The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  Brewer leaned forward. “However, comrades, this year things are going to be different. There won’t be a Green Room, and a lot of the celebs are really in a snit about it.”

  “What happened?” asked Christina.

  “The fact is that this town and its celebrity denizens are getting even more coarse and out of control every year, if that’s possible,” Brewer explained. “A lot of the so-called hot stars of today are like most young white people, overgrown adolescents who don’t quite seem ever to have come back from spring break in Florida or Cancun, and who behave accordingly. Add way too much money, way too much ego, booze and cocaine and designer drugs into the mix, and it gets really risky letting some of these bozos in front of a live mike and a camera. I’m sure you catch enough TV or news to know that in the past few years there have been a number of bizarre incidents at the Academy Awards?”

  “I caught it when Brooke Barbour flashed her tits last year,” said Randall.

  “Yeah, and then that sterling Affikin-Amurkin Darnell Washington came out on stage coked out of his gourd, gabbled like a fool into the mike for five minutes of non-stop gibberish, and pantomimed wiping his ass with the envelope for Best Director when it was handed to him,” laughed Lee Washburn.

  “Oh, last year was a hoot,” said Brewer with a chuckle. “In addition to those two incidents, Jennifer Alison got into a screaming match in the Green Room with that damned half-breed Antonia Jardine over the husband-stealing thing, and Jen knocked her winding with a right hook. Toni had a noticeable shiner just coming out when she accepted Best Actress. Paul Warren was so drunk he could barely stand up, and he couldn’t even read the teleprompter to present Best Screenplay. Manny Weinstein was so razzed and hyper on his little blue pills that his acceptance speech for Special Recognition for service to Israel consisted of a long rant accusing his neighbor in Malibu of being an anti-Semite and Arab spy. I think the guy was Polish and he was an accountant or something, but Homeland Security arrested him anyway the next day. Some paparazzi with a video cam got into the Green Room men’s room and found two nominated directors performing a deviate sexual act in one of the stalls, and managed to get out of the building with the disc even with a security guard’s bullet in his leg. That footage ended up on the internet, of course. And finally, Brittany Malloy was so nervous about her Best Supporting Actress nomination that when she hit the Green Room she knocked back most of a bottle of Bacardi. Then when she didn’t win, she ran up into the catwalks, and somehow she got over the stage, screaming she was going to kill herself. The guards tried to catch her, and then she decided it was funny, so as the guards chased her around the catwalks she started taking off her clothes. The last part of the broadcast had this deranged cackling laughter floating down from above, as well as this rain of female apparel down to her black lace panties drifting down onto the stage while the awards were being presented, and the winners making their acceptance speeches. Yeah, last year was pretty surreal.”

  “Bet the ratings were good, though,” suggested Hill.

  “The best in ten years,” agreed Brewer. “Barbour flashed her rack early enough in the proceedings for the word to get around, and people started changing the channel to the Academy Awards. But the Academy and the studio heads have decided they’ve had enough of these doped and drunken shenanigans coming out of the Green Room, and this year they’re giving their egotistical protégés a rap on the knuckles in an effort to get them to stay sober long enough to accept their victory or defeat with becoming grace, and not make complete horse’s asses out of themselves. This year, they’ve had the management of the Kodak remove the first twelve rows of seats in front of the orchestra pit, and they’ve set up a kind of sidewalk café arrangement where the nominated and the celebrated can sit at these nice big round tables and be served by waiters with posh and civilized refreshments like little ladies and gents. They can sip champagne and nosh on shrimp salad and caviar and Brie and such, while they sit through the opening dance number and applaud the earlier awards while pretending to give a damn, which is part of their punishment. The theory is that while they’re in view of the audience and the television crews they won’t do lines of coke, knock back vodka like a Russian lumberjack, belt one another in the kisser or perform Levantine deviations on the tablecloth. Hopefully not, anyway.”

  “What you’re saying is that all the serious glitterati will be sitting right out in the open, exposed to our gunfire?” said Cat-Eyes Lockhart.

  “You got it,” said Brewer, grinning back at him merrily. “Fortune does indeed favor the brave, it would seem.”

  “Now, you said you’d gotten hold of the enemy security procedure manual?” asked Hill.

  “Our man at Centurion came through,” said Brewer with a nod. “He was able to get onto the Oscar night detail, so we’ll have at least one inside man. Didn’t take too much doing, since the Motion Picture Academy is Centurion’s biggest client and the annual awards their biggest moneymaker. They’re canceling all vacations and putting everybody, his kid brother, and his dog on duty at the Kodak.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can lose ’em this big contract next year,” chuckled Randall.

  “Our guy was able to photocopy the Centurion operations plan, at some risk to himself, and e-fax it to one of our secure computers. I printed out four copies, and we can make more if needed,” said Brewer, handing Hill a binder notebook with about sixty pages in it.

  “Pardon me as a Nervous Nellie, but that e-mail address can’t be traced back to you, can it?” asked Hill anxiously.

  “No, not unless I was under physical surveillance and seen going into this place, which I am positive I wasn’t,” Brewer told him. “I’m sure if the feds or the L.A. blues had the slightest whiff of suspicion about me, I would have disappeared or at least been picked up and grilled before this.”

  “Okay. But we need this guy in Centurion and we need you, so make sure you both stay as clean as you can. Keep contact to a minimum, I’m sure you can figure out the drill. Right, let’s take a look,” said Hill. He rapidly turned the pages. “Jesus! Seventy Centurion rent-a-cops, ten LAPD uniforms, ten plainclothes renters, five plainclothes city dicks, plus over a hundred LAPD outside for traffic control and perimeter security! That’s almost two hundred armed men!”

  “Not to mention a passel of impeccably-suited private bodyguards and goons in the entourages of the stars and the big cheeses, all packing legal and heavy with full permits,” said Brewer. “You boys can expect some return fire.”

  “Metal detectors, okay, that I would expect,” said Hill.

  “On every single entrance to the theater down to the basement, without exception, upstairs, downstairs, all around the town,” added Brewer.

  “Sniffer dogs! Shit!” exclaimed Hill.

  “Both drug and explosive,” said Brewer. “The theater will be swept from top to bottom twice, with dogs and electronic sensors, once in the morning and once half an hour before curtain. And to top it all off, closed-circuit TV and fiber-optic surveillance over every square inch of the interior. You’re lucky they’re not expecting trouble.”

  “Could’ve fooled me,” grunted Charlie Randall.

  “No, really, you have to remember that this is Los Angeles, and for Los Angeles this is normal,” said Brewer. “At the top you’ve got some of the wealthiest and most powerful Beautiful People in the world, men and women who make and spend millions every day and who live in a world and in a way that is simply beyond the comprehension of the rest of humanity. But this élite exists in a massive cesspool of some of the most grinding poverty and the dirtiest, most criminal people on earth. It’s like someone built the Taj Mahal right in the middle of the Calcutta city dump. These glitterati live and move and work within this shitpit of a city every day, and they have gotten the mechanics of protecting themselves, their possessions, and their lifestyle down to a fine art. All this security will be on the lookout for gang-bangers, pickpockets and sneak thieves, muggers, serial rapists out to
do Debbie, crazed fans stalking the objects of their obsession, weirded-out fanatics who want to seize the microphone on stage and tell everybody that the space aliens are coming to take us all away to our new home in the Crab Nebula, and above all else, those hated paparazzi who make their parasitic living off these celebrities. You have to realize that we will not be the only people who are trying to sneak into the Kodak Theater on the night; those guards will have their hands full with the everyday madness of life in this place, believe me.”

  Hill sighed. “Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us, then. The problem of attacking a position like this can be divided into three parts. The first part is breaching the enemy security perimeter, either by stealth or by force.”

  “You mean we just get as close as we can to the doors, and then we come in smoking?” asked Christina.

  “We could do something like that, yes,” agreed Hill. “But there are several problems with that approach. First off, we want a quality bag, not just quantity. We’re not out to shoot down security guards and hangers-on in the lobby. I want this to be as surgical as we can make it, and take out as many major influentials as we can, crippling the Dream Machine by decapitating its leadership and management. I don’t just want all these glitterati shitting in their pants when they hear machine guns as their bodyguards are hustling them out the emergency exits, I want them on the floor bleeding. A second objection is that it’s a sloppy way to do things, and it will look sloppy to the public. I want everyone impressed and stunned by our planning and our stealth and our steely nerve as we creep up on these creeps. And what kind of casualties can we ourselves plan on for a frontal assault like that? 30 percent? 50 percent? More? We have twenty-four of the finest men and women in the NVA down here, and more coming. They are coming here to do a job, to cripple this deadly weapon and knock it out of ZOG’s hand, and if we waste the lives of our bravest and best in some kind of wild kamikaze charge we’re not only betraying their trust, we are compromising our mission.”

  “I agree,” said Randall with a nod. “I’m jealous of every drop of white blood that gets spilled in this war. Not one Volunteer life lost unnecessarily is acceptable. Not only is it wrong, it’s dangerous. The enemy can trade us a hundred lives to one and still come out on top, and we need to remember that.”

  “So we need to find some way to get in there and get our gunners in place by stealth, then open up when we can maximize the damage,” said Christina.

  “You got it,” said Hill.

  “You’re determined to use guns and not a bomb?” asked Brewer.

  “Yes, for psychological and practical reasons,” said Hill. “A bomb big enough to bring down the house, literally, would have to be very carefully placed in advance, in just the right spot, and we probably can’t do that under these conditions. We’d have almost no chance of getting a charge that big through the security, properly placed, and primed in the half hour between the sniffer dog check and the opening curtain. There are going to be too many cameras and too many people wandering around all over the building. We need to find some way to get our men in place, and then once they’re set, we need to go ahead and open up. The longer we wait, the more chance there is that someone will see something on a security camera or somebody will stumble on one of the firing positions and see guns and masks.”

  “How many men would you suggest I take inside?” asked Randall.

  “Yourself and six others,” said Hill. “Two riflemen, two grenadiers, and two full-auto cover men. I would suggest two teams of a rifle, a grenade man, and a machine gunner each, with yourself floating where needed.”

  “Our man inside Centurion says he’s also ready to help if the opportunity arises,” put in The Talented Mr. Ripley. “There’s nothing like guarding these people to make a normal man hate their guts.”

  “Cat, you long ago got the envelope for Best Sniper,” said Hill. “Who do you nominate for Best Supporting Marksman in a Ballistic Role?”

  “Ron Kolchak,” said Lockhart without hesitation.

  “Gauss and Jimmy here for the machine gunners,” suggested Randall.

  “Agreed,” said Hill. “That leaves grenadiers. After they’ve thrown their grenades, they will cover the snipers and support the machine gun men with short arms of some kind, an Uzi or a Tek-9, something like that.”

  “I’d like to go, sir,” said Christina.

  “No,” said Hill. “You’re doing too important a job for the Task Force, Chris. We need you where you are.”

  “It’s no reflection at all on your courage, comrade,” Randall told her. “No one who knows where you’ve been for the past two years would ever question that. But you have to understand that there’s every chance that some or all of us may not be coming back from this one, and that includes me. You’re part of our Trouble Trio, and we can’t risk losing any more than one of us at once. Losing two, or God forbid even three of us would cripple the task force. The Volunteers are scattered all over this huge area and don’t even know how to locate or communicate with the other teams. That’s why neither you nor I nor Lieutenant Hill can go on any combat missions together.”

  “Chris, if you want to make your bones in the traditional way, I’ll make sure it happens while we’re down here,” Hill assured her. “You have my word. Lee, do you want one of the grenadier slots?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Washburn. “Thank you.”

  “One more,” said Randall.

  “Kicky McGee,” said Christina. “This is a historic hit, and I’d like for us Volunteer girls to have at least some token estrogen involved. Besides, you might need a couple for something. That okay with you, Jim?”

  “It’s not up to me, but Kick’s good for it,” agreed Wingo.

  “Okay, she’s in,” said Hill.

  “Uh, you still haven’t told us how you plan on getting this team inside and into position, Lieutenant,” Brewer reminded him gently.

  “So I haven’t,” agreed Hill. He studied the map. “I’d like to know exactly where they’re going first, and then let’s try to figure out how to get them there. The second of those three parts of the problem I mentioned is getting close enough to terminate the target or targets. The third part, since we’re not suicidal Muslims with a yearning to die for Allah, is to extract our people and get them to safety once the hit is made and we’ve done the most damage we can possibly do.” Hill studied the photographs of the huge theater for a minute or so, using a magnifying glass. “Cat, look at these photos. Leaving aside for the moment the question of security patrols and cameras, what do you think about seeing if we can somehow get you and Ron either up on the stage itself, concealed in some sets or props or something, or on the catwalks over the stage so you can fire down through the curtains? I know you said the catwalks were too high and at a bad angle, but they may be the best we can do by way of getting you into position.”

  “Mmm, very doubtful, sir,” said Lockhart. “There would be all kinds of spotlights and footlights and overheads shining in our eyes, and we’d be well illuminated for the enemy to shoot back at us. We need to be on either side of the main kill zone, with the lights overhead or aimed toward the stage and our main target areas, this front area here in front of the orchestra pit where Mr. Ripley says the big knobs are going to have their little swanky tables set up.”

  “Damn! If only we could get into a couple of those private boxes!” muttered Randall.

  “Mmm, I don’t know about that. Look at them, Charlie,” said Hill, pointing to the boxes in several of the internet photos. “And remember when we saw them on the guided tour? Yeah, they’d be great stands if no one were shooting back at us, but in order for the snipers to aim properly they’d have to lean over the edge and expose themselves. Ripley’s right; there are going to be enough guns down there in the hall so you can expect some return fire. But the catwalks over the audience, the scaffolding on which the lights are mounted, are too high up and a bad angle, plus the extraction problem.”

  “That leav
es the projection booths,” said Brewer. “Set into the north and south walls respectively. Here and here.” He pointed them out.

  “What, exactly, are those for?” asked Hill. “Projecting what?”

  “You ever seen the Oscars when they run movie clips of the starring performances?” asked Brewer. “This is where those clips come from. There is a live feed to the television broadcast cable, so the millions at home can see it, but these booths also simultaneously project the clips for Best Actor nominees or whatever onto two screens in the theater so the live audience can see them in a stereo-type effect, one screen lowered down on each side of the proscenium, here and here. The booths are accessible by short little hallways, almost alcoves, that run off the main third floor corridors, here and here. The problem is that each door has an armed guard stationed outside as well as a security camera in the little hallway—the management long ago guessed that somebody might want to get in and tamper with the show’s film clips. If our guys can get inside, the view over the auditorium will give the sharpshooters an excellent command of the main kill zone where the celebs will be sitting, and they also should be able to pop anybody in the private boxes who sticks his head up above the edge. When the third floor occupants of the boxes come running out to get away after the shooting starts, then the machine gunner in the hall should be able to drop them.”