Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  So close, thought Neal. So goddamned close.

  The Air Saudi 747-8 seemed to take forever. The colonel watched it; a heat mirage rose from the engine structures, shimmering as it blurred the reality behind it, signifying the mounting temperature of jet engine exhaust. Then, finally, it lurched, picked up speed, and the camera stayed with it while behind it the farm plains and dreary suburbs of Minneapolis began to blur. At the end of a long, slow fifteen hundred yards, it rose, shivered, then shucked the ground, shivered again as its landing gear retracted and disappeared behind closing wheel wells, and then banked right against the black sky, heading north on the great circle route, to Yemen.

  There was no cheering in the Command trailer, but the colonel felt a stir in his heart. He had done what he could do. He had given them what they wanted. He had bridled in his wild cowboys who wanted to go in with guns blazing. He felt at peace, secure in the knowledge that no one else could have negotiated the treacherous terrain and the many obstacles between what he had discovered upon arrival and this very moment.

  Mr. Renfro whispered in his ear, “Congratulations, Doug. You brought it off. You did it.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “I couldn’t have—”

  “Sir, it’s him. Andrew Nicks.”

  The colonel took the phone, surprised to find himself drenched in sweat.

  “You saw?” he said. “You have your prisoners. Good riddance to them. Now give us our hostages.”

  “Excellent. By the way, change of plans,” said Andrew. “Please witness the firepower of the armed, fully operational Death Star.” He paused, hoping the Star Wars ref gave his carefully considered statement more oomph.

  “Imam,” he said in a loud voice so that all could hear, “tell the jihadis to open fire. Kill the hostages. Kill them all. Colonel, I now restore the security television cameras so that you and all of America can watch the massacre and learn to cower in fear of Islam.”

  8:01 P.M.–8:14 P.M.

  Nick, in the Pennsylvania Avenue crisis center, heard the kill order from Andrew Nicks, Eric and Cho wannabe, soldier of Islam, first person shooter champion, and all-around asshole, and almost before the sentence was finished, was screaming and body-Englishing into his mike, “McElroy, blow the window now, blow it now and engage targets. Ray, can you suppress from your position?”

  But he was a second behind the action curve as McElroy, having heard the same declaration of purpose, had already yanked the master cord and felt the tape securing the levers of the twelve flashbangs under the Kevlar helmet on the thick glass of the skylight pull free, and in the next second or so, the det went loud and hard, made more pointed in its effectiveness by the cupping effect of the helmet—a batch of bulletproof vests lay atop it, pinning it—which blew all force downward into and through the skylight, shearing through the heavy Plexiglas, atomizing it into a spray of glitter, like droplets of water, yielding a jagged opening, almost like a hole in the ice.

  It blew like a howitzer shell. The Kevlar helmet was sent into orbit, the noise of the purposefully loud flashbangs magnified by twelve seemed to put a needle into every nearby eardrum, and the pressure wave and subsequent vibration shivered the foundations of the planet.

  Still, ears ringing, McElroy was on the gun almost within a second, finding a braced position on the window well and peering through the scope into the smoky interior. What he could see wasn’t detailed; it was a seething blur, almost abstract, as beneath him, en masse, the hostages seemed to rise and scatter while at the same time, at the edges of the crowd, the flashes of gunfire, the percussion of reports, the shockwave of energy signified that the gunmen had opened fire. In another second, another agent, on binocs, screaming, “Two o’clock, I have a shooter, I see flash, Dave, two o’clock.”

  McElroy traced the imaginary clock hand out to the two o’clock orientation and found the flash, saw a thin black youth in black and green tribal scarf pumping rounds from his AK, the flash lighting the boy’s face, displaying his excitement, his joy, his pleasure as he shot from the hip into the screaming herd before him, and McElroy put the X-marks-the-spot on the bridge of the nose—10 power blew it up big as a movie screen, HD no less—remembered he was shooting radically downhill and so brought point of aim down a minute of angle or so, and then felt the gun recoil—he had fired instinctively, without order, his trigger finger making all decisions for him—and took his first kill, as the bullet split the head, spewing a foam of black liquid, and the boy’s limbs melted, as he went down hard and forever.

  “Clean hit,” screamed the spotter.

  McElroy raced through the bolt ritual, up hard, back hard, seeing the empty pop like a muffin in his mom’s kitchen, forward hard, down soft.

  “Go left to ten, I see more flash, two of them, take them, Dave, knock them down.”

  McElroy found the shooter at the end of blurred transit across space and frenzy, felt he was too low on the body to take time to find the head, and his oh-so-clever trigger finger put a 175-grain hollowtip through the top of the guy’s chest, so that it would follow its downward angle, opening like an umbrella or some kind of steel rose with razor petals, find and explode the heart, which is what it did, the result being another instant splash and collapse.

  “Next to him, next to him, next to him,” screamed his spotter, and McElroy jacked the spent shell out, planted a new one in the chamber, and found his next target just as that young man was reacting to the death of his partner and looked up to see Dave one hundred or so feet straight up from him.

  But he vanished in a split second, withdrawing under the canopy of the second-floor balcony and Dave felt a surge of groaning frustration.

  “Find me targets,” he screamed.

  “Looking, looking, looking,” the spotter said.

  “Oh no,” said Mr. Girardi.

  A flash, followed by the crack of a detonation, seemed to blossom upon the roof of the great building.

  Suddenly, activity burst out all over the compass.

  The explosion seemed to galvanize every figure on the landscape, and in seconds, people were running by them, cars were mobilized, even the hovering helicopters seemed to descend from the sky. They heard, though muted, the sounds that could only have been gunshots.

  “I thought it was all fixed,” said Mr. Girardi.

  “Something must have gone wrong,” said his wife.

  “I thought it was all over,” Mr. Girardi said. “And now this.”

  Each gunman heard, over his earphones, the scream of the imam.

  “My pilgrims,” the man raged, “it is time to avenge the sins of the Crusaders and the murder of the Holy Warrior. Kill the infidels. Kill them, my brave warriors, and purify the world of their filth and disease.”

  Faaid put down his box of Caramel Corn and winked at Hani, who was eating cold french fries out of a cardboard box, and Hani winked back merrily. Now for the fun part!

  The remaining boys spread around the perimeter of the large, docile crowd of white sheep in the amusement park, lifted his rifle to hip, and pivoted, a candy-sticky finger going to the safety levers for those who had bothered to put their safeties on, and each opened fire.

  Only Nadif and Khadar were reluctant. They had spent most of the time eating and never really made eye contact with any of the white people. They had more or less found each other over the long ordeal of travel and hiding, each reading the other’s lack of killer zeal among the harder faces of the truly demented. By nature passive, they had done their duty with a minimum of aggression and frenzy. They had strolled down Mississippi at the beginning, shooting out ceiling lights and blowing holes in store windows and watching mannikin strumpets dissolve under the multiple impacts of 5.45mm bullets traveling at close to 3,000 feet per second, which they found very amusing. As for actually blowing large holes in human flesh, not so much. Then they had more or less strolled the perimeter of the mass of huddled hostages, making no eye contact with the victims, interacting reluctantly, taking frequent bathroom and
food stand raid breaks.

  They were not particularly into jihad. Nadif had dreamed of being a doctor and Khadar a poet. A poet! He had soft eyes and gentle ways, was almost girlish in his winsomeness. But when General Aweys’s militia had wiped out his village, and his parents as well, he had been given a choice: carry a rifle or die.

  He chose the rifle and, alone among the boys, had never killed a soul. Today was supposed to be his first, but the approach of it had left a queasy feeling in his stomach.

  Khadar said, “It’s time to do the work of Allah,” though without much enthusiasm. Both knew punishment of all sorts awaited them if they did not perform as expected. Numbly they turned to do the necessary.

  But at that moment, from above, the sky exploded. All looked up to see the aftermath of some sort of blast at the tip of the oddly shaped skylight, and besides the unpleasantness of the noise, it rained sparkles upon them, a kind of sudden dry wind of interfering debris, and each involuntarily blinked, closed eyes, averted face.

  Only a second or two, but possibly it was tactically significant, in that its violence was so unexpected and overwhelming, it stirred the torpid crowd in unanticipated directions. Suddenly, many rose, saw the rescue had commenced just as shooting had commenced, and at last found the courage to run. They scattered outward like cinders fleeing a fire.

  Faaid fired at one runner, bringing him down, turned, fired fast at the crowd that suddenly roared toward him, was astounded that none went down and realized that there’s a lot of air in a crowd and at that time figured he was much better off aiming instead of crazily cracking off rounds from the hip, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and—

  McElroy’s first shot splattered his brains.

  The others didn’t notice. They too tried to master the crowd-massacre learning curve, and they too discovered that shooting blindly into the belly of the beast is likely to produce displeasing results, and in the time it took them to bring rifles to shoulders and brace knees tightly for supported shooting, several others, assisted by McElroy, Ray Cruz, and others, lost interest in the point of the operation as they were felled for keeps.

  Ray got the news. Dropping the cell, he rose to the balcony railing, winced as above him McElroy’s flashbang bouquet flashed and banged with stunning malevolence, blew a hole in the Lake Michigan skylight, and a blast-propelled spray of glass spewed downward, and leaned over the balcony looking for shots. He only had a P7, the German police trade-in the killers had somehow come up with on the surplus market, though he knew it by reputation to be an accurate pistol. Two hands locked onto the small thing, the lever that bisected the grip compressed by the adrenaline-pumped psycho strength coursing down his wrists, Ray stepped out, oriented on a flash—he couldn’t see well enough to pick out an actual shooter—guesstimated where the shooter had to be relative to the flash, and squeezed off three fast rounds. The gun popped in his hands at each shot, spitting an empty, yet its jump wasn’t radical and the barrel axis was so low to his hand that it just ate up recoil, so Ray got back on target fast. Three fired, the flash disappeared, and whether he’d made a kill or just scared the guy to cover, Ray didn’t know.

  But he knew Lavelva’s theoretical ambushers would have been alerted by the flashbangs as well as his own shooting, and he wheeled, still in the two-hand, low isosceles stance, and saw them—goddamn, the girl was right!—as they both emerged from a shop about sixty feet away, rifles flying to hips to take the infidel down. The P7 lived up to its rep; a long shot for a 9-mil, he still made it neatly and crisply, put one into the lead shooter, rocking him to stagger and sit-down. He rotated smoothly, telling himself not to hurry, onto the second target, tracked it as the man was moving, laid the front sight on the leading edge of the mover. Then Ray saw flash—he heard silence because his war brain had shut the world down to nothing but target—and knew instantly that his opponent, shooting fast without aiming, firing from the hip, had missed, and Ray felt his trigger pull break, the gun leaped in its little way, and the runner slowed, staggered by a solid hit, stopped, straightened up a little. At that moment from across the hallway, a door flew open and Lavelva, with her AK-74, fired, and although she shot more or less wildly, at least three of her twenty or so rounds went home, and the second Somali himself slid into coma and death on the floor of the mall.

  “Bring a gun!” he screamed, and she picked up one of the fallen AKs and ran to him.

  He took it as if it were a baton in a relay race, pivoted, looked over the sights for targets in the chaos and scramble below, vectored in on one muzzle flash as yet unquelled, and put three or four rounds into that spot directly behind where instinct told him a shooter crouched. If a man was there, he either went down hard or scampered back, under the overhang of the balconies, so that no angle was available to Ray.

  Then Ray’s eyes were drawn to a melee in the center of the space below him, and he saw that some kind of fight had broken out, a pile-on, as hostages had trapped and were beating on one of their tormentors. But he had no shot.

  The coup de SWAT consisted of some neatly tuned disobedience.

  “That’s my unit moving back,” the officer had said twenty minutes back, as they crouched in the shadows of the parking lot across from the Rio Grande entrance. “They all have the black helmets from Bravo Company for that cool Delta look.”

  “It is cool,” another guy had said. “We tried to get them, but the budget—”

  “Go ahead,” Jefferson had said.

  “Okay, so why don’t we go to them, trade helmets, and send them back to Incident Command. If they keep their helmets on, nobody’s going to know it’s them and not us. I know Nick Crewes, who commands over there. He’ll go for it.”

  “And then we’re real close if the fucking balloon goes up,” said someone else. “And if it doesn’t, who knows?”

  So this meant Jefferson and his ad hoc team of all-star SWAT mutineers were still in strike distance to the Rio Grande entrance, and they didn’t need an official order to go. When they heard Andrew’s orders to his gunmen, they just went.

  It was a quick dash to the entrance, and both shotgunners laid muzzles next to the same metal door lock and fired simultaneously. Metal hit metal with a clang of super energy that, combined with the percussion of the two shells firing, sounded nuclear in its decibel level. Nobody blinked, they were so full of adrenaline, so ready to close and shoot, after the hours of doing nothing. The door torqued under the double slam of two hard-metal missiles being sent into its innards at a thousand feet per second and warped, twisting, showing two blisters and two smears of superheated carbon where the breaching rounds had tunneled through. Jefferson gave a hard wrench and—the door didn’t budge.

  “Goddamn!” he screamed, and yanked and pulled, but it didn’t move. Inside they could hear the shots.

  “They’re shooting, oh Christ, it’s a war!” came a terrified voice.

  Oh, Christ, thought Neal. Think. Think!

  Thank God for television. Was it a World War II movie? Nazis hunting a clandestine radio in an apartment building. They have the signal, they just don’t have the floor. One by one, they turn off the power on each floor, and when the radio broadcast is interrupted, they know their guy is on that floor.

  Thank you, Nazis. Thank you, television.

  Neal dragged the icon to POWER DOWN ALL and turned off every single RealDeal outlet in every single mall, strip mall, town, suburban shithole, whatever, in America. From Toledo to Tucson, from New York to Natchez, and along any other axis you cared to chart, they all went blank, all four hundred–odd of them.

  For a second. Then one by one by ten by twenty, they came back on, as branch managers went to their boards, pressed RESTORE, and got their juice back on fast and the two hundred screen images back on. That is, all except one, where the branch manager was lying on the floor hoping not to get shot, surrounded by weepy clerks and sobbing customers, all clenched in prayer. Neal dragged to that one, clicked on it to bring it up, looked for LINKS, clicke
d on that, and found himself in a program called MEMTAC 6.2, went to the pictorial, found LOCKDOWN ENGAGED, put the cursor on it, and clicked.

  LOCKDOWN DISENGAGED came the message.

  You’re terminated, fucker, he thought.

  With the clunky sound of large pieces of metal shifting, the doors shivered and popped amid the stench of burned powder.

  “Go, go,” shouted Jefferson, as his people raced in. “Semiauto, lasers on, look for targets.”

  But the order was largely meaningless, as all six of them knew that.

  What they found was the corridor called Rio Grande overflooded with a torrent of escapees coursing down the hallway at them, as the outer margins of the hostage crowd had already begun its race to freedom and safety, overwhelming the gunner meant to stop them by sheer numbers. He got off a few shots and then was pierced from above by one of Dave McElroy’s .308s and taken from the fight and from the planet, both forever.

  So the SWAT team formed a flying wedge, waving MP5s, screaming, “Police, Police, make way!” and magically the torrent spread, admitting them. They could hear shooting up ahead, see more chaos, had no idea other shooters were already engaging the killers.

  The team spread out, bent low, looking for targets as they moved to circle those who still stood and fired. Two spotted a gunman fleeing into a CD store and pursued him, saw his feet as shadows where he crouched in terror behind a free-standing shelf unit, popped their fire selection levers to full auto, and hosed the rack with thirty rounds apiece, blowing images of rap groups, CW stars, and gospel music groups to shreds as they destroyed all that stood between them and their target. The gunman himself took close to forty hits in the few seconds that he remained standing against the onslaught, and when they got to him, they found him as dead as ancient history.

  Meanwhile, in the center of Silli-Land, amid a pile of squirming hostages, a man rose in majestic thunder with his AK-74, a Conan, a Shaka Zulu, an Attila, as if he’d just crushed his enemy, driven them to the sea and heard the lamentations of their women, and in character he shouted a medieval bellow of warriorhood, as if he dared anyone to shoot him.