Soft target rc-1

by Stephen Hunter

  So he had a free night. He checked his watch, saw that he still had an hour before his last prayers were expected, thought about this or that temptation-a small glass of wine, a trip through the pages of the latest Hustler, a rerun of the 9-11 video as Al Jazeera had reported it-but decided that tonight would be a pure and consecrated devotion.

  He unlocked his Ford Tempo and climbed in, turned on the engine, waited for the moisture to clear from the windshield, and pulled into traffic, checking the mirrors to see if on either side of Bedford anybody pulled out behind him. No one did. However, in his own back seat, someone rose directly behind him and sat back, relaxed.

  The imam’s gut clenched. You always had this fear in America that some crazed follower of a maniac like the reverend would take it in hand to blow away Islam in the form of the imam, as if the imam himself were plotting to blow up America, although of course that was on his to-do list. He cursed his stupidity for not checking the back seat. He was at war, he had to be alert. He prayed to Allah that this was not his death. And then he heard an American voice say, “If you’re worried about the FBI, they’re not here tonight. They only come on odd-numbered days in odd-numbered months and even-numbered days in even months. On the odd months, the shift is the last twelve hours of the day, the evens the first twelve hours. It used to be 24/7 but, you know… budget cutbacks.”

  The imam swallowed drily.

  “Who are you?” he asked, licking his lips. “Are you from the Reverend Hobart?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Who, sir? Please.”

  “Don’t turn around. Drive to your home, the usual route. The car is bugged, but I’ve momentarily diverted their penetration.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve hacked into their computer net and examined their operating orders and their technical capacities. To get the car bugged, they hacked into the new MyFord Touch wireless connection. This lets them hear everything in the car, see out the rear window, track via GPS, turn it on and off, everything. I wrote an iPhone app to control the car and switched the FBI views to another vehicle. Currently, they’re watching a soccer mom deliver her kids to practice. They think it’s some kind of anomaly. So I will talk while you drive. You will park in your garage. Now listen hard and well and remember what I tell you.”

  “Are you of the Faith?”

  “Shut up. Listen. My faith is of no importance and you would not understand it anyway. Accept my aid, consider me a messenger from your God, but for now, shut up and listen.”

  The imam swallowed again and kept his eyes straight ahead.

  “I want to hurt them. Badly. Why? None of your beeswax, holy man. Maybe just because I love rock and roll. But I need gunmen. I want twelve Somali jihadis smuggled into Canada and held in a safe house near the border in mid-November. They should be true believers of low intelligence and profound impulses toward religious obedience. True believers, the seventy-two virgins, all that horseshit. If blooded, so much the better.”

  “It’s impossible,” said the imam.

  “I told you, nothing’s impossible. You have connections with half a dozen refugee organizations. As well, you have contacts with Hizbul Islam in Mogadishu, and the general will provide you what you need if you can convince him. And you will convince him.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “America, that is, America, the Mall. You know the place? A hideous vulgarity a dozen or so miles out of town in Indian Falls. Busy, busy, busy. It will be jammed on the day after Thanksgiving. Your gunmen will unjam it.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible. I will provide weapons and access and plans. I will take over the mall security system. We will give them a lesson they will never forget to the glory of your God and mine. Your job is to get the men, hold them, and deliver them at a certain moment. The plan is not sophisticated and will require no rehearsal. These fellows will simply walk down a hallway, shooting. Then they will hold hostages for a short while. That’s all. None of them will survive; it is a martyr’s mission. I invite you to join me in death and glory. Together, we will punish them for their sins, and for the murder of the Holy Warrior in his bed.”

  “It costs money and permission. You cannot do such a thing without finances and a judgment from higher councils. We must examine to make sure such a course is correct and consider the political consequences. Ours is not simple nihilism but political policy.”

  “Bullshit. Listen to these rules and commit to them, or this will all go away and you will burn in your hell for eternity. No e-mails. E-mail has been penetrated. No phone calls, also penetrated. Nothing written. No Facebook or Twitter or any stupid teenaged thing that you guys always give yourself away on. Nothing amateur. There must be no physical or electronic acknowledgment of the planned event, no records. Everything recorded can be recovered. The imam himself must not deviate from his routine of the past few months except to handle communications with the great General Hassan Dahir Aweys in Somalia, solely by satellite phone, which will be provided. But he should contact no other units, no Al-Qaeda cells, nothing, as all communications must be presumed penetrated. He must never ask permission. Everything must be local and person to person, guaranteed by a handshake and mutual obedience to your faith.”

  The imam hardly knew what to say. Was this a dream, a phantom, a movie? But then he had an image of America, the Mall, consumed in flame, riven with blood, heaped with bodies of dogs, the smoke blowing its acrid perfume, an American blazing in the heart of middle America, and he was profoundly moved. The Holy Warrior avenged.

  The imam arrived at his prosaic two-bedroom house in his prosaic neighborhood.

  He pulled into his garage.

  “Get out quickly, go inside, and say or write nothing. Cling exactly to your routine. Here is an envelope with ten thousand cash, to support your activities. It must never be banked because banks raise alarms. They are not on your side. Make plans to go to Somalia within the month to find and arrange for the boys. Nothing on paper, nothing by phone, nothing by e-mail. Be hard, disciplined, focused, and I will give you glory you haven’t even dreamed of.”

  “Is this a trick? Are you an agent provocateur? Have you been sent here to gull me into a mistake? What is-”

  “You want proof, is that it? You don’t trust the white kid? You think I’m on some kind of prank or working for the assholes of five-oh? Hmm, what can I do to convince you?”

  “You must convert to-”

  “Not hardly. Oh, I know. I’ll give you a nice present. That will convince you. Would you like some delicious candy? What about a gift certificate for Walmart? Possibly a new clock radio, one that goes ding-dong five times a day.”

  The imam said nothing in the face of such blasphemy.

  “Okay, my friend. Reach down under the dashboard in front of the seat to your right. There’s your present. Enjoy it in good health.”

  The imam thought this was another joke. But he looked and, indeed, in the darkness of the space beneath the dashboard thought he made out a shape. He bent, and his fingers closed around some kind of green plastic garbage bag. He pulled it up to the seat, feeling its four pounds of weight. He set it down, studied the drawstrings of bright yellow plastic, and pulled it open.

  It was the large, florid, and quite excited head of the Reverend Reed Hobart.

  “Won’t that look great on the mantel?” said the boy as he slipped out the back and disappeared into the darkness. Then, suddenly, the dashboard display came alive and the radio blared.

  Stones. “Paint It Black.”

  5:55 P.M.-6:14 P.M

  Ray slid the answer icon to the right and put the phone to his ear.

  “This is Special Agent McElroy,” he heard.

  “No,” he said, “it’s Chucklehead McElroy. Dumbbell and dope. You ever shoot down-angle, McElroy?”

  “I guess not,” said McElroy.

  “You have to hold low. If you hold straight on, you hit high. You owe
me fifty.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Push-ups.”

  “I’m a little busy now,” said McElroy.

  “And you’re going to get busier. Put that rifle down, you’re too dangerous with it. You find me isolated targets out of visual contact with their main force and I will put them down. We’ll reduce their team one by one before they even notice it.”

  “Uh, Sergeant, that’s against policy. I’d have to get some sort of higher approval on that, and to be honest, I don’t think an agent has ever acted under such a wide license. It would definitely be against our policy.”

  “It’s against your policy. It’s not against my policy. My policy is stalk and kill, one-shot variety. It’s what I do. It’s all I do. I can shoot suppressed, so noise isn’t an issue. Now I am going to move out and try and take these people down. Having you bird-dog for me from on high like my private satellite would be very helpful. Or I can do it on my own. Either way, it will happen, McElroy. You decide right now who you are with.”

  He heard McElroy pause and even imagined that the phone picked up the vibrations of a dry swallow. But then McElroy said, “Okay. I’m in. Nothing’s happening here anyway.” Then he said, “First, maybe you have some intel I can forward to Command. You got your gear from one of them, right?”

  “He didn’t seem to mind. Black male, age twenty-two or so. Somali, I’d guess, from what I’ve seen of them in Minnesota. Handsome dude, even with a broken neck. Didn’t do an ID check.”

  “You took his stuff though. Equipment data?”

  “Okay, the pistol is a Heckler and Koch P7, much battered, I’m guessing some European police department trade-in. You have to squeeze it to make it shoot, very unusual gun. The 9-mil ammo has a foreign head stamp, I don’t have time to check it exactly. It looked grungy, as if it had been stored in tins for three decades. The AK is a 74, not a 47. It’s overmarked WTI, Laredo, Texas. Looks to be a Bulgarian or Romanian clone, I can’t really read the serial number. The ammo is 5.45?39, which is the Eastbloc variant on 5.56 NATO. Small, lethal, fast, 50-60-grain round, looks surplus too, no recognizable head stamp, crappy OD steel case, red band at base of bullet, copper gilding. The mags are sort of plum-orange color, and I saw that shade all over the Mideast and Afghanistan, so I’m guessing Eastbloc junk too. The commo shit is Radio Shack, low-end. The knife was some kind of surplus AK bayonet. The whole thing could have been supported out of some shit-city surplus store, so maybe that’s a place for you to look.”

  “Got it. I’ll get this to Command, we can get ATF hacking on it.”

  “You do that. Meanwhile, I’m on the stalk. The more we kill, the easier any kind of assault will be when the heavy hitters go in. And when that happens, I can provide distracting fire and then suppressive if they have to maneuver. You’re my spotter, McElroy, clear on that?”

  “Yes sir,” said McElroy.

  “Good. Now find me targets.”

  McElroy closed up the phone and pressed his radio. He got Webley’s assistant on the wave and fed him the weapon info he had just acquired. Then he signed off, eased over the edge of Lake Michigan, and went to work through his binoculars. Nothing much had changed one hundred feet below. From his nine-zero-degree perspective, he could see a mass of humanity gathered on the walkways of the amusement park, shaded here and there by the foliage of trees, plastic or real unknown. Santa, still dead, still on his throne. Why didn’t somebody throw a blanket over the guy? The people were crowded together so tightly it was hard to make out the individual from the herd. Most were on their haunches, some still with hands on head or behind necks, looking nowhere except straight ahead. Many were trying to talk inconspicuously on their cell phones. On their outskirts he could make out the more vigorous movements of the gunmen, who strolled about the perimeter, AKs showily in hand. They were easy to spot because of the bright tribal scarves, which made excellent target markers. Someone either hadn’t thought that one through or had thought it through very carefully and didn’t particularly care that if the assault came, targeting the gunmen would be much easier. McElroy himself didn’t know what to make of it, nor did he know what to make of a situation in which so few controlled so many so completely.

  He thought about it: yes, indeed, if all the hostages rose and ran at one of the gunmen-say that dude there, who lounged against a mall pillar, smoking an illegal cigarette, looking not particularly terrorist but more teen punk-they could almost certainly overcome him and flee en masse down the corridor. But to do that they’d have to act as one, and the first twenty-five or so would have had to have made friends with their own death. No twenty-five middle-class Americans were about to do that; whatever, that spirit was gone and nobody down there today would die of crazed courage. They would sit, try to wait it out, pray for the authorities to run the rescue, and pray that they’d be spared when that happened. The guy behind this puppy knew his victim psychology a la America, the Mall, and America, the country.

  He looked for evidence of explosives rigging, canisters of gas, maybe tanks of ignitable propane, all emblems of weapons of mass destruction mall-style, and saw nothing: just men-young, if he read their rangy, undisciplined postures correctly-and their rifles. The five executed hostages had been dragged over to the railing that separated the Wild Mouse ride from the public areas.

  Targets? None to be had. If the Marine sniper pegged one of the gunmen, he’d go down in full view; the crowd would react, the other gunmen would see, and the whole game would be up. They’d shoot ten more, then ten again until he gave himself up; that was the message in the first five deaths.

  But then-yes. Okay, maybe, yes.

  On the second floor, three jihadis had emerged from their posts below and now overlooked the crowd. Concentrating hard, he saw that all three had the bigger forty-round magazines that probably were designed to feed the gun in its light machine-gun role. These three leaned on the balcony, smoking, joking, joshing, goosing, goofing around. They’d been put there obviously because their vantage post was so much higher, their angle better, and in the event of an assault, they could bring fire not through the crowd but on the crowd. They were on the Marine sniper’s level, but not across from him, rather to his right one corridor. He was Colorado, they were Rio Grande. He couldn’t engage them from where he was, but if he rotated another corridor in the opposite direction, over to Hudson, he’d have a good shot at them. If he were above them, he’d have an even better angle.

  McElroy took out the phone, punched the button.

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay, three of them have come up to your level. They are immediately-that is a quarter rotation around the atrium-to your right. It seems to me that you might be able to get an angle onto them if you rotated to the left. Then you’d be directly across from them. Or if you got up a level, you’d have an even better angle on all three.”

  “I can’t fire multiple shots with my technology,” said the marine.

  “Well, maybe they’ll separate. Maybe one will be left alone and you can take him.”

  “Good call. It’ll take me a while, but I’ll try and get around and up. You don’t have any engineering diagrams, there’s not some kind of passage by which I can find a short cut?”

  “They just dumped us up here without any guidance. It was a big rush. There wasn’t any chance to bring that stuff into play. Now, I can contact Command and see if-”

  “No, no, that’s just more time being eaten up, more people offering opinions, more people wanting to be heard. Today, action is king, action and only action. You get?”

  “I get.”

  “Okay, I’ll get into position. If you see movement in my direction, you alert me.”

  “Got it, roger,” said the spotter.

  McElroy settled down to stay connected to the targets.

  Finally. He swaggered to the phone. This was his moment. His whole life he’d been able to synthesize arguments, turn them around instantly, and reiterate them in cajoling tones, until his opponent had
agreed with him. It was his strength. He knew he could do it now, brilliant synopsizer, genius of empathy, purveyor of mega-earnestness. Colonel Obobo looked around, saw Renfro standing close by, giving him encouragement through sympathetic, even moist, eyes.

  “It’s your line three, sir.”

  Obobo peeled off his earphones, snatched up the phone, punched 3.

  “This is Colonel Douglas Obobo, superintendent of the Minnesota State Police. To whom am I talking, please?”

  “You know who I am,” came the voice, calm and collected, untainted by accent, perhaps younger than might have been expected. “I’m the guy in the mall with a thousand hostages and ten thousand rounds of ammo. You do the math. I have demands.”

  “Sir, I’m sure we can work something out. Your demands will be given fair hearing. But I want to be clear, I must also advise you to immediately cease your activity, release all hostages, lay your weapons down, and turn yourself over to police authorities. No one else needs to get hurt.”

  “I really don’t care if anyone else gets hurt,” said the voice. “I have no objection to other people getting hurt. I have the hostages, ergo I have the power. You sit there and shut up and I will tell you what must be done, at what timetable, and what you can expect from us. Any more proffers of ‘advice,’ and I shoot a child. If you ever call me ‘son’ or ‘young man,’ I’ll shoot another child. If you say, ‘I want to be clear’ again, I will kill ten. Now, if you want to save lives, you have to do exactly what I’m telling you very quickly. You don’t have a lot of time. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think anything is accomplished by belligerence. We must have a calm, clear, measured-”

  “Shoot the little girl, holy man,” the voice said.

  “ No! No! Please, you can’t-”

  “Actually, I can. I’ve seen you on TV, I know you’re an ambitious political asshole who thinks he can talk himself into anything. Put it on the shelf or people die, do you get me loud and clear? I am not rational, I am not clear, I am not bartering. I will kill a lot of people. Do what I say and shut the fuck up, Time magazine cover boy.”