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 artificial 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.
The results were pathetic, of course. The gunman didn’t fall immediately. He was too strong and limber. His feet went, one of his arms spasmed out, and he hung for maybe three seconds by one arm, and one of his legs twitched. Then his final four fingers yielded on the death grip, he slid off into gravity, the tip of his shoe hit a strut and flipped him backward, and he fell almost horizontally, striking the earth backside first so that his legs and arms splayed outward in the dust that rose from the flower bed whose buds he crushed.
“Great shot,” said the spotter. “That’s three, or is it four?”
“He was three, but it’s like prairie dog shooting,” said McElroy, “in that it gets thin fast.”
Ray could see no one left to shoot. And by this time, from somewhere, SWAT operators had broken into the amusement park and were clearing. He’d watched them take down a big guy in a scrum of angry women, pursue another into a store, where a double burst of full auto suggested Game Over, and finally his vision was provoked by rapid movement on the periphery and he saw a gunman in midfall from the top of the roller coaster’s biggest hill to hit and bounce and then go limp in a fl
ower bed.
Yells reached him from the operators below.
“Clear left, tangos down.”
“Clear right, tangos down.”
“Clear in center, I think all tangos down.”
“Check tangos, be careful, shoot if you see movement.”
The SWAT team moved through the melancholy ritual of mop-up, never fun for anybody, and then Nick heard, “We are clear, we are clear, many civilians down, get medical in here fastest.”
Someone from Command came over the net.
“This is Command. Clear for medical, clear for medical. Get those medics in there and begin to assist the wounded. All aid stations, wounded incoming.”
“Okay,” Ray said to Lavelva as he reloaded a fresh mag in his Kalash. “Now I’m going into the place where I think this kid is hiding. You stay here, you stay down. Do not move fast, do not go down on your own. This is a tricky time, you could get shot by some hot dog real easily, do you hear?”
“Ray, you don’t have to do this thing.”
“Well, I’m closest.”
“Ray, it’s over. Let them police take that boy. That’s their job, let ’em do it for once. You just sit here by me and rest. We get some french fries.”
He smiled.
“I hear you, yes I do. But that’s not how it works. I have to finish this thing, I’m closest. Maybe he knows secret ways out or places to hide, maybe he means to set up and kill a lot of people one last time-whatever, the sooner he is put down, the better. And as it has worked out, I represent sooner.”
“I’m going with you,” said Lavelva.
“Sweetie, this is tactical entry, close-quarters battle; you need to know what you’re doing and I can’t be thinking on you. I’m giving you a Marine Corps order: you sit down over there and wait till the good guys arrive.”
He turned, went back to his iPhone.
“McElroy and anyone else, I’m now going into First Person Shooter after this kid and whoever.”
“Cruz, this is Memphis. Take off your scarf and whatever you’re wearing on the outside. You have a white T-shirt on?”
“It’s Marine OD.”
“Webley, you direct all first responders not, not, I say again, to engage an armed figure in an OD T-shirt.”
“There’s a young African American woman here too,” said Ray. “Lavelva, she is tops, she was with me the whole way. She should not be engaged either. She will be sitting outside unarmed with her hands in plain sight.”
“Get that, Webley?”
“I’m putting it out now,” said Webley. “They should be up there soon. Ray, go get ’em.”
“I’m off.”
“Good luck, Marine,” said McElroy. “I’m on you with backup far as I can go.”
Ray clambered up, but Lavelva tried one last time.
“Ray, why are you such a goddamned hero? Heroes die young and hard and leave their girlfriends all swole up with weepy snot on their faces.”
“Maybe so, but I have ancestors to answer to.”
“From China?”
“No, much worse: from Arkansas.”
The shooting had stopped. Andrew turned to face the grave demeanor of the imam, who also realized that it was almost time. Andrew felt a little like another one of his heroes, Hitler, in the Fuhrerbunker with the Russian peasant army up above.
He rose, went to the game console, pushed a button, and a memory stick popped out, which he in turn dropped into a buffered envelope, already addressed and stamped. He sealed it and handed it over to the imam.
“You will be all right. I will take you to the doorway, you will go up, your pilot will land, and you will be gone. In the mess no one will even notice. It’s going to get way crazy around here. Then you drop that in a Canadian mailbox and it goes to a Canadian letter drop for WikiLeaks. They’ll know what to do with it. A little editing, a little tightening, add a timeline and some production values, and you have the greatest FPS game ever made. You have the greatest story ever told. It will live for a million years, do you understand?”
“I do, my brother. But it is not too late. You can come with me.”
“Nah, never in the cards. I always knew and I’m prepared: narrative rules. It needs a climax. We’ve got a hero, I’m the villain of the piece. We need a duel: he and I must fight to the death. Whichever one of us goes down, it’ll make the narrative complete. WikiLeaks will patch that stuff in from CNN and from all the cell phone vid, don’t worry.”
“So be it, then, my friend.”
“If I see Allah, I’ll say hello to him for you and hope there are some virgins left.”
“I will see you in paradise.”
“Or hell. Whatever.”
The two men hugged, yet there was nothing left to say, and time was short. The imam turned with his treasure, exited the back door.
Andrew picked up his iPad, checked to see that it was receiving wireless feeds from all the gun cameras, selected number four, and brought it up. He saw what the gun muzzle of the man stalking him saw, which was the steady progress down Rio Grande toward the FPS store, where he, Andrew, awaited.
Andrew picked up his own AK-74, the one without the gun camera, and slung it. He turned and slipped into the interior corridor, raced past doorways, and finally pushed one in and stepped into the back of a Payless shoe store. A group of women crouched in horror nearby.
“Are you the police?” one of them asked.
“Not exactly,” he said.
Ray did a quick pass-by on the First Person Shooter doorway, saw that the store inside appeared to be empty. He ran a last check on the AK, making sure he was cocked and unlocked, then went in hard and low, CQB-style, gun at the shoulder, moving erratically, eyes dilated so wide in the scan for data you could have landed a plane in them. Posters of ubermenschen with the latest in stylized assault rifles stood heroically on all the walls, like in some sort of Waffen-SS fantasyland, as well as a couple of bulletin boards that tracked I, Killer tournament progress, quotes from battle gurus like Napoleon, Bedford Forrest, Jeff Cooper, Sun Tzu, all very nerd technowar. The place, however, didn’t have that Marine smell of sweat but the scent of something else: plastic wrapping.
Most of the free space-dark and shadowy without lights-was given to racks of games in the center of the room. He prowled around them, going in low, coming up in shooter-ready position, finger aching to fire at every shadow or hint of substance, but the only thing to behold were the games themselves, neatly racked cover out-not just FPSes, but every war game known to man, from every war known to man, for every style of computer known to man. No sign, no sound, no movement. He declared the place cleared.
The door to some interior chamber stood behind the cash register counter, and he went to that, kicked it hard, went in low-profile, and again was met by silence and stillness, perceiving a gloom penetrated by the glow of electron light.
It was the room of screens, the lair of the beast. It felt empty too, but Ray dashed from position to position to make sure. Yes, clear.
Now he freed his concentration up to assess. This had to be the HQ of the mission. On the wall, security feeds lit screens that showed mostly empty corridors, except for the first level, where frenzy was the mode of the day: medics hustled, the wounded were attended to, SWAT guys offered perimeter security, and everyone tried to help and get a hold on what exactly had transpired, who were good guys, who bad, the whole law enforcement crime scene drill.
But on the other wall, he saw an odd array of camera feeds displaying, well, nothing. All seemed still. The images were black or horizontal and meaningless, though occasionally there was the blur of boots and shoes hustling by or the nothingness of a wall a few inches away. What the fuck was this? One seemed more agile than all the others, number four, and he looked closely and saw a pair of shoes, New Balances, the same model he was wearing and Jesus Christ! Those were his shoes! This little fucker had clamped a wireless camera on the rifles!
He looked, and behind the muzzle of his Kalas
h he saw a neatly milled unit connected to the barrel by some kind of clamp, and the unit held a lens. Among all the tactical geegaws mounted on the AK-vertical foregrip, a receiver with a Picatinny rail, new iron backup sights-he hadn’t even noticed it. He pointed it at the screen and got that infinity of mirrors thing-where the camera records itself recording itself over and over again and the image diminishes in size as it sinks toward nothingness-but kept it moving, so if Andrew was watching, he wouldn’t tumble to the fact that Ray had tumbled to the fact.
The game! Lavelva was so right. In his sick mind, this strange genius boy had invented in real time and space the biggest first person shooter in the world and had recorded it with wireless video for some editor in some bunker to put together some giant cyberdeath tournament based on imagery from today’s adventure in slaughter.
But now he realized, For the first time, I know something he doesn’t. I know that he knows where I am and what I’m doing at all times. That’s how he knew I was coming through that door. Even now, on the move, he’s receiving my feed. He’s laughing at me, waiting for me to come.
He set the rifle down, pointing to nothing, and moved to a central chair in a mesh of Star Trek consoles wired into everything by a jungle of cord hanging behind them, and went and crouched at the big screen of what appeared to be the mother computer. The image still seemed to hold the security system main menu, and he quickly slid the mouse around until he’d nested it on ELEVATOR ACCESS, punched enter, saw some flickers and heard some clicks, and finally an icon lit up explaining ELEVATORS ENABLED, then ESCALATORS ENABLED. But, he noted, the doors had already been opened. Huh?
The phone on the desk rang.
He paused, waited, finally picked it up.
“You’re the hero,” someone said.
“Is this Andrew?” Ray said. “You’d better give yourself up. The place is full of cops. They’ll shoot you in a second. I’ll take you alive.”
“God, you are a hero. You are fucking John Wayne. This is so cool. I could never have written this.”
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