Stephen Hunter: Soft target

He edged backward a bit, to get out of the rush of the masses, and knew that if he wanted, he could fire and fire and kill and kill, but after all, there was no hurry, and there would be ample time for those pleasures.

On the large video screen displaying the SCADA icons, MEMTAC 6.2 purred away placidly, cybertestimony to the fact that all was tidy in the kingdom of AtM.

You could be forgiven for not looking, but Phil Deakins watched anyway. SCADA stood for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and it was the technology by which the mall was ruled, through the auspices of its software program, as designed by Siemens, in Germany, called MEMTAC 6.2. SCADA ran access controls, HVAC, energy consumption, life safety, and all other operational aspects of the mall. It “supervised” through the computer and it “acquired” data needed to tell the computers what to do. It could do the simple (unlock doors at a certain time) or the complex (reroute cash register transactions if the satellite processing system went down). It had no preferences, idiosyncrasies, quirks, glitches, charm, or moodiness and represented the dull, systemized perfection of the German engineering mind. You wouldn’t want to go drinking with it; you’d end up barfing beer in a gutter while yearning to invade Poland.

It set the temperature, regulated the lighting, informed security when an alarm went off, controlled the credit card verification process, monitored the fire control system, determined that the cameras and the recording equipment worked at all times. What was so cool about it-those nutsy Germans! — was that its user interface was pictorial and user-intuitive.

Thus what dominated the wall of the security office of America, the Mall, was a glowing representation against an azure blue background of a large flow chart that looked a lot like a family tree from the planet Dune. Chunks of info, identifying labels, holding pens, all arranged by a grid of lines and accessed by an operator with a good mouse hand. The system itself, when it needed petting by humans (rare enough), was controlled by the technique called drag and drop or sometimes “dragon drop,” whereby the operator made things happen via nesting the cursor on something and mousing it to another zone where it was deposited, and somewhere far-off, air-conditioning went down two degrees, the janitors were notified that someone had stuffed cotton underpants in the urinal in the men’s at Hudson 3-122, the log flume chlorine fluoridation program was cranked down by twenty parts per million so that lab smell wasn’t nearly so offensive to older people with oversensitive olfactory glands.

But until that afternoon, nobody had ever shot Santa Claus.

“Jesus, somebody just shot Santa,” someone shouted. It was a security geek tasked with monitoring the camera displays on another wall as one of his too-many duties. “Jesus Christ, I am not kidding, they blew his head wide open-”

“Call the police,” said Deakins. “God, I can’t imagine what kind of sick-”

“Phil, look at nine!”

Phil, commander of the afternoon watch for America, the Mall, security, looked and saw chaos, speed, blur, panic spreading into a plague of indistinct animal movement on the monitor marked nine, which he knew to represent the NW Colorado corridor floor one camera, which gazed from its Plexiglas encasement down the thoroughfare toward, in the distance 150 yards, Area Z, as the Silli-Land amusement complex was professionally known. In fact by the crazed magic of closed circuit security television, he could watch the panic spread from nine to eight (Area Z, entryway east) while lights began to blink on phone lines and two-way radios barked as various security personnel called in.

Meanwhile the big board began to send signals of distress; it monitored pedestrian traffic density and noted drily an overload and backup at three exits.

“Oh, shit,” called Thomason, number two in command at the fourth-floor security headquarters, “look at fifteen!”

Phil felt a cold edge of hurt slice his solar plexus and actually had to take a deep breath to keep from hyperventilating into collapse. Fifteen betrayed the same symptoms: panic, flight, mass movement, chaos, fear, people running, people falling, children being knocked over, old people pushed aside. The horror bled from monitor to monitor across the vast wall of security views into the mall from all angles-thirty-six of them total. In the background the hazy image of a gun muzzle issuing a white-hot spurt of blast drew all eyes, even if, packed in here, no outside noise reached them.

“I’m getting shooters,” Thomason was screaming over the phone. “We have active shooters in the mall, first floor, people down and bleeding, Jesus Christ.”

It was their ultimate nightmare, the one that everyone said would never come. But it had come. It was here. It was happening. Phil swallowed, dwarfed by it. He looked from monitor to monitor, seeing the armed men moving down the corridors, driving before them the unarmed civilians in the hundreds. Of course: drive them to the center, to Area Z, and hold them there or turn it into a slaughterhouse. He had a moment of remorse at the complexity of the mall and how hard a puzzle it would be for responders to engage: the amusement park at the center with its jungle of attractions and its loops and swirls of track spread across all altitudes. Of course the whole thing was equally riven by corridors and stairways running behind the stores; it was like an immense game of 3-D Chutes and Ladders.

His mind clarified. He picked up the red phone on his console, the direct line to state police headquarters, bypassing local suburban yokels. When he picked up the red line, no dial was necessary, as instantly a pipelined voice responded, “Daywatch Emergency, do you have an incident, AtM?”

Phil hung together. “Daywatch Emergency, we have active shooters in the mall. As far as I can make it out, we have one, no, two of them, in each main corridor. I can’t see who they are but I’ve got a massive panic situation here, I need relief fast. Someone even shot Santa Claus.”

“Could this be some kind of a drill? Or a movie scene-?”

“No, no, it’s for real, goddammit, people shooting, people down.” Hysteria snuck into the margins of his voice.

Daywatch Emergency got it together, or maybe now it was an older guy, more experienced.

“Do not move from your command position, Officer,” he said. “We are dispatching units immediately. We need you on the monitors, Security, do you hear me?”

“Affirmative,” said Phil, who had fifteen good years on the Saint Paul Metropolitan Police force under his belt and had been in emergencies before. He turned, cooler now, to the number two guy.

“Inform our people, they are not to attempt apprehension unarmed. They’ll just be gunned down. Jesus, we have no weapons, we-”

“Phil, I got Indian Falls Metro, they’re sending cars, we have people all over the mall calling 911, we have cops inbound from all over the place.”

“Man, this is a real basketfuck,” said Phil. Then, again with the calm of a serious professional in the crisis of his life, he picked up his earphones and throat mike, slipped them on, went to override on the communications grid of the console, and spoke to his men spread throughout the mall, some on Segways, some on foot. “Listen, all personnel, we have a ten thirty-two, man with gun, maybe multiple. I repeat, a ten thirty-two, man with gun, multiple, shots fired. Do not try to apprehend armed personnel, you will only get yourself hurt. Move people away from the line of fire if possible, provide medical attention and traffic control to open exits. I am putting mall evacuation plan A in effect, I have alerted local LE, we have big help inbound. Come on, guys, stay with me on this, do your jobs, hang in there. We will get you help as quickly as possible, we have cavalry coming from all directions, and-”