Soft Target (25 page)

“Colonel, you have a one-on-one now with ABC. It’s the only major you haven’t hit yet. Oh, and Fox—”

“My good friends at Fox,” said the colonel.

“Even they will kowtow to the colonel on this day.”

“Okay, let’s—”

But like a bad dream, someone stood between him and the doorway, beyond which lay the ABC team, with its lights and camera and love.

It was the FBI hotshot, Will Kemp. “I thought he was off running the investigation,” the colonel muttered to Mr. Renfro, but as Kemp drew within hearing distance, he blossomed into his wise, cool public personality and said, “Will, your people were unbelievably fast and proficient on the Andrew Nicks ID, really, and that’s such a help once we get those citizens out of there and go in and take the little bastard down.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Kemp.

“I’ll be sure to tell the director how well you and your team operated and under what great pressure. I’m sure he’ll be pleased, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased.”

“Yes sir,” said Kemp, “but if you’ll forgive, I want to discuss something else.”

“Will, I’m on my way to a media thing, unpleasant but, unfortunately, it goes with the territory.”

“Yes sir, but just let me express myself quickly, if I may.”

“Sure, Will, shoot. But please make it snappy.”

“Sir, I’m wondering if it was wise to pull the SWAT people so far back. Equally, I’m worried that it was unwise to give these people in the mall so much operational freedom. I mean they start shooting hostages, we’re a good five to six minutes away from confronting them with force, and they could do a great deal of killing in that time. Our intelligence says they have at least ten thousand rounds of ammunition in there and sixteen fast-firing assault weapons.”

“Will, you know, that troubles me too. Troubles me
immensely,
in fact. But the truth is, you have to take some risks in operations. I decided to take this one. I think the Muslims will be content with their propaganda victory, hollow though it is. I mean, these are basically thirteenth-century minds we’re dealing with, and they’re easily distracted. The glory that awaits them in this life, the chance to
be heroes to their coreligionists, that’s too much for them to give up on.”

“Sir, it’s not them I’m worried about. It’s this goddamned white kid, with his crazy nihilism and bloodlust, his love for Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho, he could do anything, anything. I’d feel so much better if we had a sniper put a bullet in his head.”

“Will, your concern is well placed and admirable. But by now, if we move SWAT back into place and authorize the rooftop snipers to get through the glass, I’m worried that we’ll set him off. So my judgment is to stay passive, just a little longer. Then we’ll let the SWAT boys off the leash and teach this kid a thing or two.”

He turned, smiling, and went out to face the ABC cameras.

Up they climbed, up the steel steps in the unlit shaft of the stairwell, slowly, Cruz in the lead, tough little Lavelva behind, from the second floor to the third.

“Sir?” she said.

“Call me Ray. Not sir.”

“Is this a machine gun? I haven’t fired no machine gun before.”

She was gripping the AK-74 that Ray had snatched up from the jihadi Lavelva had conked with her eight iron and he had finished with a bayonet. It made him realize: she knows nothing about that gun except what she’s seen in the movies, but she’s going on anyhow.

“It’s not a machine gun, no. Here, I better show you how to use it.”

They knelt, and he talked to her in whispers.

“Okay, this one fires as fast as you pull the trigger. No machine gun. Thirty times. But it’s got to be loaded, the safety has to be off, it has to be cocked, and it’s much better if you’re aiming it.”

He pushed the magazine release and snapped out the magazine.

“This orange banana-shaped thing is full of the cartridges. You know what a cartridge is?”

“The bullets.”

“Yeah, close enough. You can see them held by the lips of the magazine, showing.”

“Little things.”

“They are small. But they move fast, they hit hard, they do real bad damage. So to load it, you have to lock in the magazine, the bullet part up, the bullets facing down the barrel. Look how I do it. Think of it as a kind of hinge. You sort of wedge the front part of the magazine into the front part of the magazine well, until it catches. See?”

He showed it to her two or three times. Then she took the mag and the small-framed, tinny, even toylike weapon, and mimicked him, ending up with the mag forward lip lodged into the mag well until it lightly clicked.

“Good. Now that it’s set, you pivot the magazine back, or up, all the way into the well. There, that’s right, pivot it in, see how it fits? And sort of force it or shove until—”

It locked.

“Okay, turn the gun over.”

She did so.

“See that lever, that piece of rotating metal on the right side of the receiver, see how it goes up and hooks over this open slot in the gun?”

“I do.”

“That’s the safety. In that condition, up, the gun can’t be fired or cocked. It blocks the bolt. See that?” and he pulled the bolt back about an inch until it hit the safety obstruction and would go no farther. “Bet you can figure out what to do.”

“You push it down.”

“You got it.”

With her thumb, she rotated the long safety lever downward, so that it no longer blocked the bolt raceway.

“Now you have to cock it, set the bolt back, allow a cartridge to come up into the chamber.”

“Okay,” she said. She rearranged the gun so that she controlled it
more efficiently, its stock against her hip, secured by her tightened elbow.

“Now see that latch or prong thing?” he asked, pointing to the bolt handle.

“Yes.”

“Pull that back and let it go.”

She pulled it back without trouble and then let the bolt fly forward and seat itself after having moved a 5.45mm cartridge into the chamber.

“Okay, now you’re ready to rock. It’ll fire each time you pull the trigger. You know how to shoot it, like the movies. Just don’t hold it sideways. Look over the top, line up the rear sight with the front sight, put it on target, watch the front sight, and press, don’t yank, the trigger.”

It reminded him of a time he’d taken Molly to a civilian rifle range. Molly tried gamely. She pretended she cared. She pretended the gun was interesting.

“Will it hurt?” Molly had asked him.

“No, not if you do it right. I’ll show you how to do it.”

He’d seated her behind a bench, fiddled with wrist and arm and upper body, aligning the barrel, her head, focusing the scope for her, tidying the sandbags.

“Okay, what are you thinking of?”

“What we’re going to have for dinner.”

He laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

“I’m not hopeless at all. I’m full of hope. I’m hoping this will be over soon.”

And it was. And they went out and had a nice dinner and laughed their way through it, and now he wondered if he’d ever get back to that simple peacetime ritual of just hanging out with a woman you loved. Was it that big a deal? It seemed the whole world had managed it.

They made it to the top of the stairs.

“Okay,” he said, “beyond there is enemy territory. I’m going to shoot open the door just like I did before and jump into the hallway. I’ll be low. We’ll check left, we’ll check right. Then I’ll dash across the hallway and cover for you. Then we’ll move into the store, it’s just seventy-five or so feet down to the left on that side.”

Lavelva suddenly said, “No. Don’t do it.”

“What?”

“You’ll be killed.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“They waiting for you.”

“They don’t even know I’m here.”

“Yes, he do. That boy, he knows.”

“Lavelva, what’re you talking about?”

“Don’t you see? It’s in the game.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s a game. This boy, he turned this whole place into his own giant-size game. You said he run First Person Shooter? I been there. All these geeky little E.T.-lookin’ motherfuckers, black, white, yellow, it don’t matter, they all be trippin’ on killing and blowing shit up. It’s so real to them, they don’t remember they sittin’ in a mall surrounded by gal underpants stores. And he’s the king of all that. And what do a king do? He spread his empire, right?”

“Yeah, he’s nuts, but why do you—”

“I play the game too,” she said.

“We’re wasting time.”

“You get killed, you won’t waste no time anymore. You listen to me. I play the games a lot. I like to leave my thing too. I don’t want to be no girl in the projects with a brother dead and another nailing carpet and no prospects for nothing. I want to be Alex in
Wizards of Waverly Place,
and I’m all the time trying to get through the maze, you know. I like that story. I don’t like the boy shit, which is all blowing up, but I like the girl shit, the Wizard Alex shit. And so I know the rule of the game. It’s
you never go in the first way
.”

“What?”

“That’s the way the game work. Some people get it, some never do. But there is
always
another way into it.
Always.
That’s the way you win. You look and look and look and find that other way in, ’cause if you go in the first way you find, you get whacked.”

He looked hard at her.

“Ray, please,” she said. “I’m telling you straight: through that door, death, sure enough.”

T
hat is it, my brother,” said the imam. He was weeping. He had been so moved by the three young fighters in their orange suits leaping up the stairway into the plane, and now, all were aboard, and the hatch door was secured. The plane had to taxi to position at the head of the runway and then roar airborne. It was a triumph beyond his imagining.

He looked at Andrew. The young man, handsome enough in the Western way with his blond, short hair, his little ski jump of a nose, his sweatshirt and blue jeans and hiking boots, his baseball cap on backward, was lit by the glow of the news feed. His face showed nothing. He was not weeping at all. He showed no trace of joy or liberation, no sense of the meaning of the great thing he had accomplished, a thing no jihadi, not even the Holy Warrior himself, the martyred Osama, had come close to achieving.

He had actually freed prisoners from the American prison system. The Kaafi brothers, innocents, naifs, idiots, who had bumbled into an American bank on the day after Osama’s death and, in a fit of Islamic passion, attempted to rob it with airsoft pistols with the idea of contributing to the cause. It was perhaps the stupidest robbery in the history of crime, more farce than threat, as the idiots had not even bothered to cover the orange rings appended to the gun muzzles to
signify nonlethality. They were arrested by a smiling sixty-three-year-old security guard.

But some prosecutor decided to ride the prank as far as he could, and the three emerged six months later with massive sentences and were quickly shipped to the pen, where their frailness, their gentleness, their Somali beauty and grace got them fucked savagely every night by the depraved of America. The imam could not stand it. It hurt him so much. And now the boys were free, thanks to this American of dubious faith and principle named Andrew.

“We are so badass,” Andrew finally said flatly.

“Andrew,” the imam asked, “I have to know. Why? No virgins await you, only nothingness by your own beliefs. If there is no afterlife, this life is meaningless, so it must be so for you. But I cannot abide that. Please, now, on the cusp of your greatness, tell me your reasons.”

Andrew didn’t bother to repay the earnestness with eye contact. Clearly the W-word—
why
—wasn’t of much interest to him. He’d been asked it a thousand times, by teachers, deans, cops, shrinks, counselors, parents, short-term girlfriends, everybody, anybody. He preferred not to hassle with it. It was psychobabble Muzak to his ears. He shrugged his shoulders.

“One reason I did it for you is because everybody hates you. That is so cool. I love the way you guys feed on that hate and it makes you bigger and stronger and more intent on your cause, which otherwise makes no fucking sense at all to me.”

In fact, he really didn’t give a shit about the dumb-bunny Kaafis. Anyone that stupid was doomed, and the rational functioning of natural selection had worked within design specifications to cull them from the herd, and what the Crips and Bloods did to their asses in the dark of a jungle penitentiary night was of little concern to him. Empathy was not one of his gifts; he actually thought the idea of the thin and beautiful and young and tender Somalis being gangbanged was pretty funny. The point of the prisoner release had really been
just to stall things out for three hours or so, in order to let the networks set up so that the final act would play out in prime time before a world audience.

He thought a bit—meanwhile, the majestic jet had made it to the end of the airstrip and was rotating on its tires to orient itself for the long surge to liftoff—and finally applied himself at last to the conundrum that was Andrew Nicks.

Ideas, abstractions, conceits, causes—all were more or less hazy to him. He had no sense of nation or state, none whatsoever of “American interest,” and to him the government was simply the entity that prevented the Osama kill shot from making it to Fox.

The game was everything. It superseded all. It provided framework, a set of rules, a rising litany of satisfied expectations, level by level, until the ultimate moment, and that moment was the point. Didn’t they get that? Come on, assholes, I want to see the ultimate moment, the kill shot, when the SEAL operator double-taps pieces of flying steel at three thousand feet per into the famous mug of the Tall Guy, and he spasms backward amid a sudden atomized mist of Cuisinarted plasma and brain cells. I want to see his eyes go all cue ball as the pupils rotate upward in the split second before his knees give and he notices his brains now decorate the wall and the ceiling. But no. We’re so delicate all of a sudden. You have violated the rules of the game. You have set up the greatest narrative since World War II and demanded our attention, and when the climax arrives, you demurely avert your eyes, you assholes. You unbelievable pansy jerkoffs. You have violated the rules of the game.