Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“Good question,” said Ray. He rolled slightly to the left and extracted another potato. He pushed it up, close to the muzzle.

“When the first guy goes down, the second guy won’t believe it. He’ll freeze. I’ll get potato two aboard and whack him.”

“I don’t know,” said the spotter. “He’s been in war before. He just might empty in your direction and start screaming. Oh wait-oh wait. One of them just left. He’s going, I lost him, I can’t tell where he’s going.”

“I saw him. He went into the bathroom. It’s four or five stores back down the corridor. I’ll do him when he comes out. The other guy won’t hear a thing and I’ll do him next.”

“Jesus, you have balls of steel,” said the spotter.

“I’m a professional,” said Ray. “This is what I do.”

Ray found his prone and built it from the bones outward. Legs splayed, feet cranked outward for muscular pressure within the hold, rifle tight to shoulder, supported on bone not muscle, breathing cranked down to a slow seepage of air, ball of finger against the curve of the trigger. It’s all in the pull. That is, after everything else, it’s all about the pull. He’d made the pull a million times. He had a sweet stroke, firm, soft, untwisted by torque, a steady, ounce-by-ounce escalation of pressure until the break and something inevitably ended up with a hole exactly where he’d intended.

The jihadi emerged from the restroom a hundred yards away, at this distance a small man wiping his hands on a paper towel, well pleased and well relieved with his bathroom work, probably one of the few times he had relieved himself indoors, and it’s good he enjoyed it so, for the next second he stepped smack into the bullet.

It hit him above the right eye and his head jerked as no head in full health could jerk, and he went down with what was presumably a thud, though Ray couldn’t hear it at his range. What he had heard was a kind of wet pop as the potato, accepting the injection of supersonic gases from the muzzle behind the exiting bullet, detonated in a muted spatter, like a potato balloon, becoming atomized pulp in a nanosecond. Potato mist hung in the air.

Ray cranked the rifle back, crunched on another potato, and rebuilt himself the position in replica. This time he cranked over on the jihadi at the balcony, who leaned vacantly upon the rail. That a bullet had just passed by his shoulder and destroyed his partner’s face was a fact he missed entirely, and he only recognized that it was his turn next when his own bullet took his existence from him, without him even knowing it.

“Find me another target,” said Ray.

As it turned out, the Japanese were much less fearsome than the obstreperous Herr Doktor Ingenieur Jochim, and that transaction went well. And so it was that in a very few minutes, Special Agent Neal found himself with a landline receiver, punching in nothing more exotic than an 800 number. Neal had downloaded a modem app to his iPhone and connected that via Wi-Fi to his computer. Thus his phone was sending and receiving the modem tones via the Wi-Fi connection and then via the landline circuitry to the mall. He quickly engaged the Wi-Fi application on the phone and linked it to his desktop PC using a Wi-Fi USB stick.

Meanwhile, the drama around him had attracted quite an audience to his little chamber. Dr. Benson was there, a couple of interns who could be bullied into getting coffee, Holly Burbridge, whom no one had the heart to get rid of, she was that good-looking, and a few other ITs, Computer Service geeks, and special agents.

The phone rang, as it would in any pizza shop in America, and after a few seconds signified an answer by a series of clicks. He had the log-on code from the Japanese, punched in the numbers, and a robot voice informed him that he was “in contact.”

He quickly disconnected the line from the phone and clicked it into the computer, and again in seconds, after some blinking and clinking, a busy menu in Japanese came up.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Anybody read Japanese?”

“Aren’t you an expert on Japanese porn, Neal?” someone asked.

“Yeah, but only the office lady variety, goddammit. No help here.”

But then his iPhone rang.

He picked it up and answered. It was Juko Yamata, the Japanese engineer.

“Special Agent Neal, apologies, I forgot to tell you, our menu styles are very complex on Japanese software.”

“It looks like a map of the universe,” said Neal.

“Go to the third blank box on the right-hand column. That is external links. Punch anything in there, then hit enter, which you can see lower right, red box with just two emblems on it, looking like a flower and a broken ski jump.”

Neal did as he was told and was instantly informed he had accessed MEMTAC 6.2 English language version.

The colonel talked immediately by phone to the governor, then called Renfro and asked him to make an announcement to the press that demands had been issued by the gunmen and that they were being considered at the highest level of state government.

No hostages were shot at six.

“Well, that’s something,” the colonel said. He said it to nobody. The only person near him was Kemp, who had come up with an urgent look on his face to make the expected assault. Renfro had steeled Colonel Obobo for this and so he was ready for it.

“I see your point,” he said, after Kemp had finished his rather overlong argument, “and Special Agent, rest assured I will consider it very carefully. And perhaps, in the fullness of time, that’s the route I’ll choose to go. But it’s important to make these decisions carefully.”

“Goddammit,” said Kemp, “the demand for the freedom of these Somalis proves these bastards are international terrorists. This is an FBI operation and local law enforcement will assist in any way possible. But it’s not up to you to make these decisions anymore.”

“Agent Kemp, possibly you’re jumping to conclusions. Your investigators and mine have come up with no connection of this group to organized terror cells. I heard no evidence of connection to overseas entities. I heard an accent-free young white man. And these prisoners are hardly international terrorists. They’re local bank robbers, petty criminals.”

Kemp was somewhat limited in his argument, because he knew that in a certain way the colonel was right. Behavioral Sciences had done a scan of the colonel’s conversation with the terrorist. Their conclusion was that he was an American-born male, early to mid twenties, with a high IQ and verbal facility. His vocabulary alone-“alacrity” for “speediness” for one, “the narrative demands a climax” for another-would put him in the 790 area of the standard SAT verbal test. They pointed out other things too, such as a penchant for correct parallelism in speech, very rare except among the highly cultured, and a use of sophisticated irony. He used the well-known terrorist cliche Allahu akbar in conjunction with motherfucker, from urban argot, the two chosen for ironic shock value in that they are the last thing one would expect from diction such as his. Whatever Islamic terrorists were known for, it wasn’t irony.

But that wasn’t the real issue. The real issue was strategy.

“Colonel, I am not trying to seize command. I say again, and I speak for the Bureau, I am bothered that you have made no contingency plans to assault and seem inclined not to do so. These guys could start shooting at any second, people could start dying, and we are not ready to do a thing. We have to do something.”

“And just as easily, he could read our contingency preparations for assault as provocation and start shooting. We save more lives by adjudicating than by assaulting.” Another excellent gambit Renfro had come up with.