” said Farrell.

  “Good man!” said Randall approvingly. Farrell opened the door and they entered a larger room than they had expected.

  “The projector is in the retracted position now,” said Farrell, pointing to a massive machine on a wheeled caisson. “On the night it will be forward and the lens sticking out that bay there. You’ll have to move it back.”

  “Mmmm, maybe not,” said Cat. “Actually, I think I can take the right side and my partner the left, and it will serve as extra cover against return fire coming from the theater floor.” He peeped cautiously down onto the floor and saw a gang of Mexican laborers setting up the tables in the VIP area right in front of the orchestra pit. “Oh, this is going to be choice!” said Lockhart enthusiastically. “Beautiful! The other rifleman and myself are going to have to use open sights, because we’ll be breaking down our weapons to get them inside the hotel, and the telescopic sights would lose zero and throw our aim off, but at this range we won’t need them. Kentucky windage is all we’ll need. That’s what, maybe a hundred feet to the near edge of the kill zone and two hundred to the far side, a hundred and thirty or forty feet to the stage itself? Good angle, high enough for visibility but not so sharp as to make us lean forward and out and expose ourselves unduly, like we’d have to if we were in those private boxes. Good clear shot at most of the south wall boxes as well, and Ron will have the same vantage point over there for the boxes on the north wall.”

  “One guard sitting outside the door of each booth?” queried Randall.

  “Right. And one projectionist inside,” Farrell told them.

  “Cat, the main surprise requirement is for you guys to get up here fast enough once I yell go, before anyone can call those guards on their radio and let them know something’s hitting the fan, giving them time to draw their weapons and maybe alert the audience and get our targets to start dropping down or moving or taking evasive action,” Randall pointed out. “That’s why we can’t afford to have the fire teams seen on the closed-circuit monitors.”

  “Some good news, though,” said Farrell. “They’ve changed procedure a bit and those key cards I gave you will now work on the projection booths. You won’t have to take one off the guard, dead or otherwise. By the way, according to the assignment sheet there will be niggers on both doors. One of them is just a fat lazy slob whose weapon probably isn’t even in firing order. The other is a big Haitian with filed teeth who’s a violent psychopath, and whom Centurion usually uses for intimidation type jobs and head knocking. They didn’t dare deny him work on Oscar night and the overtime and the bonus that goes with it, since he’s just the type that might go and shoot up the head office, but they’re trying to keep him out of sight and away from the celebs in case he breaks bad. Neither of them will be missed. I said your key cards will work, but that’s unless something spooks the contract supervisor or the client before then, some last minute threat or warning from the cops or DHS, and they change all the encryption and issue new cards, in which case we’re up shit creek,” he concluded.

  “Cross your fingers on that, mate,” said Randall. “So far we haven’t picked up on so much as a whisper that they even know the NVA is in town.”

  Farrell nodded. “If they had, you’d better believe they would be going batshit right now. They’d either cancel the Awards ceremonies or seal this place up so tight a fly couldn’t get in.”

  “Right. I’m starting to get the germ of an idea here,” said Randall. “The plans you scammed for us show some kind of heating and A/C access area behind the control room. Can we get down there now?”

  Farrell led them out the door, turned right, then down the hall and into another stairwell. Three floors down there was another hallway, where Farrell turned left. “No need to avoid the cameras,” he said. “This place we’re going is called the first floor interstitial area, and there’s all kinds of ducts and air pumps in there. There’s four of them in the building to control the ventilation system. It won’t look unusual for air conditioning mechanics to be going in there.”

  Inside the interstitial the floors were unpolished planks, the walls were padded with pink fiberglass insulation, and there was a steady roar from the tangled skein of large square aluminum ducts. “No cameras?” asked Lockhart.

  “Nope,” said Farrell. “Just in the corridor outside.”

  “Good,” said Randall.

  “But I think I know what you’re looking for, Digger, and it’s not in here,” said Farrell. “You’re hoping for a circuit box of some kind, right? No such luck. The electrical system for the control room doesn’t come in here at all. It’s hooked into the main comm and power cables in a junction box under the floor of the control room itself. Believe me, I’ve had my eye out for any way we could cut a cable or a circuit breaker or something, once we figured out which one to cut, and disable some or all of those cameras. But it’s not in here. Just the air ducts.”

  “Right, just the air ducts,” agreed Randall. He looked over on the wall where a series of blueprints were mounted on a corkboard for the convenience of the building engineers and A/C mechanics. “Mighty nice of ’em to leave this out here for us, eh?” He studied the schematic for several minutes. “So, what it boils down to is this. We can’t figure out any way to disable the security camera system either completely or partially. There’s no cable we can conveniently cut, at least none we know where to find. The individual cameras are set so high and inaccessible that disabling each one separately would be too slow and cumbersome, and would tip the guards off too early that something was up, and they’d be reacting before our blokes can get into position. That about sum it up?”

  “That’s it,” agreed Lockhart.

  “So if we can’t take out the cameras themselves, we take out the blokes watching ’em on the telly,” said Randall. He moved along one wall and found one of the air ducts, a big one about four feet square. He checked a number plate bolted into the sheeting, then went back to the blueprint on the wall and checked that. He went back to the duct and leaned over to examine an intake grill about eighteen by twenty-four inches. “Simple Phillips head screws. Right, that’s how we do it. If that plan over there is accurate, this duct feeds air conditioning into the security control room. I get in here, and you six get into place in the jumping-off point in that little passage below the stage by 6:48 PM. I unscrew this plate, pop two or three CS tear gas grenades inside, and within a matter of seconds every Centurion guard in the control room will be bolting through the door. Do they
have any gas masks inside, Comrade Farrell?”

  “There are three or four, I think, in the arms locker,” said Farrell. “To which only the site supervisor has the necessary access code on his swipe card, which on the night will be that operations VP I mentioned. You say 6:48?”

  “Or thereabouts,” said Randall. “During the Best Screenplay presentation. We start our move when the presentation gets going, take out the guards, get into the booth and cover down, and as the faggots begin their acceptance speech, we start blasting.”

  “How do you know who’s going to win?” asked Farrell curiously.

  “Apparently these two bugger boys are going to get it because there’s an affirmative action quota for queers and it’s their turn this year,” said Randall. “According to our source, it’s pretty common knowledge. But who ever wins, that’s the presentation where we re-write the script in red ink.”

  “Okay, so if Hagerman is in the control room then, just before 6:48 I’ll find some excuse to call him out to the front entrance,” said Farrell. “When your gas hits, the only man who can get into the locker with not only the gas masks but the heavy weapons will be out of the control room. They’ll have to beat feet out of there. Some of the gas will seep out into the lobby and into the restaurant and bar, and raise hell with all the various paparazzi, drivers and bits and pieces of entourage who hang out there during the ceremonies because they can’t get a seat. There will be so much confusion they won’t know what’s going on until the shooting starts. The doors to the theater itself are closed during the presentations, and they’re soundproofed so people in the audience can hear the opera or whatever is playing without interference. By the time any gas gets into the theater area or anyone notices anything going on behind them in the lobby, you guys should already have begun your hebe harvest.”