Stephen Hunter - Soft target

He lay, looking up at the lake-shaped spread of skylights four stories up. He was not a religious man, for driving eight hundred miles a day in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler for forty years does not incline one toward the more spiritual things in life, nor was he ever in any one place long enough for church to present itself as an option. If he worshipped anything, it was a goddess: his wife.

“You must fight,” he told her. He knew about fighting: 1st Marine Division, An Loc, RVN, ’65-’66, Purple Heart, Silver Star.

“Jerry,” she said, “just be still.”

“Sweetie, listen. These bastards, don’t let ’em see you crying. Don’t give ’em nothing. Don’t give ’em no satisfaction at all. When I go, just put on your steel face and don’t show a thing. Remember that time I got busted in that vice sting in Ohio? You didn’t talk to me for a year. Honey, that’s the face. I know you got it. You give it to them and make them fear you.”

“Please, please, Jerry.”

She was sitting in a lake of blood. He was bleeding out, and the warm fluid ran from his wound into her dress and puddled around them on the floor.

“God, I love you so much,” he said, and then went still.

Not far from him a man named Charles Dougan was concerned about a bowel movement he could not prevent from occurring. He was ashamed. It was one thing to die, it was another to die with your pants full of shit. He didn’t realize that incontinence of one sort or another was a crucial feature of hostage situations, because no media ever dealt with it honestly. But the significant commonality among a large number of people held against their will was lack of sanitation for bodily fluids and that was simply an unfortunate biological reality.

He raised his hand.

A boy shoved his way over, roughly.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

“Shit in pants,” the boy said and turned away.

And so to his shame and horror, that’s what Charles Dougan did.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the young woman next to him.

“That’s okay,” said Sally Chan. “It doesn’t matter.”

There were at least a thousand, sitting cross-legged and head-down on the brick pathways of the Silli-Land amusement park. The rides, now still, towered over them. Absurd contrivances, they seemed yet more insane given the circumstances, but no one in the crowd much cared about the irony of being surrounded by thrill rides while being held at gunpoint under threat of death. And there was dead Santa on his throne, his body twisted, his hat on his ear, his head so askew only a corpse could sustain it, and that red spatter of blood V-shaped by the exit of the bullet on the satin plush of his chair. A loudspeaker issued the words “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,” but nobody paid much attention.

The armed boys wandered the perimeter, sometimes kicking their way into crowds to deal with issues. Their faces were impassive, but the guns, sinister black with ventilated barrels and wicked curved magazines, were terrifying. Nearly everyone had seen such weapons on the TV news and knew them to be the tool of the subhuman category of merciless terrorists, of which their owners were surely members.

The boys occasionally came together and laughed. Or one would vanish into the mall and return with, say, taffy apples or french fries, and all would eat. They drank a lot of Cokes and pretty much looted the Silli-Land refreshment center for shakes and hot dogs. One of them put a cowboy hat on, squishing it down over his shemagh headdress, and all helped themselves to new jeans and high-end New Balance or Nike sneakers.

Who was in charge? There didn’t seem to be a leader, but the boys weren’t quite random in their movement and more or less obeyed the rules of sound security, each knot of two hanging in that quadrant of the perimeter, keeping their guns oriented toward the seated hostages. At any time there were a great many guns bearing on the hostages, and all fingers on all triggers. Most of the hostages also believed the guns were “machine guns” and that a single pull would send a squirt of bullets out to take them down in batches. That concept alone was enough to keep them seated and quiet.

There was no chance at heroism. Any kind of mass rush toward a gunman was precluded by the impossibility of coordinating it and the immediacy of mass death it would ensure. The smell of burned powder still hung in the air. It was like an anti-aphrodisiac to dreams of action. To rise against the guns would be to die pointlessly in a mall, even while outside the rescuers accumulated.

From above it looked somewhat like the Bristol Speedway, Nikki Swagger thought. A huge, absurd structure decreed into the middle of nowhere, its odd shape touching automatically on chords of patriotism and sacrifice in all who saw it from the sky, serviced by a mesh of highways that came to it from the vague hinterlands. Now it seemed like race day: activity, activity, activity. Trucks kept pulling up, all of them spurting illumination that lit the twilight in incoherent splash patterns. From them spilled urgent men in black, with strange devices, who ran to cover and took up positions. The whole portrait pulsed with energy, purpose, dedication, high training, sophisticated deployment, yet nothing was happening. A fleet of red-white ambulances and other emergency service vehicles had gathered in one of the parking lots. Outside the ring, the highways were jammed with cars and trucks, even as more public safety teams tried to fight the rush and get through them to get close enough to assist.

Over her earphones she heard Marty back at the station.

“Nikki, the great Obobo is giving a briefing.”

“The first of many, I’m sure.”

“He didn’t say much, only that this appears to be some kind of violent takeover, shots have been fired, some people have been wounded, and the mall has been evacuated.”

“Duh,” said Nikki, “who didn’t know that? Does he have a time frame?”

“He just said law enforcement from all over the state is gathering on site, the feds are pitching in, but the situation is still hazy. He has no casualty numbers, no time frame, no declarations of policy, nothing but your usual tight-lipped five-oh bullshit.”

Nikki knew 5–0 bullshit-she’d covered cops in Bristol, Virginia, for five years-but this guy Obobo was a bullshitter beyond any she’d encountered. He was handsome, smooth, learned the reporters’ names, knew which cameras and what lights were used, and how to apply his own makeup. Her joke: “For a cop, he knows more about makeup than Lady Gaga.”

But this was her big op too, she knew, just as it was the ambitious Obobo’s. She’d worked as a news producer in Cape Coral, Florida, for a bit, and now she was a producer for WUFF-TV, Saint Paul. Scoops here, on this day, could get her to a network, to Washington or New York.

She gazed down on the scene from about two thousand feet in the WUFFcopter, as it was called on the air, the WUSScopter by station personnel, because everybody was scared to fly in it. Usually it covered traffic, but today, with Cap’n Tom at the controls, it orbited over the mall, while in the rear, Larry Soames and Jim Diehl worked cameras to send the images back to the station and thence to the greater Minneapolis area. She hoped Cap’n Tom wasn’t drinking today and cursed the United States Marine Corps, for whom he had once flown, because it was that connection that got him the job with the station manager, another ex-marine, and she chose not to acknowledge the fact that it was her connection to the Corps, via her father, that had probably gotten her the job too. In fact, the station was a kind of Marine outpost in the chilly upper Midwest.

“Nikki, I’d like to go up a couple thousand. It’s tricky this low,” said Cap’n Tom. Her paranoia tried to convince her that there was a slur to his words, but she couldn’t be positive.