Authors: Stephen Hunter
Andrew recorded each gun by serial number off the bill of lading as well as all other pertinent data. Then, using the blade again, he sliced the box end open skillfully, careful not to make any jagged cuts or rip anything in haste. He slid out the guns, each of which arrived packed in a Styrofoam box, then sliced the tape on the boxes. The guns lay inside, along with a moldy leather strap, a ten-round aftermarket magazine, a bayonet, a brass oiler, and a poorly translated manual. The 74s were real cool. He’d seen them initially in the first edition of
Modern Combat,
where Merc Force Blue used them to take
down a Soviet missile silo in Uzbek that had been commandeered by Muslim terrorists. In that game, they’d worked well, though of course the 74s fired a smaller round than the 47s, an Eastbloc variant on our own 5.56 NATO. The cool thing about the
Modern Combat
series, as opposed to
Medal of Honor
or
Black Merx
or
Commando Ops,
was that the game took into account the muzzle energy of its weapons, so when you smoked a muji on the 74, it took more center of mass hits to put him down. You had to make that adjustment, just like in real life, or he was the one that got the kill.
In any event the guns bore no surprises: standard Red design, utilitarian, untroubled by aesthetics, uninterested in making a statement other than “This machine exists to kill people,” with rough triggers and painted or baked enamel finishes. It was a gun for small, brown people, with a smallish pistol grip and a shortish buttstock, just the thing for little men trying to upset a big, US-supported government, the rifle’s purpose the world over. The metal was pressed—that is, stamped out crudely—or industrially bent to form by some huge, clanky device in a hellish, dismal, steam-punk factory next to a river of sludge in some perpetually smog-shrouded Eastbloc or ChiCom city. Its makers were all government workers, paid in pennies by the national defense industry; they went home to nothingness and squalor, while the guns, in the millions, were shipped to hot spots, under license to their original artisans in the then Soviet Union. That’s why the pieces were so crappy; no gunmakers’ craft here, as was evident in the older Winchesters and Remingtons in the old man’s rifle racks.
Next, Andrew filled each of the Styrofoam boxes with scrap metal from decommissioned shopping carts he’d bought with cash and smuggled into Mr. Reilly’s store. About six pounds in each box, just an array of coaster wheels, tubes, gratings, screws, washers, and bolts. When the lids were retaped over the trays to form a whole, the whole reinserted in the crate, the crate carefully sealed by packing tape, the result was a package equally the size and weight of the one that had arrived, with the same shifty, noisy density. Short of an
X-ray exam, no one could tell the difference between the first package and this one.
Now he went to the store computer and printed out a West Texas Imports address label to patch over the Reilly’s Sporting Goods label. Except that it contained carefully engineered errors: the return zip code for Reilly’s Sporting Goods and for West Texas Imports were both a number off, the 4 from West Texas being where the 3 from Reilly’s should be, and vice versa. Computer error, obviously.
Then, the pièce de résistance. It was a UPS Next Day Air bar code, self-adhesive, and the key to the UPS system. It was fake, carefully hand-manufactured by the clever Andrew in his lair in a Minneapolis suburb. No human eyes could read it, but the computers would send the package to New Mexico, to a store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. At that point, the confused driver would use his optical reader on the bar code for the return address and send it on its way. But its way was not back to Mr. Reilly; it went instead to another store that didn’t exist on a street that didn’t exist. Then it would go to the UPS undeliverable warehouse in Schenectady, New York, with thousands of other items, a facility bound to become overloaded with misaddressed packages during the upcoming Christmas shipping season as clerks struggled to keep up with and track each package either to its proper destination or back to its point of origin.
Tomorrow he would log them out and record the transaction in the bound book for ATF and in the notebook of shipping records that UPS issued to all commercial customers. The missing guns, thought delivered to their destination by the sender and thought returned to their sender by Mr. Reilly, would go unnoticed for months. No money was missing to alert any bean counters either, as Andrew stole about five thousand dollars a month from his wealthy father by equally intricate computer strategies and had financed the transaction out of that fund.
No need for ceremony or delicacy, not with guns like this. Grabbing
them five or six at a time like pieces of firewood, Andrew hauled them to the truck bed of his vehicle and dumped them in. The magazines got the same rough treatment. These babies were all designed for rough treatment, that’s what made them so perfect for what he had half-facetiously named Operation Mumbai after the Pakistani murder mission in that Hindu city that killed 160 people.
Andrew had a momentary lapse in his otherwise tightly focused attention. He had nostalgia for Mumbai, almost as if he had been there with the kill team, had stridden boldly down the great hotel’s corridors, down the city’s backstreets, through its bazaars, with his own AK-74 and a satchelful of grenades. Everything that moved or breathed was a target. It was a night of pure anarchy slouching to Mumbai to be born in the hot spill of the empty brass from the hyperactive bolt of the gun in full auto mode, from the pop of pressure when the Sov grenades detonated, from the scurrying figures in the darkness, stilled forever when lanced by a fleet of 5.45 hurtling into them. Andrew was a collector of apocalypses; he loved those final moments of the fall, when Troy went up in flames, when the Red T-34s rolled through Berlin at the head of an army of rapists and looters, when the sepoys went crazed and put all the British women and children, screaming, helpless, down the well at Cawnpore.
Why was this? Andrew could not tell you, nor could his many expensive medical and psychological advisors. Perhaps it was some excess brain chemical, perhaps he’d walked in on his mother giving his father a blow job, perhaps one of the bigger boys at school had smacked him in the mouth, turning him forever into a hater, or perhaps he was simply evil in the Old Testament sense. After all, as he had noted many times, evil is fun. It truly is.
He came back into the world as we know it and reacquired the self that he showed the world most of the time—steady, handsome, thorough, creative, obsequious. He went back into Reilly’s, carefully put the seventy handguns into the safe, swept the place out for the tenth time—some habits die hard—made sure everything was secure, then
armed the alarm, stepped out the back door, and pulled it shut and locked behind him.
He drove about thirty miles through the early-fall Minnesota night and at last turned off the highway to follow the signs to his destination, a freakishly large building in the center of a vast plain of now-empty parking lots. The sign read, WELCOME TO AMERICA, THE MALL.
R
ay got off the X first, leaping, driving his crown into the man’s nose, feeling it crush flat and spew blood. But where that would put most men out of the fight in an instant, this tough little skinny simply took it, took the pounding thrust of Ray’s full body weight and went to the floor under him, but upon hitting it hard, he became a squirming dervish, his small but leanly powerful muscles twisting desperately for leverage. He was faster than Ray, who was faster than most; he was clearly a guy who’d done a lot of close-quarter combat, and somehow he found enough leverage to slip from underneath Ray so that the bigger man couldn’t use his weight as an advantage, and the two knitted limbs and tried to break each other’s backs, faces about an inch apart.
Ray saw insane strength in the wide black pupils, ignored the bloody snot and saliva that flew from the flattened nose and the rancid breath contained in the gaseous, propulsive exhalations through the mouth, and tried to get enough floor contact under him to move the guy back down to the submissive position, but the bastard was too active. Ray had one of his arms by the wrist, which also meant that the enemy had one of Ray’s hands by the arm, and the other arms were tangled like fighting snakes as each tried to find a path to the throat. Ray head-butted again, hard, but didn’t have enough neck to
get the torque to deliver a disabling strike, and all he did was knock stars into both men’s eyes.
Then the guy got a leg free and kneed Ray hard in the balls, and as his breath was driven from his body sharply, Ray’s grip loosened and the guy snatched his arm free and got it to his bayonet and got that blade out before Ray caught up and snatched the wrist again. But now the blade was in play, and both men, in wrestling stalemate of enmeshed body on body, put all their focus and strength into controlling the blade, with the ultimate hope of driving it deep into the other’s body and piercing a blood-bearing organ. But then Ray, formally trained in hand-to-hand and the owner of six black belts in six disciplines, yielded suddenly, knowing that the man’s strength would overextend him, and when that happened, he reasserted control; now the Somali’s arm was straight and lacked space to set up for a plunge, and Ray bent it back, back, and back, and that’s when the guy managed to bite him hard in the ear. The pain wasn’t so bad as the surprise and the intimacy of it, and Ray lost concentration; the man, who’d lost the knife-hand battle, came quickly to victory on the nonknife side, snaking his arm through a brief hole in Ray’s defense and getting his wrist crossways across Ray’s throat. He just had to press the windpipe closed and hold it so for three minutes and he’d get the kill.
The fight sounded like six pigs in a pen built for three, all grunting and yelping and gulping. Their lungs pumped in-out; the breath came and went like waves on a beach; oxygen, fuel of battle, was as precious as gold, and they sucked for it whenever possible, in a medium lubricated by copious sweat outflow that slimed their pushing, sliding musculature like some kind of battle grease. Not a conscious thought formed in either mind; it was just instinct for the geometry of bodies, strength, will, and survival.
Ray risked his leverage contact with the floor, and with one leg pried loose, he got an ankle-wrap around his enemy’s leg and began to torque it hard, perhaps to loosen the body from the clamp it had on Ray. It seemed to be working too, but then the guy did an incredibly
creative thing. He dropped the knife and Ray took the bait, releasing the arm to grope for the knife, and the tough Somali shot his hand through the opening and clenched Ray’s throat with his thumb driving into Ray’s larynx. Ray blinked, some bloody snot rained into his face, and suddenly the guy, quick as a snake, regripped his left wrist, pulling it from the neck, then plunging back in supertime to wrap that wrist around Ray’s windpipe, rising enough for enough play to get his arm strength factored into the equation, and then had both thumbs on Ray’s Adam’s apple and was driving in. Ray could only force him to an upward posture so that he couldn’t get the fullness of his power into the dynamic, but now, really, it was a matter of time, for he’d cut Ray’s oxygen intake by a good 70 percent.
Ray tried to get his arm inside the vise closing down on his throat, but his opponent half collapsed and there was no space to penetrate, even if it meant the Somali had to reset his hand just slightly, pulling it to the right so that one pressing thumb moved on top of the other one. Ray knuckle-struck him in the ear, hard, feeling tissue rip and more blood spurt, but the little man was too close to victory to let the strike throw him off, and his eyes mad with the killing lust, he drove his thumbs—
Ray had just the most fleeting impression of something flying horizontally through the air, and whatever it was, it hit his would-be killer in the temple with the force of a heavyweight’s punch, sending a resonant cracking, breaking sound into the atmosphere, and the Somali went semi-limp for a second, relinquishing his control, his hands flying involuntarily to protect his head as fear fought the unconsciousness that threatened to overwhelm him from the power of the blow. Somehow Ray found the bayonet, and at the same time did a power roll, and in a moment achieved position on top of the squirming man. His other hand suffocated any screams in the throat and he fingered the bayonet into a grip strong enough for thrusting, then brought it back and shoved it forward. He felt it penetrate and open the softer flesh between the ribs, slide off of deep, interior
objects, then sink point-first in something fibrous. Ray withdrew, placing more strength on the man through the wrist clamp, getting more leverage as he rose to his knees, and drove again and again. The guy bucked through spasms, fighting it, his eyes cue-balling, his tongue writhing like a dying snake, until at last, supersoaked in blood, he went limp.
Ray rolled off him, feeling close enough to death himself. He lay flat on his back, sucking for oxygen at the effort he’d spent, and it seemed he’d drained the mall of all of it, but then it flooded into his lungs, bringing coolness and clarity. He sucked hard through three or four strong breaths, felt his limbs tremble with salvation at having survived the ordeal, noticed how much blood he now wore on his jeans, and looked up into the eyes of his savior.
It was the black girl La-something, he couldn’t remember, Lamelba, Lavioletta, Laviva,
Lavelva
.
“Jesus Christ, you got here just in time.”
“I clonked his ass with a eight iron,” she said, holding up the now-bent club. “I hope they ain’t mad I busted it.”
“When this is over, I will buy you a bagful of clubs, sweetie,” he said. “Now let’s get out of here.”
Renfro called a press conference, fast, and still had to wait a few minutes for the network cams to set up. Colonel Obobo, flanked by the governor and all his majors except for Jefferson, took to the podium, nodded to a few friendly reporters, pivoting this way and that to accommodate the flash cameras of the print guys, then turned on the microphone. Renfro hoped he wouldn’t overdo the I-did-this, I-did-that shit, but then he always did.