Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  They shot him anyway.

  Could this really be happening? Possibly it wasn’t really happening. You know, it was so unlikely that it almost certainly wasn’t happening.

  But it seemed to be happening.

  Colonel Obobo closed his eyes, held them tight shut, and when he opened them . . . yes, dammit, it still seemed to be happening.

  The monitors leaped to life as Andrew Nicks restored the mall’s security cameras with the click of a mouse, and the imagery poured into the Command van. The assembled police officers watched as the young men of Brigade Mumbai opened fire on the crowd. The contrast between the muzzle flashes and the unlit darkness of the crowd was so marked that the imagery resolved itself quickly enough into abstraction, the piercing stab of the flash essentially blowing all detail out of the backdrop so that the screens only showed white-hot light and jumble, incomprehensible to the eye.

  “Colonel, should I send in SWAT?” asked Major Carmody.

  “Find Jefferson!” somebody else said. “Where the hell is that guy, why isn’t he doing anything?”

  “Colonel, it would probably be a good idea to tell SWAT to blow the doors, and meanwhile, I think we ought to alert the FBI and our own snipers on the roof to engage.”

  “Where the fuck is Jefferson?” came another cry. “He was bitching all day about standing around and now the party’s started and he’s out to lunch.”

  But Obobo said nothing. He seemed utterly baffled by the craziness on the screens above him. After all, who could make sense of that insanity?

  Finally, he said, “I don’t want undue risk vis-à-vis the hostages. Let’s let the situation clarify before—”

  “Sir, they’re shooting the hostages, for God’s sake,” said Carmody. “We have to stop them.”

  “I don’t want to judge hastily. Maybe they’re bluffing, maybe this is another warning, maybe they’ll stop shooting. I see no need to further agitate them.”

  “Sir, I—”

  What was wrong with these people? When he spoke, with his calm deliberation, his firm, perfect eye contact, his empathy and compassion welling in his voice, he expected to be listened to. It had always been that way.

  “That’s all, gentlemen,” he said. “That’s my decision. Now, you all wait until it clarifies and then contact me. Mr. Renfro, call my car, will you please? I’ll be outside.”

  With that he turned, grabbed his coat, and left the room.

  For a moment the officers stared at each other stupefied. Then one by one, they went back to the monitors.

  “I think,” someone said, “we must have some people in there. I don’t know where they came from, but that sounds more like a gun battle than a massacre.”

  All watched as fleet SWAT operators, black-clad and bent aggressively as if their posture alone could protect them, entered the screens from various angles, shooting as they moved, their laser beams also vivid slashes against the confusion, darting this way and that. The monitors captured two SWAT heroes blowing the hell out of a terrorist in a CD shop, and then on another screen, a man in the center of the crowd was brought down by multiple hits.

  “Good fucking shooting,” someone said.

  “There was some kind of blast from up top,” somebody said. “Somehow the snipers blew the skylight and I think they’re firing too.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Carmody. He turned to Mr. Renfro. “I’m going to send SWAT in for backup,” he said, almost tentatively.

  “You’ll be violating the colonel’s orders,” said Renfro, but without much conviction. His pasty white face, normally so flaccid, displayed strain through tightened jowls and harsh cords standing out on the neck. “But maybe you should,” and a tide of phlegm rose in his throat, and he cleared it with a growl of breath, “Urggghhhh—I don’t know. I—I just don’t know.”

  “All units,” Carmody said into his throat mike, “you are authorized to close and engage. As soon as SWAT deploys, I’m authorizing first responders to set up triage units at each entranceway and have stretcher teams and gurneys ready to deploy when and if the mall is secure. Alert all emergency medical sites to prepare for incoming under siren but we have no idea as to casualty figures yet. It could be considerable. They’d better get all their people in and suited up.”

  “Ambulances, Larry,” someone said.

  “And get ambulances to the entrances to ferry the wounded. Do that ASAP.”

  Then it was quiet for a second, until a major’s voice arose from the darkness, as the battle on the screens played out, with the SWAT guys shooting from standing, from moving, from kneeling, pushing in, getting closer.

  “Go, babies, go,” he said.

  Maahir had more or less forgotten about jihad, and martyrdom; he’d forgotten everything except for the sex part. He liked killing too, and taking money from the wallets of the dead, but the best part was the sex, and further, sex and rape, to him, were the same thing or, at least in his experience, always had been. When the order came from the imam, he alone among the gunmen did not unsling his weapon to open fire. Instead, with his strength, his majesty, his fearsome warrior’s vitality, he strode through the crowd, as the kneeling mortals rolled away from him, screaming and begging for mercy. Scum! No warriors here this day! Hah!

  Death did not frighten him, as he had faced it and dealt it many times, and not just for jihad. Secretly, he didn’t give a fuck one way or the other for jihad. It was just that jihad offered the best opportunity for brigandage, which was his calling, for loot, which was his love, and for flesh, which was his obsession, particularly on the wren-like bones of a child virgin. He knew exactly where the child was. He smashed and pummeled his way to her. Now she was his.

  And he had never seen one like this Chinese. So pale, so frightened, so delicate. He loved the tendrils of her tiny ears, the perfection of her mouth, a rosebud yet to open, the length and smoothness of her arms, the grace of her hands and fingers. He imagined her naked, in fear of him, obedient to his will, forced to this blasphemy or that, and the result was a tumescence as hard and gigantic as a mountain. He would have her.

  He reached her, cowering in the arms of her ancient protector—mother, aunt, grandma, whatever—and he kicked that old biddy aside, freeing the child for his taking. He bent, reached her, clasped his strong hand on her frail biceps, and pulled her to him, and the lights went out big-time, except behind his eyes, where Soviet rockets detonated, filling the night sky with incandescence. He blinked his way back to reality.

  The old bitch had hit him hard with her bag, swung full-crescent around her head, and it had landed with such force, he realized now she must have filled it with lead.

  But just as his vision restored itself, she hit him again, flush to the head, and his mind filled with stars. It was as if the heavens had collapsed on his skull, and he experienced a moment of utter stupidity, and then a tide of other bitches swarmed on him. The audacity of them, the fury, the arrogance! None alone had the strength to prevent him from blowing snot from his nostrils, but taken together, their weight and squirmy, ripping rage kept him flat longer than he expected.

  He bucked, he writhed, he shouted, finally he bit some limb that presented itself and was rewarded with the sound of a scream and the taste of hot blood, and he got a leg free to kick someone away, he shimmied to the right, and then he rose, screaming, the mob of women rolling off him. Hyenas! Vultures! Exiled old lionesses with dried-up ovaries! Scavengers of the plains! He would kill them all. He snatched his rifle up, eyes blazing with hatred, and screamed in Somali, “Whores and sluts, now I shall rip hearts from your bodies before I fuck them,” and then noted the constellation of red dots upon his chest. Fireflies?

  Actually they were laser dots, followed immediately by 9mm bullets that struck him so hard and fast, they felt like the coming of rain, and he had a last, sad sense of the long topple to earth.

  Nikki was looking for the sniper she called Chicago, who seemed to be all over the place. She spotted him in a crowd of snipers
roughly at Racine halfway up the western shore of Lake Michigan.

  “Film on the snipers, film on the snipers,” she screamed, and in another second or two he had fallen away, and in the second after that, a shear of light blew a hole in Lake Michigan, unleashing a sharp hit of percussion felt even by her.

  “Jesus, I got it,” screamed Larry the camera vet, who had just recorded the only image of the skylight demolition, which would be seen around the world for the next seventy-two hours.

  “They’re assaulting,” Nikki yelled, even as she watched Chicago reassemble himself at the shattered hole in the glass lake and begin the hunt for targets.

  “Go, go, goddammit,” she commanded, and because she was so fast, the WUSScopter led the mad airborne charge of media helicopters, heretofore locked in obedient formation at three thousand feet, as it broke and scattered. Theirs not to reason why, theirs only to get really cool vid for a network feed.

  Down, down, down through the faltering dark Cap’n Tom took the WUSScopter, so hard and fast that each of the three other occupants rose slightly from their seats, feeling the impression of weightlessness. The two camera jocks held on for dear life, but Nikki, the warrior princess and Mary Tyler Moore from Hell, was screaming, “Go, go, go, get us to the exit, goddammit, Tom, go!”

  Then she turned back in the craft to the two older men.

  “Get out there, we need some fucking pictures.”

  Being yelled at by an enflamed and enraged Nikki was actually a lot more frightening than freefall under the guidance of a slightly drunk ex–Marine in his sixties, and so they squirmed forward and started shooting, and since they were first, they got the only good feed under the right lens and in sharp focus of Mike Jefferson’s illegal SWAT team racing into the mall through entrance SE, guns hot and loaded. And in another thirty seconds, the doors, all of them at this entrance, sprang open, and a human tide of refugees poured out. Simultaneously, columns of ambulances, red lights flashing, began to course toward that entrance—all entrances, in fact—from different directions. Medics and docs disembarked, setting up triage stations, while gurney teams stood by, waiting for the doorway to clear, as the hostages continued to rush from the building.

  “Nikki, what’s going on?” asked an anchorman whose name she had momentarily forgotten.

  “Well, it appears that even as the terrorist leader ordered his men to open fire, SWAT elements of some sort, some outside the building, led by snipers on the roof, assaulted the terrorist team. Possibly there’s a gunfight going on in the amusement center right now, but the hostages have either been freed or have made some kind of escape. That crowd of people you see pouring out of the southeast entrance, those are fleeing hostages and you can see that medical personnel have moved into place to handle the wounded. I don’t know if the news is good or bad, I don’t have a casualty report, I don’t know what’s going on inside yet, but events here at America, the Mall, appear to have reached their crescendo.”

  She heard the anchorman say, “We have yet to receive acknowledgment of an assault from Command, we have no idea where those SWAT members came from, we don’t know who’s inside.”

  Nikki’s phone buzzed.

  “Nikki Swagger,” she said, answering it.

  “I’m out, I’m out,” screamed the voice, and she recognized it as Amanda Birkowsky’s, the clerk in Purses, Bags and Whatnot.

  “Amanda, can I put you on air?”

  “I don’t care, I just wanted to thank you.”

  Nikki switched to Marty and said, “Put me on live, I have a witness,” and Marty was fast for the first time in his life.

  “Nikki Swagger, WUFF-TV. I am talking to a witness, Amanda Birkowsky, who hid in a store throughout the ordeal. Amanda, can you tell us what happened?”

  “We heard shots and screams and then right away some kind of explosion—I don’t know what happened, as if somebody blew something up—and then more shots. It was a gunfight, just like in the movies. Then the hostages went racing by, and I ran with them and the doors were all open, and people hiding in the stores all up and down the corridor came rushing along and we’re out now.”

  “Did you see any casualties?”

  “I saw people crying, I heard gunfire behind from all directions. I don’t know how many were hit or killed, but I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you to those brave policemen who came in and fought for us, oh, they were so brave.”

  “Amanda, find a first aid station, make sure you’re okay, call your mom, and please, please relax and rest. And thank you for your courage and help.”

  Of course that feed, over the images of chaos below, the images of the detonation and then of the SWAT team penetrating, went national in about thirty seconds and international in about thirty more.

  8:14 P.M.–8:47 P.M.

  NADIF and Khadar were almost certainly the most harmless of the Somali gunmen. Thus the universe awarded them the cruelest deaths in accordance with its policy of punishing the meek the most savagely.

  Now that hell was breaking loose, they found the idea of shooting the innocent somewhat disturbing. It was one thing to be in combat, as both had been, where the targets were fleeting and shadowy, another to simply blast people in blue jeans and baseball caps, even if, as white devils, their faces were indistinct blurs and expressed no emotion whatsoever.

  Yes, they fired, in a somewhat haphazard fashion, from the hip, passive-aggressive to the end, more or less sloppily pumping out a round a second as the white people rose and rushed in total panic by them. But neither could find it in their heart to kill, and so they angled their shots slightly upward, blasting the facade of the second-tier balcony, about one hundred yards across the Silli-Land Park from where they stood. A large explosion from above frightened them and drove them back, and then also from above someone shot Nadif in the leg, not a serious wound, but it drove the two of them back even farther.

  In seconds it seemed that American frogmen-ninjas were among them—how on earth had they gotten there so fast?—with guns with long, piercing red beams that sought to supply death to whomso-ever they touched. They watched as Maahir, emerging from a sea of angry women, was brought down by a host of red dots that had bullets attached magically. Both young men panicked, but in different ways. Nadif decided to climb to heaven, while Khadar awarded himself a boat trip.

  It actually was a log. He’d been eyeing the log flume ride for some time, finding it unbearably interesting. The water was so blue and smelled so fresh. It had no alligators, algae, dead fish, or oil slick in it. He raced up the ramp to what he had concluded was its starting station and found himself in some sort of loading area where a lot of logs were lined up, bobbing in the blue-green liquid. It occurred to him to climb into one and hide and wait until he was arrested, but he somehow knew that wasn’t what was called for. He wished he had figured out how to make the logs go along the track where at a certain point they were magically hoisted uphill—but water doesn’t run uphill, does it?—pushed through a tunnel, then sent zooming down a whirlwind of twists and turns. Wheeeee! But he had no idea.

  Instead, he leaped into the water, which was warm as piss, and tried to run toward the upward mechanism fifty or so feet away, figuring that stairs were somehow under the froth and that he could get up the ramp and out of harm’s way. Alas, his splashing attracted ninjas, who rose to the platform he himself had just occupied, and they yelled at him, almost desperately, in a language he didn’t understand.

  Without hesitation, he unslung his baby Kalash and made as if to fire, though he couldn’t remember if the safety was on or not, and immediately the water around him broke up into a disturbance of geysers and spray as his hunters fired first and he was pulled down into the blue-green urine, amid bubbles and, from somewhere, a gushing red cloud.

  As for Khadar, his choice of death ride was the Wild Mouse. He did not actually have time to get in a car and go for a ride, even if he’d known how to run it, but he made his way over fences and through an artifi
cial garden easily enough to the structure of the device itself, a steel latticework that rose four stories toward the skylights. He began to climb. Clearly, for maintenance purposes, the supporting network of beams and buttresses had been engineered to allow a fairly athletic fellow access to any portion of the track, and so up he scooted, graceful and nimble, propelled by the power of lean, strong muscles and thin, long bones. Up, up he went, climbing to the hump of the highest hill, with the idea he supposed of getting up there unnoticed and lying flat on the track. He had a brief fantasy in which this strategic move allowed him to escape and he disappeared into Minneapolis’s Somali community, acquired fake papers, married, had children and a long and happy life. But he had been noticed. Unfortunately, by a sniper.

  It was McElroy’s last kill and the one that would haunt him. The others were armed and had been dropped as a lifesaving necessity, as duty compelled. But this guy was wide open from the back, his rifle hung by sling over a shoulder, and for all the world he looked like nothing more menacing than some kind of haute-bourgie recreational climber, the guy who reads Outside magazine and shops at REI and tells everybody he wants to “do” Mount McKinley, then the Matterhorn, and as for the Hindu Kush, well, we’ll see. There’d been a guy just like that in the Cleveland field office.

  At the same time, the guy was armed and he was heading vigorously to an elevation from which he could do violence to SWAT guys and citizens. So McElroy’s pause lasted less than a second and was shortened even further by his spotter saying, “Dave, target on roller coaster structure, about ten o’clock, looks to be over a hundred.”

  It wasn’t so radical a downhill angle, so McElroy didn’t hold low but rather let the crosshairs settle between the shoulder blades as he began his press, and maybe they’d passed a little beneath that ideal spot when the trigger broke.