Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“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.”