Stephen Hunter - Soft target

“I am so up for this.”

“You are a true warrior princess, bravest of the brave. Okay, in just a few, it’ll be our turn for some first person shooting.”

The snipers huddled at, roughly, Racine.

“The only thing we have is flashbangs,” one of them said.

“And they don’t go boom, they go pop.”

“Fuck,” said McElroy, who’d just returned from scouting for Ray and hoped they’d solved their problem but was disappointed to discover they had not.

“I have two red smokers,” someone said.

“Forget the smokers.”

“Maybe if in concert, all of us whacked a certain small area with our butts.”

“A, probably doesn’t work, B, throws the scopes out of zero. No go.”

“I’m just thinking out loud.”

“That’s good, that’s good,” said McElroy, “think out loud, everybody, maybe we’ll come up with something.”

“Hey,” said a state trooper sniper, “we have Kevlar tactical helmets.” He snapped his finger against the hard tactical shell. “Maybe smash with them, open the hole, and that way we don’t throw the zeros out.”

“You’ll never get through that shit with plastic helmets,” someone else said.

“Hey, this shit is hard,” said the trooper.

“Any entrenching tools?”

“This isn’t World War Two.”

“What about with our knives we chip away at that groove FBI opened. All of us working hard, maybe we get it loosened, then smash it with our helmets.”

“That seems about the best. I mean it’s all we can do, right, FBI?”

“I guess,” said McElroy, reaching for his knife. But as he did, his wrist passed over the smooth cylinder that was the flashbang grenade, more a pyrotechnic than anything else, meant to produce a loud percussion and a disorienting flash. But not enough junk in it to “Okay,” he said. “How many flashbangs?”

A quick survey produced the answer: twelve.

“Twelve. I’m wondering, what happens if they all go off at once?”

“You’d have to contain it,” said somebody. “Direct it. They can bring down a huge building with a few pointed charges.”

“Use the helmets and-”

“But it has to go simo. You’d need wiring, dets, a whole tech kit that the Army has but we don’t. I don’t-”

McElroy saw it then.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. We take one of those helmets. We load it with flashbangs. Hmm, let’s see, they work just like grenades, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, we wrap, I don’t know, gauze, bandages, duct tape, something soft and malleable around the levers on the flashbangs, got it? That secures the levers. Then we pull the pins but nothing happens because the levers are taped down. Then very carefully we run a wire or a piece of tape or something through the tape on the flashbang levers. Then very carefully, we put the flashbangs on the glass and we cover them with the helmet and maybe you put something heavy on the helmet.”

“Is this a game you’re playing? Are you MacGyver or something?”

“Why not just run the tape through the rings on the flashers?” someone said. “Simpler.”

“Simpler, yeah, but those pins take a lot of pull to free up, and I can see the tape or whatever breaking or getting hung up,” McElroy said.

“He’s right,” said the trooper.

“So if this thing goes bad and the bastards downstairs start shooting, we pull the tape line, which pulls the tape loose, and all the flashbang levers go ping, and three seconds later all twelve of them go off more or less simo, and the helmet directs the considerable force of their detonation downward, I’m betting you blow a nice big hole in that glass. Then we go to war, and we shoot every gunman we see in the head. Do you get it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And if the hostages are released, all we have to do is replace the pins and give everybody their toys back. Okay. Have you got it?”

“It’s a plan, Stan.”

No, no, no, no, no.

He’d made the jumps from Bruce Wyatt to RealDeal Opsys to RealDeal Secsys to RealDeal Secsys Linkage to A wilderness.

Deployed in front of him on the screen were nearly four hundred-more than three screens’ worth of scrolling-coded units, each representing some kind of RealDeal franchise or outlet. One of them had to be the RealDeal on the fourth floor at America, the Mall, in Indian Falls, Minnesota. But which?

The geniuses at RealDeal Opsys so knew their empire that they didn’t bother to split the list by category as any sane outfit would do. It wasn’t broken down by store profit levels, major markets, region, or state. No, just an endless column of bullshit listings like RD/OPSYS5509-3.4X. What? What the hell was that?

“Someone call RealDeal Corporate,” said Dr. Benson. “We’ll get an engineer on the phone and we’ll-”

So close, thought Neal. So goddamned close.

The Air Saudi 747-8 seemed to take forever. The colonel watched it; a heat mirage rose from the engine structures, shimmering as it blurred the reality behind it, signifying the mounting temperature of jet engine exhaust. Then, finally, it lurched, picked up speed, and the camera stayed with it while behind it the farm plains and dreary suburbs of Minneapolis began to blur. At the end of a long, slow fifteen hundred yards, it rose, shivered, then shucked the ground, shivered again as its landing gear retracted and disappeared behind closing wheel wells, and then banked right against the black sky, heading north on the great circle route, to Yemen.

There was no cheering in the Command trailer, but the colonel felt a stir in his heart. He had done what he could do. He had given them what they wanted. He had bridled in his wild cowboys who wanted to go in with guns blazing. He felt at peace, secure in the knowledge that no one else could have negotiated the treacherous terrain and the many obstacles between what he had discovered upon arrival and this very moment.

Mr. Renfro whispered in his ear, “Congratulations, Doug. You brought it off. You did it.”

“Thanks,” he said, “I couldn’t have-”

“Sir, it’s him. Andrew Nicks.”

The colonel took the phone, surprised to find himself drenched in sweat.

“You saw?” he said. “You have your prisoners. Good riddance to them. Now give us our hostages.”

“Excellent. By the way, change of plans,” said Andrew. “Please witness the firepower of the armed, fully operational Death Star.” He paused, hoping the Star Wars ref gave his carefully considered statement more oomph.

“Imam,” he said in a loud voice so that all could hear, “tell the jihadis to open fire. Kill the hostages. Kill them all. Colonel, I now restore the security television cameras so that you and all of America can watch the massacre and learn to cower in fear of Islam.”

Nick, in the Pennsylvania Avenue crisis center, heard the kill order from Andrew Nicks, Eric and Cho wannabe, soldier of Islam, first person shooter champion, and all-around asshole, and almost before the sentence was finished, was screaming and body-Englishing into his mike, “McElroy, blow the window now, blow it now and engage targets. Ray, can you suppress from your position?”

But he was a second behind the action curve as McElroy, having heard the same declaration of purpose, had already yanked the master cord and felt the tape securing the levers of the twelve flashbangs under the Kevlar helmet on the thick glass of the skylight pull free, and in the next second or so, the det went loud and hard, made more pointed in its effectiveness by the cupping effect of the helmet-a batch of bulletproof vests lay atop it, pinning it-which blew all force downward into and through the skylight, shearing through the heavy Plexiglas, atomizing it into a spray of glitter, like droplets of water, yielding a jagged opening, almost like a hole in the ice.