“The AC must’ve gotten knocked out in that explosion,” Calvin said.
“The AC . . . wasn’t on. It’s . . . late November.”
“Yeah, but the weather’s been warm.”
“Not . . . that warm . . . You’re sweatin’ . . . because of all the people . . . crammed in here. And because . . . you’re scared.”
Calvin turned his head to frown at the old man in the wheelchair.
“You’re not even supposed to be up here in this part of the store. Where’s Father Steve?”
“Probably back there . . . prayin’. I can . . . get around without him . . . you know.”
Pete moved the knob on the wheelchair’s arm with his clawlike left hand, making the chair swing back and forth slightly as its motor hummed.
“Well, you need to go back where you’ll be safe if those terrorists attack again.”
“Is anybody . . . in here . . . really safe?”
Calvin couldn’t answer that question, or rather, he didn’t want to answer it, he thought. That would have meant admitting that they were just holding off the inevitable. Sooner or later the terrorists would storm the store, he thought, and he knew how that pitched battle would end.
Already, the defenders had fought off half a dozen attacks. Three men had been killed so far. Their bodies had been carried into the back room, and others had replaced them. Those deaths had caused spirits to run low. People were beginning to sense that the end was looming.
The gunfire, the deaths, the sheer desperation had all combined to make Calvin feel numb. He could still force his brain to think, but everything else inside him had gone dead. Things weren’t supposed to be this way, but they were and there was nothing he could do about it except to keep fighting.
He wondered how Tobey, Mr. Lockhart, and the others were doing. Calvin wished he had gone with them, rather than having Tobey pick him to be in charge of the store’s defense. He would have rather been on the move, even if it was more dangerous.
He heard a quick patter of footsteps behind him as he knelt at the counter. Turning his head, he saw a girl about his age with brown hair approaching. She was standing up too straight, so Calvin motioned for her to get down. With a nervous look, she dropped to hands and knees and crawled toward him.
“You’re the guy who’s in charge up here, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess.” Calvin thought her name was Jennie, but he wasn’t sure about that.
“The priest sent me to get you. He says somebody’s trying to get in at the back of the store, through that door where my brother and those other men left.”
Calvin’s heart thumped hard in his chest. The door into the service corridors opened into the store if you had a key for it, but anybody could open it from the other side. The doors were designed that way, he supposed, so that mall maintenance workers couldn’t get trapped in there.
At Tobey’s suggestion before he departed on his commando mission, the store’s defenders had barricaded that door with a couple of file cabinets. When Tobey and the others returned, they were supposed to knock on the door in a prearranged signal so they could be let back in.
“It must be Tobey and your brother and the others,” Calvin told the girl.
She shook her head and said, “They didn’t give any signal. They just tried to push the door open.”
Calvin closed his eyes for a second as despair went through him. His emotions weren’t as numb as he had believed them to be. The terrorists must have found those narrow passages and were trying to launch a sneak attack.
He motioned one of the other defenders over and told the man, “Keep an eye out front. I’ve got to go in the back.”
“Trouble?” the man asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Calvin said, but in truth, he did. There was nothing but trouble in the American Way Mall today.
Staying low, he and Jennie made it to the back room. The people who were hiding here had withdrawn to the other side of the room and were staring fearfully at the blockaded door. Most of them were armed, but the people who were more experienced with guns were all up front.
Still, how experienced did you have to be to point a weapon at a doorway and pull the trigger, Calvin asked himself. He pointed to half a dozen of the men and crooked his free hand at them, indicating that they should join him. They came over, albeit a bit reluctantly, and Calvin told them in a whisper, “A couple of you get ready to shove those file cabinets out of the way. The rest of you have your guns ready and start shooting if I give the order.”
The possibility that whoever was on the other side of the door was friendly still existed. Calvin wasn’t going to take any chances, though. Whoever they were, they’d have to identify themselves in a hurry to keep from getting shot.
The men positioned themselves beside the filing cabinets. Calvin and the others lifted their guns. Calvin nodded, and the men shoved the cabinets aside, causing a scraping sound as they moved on the floor. The door swung open abruptly, and the first thing Calvin saw was the barrel of a machine pistol.
His nerves snapped, and he yelled, “Fire!”
* * *
Jake caught just a glimpse of the men standing on the other side of the door pointing guns in the direction of him and the three women. Irina had been confident that the back room of the sporting goods store was on the other side of that door, but when they had tried to open it, they had encountered resistance, as if something was blocking it.
None of them had wanted to call out, for fear that the terrorists were lurking right on the other side. Then they’d heard whatever was blocking the door being moved, and Jamie had snapped, “Get behind me,” as she stepped forward with the Steyr in both hands and used her foot to push open the door.
That was when Jake spotted the armed men, and he reacted instinctively, grabbing Jamie’s collar and pulling her back and to the side while he lunged forward.
Somebody yelled, “Fire!” and guns roared, deafening in the close confines.
What felt like a giant fist smacked into Jake’s upper left arm, spun him halfway around, and caused him to lose his balance as his legs tangled with Jamie’s. They both fell, but that was good because they toppled out of the doorway and therefore out of the line of fire. As Jake landed, he saw Irina and Kaitlyn flinching away from the lead storm.
Jake’s arm hurt like blazes where he’d been hit, but he didn’t think the wound was serious. At least he hoped not. The barrage of bullets stopped abruptly. He thought it did, anyway. His ears were ringing so bad it was hard to tell for sure.
“Hold your fire,” a young voice ordered, sounding like it came from far, far away. “You terrorists, come out with your hands up!”
“Terrorists!” Kaitlyn repeated angrily. “You’re the terrorists!”
“Wait, wait.” That was the young man again. “You’re Americans?”
Jamie pushed herself up on an elbow and barked in her command voice, “Everybody stand down! That’s an order!” She looked over at Jake. “How badly are you hit, Mr. Connelly?”
“Just grazed, I think,” he said. “Still hurts like the devil, though.”
Jamie stood up, and as the right leg of her jeans hiked slightly, Jake saw the steel shaft of a prosthesis going down into the foot-shaped block of plastic inside her shoe. He hadn’t realized until just now that at least part of her right leg was gone. He had noticed that she had a slight limp but hadn’t attributed it to such a severe injury.
She didn’t let it slow her down much, that was for sure.
A young black man in a security guard’s uniform appeared in the opening, holding a gun. He stared at Jake and the three females and said, “Oh, my God. We almost killed you.”
“You came too close for comfort, kid,” Jake said. “Somebody give me a hand here.”
Within moments, Jake was on his feet again and they were all inside the store’s back room. Jake looked around, saw the frightened people gathered there, and realized that others had had the same idea of fort
ing up in here where guns and ammo were available.
Briskly taking charge, Jamie said, “Mr. Connelly, you find a place to sit down. There’s bound to be a first aid kit somewhere around here. We need to clean and bandage that wound.”
A woman who wore the uniform of the store’s sales staff volunteered, “I’ll get the kit. I know where it is.”
With that in hand, Jamie asked, “Who’s in charge here?”
“I guess I am,” the young security guard said. “My name’s Calvin Marshall.”
“I’m Captain Vasquez.” She nodded toward Jake. “This is Detective Connelly.”
Calvin swallowed and said, “Yes, ma’am. I think that makes you in charge now. Both of you. You sure as heck outrank me.”
“Tell me what’s been going on here,” Jamie said.
Calvin summarized the past couple of hours, a time filled with so much violence and death that his voice sounded haunted by it. Jake noticed that Kaitlyn appeared to sympathize with him. He knew the girl had lost her mother, back in the opening moments of the terrorist attack, and that loss probably hadn’t completely sunk in on her yet. Her moral fiber was strong enough, though, that she could feel for Calvin.
While that was going on, the woman who had gone to fetch the first aid kit returned with it in hand. She seemed to have had a little training in that area. Jake took off his jacket, and she cut away his shirt to reveal that the slug had plowed a bloody furrow across the outer part of his upper left arm. It was a painful wound, but it wouldn’t incapacitate him.
A young, blond priest stepped forward to help as the woman cleaned the wound on Jake’s arm and then wrapped a strip of gauze around it and bound it tightly in place.
“You should be able to use your arm some,” she told him, “but it’s going to hurt.”
“Let it hurt,” he said. “Right now that doesn’t matter a whole lot, does it? I really appreciate your help.” Jake nodded to the priest. “Thanks to you, too, Father.”
“I wish I could do more,” he said. “I’m Father Steve, by the way.”
“Glad to meet you.”
“Are you a Catholic?” Father Steve asked. “I mean, with a good Irish name like Connelly . . .”
Jake chuckled and said, “Sorry, Father. Methodist as far back in the family as I can remember.”
“Well, that’s all right, too.”
Jamie and Calvin came over to join them. Jamie said, “Calvin’s been telling me that some of the men who made it safely into the store have gone back out through those passages we were using.”
“To try to escape?” Jake asked.
“To kill as many of the terrorists as they can,” Jamie replied with a shake of her head.
Jake frowned and asked, “How many left here?”
“Seven men,” Jamie said.
“Against a hundred heavily armed terrorists?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” Calvin said, “but I wouldn’t count them out.”
Chapter 35
Tobey stepped through one of the narrow doors into a place that sold eyeglasses in an hour. It was empty except for the bodies of two women and a man. Broken glass covered the floor. The terrorists must have shot up every pair of glasses displayed on the walls for customers to pick from. There couldn’t have been any point in that other than sheer, wanton destruction.
Which came as no surprise, considering how easily, even gleefully, these bastards killed innocent people.
The broken glass crunched under Tobey’s boots as he catfooted toward the store’s entrance. He risked the possibility that some of the terrorists might be close enough, outside in the mall, to hear his footsteps, but he wanted to get an idea of what was going on in this section. According to Herb Dupont, they weren’t far from the children’s play area. It was just around a slight bend in the mall from here.
The idea of cold-blooded killers strutting around with guns in a place where children should be playing and enjoying themselves filled Tobey with a cold anger. Those bastards had an awful lot to answer for, and the score against them just kept mounting all the time.
He froze suddenly near the front of the store as he heard voices. It sounded like two men were talking, and they seemed to be coming closer. Tobey crouched behind a desk that, before today, had been where store employees sat as they fitted new glasses to customers.
Two of the terrorists walked past the store, never even glancing in Tobey’s direction. That’s how sure they were that they held the upper hand, he thought. They were speaking English with barely any accents. They had probably been in this country for quite a while, enjoying life here, taking advantages of all the benefits the federal government offered so freely.
He edged up to the entrance and risked a look around the corner. The two men patrolling this part of the mall were still walking away, but as Tobey watched, they stopped and turned back in his direction. He pulled back out of sight before they could spot him and looked at the door to the maintenance corridors.
Aaron stood there, watching him anxiously through the small gap.
Tobey motioned to him. Aaron slipped through the door and hurried to join him.
“There are a couple of guys coming in this direction,” Tobey whispered. “We’re going to jump them.”
“The others won’t see us?” Aaron asked.
“We’re kind of around a little corner from the main part of the mall. If we can take care of these guys without firing any shots, I don’t think we’ll alert the rest of them.”
Aaron swallowed hard but nodded. Tobey could tell that the kid was scared. Who wouldn’t be, under these circumstances? Tobey had talked enough with Aaron, though, to know that he’d done time in prison. If Aaron was tough enough to survive there, he was tough enough to make it through this.
“Just follow my lead,” Tobey said.
The terrorists were closer now. Tobey heard one of them say, “—think Habib is getting impatient with the infidels. He won’t wait much longer.”
“Good,” the other man said. “I’m not anxious to die . . . but martyrdom and all its glories await us.”
That didn’t sound good at all, Tobey thought. This Habib had to be the leader, and if he was getting ready to put his endgame into action, that didn’t bode well for any of them. Maybe there wasn’t time to whittle down the enemy forces as much as he would have liked, Tobey decided . . .
The two men appeared at the entrance to the eyeglasses store, walking steadily toward the center of the mall. Tobey and Aaron had their backs pressed to the wall, and they didn’t make their move until the terrorists had gone a couple of steps past them.
Then Tobey lunged, swinging the Steyr in one hand at a terrorist’s head while he bent slightly at the waist and launched a side kick at the other man’s back.
It was a devastating attack. The machine pistol smashed into the first man’s head with enough force to shatter bone. The kick landed in the small of the other man’s back at almost the same exact instant and knocked him forward. The impact was such that he couldn’t keep his feet. He fell hard, landing facedown with stunning force.
Aaron landed on the man’s back a split second later, pinning him down with a knee while striking with the knife he had taken from his pocket and unfolded. The blade went into the terrorist’s throat, ripped across it. The man spasmed once as crimson sprayed from the wound, then he went still.
Tobey was pretty sure he had fractured the skull of the first man, but he slit his throat just to make certain.
Then he and Aaron dragged both corpses into the store, out of sight of any casual glance directed toward this part of the mall. The blood splattered on the floor might attract attention, but there was nothing they could do about that.
The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds and been almost noiseless.
Tobey was searching the bodies for loaded magazines when he noticed something odd about one of them. He pulled the man’s jacket and shirt aside, and Aaron exclaimed, “Shit! Is that what I think it i
s?”
“Yeah,” Tobey said. “It’s a bomb. A suicide belt.” He pointed. “All you have to do is jerk that wire loose to set it off. Looks like there’s enough C-4 to make a pretty good boom.”
Aaron rubbed his jaw and shook his head.
“That’s crazy, man. Who’s nuts enough to blow themselves up like that?”
“Plenty of this bunch. Over in the sandbox, we even saw women and children carrying suicide bombs. Their husbands and parents made them do it. Sickest bunch of bastards there’s ever been on the face of the earth.”
“Yeah, no argument from me, man. You think they’re all wearing those things?”
Tobey frowned and said, “The ones I searched earlier weren’t. Either only some of them have the bombs . . . or they’re being passed out to everybody now.”
“If they’re all wearin’ ’em . . .” Aaron had to swallow again before he could go on. “How much damage would it do if they all went off at the same time?”
“Yeah, I was thinkin’ about that, too,” Tobey admitted. “We don’t know how many of them there are, but based on what we’ve seen . . . and how many men it would take to guard all the hostages they have . . . I think there’s a good chance a blast of that size could bring down the whole mall.”
“Ohhhh, man. That’s what they’re plannin’, isn’t it? They’re gonna blow this whole freakin’ place to hell.”
“Wouldn’t put it past ’em,” Tobey said with a grim nod.
“We gotta do something. We gotta get the word out, let the cops or whoever’s on the outside know they’ve got to storm the place and stop those crazy sons o’ bitches. Otherwise everybody in here is gonna die, and who knows how many outside.”
“I think that’s probably exactly what they have in mind,” Tobey said.
Ideas stirred in the back of his brain. He reached into the pocket of the dead man’s jacket and found a cheap phone. Maybe that was the way the terrorists were communicating, he thought, although reception in here would be wonky. He opened the phone and checked the recently dialed numbers.
Black Friday Page 23