Soft target rc-1 Read online

  Then he had a major running communications, trying to get everybody on the same met and organizing the inflow of information.

  “Any news on the feds?”

  “A skeleton team is inbound from Minneapolis fast under siren. They’re still collecting their SWAT people. They’ve got their HRT team gearing up at Quantico, but they’re still three hours out, and then when they land, they’ve got to get here. It’s going to take a while. Colonel, are we going in? I’ve got people in body armor at every exit now. Maybe we shouldn’t wait. Reports are that there’s a lot of wounded inside. Those folks need medical attention.”

  “Ah,” he said. An issue of jurisdiction was looming. By federal law, the FBI took charge in any situation that was defined as “terrorism” and ran the show. But things at America, the Mall, were still unclear: despite reports of terrorist-like gunmen and terrorist-like tactics and ruthlessness, he thought it could still be some crazed white militia, some NRA offshoot, some screwball Tea Party gone berserk. In his mind, one never could tell about the right in this country, particularly deep in the glowering Midwest, where men clung to guns and religion, cursed bitterly as America changed, and still believed, fundamentally, in the old ways.

  Renfro said, “Colonel, you cannot let the FBI people run this show. It can’t be a Washington thing. There are sound policy reasons for it-harder for them to coordinate with the locals, unfamiliarity with the territory, lack of intelligence on the local scene-but the politics count here too. Washington will want in, but you’ve got to hold Washington at bay.”

  “I know, I know,” said the colonel. “I’ve got a plan.”

  Obobo’s idea was to use the FBI as the primary investigative tool of this operation. They would interview witnesses, run the databases, check the photo IDs and the fingerprint files; they would liaise with ATF on ballistics. That would be plenty for them. But in no way was he prepared to relinquish command. This one was his.

  “Negative, negative on any kind of assault,” he announced to his gathered majors. “I am not going to tell the governor that he has presided over the largest bloodbath in American history. Establish the perimeter, hold the medical people and the ambulance in a zone, keep the media in the loop because we do have a responsibility to inform a panicked public, and try and set up some kind of contact with these people. They must want something, and I know I can influence them positively, given the chance.”

  “Maybe they just want to kill a lot of folks,” someone said. “Maybe the longer we wait…”

  This was Mike Jefferson, another major, head of SWAT and by nature aggressive; he’d won three gunfights and could be a pain in the ass. Obobo mistrusted him, as he mistrusted that kind of man, bodacious, body-proud, thick-armed, tattooed, and a little too hungry to go to guns. If you went to guns, he knew, all kinds of craziness was loosed upon the earth and nobody knew which way the bullets would ricochet. He would never go to guns. On the other hand, it was not his way to crush underlings.

  “Major Jefferson, that’s a great point. Therefore I want you to begin to assemble an assault plan and be ready to deploy and implement. At present, I feel we must hold until federal reinforcement arrives, and then we will see where we are and consider our options. But we have to have other options and that’s your job.”

  Jefferson understood he’d just gotten a no that sounded like a yes; he muttered something and backed off.

  Someone else said, “Mike, the doors are locked from the inside. To even get in for an assault, you’d have to blow fifty doors simultaneously and we don’t have the technology or the explosives to do that. Only the feds have stuff like that.”

  “The feds don’t even have it, not in their shop in Minneapolis,” said Jefferson. “Get the governor to authorize the National Guard to the site. Isn’t there a Special Forces unit part of the Minnesota National Guard? Maybe they have the expertise. Also, DOJ, maybe DOD. We may need some Army commandos.”

  “Major, it’ll take hours, maybe days, to get commandos in here.”

  “I got Minnetonka SWAT incoming. Where should I put them?” asked one of the radio operators.

  “I think we’re weak at California,” said the major in charge of logistics. His job was to decide where to place the various units, determine their areas of responsibility, keep them from stumbling into each other or being assigned redundant tasks, and also managing food, coffee, blankets, and other support for the men on the line.

  “Dispatch them to holding positions at the California entrance,” said Obobo, once again reiterating his major theme, on the management theory that you tell them, then you tell them again, and when you’re finished, then you tell them again. “No contact, no initiatives, stay off the air unless there’s an emergency. Their job is to help late stragglers get to medical aid, not to be heroes. The last thing we need is a hero. Now let’s have a quick press conference. We have to start putting information out. Mr. Renfro, you’re on top of this?”

  “I am, sir,” said Renfro.

  It was difficult to determine who died first, Mrs. Goldbine, from her heart attack, or Mr. Graffick, from his lower-back wound. The sixty-seven-year-old woman certainly died the loudest. She gripped her chest and began to breath harshly, coughing now and then. The woman sitting next to her, a Somali waitress who worked in a restaurant in the mall, tried to comfort her and held her hand. The woman turned gray. The waitress stood, raising her hand desperately to attract the attention of one of the gunmen, who pushed his way through the crowd with the familiar arrogance of the armed among the unarmed.

  “This lady is very sick,” said the waitress in Somali.

  “Too bad for her,” said the boy.

  “She will die,” said the girl.

  “Then that is what Allah has decreed, sister. Do not take up with these white devils. All are going to die sooner or later. If you are nice to me, maybe I can spare you.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” said the young woman in English.

  The boy laughed and turned away.

  “What did he say, what did he say?” a dozen nearby hostages had to know. She decided not to tell them what he had told her.

  “He says he doesn’t care. He thinks he is God. He will find out different.”

  She bent over Mrs. Goldbine and saw that it was too late. She had passed.

  In another sector of the crowd, Graffick lay in the arms of his wife. He had taken a bullet meant for and aimed at her. It had hit him in the lower back and initially didn’t produce much blood or even pain. He’d stumbled but continued to push her ahead in the mad scramble toward the middle of the mall, not that there was safety there. There was safety nowhere. But the law of least resistance produced the inward rush.

  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 f
rom 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.

  “Tom, let’s hold it a little longer. We need good pictures for the feed and up higher it’s just blurs and lights. People need to see the damned place.”

  “Nik, I agree with Tom. If we crash into KPOP we’ll be the lead on someone else’s live feed. You’d hate that.” That was Larry, older of the two camera jocks. He knew how fragile and precious life was, even if the concept hadn’t yet dawned on Nikki.

  But she would hate to lead anybody else’s feed: she was ferociously competitive, so much so that it scared many people. In the station, she was called “Mary Tyler Moore from Hell.”

  She looked out the window and saw a fleet, a mob, a density of news choppers hovering about her same altitude over America, the country, and America, the Mall. It was a tricky thing; the birds had to avoid updrafts and couldn’t predict blasts of prairie wind, so they tried to keep a good three hundred feet apart, but nearly everyone wanted the money shot, which was the state police communications trailer a few hundred yards east of the mall, itself surrounded by police and other official vehicles, in the same shot with the south entrance of the mall, with its famous AtM sign, plastered four stories tall, that was based on a cartoony simplification of the mall’s Americanized shape.

  “Just a few seconds more, guys,” she commanded. “Marty. Are you getting good pix?”

  “The best, Nik, but don’t get yourself killed yet. If we need you to die for ratings, we’ll let you know.”

  “Ha ha,” she said humorlessly. “Okay, let’s get out of here-”

  “Something’s coming through,” said Cap’n Tom, and he plugged the emergency general aviation channel into the radio system.

  “T
his is State Police HQ, I am asking all news helicopters to rise to and not wander below three thousand feet. We have incoming to the mall and I need you people out of the way so you don’t get hurt.”

  “Hey, maybe something’s finally going to happen,” Jim, the younger, the more eager cameraman, said.

  “We won’t be able to see jack from three,” said Nikki. “Larry, what lens are you using? Can you go to something zoomier?”

  “You really lose a lot of resolution,” Larry said. “It’ll look like plastic toys in split-pea soup. But no one else will have much anyway.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  She felt the bottomless-pit sensation as Cap’n Tom elevated the craft against the pull of gravity and the structure beneath got smaller. From altitude, the mall stood in gigantic isolation, a wounded America whose sundered arteries spurted illuminated blood into the purple haze of the lowering sun.

  It felt so strange, this proximity thing of the media. There they were, safe and toasty at 3,000 feet above the place, and inside, terrible dramas of life and death were being played out. Nikki and her cohort were there to witness and report, yet it was real life and real death at stake, nothing neat or melodramatic about it. And of course they knew that if they did well-what was the line from some old movie? “I think it’s safe to say you men are in for some promotions, medals, and positive recommendations in your personnel files!”