Soft target rc-1

by Stephen Hunter

  Crazy American bitch, he thought. What was that all about?

  No shot came. He heard turmoil and scuffling below but was in no position to check it out. Instead he waited a second, the panic passed, again he reminded himself to not look down, and he hoisted one foot up, up, up, found a toehold, God knew what, and again launched himself upward, feeling the pain of exhaustion sizzle through his arms and the yearning of his fingers to cease their death grip.

  And then it occurred to him that he was there, he had made it. He was now resting on the solidity of the fourth floor, except on the wrong side of the balcony, and it just took an adroit but controlled roll and spin, and he was over and landed on the floor of the next story. He sucked at air, waited for his racing heartbeat to diminish, and finally, sliding next to a wall, stood, got himself up.

  He looked up at the skylight, not nearly so far away now, and waved, and the figure that must have been McElroy waved back. Ray got out his phone, pressed the button.

  “Jesus, I thought you were going there for a second,” said McElroy.

  “God looks after fools, I guess,” Ray said. “Do you have an angle to the corridor?”

  “Not enough of one. I can only see about fifteen feet down it.”

  “Okay, I’m going to move down there, set up. If something happens and they start shooting hostages, I’ll step out and drop the ambushers and move into that First Person Shooter place.”

  “It’s on the left, about halfway down.”

  He then called Lavelva.

  “Okay,” he said, “I made it up, somehow. I’m just inside the balcony, to the right of the corridor. What have you got?”

  “Nothing. I’m just waiting here.”

  “Good. If I give the signal, you shoot the door frame, not the lock. You have to blow away the lockwork, which is only buried in wood and plasterboard, then you kick in the door, then you drop back. That should draw them, and I’ll put them down and go to the store. When you hear my shots, you’re clear to follow. Sweetie, are you up for this? You don’t have to go. You can just back on down the stairwell.”

  “I am so up for this.”

  “You are a true warrior princess, bravest of the brave. Okay, in just a few, it’ll be our turn for some first person shooting.”

  The snipers huddled at, roughly, Racine.

  “The only thing we have is flashbangs,” one of them said.

  “And they don’t go boom, they go pop.”

  “Fuck,” said McElroy, who’d just returned from scouting for Ray and hoped they’d solved their problem but was disappointed to discover they had not.

  “I have two red smokers,” someone said.

  “Forget the smokers.”

  “Maybe if in concert, all of us whacked a certain small area with our butts.”

  “A, probably doesn’t work, B, throws the scopes out of zero. No go.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” said McElroy, “think out loud, everybody, maybe we’ll come up with something.”

  “Hey,” said a state trooper sniper, “we have Kevlar tactical helmets.” He snapped his finger against the hard tactical shell. “Maybe smash with them, open the hole, and that way we don’t throw the zeros out.”

  “You’ll never get through that shit with plastic helmets,” someone else said.

  “Hey, this shit is hard,” said the trooper.

  “Any entrenching tools?”

  “This isn’t World War Two.”

  “What about with our knives we chip away at that groove FBI opened. All of us working hard, maybe we get it loosened, then smash it with our helmets.”

  “That seems about the best. I mean it’s all we can do, right, FBI?”

  “I guess,” said McElroy, reaching for his knife. But as he did, his wrist passed over the smooth cylinder that was the flashbang grenade, more a pyrotechnic than anything else, meant to produce a loud percussion and a disorienting flash. But not enough junk in it to “Okay,” he said. “How many flashbangs?”

  A quick survey produced the answer: twelve.

  “Twelve. I’m wondering, what happens if they all go off at once?”

  “You’d have to contain it,” said somebody. “Direct it. They can bring down a huge building with a few pointed charges.”

  “Use the helmets and-”

  “But it has to go simo. You’d need wiring, dets, a whole tech kit that the Army has but we don’t. I don’t-”

  McElroy saw it then.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. We take one of those helmets. We load it with flashbangs. Hmm, let’s see, they work just like grenades, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, we wrap, I don’t know, gauze, bandages, duct tape, something soft and malleable around the levers on the flashbangs, got it? That secures the levers. Then we pull the pins but nothing happens because the levers are taped down. Then very carefully we run a wire or a piece of tape or something through the tape on the flashbang levers. Then very carefully, we put the flashbangs on the glass and we cover them with the helmet and maybe you put something heavy on the helmet.”

  “Is this a game you’re playing? Are you MacGyver or something?”

  “Why not just run the tape through the rings on the flashers?” someone said. “Simpler.”

  “Simpler, yeah, but those pins take a lot of pull to free up, and I can see the tape or whatever breaking or getting hung up,” McElroy said.

  “He’s right,” said the trooper.

  “So if this thing goes bad and the bastards downstairs start shooting, we pull the tape line, which pulls the tape loose, and all the flashbang levers go ping, and three seconds later all twelve of them go off more or less simo, and the helmet directs the considerable force of their detonation downward, I’m betting you blow a nice big hole in that glass. Then we go to war, and we shoot every gunman we see in the head. Do you get it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And if the hostages are released, all we have to do is replace the pins and give everybody their toys back. Okay. Have you got it?”

  “It’s a plan, Stan.”

  No, no, no, no, no.

  He’d made the jumps from Bruce Wyatt to RealDeal Opsys to RealDeal Secsys to RealDeal Secsys Linkage to A wilderness.

  Deployed in front of him on the screen were nearly four hundred-more than three screens’ worth of scrolling-coded units, each representing some kind of RealDeal franchise or outlet. One of them had to be the RealDeal on the fourth floor at America, the Mall, in Indian Falls, Minnesota. But which?

  The geniuses at RealDeal Opsys so knew their empire that they didn’t bother to split the list by category as any sane outfit would do. It wasn’t broken down by store profit levels, major markets, region, or state. No, just an endless column of bullshit listings like RD/OPSYS5509-3.4X. What? What the hell was that?

  “Someone call RealDeal Corporate,” said Dr. Benson. “We’ll get an engineer on the phone and we’ll-”

  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.