The rifle fired itself.
First person shooter at its ultimate. First person shooter, for real. First person shooter, the logical destination. First person shooter, the end of the road.
He watched on number seven, the big screen. He knew he should be watching the other screens, should be scanning this corridor and that stairwell for all the signs of disturbance, for possible threat, for danger, for sloppiness on the part of the kids, but he could not stop watching.
The rifles, unnoticed by their users, had miniaturized vidcams clamped to the barrel with some fixture from GG amp;G or Bravo Company or LaRue Tactical just behind the muzzle, and each sent a streaming vid feed to him at his headquarters, via the mall’s Wi-Fi network, and came up on the big screens adjacent to the wall that displayed his intercept of the security cam data. Images, images everywhere on the walls of this dark back room, which was filled with screenglow, turning everything a translucent gray white, yet more surrealism for this most surreal of enterprises.
The guncam imagery, of course, was sent to and recorded on the 6 TB memory card, but he was still able to hit replay at the local level and watch a designated sequence over and over again.
So now he watched number seven, for about the fourteenth time. The gunman was Maahir, the oldest and most reliable, the killer of Santa Claus. It took a while for the video to settle down, but even as the muzzle prodded the arbitrarily selected five and pried them out of the crowd in a dazzle of near-abstract shapes and black-white-gray imagery, certain lucid visions still arrived: the look in the eyes of the woman, the sullen downcast of the face of the old man, the simple dullness of the uncomprehending teenager. Then it all went to blur again as the gunman walked them to the cleared space, got them on their knees. They hadn’t yet figured what was going to happen because of course it was so outside their imagination. This kind of thing, this wantonness, this jihadi contempt for life, it hadn’t yet come to America. Oh, sure, 2,900 at the Trade Center, but those were meaningless numbers. The deaths of these five would be far more terrible and would live forever in the Western imagination when the data got into the world blogosphere. But that was still a few days off.
Okay, now. Five kneelers, hands at their sides. Maahir has settled down, the gun muzzle isn’t flappity-flapping all over the joint, reducing the imagery to a smear of gaudy electrons, and the tiny camera peers down from its forearm mount, seeing the muzzle as a black prong in the upper right hand of the screen, eternally fixed in the image.
The woman is first. The camera closes on the back of her head as he presses the muzzle almost to her skull. She has no idea she’s about to enter history and sits placidly awaiting a deliverance that isn’t to be. Flash, jump, blur, a haze of smoke, and the image is still again and fills with light as she topples forward, twisted slightly, instantly extinct. With animal death comes the end of body discipline, as all the muscles let go at once and she lunges forward like a felled building, straight into the floor, not much damage visible because the bullet passed through hair, burning it, pushing it aside, but still hiding the fragility of the skull.
As the muzzle sweeps to the next in line, his eyes shoot back to the gunman, laced with bulgy fear. Flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. He topples sideways, out of the frame. The next is the younger woman, who appears to be knit up in desperate prayer, all bunched up, her jaw vibrating as she uncorks the various afterlife mantras and deity ass kissing that constitute formal address to the supreme, then flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. An eccentricity. She does not fall immediately but for some reason remains intact and upward for another second or so, then seems to melt from within, as if her core has turned liquid and imploded downward.
The fourth is the older man, who struggles in his anger to rise and fight, so we get a double jolt, the first from Maahir tomahawking him with the gun barrel to drive him back to his knees in pain, and then the flash, jump, blur, and haze of the shot itself, a disappointment because it hits him above the ear, disappearing again in hair.
The last is better, the teen, actually closer to a child. Small, frail skull. Thirteen-, fourteen-year-old boy, he thinks. Flash, jump, blur, haze, but the head detonates, becoming in an instant too swift to even record something called not-head, or unhead, a kind of broken, empty vessel, departed entirely from assumptions of human anatomy. It’s deflated, emptied, eviscerated, but the boy’s bones are so light and his musculature so unimposing that he falls to earth almost insignificantly.
Maahir steps back from his work and casually sweeps the carnage he has unleashed. Five bodies shorn of dignity on the floor in the cruel black/white videography of the guncam. Maahir walks around them, muzzle on them in case he needs to fire another shot, but all are quite dead in their loose-knit positions, and beyond them, on the pavement, a kind of communal blood pool has formed, fed by five tributaries.
In the screen room, Andrew toggles a button on his keyboard and restores the live-feed guncam data, which has, he has to admit, turned out to be rather useless except in special conditions, such as the one he’s just witnessed. It’s mostly blurs of floors, as the boys sweep this way and that, and occasionally you get a view of the cowed hostages sitting in misery and terror or a look down some deserted corridor as the boys are sent out on various errands.
He looks at his watch. It’s almost time.
5:48 P. M-5:55 P.M
It was like being hit in the head by a snow shovel. The shock was more disconcerting than the pain, as the world went to crazed fractionality, his memory purged, the eternal sensation best described as What the fuck? commandeered his entire mind, and it seemed to take minutes before clarity finally restored itself, to the effect that I’ve just been shot in the head. The next logical question, Why am I not dead? somehow didn’t follow. Instead, his knees gone all Jell-O-y, Ray threw himself back in primal panic and slipped into some kind of notch in the wall, where he shared a few square feet with a water fountain.
He fought for cognizance. First he remembered who he was, then he remembered squeezing Lisa Fong’s left tit thirty-one years ago in the cloakroom of the Subic Bay Naval Base Elementary School No. 2, then he remembered that he was in a shopping mall taken over by the Huns, and only then did it occur to him that a sniper was shooting at him! At him! The nerve of some people! He sucked in his chest, just in case an inch or so of it extended beyond the edge of his little water fountain niche and invited another shot. But he also realized he was trapped.
He could risk a run but even now the guy was on him from wherever, his reticle greedily massaging the edge of wall that shielded Ray from death. He tried to think: Can these guys have brought snipers along and salted them all over the mall in case there’s some movement from the people hiding in the stores on the upper floors? But that seemed a little far-fetched. Yes, possible, but… also insane and therefore unlikely.
So, who the fuck was shooting at him? And why did he miss?
It didn’t take a genius to make the next leap. Sure, it was a law enforcement sniper, maybe directly across the atrium, on the other second-floor expanse of balcony, maybe a part of a team the cops had somehow gotten into the mall who were even now moving into position for the assault. He’s on his scope, he sees a guy with an AK and a head scarf and he figures he’s got a target, he gets his authorization (or maybe not?). And then he puts a bullet in Ray’s head, only for some reason, he misses.
Fuck you, Jack, Ray thought.
But telling Jack to fuck himself did nothing to solve his immediate problem. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized the guy probably wasn’t across the way or even higher, on the third or fourth levels, but even higher than that. He had to be firing through or from the skylight. If he’d been right on Ray, he couldn’t have missed, but the higher he was, the more extreme the angle was. If you’re shooting downhill, the rule was you always hold low because the bullet’s point of impact will be higher. He’d forgotten while putting the hairs on Ray’s forehead, and the bullet had instead hit high, b
litzing Ray’s head right through the scarf and the crew cut, spilling red but not gray stuff. But fuck, it hurt.
Ray could feel blood sliding down through his hair. His ears rang still and he couldn’t stop shaking. Man, that was a close sucker, that was as close as close gets without death being involved.
He tried to work out a move. Hmm, maybe a feint, to draw a shot, then a quick dash during the cocking sequence. But suppose Jack isn’t shooting a bolt gun but is on some state-of-the-art semiauto rig, so the gun reloads itself in a one-hundredth of a second, and after his feint Ray steps out and catches the spine breaker.
The bastard has me dead-zero, he thought.
“Sniper Five, Sniper Five, come in,” McElroy heard through his earphones.
Shit!
“Sniper Five, have you engaged, Sniper Five? Goddammit, McElroy, what the fuck is going on?”
McElroy recognized the voice of his immediate supervisor. He couldn’t hide anymore.
“I have engaged,” he said. “One shot.”
“Can you confirm a kill?”
“Uh-”
“Oh, fuck, McElroy, you missed? Jesus Christ, I am going to have your ass for sure.”
“No, I hit him, I saw his scarf blow up as the bullet impacted in the rear quadrant of the head, but he didn’t prone out. I think I damaged him badly, but he slipped back in this niche in the wall. That’s where he is now.”
“You have him zeroed.”
Did he ever, even if the weight was racking him. He’d now been in this awkward half-hunch offhand standing for a good seven minutes, sweat was everywhere on him despite the forty-degree temp, the small of his back felt like it had taken the bullet, his arms and wrists were fighting those oncoming yips, and he kept squirming a little this way and that to find a more comfortable position even as the crosshairs had begun to widen in their tremble circle. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold it and still have the confidence to squeeze one off if the guy made a sudden move.
On the other hand, he did not want to lose this. I will not let up. I am strong enough. I will stay on this guy no matter what.
“I have him zeroed,” he said.
“Sitrep?”
“He’s stuck in there. He’s out of the fight. I’m guessing he’s bleeding out. He’ll be gone soon. You know, brain shots aren’t always instantaneous, sometimes not even fatal. But he’s not going to do much more today, that I guarantee you.”
“Yeah, but while you’re on him, who’s on your window, sending us dope?”
“There is no dope, nothing’s happening.”
“You stay on him for a little while longer, but if I have to, I’m pulling you off and sending you back to general intelligence reporting.”
“I will get him for you,” said McElroy, thinking, I will get him for me.
The phone vibrated. Great. Trapped by a sniper, shot in the head, men with guns all over the joint, and the phone vibes.
Somehow Ray got the little rectangle of plastic genius out of his pocket, careful not to extend an elbow past the edge of the niche and invite a bullet into it, slid the answer icon to the right, and saw Molly’s name announced as the caller.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Not really,” he said. “Sort of stuck here.”
“I heard from my sister. Ray, she’s in with the hostages. My mother too.”
“I can’t do anything for them now.”
“Ray, what should I tell her?”
“If there’s an assault, get down. Don’t run. Most of the firing will be at waist to chest level or higher. If they’re down, they’ll be much safer. Crawl slowly away from the area but be willing to play dead at any second. It’ll be over quickly. There’ll be a lot of firing, a lot of confusion, and they should be as innocuous as possible. If they panic and run, someone may target them as movers, our guys, their guys.”
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
“Did those kids get there?”
“Yes, the place is now crawling with them. All the women are helping. That day care girl is something.”
“She’d make a hell of a marine. Meanwhile, I’ve just had an idea. I have to get off the phone.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
Tell him, Ray thought.
But now that he had the phone out, he went quickly to his contacts screen and touched the call icon for the one man who might be able to help him, the strange, remote, laconic guy who was, they had both so recently learned, his biological father.
“This is Swagger,” came the message. “Leave a number and maybe I’ll call you back. But I probably won’t.”
Ha ha. Great for the dry humor the old bastard was known for, almost as much as his shooting, but it did his son no good now.
Ray swept his contacts and at last came upon another possibility.
Nick Memphis, FBI, the entry read.
Only a few people had his private number, so Nick was somewhat surprised to feel the phone tingling in his jacket. He picked it open, saw Ray’s number, thought it odd that the man should be calling him at all, particularly now, today.
“Cruz, how are you? Long time no hear, nice to get a call. Actually, Ray, I’m kind of busy-”
“I am too. I’m betting you’re watching reports come in of a terrorist deal in Minnesota. Well, I’m in the middle of it.”
Memphis was stunned. He was indeed sitting in the FBI Incident Command Center in the Hoover Building in DC, actually not doing much except pitching in his comments on dealing not with the gunmen but with the phenomenon known as Douglas Obobo, a tricky character. On another floor, theoretically brilliant people on computer terminals tried to hack into the closed-off mall system; up here, others worked the phones, trying desperately to find some clue as to who was behind this, and others ran logistics, helping coordinate the problems by which law enforcement units continued to pour into Indian Falls, particularly the now airborne FBI HRT from Quantico, while still others were on the phone constantly to Will Kemp, the SAIC in Minnesota, giving him advice and handling his inquiries while also monitoring the situation and evaluating his performance.
Ray explained what was happening to him.
“Jesus,” said Nick, thinking instantly how ugly a fate it would be for Cruz, after his legendary service, to get nailed by an FBI sniper in a bullshit friendly-fire incident.
He looked over, saw Ron Fields, head of the FBI’s sniper school and a leading tactical guru within the institution, on the phone.
“Okay,” he said. “Cruz, you stay put. I’m going to try and get you out of the kill zone.”
He went over and said, “Ronnie, I have a situation.”
Fields had the usual deadpan SWAT response to anything, even the fact that a Marine sniper was being targeted by an FBI sniper inside a terrorist takeover of a replica of America in the heart of the actual America on prime-time televison and that someone had shot Santa Claus. If anything in the fix seemed ironic or ridiculous or even unfortunate, he didn’t register it. He solved it. He nodded, pushed some buttons, and handed a hardwired receiver to Nick, saying, “Webley, Kemp’s number two, on site and helping Kemp.”
“Webley,” came a voice. “Webley, this is Nick Memphis.”
“Yes, Mr. Memphis.”
Nick heard Webley pop to immediately, aware that he was on the phone with a big DC player, probably for the first time in his life.
“Webley, you have snipers on the roof?”
“Yes sir,” answered Webley. “One of them is engaging even as we-”
“That’s the problem,” said Nick. “The guy he’s shooting at is a good guy. Ex-marine, sniper himself. Call him off.”
“Yes sir.”
“And put me on the line.”
“Yes sir.”
Nick listened as someone did more connecting, and heard in a few seconds “Sniper Five, this is Command. Disengage, that is an order, disengage.”
“Goddammit, I have him. He’s going to break out of there and I will nail him-”
/> “Sniper Five, I am advised you are firing on a friendly.”
“What? He has an AK and a head scarf and-”
“Sniper Five, this is Assistant Director Memphis in DC. The man you are firing on is an ex-marine with sniper experience himself. Do not engage. He could be our asset inside.”
“Can he signal? Three fingers?”
Nick put down the phone, picked up his cell.
“Ray, hold out three fingers. I’ve got the guy on the line, actually.”
“He’s not some fucking kid who’ll shoot ’em off, is he?”
“He sounds excited, yes, but he’s under control.”
There was a pause.
Then Sniper Five said, “I have acknowledgment. I see three. I am stepping down.”
“Good, good,” said Webley.
“Okay, Ray, you’re clear now. At least Sniper Five won’t be-”
It seemed to occur to all of them at once, and the jabber was impenetrable until finally all shut up and let Nick say what all had figured out.
“Webley, I’m going to give you Ray’s number. His name is Ray Cruz, twenty-two years USMC, maybe their number one sniper, five tours in the sand, great, great operator. I don’t know what he’s doing there, but he’s there and we’re fools if we don’t use him. Have Sniper Five contact him. Maybe the two of them can work together and deal with these guys in a way no one else is in position to.”
“Got you, AD. Wilco.”
Nick went back to Ray.
“The guy on the roof is going to call you. Sniper Five, don’t know his name, but maybe you and he can see things we can’t and help us.”
“Got it,” said Ray, clicking off to wait.
“Sir,” said Webley, “should I alert SAIC Kemp about this contact?”
“You know Kemp, I don’t. You make the call.”
“Ah… he’s not too anxious to get heavy into this one. It looks like it’s going down bad for all involved and there could be big repercussions.”
The Bureau culture. It was, as often as not, the true enemy. SAs learned that the route to promotion and retirement plus lucrative security industry positions afterward was a spotless run through their twenty years on the street, and that had the inevitable effect of drying out initiative. Nobody wanted to make the big mistake and get creamed. And no one seemed to notice that Nick had mavericked himself aloft, but even Nick knew he was the exception and that his connection to the even more maverick Bob Lee Swagger had been a fantastic aid. So these guys always played it cautious, and somehow career considerations came into play in command decisions in ways that couldn’t be anticipated. It was nobody’s fault, it was the culture.
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