The Rivalry (22 page)

“That would have been Ramspeth,” Stevie said.

“Right,” Caccese said. “There was also talk about just sticking with what they were doing and being close to the payoff.”

“Payoff?” Susan Carol said. “You’ve got it right there, don’t you?”

Caccese shook his head. “No. They
might
be talking about some kind of bet; they could also just be talking about getting paid for working the game or the payoff of knowing they’ve done a good job. Trust me, it would never hold up in court. Bugging the room without a court order is already a little shaky. But we called Ed Murphy, who heads up our gambling unit in DC, and he thought there was cause. He’s on his way now.”

Caccese finished, “My gut tells me you guys have this
right. We just don’t have enough evidence to take any action.”

Stevie felt his heart sink.

“The room is still bugged,” Mayer said. “Maybe we’ll hear something when they come in afterward. And we’ll watch to see if any of these guys seems to come into windfalls after the game. It’s not over.”

“But the game is,” Susan Carol said.

“Yeah,” Mayer said. “Could be. I’m truly sorry.”

Stevie and Susan Carol decided to stick together on the sidelines, if only to take solace in each other’s company. They started on the Army sideline since Army had the football to start the second half.

The third quarter was like a rerun of the first two. Army moved the ball quickly into Navy territory and had a third and one at the Navy 37. Fullback Jared Hassin, Stevie’s old friend who had piled into him at West Point, dove into the line and appeared to pick up the first down. In came Ramspeth—the line judge—to spot the ball. He picked it up and moved it back almost a full yard from where Hassin had been tackled. The Army bench immediately began screaming about the spot.

“What is with these guys?” Dean Taylor said. “It’s that same guy again, the line judge.”

Ramspeth’s spot left Army a yard short of a first down.

“I’m going to tell you something right now,” Stevie said while Ellerson called a time-out to decide whether to
go for it on fourth and one or punt. “If you go for it and get the first down, there will be a penalty.”

Taylor, Hall, and Kelly all looked at him. “You just being cynical, Steve?” Hall asked.

“I don’t think he is,” Kelly said before Stevie could answer.

Army decided to go for the first down. They lined up in a tight formation, apparently planning to either quarterback sneak or go for the fullback dive again. Just as Steelman took the snap, though, the whistle blew. In came Daniels.

“Illegal motion before the snap,” he said. “That’s a five-yard penalty. Repeat fourth down.”

As the umpire picked the ball up and moved it back five yards, it was Ellerson’s turn to demand to know who the penalty was on. Daniels pretended not to hear.

“They didn’t even wait to see if we made it,” Taylor said.

“Guess they didn’t want to take any chances,” Susan Carol said.

With the play now fourth and six, Army punted, the ball rolling out-of-bounds on the 4-yard line.

“That should make the officials happy,” Susan Carol said. “They’ve killed five minutes, and Navy’s ninety-six yards from the goal line.”

“What do you guys know?” Tim Kelly said. “You know something.”

“We might,” Stevie said. “We just aren’t sure.”

“More sure by the minute, though,” Susan Carol added.

TV had gone to time-out. As the cadets and the midshipmen in the stands whooped it up, Stevie saw Mayer, Caccese, Dowling, and Campbell running down the sidelines.

“We’ve got them,” Caccese said as they got close.

“Whaaaa?” they both said.

“No time for details right now,” Caccese said. “But you know the kid in the locker room, the one taking care of the officials?”

“Daniels’s nephew, Todd?” Stevie said.

“Yeah. As soon as the boys left the locker room for the second half, he was on the phone with offshore betting services. He was reading off confirmation numbers to make sure the bets they’d placed before the game were all in place. Based on what we’ve heard, these guys have at least ten million dollars riding on the under—which was forty-eight points—and even more riding on the regulation game ending scoreless.”

“So what are you going to do?” Stevie asked.

“Ed Murphy, the head of the gambling unit, just arrived,” Caccese said. “We asked the TV producer to hold the time-out for a minute longer so we can remove these guys.”

“Remove them?” Stevie and Susan Carol shouted together.

“Yup. They can leave the field voluntarily or in
handcuffs. We’re drawing up warrants for their arrests right now in the command center.”

“But are you sure all seven are involved?” Stevie asked.

“Not a hundred percent. Todd used eight different names when confirming the bets. They were fake names, but we’re pretty sure it’s these seven guys plus him. Okay, here comes Murph.”

A tall man with iron-gray hair in an equally gray suit was walking toward them, followed by at least a dozen other agents.

“Which one is the referee, John?” he asked, all business.

Caccese pointed at Daniels, who was in conversation at that moment with the umpire. “I’ll ask the Army coach to call him over.”

“Let’s go,” Murphy said.

Murphy, Caccese, and Mayer began walking up the Army sideline with a squad of agents trailing behind them. From the stands it must have looked very strange, Stevie thought. The FBI approached Ellerson, who took off his headset. There was a brief nod and then he waved at Daniels, who trotted over.

Stevie was dying to hear the conversation, but Daniels’s body language was clear enough. As Murphy began speaking, he lurched backward. Then he was shouting.

If any of it bothered Murphy, it didn’t show, and he cut him off effectively. With the crowd beginning to murmur, Daniels waved the other officials over. Stevie saw
Ken Niumatalolo several yards onto the field on his side, clearly confused by what the commotion could be. After a few more seconds of discussion, which included Terry Ramspeth screaming while taking his cap off and throwing it onto the ground, the FBI men and the officials began walking off the field.

The fans didn’t know how to react. Some booed. Others hooted. Mostly there was confused silence. Murphy pointed at Pete Dowling, who nodded and began talking into his wrist. Within a minute Stevie knew what he had been saying.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the PA announcer said, “we apologize, but there will be a brief delay because there is a problem with the game officials.”

“Yeah, there’s a problem,” Stevie heard a fan yell from the stands. “They SUCK!”

Dowling turned to Bob Campbell. “Bob, go tell Niumatalolo what’s going on and that we’re going to need a few minutes. They can keep their kids out here or take them back to the locker rooms. Whatever they want. Then meet me back in the tunnel; we’ve got the ADs en route.”

Campbell nodded and took off across the field.

“You two can come too if you want,” Dowling said. “You started all this. You have any brilliant ideas where we can find some new officials?”

*   *   *

Chet Gladchuk, the Navy athletic director, and Kevin Anderson, his counterpart at Army, were clearly confused when they arrived in the tunnel a few minutes later.

“What’s going on?” Gladchuk asked. “The officials just went by me with a bunch of agents. Are they being arrested for incompetence or something?”

“Gentlemen, I’m sorry, but we’ve got a situation here,” Agent Caccese said. “If those seven men had continued officiating, I can tell you with certainty that the game was going to end regulation at zero-zero.”

“You aren’t the first one to make that comment today,” Anderson said. “What’d they do, bet the under?”

“That’s about the size of it. We can get you details later,” Caccese said. “For the moment, we need seven new officials for the game to continue. Any ideas?”

Gladchuk and Anderson both gaped at him.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Gladchuk said.

“As serious as someone trying to fix the Army-Navy game,” Caccese answered.

“We could call Harold Neve at the ACC,” suggested Anderson. But no one seemed to think he’d be all that helpful.

Stevie ventured, “Would the officials for the Redskins game tomorrow be in town already?”

“Maybe—but it would take a while to find out and get them here. And the NFL rules are different.…”

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Susan Carol said, “What about the high school officials? The ones honored before the game?”

Anderson snapped his fingers. “Of course. They’re all up in a corporate box, watching the game.”

“We need seven of them,” Caccese said.

“What about uniforms?” Susan Carol asked.

“They have to keep spares in the locker room,” Gladchuk said. “I’m sure someone who works here for the Redskins can help us with that.”

Caccese looked at Anderson and Gladchuk. “No matter how good or bad they may be, at least they won’t be cheating,” he said.

Both athletic directors nodded. Then everyone pulled out their cell phones and started to dial.

It took about thirty minutes to sort out which of the high school officials would take over the game and to get them outfitted and ready. Agent Mayer returned to say that the seven officials and Todd were being taken to the FBI office downtown to be charged with game-fixing and assorted other gambling-related crimes. He and Dowling then went with the two athletic directors to explain the plan to the coaches.

The teams had both gone to the locker rooms, and the crowd was told nothing more than that the delay simply had to do with a problem with the officials. They would learn the rest soon enough, Stevie imagined. There were some murmurs, but no one was leaving, that was for sure. The weather was cold but not frigid, and the sun was shining down.

“That’s one of the good things about a military crowd: they don’t question things as much as some other people might,” Kelleher said. He and Tamara had managed to get downstairs with their all-access passes after Stevie and Susan Carol had called to fill them in.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tamara said. “Stevie, what tipped you off? We were all sitting in the press box thinking it was a horribly reffed game but that at least the calls were balancing out.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Stevie said. “But when the line judge went off on Dr. Taylor after he said something about keeping anyone from scoring, it seemed like an over-the-top reaction. Just like the way the officials overreacted about Susan Carol’s articles. Plus, I believed Susan Carol. She didn’t see how those calls at the Notre Dame game could be honest mistakes, so I started to believe they were
dishonest
mistakes.”

“And the kid Todd was stupid enough to make the call to confirm the bets from the locker room,” Kelleher said. “That’s unreal. He walks out into the hall and uses his cell phone, they never get caught.”

“True,” Susan Carol said. “But now they’ve got all those confirmation numbers on tape.”

“Well, we’ve got to go upstairs and let our papers know what happened,” Kelleher said. “I’m told the FBI is putting out a press release on the whole thing within an hour, but we can at least get some people moving downtown—checking out who these guys are, their backgrounds, things like that. You guys stay on the sidelines and focus on the
game. We’ll talk about how you’ll write it when it’s over. You may have to do something in the first person. Either way, you’ll both have a lot to do.”

They both nodded just as the new officials walked past, heading onto the field.

The teams were back out and had been given an extra couple of minutes to warm up after the long break.

Susan Carol had made her way back to the Navy sideline and found Captain Klunder waiting to shake her hand. “I hear we have you to thank for this, Susan Carol.”

“No—it was Stevie who put it together, really,” she tried to say, but then Ken Niumatalolo came up and lifted her off the ground in a bear hug.

“Looks like you were right,” he said.

“More than I thought, even,” Susan Carol said.

“Well, thank you for your story—and for sticking with it. You made all the difference. You saved the game—I can’t even tell you—” One of his coaches called him away, and he ran back to get ready for the game to resume.

Before she could start to take that in, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned, and Ricky Dobbs bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said. “For giving us back the game.”

Then he put on his helmet and ran onto the field.

Suddenly, Susan Carol wished she had a place to sit down.

T
he rest of the second half was everything you could have wanted an Army-Navy game to be. If the officials made a mistake, neither side seemed to notice—these refs were every player’s new best friend.

Navy, which had been backed up on its 4-yard line before the break, couldn’t move and had to punt to Army, which took over at midfield. From there, the Cadets put together the first (allowed) scoring drive of the day, with quarterback Trent Steelman diving in from the 1-yard line. Navy answered right away, Dobbs matching his counterpart with his own run into the end zone, tying the game at 7–7 with 2:07 left in the third quarter.

It was Army’s ball again, but Alan Arnott stepped in front of his brother, made a one-handed interception of a Steelman pass, and got the ball back for Navy on the Army 32. On the very first play, Dobbs faked to Murray, pulled
the ball back at the last minute, and found Greg Jones wide open in the middle. It was the exact play that had produced the called-back touchdown in the first half. But this time there was no flag, and Navy led 14–7.

Undaunted, Steelman fired a blistering pass through two defenders to Michael Arnott, who outraced his brother and two other defenders while sprinting forty-seven yards to tie the game again as the third quarter ended.

“This is the way Army-Navy is supposed to be,” Taylor said to Stevie. “You have your heart in your throat on every play.”

After the gun sounded to end the third quarter—the new officials had apparently taken possession of Dowling’s starter pistol—Stevie looked up and saw Susan Carol walking in his direction.