In the Hollywood Royale’s Suite 1401, Cat-Eyes Lockhart said, “We’re on our way,” and slipped the radio into his back pocket. “Right, let’s go.” The six Volunteers left the suite, all wearing identical black and white tuxedos and wearing festive costume party masks, each lugging a heavy canvas gym bag. They met a drunken couple shrieking with maniacal laughter as they staggered down the corridor, the shoulder strap of her evening gown half off. “What’s in the bags, guys?” cackled the woman, her eyes dilated.
“We’re that new band, the Grim Reapers,” said Cat from beneath his gorilla mask, as they waited for the elevator. “These are our instruments. We’re going to do a hot number on the Oscars tonight.”
“Knock ’em dead!” offered the drunken woman cheerfully.
“We will,” said Cat as the elevator doors opened. They made it into the laundry room and to the door of the secret passageway without further incident, and everyone held their breath while Cat swiped his card through the slot. The card worked. The team moved swiftly down the corridor, into the theater, and then after a wait for the camera they went into the entrance of the small tunnel leading to the orchestra pit. Cat tore off the monkey mask and picked up his radio and clicked it. “We’re in place,” he said. “Set in sixty.”
“I’m set,” came Randall’s voice. He had the air vent grill plate unscrewed and out on the floor, and his three CS grenade canisters were laid out on the duct. He had also taken the precaution of laying out a Prince of Wands tarot card, prominently displayed on another nearby duct, in case he hadn’t time to do so if things got hectic. “Any hiccups?” he asked.
“Nary a one,” said Cat. All around him the team members were taking off their fun masks, strapping on their web belts, and removing weapons and ammunition pouches from the canvas bags. Kicky and Lee Washburn carried HKs. Mike Gauss was quickly assembling his famous Thompson submachine gun, slapping in a 100-round drum, and over his shoulder he had slid a canvas pouch containing two extra 100-rounders and two 50-round drums. Jimmy Wingo took out an AK-47, extended its folding stock, then a drum magazine that he inserted into the weapon. In his cylindrical pouch he carried four more such magazines. All the ammunition he and Gauss carried for their weapons was a heavy burden, but they figured to lighten their load significantly by the time they left. Kicky and Lee held flashlights while Cat-Eyes and Ron Kolchak carefully assembled and loaded their broken-down rifles. Then they stashed their masks in the bags, which also contained the street clothes in which they had entered the Royale, and the bags themselves into Wingo’s large U.S. Army duffle bag. Finally, they pulled the dark blue ski masks down over their faces. They were ready in forty-five seconds. Cat got on the radio. “We’re set,” he told Randall in a tense voice.
“Wait on my signal,” ordered Randall’s voice. No one’s tried to come in here and check out what’s going on, he thought. Bloody Norah! Are those people all asleep down there?
As Randall was to learn later, the reason no one had come to see who he was and what he was doing in the building was that the control room staff members were all watching the action at the front door on their monitors. Security Sergeant Sterling Farrell had picked a fight with a drunken paparazzi, an obnoxious little Third Worlder of some nondescript brown appearance, who had been trying a routine schmooze past the metal detectors with a camcorder. Instead of simply telling him to get lost, Farrell suddenly went berserk, pepper-sprayed the man, knocked him down and began beating on him with a nightstick. Centurion Vice President for Operations Marvin Hagerman, head of security for the event, had come running from the control room and was still at the front door trying to sort out the brawl, which had left the pap with a broken nose streaming blood and screaming that he was going to sue everyone in sight.
Randall checked his portable cell TV and stuck the earphone in his head as he saw Erica Collingwood walk onto the stage with calm poise, her silver lamé gown and her golden hair floating around her. He heard her mellifluous and sensual voice say, “This year’s nominees for Best Screenplay are . . .” He put on his gas mask, popped the grenades one after the other, and dumped them into the air conditioning vent. He waited almost thirty seconds before he heard yelling and screaming through the ducts from the floor below him that let him know the gas was in the control room. He picked up his radio and yelled “Go! Go! Go!”
They went. The six Volunteers broke out of the doorway beneath the stage at a run, and each group of three charged for their respective stairwells. Cat, Kicky, and Wingo bounded up the stairs to the third floor, weapons at the ready, and when they got into the corridor Cat handed Kicky his M-21 while he drew his silenced Walther P-38. They ran down the corridor until they came to the short little alcove that led to the projection booth. Cat leaned around and saw a large, fat negro in a Centurion security guard uniform with a 9-millimeter automatic in a black holster on his hip, sitting on a chair watching the Oscar ceremony on a wireless cellphone. He looked up just as Cat-Eyes shot him twice in the heart. The guard didn’t even fall out of the chair; he just grunted and slumped over. Cat walked up and put another slug through the top of his head.
Then he swiped the card he had been given through the slot. He kicked the door open and a surprised young redheaded, green-eyed white girl in sweats looked up in terror from beside the projector. Cat was on her, shoving her against the wall, his hand over her mouth, gun muzzle below her chin. “Do as I say, if you want to live,” he whispered to her gently. “When I take my hand off your mouth, you will not speak. You will be quiet and do what you’re told. If you make any sound of any kind, then you must die. Do you understand? Nod.” The terrified girl nodded. Kicky grabbed her away from Cat and forced the girl onto the floor on her stomach. She pulled the girl’s hands behind her back and bound her wrists together with a plastic cuff tie, standard Iraq issue by the hundred thousands, and then bound her legs at the ankles, while Cat drew a small spool of duct tape off his web belt and taped her mouth. “Can you breathe, Miss?” he said with equal gentleness. “Nod.” She nodded. “Do not move or do anything at all foolish,” he whispered to her. “Many people must die tonight, but as God is my witness, you will live, if you simply lie still and be very quiet.” He rose to his feet and ignored her from then on. Jimmy Wingo handed him his rifle through the door and went down to the end of the short passage to cover down on the main corridor.
Down on the stage, Erica Collingwood called out, “The envelope, please!”
Cat took up a position on the right side of the projector, and Kicky to the left. Cat took out an extra 20-round magazine for his M-21, containing normal copper-jacketed rounds, and checked to make sure that the magazine in his weapon indeed contained the special exploding lead bullets. Kicky took out both her grenades and set them on the base plate of the projector, then slipped the safety off her HK and covered down on the target area, the forward VIP section in front of the orchestra pit with its tables of wine champagne and dainty food, glittering with men in gleaming tuxedos and women in a fantastic array of color and bejeweled elegance. Cat did the same, searching the kill zone over the barrel, marking targets. He took out the radio. “Red Team set,” he said. There was a delay of ten seconds or so, which seemed very long, and then he heard Kolchak’s voice say, “Gold Team set.”
“Red Team Leader, fire at will,” came Randall’s voice, somewhat muffled due to his gas mask. “I will begin my own E&E when I hear you open fire. Good luck and good hunting, comrades. Freedom!”
On stage the pudgy Martin Rudin and the tall, slim mulatto Nat Turner Thomas, elegant in their tuxedos, approached the podium, hand in hand. They each embraced a smiling Erica and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she handed them the gold Oscar statuette. Marty Rudin began to speak. “It’s no secret that The Color of Love is largely autobiographical, the story of how my beloved partner Nat and myself were able to overcome a racist society’s hurdles, not just one, but the triple prejudices of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia . . .”
“Come o
n, honey, step back!” Cat muttered to Erica under his breath. “Step back, please!” Rudin droned on, but still Cat held his hand, not happy with the shot that presented itself, afraid of hitting Erica with one of the deadly rounds.
Kicky leaned under the projector and whispered in his ear, very softly so the bound girl on the floor could not hear. “Cat, she’s one of us. She’s a Volunteer and she’s doing her duty. Now you have to do yours.”
“Nat, I couldn’t have done it without you,” blubbered an overcome Rudin down on the stage. “I couldn’t have done any of it without you.” The two men leaned over and gave each other a long, tongue-slurping French kiss. There was a sigh of “Awwww . . .” and a scattering of applause from the audience.
The two kissing men’s heads exploded like watermelons, a single bullet virtually decapitating both of them. Erica Collingwood’s mouth opened in a single long scream of pure terror, a scream heard around the world and immortalized for all time. She seemed to faint and dropped to the floor. Then all hell broke loose.
* * *
The Kodak Theater was originally designed as an operatic and concert house, and the acoustics were widely and justly acclaimed to be the best in the world, second only to the Sydney Opera House. The ribbed and shaped steel bands running from floor to high domed ceiling along the oval walls could magnify and reverberate the sound of a coin being dropped on stage.
The noise that filled the theater now passed any description that might convey the reality of it to anyone who was not there. The subsequent millions of replays of the videos from all angles were filled with the madness and the terror and the death and the blood, but could never adequately convey the sound of the gunfire that roared down from the sky, rolling in waves from the ceiling and the walls. One survivor described it as being “trapped inside an endless clap of thunder.” The first grenades flew down from the projection booths, bounced and rolled along the floor, then detonated and hurtled fragments of wood and metal from chairs and tables, and human body parts. Several people were blown into the air, whirling like rag dolls in a tornado. Men and women screamed and scrambled and ran and hid, trampled and fought one another to get to the exits while a rain of death poured among them, rifle and submachine-gun fire, cutting them down and sending them flopping and gushing blood down to the floor.
After maybe ten seconds, Kicky and Cat heard pops from the theater floor and heard the slap of pistol bullets slamming into the wall around the projection booth. The security guards, the bodyguards, and the cops were firing back at them. One bullet shattered the lens of the projector, showering them with powdered glass. A second clanged into the metal body of the projector and rang deafeningly. “The bells, the bells!” moaned Lockhart in a Hunchback of Notre Dame imitation, grinning maniacally at Kicky, who screamed with adrenalin-fueled laughter, blazing away with her submachine gun. Still firing, Cat yelled “Grenade!” and Kicky threw her second one, then returned to spraying bullets at anything that moved, slapping empty magazines out onto the floor and full ones into the weapon. The grenade exploded with a whump that made the building shake, and maybe five seconds later the fourth grenade from the other projection booth detonated as well.
In one way it was an endless time, and in another way it was but the flash of a moment until Cat ripped the empty magazine out of his M-21, slapped in the next one, pulled a Jack of Diamonds card out of his pocket and laid it on the bullet-scarred ledge, and yelled, “That’s twenty rounds, and we’re outta here!” Kolchak and Washburn were still firing into the shrieking, undulating mass of bodies down in the theater. Out in the corridor, heavy-set Jewish men, some in yarmulkes, all in tuxedos, had come charging out the doors of the private boxes dragging women in expensive gowns, mostly young and blonde, as they tried to escape. Jimmy Wingo was waiting for them, crouching behind the corner of the entranceway, and with short, well-aimed bursts he cut them all down. Not one made it to the stairs.
Cat and Kicky came out of the projection room. “Let me go first,” said Wingo, and they pelted down the corridor after him. Just as they reached the stairwell the door opened and a Centurion guard popped out, pistol in his hand. Wingo chopped him down with the AK. A bullet screamed by them and slapped into the wall. Kicky turned and blazed away with the HK at a couple of guards who were stumbling along the corridor behind them, hitting one of them and dropping him. The other turned and fled. They crashed down the stairs and Wingo machine-gunned another Centurion guard who was on his way up.
The backstage area was no longer empty. It was filled with milling and jabbering members of the orchestra, some of them wounded, who had fled through the passageway under the stage. A woman screamed as the Volunteers came out of the stairwell in their ski masks. Wingo spotted a Mexican security guard and splattered him against the wall with a burst of the Kalashnikov, quickly removing the magazine when it ran dry and slapping in another. The people all screamed and fled or ducked under cover. They met Ron Kolchak and his team at the door of the passageway, and Lee Washburn tore the door open and grabbed the duffle bag with all their bits and pieces in it. Then they ran for the archway and the Trap Door. Mike Gauss walked backwards, spraying the oncoming guards and police with bursts from his Thompson.
With perfect timing, Randall was waiting for them at the door, holding it open. “Uh-the-uh-the-uh-the-uh-that’s all, folks!” said Cat-Eyes as they moved into the passageway. They ran down the passage and came out into the underground garage beneath the Royale. It was empty except for two police cruisers parked near the Highland Avenue exit. “Wait, we need to make damned sure they’re ours!” said Randall. Two uniformed LAPD officers were standing by the squad cars, but they could not be recognized at that distance. He called out to them, “Apple?”
“Cobbler!” shouted back Volunteer Joe Pilefski.
“Here, take these!” Randall handed them his toolbox and his Uzi and ammo pouch and tool belt, retaining only his pistol. “I’ll meet you back at the Batcave. Good job, comrades, but we’re not home free yet. Now go!”
He watched them all run to the squad cars and pile inside, then watched the cars depart, their blue and red lights silently flashing. Then Randall walked up the stairs and entered the hotel lobby, where there was chaos, people running around and shouting and weeping, others glued to the television sets in the bar and in the lobby, staring at the carnage on the screen. Randall walked unnoticed in his gray coveralls through the lobby, down another hall and right into the control room of the Hollywood Royale Centurion security force. There was a single Mexican security guard in the room. He looked up and said, “Hey, man, you ain’t allowed in here.” Randall shot him in the head. He went over to the console, felt around under the board until he found a switch, and released the hard drive containing the security digital recordings for the hotel for the past several years, which he dropped into a plastic carrier bag he unfolded from his pocket that said “Hollywood and Highland, Where The Stars Shop!” Randall returned the pistol to his shoulder holster. Then he walked unnoticed out the front door. Three blocks down Hollywood Boulevard a late-model BMW pulled over to the curb and beeped. Randall got into the car. Barry Brewer was driving. “Everybody else get away okay?” asked Brewer.
“They made it to the cop cars,” said Randall. “You got any word on Farrell and Erica?”
“Farrell just called me. He slipped out in the confusion and he’s heading for the pickup point. Erica made it too. I heard her being interviewed on the car radio by some of the media people who also survived. She’s laying on just the right combination of hysterics and confusion, as well she might. That first bullet of Cat’s must have shaved an eyelash off her. God damn, that girl has got balls!”
“She wasn’t hit, then,” said Randall with a sigh of relief. “She ducked and covered okay. Thank God. I got the hotel security videos.” He shook the bag. “You get any take from the early media yammer on how we did?”
“I can tell you this much. You cut out Hollywood’s heart and stomped that sucker flat!” s
aid Brewer.
* * *
The day after the Oscar Night Massacre, the following casualty list appeared on the front page of a black-bordered edition of the Los Angeles Times. In addition to the dead listed here, over two hundred people were wounded by bullets and flying shrapnel, and also from being trampled in the stampede to escape. The L.A. Times list was subsequently posted to the internet on a satiric Web site called insidetinseltown.com, with certain pointed and irreverent commentary added. The day after it was posted, the site was shut down and the webmaster arrested under the Patriot Act. He has never been seen since. But this did not occur before the site was mirrored all across the World Wide Web:
Adelstein, Jeremy (34)—Jewish. Scriptwriter for six major television sitcoms on two networks. Faked mental illness to evade draft.
Adler, Allen (41)—Jewish. Senior vice president in charge of marketing, Paradigm Studios. Got his start making porno and snuff films in Mexico.
Baylor, Amber (30)—White. Nominated for Best Supporting Actress for portrayal of tough female FBI agent hunting evil white racists in the Pacific Northwest. Married to Israeli independent producer and director Avrohom Stern.
Bernstein, Arthur (45)—Jewish. Prominent director, recipient of two Lifetime Achievement Academy Awards and two Best Directors. Slated to direct Great White North for World Artists. Indicted for insurance fraud and tax evasion. Charges dropped.
Borenstein, Albert (50)—Jewish. Senior Vice President In Charge of Production, World Artists. Several complaints of physical and sexual abuse by multiple wives dropped through unknown influence.
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