Chapter 35
T
obey stepped through one of the narrow doors into a place that sold eyeglasses in an hour. It was empty except for the bodies of two women and a man. Broken glass covered the floor. The terrorists must have shot up every pair of glasses displayed on the walls for customers to pick from. There couldn't have been any point in that other than sheer, wanton destruction.
Which came as no surprise, considering how easily, even gleefully, these bastards killed innocent people.
The broken glass crunched under Tobey's boots as he catfooted toward the store's entrance. He risked the possibility that some of the terrorists might be close enough, outside in the mall, to hear his footsteps, but he wanted to get an idea of what was going on in this section. According to Herb Dupont, they weren't far from the children's play area. It was just around a slight bend in the mall from here.
The idea of cold-blooded killers strutting around with guns in a place where children should be playing and enjoying themselves filled Tobey with a cold anger. Those bastards had an awful lot to answer for, and the score against them just kept mounting all the time.
He froze suddenly near the front of the store as he heard voices. It sounded like two men were talking, and they seemed to be coming closer. Tobey crouched behind a desk that, before today, had been where store employees sat as they fitted new glasses to customers.
Two of the terrorists walked past the store, never even glancing in Tobey's direction. That's how sure they were that they held the upper hand, he thought. They were speaking English with barely any accents. They had probably been in this country for quite a while, enjoying life here, taking advantages of all the benefits the federal government offered so freely.
He edged up to the entrance and risked a look around the corner. The two men patrolling this part of the mall were still walking away, but as Tobey watched, they stopped and turned back in his direction. He pulled back out of sight before they could spot him and looked at the door to the maintenance corridors.
Aaron stood there, watching him anxiously through the small gap.
Tobey motioned to him. Aaron slipped through the door and hurried to join him.
“There are a couple of guys coming in this direction,” Tobey whispered. “We're going to jump them.”
“The others won't see us?” Aaron asked.
“We're kind of around a little corner from the main part of the mall. If we can take care of these guys without firing any shots, I don't think we'll alert the rest of them.”
Aaron swallowed hard but nodded. Tobey could tell that the kid was scared. Who wouldn't be, under these circumstances? Tobey had talked enough with Aaron, though, to know that he'd done time in prison. If Aaron was tough enough to survive there, he was tough enough to make it through this.
“Just follow my lead,” Tobey said.
The terrorists were closer now. Tobey heard one of them say, “âthink Habib is getting impatient with the infidels. He won't wait much longer.”
“Good,” the other man said. “I'm not anxious to die . . . but martyrdom and all its glories await us.”
That didn't sound good at all, Tobey thought. This Habib had to be the leader, and if he was getting ready to put his endgame into action, that didn't bode well for any of them. Maybe there wasn't time to whittle down the enemy forces as much as he would have liked, Tobey decided . . .
The two men appeared at the entrance to the eyeglasses store, walking steadily toward the center of the mall. Tobey and Aaron had their backs pressed to the wall, and they didn't make their move until the terrorists had gone a couple of steps past them.
Then Tobey lunged, swinging the Steyr in one hand at a terrorist's head while he bent slightly at the waist and launched a side kick at the other man's back.
It was a devastating attack. The machine pistol smashed into the first man's head with enough force to shatter bone. The kick landed in the small of the other man's back at almost the same exact instant and knocked him forward. The impact was such that he couldn't keep his feet. He fell hard, landing facedown with stunning force.
Aaron landed on the man's back a split second later, pinning him down with a knee while striking with the knife he had taken from his pocket and unfolded. The blade went into the terrorist's throat, ripped across it. The man spasmed once as crimson sprayed from the wound, then he went still.
Tobey was pretty sure he had fractured the skull of the first man, but he slit his throat just to make certain.
Then he and Aaron dragged both corpses into the store, out of sight of any casual glance directed toward this part of the mall. The blood splattered on the floor might attract attention, but there was nothing they could do about that.
The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds and been almost noiseless.
Tobey was searching the bodies for loaded magazines when he noticed something odd about one of them. He pulled the man's jacket and shirt aside, and Aaron exclaimed, “Shit! Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” Tobey said. “It's a bomb. A suicide belt.” He pointed. “All you have to do is jerk that wire loose to set it off. Looks like there's enough C-4 to make a pretty good boom.”
Aaron rubbed his jaw and shook his head.
“That's crazy, man. Who's nuts enough to blow themselves up like that?”
“Plenty of this bunch. Over in the sandbox, we even saw women and children carrying suicide bombs. Their husbands and parents made them do it. Sickest bunch of bastards there's ever been on the face of the earth.”
“Yeah, no argument from me, man. You think they're
all
wearing those things?”
Tobey frowned and said, “The ones I searched earlier weren't. Either only some of them have the bombs . . . or they're being passed out to everybody now.”
“If they're all wearin' 'em . . .” Aaron had to swallow again before he could go on. “How much damage would it do if they all went off at the same time?”
“Yeah, I was thinkin' about that, too,” Tobey admitted. “We don't know how many of them there are, but based on what we've seen . . . and how many men it would take to guard all the hostages they have . . . I think there's a good chance a blast of that size could bring down the whole mall.”
“Ohhhh, man. That's what they're plannin', isn't it? They're gonna blow this whole freakin' place to hell.”
“Wouldn't put it past 'em,” Tobey said with a grim nod.
“We gotta do something. We gotta get the word out, let the cops or whoever's on the outside know they've got to storm the place and stop those crazy sons o' bitches. Otherwise everybody in here is gonna die, and who knows how many outside.”
“I think that's probably exactly what they have in mind,” Tobey said.
Ideas stirred in the back of his brain. He reached into the pocket of the dead man's jacket and found a cheap phone. Maybe that was the way the terrorists were communicating, he thought, although reception in here would be wonky. He opened the phone and checked the recently dialed numbers.
There was only one, but it had been called several times.
Tobey was willing to bet it belonged to Habib.
He could maybe do something about that later. Right now he had something else in mind. Carefully, he removed both suicide belts from the dead terrorists.
“We're not takin' those things with us, are we?” Aaron asked.
“They might come in handy,” Tobey said.
Aaron looked at him like
he
was crazy, too.
Maybe he was.
* * *
Tobey left Aaron and the bombs at the eyeglass store and went scouting toward the center of the mall. He was being more daring now, but his instincts told him the risk was justified because they might be running out of time.
He reached the bend in the mall and carefully looked around it. The children's play area was about fifty yards away. Hostages were packed into it, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Guards with machine pistols stood around the perimeter of the group. Tobey counted eight men, but there were probably more nearby that he couldn't see.
As he looked around, his gaze fell on some plush, motorized, wheeled toys in the shape of giraffes, kangaroos, lions, and other exotic animals. They stood about four feet tall and three feet long, and they had handlebars with throttle controls on them, as well as built-in seats and places for a kid's feet to go. There were about a dozen of them inside a plastic corral.
Parents could rent those animals for their children to ride while they were shopping. Tobey figured they couldn't go very fast, since the kids controlled the speed by squeezing the handlebars. It was a weird deal, he thought, but maybe he could make use of it.
And someday, when he and Ashley had kids of their own, they could bring them here and they could ride the animals and laugh and it would be a great day.
Yeah, someday. Tobey wasn't going to allow himself to consider any other possibility.
The corral was located right where the mall made its little turn. Tobey knew he would be taking a big chance if he went out there, but he waited until none of the guards were looking in this direction and then moved as fast as he could, sprinting across the open space and then ducking down behind the dozen or so animals.
Nobody shot at him, so after a minute he figured he hadn't been spotted.
The plastic corral wasn't meant to keep anybody out. It was mostly for show. Tobey moved a section aside, being careful not to make any noise. Then he reached in and took hold of the nearest animal, a lion.
It wheeled backward without any trouble. When Tobey had it clear of the corral, he continued backing, keeping the group of animals between him and the play area where the hostages and the terrorists were. He could only hope no other patrols would spot him.
Suddenly he heard footsteps and voices above him. Some of the terrorists were on the upper level, too. Going flat on the floor, he left the animal where it was and rolled under one of the mall benches set at intervals for weary shoppers. He froze and stayed there until the terrorists above him were gone.
Then he rolled out, got hold of the lion again, and rolled it back another twenty feet or so before the angle was good enough for him to surge to his feet, grab the thing up into his arms, and trot toward the store where Aaron was waiting, his eyes big with confusion.
“What the hell, man?” Aaron asked as Tobey set the lion down.
Tobey didn't explain. He just said, “Go tell Herb you need to find a place that sells sewing materials. I need some sturdy gray thread.”
Fishing line might have been even better, but he didn't want to go all the way back to the sporting goods store.
“Thread?” Aaron repeated.
“Yeah. And hurry up. We don't know how much time we have left.”
“Okay, dude. Whatever you say.”
Aaron disappeared through the narrow door to the maintenance corridors. Tobey went to work. He used his knife to cut a slit in the plush covering over the lion's framework.
Time seemed to pass maddeningly slowly while Aaron was gone, but Tobey stayed busy with his part of the task, and eventually Aaron showed up with several spools of gray thread clutched in his hand.
“Will this work?” he asked. “I didn't know exactly how much you'd need.”
“Yeah, I'll tie some of it together to make it longer if I have to.” Tobey took one of the spools, unwrapped some of the thread, and pulled back the padding he had cut loose on the lion.
“Oh, hell,” Aaron breathed. “You put those bombs in there?”
“Yep.” Tobey tied the thread to the wire that would trigger one of the bombs. “I figure if this one goes off, the other one will, too.”
“Be careful, man. If this goes wrong, you'll blow us both sky-high.”
“It won't go wrong,” Tobey said. He started unwinding more of the thread, being careful to keep it from tangling. Then he handed the spool to Aaron. “Here, hold this. Keep playing it out. Just don't pull on it until I give you the signal.”
Aaron took the spool of thread, but he looked at it like Tobey had just handed him a live rattlesnake.
Tobey rolled the lion to the bend, then put his leg over it and stood so that his legs blocked the two footrests and kept the animal from moving as he held down the control on the handlebar. The motor made it push against the back of his calves.
He took a length of thread he had snapped off from the spool and used it to tie the control in place, gauging the tension so the lion wouldn't move too fast. He wanted the toy just barely rolling along. When he was satisfied, he stepped back.
Slowly, the lion trundled past the corner and started toward the play area.
Tobey stayed where he was. Somebody had to watch the blasted thing. He couldn't let it get too close to the hostages.
Looked like that wouldn't be a problem. One of the guards spotted the lion almost right away and let out a yell. Tobey heard the swift rataplan of running footsteps, and as he risked a look around the corner, he saw at least half a dozen terrorists swarming around the lion and pointing their machine pistols as they babbled questions at each other. As far as he could tell, none of them noticed the dark gray thread played out along the floor behind the animal.
Idiots, Tobey thought.
He raised a fist where Aaron could see it and made a sharp tugging motion.
Aaron nodded, wrapped the thread around his hand, and pulled hard.
The blast shook the floor under Tobey's feet.