Stephen Hunter - Soft target

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.

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.”