Stephen Hunter - Soft target

He looked down at the young man, who coughed and said, “I thought I’d get Bruce Willis, but I got Keanu fucking Reeves.”

The turbulence pitched the WUSScopter to the right, badly, and only Cap’n Tom’s skills, eroded or not, kept them airborne even as the man cursed, “Goddamn him!”

It was the KPOP Traffic 24/7 copter beelining by them and missing only by inches as it descended toward the vast roof beneath them.

Both camera jocks cursed too, the brush with death particularly bitter in their mouths and minds as the danger part was supposed to be over, but Nikki alone watched the traffic bird diminish as it descended.

“Tom,” she said, “what kind of copter is that? I don’t recognize the type.”

“Moving so fast I could hardly tell. I think it’s an Alouette, a French bird, they use ’em for agricultural spraying and-”

“Do they use ’em for media?” Nikki asked sharply.

“Well, now that you mention it, I can’t recall-”

She saw the small, agile helicopter settle on the roof adjacent to what was barely recognizable as some kind of shack that housed a door.

“He’s terrorist,” she said suddenly. “He’s fake. He’s here to help somebody get away.”

Moment of silence in the chopper, despite the crescendo of noise pouring in from all sides and the waves of turbulence flushing through the open doors. What to do, what to do?

Nikki knew. “Get over there on top of him. Don’t let him take off. We’ve got to stop him. And call five-oh. Get cops here fast. And you guys, get those cameras running, goddammit.”

Cap’n Tom veered hard right on rotor pitch, upped the rpms on his big Bell engine, and began a Vietnam-LZ-under-fire power dive toward his prey.

The helicopter settled twenty-five yards away, its rotors pushing the air out like swells of ocean, and the imam stepped into their full force, then stepped back, lowered, adjusted, and solidified his posture, and began the short run to the aircraft.

It looked like some kind of large mechanical insect, its vivid bulb cockpit somehow representing eyes, its delicate landing struts folded legs, its frail, pipe-like fuselage standing for thorax, and the whirling blades in their blur representing the flashing of wings. He saw Haji beckoning him forward and he got to the thing, used the landing strut as a footrest, and hoisted himself upward and into the empty seat.

“Praise be to Allah! He looks after us!” he screamed, and though the other man could not possibly hear him, he smiled back, squeezing him firmly on the wrists, then turned his attention back to the controls before him and the flight outward.

But at that second, another presence was suddenly upon them. In horror, the imam looked up and saw through the encompassing bubble another helicopter settle over them, sealing them in a little coffin of airspace, the strange craft, being larger and faster, able to impose its will on them.

“Go! Go!” he screamed. “You must go!”

But the pilot above was agile with his heavier machine, and when Haji meant to zoom forward, somehow the intruder beat him to the space and infringed upon his angle, preventing him, and so it went sideways and backward, and the imam watched in horror as Haji’s face clenched into despair, yielding to the look of the hunted.

“Go up, he will not stand against you!” the imam screamed, unaware of the fundamental stupidity of ramming the enemy copter’s skids with his own aircraft’s whirling rotors, but that is indeed what happened, either by intention or imprecise maneuver, and the smaller Alouette shook spastically as its rotors broke apart on the struts beneath the WUFFcopter Huey and, unstabilized, began to chase its own tail as it spun, finding a last surge before it gave over to its death spiral.

The imam screamed as the jaws of hell on this earth opened wide, and the flames were so hot, so very hot.

“Stop talking,” snapped Ray. “You’re hit in both lungs and bleeding out, and I’m going to try and stop the bleeding. Relax, think about something nice, the medics will be here soon.”

Andrew laughed. “Joke’s on you,” he explained. “I wasn’t in it for the money or the chicks, but the glory. As of tomorrow, I’m the most famous man in the world, and nobody will ever remember your name. Memo for next time: Always play the supervillain. Heroes are so last week.”

He laughed again, then winced as, intent, Ray peeled the shemagh off Andrew’s neck and tried to stanch the welling blood from the three 9mm entry punctures, seeing that it was basically hopeless, feeling, despite the circumstances, the depression he usually felt when someone bleeds out helplessly, making ugly sounds, twitching, before going slack forever.

“You might think-”

“I’m telling you to shut up,” Ray said. “Where are those goddamn guys? You need transfusion, surgical clamps, and clotting agent fast. Where the hell are they?”

He looked at the dying boy’s eyes and saw merriment. You had to give it to him: no contrition, no bullshit, Andrew 24/7 to the end.

“Keep fighting,” Ray said. “You can stay around on willpower. Concentrate. Do not let yourself die. Fight, goddammit, the medics will be-”

“It doesn’t matter,” Andrew said. “Tomorrow my game goes up on iPads and Nintendo DS’s and their clones all over the world. You can’t stop it now.”

Ray held the scarf wadded hard against the wound producing the most blood outflow, seemed to slow it for a bit, but so hydraulic is the human body and so critically injured was the boy that the blood simply found another exit point, and thus another wound increased its outflow in response.

Then-an appalling thunderclap split the air accompanied by an instant flash of megaheat and illumination. The flame sucked the air out of the auditorium, that vacuum effect, and then the flare-up subsided, and oxygen became again available. Ray breathed hard at the coolness even as he shielded Andrew with his own body, then turned to see that at the far end of the theater, the roof had caved in under the thrust of a flaming machine, a helicopter, its bulb canopy shattered into a constellation of spiderweb fracture, its struts bent, melted, or sheared, its two passengers mute as the fire ate their corpses.

“Damn,” said Andrew. “I hate it when that happens.”

Suddenly, FBI people were all around Ray, and someone had grabbed him and pulled him out of the theater as medics squadded on Andrew to perform services too late to matter.

“How did you know? How did you know?” someone in a helmet and goggles was yelling into his ear, incomprehensibly.

“I don’t-”

“Which theater?” the fed demanded. “He could have been in any of them.”

Ray gestured upward, as more emergency personnel and other SWAT people ran by him.

The marquee on Theater 5 read:

The Minneapolis Film Society presentsOne night onlyHits of the Eighties Die Hard Yippie-ki-yay, M*****-F******!

Finally, someone threw a sheet over dead Santa.

Mr. Renfro understood: aggression is the key.

“All right,” he said, “I am speaking for the colonel. No officer is allowed to speak directly to media. All media contacts will be cleared through this office. I say again, no media contact except through the superintendent’s office. Now get me this Major Jefferson, fast.”

“Excuse me, sir, who are you?” asked Kemp. “I think I will control press access to FBI personnel in this instance.”

“No, Special Agent. This is a Minnesota State Police initiative. I speak for the colonel on media relations, and if need be, I will get on the phone and get a court gag order on you in three minutes’ time, and if you don’t believe me, you just watch it happen.”

Thus in time, the official hero of the event, Mike Jefferson, was brought into Renfro’s corner of the Incident Command trailer. Renfro cleared the room out before speaking to him.