Soft Target (9 page)

“Everybody gets a turn. No shoving. Stand in line. Make Miss Lavelva proud,” she instructed, knowing these passive little white girls would do exactly that. She couldn’t go with them, of course; policy was that no childcare coordinator could be alone in a bathroom with a child of either sex. But perhaps, on a day such as today, the rules had gone out the window. Still, it was better to obey policy, no matter what was happening outside. Here in the second-floor Mall Service Childcare Center, policies would be obeyed.

Well, all but one.

She said to the boys, “You all line up against the wall. We’re still going to play Hide from the monster. You lie down, you be quiet. You don’t let no monster spot you. This is going to be a long game, so best get used to it. I don’t want crying or whining. Y’all have to be brave little boys today, you hear?”

They nodded. The redheaded one, CHARLES 3-5, said, “What’s brave?”

“Like a big old football player. Ain’t scared of nothing.”

“I am scared,” said Charles. “It’s different now.”

“Yes it is,” said Lavelva. “It is very different. But Charles, you are so feisty I want you to be the leader, okay? You be the bravest.”

“Yes, Miss Lavelva,” said Charles.

Lavelva turned, went to her desk, or rather
the
desk, as it was generic to the center, owned by none of the coordinators. She saw nothing that could be altered to be dangerous, no letter openers, no files, no spikes for spearing paper notices, nothing. Not even a ruler. Obviously, with nimble-fingered little brutes around, thought had been exercised on keeping the space free of dangerous implements.

Then she saw the daily schedule notebook, a three-ring binder volume. She opened it, realized that a steel or at least metal slat ran up its spine. She pulled apart the three rings, and dumped the papers out, then used her strength to rip the slat from the spine of the book. It tore messily, taking some cardboard binding with it, but it was eleven inches of sharp steel, albeit flawed by three rings, which she snapped shut. She slipped it into her jeans, in the small of her back. Then she turned back to the boys.

CHARLES 3-5 was standing and pointing.

“I see a monster,” he said.

She turned, and through the glass block wall that divided the center from the pedestrian corridor, she saw the shadow of a gunman.

There were six of them, but the manager, Mrs. Renfels, had broken down: all women, all terrified, except for Molly, who was more concerned for her mother and her sister Sally than she was for herself. Even tough little Rose, the assistant manager, had quieted down as apprehension gripped her.

“You won’t find out soon,” Ray told Molly. “You have to worry about Molly first. You have to commit yourself to staying put, locking down, waiting them out. That is how you win.” There was no privacy,
as all of them were jammed in the rear storeroom, under racks of bustiers and negligees and all the scanties of the male imagination that now seemed quite alien to their world.

“I have to know,” she said, trying to quell the anxiety. Sally was impossibly cute at fifteen, with smart, vivid eyes, a thin girl’s body, and grace just easing into a woman’s radiance, and Mom was still feisty even if she had never quite adjusted to American ways. It sickened Molly that the two most vulnerable members of her family were in the greatest danger. The last she’d spoken to them on her cell, they had in fact been on the first floor where the roundup had taken place. But if they’d been luckily in the outer ring, they might have made it to an exit. She wanted to call, but she was terrified that if they were in the mob of hostages Ray had described, the ringing cell might have attracted attention.

“I wish they’d turn that goddamn music off,” Milt’s wife said. “If I hear ‘Jingle Bells’ one more time I will puke.”

“Not on me, please,” said the blonde, the one who clearly considered herself a hot number.

“Why is this happening?” Mrs. Renfels asked, her first words since the crisis had begun.

“It’s because we should have used the atom bomb on them after nine-eleven,” said the hot blonde, obviously the sort used to issuing opinions and by her beauty banishing responses. “If we’d have burned them all, this wouldn’t be going on.”

“You can’t kill a billion people because, what, thirteen men are crazy assholes,” responded Milt’s wife.

“Oh yes you can. You push a button and they are in flames.”

“That is the craziest—”

“All right, all right,” said Ray. “I am not trying to be a boss or take over or anything, but it’s better if you don’t get in squabbles until this thing is over. You may have to work together and you have to see the person beside you as a family member. You can fight all you want when you’re advising on the set of the TV movie or something.”

“He’s right,” said Rose. “Just keep a cork in it, it’s better for all of us.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” said Mrs. Renfels. “You’re young, you’re in this for yourself. I have three kids. If something happens to me—oh, why is this happening?”

“Ma’am,” said Ray, “I don’t mean to tell you how to think, but I am a former marine and I have been in some fights. If you’ll allow me, I would advise you never to use the W-word today. The W-word is
why
. Sometimes there is no why, and if you get hung up on why, you lose your effectiveness. I’ve seen it happen. The men who die are the men who can’t believe they’re in a fight and can’t believe that someone is trying to kill them. It seems so unfair to them and they’re so busy feeling sorry for themselves, they don’t seek cover, they don’t return fire, they don’t scan the horizon, they forget how to use their expensive equipment. The men who live get it right away; they understand they’re in a different world and they have to deal with exactly what is before them with maximum concentration.”

“That’s very good advice,” said Rose.

“Maybe we should surrender,” said the blonde.

“No ma’am,” said Ray. “You should instead consider how lucky you are. Some people are dead, some people, maybe a thousand, are under the gun. You are, for the time being, safe. No one knows you’re here and no one, that I can tell, is looking for you. Just stay put and trust in God and the public safety people who are, I guarantee you, working very hard right this second to set us free.”

“Great job,” said Obobo. “Major Jefferson, this is a fabulous plan. I’m very impressed.”

Jefferson amplified: “We don’t blow all doors simultaneously and move down the corridors into the crowd, unable to engage until we reach the amusement park. That’s a no go, because it gives them however
long it takes our people to advance down the corridors to open fire on hostages. One guy at each corridor shooting at SWAT could hold up the advance for six or eight minutes. Way too much time.”

“Go on, Major.”

“So we take the six best shooters with gunfight experience, all armed with red dot MP5s on semiauto. And we’ve got these guys. Some of our people are good, some of the FBI guys are really good, and Phil Mason of Edina SWAT is the Area Seven three-gun champion. I’ve shot against him and he is damned good and damned cool. So we six, we go underground through a shaft that runs from parking lot seven to the mall central. That puts us right underneath Area Z. I have a guy from Bloomington SWAT who was an army engineer in the sandbox. We rig six detonations to blow through the floor. At a given moment, we turn off the power, the place goes dark. It’ll be a few seconds before the emergency gen kicks in. But the gunmen immediately see the holes and assume men will come from them. No, uh-uh, that’s the diversion. We’ve quietly come up through the ducts under the Area Z concessionaire stand here”—he pointed to it on the chart—“and have only floor boarding and linoleum at a certain locality that the engineer has specified. Once the gunmen commit to the assault from the ground, we hit ’em. They will have moved to cover the openings we’ve just blown. Head shots, targets marked, we can take ’em down fast, before the crowd has a chance to panic. But Colonel, we have to move now. It’ll take time to get men through the ducts into the space under Area Z, it’ll take time to locate and plant the explosives, and it’ll take time to—”

“Again, I can’t tell you how impressed I am,” Colonel Obobo said, explaining his reasons. “It’s thorough, it’s creative, it takes all the variables into consideration. I’m very pleased to take it under advisement.” He touched the intense major on the shoulder as if to confer a blessing. Then he turned away, leaving an incredulous look on the major’s face and the awareness that he’d just gotten another no that sounded even more like a yes.

“They’re shooting inside the mall,” one of the radio techs announced. “FBI snipers say they’re shooting inside the mall.”

McElroy was first off the chopper, first into position. From the air, the lake shape of the glass was apparent and he had raced to what must have been the tip of Lake Michigan, right at Chicago, but now that he was here, it was simply Lake Glass, or Lake Plastic, an immensity of transparent, thick plastic that would somehow have to be penetrated. But first he had to equip.

He unzipped the rifle bag and laid out a Remington 700 with a Leupold 10× tactical scope, the whole thing anodized forest green. Carefully he removed a long green tube, which a Velcro strap had secured inside the bag, and brought it close to his eyes for an examination. It was a Gemtech suppressor, about eight inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, and under the tubing it consisted mainly of baffles and chambers and holes, the point of which was to elongate the time of escape for the rapidly expanding gases of a shot so that when they reached the atmosphere, they were slowed down and exited with a kind of snap instead of a terrible, earsplitting crack. With the suppressor screwed carefully on the threaded muzzle, he inserted the bolt into the receiver, reached into an ammo compartment to remove a box of Federal 175-grain match cartridges in .308, and slid five into the rifle’s magazine, closing the bolt on and chambering the fifth. He flicked the safety on, not that he believed in safeties, looped the sling around his shoulder, and stood to examine the scene.

What lay before him was a wall about five feet tall that formed the well of the vast skylight that was Lake Michigan. It was of course not a single sheet of Plexiglas but divided into cells about 20 by 20 feet. Peering over the edge of this southernmost cell, he was rewarded with a vision from five stories up of a crowd of disconsolate Christmas shoppers jammed into the walkways and open areas of a Technicolor amusement park and seen from ninety degrees at an altitude
of about 125 feet through heavy plastic; details were hard to pick out. In time he recognized what had to be a gunman, mainly by the black object carried under one arm and the black-green rag on his head. Details emerged: pistol, knife, throat mike. With access, it would have been an easy shot, and he prayed to the sniper god that he would get a chance to take it.

He radio-checked.

“Sniper Five, set up, in position,” speaking to a state police sergeant in the headquarters van.

“I have you, Five. Sitrep, please.”

“I have a good angle on the scene, almost straight down. I’m at site Chicago at the bottom of Michigan and therefore have a good view of the balconies on the opposite, that is, the eastward side. No activity there. I do not have a shot, repeat, do not have a shot. The glass or plastic or whatever it is is very thick, I don’t think I could get through it if I had a fucking hammer.”

“Be advised, no shooting, that is our call. You stay on position and call in periodically with intelligence and we will take that under advisement.”

“May I talk with FBI supervisor?”

“Negative, Five, he is in conference with incident commander and others. The governor is expected momentarily.”

“Request conference with him when available, over.”

“Noted, will try and make that happen, Five, but no promises, out.”

So that was it. All dressed up and no one to shoot. Or rather, no way to shoot, although, given the angle, the bad boys would literally represent the idealized fish in a barrel.

Dear Sniper God, your humble servant Dave here, please let me take one of these motherfuckers before the day is done
. But he also knew the ways of the sniper god, and the sniper god would only help those who help themselves.

McElroy, thirty-two and a Bureau lifer who loved the SWAT life
and had been on a hundred raids and on the periphery of two or three gunfights but had yet to fire a shot in anger, looked around him. Beyond, of course, was Minnesota, turning dark and pierced with an ever-increasing array of lights as the sun was setting. Far off he could see highways streaming with cars, the illumination of suburbs and strip malls, just regular American stuff. Then there was the roof itself, the flat, black-asphalt stage upon which this drama was playing out. The flatness was vast, way out of human scale, easily bigger than an aircraft carrier’s deck or a football stadium’s parking area, reaching to infinity. About a mile away, or so it seemed, was a rack of industrial-looking apparatuses, presumably part of the cooling and heating system. There were at least six little sheds—they looked comically like the ice-fishing hutches these Minnesotans built on their frozen lakes in winter—that presumably held doors that opened onto stairways into the interior. He guessed they were all locked, but it occurred to him that a good B-and-E man could probably get through, and operators could be fed into play that way. But surely they would know that at Command.

Then, more immediately, these goddamned lake-shaped skylights, here at the center of the vastness. Regularly spaced around the perimeter of Michigan, he saw a fellow such as himself, all Tommy-Tacticaled up in Nomex jumpsuit with Glock .40 in shoulder holster, with a big bad rifle, a black watch cap or Kevlar helmet, and a posture of utter helplessness with reference to the thick wall of impenetrable glass between himself and his potential targets.

He thought, I will get through this fucking glass. I will, I will, I will.

But how? This wasn’t one of those absurd movies where the guy reaches into his kit and just happens to have exactly the right tool, a computer-driven microdiamond buzz saw that was also miniaturized and could cut through the stuff like butter and makes a hell of an old-fashioned. No, darn, he’d left that at home. Nor did he have Gatorade and cough medicine that could be instantly combined into sulfuric acid and melt the glass. He didn’t have a goddamned thing.