The men were getting ready to lift him to their shoulders, but he didn’t want to go anywhere without her. He turned toward her as the players swept him off his feet and began to carry him through the crowd. She was laughing. He laughed back. And then everything inside him grew alert as something in the stands behind her caught his attention.

In a sea of screaming, shifting fans, Ray Hardesty stood in eerie stillness. Every muscle in his body was rigid with hatred as he glared at Dan from the front row. Dan saw the glint of a gun in his hand even before he lifted his arm.

Everything happened in a matter of seconds, but each fragment of time became a still photograph, an image of horror that would be frozen forever in his mind. Dan, bobbing high on the players’ shoulders, had become an open target, but Hardesty, with a madman’s insight, had found a better way to destroy the man he hated. Strobes flashed, reporters shouted questions at him, and Dan watched in impotent horror as Hardesty adjusted his aim so that the gun was pointed directly at the back of Phoebe’s head.

A mass of security guards swarmed toward Hardesty. Those in the front saw his gun, but they couldn’t use their own weapons in the middle of the teeming crowd.

In the foreground, Phoebe, unaware of the peril she was in, still laughed. Dan had no weapon, nothing to protect the woman he loved with all his heart. Nothing except the game ball cradled against his chest.

He was part of an exclusive fraternity of great quarterbacks, but as his hand closed around the football, he was no longer in his prime. Instinctively, his fingertips settled into the position that felt more familiar to him than the contours of his own face.

The names of the immortals flashed through his mind: Bart Starr, Len Dawson, Namath and Montana, the great Johnny U. himself. None of them had ever had this much at stake.

He drew back his arm and fired the ball. It shot above the heads of the crowd, low and hard, a fierce spiral, as perfectly thrown as any ball in the history of professional sports.

In the front row of the stands, Hardesty spun sideways as the ball slammed him in the shoulder. The force sent him sprawling into the seats, and the gun flew from his hand.

Phoebe, who had finally realized something was wrong, whirled around just in time to see a bevy of security guards converging directly behind her in the stands. Before she could see what had happened, Bobby Tom and Webster had grabbed her and she, too, was being carried toward the field tunnel.

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