Jamie moved through them like a shark through a school of smaller fish, cutting a path toward the doors. She wished she was armed. She’d always carried a sidearm when she was flying, but since coming home she’d gotten out of the habit.
Those guys doing the shooting had guns, she thought. Maybe she could take one away from them. That would help even the odds.
As she neared the exit she heard a man shouting for everyone to get down on the floor. More shots blasted. People screamed. Jamie saw several of the terrified shoppers dropping to the floor. More and more followed their example.
Jamie knelt behind a rack of dresses. She couldn’t stay at her full height without being noticed. Moving at an awkward gait between a crouch and a crawl, she began to work her way toward the yelling gunmen.
She hadn’t gone very far when a loud blast shook the floor under her. She stopped where she was and wondered for a frightening few seconds if the entire mall was going to collapse, or if more explosions were imminent.
After a moment, though, as the echoes died away, it appeared that there weren’t going to be any more blasts, at least for now. The stench of smoke drifted through the store, along with another smell that Jamie, unfortunately, recognized.
The smell of burned human flesh.
She swallowed the impulse to gag at the grisly odor and forced herself to start moving again.
She reached a glass-topped and -fronted jewelry counter laid out in the shape of a square with an opening at one corner so a clerk could get inside it to work. A dozen people were lying on the floor nearby. Jamie gestured to get their attention, then pointed to the opening in the counter and motioned for them to crawl into the square. The wood and plastic and glass display case wouldn’t offer much protection from high-powered bullets, but it was better than nothing.
Several people started moving in that direction, including a middle-aged woman and a teenage girl who looked enough like her that Jamie knew they were mother and daughter. The sight made her think of her own daughters, and her breath caught in her throat at the idea she might never see them again. She knew Tom would do a good job of raising the kids if anything happened to her, but she should have made sure that they all knew she loved them.
If she got the chance to tell them again . . .
Jamie pushed that thought out of her head. Her best chance of ever seeing her family again lay in concentrating on the situation in which she found herself now.
Not everyone tried to crawl into the scant cover of the jewelry counter. Some of the shoppers continued hugging the floor. Jamie couldn’t do anything about that. She eased on past, staying low.
The shooting had stopped now, at least in this part of the store. Jamie could hear gunfire in the distance. Men were still shouting orders to stay down, though. They had their cowed victims on the floor and wanted to keep them there.
Jamie risked a glance around a rack of men’s coats and saw that there were two gunmen standing near the exit doors. Both appeared to be Middle Eastern, looking a lot like members of the Taliban she had seen in Afghanistan.
That came as no surprise. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the names might change, but in the end they were all the same.
Barbarians. Killers that had no place in a civilized world.
Too bad there were two of them. One would have been easier to deal with. Jamie knew she would just have to do the best she could, though.
A sudden throb of pain from her leg reminded her that she was no longer whole. She asked herself what she was thinking about doing. She couldn’t attack two ruthless terrorists armed with automatic weapons. Those guns would chop her to pieces as soon as she made a move toward the men.
Then a possible answer to her dilemma presented itself as one of the men strode forward, stalking past the bloody corpses of the luckless shoppers who had been killed in the first moments of the attack.
“Everyone stay on the floor,” this man said as the other one swung his weapon back and forth, covering the crowd near the doors. “If you stay down and do as you are told, you will not be hurt.”
Jamie didn’t believe that. She knew all too well the bloodlust that men such as these directed at people they considered godless infidels. To them, nonbelievers were less than human, and slaughtering them was the same as stepping on bugs . . . or possibly even better, since spilling the blood of infidels would buy them rewards in their deranged version of paradise.
She had seen the behavior with her own eyes, again and again, but she still couldn’t wrap her mind around the concept of having such sick brains. You couldn’t negotiate with Islamic terrorists, you couldn’t reason with them . . .
All you could do was wipe them off the face of the earth.
Jamie edged to her left, keeping one of the clothes racks between her and the first man as he approached. She had gotten a better look at their weapons by now and knew the killers carried Steyr TMPs, German-made machine pistols. The long magazines extending below the grips probably held thirty rounds, fully loaded. The men had fired quite a bit already, though, and Jamie didn’t know how recently they had switched magazines.
The terrorist was only about fifteen feet from her now, stepping carefully among the huddled, trembling shoppers. Jamie couldn’t see him, but she could track his movements easily enough by the sounds he made.
The two killers were outnumbered, maybe as much as fifty to one. Why didn’t the people rise up against them and overwhelm them by sheer force of numbers?
Jamie knew the answer to that. These were civilians, and they were scared, and you couldn’t fault them for that. When they woke up this morning, they had thought they were just going to the mall. They’d had no idea they were going into battle, despite all the jokes people made about how crowded the stores were on this day after Thanksgiving.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, Jamie thought wryly.
For all Jamie knew, she was the only veteran here, the only one who’d seen combat. So it was up to her to do something, and the time was almost here. The guy was right on the other side of the clothes rack that concealed her . . .
She surged upright and shoved the rack into him as hard as she could.
The move seemed to take the terrorist completely by surprise. He staggered under the impact and tried to bring up the machine pistol he held, but his arms tangled in the clothes on the rack. Behind him, people on the floor screamed and yelled and tried to get out of the way as Jamie kept pushing the man back.
Over by the doors, the second terrorist shouted angrily in a foreign language but held his fire, probably because he didn’t want to take a chance on hitting his friend.
That restraint wouldn’t last long, though, Jamie knew. Their so-called holy cause took precedence over everything, including friendship.
Anyway, the other guy probably figured this one would be happy to die for Allah.
Not all the people on the floor could scramble out of the way in time. The terrorist finally tripped over some of them and went down. As he did, Jamie vaulted over the clothes rack and landed on top of him. She drove the heel of her right hand up under his chin with all the strength she could muster, which slammed the back of his head on the floor and stunned him.
As she lunged toward the machine pistol now gripped loosely in his hand, the other man opened fire. Bullets ripped through the air above her head. In his killing frenzy, the terrorist was letting the Steyr ride up.
Jamie yanked the weapon loose from the senseless man underneath her and raised it. She didn’t know how many bullets were left in the magazine, but at full auto, it wouldn’t take long to burn through them. She pressed the trigger and fired a short burst.
The terrorist probably didn’t expect a woman to fight back like that. He was just standing there out in the open, not trying to take any evasive action. He looked shocked when the three rounds slammed into his chest and knocked him back a step. His eyes opened impossibly wide as blood began to well from the wounds.
The Steyr slipped from hi
s fingers and thudded to the floor. A second later, the dying terrorist followed the machine pistol as his knees folded up.
The man Jamie had knocked down chose that moment to regain his senses, roar something incoherent but obviously furious, and buck madly beneath her. He swung his left arm and crashed it into the side of her head, knocking her off of him.
She lost her hold on the machine pistol at the same time. It slid across the floor in the open space where everybody had tried to get out of the way of the fight.
The man rolled after Jamie, punching at her. His fists smacked into her body. She tried to fend him off, but he was caught up in the twisted emotions that fueled him and was fighting like a berserker. A wild, looping punch crashed into her jaw, jerked her head to the side, and threatened to knock her out.
Jamie struggled to hang on to consciousness. That was all she could do. She couldn’t muster up enough strength to keep fighting. She struck out feebly as both of his hands closed around her neck. He dug a knee into her belly and leaned into her with his stranglehold.
He was going to crush her larynx, cut off her air, and suffocate her. She would die in a matter of minutes, she knew.
And there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it except stare up helplessly into his cruel, hate-distorted face. He hated her because she was an American, a woman, and an unbeliever. Any one of those things was enough to enrage him. Taken all together . . .
He was going to enjoy killing her. She could read that unholy glee in his eyes.
That was the last emotion he ever felt, because the next instant his head seemed to explode as bullets slammed into it from behind. A gruesome rain of blood, gray matter, and bone fragments pelted Jamie in the face. It sickened her, but the need for air was much more overpowering than her revulsion. She grabbed his hands, ripped them away from her throat, and hauled him to the side. He toppled off of her.
She rolled away from the corpse and lay there for a moment gasping for breath. A trembling hand pawed gore away from her mouth, nose, and eyes. She pushed herself up on her other elbow and looked around to see who had saved her.
A few yards away, the teenage girl Jamie had noticed earlier, the one in the University of Illinois sweatshirt who’d been with a woman who was obviously her mom, was on her knees with the Steyr TMP cradled in both hands. Her eyes were wide with awe.
“Son of a bitch!” she exclaimed. “This thing can really shoot!”
Jamie sat up, still a little breathless, and said, “Give it to me.”
Jamie reached over, tore the gun out of the girl’s hands, and then twisted back toward the dead terrorist. She started slapping the man’s pockets, searching for extra magazines.
The two terrorists charged with blocking this exit were dead, Jamie thought, but that didn’t mean the battle was over.
Chapter 22
The attackers had done the smart thing by making everybody get down on the floor. That way anybody who was upright and moving around could be considered an enemy and a safe target.
For that reason, Tobey dropped to the floor as well, but he didn’t remain still. Most of the shoppers were petrified by fear, but Tobey was able to crawl slowly and carefully among them, using their bodies to shield his own movements.
Several people noticed the Smith & Wesson 9mm in his hand, and as their eyes widened, he worried that they would call out to the terrorists and reveal that there was a man with a gun among them. They might try to curry favor among their captors in hopes of being spared.
In the long run, that wouldn’t buy them a thing, Tobey knew. They would still be killed.
They must have realized that, too, because they remained quiet.
He came to a kiosk that rented small, motorized scooters in the shape of zoo animals. Little kids rode them through the mall on normal shopping days, when it wasn’t as crowded. The kiosk was closed today, since mall management had anticipated that shoppers would be packed in too tightly for such an amusement. Somebody would get run into and be hurt. The ranks of scooters provided cover for Tobey now, though.
He eased around until he could see the man he had tried to draw a bead on earlier, before that security guard tackled him. The terrorist was pacing back and forth among the terrified shoppers huddling on the floor, ranting about how Allah and his followers were going to destroy the United States and all the godless infidels who lived here. Islam was going to spread across the world and only when it reigned supreme would there be peace.
Tobey could think of another, better way to achieve peace: kill all the lunatics. He was fine with anybody practicing their own religion however they wanted, as long as it didn’t involve anybody else being hurt.
But once it crossed that line, it wasn’t religion anymore. It was a sickness that had to be eradicated if humanity was going to survive.
He could hear the guy talking, saying, “By now this mall, this symbol of Satan, is under the complete control of the Sword of the Prophet.”
Cute. This nutjob even had a name for himself and his buddies.
“The world will soon know that we have struck a blow in the holy name of Islam against the sinful decadence of America. The rest of your evil nation will cower in fear at the realization that your time is done. Today is the beginning of the caliphate, and soon it will spread across the world!”
At this range, Tobey figured he could put a couple of rounds through the madman’s head without much trouble. Whether the caliphate ever took over the world or not, this murderer would never know it, because he would be dead, as he deserved to be.
But as satisfying as that might be, it would also give away Tobey’s position, and he wasn’t sure he could afford to do that just yet. He didn’t know how many of the terrorists there were or just how bad the situation was. It might be better to wait and get a better idea of what he was dealing with.
Then the guy paused in his ranting and pacing and swung around so Tobey got a good look at his face.
What he saw felt like a punch in his gut.
The guy was young, little more than a kid, and the sight of him knocked Tobey all the way back to Iraq. He was there again on that miserably hot, dusty day when his patrol had been ambushed and he was the only one to make it out alive. He carried souvenirs of it in the form of the scars on his leg and the memories of his dead buddies.
Tobey had heard plenty about survivor’s guilt. The army shrinks were big on it. So he knew what it was but had never really suffered from it. He would have if he had abandoned the rest of the patrol and they’d died because of it, sure.
But it had been pure luck or fate or whatever you wanted to call it that he and Segers had dropped off the truck to take a piss at just the right time to save their lives. After that they had both fought with equal determination to save their lives, and again some power beyond their control had decreed that Tobey lived and Segers died. Tobey couldn’t feel guilty about that.
The memories had stayed with him, though, as vivid as if the ambush and firefight had happened yesterday, and among those recollections was the kid whose life Tobey had spared because he looked young and scared and like he didn’t want to be there.
That kid was now strutting around in the American Way Mall, waving a Steyr machine pistol, and evidently masterminding a terrorist attack that had cost the lives of many innocent people already.
Tobey’s finger was outside the trigger guard on the Shield. He wanted so badly to slide it in there, aim the gun, and blow out that son of a bitch’s lights. Now he felt guilt. Now he knew that if he had just killed the kid that day in Iraq, instead of taking pity on him, all those innocent folks who been gunned down or blown up when the bomb went off would still be alive, going happily about their Black Friday shopping.
All Tobey would have needed to do was pull a trigger . . .
He could pull a trigger now.
But it was the wrong thing to do, a stern voice in the back of his head warned him. Sure, he could kill the little bastard, but it wouldn’t bring bac
k any of the people who had died, nor would it prevent any more killing. If Tobey fired a shot, the guy’s buddies would swarm him and cut him to pieces with those machine pistols. He would get a few of them, but ultimately he would lose.
As gut wrenching as the idea was, it made more sense to wait. Maybe he could figure out a way to save some of the people who had been taken hostage in the attack on the mall.
Because that’s what they were, Tobey realized—hostages. If all the kid and his terrorist cohorts were interested in was wholesale slaughter, they wouldn’t have stopped killing until everybody in the place was dead.
No, there had to be another reason, something else they wanted, even if it was just to draw things out and make the whole country suffer more, knowing that thousands of lives were hanging in the balance.
So he had a little time—how much, he had no idea—and a chance to use it to fight back more effectively. That kid might have a small army with him.
Tobey needed an army, too.
He thought he might know where to find one.
* * *
Aaron hadn’t gone very far toward the area where he had last seen Jennie when he encountered a group of frightened people being herded out of a gift shop at gunpoint. It made sense that the guys who were behind this attack would have men posted in the stores to take them over as well.
In this case, the terrorist was a short, chunky guy in his thirties who waved a machine pistol around as he shouted orders. Aaron quickly tried to blend in with the people in the group, but the man spotted the Browning in his hand, yelled something that Aaron didn’t understand, and jabbed the automatic weapon at him.
Aaron had never fired a gun like this before, but he knew enough to point and shoot. Video games had taught him that. He hurried too much, yanked the trigger on the first shot, and the bullet went high.
Luckily for him the terrorist’s nerves must have been jumping around like crazy, too. The burst of slugs from the machine pistol went wide. Aaron settled his sights on center mass and fired three rounds. He tried to make the trigger pulls as smooth as he could.
Black Friday Page 13