McElroy went back to scope and saw the face quadrisected by the four pie slices of scope upon which the reticle was centered. He had the kill shot with his suppressor. He had to get the okay to shoot.
Amazingly, the guy looked not Arabic at all but sort of Chinese or something.
It was Webley again, Kemp’s second in command, and this time he’d come up almost secretly to Kemp. He spoke in a whisper.
“One of our guys on the roof has managed to bore through a soft spot under the frame of the window. He has a target.”
“Tango?” asked Kemp.
“Affirmative. Dead center, moving down the hallway. One guy, isolated, AK-74, don’t know what he’s doing up there. My shooter is suppressed, he’s on him now, can take him down quietly, the others won’t know.”
“Interesting,” said Kemp.
“Will, we have to take this guy.”
“We ought to clear it with Obobo.”
“He’ll say no. I guarantee you, you know it, I know it. He’s risk-averse, force-averse, kill-averse. I don’t know what he’s doing in this line of work.”
“Jake, keep it down. You don’t know who’s listening.”
“Will, let us take this guy. It’s one less to deal with. Obobo doesn’t need to know. It’s our sniper, our operation, we have to take this chance.”
Everything in Kemp warned him to say no, which is why he himself was surprised when he said, “Green-light him. Drop the fucker hard.”
“Sniper Five, cleared to engage,” McElroy heard.
“Roger wilco,” said McElroy, trying to fight the spasm of elation that it had finally come, the clearance to make the kill, the order he’d been waiting for his whole life. He almost pulled hard at that second but…
Some sniper wisdom from somewhere halted him, maybe the sniper god reaching down to calm him. He’d been in position too long, his body discipline was breaking down, the whole goddamn thing was pretty shaky because he wasn’t set up on something to take the weight, the rifle wasn’t on its bipod, he didn’t have a bag or a tight left arm under the buttstock to eat up the tremble. This was all fucked up and nobody in sniper school had ever said a thing about an improvised position like this.
He stood half hunching, all weight centered on the small of his back, which was beginning to object. His legs were slightly spread but he couldn’t lock his knees and instead had to keep them precisely folded to stay on target. He supported the rifle entirely on the strength of his arms, which deadened his trigger finger and sent telegrams of pain to wrists and gripping hands. The yips had begun to build, little random tremors that could come from nowhere and blow the shot he’d made ten thousand times. He stepped back, eased the rifle down, took a deep breath of cool air, felt it soothe his lungs and his dried throat, felt the oxygen send a squirt of strength to his much-troubled and overworked limbs, and he willed himself back together again.
He went into his hunch, drawing the rifle up, knowing that he wouldn’t want to spend too much time on target but break the trigger at the first sight picture. He torqued his elbows inward even as his trigger finger snapped the safety forward, making him hot, good to go, ready to rock. He found the spotweld, watched the sight picture clarify, noted that his guy had moved just a bit and was possibly a foot closer to his objective-which had to be the balcony overlooking the hostages-and felt a little oddness.
Why was he so cautious? Why was he not striding about like he owned the place? Why was he kind of Asian?
McElroy had no answers.
But on the other hand: He has an AK. He is dressed in the tribal headdress of Islamic, specifically Arab, persuasion. He has a throat mike, a pistol, a knife, as had all the others McElroy’d seen. He was a terrorist, he had to be, the only explanation that made sense.
Kill him, he thought, kill him quick before the yips break you down again.
He made the slight adjustment to drop the muzzle to account for the slight forward progress of the man, felt the trigger strut against the softest push of his finger just exactly as the four right angles of the reticle settled on the blank of the forehead, and beheld the perfection.
The rifle fired itself.
First person shooter at its ultimate. First person shooter, for real. First person shooter, the logical destination. First person shooter, the end of the road.
He watched on number seven, the big screen. He knew he should be watching the other screens, should be scanning this corridor and that stairwell for all the signs of disturbance, for possible threat, for danger, for sloppiness on the part of the kids, but he could not stop watching.
The rifles, unnoticed by their users, had miniaturized vidcams clamped to the barrel with some fixture from GG amp;G or Bravo Company or LaRue Tactical just behind the muzzle, and each sent a streaming vid feed to him at his headquarters, via the mall’s Wi-Fi network, and came up on the big screens adjacent to the wall that displayed his intercept of the security cam data. Images, images everywhere on the walls of this dark back room, which was filled with screenglow, turning everything a translucent gray white, yet more surrealism for this most surreal of enterprises.
The guncam imagery, of course, was sent to and recorded on the 6 TB memory card, but he was still able to hit replay at the local level and watch a designated sequence over and over again.
So now he watched number seven, for about the fourteenth time. The gunman was Maahir, the oldest and most reliable, the killer of Santa Claus. It took a while for the video to settle down, but even as the muzzle prodded the arbitrarily selected five and pried them out of the crowd in a dazzle of near-abstract shapes and black-white-gray imagery, certain lucid visions still arrived: the look in the eyes of the woman, the sullen downcast of the face of the old man, the simple dullness of the uncomprehending teenager. Then it all went to blur again as the gunman walked them to the cleared space, got them on their knees. They hadn’t yet figured what was going to happen because of course it was so outside their imagination. This kind of thing, this wantonness, this jihadi contempt for life, it hadn’t yet come to America. Oh, sure, 2,900 at the Trade Center, but those were meaningless numbers. The deaths of these five would be far more terrible and would live forever in the Western imagination when the data got into the world blogosphere. But that was still a few days off.
Okay, now. Five kneelers, hands at their sides. Maahir has settled down, the gun muzzle isn’t flappity-flapping all over the joint, reducing the imagery to a smear of gaudy electrons, and the tiny camera peers down from its forearm mount, seeing the muzzle as a black prong in the upper right hand of the screen, eternally fixed in the image.
The woman is first. The camera closes on the back of her head as he presses the muzzle almost to her skull. She has no idea she’s about to enter history and sits placidly awaiting a deliverance that isn’t to be. Flash, jump, blur, a haze of smoke, and the image is still again and fills with light as she topples forward, twisted slightly, instantly extinct. With animal death comes the end of body discipline, as all the muscles let go at once and she lunges forward like a felled building, straight into the floor, not much damage visible because the bullet passed through hair, burning it, pushing it aside, but still hiding the fragility of the skull.
As the muzzle sweeps to the next in line, his eyes shoot back to the gunman, laced with bulgy fear. Flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. He topples sideways, out of the frame. The next is the younger woman, who appears to be knit up in desperate prayer, all bunched up, her jaw vibrating as she uncorks the various afterlife mantras and deity ass kissing that constitute formal address to the supreme, then flash, jump, blur, haze, stability. An eccentricity. She does not fall immediately but for some reason remains intact and upward for another second or so, then seems to melt from within, as if her core has turned liquid and imploded downward.