Soft Target (29 page)

Faaid fired at one runner, bringing him down, turned, fired fast at the crowd that suddenly roared toward him, was astounded that none went down and realized that there’s a lot of air in a crowd and at that time figured he was much better off aiming instead of crazily cracking off rounds from the hip, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and—

McElroy’s first shot splattered his brains.

The others didn’t notice. They too tried to master the crowd-massacre learning curve, and they too discovered that shooting blindly into the belly of the beast is likely to produce displeasing results, and in the time it took them to bring rifles to shoulders and brace knees tightly for supported shooting, several others, assisted by McElroy, Ray Cruz, and others, lost interest in the point of the operation as they were felled for keeps.

Ray got the news. Dropping the cell, he rose to the balcony railing, winced as above him McElroy’s flashbang bouquet flashed and banged with stunning malevolence, blew a hole in the Lake Michigan skylight, and a blast-propelled spray of glass spewed downward, and leaned over the balcony looking for shots. He only had a P7, the German police trade-in the killers had somehow come up with on the surplus market, though he knew it by reputation to be an accurate pistol.
Two hands locked onto the small thing, the lever that bisected the grip compressed by the adrenaline-pumped psycho strength coursing down his wrists, Ray stepped out, oriented on a flash—he couldn’t see well enough to pick out an actual shooter—guesstimated where the shooter had to be relative to the flash, and squeezed off three fast rounds. The gun popped in his hands at each shot, spitting an empty, yet its jump wasn’t radical and the barrel axis was so low to his hand that it just ate up recoil, so Ray got back on target fast. Three fired, the flash disappeared, and whether he’d made a kill or just scared the guy to cover, Ray didn’t know.

But he knew Lavelva’s theoretical ambushers would have been alerted by the flashbangs as well as his own shooting, and he wheeled, still in the two-hand, low isosceles stance, and saw them—goddamn, the girl was right!—as they both emerged from a shop about sixty feet away, rifles flying to hips to take the infidel down. The P7 lived up to its rep; a long shot for a 9-mil, he still made it neatly and crisply, put one into the lead shooter, rocking him to stagger and sit-down. He rotated smoothly, telling himself not to hurry, onto the second target, tracked it as the man was moving, laid the front sight on the leading edge of the mover. Then Ray saw flash—he heard silence because his war brain had shut the world down to nothing but target—and knew instantly that his opponent, shooting fast without aiming, firing from the hip, had missed, and Ray felt his trigger pull break, the gun leaped in its little way, and the runner slowed, staggered by a solid hit, stopped, straightened up a little. At that moment from across the hallway, a door flew open and Lavelva, with her AK-74, fired, and although she shot more or less wildly, at least three of her twenty or so rounds went home, and the second Somali himself slid into coma and death on the floor of the mall.

“Bring a gun!” he screamed, and she picked up one of the fallen AKs and ran to him.

He took it as if it were a baton in a relay race, pivoted, looked over the sights for targets in the chaos and scramble below, vectored in on
one muzzle flash as yet unquelled, and put three or four rounds into that spot directly behind where instinct told him a shooter crouched. If a man was there, he either went down hard or scampered back, under the overhang of the balconies, so that no angle was available to Ray.

Then Ray’s eyes were drawn to a melee in the center of the space below him, and he saw that some kind of fight had broken out, a pile-on, as hostages had trapped and were beating on one of their tormentors. But he had no shot.

The coup de SWAT consisted of some neatly tuned disobedience.

“That’s my unit moving back,” the officer had said twenty minutes back, as they crouched in the shadows of the parking lot across from the Rio Grande entrance. “They all have the black helmets from Bravo Company for that cool Delta look.”

“It is cool,” another guy had said. “We tried to get them, but the budget—”

“Go ahead,” Jefferson had said.

“Okay, so why don’t we go to them, trade helmets, and send
them
back to Incident Command. If they keep their helmets on, nobody’s going to know it’s them and not us. I know Nick Crewes, who commands over there. He’ll go for it.”

“And then we’re real close if the fucking balloon goes up,” said someone else. “And if it doesn’t, who knows?”

So this meant Jefferson and his ad hoc team of all-star SWAT mutineers were still in strike distance to the Rio Grande entrance, and they didn’t need an official order to go. When they heard Andrew’s orders to his gunmen, they just went.

It was a quick dash to the entrance, and both shotgunners laid muzzles next to the same metal door lock and fired simultaneously. Metal hit metal with a clang of super energy that, combined with the percussion of the two shells firing, sounded nuclear in its decibel
level. Nobody blinked, they were so full of adrenaline, so ready to close and shoot, after the hours of doing nothing. The door torqued under the double slam of two hard-metal missiles being sent into its innards at a thousand feet per second and warped, twisting, showing two blisters and two smears of superheated carbon where the breaching rounds had tunneled through. Jefferson gave a hard wrench and—the door didn’t budge.

“Goddamn!” he screamed, and yanked and pulled, but it didn’t move. Inside they could hear the shots.

“They’re shooting, oh Christ, it’s a war!” came a terrified voice.

Oh, Christ, thought Neal. Think.
Think!

Thank God for television. Was it a World War II movie? Nazis hunting a clandestine radio in an apartment building. They have the signal, they just don’t have the floor. One by one, they turn off the power on each floor, and when the radio broadcast is interrupted, they know their guy is on that floor.

Thank you, Nazis. Thank you, television.

Neal dragged the icon to POWER DOWN ALL and turned off every single RealDeal outlet in every single mall, strip mall, town, suburban shithole, whatever, in America. From Toledo to Tucson, from New York to Natchez, and along any other axis you cared to chart, they all went blank, all four hundred–odd of them.

For a second. Then one by one by ten by twenty, they came back on, as branch managers went to their boards, pressed RESTORE, and got their juice back on fast and the two hundred screen images back on. That is, all except one, where the branch manager was lying on the floor hoping not to get shot, surrounded by weepy clerks and sobbing customers, all clenched in prayer. Neal dragged to that one, clicked on it to bring it up, looked for LINKS, clicked on that, and found himself in a program called MEMTAC 6.2, went to the pictorial, found LOCKDOWN ENGAGED, put the cursor on it, and clicked.

LOCKDOWN DISENGAGED came the message.
You’re terminated, fucker, he thought.

With the clunky sound of large pieces of metal shifting, the doors shivered and popped amid the stench of burned powder.

“Go, go,” shouted Jefferson, as his people raced in. “Semiauto, lasers on, look for targets.”

But the order was largely meaningless, as all six of them knew that.

What they found was the corridor called Rio Grande overflooded with a torrent of escapees coursing down the hallway at them, as the outer margins of the hostage crowd had already begun its race to freedom and safety, overwhelming the gunner meant to stop them by sheer numbers. He got off a few shots and then was pierced from above by one of Dave McElroy’s .308s and taken from the fight and from the planet, both forever.

So the SWAT team formed a flying wedge, waving MP5s, screaming, “Police, Police, make way!” and magically the torrent spread, admitting them. They could hear shooting up ahead, see more chaos, had no idea other shooters were already engaging the killers.

The team spread out, bent low, looking for targets as they moved to circle those who still stood and fired. Two spotted a gunman fleeing into a CD store and pursued him, saw his feet as shadows where he crouched in terror behind a free-standing shelf unit, popped their fire selection levers to full auto, and hosed the rack with thirty rounds apiece, blowing images of rap groups, CW stars, and gospel music groups to shreds as they destroyed all that stood between them and their target. The gunman himself took close to forty hits in the few seconds that he remained standing against the onslaught, and when they got to him, they found him as dead as ancient history.

Meanwhile, in the center of Silli-Land, amid a pile of squirming hostages, a man rose in majestic thunder with his AK-74, a Conan, a
Shaka Zulu, an Attila, as if he’d just crushed his enemy, driven them to the sea and heard the lamentations of their women, and in character he shouted a medieval bellow of warriorhood, as if he dared anyone to shoot him.

They shot him anyway.

Could this really be happening? Possibly it wasn’t really happening. You know, it was so unlikely that it almost certainly wasn’t happening.

But it seemed to be happening.

Colonel Obobo closed his eyes, held them tight shut, and when he opened them . . . yes, dammit, it still seemed to be happening.

The monitors leaped to life as Andrew Nicks restored the mall’s security cameras with the click of a mouse, and the imagery poured into the Command van. The assembled police officers watched as the young men of Brigade Mumbai opened fire on the crowd. The contrast between the muzzle flashes and the unlit darkness of the crowd was so marked that the imagery resolved itself quickly enough into abstraction, the piercing stab of the flash essentially blowing all detail out of the backdrop so that the screens only showed white-hot light and jumble, incomprehensible to the eye.

“Colonel, should I send in SWAT?” asked Major Carmody.

“Find Jefferson!” somebody else said. “Where the hell is that guy, why isn’t he doing anything?”

“Colonel, it would probably be a good idea to tell SWAT to blow the doors, and meanwhile, I think we ought to alert the FBI and our own snipers on the roof to engage.”

“Where the fuck is Jefferson?” came another cry. “He was bitching all day about standing around and now the party’s started and he’s out to lunch.”

But Obobo said nothing. He seemed utterly baffled by the craziness on the screens above him. After all, who could make sense of that insanity?

Finally, he said, “I don’t want undue risk vis-à-vis the hostages. Let’s let the situation clarify before—”

“Sir, they’re shooting the hostages, for God’s sake,” said Carmody. “We have to stop them.”

“I don’t want to judge hastily. Maybe they’re bluffing, maybe this is another warning, maybe they’ll stop shooting. I see no need to further agitate them.”

“Sir, I—”

What was wrong with these people? When he spoke, with his calm deliberation, his firm, perfect eye contact, his empathy and compassion welling in his voice, he expected to be listened to. It had always been that way.

“That’s all, gentlemen,” he said. “That’s my decision. Now, you all wait until it clarifies and then contact me. Mr. Renfro, call my car, will you please? I’ll be outside.”

With that he turned, grabbed his coat, and left the room.

For a moment the officers stared at each other stupefied. Then one by one, they went back to the monitors.

“I think,” someone said, “we must have some people in there. I don’t know where they came from, but that sounds more like a gun battle than a massacre.”

All watched as fleet SWAT operators, black-clad and bent aggressively as if their posture alone could protect them, entered the screens from various angles, shooting as they moved, their laser beams also vivid slashes against the confusion, darting this way and that. The monitors captured two SWAT heroes blowing the hell out of a terrorist in a CD shop, and then on another screen, a man in the center of the crowd was brought down by multiple hits.

“Good fucking shooting,” someone said.

“There was some kind of blast from up top,” somebody said. “Somehow the snipers blew the skylight and I think they’re firing too.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Carmody. He turned to Mr. Renfro. “I’m going to send SWAT in for backup,” he said, almost tentatively.

“You’ll be violating the colonel’s orders,” said Renfro, but without much conviction. His pasty white face, normally so flaccid, displayed strain through tightened jowls and harsh cords standing out on the neck. “But maybe you should,” and a tide of phlegm rose in his throat, and he cleared it with a growl of breath, “
Urggghhhh
—I don’t know. I—I just don’t know.”

“All units,” Carmody said into his throat mike, “you are authorized to close and engage. As soon as SWAT deploys, I’m authorizing first responders to set up triage units at each entranceway and have stretcher teams and gurneys ready to deploy when and if the mall is secure. Alert all emergency medical sites to prepare for incoming under siren but we have no idea as to casualty figures yet. It could be considerable. They’d better get all their people in and suited up.”

“Ambulances, Larry,” someone said.

“And get ambulances to the entrances to ferry the wounded. Do that ASAP.”

Then it was quiet for a second, until a major’s voice arose from the darkness, as the battle on the screens played out, with the SWAT guys shooting from standing, from moving, from kneeling, pushing in, getting closer.

“Go, babies, go,” he said.

Maahir had more or less forgotten about jihad, and martyrdom; he’d forgotten everything except for the sex part. He liked killing too, and taking money from the wallets of the dead, but the best part was the sex, and further, sex and rape, to him, were the same thing or, at least in his experience, always had been. When the order came from the imam, he alone among the gunmen did not unsling his weapon to open fire. Instead, with his strength, his majesty, his fearsome warrior’s vitality, he strode through the crowd, as the kneeling mortals rolled away from him, screaming and begging for mercy. Scum! No warriors here this day! Hah!