Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  “I killed one, Asad,” he said.

  “Hah,” said Asad, “I have killed many,” but stung by the boastfulness in Saalim’s voice, he felt that to retain warrior face he must kill again, and so he selected a cow from the herd and fired. She was a big one, black like himself, but slow, which is why she lingered at the rear of the fleeing crowd, but he had no mercy this day. The rifle cracked and spurt, spinning hot brass, and though he could not see the hit, she went down with the heavy flop of a large dead animal. Next to her, behind her, two more, a man and a child, went down, but the man got up, got the child up, and the two raced off, trailing slicks of blood, easy to track. He looked back at his kill. She lay in a sprawl, her face fat and slack, and next to her a child knelt, crying for his downed mother, unaware that today would be a day without pity.

  “We will kill them all!” he exulted, feeling the power of God’s will move through his body, the aphrodisiacal smell of the fired powder, the satisfying recoil of the baby Kalashnikov.

  Before him, with even more urgency if such could be imagined, the crowd seemed to speed up, all the mothers and daughters and fathers and sons of the West, all of them, cursed unto damnation and eternal fire by Allah, and he, Asad, was the deliverer, the living embodiment of Allah’s will on earth. Oh, it so fit with his imagery of the end of times—the scale of it, the fury of it, the blood of it, his own pitiless relentlessness like an angel from on high, sent by Our Lord to cleanse the earth of those who would not submit to the Faith. He was so lucky, he did not know how to contain himself. This day he would sit with Allah and feel his warmth and benevolence, and he would have sexual congress with any young women he cared so to select. And the best part: he didn’t have to be dead to enjoy the sex. He had been promised a live Western girl.

  To celebrate he decided to shoot up a ladies’ shop. He turned, faced it directly, and began to pump the trigger at the big display window. The baby Kalashnikov danced in his hands, breathing hell’s breath of smoke and flame and spent casings, as before him the glass yielded into punctures, then shattered in a sleet of delirious reflection, and behind that dummies that wore those garments that decent women kept hidden under their burkas and only showed to their husbands splintered and fell in puffs of white dust and snapping ribbon as the bullets pierced them and—in the metaphorical immensity of Asad’s mind—pierced the West too, with its temptation, its licentiousness, its sultry ardor and appeal. It reminded him of a strip club in Toronto he’d visited and had wanted to shoot up as well, though it had been explained to him then that his rage was best controlled until it could be unleashed.

  Then on his radio set came the stern voice of authority.

  “You two,” he heard the imam command, “we see you on the television screens. Asad and Saalim, correct? You were told not to wantonly destroy property with your limited amounts of ammunition. This is not a party, it is a serious martyr operation. Treat it seriously or be banished. All you boys, you listen. You are martyrs, not brigands. The mission is to drive the people forward into the center and hold them, penned under your guns. You cannot give in to temptation and random impulse. The Koran forbids it. Verse twenty-three, directive eleven: ‘Know the wisdom of thy elders.’”

  Throughout America, the Mall, there was frenzy. People scurried desperately to comply, to escape, or to hide. Their minds focused on a single thing and that was to survive. Yet they were not inhumane, and some were quite heroic. Goth teenagers helped old ladies. Black gangbangers helped white Republican mothers. Gay waiters helped high school football players. Old white men helped young white women without thinking about having sex with them, at least for a little while. Somali grandmothers helped Scandinavian grandmothers, who helped them back. Fallen children were gathered and shielded and comforted by complete strangers. Doctors went to the wounded, tried to stanch the blood flow without bandages and placed their own bodies in the way of bullets. Dead Santa’s teenaged elves tried to keep some panicked mothers from racing off, and one even threw herself on a child who had fallen in the crush, got the girl up, and helped her to—well, there was no place to go, but helped her to her screaming mother, who hadn’t found her yet. No one hit anyone or trampled anyone to escape. None of them committed an I-must-live-above-all-else sin worthy of punishment. Manhood was in flower down there on the killing floor and so was womanhood, and fellowhood, until there was nothing to be done but to sit down under the guns of the attackers and hope that they had grown bored with slaughter.

  But in all this motion, there was one figure of motionlessness. He was a gangly young man of an age perhaps between eighteen and twenty-five, more or less lounging against the fourth-floor railing of the balcony overlooking the amusement park area from the terminus of the corridor called Colorado.

  He wore jeans over New Balance hiking boots, a hoodie that actually said HARVA-D, the R having flaked off after numerous washings, and an old Vikings cap backward on his head. From his coloring and the perfect shape of his nose, most would have assumed a shock of blond hair lay under his cap, and they would have assumed rightly. His legs were crossed and he slouched against the railing, his arms crossed as he supported himself upon it. He looked like he was watching a baseball game or a parade or something. No tension showed in the muscles of his body under the clothes, no shock, no fear, nothing except the utmost in relaxed viewing.

  He was recognizing patterns. It was interesting to him that the Rio Grande team had been the most aggressive, and so they forced their flock into the center of the mall the soonest; meanwhile, the Colorado and Hudson driven reached almost simultaneously, and both mobs crushed together with much bumping and shoving. Finally, the laggards at Mississippi produced, and those folks were the most unfortunate, as all the prime real estate had been seized and they were left to the margins, which put them closest to the gunmen, the most apt to incur the whimsical displeasure and hair-trigger temper of the shooters, and therefore most at risk.

  Then he switched his attention to the throne in the center, where Santa had been whacked. From four stories, he could just barely make out the man’s ruined face and the pattern of blood spray across the satin plush of the throne. He was struck, nonetheless, by the considerable if de trop amusement factor in seeing the familiar icon so completely, comprehensively dead. It seemed to make up for a lot. He hoped someone got a good picture of it, because as an image of his ambition, it seemed to say it all. It was one of those casual artifacts that nonetheless are freighted with communication, a piece of spontaneous art.

  He saw the image on the cover of a box: “Dead Santa, the Christmas Mall Carnage Game, for Microsoft Xbox Only.” It was pretty damn funny.

  The game had begun.

  3:20 P.M.–4:00 P.M.

  The shooting had stopped. Ray lay with Molly and several other women in the rear of a Frederick’s of Hollywood store on the second floor. Generic women’s bodies, truncated at neck and thigh, stood around in bikinis, leather corsets, underpants, pasties, but nobody thought there was anything remotely funny about it. Outside, the pedestrian traffic had disappeared.

  “Oh God,” said a girl, “Oh God, oh God, oh God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “I don’t want to die,” said another woman. “I have children. I can’t die. It’s not right.”

  “Please, ladies,” Ray said, “I’m no expert but you’ll be better off if you hold it down and get a grip. You can worry about how unfair it is later.”

  “He’s right, Phyllis,” someone said. “Shut up. Just be glad Milt and the kids aren’t here.”

  “I’m here to buy something to wear for his goddamn birthday! He should be here.”

  “It’s probably some freak with a gun,” said another. “The cops will get him. Don’t you think they’ll get him, mister?”

  “I heard more than one gun,” said Ray. “That’s what bothers me.”

  “I can’t get through. I have to call my husband. The phones are—”

  “It’s all jammed up,” Ray said. “E
veryone in this mall who isn’t dead is trying to call home. Please, you’d be much better off not to worry about making contact now. Just try and stay calm and relax. I didn’t hear any firing on the upper floors. I think this is restricted to downstairs, so if you’ll just try and stay calm and still, in the long run that’s the best course.”

  “We just lie here and they come kill us.”

  “If they were into slaughter, they’d still be shooting. Now I’m going to slip out and see what I can see. Stay here, stay down. Don’t get curious.”

  Molly pulled him close.

  “My mother and sister are downstairs,” she said.

  “Let me see what’s going on,” he said. Then, louder, “Is there a manager or a clerk here?”

  A young woman crawled over to him.

  “Mrs. Renfels is the manager, but she’s in pretty bad shape. My name is Rose. I work here.”

  “Listen, Rose, I need to know about the security cameras here in the mall. Are they everywhere? If I sneak out, will someone watching them in the security headquarters see me? Maybe they’ve taken that over. That would be their logical first step.”

  “I don’t think there are any in the corridors, you know, I mean, what I mean is—”

  “Settle down, Rose. Take a deep breath. No rush. You’re doing fine.”

  “Okay. Mostly they’re at the intersections and they look down the corridors. They don’t have them every twenty-five feet or anything, that’s what I mean. They make you take a tour when you start working here and I was in that room. The views don’t have a lot of details, you know. It’s a long look down the corridor, there’s a lot of shadows. I wouldn’t stand up. If you stand up and someone’s looking at that camera, they’ll know you’re there.”

  “Good, very good.” He considered. “Okay,” he said, “I’m going to crawl out and try and get a feel for what’s happening. Ladies, please stay here. Like Rose said, if you try and get out by running, they may see you.”

  “What are you going to do, Ray?” Molly asked.

  “Well, I guess I ought to scout around. I can’t just sit here.”

  “Ray, you can just sit here. Follow your own advice. Just sit here. Wait. Help will come.”

  “I heard that one about a thousand times in the suck. It never did. I’m just going to slide out and see what’s what. You ladies, you just stay still.”

  Slowly, Ray snaked forward. He eased his head around the threshold of the doorway. The corridor was empty, though signs of rapid abandonment were everywhere, dropped purses and bags of goods, upturned baby carts, some of the windows of the stores broken. He saw no bodies and no shell casings on the floor. But he heard moans, din, the sound of many people shifting in place. That noise came from the space of the atrium, seventy-five feet away, its openness and height guarded by railings. Incomprehensibly, Christmas music still filled the air and the lights from the amusement park still blinked remorselessly on. No, it wasn’t a silent night; it was a loud afternoon.

  He looked up and down the hallway for a sign of gunmen, saw nothing. Everything told him get in the back of the store. Block the doors. Wait it out. There can’t be that many, even now law enforcement is responding in a big way, there will be an assault, and you do not want to be running around in the middle of that kind of shitstorm.

  Fuck, he thought. I thought I was done with this stuff. He had been shot at a whole lot in his life, and for the most part, he was fine by that. It went with the territory, it was the avenue by which he expressed his odd, powerful, even self-defining gift to put a bullet where he wanted no matter the position, the distance, the angle, the firearm, to be the dark figure known as the Sniper. Someone wanted him to enjoy that talent, and it was the centerpiece of his life that he not blow the mission, whatever the mission was, whoever gave it to him, and now he knew that it tracked back over generations to an odd family of men with similar gifts, some greater, some smaller, but who had always gone beyond the edge with their possibly autistic (how else to explain it?) coordination of front sight and target and sometimes not even front sight.

  But . . . now? Here? He thought he was home free from the suck, but the suck had followed him home and he was not free. Someone had given him another mission, and though his bones ached and his breath came in hard spurts, he had some obligation to . . . well, he knew the obligation more than he knew the name of the force that had generated it. So he pushed on.

  Again, checking the hallway and seeing no signs of movement, he edged out and slithered in the low crawl. He stuck close to the wall, figuring that he was in a zone of shadow, and unless one were looking carefully at the feed from a particular camera, itself mounted a good hundred feet down the corridor at the intersection, he ought to be okay. He got by several stores and became aware that each contained people as well. The smart ones, the lucky ones, the strong ones, the young ones had beat it to the exitways and gotten out to the parking areas.

  He could see the balcony ahead and, beyond it, the looming strut-work of various thrill rides, the buttresses of the coaster tracks, the log chute, the top of the whirling two-seat swings. The noise from just beyond had gotten more intense. He had to know what was going on below.

  He slid forward just a few feet to the very edge of the balcony, lifted his head, and took a quick scan, then withdrew.

  Shit.

  First, of course, in the center of the park, dead Santa atop his throne of blood presided, head tilted, inert as the earth itself. He was the king of death. Beneath His Majesty, sitting disconsolately on the pathways that crosscut the amusement park, were at least a thousand people, packed closely, most in a state of shock. He saw what had happened. The gunmen had begun at the outer ring and, shooting wildly, killing enough to compel instant, terrified obedience, had driven shoppers forward to converge in the amusement park in the center. A thousand hostages, under the struts and buttresses of the roller coasters, under the vastness of glass above shaped like Lake Michigan. He hadn’t time to check closely, but he imagined they were now circled by gunmen. That was two gunmen per corridor, eight gunmen at least, a team for each “river,” in the wacky scheme of the mall, the Colorado, the Hudson, the Rio Grande, and the Mississippi.

  He scooted low along the balcony railing, out of view from beneath, and popped up again for a look at the shooters. He could see them as if from his own nightmares: the insouciant postures, the raffish shemaghs thrown loosely around the neck in gaudy variations, otherwise in jeans and hoodies and sneaks. All carried some kind of AK, though from the distance and given the time he had, he couldn’t tell if it was a 47 or a 74. They carried the guns with that movie-driven stylishness of the young jihadi, aware how cool and badass they looked, self-consciously modeled on the same figure they had worshipped for years on television. Thin-hipped, sexy, anonymous, deadly: the warrior of the East come to slay in the West.

  And he saw what a mess they had crafted. The situation instantly became clear in Ray’s tactical mind. Those on the upper floors will be abandoned there, too terrified to move downward, basically not a part of the equation. The young, the spry, the brave: they had escaped, running crazily past the gunmen, getting out of ground-floor exits, climbing, finding other ways out or secure hides. Who was left? The weakest of the weak, the most defenseless of the defenseless. The old. The very young. Mothers and fathers tethered to children.

  At any sign of an assault, the gunmen could open fire. Even with semiautomatics, as his ears told him their weapons were, they could kill hundreds, while at each corridor their brothers held off the assaulters for a few minutes more. Ray looked up, saw the lake-shaped skylights. They appeared deserted, but at any moment snipers would station themselves there. Could they get shots through the heavy glass? Probably not. They’d have to blow the glass to have any effectiveness, and that would give away any surprise element. Military operators, Delta people or SEALs, could blow the glass and rappel down, but they’d be sitting ducks as they descended and they couldn’t fire downward for fear of hit
ting the innocent. They could, Ray supposed, just keep coming, like the Marines at Iwo, but that kind of dying for an objective was definitely out of fashion. On top of that, operators at that tactical level were mostly deployed overseas; where would the Minnesota authorities, even with FBI assistance, get such men on short notice? And this whole op had the look of something planned for maximum outrage over a short window of time.

  He remembered something similar in Russia, with Chechens. Didn’t they take over a theater? Hundreds of hostages, lots of explosives and gunmen, no way in. The Russian authorities had gassed the place. But the gas was tricky, and although it incapacitated the Chechens, it killed half the hostages. There was no way Americans would be willing to run that risk. And with so many hostages children and the elderly, with undeveloped or overworked, inefficient respiratory systems, the gas would be doubly risky, perhaps doubly lethal. And who said the gunmen didn’t have gas masks? They seemed to have everything else.

  Fuck, Ray thought. He suddenly felt him. Him? Yes, the one, the guy, what’shisname, Beelzebub, Lucifer, whoever he was, the fellow who’d thought this thing up. In his mind, he saw some Osama variant, possibly with time in America, who knew American vanities and vulnerabilities, a guy with a special, malevolent cunning and a great deal, damn his damned soul, of creativity. He’d thought it through very carefully, for maximum impact, maximum drama, maximum casualties, at a site comprising entirely the innocent, at the start of the West’s most precious holiday. He knew who his hostages would be; he knew where to place his assets for maximum utility; he had both a strategic and a tactical gift. Already, Ray knew, this was worldwide news, and in every department in the world, pointy-heads were trying to figure out its meaning. Nobody anywhere was talking about anything else.