“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 hitting 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 anyth
ing else.
Would I ever like to get that guy in my crosshairs, he thought.
Molly looked up as Ray slid back in the door.
“Did you see my mother and Sally?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t have time. Ladies, listen up, I’m going to tell you what I think is best.”
Quickly he narrated his discoveries, the situation, his estimation of the difficulties law enforcement would face.
“How soon will they come?” one of the women asked.
“Not soon. They have to get their best people in here; they have to acquire detailed plans for the mall; they have to try and penetrate the security system, which these people may already control and which was designed by geniuses to keep people out. They have to decide their best course. On top of that, these invaders, they may have demands, which will put further complications into the situation. They seem professional and this operation appears well planned. And nobody outside wants to make a hasty decision that could get a thousand civilians killed, believe me. So I’m telling you right now, you have to commit to the long haul. You can’t pin your hopes on this being done quickly.”
“So do we just sit here?”
He turned to the young clerk, Rose.
“Rose, what about a back way out?”
“There’s a loading corridor that runs through each of the sections. That’s how we receive our merchandise.”
“Where would that take us?”
“Well, there’s an elevator to the basement, which leads to the subterranean receiving level.”
“First thing they’d do would be to turn off the elevators. What about a stairwell?”
“Yes, there’s a stairwell.”
“We could escape through the stairwell!” someone said joyously.
“No, not quite. See, I’m thinking that for now they’re not going to pay attention to the upper floors. But as time goes by, they may send teams upstairs to root people out and herd them down to join the hostages. The more hostages they have, the more power to negotiate. So I’d go up one floor to three and find refuge there. Because when they come for us, one team will start at the top and work their way down. And another will come up to the second and work up. So the middle floor is the safest in the long run. Plus, if the cops do assault, they may drive some gunmen up here, to this floor, and have a shootout here, and trust me, you don’t want to be in the middle of it. Does that make sense?”
A surge of good cheer arose and Ray noticed that all the women were buoyed at the prospect of doing something to help their chances. Except for Rose.
“Rose, what’s wrong?”
“When the shooting started, I had the same idea. I ran out the back and tried the stairwell. See, all the locks in the building are part of the software. He’s locked it. We’re stuck here.”
“Are the doors heavy?”
“They’re not as heavy as the outside doors. Those are metal, sunk in metal. But these are tough, heavy wood and you’d have to batter and kick an hour to get them down. Or shoot your way through.”
Ray didn’t say anything, but he knew what that meant. Yes, it confirmed that somehow the attack team had taken over the security program that underlay the mall operations protocols. They had locked the doors remotely. They were in complete control.
He looked carefully at the SCADA representation of MEMTAC 6.2 where its captured images blazed from his own monitors. Quickly he checked off the key points.
LOCKDOWN ENABLEDELEVATORS DISABLEDESCALATORS DISABLED
No surprises there. Once you get in, you learn the culture of the system, the assumptions it’s built on, how the German geniuses at Siemens think, how thorough they were, how they swept up their sandwich crumbs after lunch, and how shiny the bathroom fixtures were.
He continued to monitor, examining the ecosystem of the empire.
AIR-CONDITIONING ONTEMPERATURE CONTROL 72FIRE SPRINKLERS ENABLEDFLUORESCENT LIGHTING SYSTEM ENABLEDAREA Z FUSES FUNCTION 100 PERCENTPOWER GRID STABLESANTA CLAUS DEAD
No, no, it didn’t say that, but he had a morbid sense of humor and he saw it in his imagination, as he also thought about what he could do with his power. Since the owners of this mall owned dozens of other malls in the US and Canada, all using the MEMTAC-driven SCADA, all linked, he could really raise hell if he wanted by refusing credit cards, turning cash registers insane, locking out and in, freezing elevators, directing the Coke machines to urge customers to buy Pepsi all across the land. But really. That wasn’t the point. The point was
… the game.
And then as an afterthought, his piece de resistance.
INTERNET CONNECTION DISABLED
Ha. I hear you knocking but you can’t come in.
Well actually, there was one way in. It would be interesting to see if there was anybody out there smart enough to figure it out.
“I can’t get in,” said a computer technician from the Minnesota State Police. “Whoever he is, he’s taken the thing off line. It’s internally sealed. I’ve run all my conventional link search programs and I’m not getting a thing. It’s a vault.”
“Keep trying,” said Douglas Obobo, who was the newly appointed commandant of the state cops. “I know you won’t let me down.”
A special warmth came into Colonel Obobo’s voice on the last sentence. I know you won’t let me down. That was the Obobo touch, known in its limited way and possibly about to become more famous. He had the gift of inspiration, of making people believe, first in him, second in the mission, third in the larger program that sustained the mission, and finally in the administrative entity that embraced all. It was why he was the youngest man in history, at forty-four, to become a superintendent of state police, and the first African American. It had been national news.
“Sir, we need more sophisticated programs and more sophisticated IT guys. The federal people will have that; maybe they can get in.”
Obobo said, “I understand and that’s why I have federal people on the way. I know if we all work together, we can get this done with a minimum of loss.” He spoke with the confidence of the man who knew the truth.
And why shouldn’t he? His success had been pretty much a certainty. The son of a Kenyan graduate student at Harvard and a Radcliffe anthropology major, he’d graduated from both Harvard and Harvard Law. But instead of taking the conventional path to whatever the American Dream was, he’d joined the Boston Police Department as a beat cop. He was quickly absorbed into the Homicide Bureau and had been the front man on a series of highly publicized cases, where he revealed himself to be a mellifluous speaker and a quick wit and to exude a kind of enlightened law enforcement attitude that could console the races, even in a tough town like Boston.
Despite the fact that he never broke a case, arrested a suspect, won a gunfight, led a raid, or testified in court, in five years he left the department to become the lead investigator for the Senate Subcommittee on Government Fraud, where again his charisma made him a star and got him noticed on the national level. Run for office, many said. You have the gift.
But he was a cop, he said, and committed to the healing of America by progressive law enforcement policy. The old days of kick-ass and coerced confession were gone; the new day of respect for all had arrived.
He became, quickly, the assistant commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, then the chief of the Omaha Police Department, though he cared little for the snowy plains far from the national media. But they kept dropping by anyway, and he made the national news more than any other police executive in the country, in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Finally, his big move, to head the Minnesota State Police with the idea of bringing it into the twenty-first century, making it the premier investigative agency in the state while aiming to cut traffic fatalities to a new low. That hadn’t happened yet and in fact no stated goal had been accomplished, but it was hard to hold that against a man struggling against the old culture and the old ways. The media loved him for his effort. Somehow, he’d ended up on the cover of the New York Ti
mes Magazine, subject of a gushing profile by David Banjax.
Now, his first real crisis. He understood that America, the Mall, was a mess. First responders had had a nightmare approaching, as shoppers fled in the thousands, most in cars, gridlocking the place so that incoming LE simply added to the confusion. Meanwhile, the reports were sketchy. Mall security was not answering and had not communicated since the first 10–32 alert went out. Thousands of 911 calls crowded the circuits, all some variety on the theme “Machine gunners are in the mall,” or “I lost my grandma in the mess, help me find my grandma.”
Grandma was going to have to wait, unless she was already dead.
But he also understood that this was an opportunity beyond measure, in some way a gift. The national spotlight would again shine on him and the decisions he made, the leadership he showed-the resolution coupled with fairness, the fortitude coupled with compassion, the eloquence coupled with wisdom-would be on fine display. It wasn’t about ambition, he always said; it was about gifts. He had been given many; it was mandated, therefore, that he give back.
“You know,” his longtime civilian advisor and public affairs guru David Renfro had whispered in his ear on the thunderous ride over, “few men get a chance like this. This is an opportunity we have to seize by the throat.”
Obobo and his senior command team-including Mr. Renfro-were in a state police communication van parked across the highway from the huge structure of the mall. They were roughly in the position of Bermuda, about 250 yards out from the Middle Atlantic states, directly to the east.
He had made some early organizational decisions: one major was liaising with incoming SWAT teams from the local area, assigning the men positions on the perimeter. But the colonel had authorized no entry or engagement. The situation was too unclear; he had no idea what he was up against, who these people were, what they wanted. The last thing he needed was an out-of-control gunfight between his heavily armed operators and equally heavily armed terrorists or whatever in the middle of a crowd of civilians. Hundreds would die. But he also knew that people inside were bleeding out with wounds, suffering heart attacks, anxiety overloads, had been separated from children or other siblings or relatives, were hiding in stores, panicking, maybe plotting a rebellion of their own.
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