Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  He read the titles.

  And he knew.

  Of course. Had to be. No other. That was it. That was the one.

  It was fifth in line, on the left-hand side. Ray sidled up to it, trying to figure how to—

  He knows I’m here.

  He’ll know exactly when I’m coming through because he’s extrapolating from the imagery of my guncam, that’s the gig, and that gives him a one-second start on the action curve, and that’s the one second he uses to dust me. I pop in, blink, can’t see. He lays the front sight and jerks off three fast ones from point-blank range and I’m down. He goes out the back or whatever. Maybe he kills himself. But that’s what the “narrative” demands, he and I, together at last. Ray’s back, and Andrew’s got him. Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Scorsese and De Niro, Andrew and Ray.

  Ray had about two seconds or so to decide what to do, and he looked up and down the corridor for inspiration while loud, thriller music came out of the room just beyond the doors, singing the adrenal-goosing rhapsody of syncopated FX destruction, of shots and blasts and falls and deaths in 4-4 time, with a percussion line holding the back beat while the guitar chords moved forward relentlessly, on toward Armageddon or at least The and End.

  Ray let his muzzle rise to the marquee above the entrance so that Andrew, so near, so ready for this, knew that he was here at last, ready for his close-up.

  The imam made it to the stairwell leading to the roof. He climbed the metal stairs, hearing his steps echo into nothingness, and reached the door itself. He pulled his phone from his jacket, went to CONTACTS, and punched the number. No need for an answer. The pilot would feel the vibe of the phone in his pocket, drop down, and the imam would run twenty feet to the open door, lunge inside, and off they’d go, running low and without lights, next stop Canada. Then the long, secret trip home, then infinite glory, the love of the Faith, the thrill of being Mohamed Atta without the inconvenience of a fiery martyrdom. And then, finally, years and years of glory beyond, the loveliness of death, and the embrace and adoration of Allah himself.

  He opened the door—it clicked easily from the inside, according to fire department regulations—and stepped onto the roof.

  The sun had set, leaving an apocalyptic purple smear across low-hanging clouds, like a wound in the wall of the universe itself, signifier of end times. A cold breeze struck him, filled his lungs with hope, and yet the spectacle before him was so extraordinary, he could not but respond with utter fascination.

  It was like a scene from a war of the last century, where airmen fought in planes with double wings, looping and swirling close at hand, missing each other by inches, skidding this way and that, birdlike and deft, a true flock of death machines. The craft, of course, were helicopters, not biplanes, and now, at the moment of climax, they’d lost all sense of propriety and were swooping and jockeying for position, hovering low, then darting away. The air was aswarm with them, not so much as objects of defined specificity but as presences, blurs of weight and motion lit by red and white lights against the material of their construction, while the beating of their rotors buffeted him powerfully, the sounds of the many petrol-driven engines throbbed loudly, contributing their own vibrations to what he felt as he entered the maelstrom.

  He hunched down next to the door, itself contained in a tiny, shack-like structure on the edge of the vast roof, one of many such abutments, rises, and abstractions that made the roof its own kind of featureless wilderness in the mostly dark. He pulled out a flashlight, scrunched it on, and began to wave it, aware of how tiny a signal it was in the immense cauldron of airborne activity.

  Yet the angel watched over him. One of the whirling birds immediately detached itself from the mass overhead, and though he couldn’t identify it by type, he knew by the purposeful dive on his orientation that it was his ticket to Mecca.

  First person shooter. Andrew crouched behind a row of seats that yielded a perfect angle on the doorway into the auditorium, gun in one hand, iPad delicately balanced on his left knee. He saw what his opponent’s gun muzzle covered. The man looked up to the marquee again, rifle already mounted, so Andrew saw the name of the film playing behind him on the big screen, then he saw the muzzle come down, he saw the man point it at the door, steel himself a last time, and make ready for this most basic yet most dangerous of all FPS exercises, the tactical entry.

  The camera closed on the door, losing detail in blur, and at that precise moment, Andrew rose, lifted rifle to shoulder, shifted his view from virtual to real. The gunsight before him was not electrons in cyberspace but cold Eastbloc killing technology at the apogee the genius Mikhail Kalashnikov had achieved, and exactly as the door flew open ten feet from where he crouched in the seats and the man came in low and hard and straight to Andrew, Andrew shot him three times, putting three pills at about three thousand per deep into his center mass. But exactly as Andrew’s focus clarified, he saw that he had not shot a man moving low and fast but a garbage can on wheels with an AK-74 and gun barrel minicam secured at the plastic rim and at that moment the man revealed himself behind the door frame and Andrew, light being faster than sound or bullets, saw three huge flashes blossom from his cupped hands—classic isosceles, like all the books said—and then he found himself lurching backward, catching clumsily on an armrest, and twisting into the chair, very wet, three deep and throbbing wounds beginning to generate enormous pain. In seconds, a face loomed before him, the face of a kind of half-Chinese guy with a crew cut, knocking his gun away, and talking into a phone, saying, “McElroy, I got him, he’s hit bad, get medics up here fast, I’m in theater five in the movie complex.”

  He looked down at the young man, who coughed and said, “I thought I’d get Bruce Willis, but I got Keanu fucking Reeves.”

  The turbulence pitched the WUSScopter to the right, badly, and only Cap’n Tom’s skills, eroded or not, kept them airborne even as the man cursed, “Goddamn him!”

  It was the KPOP Traffic 24/7 copter beelining by them and missing only by inches as it descended toward the vast roof beneath them.

  Both camera jocks cursed too, the brush with death particularly bitter in their mouths and minds as the danger part was supposed to be over, but Nikki alone watched the traffic bird diminish as it descended.

  “Tom,” she said, “what kind of copter is that? I don’t recognize the type.”

  “Moving so fast I could hardly tell. I think it’s an Alouette, a French bird, they use ’em for agricultural spraying and—”

  “Do they use ’em for media?” Nikki asked sharply.

  “Well, now that you mention it, I can’t recall—”

  She saw the small, agile helicopter settle on the roof adjacent to what was barely recognizable as some kind of shack that housed a door.

  “He’s terrorist,” she said suddenly. “He’s fake. He’s here to help somebody get away.”

  Moment of silence in the chopper, despite the crescendo of noise pouring in from all sides and the waves of turbulence flushing through the open doors. What to do, what to do?

  Nikki knew. “Get over there on top of him. Don’t let him take off. We’ve got to stop him. And call five-oh. Get cops here fast. And you guys, get those cameras running, goddammit.”

  Cap’n Tom veered hard right on rotor pitch, upped the rpms on his big Bell engine, and began a Vietnam-LZ-under-fire power dive toward his prey.

  The helicopter settled twenty-five yards away, its rotors pushing the air out like swells of ocean, and the imam stepped into their full force, then stepped back, lowered, adjusted, and solidified his posture, and began the short run to the aircraft.

  It looked like some kind of large mechanical insect, its vivid bulb cockpit somehow representing eyes, its delicate landing struts folded legs, its frail, pipe-like fuselage standing for thorax, and the whirling blades in their blur representing the flashing of wings. He saw Haji beckoning him forward and he got to the thing, used the landing strut as a footrest, and hoisted himself upward and into
the empty seat.

  “Praise be to Allah! He looks after us!” he screamed, and though the other man could not possibly hear him, he smiled back, squeezing him firmly on the wrists, then turned his attention back to the controls before him and the flight outward.

  But at that second, another presence was suddenly upon them. In horror, the imam looked up and saw through the encompassing bubble another helicopter settle over them, sealing them in a little coffin of airspace, the strange craft, being larger and faster, able to impose its will on them.

  “Go! Go!” he screamed. “You must go!”

  But the pilot above was agile with his heavier machine, and when Haji meant to zoom forward, somehow the intruder beat him to the space and infringed upon his angle, preventing him, and so it went sideways and backward, and the imam watched in horror as Haji’s face clenched into despair, yielding to the look of the hunted.

  “Go up, he will not stand against you!” the imam screamed, unaware of the fundamental stupidity of ramming the enemy copter’s skids with his own aircraft’s whirling rotors, but that is indeed what happened, either by intention or imprecise maneuver, and the smaller Alouette shook spastically as its rotors broke apart on the struts beneath the WUFFcopter Huey and, unstabilized, began to chase its own tail as it spun, finding a last surge before it gave over to its death spiral.

  The imam screamed as the jaws of hell on this earth opened wide, and the flames were so hot, so very hot.

  “Stop talking,” snapped Ray. “You’re hit in both lungs and bleeding out, and I’m going to try and stop the bleeding. Relax, think about something nice, the medics will be here soon.”

  Andrew laughed. “Joke’s on you,” he explained. “I wasn’t in it for the money or the chicks, but the glory. As of tomorrow, I’m the most famous man in the world, and nobody will ever remember your name. Memo for next time: Always play the supervillain. Heroes are so last week.”

  He laughed again, then winced as, intent, Ray peeled the shemagh off Andrew’s neck and tried to stanch the welling blood from the three 9mm entry punctures, seeing that it was basically hopeless, feeling, despite the circumstances, the depression he usually felt when someone bleeds out helplessly, making ugly sounds, twitching, before going slack forever.

  “You might think—”

  “I’m telling you to shut up,” Ray said. “Where are those goddamn guys? You need transfusion, surgical clamps, and clotting agent fast. Where the hell are they?”

  He looked at the dying boy’s eyes and saw merriment. You had to give it to him: no contrition, no bullshit, Andrew 24/7 to the end.

  “Keep fighting,” Ray said. “You can stay around on willpower. Concentrate. Do not let yourself die. Fight, goddammit, the medics will be—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Andrew said. “Tomorrow my game goes up on iPads and Nintendo DS’s and their clones all over the world. You can’t stop it now.”

  Ray held the scarf wadded hard against the wound producing the most blood outflow, seemed to slow it for a bit, but so hydraulic is the human body and so critically injured was the boy that the blood simply found another exit point, and thus another wound increased its outflow in response.

  Then—an appalling thunderclap split the air accompanied by an instant flash of megaheat and illumination. The flame sucked the air out of the auditorium, that vacuum effect, and then the flare-up subsided, and oxygen became again available. Ray breathed hard at the coolness even as he shielded Andrew with his own body, then turned to see that at the far end of the theater, the roof had caved in under the thrust of a flaming machine, a helicopter, its bulb canopy shattered into a constellation of spiderweb fracture, its struts bent, melted, or sheared, its two passengers mute as the fire ate their corpses.

  “Damn,” said Andrew. “I hate it when that happens.”

  Suddenly, FBI people were all around Ray, and someone had grabbed him and pulled him out of the theater as medics squadded on Andrew to perform services too late to matter.

  “How did you know? How did you know?” someone in a helmet and goggles was yelling into his ear, incomprehensibly.

  “I don’t—”

  “Which theater?” the fed demanded. “He could have been in any of them.”

  Ray gestured upward, as more emergency personnel and other SWAT people ran by him.

  The marquee on Theater 5 read:

  The Minneapolis Film Society presents

  One night only

  Hits of the Eighties

  Die Hard

  Yippie-ki-yay, M*****-F******!

  Finally, someone threw a sheet over dead Santa.

  Mr. Renfro understood: aggression is the key.

  “All right,” he said, “I am speaking for the colonel. No officer is allowed to speak directly to media. All media contacts will be cleared through this office. I say again, no media contact except through the superintendent’s office. Now get me this Major Jefferson, fast.”

  “Excuse me, sir, who are you?” asked Kemp. “I think I will control press access to FBI personnel in this instance.”

  “No, Special Agent. This is a Minnesota State Police initiative. I speak for the colonel on media relations, and if need be, I will get on the phone and get a court gag order on you in three minutes’ time, and if you don’t believe me, you just watch it happen.”

  Thus in time, the official hero of the event, Mike Jefferson, was brought into Renfro’s corner of the Incident Command trailer. Renfro cleared the room out before speaking to him.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “Now, let’s get to it. Here’s the bargain. You and I know that the colonel didn’t exactly distinguish himself today. So I am going to give you what you want. I am going to get him the hell out of here. That was always the plan anyhow; this just accelerates it.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Shut up, Major. I don’t have time to argue. I speak with the full authority of the colonel’s office. Here is the reality. The media love him. You know why as well as I do. They yearn to credit him with a brilliant operation. Thus we will give them what they want. He came up with the idea of these secret assaults, and you followed it. His plan worked out brilliantly. He outthought and outfought this nutcase kid and all the Somali gunmen. That’s the narrative, get it?”

  “He froze like a popsicle,” said Jefferson. “If it weren’t for that sniper and some marine Superman cutting their firepower in half, and some genius kid in DC out-cyberpunching that nasty little punk, you’re looking at a thousand dead citizens.”

  “The colonel came up with a brilliant plan. If you go to the media with another narrative, they will destroy you and it’ll do you no good. I’ll even tell you what the countermove is. The colonel is so brilliant, he knew that if he let you work up an assault plan, it would be too compromised by ego, turf, overthinking, politics, grudges, and PC considerations. So he played you perfectly, and when you had to act, you didn’t have time for any of that bullshit and so what you came up with was simple, direct, and effective, a SWAT classic, the ideal. He wouldn’t let you fail; he put you in a position to succeed, which is all any manager can do. You’re just not smart enough to see the nuance of the great one’s genius.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “And don’t you think the race card will fall out of heaven and land on your skull: you’ll be one of those jealous, envious underlings who cannot stand that a black man outperformed them. They will hound you until you are disgraced and your professional life is over. My way, he gets a big DC job and is gone, he thanks and decorates and recommends you, and you are golden forever, whatever it is you choose to do.”

  “You fucking spin guys, you are the fucking ruination of the world. You take everything that’s real and decent and you twist it to some end in some game nobody even knew was on the table,” said Jefferson.

  “Nicely said, but it is what it is. Welcome to the world we live in, not the world we want to live in. It’s a pretty good world for you, Jefferson, don’t forget
that. You’ll get a promotion and the sincere gratitude of Colonel Obobo. It’s the best deal anyone will ever offer you.”

  Nobody had stopped them from approaching, and now they just stood there, as hundreds of people raced by, each with a call to make, a story to tell, a wound to be bound, a loved one to contact. Nobody paid any attention to Mr. and Mrs. Girardi.

  They stood there as escapees from the mall flooded toward them.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Girardi, “showtime.”

  He threw off his lumpy overcoat to reveal a nicely tailored double-breasted coat, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a stack of business cards.

  “Folks,” he said, “Jack Scheister, of the law firm Scheister & Jackell. Folks, you’ve gone through an ordeal, and somebody should pay for it.”

  He started handing out cards to people, most of whom were in such a state of shock they took them.

  Scheister & Jackell

  Attorneys at Law

  309-555-2132

  24-Hour Law Line

  “We sue, they rue.”

  “Folks,” his wife was saying as she handed out the cards, “I’m Monica Jackell. You should be compensated for your time, your pain, your anguish, and we’re here to see you get your justice and your cash.”

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  Ray and Molly sat in the bar of a restaurant in Washington DC. They were going to get married shortly and would be flying back to Saint Paul for the ceremony, to which every Hmong in America had been invited. Even old Bob Lee was flying in for this one. McElroy and his wife were coming, as were Nick Memphis, Jake Webley, and Will Kemp. Lavelva would make it if she could get leave, but she was in her third week of Marine Basic, so it was doubtful. But tonight, before the week of marriage craziness started, was just for them.

  The order of the night was martinis, vodka variant, slightly dirty, Absolut, no bullshit about shaking or stirring, just whatever the bartender preferred, Ray didn’t even know. It was Friday, pretty late, since she worked hard, as did he—recently appointed head instructor of sniper tactics for the FBI under Ron Fields out in Quantico—and she in the legal department of the Department of Energy. If you saw them, you’d see two Asian American yuppies, well preserved, representing diversity, on secure career paths, but not unusual in the cosmopolitan DC restaurant scene.