Ray could feel blood sliding down through his hair. His ears rang still and he couldn’t stop shaking. Man, that was a close sucker, that was as close as close gets without death being involved.
He tried to work out a move. Hmm, maybe a feint, to draw a shot, then a quick dash during the cocking sequence. But suppose Jack isn’t shooting a bolt gun but is on some state-of-the-art semiauto rig, so the gun reloads itself in a one-hundredth of a second, and after his feint Ray steps out and catches the spine breaker.
The bastard has me dead-zero, he thought.
“Sniper Five, Sniper Five, come in,” McElroy heard through his earphones.
Shit!
“Sniper Five, have you engaged, Sniper Five? Goddammit, McElroy, what the fuck is going on?”
McElroy recognized the voice of his immediate supervisor. He couldn’t hide anymore.
“I have engaged,” he said. “One shot.”
“Can you confirm a kill?”
“Uh—”
“Oh, fuck, McElroy, you missed? Jesus Christ, I am going to have your ass for sure.”
“No, I hit him, I saw his scarf blow up as the bullet impacted in the rear quadrant of the head, but he didn’t prone out. I think I damaged him badly, but he slipped back in this niche in the wall. That’s where he is now.”
“You have him zeroed.”
Did he ever, even if the weight was racking him. He’d now been in this awkward half-hunch offhand standing for a good seven minutes, sweat was everywhere on him despite the forty-degree temp, the small of his back felt like it had taken the bullet, his arms and wrists were fighting those oncoming yips, and he kept squirming a little this way and that to find a more comfortable position even as the crosshairs had begun to widen in their tremble circle. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold it and still have the confidence to squeeze one off if the guy made a sudden move.
On the other hand, he did not want to lose this. I will not let up. I am strong enough. I will stay on this guy no matter what.
“I have him zeroed,” he said.
“Sitrep?”
“He’s stuck in there. He’s out of the fight. I’m guessing he’s bleeding out. He’ll be gone soon. You know, brain shots aren’t always instantaneous, sometimes not even fatal. But he’s not going to do much more today, that I guarantee you.”
“Yeah, but while you’re on him, who’s on your window, sending us dope?”
“There is no dope, nothing’s happening.”
“You stay on him for a little while longer, but if I have to, I’m pulling you off and sending you back to general intelligence reporting.”
“I will get him for you,” said McElroy, thinking, I will get him for me.
The phone vibrated. Great. Trapped by a sniper, shot in the head, men with guns all over the joint, and the phone vibes.
Somehow Ray got the little rectangle of plastic genius out of his pocket, careful not to extend an elbow past the edge of the niche and invite a bullet into it, slid the answer icon to the right, and saw Molly’s name announced as the caller.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Not really,” he said. “Sort of stuck here.”
“I heard from my sister. Ray, she’s in with the hostages. My mother too.”
“I can’t do anything for them now.”
“Ray, what should I tell her?”
“If there’s an assault, get down. Don’t run. Most of the firing will be at waist to chest level or higher. If they’re down, they’ll be much safer. Crawl slowly away from the area but be willing to play dead at any second. It’ll be over quickly. There’ll be a lot of firing, a lot of confusion, and they should be as innocuous as possible. If they panic and run, someone may target them as movers, our guys, their guys.”
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
“Did those kids get there?”
“Yes, the place is now crawling with them. All the women are helping. That day care girl is something.”
“She’d make a hell of a marine. Meanwhile, I’ve just had an idea. I have to get off the phone.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
Tell him, Ray thought.
But now that he had the phone out, he went quickly to his contacts screen and touched the call icon for the one man who might be able to help him, the strange, remote, laconic guy who was, they had both so recently learned, his biological father.
“This is Swagger,” came the message. “Leave a number and maybe I’ll call you back. But I probably won’t.”
Ha ha. Great for the dry humor the old bastard was known for, almost as much as his shooting, but it did his son no good now.
Ray swept his contacts and at last came upon another possibility.
Nick Memphis, FBI, the entry read.
Only a few people had his private number, so Nick was somewhat surprised to feel the phone tingling in his jacket. He picked it open, saw Ray’s number, thought it odd that the man should be calling him at all, particularly now, today.
“Cruz, how are you? Long time no hear, nice to get a call. Actually, Ray, I’m kind of busy—”
“I am too. I’m betting you’re watching reports come in of a terrorist deal in Minnesota. Well, I’m in the middle of it.”
Memphis was stunned. He was indeed sitting in the FBI Incident Command Center in the Hoover Building in DC, actually not doing much except pitching in his comments on dealing not with the gunmen but with the phenomenon known as Douglas Obobo, a tricky character. On another floor, theoretically brilliant people on computer terminals tried to hack into the closed-off mall system; up here, others worked the phones, trying desperately to find some clue as to who was behind this, and others ran logistics, helping coordinate the problems by which law enforcement units continued to pour into Indian Falls, particularly the now airborne FBI HRT from Quantico, while still others were on the phone constantly to Will Kemp, the SAIC in Minnesota, giving him advice and handling his inquiries while also monitoring the situation and evaluating his performance.
Ray explained what was happening to him.
“Jesus,” said Nick, thinking instantly how ugly a fate it would be for Cruz, after his legendary service, to get nailed by an FBI sniper in a bullshit friendly-fire incident.
He looked over, saw Ron Fields, head of the FBI’s sniper school and a leading tactical guru within the institution, on the phone.
“Okay,” he said. “Cruz, you stay put. I’m going to try and get you out of the kill zone.”
He went over and said, “Ronnie, I have a situation.”
Fields had the usual deadpan SWAT response to anything, even the fact that a Marine sniper was being targeted by an FBI sniper inside a terrorist takeover of a replica of America in the heart of the actual America on prime-time televison and that someone had shot Santa Claus. If anything in the fix seemed ironic or ridiculous or even unfortunate, he didn’t register it. He solved it. He nodded, pushed some buttons, and handed a hardwired receiver to Nick, saying, “Webley, Kemp’s number two, on site and helping Kemp.”
“Webley,” came a voice. “Webley, this is Nick Memphis.”
“Yes, Mr. Memphis.”
Nick heard Webley pop to immediately, aware that he was on the phone with a big DC player, probably for the first time in his life.
“Webley, you have snipers on the roof?”
“Yes sir,” answered Webley. “One of them is engaging even as we—”
“That’s the problem,” said Nick. “The guy he’s shooting at is a good guy. Ex-marine, sniper himself. Call him off.”
“Yes sir.”
“And put me on the line.”
“Yes sir.”
Nick listened as someone did more connecting, and heard in a few seconds “Sniper Five, this is Command. Disengage, that is an order, disengage.”
“Goddammit, I have him. He’s going to break out of there and I will nail him—”
“Sniper Five, I am advised you are firing on a friendly.”
“What? He has
an AK and a head scarf and—”
“Sniper Five, this is Assistant Director Memphis in DC. The man you are firing on is an ex-marine with sniper experience himself. Do not engage. He could be our asset inside.”
“Can he signal? Three fingers?”
Nick put down the phone, picked up his cell.
“Ray, hold out three fingers. I’ve got the guy on the line, actually.”
“He’s not some fucking kid who’ll shoot ’em off, is he?”
“He sounds excited, yes, but he’s under control.”
There was a pause.
Then Sniper Five said, “I have acknowledgment. I see three. I am stepping down.”
“Good, good,” said Webley.
“Okay, Ray, you’re clear now. At least Sniper Five won’t be—”
It seemed to occur to all of them at once, and the jabber was impenetrable until finally all shut up and let Nick say what all had figured out.
“Webley, I’m going to give you Ray’s number. His name is Ray Cruz, twenty-two years USMC, maybe their number one sniper, five tours in the sand, great, great operator. I don’t know what he’s doing there, but he’s there and we’re fools if we don’t use him. Have Sniper Five contact him. Maybe the two of them can work together and deal with these guys in a way no one else is in position to.”
“Got you, AD. Wilco.”
Nick went back to Ray.
“The guy on the roof is going to call you. Sniper Five, don’t know his name, but maybe you and he can see things we can’t and help us.”
“Got it,” said Ray, clicking off to wait.
“Sir,” said Webley, “should I alert SAIC Kemp about this contact?”
“You know Kemp, I don’t. You make the call.”
“Ah . . . he’s not too anxious to get heavy into this one. It looks like it’s going down bad for all involved and there could be big repercussions.”
The Bureau culture. It was, as often as not, the true enemy. SAs learned that the route to promotion and retirement plus lucrative security industry positions afterward was a spotless run through their twenty years on the street, and that had the inevitable effect of drying out initiative. Nobody wanted to make the big mistake and get creamed. And no one seemed to notice that Nick had mavericked himself aloft, but even Nick knew he was the exception and that his connection to the even more maverick Bob Lee Swagger had been a fantastic aid. So these guys always played it cautious, and somehow career considerations came into play in command decisions in ways that couldn’t be anticipated. It was nobody’s fault, it was the culture.
So Nick said, “You know, he’s got a lot on his mind, Webley. And I don’t want him trying to conceal anything from Obobo. So until we see how this is going to work out, we’ll keep it to ourselves, okay? If Ray moves, he may have to move fast, and I don’t want him fighting Bureau culture and Command doubt among his many enemies.”
“I am on board, sir,” said Webley.
Nothing scared Mom. Her wrinkled old face had knitted up tight and now showed nothing but fighting rage. And she knew a little about fighting rage: she’d been born into the tribal mountain zones of a country that had been destroyed, into a war culture, and had grown up to the smell of aviation fuel from the coming and going of the American helicopters, the fluttery lights of illumination flares parachuting down outside the wire in the night, the far-off and sometimes not so far-off popping of small-arms fire. She knew how to fieldstrip both an AK-47 and a carbine. She knew how to lay a mine, cut a man’s throat, read sign, and stay dead still when the northerners, in their ridiculous uniforms (were they monkeys? she thought they looked like monkeys) stalked her. She’d lost three brothers by the time she was fifteen, and her father, Gua-Mo Chan, had worked with a variety of young American commandos on missions against the same hated northerners. She married at seventeen to a fighter named Jang, the bravest of the brave. Then one day he didn’t come back, and so she mourned for a year and a day, and at eighteen married another fighter, her current husband, Dang Yan, called Danny, now a travel agency owner on Central Avenue in Saint Paul.
She remembered the day when the world ended, and it was foretold that the northerners would win. The Americans were not cruel; they did not abandon their loyal allies. But they were not gentle either, and in truth, what followed next was a mess coming close in its sloppiness to a tragedy. In a confusion of camps and helicopters and ships and more camps, she ended up with those of her family who still survived in the belly of a cold, far city. She began a new life and raised five daughters and nothing ever scared her.
This filth didn’t scare her. Boys with guns, black boys with guns, just like the ones you sometimes saw in Saint Paul, with no respect for ancestors, for family or clan, no warrior ethic, not even an ability to read or write. They were nothing. She spat on creatures so low.
What scared her was her daughter Sally, who sat next to her under the blaze of windows in the roof high above, in an ocean of victims, somewhat like the camps where she had spent too many months. They sat, hands folded on heads, driven here by the panic of the crowd at the gunfire. Some had already died. Some were crying, some were breaking down, some sat with the dullness of the soon-to-be-dead, most prayed for deliverance or tried to hush frightened children, but all of them just hoped not to be noticed.
But someone had noticed Sally, Mom saw. He was the shooter, the one who’d killed the five. He was maybe a little bigger than the others, and there was something surly about him. He alone was—the Hmong word was khav, meaning “proud” or possibly “self-important,” although she didn’t know English well at all, even after these many years—in the way he carried his weapon with a certain deliberate coolness and disdain. The other filth saw nothing. Their eyes were blank, they had no appreciation for what lay in front of them, as if other lives had no meaning and other places had none either. They had no depth. Whatever had formed them—war, poverty, whatever—it had left them empty, incapable of paying attention to or feeling anything. They would take what was before them, life or death, beauty or ugliness, fate or luck, and do what they had been instructed. But they would not select. They would not consider, they did not winnow, they did not decide. This one had decided.
Sally, her youngest, was a fragrant blossom on a spring day, before the wet season arrived. She smelled of delicacy, sweetness, not-yet-ripeness. She was too young to have developed but you could tell from the way men looked at her that she had a rare, almost ethereal beauty. Molly, the eldest, so smart, went away to school and now was a lawyer for the Americans in their capital; Annie had married a Japanese dentist with a practice in the suburbs; Ginger was a softball coach and nationally ranked player who had almost made the Olympics and might still; and Jeannie was in first-year med at Bloomington. But Sally, a latecomer, a final surprise from God, was the baby of the family, with ears of porcelain and a perfect little nose and bright eyes and thick, lustrous hair gathered in a ponytail. She was her mother’s prize.
But he had noticed her. She sat beside Mom, huddling, trying to comfort both Mom and herself. She wore Ugg boots in suede, black tights, a little blue jean skirt, a hoodie sweatshirt with ST. PAUL TRINITY stenciled on it, and a blue jean jacket, much too light for the weather, though Sally was a native Minnesotan, far hardier than her tropically raised mom, and normally shrugged off the cold, like the white people did.
The crowd parted as he bullied his way to them. About ten feet away, he stopped, bent down, and snatched up a woman’s purse roughly. Opening it, he grabbed the wallet and pulled out a wad of bills. Then he tossed the purse and strode forcefully to Sally through the crowd of cowed hostages. He stood above her, looking down on her imperially, like the conqueror he believed himself to be. He smiled, showing broad white teeth. Then he took a step to Mom, bent down, and said, “I have no goats. Here, take this,” and he threw the money at her.
“I buy her from you. Now she is mine. She will be my bride this day.” He laughed heartily. Then he reached down, forced his hand i
nside her sweatshirt and bra, and enjoyed a fondle of her small left breast. Mom saw the pain and shame cross her daughter’s face and the girl, violated, seemed to diminish before her. The large man laughed, winked at Mom, and stomped away.
Mom watched him go. She knew what she must do. She reached back, over a low stone arrangement that separated grass from garden in this mock outdoors, and surreptitiously, she snatched up a fistful of black soil. She dumped it into her purse. Then she did it again and again and again.
It seemed to take forever, setting up the phone connections, finding a special agent fluent in German, getting numbers from someone at a Siemens branch in New York, reaching finally a Siemens PR gal in Stuttgart, then finally a vice president, getting an authenticating call from the German Federal Police (they were so goddamned careful!), and now finally, Hans Jochim, fifty-four.
Yet it was not like talking to someone named Hans Jochim, fifty-four. It was like talking to someone named Holly Burbridge, thirty-two, who sat next to him. She was the translator and eventually the rhythms of the time lags seemed to disappear.
“Sir, I understand you were the design team leader on the MEMTAC 6.2 program that runs the SCADA system at several big malls in America.”
“Well, not exactly team leader,” Holly responded. “I was more of a coordinator. Policy is set by the executive branch, and, alas, vetted by marketing; then an environmental committee and a labor union committee have to file action reports, which of course must be responded to, in detail, and then there’s the hearing where the arguments are made orally in front of a board composed of—”
Jesus Christ! How long would this take!
“Sir, we’re in an emergency mode here. May I proceed, with all due respect, Herr Doktor Ingenieur?” the last a flourish he’d picked up from some World War II novel or something.
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