Stephen Hunter - Soft target

Nothing there, our hero crept around the corner and at last confronted the long corridor off which each of the auditoriums was sited. The guy had to know that he, Andrew, was in one of them. Would he get it right? Would he go by trial and error? Would reinforcements arrive? Would he call for backup? Hmm, probably he’d go straight ahead, because he had to realize that Andrew knew the mall forward and backward, and might know all kinds of escape routes and could even yet, this late in the game, make a getaway. So he had to move fast and close the distance, make the arrest or the kill.

Andrew chuckled softly. This was really cool. It was working out so much better than he’d thought, even if the kill number looked as though it would be the one disappointment. He’d thought those kids would do a better job, but it seemed that so many of them had been secretly taken down that the remaining guys could never get any heavy fire going, and the few that were left sort of wimped out at the end and weren’t willing to aim and kill systematically, as they had been instructed. No, you really couldn’t get good help anymore.

His back to the wall, Ray slid down the corridor, under art deco golden-movie-age affectations, posters of improbably beautiful human beings, another abandoned garbage can on wheels, to the first door. In one of the auditoriums before him, the kid Andrew lurked, probably set up behind the seats, waiting for someone to pop in, silhouetted in the glare of the door, lit from the front by the glow of the screen. Andrew would blast him down, then maybe escape by some predetermined route only he knew. Yet if Ray didn’t press, the boy might vanish just the same, and the little bastard was so smart and had all this stuff so wired, maybe he’d actually have figured out some way to beat the game.

Ray looked at the signs jutting into the hallway, each a mini-marquee bearing the name of the flick on display inside. Sure, Junior might play on that too. That was him: nihilistic but in a “funny” way, hip, ironic, thought everything was a joke, even saw himself as a comedian as he took down the system on its biggest day. It wouldn’t be worth it if he had to do it as some little Arab commando type, cornily shrieking his allegiance to Allah; no, Andrew was too cool for that. He’d do it, but the trick was to do it insouciantly, with some kind of snarky comedy element, so that no matter how it turned out, his followers-there’d be millions, in the way these things worked-would get the joke, smile at it, and hold a special regard in their heart for the great Andrew Nicks, cool to the end, cooler than Dylan and Eric, cooler than Cho, cooler than Jared.

Ray heard movie music blaring from the theater he was closest to, looked up, saw it was some Disney family comedy. No way Andrew would be caught alive, much less dead, in such a travesty of happy-fam cliche.

Ray realized, It’s become a pop quiz on movie irony. To have a chance at him, I have to know which theater he’s in. To know that, I have to decipher the names and meanings of the movies and decide which one would best express his sensibility. Too bad Roger Ebert isn’t here to advise me.

He read the titles.

And he knew.

Of course. Had to be. No other. That was it. That was the one.

It was fifth in line, on the left-hand side. Ray sidled up to it, trying to figure how to He knows I’m here.

He’ll know exactly when I’m coming through because he’s extrapolating from the imagery of my guncam, that’s the gig, and that gives him a one-second start on the action curve, and that’s the one second he uses to dust me. I pop in, blink, can’t see. He lays the front sight and jerks off three fast ones from point-blank range and I’m down. He goes out the back or whatever. Maybe he kills himself. But that’s what the “narrative” demands, he and I, together at last. Ray’s back, and Andrew’s got him. Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Scorsese and De Niro, Andrew and Ray.

Ray had about two seconds or so to decide what to do, and he looked up and down the corridor for inspiration while loud, thriller music came out of the room just beyond the doors, singing the adrenal-goosing rhapsody of syncopated FX destruction, of shots and blasts and falls and deaths in 4–4 time, with a percussion line holding the back beat while the guitar chords moved forward relentlessly, on toward Armageddon or at least The and End.

Ray let his muzzle rise to the marquee above the entrance so that Andrew, so near, so ready for this, knew that he was here at last, ready for his close-up.

The imam made it to the stairwell leading to the roof. He climbed the metal stairs, hearing his steps echo into nothingness, and reached the door itself. He pulled his phone from his jacket, went to CONTACTS, and punched the number. No need for an answer. The pilot would feel the vibe of the phone in his pocket, drop down, and the imam would run twenty feet to the open door, lunge inside, and off they’d go, running low and without lights, next stop Canada. Then the long, secret trip home, then infinite glory, the love of the Faith, the thrill of being Mohamed Atta without the inconvenience of a fiery martyrdom. And then, finally, years and years of glory beyond, the loveliness of death, and the embrace and adoration of Allah himself.

He opened the door-it clicked easily from the inside, according to fire department regulations-and stepped onto the roof.

The sun had set, leaving an apocalyptic purple smear across low-hanging clouds, like a wound in the wall of the universe itself, signifier of end times. A cold breeze struck him, filled his lungs with hope, and yet the spectacle before him was so extraordinary, he could not but respond with utter fascination.

It was like a scene from a war of the last century, where airmen fought in planes with double wings, looping and swirling close at hand, missing each other by inches, skidding this way and that, birdlike and deft, a true flock of death machines. The craft, of course, were helicopters, not biplanes, and now, at the moment of climax, they’d lost all sense of propriety and were swooping and jockeying for position, hovering low, then darting away. The air was aswarm with them, not so much as objects of defined specificity but as presences, blurs of weight and motion lit by red and white lights against the material of their construction, while the beating of their rotors buffeted him powerfully, the sounds of the many petrol-driven engines throbbed loudly, contributing their own vibrations to what he felt as he entered the maelstrom.

He hunched down next to the door, itself contained in a tiny, shack-like structure on the edge of the vast roof, one of many such abutments, rises, and abstractions that made the roof its own kind of featureless wilderness in the mostly dark. He pulled out a flashlight, scrunched it on, and began to wave it, aware of how tiny a signal it was in the immense cauldron of airborne activity.

Yet the angel watched over him. One of the whirling birds immediately detached itself from the mass overhead, and though he couldn’t identify it by type, he knew by the purposeful dive on his orientation that it was his ticket to Mecca.

First person shooter. Andrew crouched behind a row of seats that yielded a perfect angle on the doorway into the auditorium, gun in one hand, iPad delicately balanced on his left knee. He saw what his opponent’s gun muzzle covered. The man looked up to the marquee again, rifle already mounted, so Andrew saw the name of the film playing behind him on the big screen, then he saw the muzzle come down, he saw the man point it at the door, steel himself a last time, and make ready for this most basic yet most dangerous of all FPS exercises, the tactical entry.

The camera closed on the door, losing detail in blur, and at that precise moment, Andrew rose, lifted rifle to shoulder, shifted his view from virtual to real. The gunsight before him was not electrons in cyberspace but cold Eastbloc killing technology at the apogee the genius Mikhail Kalashnikov had achieved, and exactly as the door flew open ten feet from where he crouched in the seats and the man came in low and hard and straight to Andrew, Andrew shot him three times, putting three pills at about three thousand per deep into his center mass. But exactly as Andrew’s focus clarified, he saw that he had not shot a man moving low and fast but a garbage can on wheels with an AK-74 and gun barrel minicam secured at the plastic rim and at that moment the man revealed himself behind the door frame and Andrew, light being faster than sound or bullets, saw three huge flashes blossom from his cupped hands-classic isosceles, like all the books said-and then he found himself lurching backward, catching clumsily on an armrest, and twisting into the chair, very wet, three deep and throbbing wounds beginning to generate enormous pain. In seconds, a face loomed before him, the face of a kind of half-Chinese guy with a crew cut, knocking his gun away, and talking into a phone, saying, “McElroy, I got him, he’s hit bad, get medics up here fast, I’m in theater five in the movie complex.”