Soft Target (10 page)

He walked the edge of the skylight, finding it uniform in its precision. Why had the developers built it so sturdily? Couldn’t they have cut corners, couldn’t a worker have faked the effort, couldn’t there be some way the thing wasn’t up to spec and a hole could be bored through the joinery of glass and building, giving him a shooting lane? No, no such luck, it was all solid and tight to the finger. Okay, so—

His eye caught movement below.

What was—

Looking down from God’s-eye view, he could tell that two of the gunmen had kicked their way into the center of the crowd, covered by other gunmen. They cleared a space. Then they grabbed five people, apparently two women, two men, and a teenager, and dragged them to the center of the opening and made them kneel.

It looked like an execution.

Please, Sniper God, give me a shot!

But he had no shot. He was sealed off by thick glass.

One of the gunmen walked behind the kneeling five and with his rifle shot each in the back of the head. McElroy felt the vibration of the gunshot meeting the glass, giving it a little buzz. He wished he could look away but he could not.

Executed, each victim fell forward without grace and hit the floor face-first and hard. They lay sprawled, loose as ragdolls. In a bit of time one, then another, and finally all began to spew a blackish puddle from the head, and these multiple lakes of plasma reached out, found and followed fissures on the floor, and joined in a large wet-land of blood, though leaving the odd island of high spot.

“Control, this is Five, directly below me the gunmen just executed five hostages, shot ’em dead through the head.”

“I have that,” said the radio.

“Jesus Christ, let us blow this goddamn glass and take these pricks down. They don’t know we’re here; if we get through the glass we can do them all in under thirty seconds.”

“Negative, negative, Five, you are advised to do nothing but
stand and observe. If we go tactical, you will be notified and assigned targets.”

“Goddammit, they are killing people and—”

“Five, this is Command, commo space is at a premium and we don’t want you using it up on a rant. Tactical discipline.”

“Sir, please put Special Agent Kemp on—”

“Any information must be channeled through Command,” said the frosted voice.

T
his is very disturbing,” said Colonel Obobo.

He stood unbelieving in the center of the state police Incident Command van, surrounded by several majors and the FBI executive, Kemp, as they dealt with the news from the snipers that five people had just been executed. Mr. Renfro stood immediately to the left of the colonel, saying nothing.

“Could it be a phony?” someone asked. “Maybe those are actors or something, or his own volunteers previously put in place, and—”

“They’re real,” said Mike Jefferson, the aggressive SWAT commander. “And he is talking to us—in blood.”

“I just—”

“Look at the time, Colonel Obobo. It’s five o’clock. He killed five people at five o’clock. He’ll kill six people at six o’clock, seven at seven o’clock, and on through the night. There aren’t any demands, except that we get a lot of body bags. This is just a straight murder job. We have to get our assault units in position, issue orders, distribute the proper breaching equipment, and get ready to jump.”

“He will talk to us,” said the colonel. “This is just his way of getting our attention.”

“He had our attention, for God’s sake!” shouted Jefferson. “For
Christ’s fucking sake, men with AKs shooting everything that moves, he
has
our fucking attention.”

“No,” said Obobo, ever courteous, ever unflappably astute and collected. “He has to demonstrate that he is capable of ordering executions. That is his baseline. All our negotiations will now have to take that into consideration. He’s laying down the rules, that’s what he’s doing. He will talk to us, before six. Well before six. And he knows that to assault, we have a massive job of logistics, planning, equipping, moving, and coordinating, and he’s putting something before us to slow us down, baffle us, make us inefficient at that very tough job.”

“Ah,” said Jefferson in immense frustration. “Colonel, let me begin to put people in play under the mall. We’ve got to be able to breach that floor, it’s the only way, and we have to have them there now in order to do it anytime in the future. We can’t just blow the doors and charge into the place.”

“Can we chopper people to the roof? Aren’t there doorways, they could come down from above somehow?” someone asked.

“No,” said Kemp, “at least not as a main strike. It would take a dozen choppers to get men in force. He’d know. If they blew the doors, it would take ten minutes for them to work their way down. If they rappelled, they’d be sitting ducks for the riflemen. You’d just get a lot of highly trained men killed for nothing, and maybe fifty or sixty hostages.”

Obobo tuned it all out. He made eye contact with Mr. Renfro and the two exchanged listen-to-these-idiots-talk expressions. The advisor then nodded, communicating his sublime confidence in Colonel Obobo’s abilities. He knew that if the colonel could just talk to these people and make them see the hopelessness of their position, the inevitability of what lay ahead, he could make this thing go away. He had that power. He was a convincer, an inspirer.

“Gentlemen, for now I’d like you to hold your positions,” Obobo finally said. “Commo, continue to monitor the channels to see if he’s trying to talk to us. We have to know his demands. When we learn his demands—”

“His demands are that a lot of people die; those are his demands,” said Jefferson. “This is a straight murder raid, like Mumbai or the World Trade Center. He just wants a lot of people off the earth and his own glory and ascension to heaven guaranteed. He thinks when this is over, he’s going to get himself fucked royally by seventy-two—”

“Major Jefferson,” said Obobo, showing a whisper of irritation, “I think you’ve made your point. In the meantime, I want a written assault plan from you, a list of assets you currently have and those that you will need before I can authorize any kind of a strike. I hope to hell I never have to issue that order. Nichols, get on the phone to the Justice Department and see how our request for Army engineers, Delta, and SEAL people is playing at Defense. Special Agent Kemp, I want an update on your investigative efforts in Minneapolis as well as our requests to BATF for support in the firearms investigation.”

“Sir,” said Jefferson, “this isn’t an investigation, it’s a war.”

“Major Jefferson, you’ve made your point fifty times over. Please follow my orders or be relieved of duty. I can’t fight him and you.”

“Yes sir.”

“Sir,” someone said, “do we release to media?”

“No,” said Mr. Renfro, who rarely addressed tactical or operational issues but this time couldn’t help himself. “If word gets out he’s shooting hostages, it’ll add pressure to an already pressurized decision.”

“Good point,” said the colonel. “Do you concur, Special Agent Kemp?”

Kemp, thanking God he had no dog in this fight, said, “Yes, Colonel.”

“Sir,” someone said, “the governor is here.”

“Oh fuck,” said somebody.

It happened that Nikki was watching a particular sniper whom she had nicknamed Chicago with her binoculars from three thousand
feet up at a particular moment as the WUSScopter hovered at that height. Though from there he was a tiny, almost blurred figure and the light was quickly diminishing, she saw him suddenly bolt upward, then lean forward, tense radically as if he were willing himself somehow to penetrate the glass of the skylight and fly down into the atrium; instantly, his finger flew to the radio unit at his belt—she knew where to look because she’d covered cops in Bristol—and presumably switched it on. He began jabbering into the throat mike. She zapped around the margins of the lake of Plexiglas until she’d located all five snipers and noted that all five were on their mikes.

“Something just happened,” she said.

“How can you tell?” asked Jim, the cameraman.

“I saw the snipers jerk up, and now all are reporting in.”

She switched to Marty back at the station.

“Is Command saying anything?”

“No, nothing. We’ve had reports the governor is incoming. We might want to put you on the ground and get over there in case he has a presser.”

“Marty, no presser means anything tonight. They’ll use the press to put out reassuring bullshit, knowing that whoever’s doing this is monitoring. Pressers are a waste of time and it pisses me off that His Eminence puts his big fat mug on camera tonight.”

“Settle down, Mary Richards, it was only a suggestion.”

“Well, something’s happened here and—”

She had an idea. Two weeks ago she’d been to the mall and had bought a pocketbook from a shop called Purses, Bags and Whatnot, one of those cutesy places that smelled of potpourri but had very nice leather bags. She pulled out that very same pocketbook now and began to rifle through it, because she remembered that’s where she’d stuffed the bill of sale. Yes, indeed, there it was, amid a scruffy collection of receipts for $100 from Bank of America, $35.47 for gas at Sheetz, and $22.75 from Safeway.

Remembering the very pleasant young woman who had run the transaction for her, she looked at the bottom of the bill of sale and saw a handwritten note, “Thanks so much, Amanda Birkowsky.”

“Marty,” she said, “real quick, run the name Birkowsky through
AnyWho.com
and see what you come up with.”

“Nikki—”

“Just do it, Marty. I don’t have time to explain. It’s a rare enough name so there probably aren’t too many of them.”

There were, as it turned out, only three in the three Minneapolis–Saint Paul area codes. She dialed the first, got no answer, and then hit on the second.

“Yes,” she said. “This is WUFF-TV. May I speak with Amanda, please.”

A woman said, brokenly, “Amanda is in the mall.”

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Birkowsky,” Nikki said, guessing from the voice that it was a mom, not a sister.

“She’s all right,” said Mrs. Birkowsky. “For now. She’s upstairs in the—who did you say you were?”

Nikki explained the connection.

“What is it you want?”

“I’m trying to reach Amanda. She’s called you? I guess she has a cell, she called you to tell you she’s all right, she’s in no danger, or no immediate danger.”

“I can’t give you her number.”

“I understand. But . . . can you call her, give her my number, and if she decides, she can call me? I just think people have a right to know what’s going on. It’s my job. There’s next to no information available and that’s never a good thing.”

Amanda called Nikki three minutes later. She and two customers and two other staff were hiding in the rear room of Purses, Bags and Whatnot on the first floor of the mall, in the dark. They felt themselves all right for the time being as no one had begun to search the stores for hiding shoppers.

“Did anything happen at five?” Nikki asked. “We heard five shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Not a machine gun, not like that, but five individual shots. Then we heard the crowd—it makes noise, like an animal, all those people—we heard what I would call some kind of uproar, I don’t know, then barking from the voices of the guards, I guess. It was very unclear but something bad must have happened.”

“Five shots?” said Nikki. “Yes, exactly. I could try and sneak out there and—”

“No, no, no, no, you just stay where you are.”

“Are they going to come get us soon? The police.”

“There are police all over the place, but in truth, I don’t see any signs of an attack or an entry or anything.”

“This is so awful.”

“Listen, if something happens and you want to, and it seems safe, can you call me back? And if I think the cops are going to go, I’ll give you a heads-up through your mom, okay, and you can get low to the floor behind cover. I’ll never call you, because I won’t know what situation you’ll be in. Is that fair?”

“Thank you,” said Amanda.

“Sweetie, don’t thank me. You’re the brave one here.”

One minute later, Nikki was on the air with the news that five shots had been fired within the atrium and that possibly the gunmen had begun to shoot hostages.

“They just shot five people,” Ray said.

“You don’t know that,” Molly said.

“Yes, I do,” said Ray.

It seemed that the sound of the shots still echoed through the weird acoustics of the gigantic space. Everyone in the Frederick’s had stiffened when the sounds reached them, and in the several minutes since, nobody had said a thing until Ray broke the silence.

“Maybe some kid raised his rifle and pulled the trigger five times because he thought it was a cool thing to do,” Molly said.

“No,” said Ray. “That would have been faster shooting, onetwothreefourfive. This was deliberate fire. One shot, move to the next, shoot, move to the next. He just shot five people.”

Nobody said a thing. Ray, Molly, Rose the clerk, the broken-down manager of the store, and the three customers just lay there in the dark, in the storeroom.

“You could go check, like last time,” Rose finally said.

Ray didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “No. No, if I go out there, I’m not coming back. Somebody’s got to do something and I’m probably the only man with training who’s close enough to the situation to act and the police have no idea of how to get in here.”

“Ray—” said Molly, but Rose cut her off.

“If you go, what do we do? Do we just lie here? Six women, and there’s guys out there with machine guns? What do we do? What happens to us?”

“I think you’re okay,” said Ray. “You don’t need help. The people down there do.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” said Rose. “There’s a bunch of them, with army weapons. What can one guy do? You’ll just get yourself killed. You don’t even have a gun, much less a machine gun.”

Molly said, “She’s right. If they see you, they’ll kill you. That’s all. After all you’ve done, some punk kills you in the Payless shoe store or the Best Buy and you haven’t helped a thing and in six hours the hostage takers make a deal with the cops and fly to Cuba with a million dollars and what has your death accomplished?”