Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  “Of course, Special Agent. You’ll get your more detailed briefing from Major Carmody, and if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. But let me tell you up front, I am not about to launch an assault. Even with your additions, I don’t have the people, the expertise, or the equipment. We’ve asked the governor to get us some National Guard people to take over the perimeter and that will free up our SWAT personnel for possible deployment.”

  Kemp suspected the chances of a SWAT deployment order from Obobo were somewhere between ze-fucking-ro and na-fucking-da; he kept his face that administrative blank that long government service teaches.

  “You know the drill,” said Obobo. “Perimeter security, establish commo with the hostage takers, and begin to negotiate. Time is on our side. They’ll get tired, hungry, and scared. We’ll play them out over their demands as long as possible. If I might suggest, I’d like you to get on the horn to Defense and see if we could get some advice on chemical agents that might come into play.”

  “I will, Colonel Obobo. I also brought in some very good snipers. I’d like to deploy them on the roof.”

  “Of course, and we’ll combine forces with some state police marksmen. But I’m advised the roof skylights are heavy Plexiglas sealed in concrete. I don’t know how we get through them. Yes, we’ll send snipers, but no shooting without permission of course, and they have to understand their primary mission is observation.”

  “Yes sir,” said Kemp.

  Standing nearby was the rogue state police commander Mike Jefferson. His take was different, but he had fewer people to answer to, and if he lost his job, his status as a famous police gunfighter and SWAT warrior would get him rehired anywhere in America on a moment’s notice. He’d been thinking about Idaho, as a matter of fact.

  But his warrior’s instincts were all lit up now. His idea: assault the gunmen, have a gunfight, take the casualties and the press bashing that would occur, and to hell with it. Kill all the bad guys, that was the basic idea. He was Custer, always moving to the sound of the guns. He had no patience for the Obobo school of psychobabble bullshit, for that faction of police psychology that required “negotiators” well-trained in making empathetic connection to the hostage takers, understanding their pain, and cajoling them to a peaceful resolution. He knew that Obobo, by long reputation not afraid of the sound of his own voice, would assume that responsibility for himself. But Jefferson knew how fragile these things could be and had seen it all go down. His idea was to end the bad guys’ pain by shooting them in the head.

  But he saw now nobody wanted to listen to him or entertain his speculations. Jefferson thought these gunmen were here simply because they wanted to kill people. That’s what would make the biggest splash. If they killed five hundred people on the day after Thanksgiving to the greater glory of Allah and the Islamic Faith—no, no confirmation that Islamists were involved—in a mall called America that looked like America, then that would be their victory. Hell, they’d already killed Santa Claus! There was no evidence this wasn’t a suicide thing, and suicide—martyrdom, the goatfuckers called it—was a part of their mind-set.

  The truth was, Jefferson really shouldn’t have been a cop. He should have been an old-time marshal with a six-gun on his belt, not a Sig Sauer. That was his mentality. He felt fully alive when he faced armed men, and his solution to all problems tended to angle the situation toward man-on-man violence. The team play aspect of law enforcement had never meant much to him, not since he was twenty-one and faced three armed robbers in a Saint Paul bank and shot it out face to face (to face to face) with them, took two .38s in the left arm and hand but dropped all three, two fatally, with his own .38, it being the day of the revolver. Nothing since had quite matched that moment of maximum life/maximum risk. He was a gunfighter, that was all, and love him or hate him, he’d never be another thing as long as he lived, which might not, given his personality and lack of fear of anything, be very long.

  “Mike,” another major yelled, “we have detailed mall plans, just arrived from the construction firm that built the place. An engineer is here too.”

  “Bring him along. Maybe he knows the back way in.”

  Meanwhile, Obobo and Renfro conferred briefly in the corner.

  “You handled that well,” said Renfro. “Decent, smooth, no macho bullshit.”

  “That goddamned Jefferson, though. He has been a pain since the start. I can tell, he doesn’t buy me, never has, never will. The tough guys hate me, think I’m too fine a lady. I’d love to push him up to International Falls, in charge of taking the temperature.”

  “You were fine with him, Colonel. Yes, he’s a pain, all the SWAT people are. Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out. But you handled him. Here’s my advice: Keep him busy. Keep him running around, making reports, checking this way and that. You don’t want him here at Command, sowing doubts, collecting allies. Make him your little errand boy and bury him in praise. That’s a weapon he can’t overcome.”

  Saalim had his eye on the Somali girl in the crowd. “Fuck you,” she had said in English to him, the two words he knew. Ha ha. She was spirited. She was proud. She had bright eyes and fine, straight white teeth and a rich crop of hair. She would make a good wife. He wondered how many goats her father would charge. Probably many.

  Sitting there in the mall, his baby Kalashnikov across his lap, his pistol dangling from his holster, the shemagh tight around his face, he had a brief fantasy that reflected on a childhood he never had. He was the son of the tribal chief in the high desert. He was a fierce warrior, a killer of men and lions. He was favored by Allah, and the mullahs agreed he was destined for greatness. He would have many wives and many concubines and many goats. He would lead his people in many battles and that one, that proud African girl, she would be his.

  Actually, he had been born in a slum of Mogadishu; his mother was a whore. He lived the life of an unclean, wild pig for some years, scrapping and fighting for survival. Finally, when he was big enough to hold a Kalashnikov, General Hassan Dahir Aweys’s Hizbul Islam militia took him in. That was his family, boy soldiers and brutal leaders, and enemies to be slain in the name of Allah.

  “Fuck you,” she said! What spirit, what—

  “Saalim, I can tell by the glaze in your eyes you are dreaming,” said Asad, next to him. “If the imam catches you with a faraway look on your face, he’ll cane you and make you sleep with the goats.”

  “There are no goats here,” said Saalim. “This is America. They keep the goats outside. No goats, no goatshit in a fine American place.”

  “That is why we came so far. To destroy it and spread the will of Allah—”

  “And to bring the goats inside, where they belong!”

  Both boys laughed. They were lounging on a park bench on the southeast side of the Silli-Land Park, near the ticket office for the Ride-a-Log flume shoot, a twisty tube of water that enabled Americans the thrill of a downward thunder of a splashing ride, now vacant and unattended. From where they were, they were spared the disagreeable sight of Dead Man in Red upon His Throne. But they did see, everywhere, desultory Americans sitting crunched together, supposedly with their hands on their heads, though this imposed discipline had soon disappeared.

  They were teenaged boys: their own discipline was not superb. They were supposed to keep iron eyes on their captives, to make certain little cliques didn’t form and plot some kind of revolution. But the Americans seemed to have no spirit for that kind of work and mostly just sat there, in a kind of stupor that both Saalim and Asad had seen among the struggling citizens of Wabra. Thus, Saalim and Asad found themselves occupied with chitchat, petty teasing, attraction to various girls, shows of adolescent bravado, and hunger for fast food, which was abundant in the now largely empty mall. That sometime soon soldiers or police officers would surely crash the place, guns firing, and probably kill them was of utterly no concern. Given the toughness of their lives, death held little sting.

  But suddenly a crackle came over
the earphones they wore under their shemaghs. It was the imam.

  “You, Asad, that is your name, correct?”

  “Yes, Imam,” said Asad, jumping alert.

  “You remember what we discussed, you and I?”

  It was true. He had a special mission.

  “I do, Imam,” he said into the throat mike.

  “Well, it’s time. You can find this place?”

  He remembered. Second floor, NW Colorado, C-2-145. That was the destination. The imam had shown him on the bright-colored brochures with maps that guided them through the mall.

  “I can, Imam,” he said.

  “Good,” said the imam. “It’s time to go and get the babies.”

  Humbly, Mr. and Mrs. Girardi approached the police officer at the farthest extreme from the mall. In fact, they could see it almost a mile away in the twilight, looking like a big tub upside down, surrounded by police cars and fire engines.

  “Folks,” said the cop, “sorry, I can’t let you in any closer.”

  “Sir,” said Mr. Girardi, “we’re looking for our son. He’s fourteen.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever let him go to the mall alone,” said Mrs. Girardi. “I usually take him or he goes with friends. But he wanted to do his Christmas shopping.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “We haven’t heard from him. Should we call him?”

  “He hasn’t called you?”

  “We haven’t heard anything. We just know what’s on the TV.”

  “No I wouldn’t advise that,” said the officer. “He may be hiding or something, or hurt or—well, you just don’t know what his circumstance is and it’s probably better to wait until he reaches out to you.”

  “Is there any information available?”

  “No, sir. We’re trying to get a command structure set up and get organized. It’s a terrible problem and nobody is clear on what to do. To be honest, it’ll be several hours before we really get what’s going on, and even longer before we have information. I’m sure your son is okay. He’s young, he’s strong, he’s quick.”

  “He’s not really. He has asthma. He’s very thin and frail.”

  “Well,” said the cop, stuck for an answer. “Maybe the best thing for you to do is find the Red Cross tent. I think they’re set up on the western side. You can rest there and you’ll get information there sooner.”

  “I never should have let him come to the mall by himself,” said Mrs. Girardi, as her husband led her away.

  Lavelva Oates shushed the redheaded one. He was a handful. Maybe it was because he was a redhead, he seemed to want a lot of attention and had tendencies toward disruption. He kept picking on a little Asian girl who would do nothing but sit and weep when he addressed her. Smack him hard on his burry little pipsqueak head? That’s what Lavelva wanted to do, but she knew it was a mistake. Jobs were hard enough to come by these days and no one went around hitting damn babies.

  “Okay, boys and girls, now let’s play a new game,” she said brightly. “In this game, I want you all to be playing Hide from the monster. When I say go, you go hide. We’ll pretend the bad monsters are here. But they won’t see you, and you’ll be all right. We can hide from the monsters together.”

  “That’s a scary game,” said Robert. She knew he was named Robert because he had a big name tag pinned on: ROBERT 3-4. But it was past four o’clock and Robert’s mom hadn’t shown up. Maybe she was dead.

  “I want to go home. Where’s my mom?” asked Robert.

  “I’m sure she’s on her way,” Lavelva said.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Linda said.

  “Peepee or the other?” asked Lavelva.

  “Both,” said the child.

  “All right,” said Lavelva. “Anybody else?”

  A few hands came up.

  “I’m going to take you back there”—the lavatory was in the rear of the room—“but we have to go on tippy-toes.”

  “I don’t like tippy-toes,” said Larry. “It’s for babies.”

  Lavelva was the day care service coordinator, afternoon shift, second floor. She had seventeen unruly kids, three through eight, under her charge. This was her first day! Goddamn!

  She wasn’t sure what was going on. She was trapped in the day care center, a large room full of beat-up toys and pissed-on dolls, on the second floor. About an hour ago, she’d heard the shooting—loud sharp cracks, echoing eerily along the walls, the nooks and crannies of the mall, very frightening—and herded her kids to the back of the room and told them to them lie down. She went to the doorway and watched as the crowded corridor outside seemed to drain itself in a couple of minutes. People ran crazily, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting, they have machine guns.” She knew there was no way she could get seventeen kids through that mob and that the kids would be knocked down, separated, even hurt. Where was her supervisor? Mrs. Watney, head of mall day care, didn’t answer her calls or her texts. Maybe she’d raced out the door too. She tried her mom; couldn’t get through. She tried her brother Ralphie installing carpets, even though he’d told her never to call while he was on the job. It didn’t matter; couldn’t get through. She tried 911. No response. She was alone.

  Lavelva knew two things immediately: the first was that she’d be much better holding the children here until someone in authority—a cop, a fireman, someone—came with instructions, and second that if there were men with guns around, she had to have a weapon. In her universe, inner-city Minneapolis, Twenty-Eighth and Washington, it was a tough life and all the young men carried. She’d seen them lying on the streets, bled out, eyes blank. That was the world. There was no other. All the newspapers were always jabbering about the tragedy of it, blah blah and blah, but words like tragedy held little meaning for Lavelva; hers was a more practical turn of mind, and it had to do with dealing with what was instead of dreaming about what could be.

  She herded the kids back to the rear of the room and sent Linda in to do peepee and the other one. Suzanne, Mindy, Jessica, and Marsha went too. In fact all the girls went.

  “Everybody gets a turn. No shoving. Stand in line. Make Miss Lavelva proud,” she instructed, knowing these passive little white girls would do exactly that. She couldn’t go with them, of course; policy was that no childcare coordinator could be alone in a bathroom with a child of either sex. But perhaps, on a day such as today, the rules had gone out the window. Still, it was better to obey policy, no matter what was happening outside. Here in the second-floor Mall Service Childcare Center, policies would be obeyed.

  Well, all but one.

  She said to the boys, “You all line up against the wall. We’re still going to play Hide from the monster. You lie down, you be quiet. You don’t let no monster spot you. This is going to be a long game, so best get used to it. I don’t want crying or whining. Y’all have to be brave little boys today, you hear?”

  They nodded. The redheaded one, CHARLES 3-5, said, “What’s brave?”

  “Like a big old football player. Ain’t scared of nothing.”

  “I am scared,” said Charles. “It’s different now.”

  “Yes it is,” said Lavelva. “It is very different. But Charles, you are so feisty I want you to be the leader, okay? You be the bravest.”

  “Yes, Miss Lavelva,” said Charles.

  Lavelva turned, went to her desk, or rather the desk, as it was generic to the center, owned by none of the coordinators. She saw nothing that could be altered to be dangerous, no letter openers, no files, no spikes for spearing paper notices, nothing. Not even a ruler. Obviously, with nimble-fingered little brutes around, thought had been exercised on keeping the space free of dangerous implements.

  Then she saw the daily schedule notebook, a three-ring binder volume. She opened it, realized that a steel or at least metal slat ran up its spine. She pulled apart the three rings, and dumped the papers out, then used her strength to rip the slat from the spine of the book. It tore messily, taking some cardboard bind
ing with it, but it was eleven inches of sharp steel, albeit flawed by three rings, which she snapped shut. She slipped it into her jeans, in the small of her back. Then she turned back to the boys.

  CHARLES 3-5 was standing and pointing.

  “I see a monster,” he said.

  She turned, and through the glass block wall that divided the center from the pedestrian corridor, she saw the shadow of a gunman.

  There were six of them, but the manager, Mrs. Renfels, had broken down: all women, all terrified, except for Molly, who was more concerned for her mother and her sister Sally than she was for herself. Even tough little Rose, the assistant manager, had quieted down as apprehension gripped her.

  “You won’t find out soon,” Ray told Molly. “You have to worry about Molly first. You have to commit yourself to staying put, locking down, waiting them out. That is how you win.” There was no privacy, as all of them were jammed in the rear storeroom, under racks of bustiers and negligees and all the scanties of the male imagination that now seemed quite alien to their world.

  “I have to know,” she said, trying to quell the anxiety. Sally was impossibly cute at fifteen, with smart, vivid eyes, a thin girl’s body, and grace just easing into a woman’s radiance, and Mom was still feisty even if she had never quite adjusted to American ways. It sickened Molly that the two most vulnerable members of her family were in the greatest danger. The last she’d spoken to them on her cell, they had in fact been on the first floor where the roundup had taken place. But if they’d been luckily in the outer ring, they might have made it to an exit. She wanted to call, but she was terrified that if they were in the mob of hostages Ray had described, the ringing cell might have attracted attention.

  “I wish they’d turn that goddamn music off,” Milt’s wife said. “If I hear ‘Jingle Bells’ one more time I will puke.”

  “Not on me, please,” said the blonde, the one who clearly considered herself a hot number.

  “Why is this happening?” Mrs. Renfels asked, her first words since the crisis had begun.