Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“Yes sir.”

“Sir,” someone said, “do we release to media?”

“No,” said Mr. Renfro, who rarely addressed tactical or operational issues but this time couldn’t help himself. “If word gets out he’s shooting hostages, it’ll add pressure to an already pressurized decision.”

“Good point,” said the colonel. “Do you concur, Special Agent Kemp?”

Kemp, thanking God he had no dog in this fight, said, “Yes, Colonel.”

“Sir,” someone said, “the governor is here.”

“Oh fuck,” said somebody.

It happened that Nikki was watching a particular sniper whom she had nicknamed Chicago with her binoculars from three thousand feet up at a particular moment as the WUSScopter hovered at that height. Though from there he was a tiny, almost blurred figure and the light was quickly diminishing, she saw him suddenly bolt upward, then lean forward, tense radically as if he were willing himself somehow to penetrate the glass of the skylight and fly down into the atrium; instantly, his finger flew to the radio unit at his belt-she knew where to look because she’d covered cops in Bristol-and presumably switched it on. He began jabbering into the throat mike. She zapped around the margins of the lake of Plexiglas until she’d located all five snipers and noted that all five were on their mikes.

“Something just happened,” she said.

“How can you tell?” asked Jim, the cameraman.

“I saw the snipers jerk up, and now all are reporting in.”

She switched to Marty back at the station.

“Is Command saying anything?”

“No, nothing. We’ve had reports the governor is incoming. We might want to put you on the ground and get over there in case he has a presser.”

“Marty, no presser means anything tonight. They’ll use the press to put out reassuring bullshit, knowing that whoever’s doing this is monitoring. Pressers are a waste of time and it pisses me off that His Eminence puts his big fat mug on camera tonight.”

“Settle down, Mary Richards, it was only a suggestion.”

“Well, something’s happened here and-”

She had an idea. Two weeks ago she’d been to the mall and had bought a pocketbook from a shop called Purses, Bags and Whatnot, one of those cutesy places that smelled of potpourri but had very nice leather bags. She pulled out that very same pocketbook now and began to rifle through it, because she remembered that’s where she’d stuffed the bill of sale. Yes, indeed, there it was, amid a scruffy collection of receipts for $100 from Bank of America, $35.47 for gas at Sheetz, and $22.75 from Safeway.

Remembering the very pleasant young woman who had run the transaction for her, she looked at the bottom of the bill of sale and saw a handwritten note, “Thanks so much, Amanda Birkowsky.”

“Marty,” she said, “real quick, run the name Birkowsky through AnyWho. com and see what you come up with.”

“Nikki-”

“Just do it, Marty. I don’t have time to explain. It’s a rare enough name so there probably aren’t too many of them.”

There were, as it turned out, only three in the three Minneapolis-Saint Paul area codes. She dialed the first, got no answer, and then hit on the second.

“Yes,” she said. “This is WUFF-TV. May I speak with Amanda, please.”

A woman said, brokenly, “Amanda is in the mall.”

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Birkowsky,” Nikki said, guessing from the voice that it was a mom, not a sister.

“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Birkowsky. “For now. She’s upstairs in the-who did you say you were?”

Nikki explained the connection.

“What is it you want?”

“I’m trying to reach Amanda. She’s called you? I guess she has a cell, she called you to tell you she’s all right, she’s in no danger, or no immediate danger.”

“I can’t give you her number.”

“I understand. But… can you call her, give her my number, and if she decides, she can call me? I just think people have a right to know what’s going on. It’s my job. There’s next to no information available and that’s never a good thing.”

Amanda called Nikki three minutes later. She and two customers and two other staff were hiding in the rear room of Purses, Bags and Whatnot on the first floor of the mall, in the dark. They felt themselves all right for the time being as no one had begun to search the stores for hiding shoppers.

“Did anything happen at five?” Nikki asked. “We heard five shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not a machine gun, not like that, but five individual shots. Then we heard the crowd-it makes noise, like an animal, all those people-we heard what I would call some kind of uproar, I don’t know, then barking from the voices of the guards, I guess. It was very unclear but something bad must have happened.”

“Five shots?” said Nikki. “Yes, exactly. I could try and sneak out there and-”

“No, no, no, no, you just stay where you are.”

“Are they going to come get us soon? The police.”

“There are police all over the place, but in truth, I don’t see any signs of an attack or an entry or anything.”

“This is so awful.”

“Listen, if something happens and you want to, and it seems safe, can you call me back? And if I think the cops are going to go, I’ll give you a heads-up through your mom, okay, and you can get low to the floor behind cover. I’ll never call you, because I won’t know what situation you’ll be in. Is that fair?”

“Thank you,” said Amanda.

“Sweetie, don’t thank me. You’re the brave one here.”

One minute later, Nikki was on the air with the news that five shots had been fired within the atrium and that possibly the gunmen had begun to shoot hostages.

“They just shot five people,” Ray said.

“You don’t know that,” Molly said.

“Yes, I do,” said Ray.

It seemed that the sound of the shots still echoed through the weird acoustics of the gigantic space. Everyone in the Frederick’s had stiffened when the sounds reached them, and in the several minutes since, nobody had said a thing until Ray broke the silence.

“Maybe some kid raised his rifle and pulled the trigger five times because he thought it was a cool thing to do,” Molly said.

“No,” said Ray. “That would have been faster shooting, onetwothreefourfive. This was deliberate fire. One shot, move to the next, shoot, move to the next. He just shot five people.”

Nobody said a thing. Ray, Molly, Rose the clerk, the broken-down manager of the store, and the three customers just lay there in the dark, in the storeroom.

“You could go check, like last time,” Rose finally said.

Ray didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “No. No, if I go out there, I’m not coming back. Somebody’s got to do something and I’m probably the only man with training who’s close enough to the situation to act and the police have no idea of how to get in here.”

“Ray-” said Molly, but Rose cut her off.

“If you go, what do we do? Do we just lie here? Six women, and there’s guys out there with machine guns? What do we do? What happens to us?”

“I think you’re okay,” said Ray. “You don’t need help. The people down there do.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” said Rose. “There’s a bunch of them, with army weapons. What can one guy do? You’ll just get yourself killed. You don’t even have a gun, much less a machine gun.”

Molly said, “She’s right. If they see you, they’ll kill you. That’s all. After all you’ve done, some punk kills you in the Payless shoe store or the Best Buy and you haven’t helped a thing and in six hours the hostage takers make a deal with the cops and fly to Cuba with a million dollars and what has your death accomplished?”