Soft Target Read online

  “MR. HUNTER WRITES

  ACTION SCENES AS WELL AS,

  OR BETTER THAN, ANYONE

  IN THE BUSINESS.”

  —THE NEW YORK SUN

  Black Friday

  America’s largest shopping mall

  Suburban Minneapolis

  3:00 P.M.

  Ten thousand people jam the aisles, the corridors, the elevators, and the escalators of America, the Mall—a giant Rubik’s Cube of a structure with its own amusement park located in the spacious center atrium. Of those people, nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight have come to shop.

  The other twelve have come to kill.

  Stephen Hunter’s hyper-drive, eighth-gear new thriller, Soft Target, chronicles the day when the unthinkable happens: twelve gunmen open fire in the mall corridors, driving the pack before them. Those on the upper floors take cover or get out any way they can; but within a few minutes the gunmen have herded more than a thousand hostages into the amusement park.

  Ray Cruz, one of the heroes of Hunter’s last bestseller, Dead Zero, is in the mall with his fiancée and her family. The retired Marine sniper thought he was done with stalking and killing—but among the trapped thousands, he’s the only one with a plan and the guts to confront the self-proclaimed “Brigade Mumbai.” Now all he needs is a gun.

  FBI Sniper Dave McElroy has a gun. But positioned on the roof of the vast building, looking down through one of its thickly paned Great Lakes–shaped skylights, and without explosives or fuses—or the go-ahead from his superiors—he is effectively cut off from his targets and forced into the role of witness to the horror unfolding below.

  Set during the four hours of the terrifying event, the story follows both hostages and gunmen, detailing the complex strategic police response, the full-press media saturation coverage, even the politics of SWAT as both the Minnesota State Police and the FBI struggle to control, confront, and ultimately defuse the crisis.

  Having learned the lessons of Columbine, the feds believe that immediate action is the only solution. But Douglas Obobo, the charismatic and ambitious commandant of the state police, orders cooperation, tolerance, communication, and empathy for the gunmen. He feels that with his superior negotiating skills, he can make contact with the shooters and gently nudge them into surrender. But what if their goal all along has been unparalleled massacre—and they’re only waiting for prime time?

  With unrelenting suspense and vivid scenes of violence and chaos in the center of a terror-crazed afternoon in Middle America, thriller master Stephen Hunter takes us into the belly of the softest of soft targets.

  PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNTER’S DEAD ZERO

  THE THRILLER THAT INTRODUCED

  MARINE SNIPER RAY CRUZ

  “Dead Zero is at its best when Hunter has Cruz in the novel’s crosshairs.”

  —THE OREGONIAN

  “The only book better than a new Jack Reacher novel is a new Bob Lee Swagger adventure. Dead Zero, with a dynamite plot and riveting characters, is everything any action fan could want as [Swagger] pits his wits against a man who could be a younger version of himself.”

  —TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

  “If anyone could be more valorous, more skilled and resourceful, more uncompromisingly upright, and at the same time more downright deadly than Bob Lee Swagger, it would have to be Gunnery Sergeant Ray Cruz.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger is getting to be almost as popular as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. . . . In Dead Zero . . . there’s a marine sniper out there who just won’t die. He mirrors Swagger in his talent and intensity. His name is Ray Cruz. . . . Dead Zero is packed with Hunter’s patented action sequences, great character studies and sinister villains working on their doctorate in Power. Here’s hoping we see more of the unstoppable Ray Cruz. He’d make a fitting successor in Hunter’s army elite.”

  —MADISON COUNTY HERALD.COM

  MORE PRAISE FOR STEPHEN HUNTER

  “Hunter is a great entertainer, one of our finest practitioners of the classic, blood-soaked and propulsive American thriller.”

  —THE WASHINGTON POST

  “Master of the modern gunfighter tale, he isn’t just the best action writer of this generation, but the best of any.”

  —THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

  “Few authors, of any genre, write with as much swagger and verve as film-critic-turned-thriller-bestseller Hunter.”

  —FT. WORTH STAR TELEGRAM

  STEPHEN HUNTER has written 17 novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2011 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

  __________

  Dead Zero

  I, Sniper

  Night of Thunder

  The 47th Samurai

  American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)

  Now Playing at the Valencia

  Havana

  Pale Horse Coming

  Hot Springs

  Time to Hunt

  Black Light

  Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Criticism

  Dirty White Boys

  Point of Impact

  The Day Before Midnight

  Target

  The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spies)

  The Second Saladin

  The Master Sniper

  Simon & Schuster

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  New York, NY 10020

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunter

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

  Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition December 2011

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  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunter, Stephen.

  Soft target/Stephen Hunter. — 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Snipers—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction.

  3. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.U494S57 2011

  813’.54—dc23 2011030150

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3
870-0

  ISBN 978-1-4391-4994-2 (ebook)

  Contents

  2:47 P.M.–3:19 P.M.

  A Few Minutes Earlier

  3:20 P.M.–4:00 P.M.

  4:00 P.M.–5:04 P.M.

  5:04 P.M.–5:26 P.M.

  5:26 P.M.–5:48 P.M.

  5:48 P.M–5:55 P.M.

  Three Months Earlier

  5:55 P.M.–6:14 P.M.

  6:15 P.M.–6:55 P.M.

  Two Months Earlier

  6:55 P.M.–7:20 P.M.

  One Month Earlier

  7:21 P.M.–7:35 P.M.

  7:35 P.M.–7:55 P.M.

  Earlier That Day

  7:55 P.M.–8:01 P.M.

  8:01 P.M.–8:14 P.M.

  8:14 P.M.–8:47 P.M.

  8:47 P.M.–9:35 P.M.

  Three Months Later

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To the writing teachers who made an otherwise

  unspecial kid feel special all the way through.

  Mr. Aita

  Mr. Gregory

  Dr. Guest

  Mr. Byrne

  Mr. Hungerford

  Mr. Jacobi

  Mr. Baldwin

  Feathers flew like a turkey! Well,

  they shouldna run, they shouldna run.

  —CRAZY LEE, THE WILD BUNCH, 1969

  SOFT TARGET

  2:47 P.M.–3:19 P.M.

  The bullet hit Santa Claus beneath the left eye.

  It shattered his skull, blew a large exit wound from the rear of that vessel, and drove a bright red spatter pattern across the pale satin of his throne like some sort of twisted abstract painting. Worse still, the ballistic energy unleashed an upper-body spasm that shook his hat comically askew, and it slipped off his face and caught on his ear and hung there like a large red sock.

  The four-year-old girl sitting in his lap stared not so much in horror but in fascination. She understood that this was “different” but had no larger context against which to compare it. She had no acquaintance yet with the concept of horror and the human fear of seeing the body’s vaults penetrated and eviscerated, but she picked up immediately on the appropriate response from her mother, who grabbed her and started screaming as the hundreds of others clustered around Santa’s throne began to do the same.

  A FEW MINUTES EARLIER

  It was like combat, except the food wasn’t as good.

  It was . . . shopping . . . in a mall . . . on the day after Thanksgiving, the blackest of black Fridays.

  Ray Cruz decided that he would never take an IQ test again, for the results, after he had agreed to this adventure, would prove suicidally depressing.

  He shook his head, even as someone in the crowd jostled his shoulder. That person was outbound down the corridor called Colorado—after the river, not the state—while he was inbound. His fault? Maybe, maybe not, and courteous as ever, he shot a look to his victim, issued a tiny smile of contrition, noted that it was a she and that she was under twenty and concluded that he did not register as a carbon-based life form, and turned back to what lay ahead.

  What lay ahead was people, confusion, greed, stuff, the despair of the holidays, the crunch of families that did not get along, duties and responsibilities only half-articulated but completely felt, guilt and regret, endless and passionate. All that was evident in the tableaux before him, the long corridor of mall America, a place he hardly knew, lined on each side by mercantile units offering the usual treasure—jewelry, clothes, shoes, ladies’ undies, toys, a stop here and there for junk food or hooch—all of it lit through the daylight by the red-green-yellow spectrum of holiday illumination, though the temp was a steady seventy-two and the echoes that amplified the ambient noise level testified also to its indoorness. So much data, so many splendors, a multitude of faces and costumes, the range from beauty to grotesque, from health to sickness, from the very young to the very old. It was like a village bazaar he’d once seen in Afghanistan, except for the Afghanistan part. It sucked the energy out of him. He wanted to take cover. It was incoming, like an artillery barrage to the senses, 24/7. He felt his normally impassive face collapse in unwilled but undeniable melancholy.

  “Hey, Marine, don’t fade on me,” Molly Chan said.

  “I’m about to call a corpsman,” he said.

  “Big tough guy like you? You can get through this. We’ll show up with packages and make them so happy and you’ll feel good. The nephews will all worship you, the sisters will wonder why you took me over them, my father will offer to make you a partner in his business, and my mom . . . well, who knows about my mom?”

  It sounded pretty good to Ray. Family. It was something that had been taken from him years ago, on a highway outside Manila when a drunken truck driver hit his mother and father as they drove home from a visit with her relatives. Even discovering that his biological father still lived hadn’t quite filled the hole in his life; maybe the sprawling, argumentative, rambunctious Chan clan would.

  He was forty-two now, a few months past twenty-two years of gung ho, Semper Fi USMC lifestyle, mostly shooting and getting shot at. Ray had many scars from distant, dry or cold places, and he had many memories that sometimes—less now than before—flooded over him: men and boys bleeding out or torn to pieces, the dysentery of fear, the yoke of duty, his own need to press on and finish, even if it finished him. What’re you trying to prove, Ray? Achilles died a million years ago. Someone’s going to put an arrow in your heel too, if you don’t watch out.

  I’m Hector, not Achilles, Ray had replied, knowing the difference.

  But then, in the Washington area for a talk at one of the alphabet-soup agencies that sought his postretirement employment, he had met Molly Chan, and maybe it would all change, maybe it would be better after all. It had been, of all places, another gigantic mall, one out in Northern Virginia.

  “You look like you’re about to cry,” someone had said to him as he stood at the corner of Macy’s and Lord & Taylor’s, baffled as to direction and destination.

  He turned; she was more Asian than he was, shorter than he was, and unlike his dead flat desert of a face, adept primarily at staying neutral while people tried to kill him, hers was lively, lit from within by intelligence and wit. And she had—

  “You have cheekbones,” he said.

  “One on each side. They won’t go away no matter how much I eat.”

  “I’m half-Asian,” he said.

  “I noticed both halves,” she said. “I bet it’s a long story.”

  “Longer than Tolkien. Denser too. But at least—no hobbits. Anyhow, yeah, I am about to cry. Why did I come here? It’s like the end of the world. I just need some underpants.”

  “You’ve never been in a mall before?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure. I’m just out of the Marine Corps, twenty-two years. They may get you killed, but they do hand out free underpants.”

  She laughed at his little joke, and that was a kind of start. It turned out they got along, their rhythms were right, they agreed on who the world’s assholes were, they didn’t like pompous, overbearing, self-important people, they believed in hard work, modesty, repression, and honesty. Neither drank a lot, both drank a little. Both were embarrassingly smart. What could possibly go wrong?

  First it was coffee, then it was a couple of meals, a number of enjoyably merry e-mails, then a really bad movie, and then some interesting stuff happened and here he was in suburban Minnesota, at the biggest mall in America—America, the Mall, it called itself, and everywhere you looked stood the three letters AtM—on the biggest shopping day of the year. He was visiting her parents and family, headquartered in nearby Saint Paul, and on this day, the Chans went shopping en masse.

  The family was Hmong, that is, formerly mountain tribal Vietnamese, honorable and ferocious allies of the American war effort of the ’60s and ’70s, since (by political necessity) decamped to the upper Midwest. She was second-generation, had only been to Asia as a tourist. She was thirty-four a
nd an attorney in Washington, at the Department of Energy. She was beautiful, too good for any man she’d ever met, and even now unsure why she had spoken to the trim guy in the mall looking for underpants but glad she had. He remained vague about his past, not knowing that at a certain time, before she got in too deep, Molly had called in a DC favor and had received a synopsis of his career highlights, all five tours in the suck, and the last, crazy ride to hell and glory that ended in that famous missile detonation at the Rose Garden.

  “Now,” he said, as they were carried along by the current of the torrential second-floor Colorado corridor, “are we at this spot by random drift or is there a conscious destination ahead?” On either side, stores came and went: Ann Taylor, InvisibleSHIELD by Zagg, LEGO Imagination Center, Impulse, Lee’s Video Gallery. And everywhere lights, green and red, Christmas trees, elves, Santas, the whole nine yards of Christmas cheer braying psychotically at the innocent and the easily disturbed.

  “I think there’s a skateboard place up ahead. My nephew George needs tape, it has been explained to me. Thus tape. We get the tape and we are on the homeward bound.”

  “I guess I can handle that,” he said.

  “You’ll prevail. You always have. Why wouldn’t you now?” she said with a smile.

  But the going wasn’t easy, not by any means, and en masse the normally polite and melancholy Minnesotans became somewhat bellicose. Christmas was do-or-die for them, a full-contact sport, played more vigorously than their beloved if sad-boy Minnesota Vikings had played again this season, and two exotics like Ray—Reyes Fidencio Cruz, Filipino by culture if not by birth—and Molly Chan weren’t going to stand in anybody’s way.