Soft target rc-1

by Stephen Hunter

  “Look, kid, you’re going to ride the needle for sure, no lie. But that’ll take years and for all those years you and I both know you’ll be god to millions of people as fucked up as you are but not nearly as resourceful. You’ll love every second of it and you’ll love the hatred everyone else pours on you and you will have the time of your life. Don’t pretend that’s not what this is all about.”

  “You’ve got it wrong, Duke. It’s not about that. I’m shallow but not that shallow. It’s about the game. And the game needs a big bang finish. So you better come for me before all those Minneapolis ice fishermen get up to this floor and shoot me to Swiss cheese. It’s so much cooler if you kill me or we kill each other and give the thing a gleam of mythic tragedy. By the way, if you want to find me, here’s a subtle hint: I’m in the movie complex.”

  “Give yourself up!”

  “I can’t. We’re at the hyper level of the game. I have to see who wins.”

  8:47 P.M.-9:35 P.M

  Andrew was disappointed in the popcorn. It had gone cool and stale and had toughened somewhat. Now, a good employee of the Regal Theater chain, a true professional, would have stayed on station, keeping the popcorn hot throughout the massacre, because you never could tell when somebody would want some fine, freshly popped popcorn. You just can’t find good help these days.

  He sat in one of the megaplex’s fifteen auditoriums down the hall a quarter-mall rotation over to Mississippi from First Person Shooter, watching a flow of images above him. It was an old favorite, and he was happy to see that the robo-screening mechanism had kept the images on-screen even if the human part of the system seemed to have failed, though you wouldn’t want to judge a whole program on just one example. In this movie, lots of gunfire, lots of dying, lots of smart, snarky talk, the hero in an undershirt with a Jersey accent. It was pretty good, maybe the best in the series, even if some of the conventions of audience appeal-the cute, rotund black cop, for example-were by now a tiresome trope. He would have fast-forwarded through them if it were possible.

  Now and then he looked at his iPad, which still received the camera feed from number four, that is, the gun muzzle view of the hero who was now stalking him, giving Andrew the man’s precise location. He doubted he would show up in an undershirt. No, no, Andrew imagined some SWAT captain in a black combat outfit, maybe with a wool watchcap and one of those mikes bent around his face. Probably a dad, never done this before, scared to death the whole way, yet in the obdurate squareness of mind-set utterly committed to the Rules. “Give yourself up!” Yeah, right, you have the right to remain blah blah blah and blah.

  The guy should have warrior-pure thoughts at this time. He should be thinking, Kill this little motherfucker. But no, not in modern America. He was probably thinking, Will I get in trouble because I snapped at Commander Jackson a few minutes ago, will this count as overtime, will I be so hung up in paperwork I’m not free to go on my Caribbean cruise with the unit next week, should I hire an agent for the movie version, or should I write a book first, and if so, where would I find an actual writer to put the words on paper? That kind of thinking could get you killed.

  Andrew checked again. The guy was outside the movie theater, running his gun muzzle over the box office. Now the camera bounced hard as he made a dash to that structure, took cover behind it, and tracked the gun muzzle through the door, scanning the vast but abandoned refreshment stand, peering hard into the darker “lounge” areas where sofas and chairs had been set up in pathetic imitation of the typical American living room. Then another dash as he moved into a position to scan the corner closet where the maintenance people ran their operation, seeing a few tipped-over garbage cans on wheels, dumped sweeper brooms, stacks of toilet paper for the johns, and vats of soap for the sinks. No paper towels, though. This theater complex clearly had those awful blow-dry things.

  Nothing there, our hero crept around the corner and at last confronted the long corridor off which each of the auditoriums was sited. The guy had to know that he, Andrew, was in one of them. Would he get it right? Would he go by trial and error? Would reinforcements arrive? Would he call for backup? Hmm, probably he’d go straight ahead, because he had to realize that Andrew knew the mall forward and backward, and might know all kinds of escape routes and could even yet, this late in the game, make a getaway. So he had to move fast and close the distance, make the arrest or the kill.

  Andrew chuckled softly. This was really cool. It was working out so much better than he’d thought, even if the kill number looked as though it would be the one disappointment. He’d thought those kids would do a better job, but it seemed that so many of them had been secretly taken down that the remaining guys could never get any heavy fire going, and the few that were left sort of wimped out at the end and weren’t willing to aim and kill systematically, as they had been instructed. No, you really couldn’t get good help anymore.

  His back to the wall, Ray slid down the corridor, under art deco golden-movie-age affectations, posters of improbably beautiful human beings, another abandoned garbage can on wheels, to the first door. In one of the auditoriums before him, the kid Andrew lurked, probably set up behind the seats, waiting for someone to pop in, silhouetted in the glare of the door, lit from the front by the glow of the screen. Andrew would blast him down, then maybe escape by some predetermined route only he knew. Yet if Ray didn’t press, the boy might vanish just the same, and the little bastard was so smart and had all this stuff so wired, maybe he’d actually have figured out some way to beat the game.

  Ray looked at the signs jutting into the hallway, each a mini-marquee bearing the name of the flick on display inside. Sure, Junior might play on that too. That was him: nihilistic but in a “funny” way, hip, ironic, thought everything was a joke, even saw himself as a comedian as he took down the system on its biggest day. It wouldn’t be worth it if he had to do it as some little Arab commando type, cornily shrieking his allegiance to Allah; no, Andrew was too cool for that. He’d do it, but the trick was to do it insouciantly, with some kind of snarky comedy element, so that no matter how it turned out, his followers-there’d be millions, in the way these things worked-would get the joke, smile at it, and hold a special regard in their heart for the great Andrew Nicks, cool to the end, cooler than Dylan and Eric, cooler than Cho, cooler than Jared.

  Ray heard movie music blaring from the theater he was closest to, looked up, saw it was some Disney family comedy. No way Andrew would be caught alive, much less dead, in such a travesty of happy-fam cliche.

  Ray realized, It’s become a pop quiz on movie irony. To have a chance at him, I have to know which theater he’s in. To know that, I have to decipher the names and meanings of the movies and decide which one would best express his sensibility. Too bad Roger Ebert isn’t here to advise me.

  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 WUF
Fcopter 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.