“They’re shooting inside the mall,” one of the radio techs announced. “FBI snipers say they’re shooting inside the mall.”
McElroy was first off the chopper, first into position. From the air, the lake shape of the glass was apparent and he had raced to what must have been the tip of Lake Michigan, right at Chicago, but now that he was here, it was simply Lake Glass, or Lake Plastic, an immensity of transparent, thick plastic that would somehow have to be penetrated. But first he had to equip.
He unzipped the rifle bag and laid out a Remington 700 with a Leupold 10? tactical scope, the whole thing anodized forest green. Carefully he removed a long green tube, which a Velcro strap had secured inside the bag, and brought it close to his eyes for an examination. It was a Gemtech suppressor, about eight inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, and under the tubing it consisted mainly of baffles and chambers and holes, the point of which was to elongate the time of escape for the rapidly expanding gases of a shot so that when they reached the atmosphere, they were slowed down and exited with a kind of snap instead of a terrible, earsplitting crack. With the suppressor screwed carefully on the threaded muzzle, he inserted the bolt into the receiver, reached into an ammo compartment to remove a box of Federal 175-grain match cartridges in. 308, and slid five into the rifle’s magazine, closing the bolt on and chambering the fifth. He flicked the safety on, not that he believed in safeties, looped the sling around his shoulder, and stood to examine the scene.
What lay before him was a wall about five feet tall that formed the well of the vast skylight that was Lake Michigan. It was of course not a single sheet of Plexiglas but divided into cells about 20 by 20 feet. Peering over the edge of this southernmost cell, he was rewarded with a vision from five stories up of a crowd of disconsolate Christmas shoppers jammed into the walkways and open areas of a Technicolor amusement park and seen from ninety degrees at an altitude of about 125 feet through heavy plastic; details were hard to pick out. In time he recognized what had to be a gunman, mainly by the black object carried under one arm and the black-green rag on his head. Details emerged: pistol, knife, throat mike. With access, it would have been an easy shot, and he prayed to the sniper god that he would get a chance to take it.
He radio-checked.
“Sniper Five, set up, in position,” speaking to a state police sergeant in the headquarters van.
“I have you, Five. Sitrep, please.”
“I have a good angle on the scene, almost straight down. I’m at site Chicago at the bottom of Michigan and therefore have a good view of the balconies on the opposite, that is, the eastward side. No activity there. I do not have a shot, repeat, do not have a shot. The glass or plastic or whatever it is is very thick, I don’t think I could get through it if I had a fucking hammer.”
“Be advised, no shooting, that is our call. You stay on position and call in periodically with intelligence and we will take that under advisement.”
“May I talk with FBI supervisor?”
“Negative, Five, he is in conference with incident commander and others. The governor is expected momentarily.”
“Request conference with him when available, over.”
“Noted, will try and make that happen, Five, but no promises, out.”
So that was it. All dressed up and no one to shoot. Or rather, no way to shoot, although, given the angle, the bad boys would literally represent the idealized fish in a barrel.
Dear Sniper God, your humble servant Dave here, please let me take one of these motherfuckers before the day is done. But he also knew the ways of the sniper god, and the sniper god would only help those who help themselves.
McElroy, thirty-two and a Bureau lifer who loved the SWAT life and had been on a hundred raids and on the periphery of two or three gunfights but had yet to fire a shot in anger, looked around him. Beyond, of course, was Minnesota, turning dark and pierced with an ever-increasing array of lights as the sun was setting. Far off he could see highways streaming with cars, the illumination of suburbs and strip malls, just regular American stuff. Then there was the roof itself, the flat, black-asphalt stage upon which this drama was playing out. The flatness was vast, way out of human scale, easily bigger than an aircraft carrier’s deck or a football stadium’s parking area, reaching to infinity. About a mile away, or so it seemed, was a rack of industrial-looking apparatuses, presumably part of the cooling and heating system. There were at least six little sheds-they looked comically like the ice-fishing hutches these Minnesotans built on their frozen lakes in winter-that presumably held doors that opened onto stairways into the interior. He guessed they were all locked, but it occurred to him that a good B-and-E man could probably get through, and operators could be fed into play that way. But surely they would know that at Command.
Then, more immediately, these goddamned lake-shaped skylights, here at the center of the vastness. Regularly spaced around the perimeter of Michigan, he saw a fellow such as himself, all Tommy-Tacticaled up in Nomex jumpsuit with Glock. 40 in shoulder holster, with a big bad rifle, a black watch cap or Kevlar helmet, and a posture of utter helplessness with reference to the thick wall of impenetrable glass between himself and his potential targets.
He thought, I will get through this fucking glass. I will, I will, I will.
But how? This wasn’t one of those absurd movies where the guy reaches into his kit and just happens to have exactly the right tool, a computer-driven microdiamond buzz saw that was also miniaturized and could cut through the stuff like butter and makes a hell of an old-fashioned. No, darn, he’d left that at home. Nor did he have Gatorade and cough medicine that could be instantly combined into sulfuric acid and melt the glass. He didn’t have a goddamned thing.
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.