Stephen Hunter: Soft target

With the sound of a vacuum tin being opened, power died in the room. Darkness fell, replaced in seconds by emergency red lighting. But the big board plasma screen with its gleaming representation of Germanic efficiency was black, all the security monitors were down, and the radio net had gone belly-up. The electrical backup system had not cut over and there were no comforting sounds of well-running technology.

“What the fuck?” Phil said, and he wasn’t the only one, as all six men in the command office began to curse immediately, flipping buttons, hitting toggles, banging screens, twisting radio dials, yelling at handsets.

“Cool it, cool it! ” yelled Phil. In seconds his team had gotten hold of themselves.

“He’s taken over our security system,” someone said. “Motherfucker has cut us out of it.”

“Okay, okay,” said Phil, “stay calm, nothing is helped if we panic. We-”

“The fucking doors are locked,” someone said.

The men sat there for a second, amid dead security monitors, lightless communications equipment, air-conditioningless rising temps, feeling nausea. They were trapped. They were in lockdown. The electromagnets concealed within each door had been directed by MEMTAC 6.2 to clamp them closed, using the full power of the lodestone, which was beyond influence by any force less than a well-planted explosive.

“Oh shit,” someone said. “Smell that?”

Yes, it was an odor. Something chemical in nature had just popped in the air vent. The smell of fresh-mown hay filled the air. It reminded Phil of the farm he’d grown up on in Iowa, even as he recalled from a class on some long-forgotten law enforcement seminar twenty years ago that the smell of new-mown hay or grass was an indicator of a substance called phosgene.

It was a poison gas.

Asad thought, Look at the white sheep run.

Oh, how they ran. What sorts of men were these? They had no courage, no heart of lion, no belief in Allah. A little pop from the gun and they ran.

“What cowards,” he said to Saalim.

Saalim’s job was to cover the rear. He was not happy about it. It wasn’t fair. Was he not a fighter like Asad, perhaps more so even? Had he not stood in the high desert with Hizbul Islam against the city usurpers of al Shbaab, near Wabra? Had he not burned their houses and executed their men and herded their women and children into the stockades? He had done it all, praise be to Allah, may peace be upon you, brother.

But now he was the rear security chap while this miscreant Asad reaped Allah’s glory on the rifle, the cracks of the gunfire knifing through, then echoing off the profane walls of this grotesque temple of infidel faith, with its nude women in windows, its temptations, its Then a man appeared in a white shirt on some kind of insane upright motorcycle, his head clasped in a helmet, and certainly he was armed, for he had what appeared to be police wires running to communications plugs in his ears, as had the Iranian advisor in the high, bright desert, who’d talked them through the campaign and led them in their vengeance upon the false believers of al Shbaab.

The rifle was there, cradled in his arms against his shoulder, and with a surge of joy and glory, he fired, loving the drama of the baby Kalashnikov, and in the smear of flash at the muzzle he saw darkness blossom upon his enemy’s chest, and down the infidel went, sprawling lifelessly in a heap beyond grace as if his legs had been turned to wet clay beneath him. That is how they die, no? Without dignity or sense of courage, just brought down like animals.

“I killed one, Asad,” he said.

“Hah,” said Asad, “I have killed many,” but stung by the boastfulness in Saalim’s voice, he felt that to retain warrior face he must kill again, and so he selected a cow from the herd and fired. She was a big one, black like himself, but slow, which is why she lingered at the rear of the fleeing crowd, but he had no mercy this day. The rifle cracked and spurt, spinning hot brass, and though he could not see the hit, she went down with the heavy flop of a large dead animal. Next to her, behind her, two more, a man and a child, went down, but the man got up, got the child up, and the two raced off, trailing slicks of blood, easy to track. He looked back at his kill. She lay in a sprawl, her face fat and slack, and next to her a child knelt, crying for his downed mother, unaware that today would be a day without pity.

“We will kill them all!” he exulted, feeling the power of God’s will move through his body, the aphrodisiacal smell of the fired powder, the satisfying recoil of the baby Kalashnikov.

Before him, with even more urgency if such could be imagined, the crowd seemed to speed up, all the mothers and daughters and fathers and sons of the West, all of them, cursed unto damnation and eternal fire by Allah, and he, Asad, was the deliverer, the living embodiment of Allah’s will on earth. Oh, it so fit with his imagery of the end of times-the scale of it, the fury of it, the blood of it, his own pitiless relentlessness like an angel from on high, sent by Our Lord to cleanse the earth of those who would not submit to the Faith. He was so lucky, he did not know how to contain himself. This day he would sit with Allah and feel his warmth and benevolence, and he would have sexual congress with any young women he cared so to select. And the best part: he didn’t have to be dead to enjoy the sex. He had been promised a live Western girl.

To celebrate he decided to shoot up a ladies’ shop. He turned, faced it directly, and began to pump the trigger at the big display window. The baby Kalashnikov danced in his hands, breathing hell’s breath of smoke and flame and spent casings, as before him the glass yielded into punctures, then shattered in a sleet of delirious reflection, and behind that dummies that wore those garments that decent women kept hidden under their burkas and only showed to their husbands splintered and fell in puffs of white dust and snapping ribbon as the bullets pierced them and-in the metaphorical immensity of Asad’s mind-pierced the West too, with its temptation, its licentiousness, its sultry ardor and appeal. It reminded him of a strip club in Toronto he’d visited and had wanted to shoot up as well, though it had been explained to him then that his rage was best controlled until it could be unleashed.

Then on his radio set came the stern voice of authority.

“You two,” he heard the imam command, “we see you on the television screens. Asad and Saalim, correct? You were told not to wantonly destroy property with your limited amounts of ammunition. This is not a party, it is a serious martyr operation. Treat it seriously or be banished. All you boys, you listen. You are martyrs, not brigands. The mission is to drive the people forward into the center and hold them, penned under your guns. You cannot give in to temptation and random impulse. The Koran forbids it. Verse twenty-three, directive eleven: ‘Know the wisdom of thy elders.’”

Throughout America, the Mall, there was frenzy. People scurried desperately to comply, to escape, or to hide. Their minds focused on a single thing and that was to survive. Yet they were not inhumane, and some were quite heroic. Goth teenagers helped old ladies. Black gangbangers helped white Republican mothers. Gay waiters helped high school football players. Old white men helped young white women without thinking about having sex with them, at least for a little while. Somali grandmothers helped Scandinavian grandmothers, who helped them back. Fallen children were gathered and shielded and comforted by complete strangers. Doctors went to the wounded, tried to stanch the blood flow without bandages and placed their own bodies in the way of bullets. Dead Santa’s teenaged elves tried to keep some panicked mothers from racing off, and one even threw herself on a child who had fallen in the crush, got the girl up, and helped her to-well, there was no place to go, but helped her to her screaming mother, who hadn’t found her yet. No one hit anyone or trampled anyone to escape. None of them committed an I-must-live-above-all-else sin worthy of punishment. Manhood was in flower down there on the killing floor and so was womanhood, and fellowhood, until there was nothing to be done but to sit down under the guns of the attackers and hope that they had grown bored with slaughter.