Soft Target

by Stephen Hunter

  “It’s because we should have used the atom bomb on them after nine-eleven,” said the hot blonde, obviously the sort used to issuing opinions and by her beauty banishing responses. “If we’d have burned them all, this wouldn’t be going on.”

  “You can’t kill a billion people because, what, thirteen men are crazy assholes,” responded Milt’s wife.

  “Oh yes you can. You push a button and they are in flames.”

  “That is the craziest—”

  “All right, all right,” said Ray. “I am not trying to be a boss or take over or anything, but it’s better if you don’t get in squabbles until this thing is over. You may have to work together and you have to see the person beside you as a family member. You can fight all you want when you’re advising on the set of the TV movie or something.”

  “He’s right,” said Rose. “Just keep a cork in it, it’s better for all of us.”

  “It’s easy for you to say,” said Mrs. Renfels. “You’re young, you’re in this for yourself. I have three kids. If something happens to me—oh, why is this happening?”

  “Ma’am,” said Ray, “I don’t mean to tell you how to think, but I am a former marine and I have been in some fights. If you’ll allow me, I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is why. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.”

  “That’s very good advice,” said Rose.

  “Maybe we should surrender,” said the blonde.

  “No ma’am,” said Ray. “You should instead consider how lucky you are. Some people are dead, some people, maybe a thousand, are under the gun. You are, for the time being, safe. No one knows you’re here and no one, that I can tell, is looking for you. Just stay put and trust in God and the public safety people who are, I guarantee you, working very hard right this second to set us free.”

  “Great job,” said Obobo. “Major Jefferson, this is a fabulous plan. I’m very impressed.”

  Jefferson amplified: “We don’t blow all doors simultaneously and move down the corridors into the crowd, unable to engage until we reach the amusement park. That’s a no go, because it gives them however long it takes our people to advance down the corridors to open fire on hostages. One guy at each corridor shooting at SWAT could hold up the advance for six or eight minutes. Way too much time.”

  “Go on, Major.”

  “So we take the six best shooters with gunfight experience, all armed with red dot MP5s on semiauto. And we’ve got these guys. Some of our people are good, some of the FBI guys are really good, and Phil Mason of Edina SWAT is the Area Seven three-gun champion. I’ve shot against him and he is damned good and damned cool. So we six, we go underground through a shaft that runs from parking lot seven to the mall central. That puts us right underneath Area Z. I have a guy from Bloomington SWAT who was an army engineer in the sandbox. We rig six detonations to blow through the floor. At a given moment, we turn off the power, the place goes dark. It’ll be a few seconds before the emergency gen kicks in. But the gunmen immediately see the holes and assume men will come from them. No, uh-uh, that’s the diversion. We’ve quietly come up through the ducts under the Area Z concessionaire stand here”—he pointed to it on the chart—“and have only floor boarding and linoleum at a certain locality that the engineer has specified. Once the gunmen commit to the assault from the ground, we hit ’em. They will have moved to cover the openings we’ve just blown. Head shots, targets marked, we can take ’em down fast, before the crowd has a chance to panic. But Colonel, we have to move now. It’ll take time to get men through the ducts into the space under Area Z, it’ll take time to locate and plant the explosives, and it’ll take time to—”

  “Again, I can’t tell you how impressed I am,” Colonel Obobo said, explaining his reasons. “It’s thorough, it’s creative, it takes all the variables into consideration. I’m very pleased to take it under advisement.” He touched the intense major on the shoulder as if to confer a blessing. Then he turned away, leaving an incredulous look on the major’s face and the awareness that he’d just gotten another no that sounded even more like a yes.

  “They’re shooting inside the mall,” one of the radio techs announced. “FBI snipers say they’re shooting inside the mall.”

  McElroy was first off the chopper, first into position. From the air, the lake shape of the glass was apparent and he had raced to what must have been the tip of Lake Michigan, right at Chicago, but now that he was here, it was simply Lake Glass, or Lake Plastic, an immensity of transparent, thick plastic that would somehow have to be penetrated. But first he had to equip.

  He unzipped the rifle bag and laid out a Remington 700 with a Leupold 10× tactical scope, the whole thing anodized forest green. Carefully he removed a long green tube, which a Velcro strap had secured inside the bag, and brought it close to his eyes for an examination. It was a Gemtech suppressor, about eight inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, and under the tubing it consisted mainly of baffles and chambers and holes, the point of which was to elongate the time of escape for the rapidly expanding gases of a shot so that when they reached the atmosphere, they were slowed down and exited with a kind of snap instead of a terrible, earsplitting crack. With the suppressor screwed carefully on the threaded muzzle, he inserted the bolt into the receiver, reached into an ammo compartment to remove a box of Federal 175-grain match cartridges in .308, and slid five into the rifle’s magazine, closing the bolt on and chambering the fifth. He flicked the safety on, not that he believed in safeties, looped the sling around his shoulder, and stood to examine the scene.

  What lay before him was a wall about five feet tall that formed the well of the vast skylight that was Lake Michigan. It was of course not a single sheet of Plexiglas but divided into cells about 20 by 20 feet. Peering over the edge of this southernmost cell, he was rewarded with a vision from five stories up of a crowd of disconsolate Christmas shoppers jammed into the walkways and open areas of a Technicolor amusement park and seen from ninety degrees at an altitude of about 125 feet through heavy plastic; details were hard to pick out. In time he recognized what had to be a gunman, mainly by the black object carried under one arm and the black-green rag on his head. Details emerged: pistol, knife, throat mike. With access, it would have been an easy shot, and he prayed to the sniper god that he would get a chance to take it.

  He radio-checked.

  “Sniper Five, set up, in position,” speaking to a state police sergeant in the headquarters van.

  “I have you, Five. Sitrep, please.”

  “I have a good angle on the scene, almost straight down. I’m at site Chicago at the bottom of Michigan and therefore have a good view of the balconies on the opposite, that is, the eastward side. No activity there. I do not have a shot, repeat, do not have a shot. The glass or plastic or whatever it is is very thick, I don’t think I could get through it if I had a fucking hammer.”

  “Be advised, no shooting, that is our call. You stay on position and call in periodically with intelligence and we will take that under advisement.”

  “May I talk with FBI supervisor?”

  “Negative, Five, he is in conference with incident commander and others. The governor is expected momentarily.”

  “Request conference with him when available, over.”

  “Noted, will try and make that happen, Five, but no promises, out.”

  So that was it. All dressed up and no one to shoot. Or rather, no way to shoot, although, given the angle, the bad boys would l
iterally represent the idealized fish in a barrel.

  Dear Sniper God, your humble servant Dave here, please let me take one of these motherfuckers before the day is done. But he also knew the ways of the sniper god, and the sniper god would only help those who help themselves.

  McElroy, thirty-two and a Bureau lifer who loved the SWAT life and had been on a hundred raids and on the periphery of two or three gunfights but had yet to fire a shot in anger, looked around him. Beyond, of course, was Minnesota, turning dark and pierced with an ever-increasing array of lights as the sun was setting. Far off he could see highways streaming with cars, the illumination of suburbs and strip malls, just regular American stuff. Then there was the roof itself, the flat, black-asphalt stage upon which this drama was playing out. The flatness was vast, way out of human scale, easily bigger than an aircraft carrier’s deck or a football stadium’s parking area, reaching to infinity. About a mile away, or so it seemed, was a rack of industrial-looking apparatuses, presumably part of the cooling and heating system. There were at least six little sheds—they looked comically like the ice-fishing hutches these Minnesotans built on their frozen lakes in winter—that presumably held doors that opened onto stairways into the interior. He guessed they were all locked, but it occurred to him that a good B-and-E man could probably get through, and operators could be fed into play that way. But surely they would know that at Command.

  Then, more immediately, these goddamned lake-shaped skylights, here at the center of the vastness. Regularly spaced around the perimeter of Michigan, he saw a fellow such as himself, all Tommy-Tacticaled up in Nomex jumpsuit with Glock .40 in shoulder holster, with a big bad rifle, a black watch cap or Kevlar helmet, and a posture of utter helplessness with reference to the thick wall of impenetrable glass between himself and his potential targets.

  He thought, I will get through this fucking glass. I will, I will, I will.

  But how? This wasn’t one of those absurd movies where the guy reaches into his kit and just happens to have exactly the right tool, a computer-driven microdiamond buzz saw that was also miniaturized and could cut through the stuff like butter and makes a hell of an old-fashioned. No, darn, he’d left that at home. Nor did he have Gatorade and cough medicine that could be instantly combined into sulfuric acid and melt the glass. He didn’t have a goddamned thing.

  He walked the edge of the skylight, finding it uniform in its precision. Why had the developers built it so sturdily? Couldn’t they have cut corners, couldn’t a worker have faked the effort, couldn’t there be some way the thing wasn’t up to spec and a hole could be bored through the joinery of glass and building, giving him a shooting lane? No, no such luck, it was all solid and tight to the finger. Okay, so—

  His eye caught movement below.

  What was—

  Looking down from God’s-eye view, he could tell that two of the gunmen had kicked their way into the center of the crowd, covered by other gunmen. They cleared a space. Then they grabbed five people, apparently two women, two men, and a teenager, and dragged them to the center of the opening and made them kneel.

  It looked like an execution.

  Please, Sniper God, give me a shot!

  But he had no shot. He was sealed off by thick glass.

  One of the gunmen walked behind the kneeling five and with his rifle shot each in the back of the head. McElroy felt the vibration of the gunshot meeting the glass, giving it a little buzz. He wished he could look away but he could not.

  Executed, each victim fell forward without grace and hit the floor face-first and hard. They lay sprawled, loose as ragdolls. In a bit of time one, then another, and finally all began to spew a blackish puddle from the head, and these multiple lakes of plasma reached out, found and followed fissures on the floor, and joined in a large wet-land of blood, though leaving the odd island of high spot.

  “Control, this is Five, directly below me the gunmen just executed five hostages, shot ’em dead through the head.”

  “I have that,” said the radio.

  “Jesus Christ, let us blow this goddamn glass and take these pricks down. They don’t know we’re here; if we get through the glass we can do them all in under thirty seconds.”

  “Negative, negative, Five, you are advised to do nothing but stand and observe. If we go tactical, you will be notified and assigned targets.”

  “Goddammit, they are killing people and—”

  “Five, this is Command, commo space is at a premium and we don’t want you using it up on a rant. Tactical discipline.”

  “Sir, please put Special Agent Kemp on—”

  “Any information must be channeled through Command,” said the frosted voice.

  5:04 P.M.–5:26 P.M.

  This is very disturbing,” said Colonel Obobo.

  He stood unbelieving in the center of the state police Incident Command van, surrounded by several majors and the FBI executive, Kemp, as they dealt with the news from the snipers that five people had just been executed. Mr. Renfro stood immediately to the left of the colonel, saying nothing.

  “Could it be a phony?” someone asked. “Maybe those are actors or something, or his own volunteers previously put in place, and—”

  “They’re real,” said Mike Jefferson, the aggressive SWAT commander. “And he is talking to us—in blood.”

  “I just—”

  “Look at the time, Colonel Obobo. It’s five o’clock. He killed five people at five o’clock. He’ll kill six people at six o’clock, seven at seven o’clock, and on through the night. There aren’t any demands, except that we get a lot of body bags. This is just a straight murder job. We have to get our assault units in position, issue orders, distribute the proper breaching equipment, and get ready to jump.”

  “He will talk to us,” said the colonel. “This is just his way of getting our attention.”

  “He had our attention, for God’s sake!” shouted Jefferson. “For Christ’s fucking sake, men with AKs shooting everything that moves, he has our fucking attention.”

  “No,” said Obobo, ever courteous, ever unflappably astute and collected. “He has to demonstrate that he is capable of ordering executions. That is his baseline. All our negotiations will now have to take that into consideration. He’s laying down the rules, that’s what he’s doing. He will talk to us, before six. Well before six. And he knows that to assault, we have a massive job of logistics, planning, equipping, moving, and coordinating, and he’s putting something before us to slow us down, baffle us, make us inefficient at that very tough job.”

  “Ah,” said Jefferson in immense frustration. “Colonel, let me begin to put people in play under the mall. We’ve got to be able to breach that floor, it’s the only way, and we have to have them there now in order to do it anytime in the future. We can’t just blow the doors and charge into the place.”

  “Can we chopper people to the roof? Aren’t there doorways, they could come down from above somehow?” someone asked.

  “No,” said Kemp, “at least not as a main strike. It would take a dozen choppers to get men in force. He’d know. If they blew the doors, it would take ten minutes for them to work their way down. If they rappelled, they’d be sitting ducks for the riflemen. You’d just get a lot of highly trained men killed for nothing, and maybe fifty or sixty hostages.”

  Obobo tuned it all out. He made eye contact with Mr. Renfro and the two exchanged listen-to-these-idiots-talk expressions. The advisor then nodded, communicating his sublime confidence in Colonel Obobo’s abilities. He knew that if the colonel could just talk to these people and make them see the hopelessness of their position, the inevitability of what lay ahead, he could make this thing go away. He had that power. He was a convincer, an inspirer.

  “Gentlemen, for now I’d like you to hold your positions,” Obobo finally said. “Commo, continue to monitor the channels to see if he’s trying to talk to us. We have to know his demands. When we learn his demands—”

  “His demands are that a lot of
people die; those are his demands,” said Jefferson. “This is a straight murder raid, like Mumbai or the World Trade Center. He just wants a lot of people off the earth and his own glory and ascension to heaven guaranteed. He thinks when this is over, he’s going to get himself fucked royally by seventy-two—”

  “Major Jefferson,” said Obobo, showing a whisper of irritation, “I think you’ve made your point. In the meantime, I want a written assault plan from you, a list of assets you currently have and those that you will need before I can authorize any kind of a strike. I hope to hell I never have to issue that order. Nichols, get on the phone to the Justice Department and see how our request for Army engineers, Delta, and SEAL people is playing at Defense. Special Agent Kemp, I want an update on your investigative efforts in Minneapolis as well as our requests to BATF for support in the firearms investigation.”

  “Sir,” said Jefferson, “this isn’t an investigation, it’s a war.”

  “Major Jefferson, you’ve made your point fifty times over. Please follow my orders or be relieved of duty. I can’t fight him and you.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Sir,” someone said, “do we release to media?”

  “No,” said Mr. Renfro, who rarely addressed tactical or operational issues but this time couldn’t help himself. “If word gets out he’s shooting hostages, it’ll add pressure to an already pressurized decision.”

  “Good point,” said the colonel. “Do you concur, Special Agent Kemp?”

  Kemp, thanking God he had no dog in this fight, said, “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Sir,” someone said, “the governor is here.”

  “Oh fuck,” said somebody.

  It happened that Nikki was watching a particular sniper whom she had nicknamed Chicago with her binoculars from three thousand feet up at a particular moment as the WUSScopter hovered at that height. Though from there he was a tiny, almost blurred figure and the light was quickly diminishing, she saw him suddenly bolt upward, then lean forward, tense radically as if he were willing himself somehow to penetrate the glass of the skylight and fly down into the atrium; instantly, his finger flew to the radio unit at his belt—she knew where to look because she’d covered cops in Bristol—and presumably switched it on. He began jabbering into the throat mike. She zapped around the margins of the lake of Plexiglas until she’d located all five snipers and noted that all five were on their mikes.