Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  Stones. “Paint It Black.”

  5:55 P.M.–6:14 P.M.

  Ray slid the answer icon to the right and put the phone to his ear.

  “This is Special Agent McElroy,” he heard.

  “No,” he said, “it’s Chucklehead McElroy. Dumbbell and dope. You ever shoot down-angle, McElroy?”

  “I guess not,” said McElroy.

  “You have to hold low. If you hold straight on, you hit high. You owe me fifty.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Push-ups.”

  “I’m a little busy now,” said McElroy.

  “And you’re going to get busier. Put that rifle down, you’re too dangerous with it. You find me isolated targets out of visual contact with their main force and I will put them down. We’ll reduce their team one by one before they even notice it.”

  “Uh, Sergeant, that’s against policy. I’d have to get some sort of higher approval on that, and to be honest, I don’t think an agent has ever acted under such a wide license. It would definitely be against our policy.”

  “It’s against your policy. It’s not against my policy. My policy is stalk and kill, one-shot variety. It’s what I do. It’s all I do. I can shoot suppressed, so noise isn’t an issue. Now I am going to move out and try and take these people down. Having you bird-dog for me from on high like my private satellite would be very helpful. Or I can do it on my own. Either way, it will happen, McElroy. You decide right now who you are with.”

  He heard McElroy pause and even imagined that the phone picked up the vibrations of a dry swallow. But then McElroy said, “Okay. I’m in. Nothing’s happening here anyway.” Then he said, “First, maybe you have some intel I can forward to Command. You got your gear from one of them, right?”

  “He didn’t seem to mind. Black male, age twenty-two or so. Somali, I’d guess, from what I’ve seen of them in Minnesota. Handsome dude, even with a broken neck. Didn’t do an ID check.”

  “You took his stuff though. Equipment data?”

  “Okay, the pistol is a Heckler and Koch P7, much battered, I’m guessing some European police department trade-in. You have to squeeze it to make it shoot, very unusual gun. The 9-mil ammo has a foreign head stamp, I don’t have time to check it exactly. It looked grungy, as if it had been stored in tins for three decades. The AK is a 74, not a 47. It’s overmarked WTI, Laredo, Texas. Looks to be a Bulgarian or Romanian clone, I can’t really read the serial number. The ammo is 5.45×39, which is the Eastbloc variant on 5.56 NATO. Small, lethal, fast, 50–60-grain round, looks surplus too, no recognizable head stamp, crappy OD steel case, red band at base of bullet, copper gilding. The mags are sort of plum-orange color, and I saw that shade all over the Mideast and Afghanistan, so I’m guessing Eastbloc junk too. The commo shit is Radio Shack, low-end. The knife was some kind of surplus AK bayonet. The whole thing could have been supported out of some shit-city surplus store, so maybe that’s a place for you to look.”

  “Got it. I’ll get this to Command, we can get ATF hacking on it.”

  “You do that. Meanwhile, I’m on the stalk. The more we kill, the easier any kind of assault will be when the heavy hitters go in. And when that happens, I can provide distracting fire and then suppressive if they have to maneuver. You’re my spotter, McElroy, clear on that?”

  “Yes sir,” said McElroy.

  “Good. Now find me targets.”

  McElroy closed up the phone and pressed his radio. He got Webley’s assistant on the wave and fed him the weapon info he had just acquired. Then he signed off, eased over the edge of Lake Michigan, and went to work through his binoculars. Nothing much had changed one hundred feet below. From his nine-zero-degree perspective, he could see a mass of humanity gathered on the walkways of the amusement park, shaded here and there by the foliage of trees, plastic or real unknown. Santa, still dead, still on his throne. Why didn’t somebody throw a blanket over the guy? The people were crowded together so tightly it was hard to make out the individual from the herd. Most were on their haunches, some still with hands on head or behind necks, looking nowhere except straight ahead. Many were trying to talk inconspicuously on their cell phones. On their outskirts he could make out the more vigorous movements of the gunmen, who strolled about the perimeter, AKs showily in hand. They were easy to spot because of the bright tribal scarves, which made excellent target markers. Someone either hadn’t thought that one through or had thought it through very carefully and didn’t particularly care that if the assault came, targeting the gunmen would be much easier. McElroy himself didn’t know what to make of it, nor did he know what to make of a situation in which so few controlled so many so completely.

  He thought about it: yes, indeed, if all the hostages rose and ran at one of the gunmen—say that dude there, who lounged against a mall pillar, smoking an illegal cigarette, looking not particularly terrorist but more teen punk—they could almost certainly overcome him and flee en masse down the corridor. But to do that they’d have to act as one, and the first twenty-five or so would have had to have made friends with their own death. No twenty-five middle-class Americans were about to do that; whatever, that spirit was gone and nobody down there today would die of crazed courage. They would sit, try to wait it out, pray for the authorities to run the rescue, and pray that they’d be spared when that happened. The guy behind this puppy knew his victim psychology à la America, the Mall, and America, the country.

  He looked for evidence of explosives rigging, canisters of gas, maybe tanks of ignitable propane, all emblems of weapons of mass destruction mall-style, and saw nothing: just men—young, if he read their rangy, undisciplined postures correctly—and their rifles. The five executed hostages had been dragged over to the railing that separated the Wild Mouse ride from the public areas.

  Targets? None to be had. If the Marine sniper pegged one of the gunmen, he’d go down in full view; the crowd would react, the other gunmen would see, and the whole game would be up. They’d shoot ten more, then ten again until he gave himself up; that was the message in the first five deaths.

  But then—yes. Okay, maybe, yes.

  On the second floor, three jihadis had emerged from their posts below and now overlooked the crowd. Concentrating hard, he saw that all three had the bigger forty-round magazines that probably were designed to feed the gun in its light machine-gun role. These three leaned on the balcony, smoking, joking, joshing, goosing, goofing around. They’d been put there obviously because their vantage post was so much higher, their angle better, and in the event of an assault, they could bring fire not through the crowd but on the crowd. They were on the Marine sniper’s level, but not across from him, rather to his right one corridor. He was Colorado, they were Rio Grande. He couldn’t engage them from where he was, but if he rotated another corridor in the opposite direction, over to Hudson, he’d have a good shot at them. If he were above them, he’d have an even better angle.

  McElroy took out the phone, punched the button.

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay, three of them have come up to your level. They are immediately—that is a quarter rotation around the atrium—to your right. It seems to me that you might be able to get an angle onto them if you rotated to the left. Then you’d be directly across from them. Or if you got up a level, you’d have an even better angle on all three.”

  “I can’t fire multiple shots with my technology,” said the marine.

  “Well, maybe they’ll separate. Maybe one will be left alone and you can take him.”

  “Good call. It’ll take me a while, but I’ll try and get around and up. You don’t have any engineering diagrams, there’s not some kind of passage by which I can find a short cut?”

  “They just dumped us up here without any guidance. It was a big rush. There wasn’t any chance to bring that stuff into play. Now, I can contact Command and see if—”

  “No, no, that’s just more time being eaten up, more people offering opinions, more people wanting to be heard. Today, action is ki
ng, action and only action. You get?”

  “I get.”

  “Okay, I’ll get into position. If you see movement in my direction, you alert me.”

  “Got it, roger,” said the spotter.

  McElroy settled down to stay connected to the targets.

  Finally. He swaggered to the phone. This was his moment. His whole life he’d been able to synthesize arguments, turn them around instantly, and reiterate them in cajoling tones, until his opponent had agreed with him. It was his strength. He knew he could do it now, brilliant synopsizer, genius of empathy, purveyor of mega-earnestness. Colonel Obobo looked around, saw Renfro standing close by, giving him encouragement through sympathetic, even moist, eyes.

  “It’s your line three, sir.”

  Obobo peeled off his earphones, snatched up the phone, punched 3.

  “This is Colonel Douglas Obobo, superintendent of the Minnesota State Police. To whom am I talking, please?”

  “You know who I am,” came the voice, calm and collected, untainted by accent, perhaps younger than might have been expected. “I’m the guy in the mall with a thousand hostages and ten thousand rounds of ammo. You do the math. I have demands.”

  “Sir, I’m sure we can work something out. Your demands will be given fair hearing. But I want to be clear, I must also advise you to immediately cease your activity, release all hostages, lay your weapons down, and turn yourself over to police authorities. No one else needs to get hurt.”

  “I really don’t care if anyone else gets hurt,” said the voice. “I have no objection to other people getting hurt. I have the hostages, ergo I have the power. You sit there and shut up and I will tell you what must be done, at what timetable, and what you can expect from us. Any more proffers of ‘advice,’ and I shoot a child. If you ever call me ‘son’ or ‘young man,’ I’ll shoot another child. If you say, ‘I want to be clear’ again, I will kill ten. Now, if you want to save lives, you have to do exactly what I’m telling you very quickly. You don’t have a lot of time. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think anything is accomplished by belligerence. We must have a calm, clear, measured—”

  “Shoot the little girl, holy man,” the voice said.

  “No! No! Please, you can’t—”

  “Actually, I can. I’ve seen you on TV, I know you’re an ambitious political asshole who thinks he can talk himself into anything. Put it on the shelf or people die, do you get me loud and clear? I am not rational, I am not clear, I am not bartering. I will kill a lot of people. Do what I say and shut the fuck up, Time magazine cover boy.”

  Obobo swallowed.

  “Please proceed,” he said tightly.

  “Excellent. Hmm, it’s almost six. At six, I shoot six more. Unless you pay attention and I see action.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can. Anything I want. Let me say this whole plan is predicated on speed. You will have to work like hell to make my demands happen in the short time frame I specify. But it can be done. I will enforce my demands with hostage executions if I don’t see alacrity. I want you to have no time to counterplot, to plan reversals or assaults, to get cute, to hold meetings. You won’t have time to discuss or consider or make counteroffers. This whole thing will be done in four hours or everybody dies and you go into the history books as the biggest fool in America. You do what I say, you do it at high speed, low drag, and most of these assholes will make it out alive. You care about them; frankly, I don’t. They’re the herd, and any herd can be thinned, that’s the law of nature.”

  Get to it, the colonel thought.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “There are three young men doing ten to fifteen in the Minnesota State Penitentiary for bank robbery. You remember the case, it was famous. Yusuf, Jaheel, and Khalid Kaafi. They got far more for their crimes because of the black-guy penalty, which nobody will admit to but which everybody acknowledges. Anyway, their crime was political, to raise money for the brigades back home. My friends here are very upset that you treated them like common criminals. It seems so unfair. Do you not understand that no infidel law can be applied to those of the Faith? This is the lesson they must teach you. The Kaafi boys, heroes and geniuses all, are to be immediately released and ferried to Minneapolis International, where they are to be flown to Yemen by an Air Saudi Super 747-8 ready to take that flight at seven fifty-five p.m. You should have just enough time. If the flight is full, kick three people off. Moreover, if I do not see visual confirmation on CNN of the prisoners boarding buses by seven p.m., I will execute seven more hostages. If they are not on that plane at seven fifty-five, I will order the massacre that you fear so much. Say, wouldn’t that be a career black eye. You might not even make Eagle Scout or get into Princeton. As for the next batch I shoot, the six at six, I will begin with Jews. Then, if I am not pleased, I may break my own rules, though I hate to do that, and shoot seven and a half children at seven thirty. At a certain point, I will allow each of my men to rape any woman they choose, and if you know the Muslim mind, you know the women will be preteens. If there is any assault, I will order all my gunners to open fire on hostages. You must comply. Hostages will be released when I see the plane has safely taken off for Yemen and has crossed into Canadian airspace a few minutes later. When the hostages have been released, we will not surrender. We will take cover. You may assault. We will have a nice gun battle. We do not fear death. The narrative demands a climax, and we will give it one. America will enjoy it mightily. I would say to your assault troops that though you might ultimately prevail, bring many, many body bags. I know in those circumstances, the thing to do would be to destroy us with a smart bomb. But you won’t do that. You’d destroy too many shoe stores. Allahu akbar, motherfucker.”

  He broke the contact.

  Ray decided not to try to find a stairwell for the down-angle shot, which would cost him time as well as the effort to somehow get through the locked door. Instead he low-crawled as fast as he could along the shadows where the floor and walls joined, sliding under the retail windows. Good thing he was a gym rat still and did hard cardiovascular every day. Stamina is the essence of victory, he knew, and he was able to move at a high rate of speed, not really in the classical low crawl, with that squirming, swimming wiggle that pulls you along, but on all fours, like some kind of sniper rat, scurrying along. He thought, When they make the movie, they’ll cut this bullshit out.

  It was a long transit, and he fought the fatigue and particularly the neck strain, for he had to keep his neck pried back so that he could use his eyes to scan ahead for threat. Whoever was monitoring the hall cameras was not paying much attention; no call came from McElroy indicating a reaction from the gunmen, and ahead of him, he saw nothing, though as he passed each store, he could hear scurrying, breathing, shifting, as people sought security deep inside. It took six minutes, down the length of Colorado to the outer ring, down the outer ring, then back down Rio Grande, until he came to rest at the balcony overlooking the atrium, though one quarter of a turn to the left.

  He set up not at but a little behind the railing. Peering between its steel struts, he saw his targets. Now there were two, as one had departed for destinations unknown. Ray uncorked his iPhone.

  “Okay, I’m here. Where’d the third guy go?”

  “He kind of casually left a few minutes ago and took the elevator down. I guess that one central elevator is working. I’ve seen him; he’s rejoined the downstairs bunch.”

  “Okay, two. This’ll take some tricky work.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “My secret weapon: the deadly potato.”

  Ray had a shirtful of the starchy tubers with him. He’d dipped into the Boardwalk Fries outlet near the Frederick’s of Hollywood, picked seven or eight of the biggest, gnarliest, grossest spuds.

  “A potato!” said McElroy.

  “Potatoes make excellent field-expedient suppressors. You watch, bud.”

  He selected the biggest, unslung the AK, and w
edged the vegetable over the muzzle, feeling the flash hider and sight blade cut into the crunchy fiber of the thing as he slid it over, until a good two inches of potato embraced the weapon. The potato was stoutly mounted.

  He set himself up in prone, brought rifle to shoulder, slipped the big prong safety off by pressing it down on the right side of the receiver. Ancient memories came back, associated with the weapon. Some firefight in the sand—Afghanistan, Iraq? who could remember?—he and a mixed force of Marine infantry and Army rangers in a house in some godawful ville. He’d gone to a captured AK and fired and fired and fired, the whole night through. He must have killed thirty men that night, and in the morning, when the Bradleys got to them, nobody in the house was dead, though several were badly hit. That gun was crude, rattly, unclean, but baby, it had done its work hard and well over the long night’s ordeal.

  “But won’t the first one blow the potato? Are you going to have time to get a second one on the muzzle?”

  “Good question,” said Ray. He rolled slightly to the left and extracted another potato. He pushed it up, close to the muzzle.

  “When the first guy goes down, the second guy won’t believe it. He’ll freeze. I’ll get potato two aboard and whack him.”

  “I don’t know,” said the spotter. “He’s been in war before. He just might empty in your direction and start screaming. Oh wait—oh wait. One of them just left. He’s going, I lost him, I can’t tell where he’s going.”

  “I saw him. He went into the bathroom. It’s four or five stores back down the corridor. I’ll do him when he comes out. The other guy won’t hear a thing and I’ll do him next.”

  “Jesus, you have balls of steel,” said the spotter.

  “I’m a professional,” said Ray. “This is what I do.”

  Ray found his prone and built it from the bones outward. Legs splayed, feet cranked outward for muscular pressure within the hold, rifle tight to shoulder, supported on bone not muscle, breathing cranked down to a slow seepage of air, ball of finger against the curve of the trigger. It’s all in the pull. That is, after everything else, it’s all about the pull. He’d made the pull a million times. He had a sweet stroke, firm, soft, untwisted by torque, a steady, ounce-by-ounce escalation of pressure until the break and something inevitably ended up with a hole exactly where he’d intended.