Stephen Hunter - Soft target

Why was he so cautious? Why was he not striding about like he owned the place? Why was he kind of Asian?

McElroy had no answers.

But on the other hand: He has an AK. He is dressed in the tribal headdress of Islamic, specifically Arab, persuasion. He has a throat mike, a pistol, a knife, as had all the others McElroy’d seen. He was a terrorist, he had to be, the only explanation that made sense.

Kill him, he thought, kill him quick before the yips break you down again.

He made the slight adjustment to drop the muzzle to account for the slight forward progress of the man, felt the trigger strut against the softest push of his finger just exactly as the four right angles of the reticle settled on the blank of the forehead, and beheld the perfection.

The rifle fired itself.

First person shooter at its ultimate. First person shooter, for real. First person shooter, the logical destination. First person shooter, the end of the road.

He watched on number seven, the big screen. He knew he should be watching the other screens, should be scanning this corridor and that stairwell for all the signs of disturbance, for possible threat, for danger, for sloppiness on the part of the kids, but he could not stop watching.

The rifles, unnoticed by their users, had miniaturized vidcams clamped to the barrel with some fixture from GG amp;G or Bravo Company or LaRue Tactical just behind the muzzle, and each sent a streaming vid feed to him at his headquarters, via the mall’s Wi-Fi network, and came up on the big screens adjacent to the wall that displayed his intercept of the security cam data. Images, images everywhere on the walls of this dark back room, which was filled with screenglow, turning everything a translucent gray white, yet more surrealism for this most surreal of enterprises.

The guncam imagery, of course, was sent to and recorded on the 6 TB memory card, but he was still able to hit replay at the local level and watch a designated sequence over and over again.

So now he watched number seven, for about the fourteenth time. The gunman was Maahir, the oldest and most reliable, the killer of Santa Claus. It took a while for the video to settle down, but even as the muzzle prodded the arbitrarily selected five and pried them out of the crowd in a dazzle of near-abstract shapes and black-white-gray imagery, certain lucid visions still arrived: the look in the eyes of the woman, the sullen downcast of the face of the old man, the simple dullness of the uncomprehending teenager. Then it all went to blur again as the gunman walked them to the cleared space, got them on their knees. They hadn’t yet figured what was going to happen because of course it was so outside their imagination. This kind of thing, this wantonness, this jihadi contempt for life, it hadn’t yet come to America. Oh, sure, 2,900 at the Trade Center, but those were meaningless numbers. The deaths of these five would be far more terrible and would live forever in the Western imagination when the data got into the world blogosphere. But that was still a few days off.

Okay, now. Five kneelers, hands at their sides. Maahir has settled down, the gun muzzle isn’t flappity-flapping all over the joint, reducing the imagery to a smear of gaudy electrons, and the tiny camera peers down from its forearm mount, seeing the muzzle as a black prong in the upper right hand of the screen, eternally fixed in the image.

The woman is first. The camera closes on the back of her head as he presses the muzzle almost to her skull. She has no idea she’s about to enter history and sits placidly awaiting a deliverance that isn’t to be. Flash, jump, blur, a haze of smoke, and the image is still again and fills with light as she topples forward, twisted slightly, instantly extinct. With animal death comes the end of body discipline, as all the muscles let go at once and she lunges forward like a felled building, straight into the floor, not much damage visible because the bullet passed through hair, burning it, pushing it aside, but still hiding the fragility of the skull.

As the muzzle sweeps to the next in line, his eyes shoot back to the gunman, laced with bulgy fear. Flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. He topples sideways, out of the frame. The next is the younger woman, who appears to be knit up in desperate prayer, all bunched up, her jaw vibrating as she uncorks the various afterlife mantras and deity ass kissing that constitute formal address to the supreme, then flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. An eccentricity. She does not fall immediately but for some reason remains intact and upward for another second or so, then seems to melt from within, as if her core has turned liquid and imploded downward.

The fourth is the older man, who struggles in his anger to rise and fight, so we get a double jolt, the first from Maahir tomahawking him with the gun barrel to drive him back to his knees in pain, and then the flash, jump, blur, and haze of the shot itself, a disappointment because it hits him above the ear, disappearing again in hair.

The last is better, the teen, actually closer to a child. Small, frail skull. Thirteen-, fourteen-year-old boy, he thinks. Flash, jump, blur, haze, but the head detonates, becoming in an instant too swift to even record something called not-head, or unhead, a kind of broken, empty vessel, departed entirely from assumptions of human anatomy. It’s deflated, emptied, eviscerated, but the boy’s bones are so light and his musculature so unimposing that he falls to earth almost insignificantly.

Maahir steps back from his work and casually sweeps the carnage he has unleashed. Five bodies shorn of dignity on the floor in the cruel black/white videography of the guncam. Maahir walks around them, muzzle on them in case he needs to fire another shot, but all are quite dead in their loose-knit positions, and beyond them, on the pavement, a kind of communal blood pool has formed, fed by five tributaries.

In the screen room, Andrew toggles a button on his keyboard and restores the live-feed guncam data, which has, he has to admit, turned out to be rather useless except in special conditions, such as the one he’s just witnessed. It’s mostly blurs of floors, as the boys sweep this way and that, and occasionally you get a view of the cowed hostages sitting in misery and terror or a look down some deserted corridor as the boys are sent out on various errands.

He looks at his watch. It’s almost time.

It was like being hit in the head by a snow shovel. The shock was more disconcerting than the pain, as the world went to crazed fractionality, his memory purged, the eternal sensation best described as What the fuck? commandeered his entire mind, and it seemed to take minutes before clarity finally restored itself, to the effect that I’ve just been shot in the head. The next logical question, Why am I not dead? somehow didn’t follow. Instead, his knees gone all Jell-O-y, Ray threw himself back in primal panic and slipped into some kind of notch in the wall, where he shared a few square feet with a water fountain.

He fought for cognizance. First he remembered who he was, then he remembered squeezing Lisa Fong’s left tit thirty-one years ago in the cloakroom of the Subic Bay Naval Base Elementary School No. 2, then he remembered that he was in a shopping mall taken over by the Huns, and only then did it occur to him that a sniper was shooting at him! At him! The nerve of some people! He sucked in his chest, just in case an inch or so of it extended beyond the edge of his little water fountain niche and invited another shot. But he also realized he was trapped.

He could risk a run but even now the guy was on him from wherever, his reticle greedily massaging the edge of wall that shielded Ray from death. He tried to think: Can these guys have brought snipers along and salted them all over the mall in case there’s some movement from the people hiding in the stores on the upper floors? But that seemed a little far-fetched. Yes, possible, but… also insane and therefore unlikely.