Soft Target (20 page)

“You have to be able to blow a hole in that window. You squad with the other snipers, you figure out something, just in case, to get through that fucking window fast and start taking people down. You may have just seconds to engage. Solve it yourself, solve it now.”

“You’re basically asking me to disobey orders.”

“Sniper Five,” said Memphis, in Washington Crisis, “you do what Cruz tells you, and if it comes to flak, you give them my name and I will swing for it, got that?”

“Got it, yes sir,” said McElroy.

“And you don’t know anything about this, Webley, if you’re listening.”

“I never heard a thing, sir,” said Webley, who had been listening. “Now McElroy, get busy, you have work to do.”

Ray put the phone away and tried to search out a retail outlet near the balcony where he could get into action if something happened, but he sensed a presence. Turning, his eyes met those of a jihadi gunman not three feet away. The man stared at him quizzically, and in the split second of stillness, Ray saw him trying to solve certain problems. Why, he had to be wondering, is this fellow here, in our uniform? Why is he not Somali? Who was he talking to?

And then he and Ray leaped at each other.

Dead Santa, atop his throne, gazed with sightless eyes upon the mortal anguish his passing signified. A woman on the other side of the crowd had also died, of a heart attack. There was a man near the
Tilt-a-Whirl who was very, very close to death; he needed blood badly. One of the babies had started to cry and would not shut up. Everywhere, people were giving up or surrendering to bitterness and despair, trying to sneak last phone calls to tell relatives how much they loved them. Worst of all, the odors of colonic release filled the air. Generally it felt like the end of the world in the mass of hostages packed on the byways of the amusement park, dwarfed by the skeletal struts of various thrill rides, mocked by flappity-flapping banners and signs for refreshments and insane Christmas muzak from unstoppable speakers. “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright,” yadda yadda.

But Mom had seen worlds end before and gotten through, so she was not upset. She held Sally close to her. She did not want Sally looking around, with her bright face and bright eyes. She knew the child’s charisma was like a beacon and that it attracted attention, the wrong kind.

In her native language she prayed to Buddha for deliverance, but she also prayed for death to come to the filth that had engineered this thing. Everywhere she looked, she saw bleakness and turmoil. She continued to steal a handful of dirt into her bag every few minutes or so, as yet unnoticed, uncaught. It was just about time for another load.

But then—

Simultaneously two or three of the gun boys began to leap with what looked like joy and clap each other on the back. Then one pointed his rifle upward and jerked off a batch of shots while others pounded him raucously. A whisper ran through the crowd and it came to and blew over Mom and Sally.

“There must be an agreement! We’ll be getting out of here soon! We just have to hold on a little longer!”

Mom didn’t buy it, not for a second. She’d seen boys like these before: they loved their guns, their power, their uniforms too much. They had too little wisdom or imagination; they’d never felt responsibility.
They were just children, really, and even if someone was directing them—no evidence, except in the earphones that suggested a leader somewhere addressing them and giving orders and instructions—they would behave like children, pointlessly, foolishly violent and cruel.

Then a confirmation came. Someone with an iPhone had managed to call up CNN, which was reporting an agreement in the Minnesota standoff! This news flew through the crowd and was confirmed by other iPhoners faster than the first news. Now the optimism was palpable, the sense of relief. Oh, it was so good. Mom allowed herself to half believe, but her hard experience in the world still left her worried.

Sally peeked up.

“Mom, what is it?” she asked in Hmong.

“Good news. They say we’ll be out of here in a bit, some kind of deal has been made.”

“Thank God,” said Sally.

“Sally, do not let yourself believe until it is true. Guard against feelings of gratitude and relief. It may still be a long, tragic day and you might still have to use all your skills to survive it.”

Suddenly a shadow crossed them. Both looked up.

The black man who’d shot the hostages and who’d bought Sally as his bride stood there, all insolence, pride, glee, his weapon resting casually on his shoulder. He smiled, white teeth showing brightly. Then he knelt down.

“I will have my wedding night,” he said, “when the time is right. You will come to love me, and possibly when you give yourself to Maahir, Maahir will save you. The martyrs are cheering because they know that the killing is near.”

The young man turned to the imam.

“So can you watch the shop for a while?”

“I’m sorry, what do you—”

“Oh, nothing’s going to happen for a while. They’ll be driving the Kaafi boys to the airport, you’ll see, and then there’ll be the TV drama of the boarding and takeoff and all the talking heads will check in, and then we’ll move up to another game level on them. But meanwhile, I’ve got a little something to check. You can hang here. I’ll be back in a second.”

“Yes, of course.”

He reached under his console and took out a plastic bag that could only contain a gas mask. Or another head. But it was a gas mask. He pulled it on carefully, making adjustments. Then he went to the console, armed himself with the mouse, dragged the cursor to SECURITY OFFICE, and clicked. The icon told him it was still remotely locked. He ordered UNLOCK.

Then he rose, snatched up an AK, and left through the front door. It was only a quarter rotation around and there was no pedestrian traffic. A few windows had been broken, a few carriages abandoned, a few shoes lost. It had an after-the-zombie-apocalypse feeling he kind of liked, thank you, George Romero and all your clones. He passed the big, bright, deserted RealDeal that sold more TV sets than any other retail outlet in America, saw more zombie ruin inside but still utter stillness as all the trapped shoppers would presume him a killer and quake in their hiding places, and beyond that he came to the unmarked door that was the security office.

Unlocked by computer fiat, it yielded to his push, admitting him to a tunnel that led to more heavy doors, and they too opened cheerfully.

Inside: not pleasant.

Six dead guys. Wrong place, wrong time, fellows, the way of the universe. He felt not a morsel of pity for them and—this was his gift or something—could not imagine them as men of families, with lives, relatives, kids, histories, contributions. They were just sort of repulsive in their twisted grotesqueness.

He walked to a device of some mystery mounted on a wall. A
small green bulb gleamed brightly. Oh, they think they’re so smart. Oh, they think they’ve got it figured. Some boy genius of the FBI or the NSA or the CIA, working away, he’d managed to connect with the system, thinking that Satan had forgotten something. Too bad for him. So it goes with the weak and virtuous.

He smashed the green-lit modem two times with his rifle butt, the second driving the shattered plastic mechanism, its guts of circuits and wires and smashed plastic hanging out, to the floor.

He was doing what he had always dreamed of. He was smashing the machine. In its tangled, ripped wiring, in its shattered plastic, in its broken solenoids, he saw the future.

Ain’t it cool?

M
r. Reilly was baffled. The owner—actually, the FFL was still in his wife’s name, though she’d died three months earlier—of Reilly’s Sporting Goods and Surplus, in far suburban, nearly rural Twin Falls, Minnesota, he stared at the two crates, one quite large, one quite small, that rested on the UPS man’s freight dolly. He bent, saw the return address on the shipping label as WTI, Laredo, Texas, which he knew to be West Texas Imports, his supplier for low-end Eastbloc surplus military weapons, which he sold to working-class hunters and gun folks who couldn’t afford a big-ticket American deer rifle.

About a hundred mounted animals witnessed the somewhat confused transaction between the old fellow and the man in brown, and most of them had horns, though of course a few were badgers, ducks, even, whimsically, a groundhog noted for its sagacity and insight. Also on the cozy, wood-paneled walls: rifles, rifles, rifles, most bolt guns, a few ARs, a few shotguns. In the fluorescent-lit cabinets lay the handguns, gleaming, laid out neatly by someone who took the responsibility for display of merchandise and price, the bedrock of retail, seriously.

“I just don’t see why it’s such a big crate,” he said to Wally, the UPS man.

“Mr. Reilly, do you want to refuse it? No big deal, I’ll just dolly it back to the truck and we’ll return it.”

“Well,” said Mr. Reilly, still a little foggy, “let’s ask Andrew.” He turned and called, “Andrew.
Andrew!
”

Andrew stepped from the stockroom. He was a tall, thin young man in his early twenties, and he was the best thing that had come into Mr. Reilly’s life since Flora died. He was punctual, hardworking, entirely trustworthy, good with customers, reliable, and honest. He had a shock of blond hair and a fair complexion. He could have been any neighbor’s son, and it was his compulsion toward tidiness that had turned the store into such a masterpiece of organization.

“He doesn’t understand why the WTI crate is so big,” said Wally.

“Mr. Reilly, I’ll check it. Maybe it’s two or three orders in one.”

“You don’t want to refuse it?” said Wally.

“No, I guess not,” said Mr. Reilly. “Okay, Andrew?”

“Yes sir. I’ll run it down through the computer records. They do make mistakes, but I think we did have an outstanding order on Chinese SKSes, and maybe this is them. Or maybe it’s them plus a duplicate order. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ll straighten it out, and if it’s wrong, you can pick it up tomorrow, Wally.”

“Sure.”

Carefully, Wally ran his digital reader over the bar codes on each package label, thus recording accurately and in perpetuity the fact that both packages had been delivered to their destination.

Andrew hefted the handles of the dolly, got it unmoored from the floor upon which it rested, and wheeled it back into the stockroom. He returned with the empty dolly and slid it over to Wally, who took control of it from him, turned as Mr. Reilly unlocked the door, as it was well after closing time, and returned to his brown van. Reilly waved good-bye, then looked around his store, part of a decaying strip mall that had been on the downhill since big boys like Cabela’s and Midway USA put everything one click away.

“You’ll get it straightened out, Andrew?” he asked.

“Absolutely. It may take a while, I’ve got to go through the records. I may have to call them. And I haven’t even begun to put the handguns in the safe.”

“Oh, I’ll do that.”

“No, no,” said Andrew. “I know you’re tired. I’ll take care of everything.”

That pleased the old man. There were over seventy handguns on display in the store and, though it had never been robbed, the old man wanted it never to be robbed, which committed him or Andrew to a half hour’s hard labor every night, picking up the guns and carefully stowing them in the two big safes behind the counter, then locking them tight. The rifles he could leave on display; the thieves were mostly black people from the city and they only wanted handguns.

“Okay, Andrew. I think we’re due for an ATF walk-through anytime now and I don’t want any trouble. There was never any trouble with Flora, she kept the records so neatly. It’s not my skill, you know. Not my kind of mind. I’d rather talk hunting with customers. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“It’s not a problem. I’ll get to the bottom of this and by the time you get in tomorrow, we’ll be shipshape.”

“Make sure to—”

“I know, I know,” said Andrew, “log the shipment into the ATF bound book, no worries.”

Andrew knew the ATF regs forward and backward, maybe better than Flora. If any gun spent twenty-four hours in a retail outlet, it had to be accounted for in the big log book ATF required, which would show its arrival and ultimately its dispersal, either via retail sale or, rarely, shipment back to wholesaler.

“Mr. Reilly, you go on home. I’ll run this through, and if it’s a mistake, I’ll relabel and ready for shipment back and Wally can pick them up tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Andrew. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

It took the old man more than a few minutes to get himself
together enough to leave. Since Flora’s death, he’d become a ditherer. He’d start one thing, get halfway through, then move on to another. In the end, he had accomplished nothing except to half start a bunch of things that poor Andrew would have to follow through on. Mr. Reilly knew he had this tendency and he was too reliant on Andrew, but he’d never really come out of the fog that his wife’s death had caused. Anyway, in time, he was set to leave, and he yelled good night to Andrew, unlocked then relocked the door, and got into his car and drove away, wondering if he could still make the early bird rate at the Walloon Lake Sizzler.

As soon as the old man left, Andrew used an X-acto knife to slice the shipping pouch on the big crate and slid out the bill of lading. He knew that it contained sixteen Bulgarian AK-74s from WTI. They’d arrived in the United States as surplus kit purchased by Century Arms, of Vermont. Century’s not particularly subtle armorers had replaced the full auto parts with American-made semiauto parts, which by regulation qualified them for US retail sale, and somewhat haphazardly reassembled them. Usually they worked; sometimes they didn’t. Those guns were wholesaled to WTI, who overstamped them with their own emblem, then repackaged them for entry in the great American gun ocean, 300 million and growing. The smaller package contained two hundred of the orange Chinese magazines held to be the best on the market. Nobody cared much about them and they went uncovered in ATF regs.