Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  He sat in his command chair in the back room of First Person Shooter before a wall of such imagery. On the other wall, more important to monitor, were all the image feeds from the security cameras. They at least communicated security responses to his event. He could see in the exterior exit cameras, for example, that the murky black-clad ninjas known as SWAT teams had pulled back, or at least out of the picture, and that at each entrance a line of buses had pulled up. According to Andrew’s instructions, each bus driver had opened his doors and left his bus and now stood in front of it, arms held upward and without jacket to display his unarmed status.

  Ho-hum, another day at the office. It was all going swell.

  The big board, which had the hacked SCADA pictorial of the MEMTAC 6.2 security program, showed nothing. Everything that was supposed to be locked down was still locked down; everything that wasn’t, wasn’t.

  “What is going on with number six?” asked the imam.

  “I don’t—”

  “He is still. He is on the ground. What is wrong with him?” Andrew looked back to number six on the gun camera wall. It took him a while to make any sense of it, but then he realized it was an inverted image, and twisting his head to find the proper orientation, he saw that it was a floor-level observation of nothing, that is to say, not ceiling, not hallway, nothing containing data, but rather what, upon concentration, appeared to be the lower foot or so of wall beneath the window of a retail outlet, on a level with the floor.

  “The gun is on the floor,” Andrew said. “Like the kid just dumped it and went and got himself some ice cream. Or maybe the camera fell off in some roughhouse and it landed on the floor sideways. He wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t even know it was there.”

  “Or someone killed him, left the gun on the floor, and it’s just lying there, showing nothing.”

  “Call him,” said Andrew.

  The imam spoke in Somali. “Number six, Hanad, are you there? Hanad? Has anybody seen Hanad?”

  The imam listened to the return messages and then reported, “Hanad went up on the second floor with Feysal.”

  “Which one was he?”

  “Number eight.”

  He looked at number eight. Hmm, it seemed okay, just more blur and dazzle as the muzzle bounced about, pulling the camera with it.

  “Asad? Where is Asad?” asked the imam. “I sent him to get the babies an hour or so ago. Where is Asad?”

  Asad was number three. They both looked at that image and for a second it seemed to show nothing much, just the same blur and dazzle. But then it stabilized. It seemed to show a door. Then it went up to the ceiling and a man’s hand reached around from the left and both the imam and Andrew watched as something large and irregularly shaped was crushed over the muzzle until it was held secure.

  Andrew almost laughed. It looked like a potato.

  Then the muzzle was lowered and it reacquired the door, settling just over the computer-controlled lock. The muzzle leaped, the irregular object—it was a potato!—dissolved in a blast of mist, and the doorjamb was blown out of the door frame, freeing the lock bolt. Hmm, interesting. The shooter had known not to fire into the lock itself—unbudgeable—but into the door frame, which was wooden and vulnerable to high-velocity energy. This fellow—was he a professional? It was like the moment when Dirty Harry leaps onto the school bus roof from the rail trestle, driving Scorpio nuts!

  On the monitor, the muzzle dropped to the floor, displaying a pair of New Balance cross-trainers, and Andrew was aware that the owner had just moved through the door he had shot open and begun to climb some steps.

  It suddenly made sense. Somebody in the mall was hunting his people. Some vigilante had killed Asad silently, gotten the rifle, and then improvised a suppressor from the potato—that was straight out of Marine Field Manual MC-118-341, “field-expedient suppression techniques.” Now that person had shot his way into one of the locked stairwells and was headed upstairs, that is, upstairs toward him, Andrew. Was it Bronson, the young Eastwood, Bruce Willis? Or was it some clumping cheese eater who had disobeyed the mall’s privately imposed law and brought a carry piece inside and now waged war?

  No. He knew how to blow the lock; he was a professional. Maybe Delta, maybe SEAL, maybe some real good FBI HRT guy.

  He hadn’t counted on that, but at the same time, instead of being scared, he was exhilarated. This is really interesting. Oh, this will be so cool in the final document. Every story needs a tragic hero; this guy would be it. This would also give the story another narrative strand to twist in and out. It revved him way up.

  He realized he must have, in his voluminous recording stick, the actual moment when the mystery man took out Asad and Feysal and Hanad and whoever else he’d taken out. He also realized that the hunter was now carrying the rifle, not having yet figured out that it was camera-equipped.

  He went to his software screen, found the elevator on switch on the menu, and turned the elevators back on.

  “Tell Maahir to send two guys up to the fourth floor by elevator and set up in a storefront across from us. They’ll be getting visitors soon. Oh,” he continued, “this is going to look so cool in the game!”

  “There it is,” said Renfro. “That’s it, that’s the ball game.”

  He and the colonel stood in the Command trailer, watching the network feed from NBC. It showed the three Kaafi boys bounding up the stairs into the Air Saudi plane. Joy pulsed through their limbs and loins, three young men who two hours ago faced ten years of incarceration in an antiseptic, dreary Western prison, now able to dream and plan and feel freedom and anticipate the softness of a woman’s flesh, the awareness of Allah’s approval, the congratulations of imams and mullahs, and, eventually, another chance to strike and bring death to the infidel beast and vengeance for the murder of the Holy Warrior.

  “You did it,” said Mr. Renfro.

  “You did it,” said the colonel.

  “We both did it,” said Mr. Renfro. “And now, look out, world, here we come.”

  “It’ll only be another half hour before they clear airspace and they’re home free. Our people would never shoot them down and the Saudi pilots would never obey orders to turn back. The hostages will be freed, the Kaafi brothers will be in Yemen and shortly Mogadishu, and I think I’ll let the mopping up devolve to my good friend Mike Jefferson, who likes the bang-bang stuff so much, he can go in and have his little gun battle with the bad guys. They’ll all be punished that way, my hands are clean, and as you say, look out, world, here we come.”

  “Colonel, you have a one-on-one now with ABC. It’s the only major you haven’t hit yet. Oh, and Fox—”

  “My good friends at Fox,” said the colonel.

  “Even they will kowtow to the colonel on this day.”

  “Okay, let’s—”

  But like a bad dream, someone stood between him and the doorway, beyond which lay the ABC team, with its lights and camera and love.

  It was the FBI hotshot, Will Kemp. “I thought he was off running the investigation,” the colonel muttered to Mr. Renfro, but as Kemp drew within hearing distance, he blossomed into his wise, cool public personality and said, “Will, your people were unbelievably fast and proficient on the Andrew Nicks ID, really, and that’s such a help once we get those citizens out of there and go in and take the little bastard down.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Kemp.

  “I’ll be sure to tell the director how well you and your team operated and under what great pressure. I’m sure he’ll be pleased, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”

  “Yes sir,” said Kemp, “but if you’ll forgive, I want to discuss something else.”

  “Will, I’m on my way to a media thing, unpleasant but, unfortunately, it goes with the territory.”

  “Yes sir, but just let me express myself quickly, if I may.”

  “Sure, Will, shoot. But please make it snappy.”

  “Sir, I’m wondering if it was wise to pull the SWAT people so far back. Equally
, I’m worried that it was unwise to give these people in the mall so much operational freedom. I mean they start shooting hostages, we’re a good five to six minutes away from confronting them with force, and they could do a great deal of killing in that time. Our intelligence says they have at least ten thousand rounds of ammunition in there and sixteen fast-firing assault weapons.”

  “Will, you know, that troubles me too. Troubles me immensely, in fact. But the truth is, you have to take some risks in operations. I decided to take this one. I think the Muslims will be content with their propaganda victory, hollow though it is. I mean, these are basically thirteenth-century minds we’re dealing with, and they’re easily distracted. The glory that awaits them in this life, the chance to be heroes to their coreligionists, that’s too much for them to give up on.”

  “Sir, it’s not them I’m worried about. It’s this goddamned white kid, with his crazy nihilism and bloodlust, his love for Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho, he could do anything, anything. I’d feel so much better if we had a sniper put a bullet in his head.”

  “Will, your concern is well placed and admirable. But by now, if we move SWAT back into place and authorize the rooftop snipers to get through the glass, I’m worried that we’ll set him off. So my judgment is to stay passive, just a little longer. Then we’ll let the SWAT boys off the leash and teach this kid a thing or two.”

  He turned, smiling, and went out to face the ABC cameras.

  Up they climbed, up the steel steps in the unlit shaft of the stairwell, slowly, Cruz in the lead, tough little Lavelva behind, from the second floor to the third.

  “Sir?” she said.

  “Call me Ray. Not sir.”

  “Is this a machine gun? I haven’t fired no machine gun before.”

  She was gripping the AK-74 that Ray had snatched up from the jihadi Lavelva had conked with her eight iron and he had finished with a bayonet. It made him realize: she knows nothing about that gun except what she’s seen in the movies, but she’s going on anyhow.

  “It’s not a machine gun, no. Here, I better show you how to use it.”

  They knelt, and he talked to her in whispers.

  “Okay, this one fires as fast as you pull the trigger. No machine gun. Thirty times. But it’s got to be loaded, the safety has to be off, it has to be cocked, and it’s much better if you’re aiming it.”

  He pushed the magazine release and snapped out the magazine.

  “This orange banana-shaped thing is full of the cartridges. You know what a cartridge is?”

  “The bullets.”

  “Yeah, close enough. You can see them held by the lips of the magazine, showing.”

  “Little things.”

  “They are small. But they move fast, they hit hard, they do real bad damage. So to load it, you have to lock in the magazine, the bullet part up, the bullets facing down the barrel. Look how I do it. Think of it as a kind of hinge. You sort of wedge the front part of the magazine into the front part of the magazine well, until it catches. See?”

  He showed it to her two or three times. Then she took the mag and the small-framed, tinny, even toylike weapon, and mimicked him, ending up with the mag forward lip lodged into the mag well until it lightly clicked.

  “Good. Now that it’s set, you pivot the magazine back, or up, all the way into the well. There, that’s right, pivot it in, see how it fits? And sort of force it or shove until—”

  It locked.

  “Okay, turn the gun over.”

  She did so.

  “See that lever, that piece of rotating metal on the right side of the receiver, see how it goes up and hooks over this open slot in the gun?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s the safety. In that condition, up, the gun can’t be fired or cocked. It blocks the bolt. See that?” and he pulled the bolt back about an inch until it hit the safety obstruction and would go no farther. “Bet you can figure out what to do.”

  “You push it down.”

  “You got it.”

  With her thumb, she rotated the long safety lever downward, so that it no longer blocked the bolt raceway.

  “Now you have to cock it, set the bolt back, allow a cartridge to come up into the chamber.”

  “Okay,” she said. She rearranged the gun so that she controlled it more efficiently, its stock against her hip, secured by her tightened elbow.

  “Now see that latch or prong thing?” he asked, pointing to the bolt handle.

  “Yes.”

  “Pull that back and let it go.”

  She pulled it back without trouble and then let the bolt fly forward and seat itself after having moved a 5.45mm cartridge into the chamber.

  “Okay, now you’re ready to rock. It’ll fire each time you pull the trigger. You know how to shoot it, like the movies. Just don’t hold it sideways. Look over the top, line up the rear sight with the front sight, put it on target, watch the front sight, and press, don’t yank, the trigger.”

  It reminded him of a time he’d taken Molly to a civilian rifle range. Molly tried gamely. She pretended she cared. She pretended the gun was interesting.

  “Will it hurt?” Molly had asked him.

  “No, not if you do it right. I’ll show you how to do it.”

  He’d seated her behind a bench, fiddled with wrist and arm and upper body, aligning the barrel, her head, focusing the scope for her, tidying the sandbags.

  “Okay, what are you thinking of?”

  “What we’re going to have for dinner.”

  He laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

  “I’m not hopeless at all. I’m full of hope. I’m hoping this will be over soon.”

  And it was. And they went out and had a nice dinner and laughed their way through it, and now he wondered if he’d ever get back to that simple peacetime ritual of just hanging out with a woman you loved. Was it that big a deal? It seemed the whole world had managed it.

  They made it to the top of the stairs.

  “Okay,” he said, “beyond there is enemy territory. I’m going to shoot open the door just like I did before and jump into the hallway. I’ll be low. We’ll check left, we’ll check right. Then I’ll dash across the hallway and cover for you. Then we’ll move into the store, it’s just seventy-five or so feet down to the left on that side.”

  Lavelva suddenly said, “No. Don’t do it.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll be killed.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “They waiting for you.”

  “They don’t even know I’m here.”

  “Yes, he do. That boy, he knows.”

  “Lavelva, what’re you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s in the game.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s a game. This boy, he turned this whole place into his own giant-size game. You said he run First Person Shooter? I been there. All these geeky little E.T.-lookin’ motherfuckers, black, white, yellow, it don’t matter, they all be trippin’ on killing and blowing shit up. It’s so real to them, they don’t remember they sittin’ in a mall surrounded by gal underpants stores. And he’s the king of all that. And what do a king do? He spread his empire, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s nuts, but why do you—”

  “I play the game too,” she said.

  “We’re wasting time.”

  “You get killed, you won’t waste no time anymore. You listen to me. I play the games a lot. I like to leave my thing too. I don’t want to be no girl in the projects with a brother dead and another nailing carpet and no prospects for nothing. I want to be Alex in Wizards of Waverly Place, and I’m all the time trying to get through the maze, you know. I like that story. I don’t like the boy shit, which is all blowing up, but I like the girl shit, the Wizard Alex shit. And so I know the rule of the game. It’s you never go in the first way.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the way the game work. Some people get it, some never do. But there is always a
nother way into it. Always. That’s the way you win. You look and look and look and find that other way in, ’cause if you go in the first way you find, you get whacked.”

  He looked hard at her.

  “Ray, please,” she said. “I’m telling you straight: through that door, death, sure enough.”

  7:35 P.M.–7:55 P.M.

  That is it, my brother,” said the imam. He was weeping. He had been so moved by the three young fighters in their orange suits leaping up the stairway into the plane, and now, all were aboard, and the hatch door was secured. The plane had to taxi to position at the head of the runway and then roar airborne. It was a triumph beyond his imagining.

  He looked at Andrew. The young man, handsome enough in the Western way with his blond, short hair, his little ski jump of a nose, his sweatshirt and blue jeans and hiking boots, his baseball cap on backward, was lit by the glow of the news feed. His face showed nothing. He was not weeping at all. He showed no trace of joy or liberation, no sense of the meaning of the great thing he had accomplished, a thing no jihadi, not even the Holy Warrior himself, the martyred Osama, had come close to achieving.

  He had actually freed prisoners from the American prison system. The Kaafi brothers, innocents, naifs, idiots, who had bumbled into an American bank on the day after Osama’s death and, in a fit of Islamic passion, attempted to rob it with airsoft pistols with the idea of contributing to the cause. It was perhaps the stupidest robbery in the history of crime, more farce than threat, as the idiots had not even bothered to cover the orange rings appended to the gun muzzles to signify nonlethality. They were arrested by a smiling sixty-three-year-old security guard.

  But some prosecutor decided to ride the prank as far as he could, and the three emerged six months later with massive sentences and were quickly shipped to the pen, where their frailness, their gentleness, their Somali beauty and grace got them fucked savagely every night by the depraved of America. The imam could not stand it. It hurt him so much. And now the boys were free, thanks to this American of dubious faith and principle named Andrew.