Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“Tom, let’s hold it a little longer. We need good pictures for the feed and up higher it’s just blurs and lights. People need to see the damned place.”

“Nik, I agree with Tom. If we crash into KPOP we’ll be the lead on someone else’s live feed. You’d hate that.” That was Larry, older of the two camera jocks. He knew how fragile and precious life was, even if the concept hadn’t yet dawned on Nikki.

But she would hate to lead anybody else’s feed: she was ferociously competitive, so much so that it scared many people. In the station, she was called “Mary Tyler Moore from Hell.”

She looked out the window and saw a fleet, a mob, a density of news choppers hovering about her same altitude over America, the country, and America, the Mall. It was a tricky thing; the birds had to avoid updrafts and couldn’t predict blasts of prairie wind, so they tried to keep a good three hundred feet apart, but nearly everyone wanted the money shot, which was the state police communications trailer a few hundred yards east of the mall, itself surrounded by police and other official vehicles, in the same shot with the south entrance of the mall, with its famous AtM sign, plastered four stories tall, that was based on a cartoony simplification of the mall’s Americanized shape.

“Just a few seconds more, guys,” she commanded. “Marty. Are you getting good pix?”

“The best, Nik, but don’t get yourself killed yet. If we need you to die for ratings, we’ll let you know.”

“Ha ha,” she said humorlessly. “Okay, let’s get out of here-”

“Something’s coming through,” said Cap’n Tom, and he plugged the emergency general aviation channel into the radio system.

“This is State Police HQ, I am asking all news helicopters to rise to and not wander below three thousand feet. We have incoming to the mall and I need you people out of the way so you don’t get hurt.”

“Hey, maybe something’s finally going to happen,” Jim, the younger, the more eager cameraman, said.

“We won’t be able to see jack from three,” said Nikki. “Larry, what lens are you using? Can you go to something zoomier?”

“You really lose a lot of resolution,” Larry said. “It’ll look like plastic toys in split-pea soup. But no one else will have much anyway.”

“Damn,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”

She felt the bottomless-pit sensation as Cap’n Tom elevated the craft against the pull of gravity and the structure beneath got smaller. From altitude, the mall stood in gigantic isolation, a wounded America whose sundered arteries spurted illuminated blood into the purple haze of the lowering sun.

It felt so strange, this proximity thing of the media. There they were, safe and toasty at 3,000 feet above the place, and inside, terrible dramas of life and death were being played out. Nikki and her cohort were there to witness and report, yet it was real life and real death at stake, nothing neat or melodramatic about it. And of course they knew that if they did well-what was the line from some old movie? “I think it’s safe to say you men are in for some promotions, medals, and positive recommendations in your personnel files!”

Then she saw it.

The cavalry? Not quite.

“Is that all?” Jim asked.

“Clearly, that’s not an assault,” said Nikki.

It was just the state police Bell JetRanger, rising from a parking lot and veering on the tilt toward the mall, all lights running hot and red and blinking.

“What are they going to do, scare the bad guys with the noise?” Larry said.

The bird, painted in the maroon-brown scheme of the Minnesota State Police, took a direct line to the mall and hovered six feet off its roof. Six young men in dark suits jumped out and began to deploy at the edges of the lake-shaped glass skylights that topped the atrium over the center of the mall.

“Six guys?” said Jim.

“Those aren’t guys,” said Nikki. “They’re snipers.”

D on’t have too much fun in there,” someone yelled merrily at Special Agent Jeffrey Neal.

He was one of the bright guys, tech-style, who worked in the Hoover Building, detecting mainly on a computer. He was an unbuttoner, a penetrator, a second-story man, a slippery little shadow in the night of cyberspace. It was said he’d get the department if he didn’t fuck up but that he would fuck up, as guys with his IQ could be counted on to get busted for falling in love with escorts or acquiring a drug habit or coming to believe Ancient Grecians were communicating with him through his Grecian Formula hair coloring brush, something self-destructive that for some reason always draws the hyperintelligent into its flame.

“Ha ha,” he commented from within the shroud.

The shroud was a canopy draped over his second computer, which was connected to the Internet. It was next to his unshrouded non-Internet-connected computer, and the two machines and two monitors crowded his small cubicle in the Computer Services Division of the Pennsylvania Avenue monstrosity. The shroud on the net beast kept inquiring eyes out and political correctness at its highest level, for one had to dip inside it and only in dark secrecy encounter the very special hell known as the universe of child pornography.

It was dues you had to pay, even if nobody wanted to.

But Neal had three months left to go on his six-month tour on the Child Porn Task Force, which meant he went home each night feeling like a used condom. His own sex life, mild as it was, had been destroyed. The things people did to kids, the sick worms in their heads that compelled them to conjure new variations in torment, abuse, piercing, and posture. You wanted to reach through the screen and crush skulls, watch the bastards-not just fat white guys in their forties, but amazingly handsome people of all races, ages, demo groups, normal-looking people, even distinguished-looking people-bleed out in the gutter, whimpering. But he soldiered on, knowing that at the end of “Neal, hey, wake up in there, hot one in from HQ. There’s some kind of mall takedown in Minneapolis and we have to get into the computer system.” It was his supervisor, Dr. Bob Benson, SA and PhD.

“He’s in the system?” Neal asked.

“Is he ever. He’s got a thousand hostages, he’s locked down the mall, no local agencies have been able to penetrate. Guess on whose plate it is now.”

“On it,” said Neal.

“Get upstairs ASAP for the briefing, then get down here and get your action into gear. This baby’s so hot it’s steaming. No more kiddie rape.”

Neal rose quickly, started to dash out. But he turned back, reached out, grabbed the shroud of his enforced disgust, and ripped it down. It was sort of like John Wayne throwing off the rifle scabbard as he saw the burning ranch before him in The Searchers. It meant he was going to war.

On the way over, Kemp had been on the phone with Washington the whole time. Subject: politics. Tone: unpleasant. Reality: discouraging.

“You have to play this very well, Will,” said Assistant Director Nick Memphis. “He will not want to give up command, and if you backstreet him, he will go to the media and they love him, you know that.”

“So how the hell do I play it?” said Kemp.

“I wouldn’t buck him,” said Nick. “Let him come to you. He has to.”

“He better come to me, goddammit,” said Kemp, the SAIC of the Minneapolis Office, a vet of several task forces including a long spell in Texas with ATF and Drug Enforcement that got him shot in the leg. “He doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

It was true. Colonel Douglas Obobo really hadn’t done anything. His career was primarily a phenomenon of showing up, giving speeches, accepting awards, then moving up to the next level, as assisted by the superb public relations and career advisor David Renfro, who’d spent years working the trade, fronting at various times for the New York chief of police, the San Francisco police commissioner. Renfro had met Obobo when both worked for the Senate committee and had been with him ever since.