“Are you all right?” she asked. “Not really,” he said. “Sort of stuck here.”
“I heard from my sister. Ray, she’s in with the hostages. My mother too.”
“I can’t do anything for them now.”
“Ray, what should I tell her?”
“If there’s an assault, get down. Don’t run. Most of the firing will be at waist to chest level or higher. If they’re down, they’ll be much safer. Crawl slowly away from the area but be willing to play dead at any second. It’ll be over quickly. There’ll be a lot of firing, a lot of confusion, and they should be as innocuous as possible. If they panic and run, someone may target them as movers, our guys, their guys.”
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
“Did those kids get there?”
“Yes, the place is now crawling with them. All the women are helping. That day care girl is something.”
“She’d make a hell of a marine. Meanwhile, I’ve just had an idea. I have to get off the phone.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
Tell him, Ray thought.
But now that he had the phone out, he went quickly to his contacts screen and touched the call icon for the one man who might be able to help him, the strange, remote, laconic guy who was, they had both so recently learned, his biological father.
“This is Swagger,” came the message. “Leave a number and maybe I’ll call you back. But I probably won’t.”
Ha ha. Great for the dry humor the old bastard was known for, almost as much as his shooting, but it did his son no good now.
Ray swept his contacts and at last came upon another possibility.
Nick Memphis, FBI, the entry read.
Only a few people had his private number, so Nick was somewhat surprised to feel the phone tingling in his jacket. He picked it open, saw Ray’s number, thought it odd that the man should be calling him at all, particularly now, today.
“Cruz, how are you? Long time no hear, nice to get a call. Actually, Ray, I’m kind of busy-”
“I am too. I’m betting you’re watching reports come in of a terrorist deal in Minnesota. Well, I’m in the middle of it.”
Memphis was stunned. He was indeed sitting in the FBI Incident Command Center in the Hoover Building in DC, actually not doing much except pitching in his comments on dealing not with the gunmen but with the phenomenon known as Douglas Obobo, a tricky character. On another floor, theoretically brilliant people on computer terminals tried to hack into the closed-off mall system; up here, others worked the phones, trying desperately to find some clue as to who was behind this, and others ran logistics, helping coordinate the problems by which law enforcement units continued to pour into Indian Falls, particularly the now airborne FBI HRT from Quantico, while still others were on the phone constantly to Will Kemp, the SAIC in Minnesota, giving him advice and handling his inquiries while also monitoring the situation and evaluating his performance.
Ray explained what was happening to him.
“Jesus,” said Nick, thinking instantly how ugly a fate it would be for Cruz, after his legendary service, to get nailed by an FBI sniper in a bullshit friendly-fire incident.
He looked over, saw Ron Fields, head of the FBI’s sniper school and a leading tactical guru within the institution, on the phone.
“Okay,” he said. “Cruz, you stay put. I’m going to try and get you out of the kill zone.”
He went over and said, “Ronnie, I have a situation.”
Fields had the usual deadpan SWAT response to anything, even the fact that a Marine sniper was being targeted by an FBI sniper inside a terrorist takeover of a replica of America in the heart of the actual America on prime-time televison and that someone had shot Santa Claus. If anything in the fix seemed ironic or ridiculous or even unfortunate, he didn’t register it. He solved it. He nodded, pushed some buttons, and handed a hardwired receiver to Nick, saying, “Webley, Kemp’s number two, on site and helping Kemp.”
“Webley,” came a voice. “Webley, this is Nick Memphis.”
“Yes, Mr. Memphis.”
Nick heard Webley pop to immediately, aware that he was on the phone with a big DC player, probably for the first time in his life.
“Webley, you have snipers on the roof?”
“Yes sir,” answered Webley. “One of them is engaging even as we-”
“That’s the problem,” said Nick. “The guy he’s shooting at is a good guy. Ex-marine, sniper himself. Call him off.”
“Yes sir.”
“And put me on the line.”
“Yes sir.”
Nick listened as someone did more connecting, and heard in a few seconds “Sniper Five, this is Command. Disengage, that is an order, disengage.”
“Goddammit, I have him. He’s going to break out of there and I will nail him-”
“Sniper Five, I am advised you are firing on a friendly.”
“What? He has an AK and a head scarf and-”
“Sniper Five, this is Assistant Director Memphis in DC. The man you are firing on is an ex-marine with sniper experience himself. Do not engage. He could be our asset inside.”
“Can he signal? Three fingers?”
Nick put down the phone, picked up his cell.
“Ray, hold out three fingers. I’ve got the guy on the line, actually.”
“He’s not some fucking kid who’ll shoot ’em off, is he?”
“He sounds excited, yes, but he’s under control.”
There was a pause.
Then Sniper Five said, “I have acknowledgment. I see three. I am stepping down.”
“Good, good,” said Webley.
“Okay, Ray, you’re clear now. At least Sniper Five won’t be-”
It seemed to occur to all of them at once, and the jabber was impenetrable until finally all shut up and let Nick say what all had figured out.
“Webley, I’m going to give you Ray’s number. His name is Ray Cruz, twenty-two years USMC, maybe their number one sniper, five tours in the sand, great, great operator. I don’t know what he’s doing there, but he’s there and we’re fools if we don’t use him. Have Sniper Five contact him. Maybe the two of them can work together and deal with these guys in a way no one else is in position to.”
“Got you, AD. Wilco.”
Nick went back to Ray.
“The guy on the roof is going to call you. Sniper Five, don’t know his name, but maybe you and he can see things we can’t and help us.”
“Got it,” said Ray, clicking off to wait.
“Sir,” said Webley, “should I alert SAIC Kemp about this contact?”
“You know Kemp, I don’t. You make the call.”
“Ah… he’s not too anxious to get heavy into this one. It looks like it’s going down bad for all involved and there could be big repercussions.”
The Bureau culture. It was, as often as not, the true enemy. SAs learned that the route to promotion and retirement plus lucrative security industry positions afterward was a spotless run through their twenty years on the street, and that had the inevitable effect of drying out initiative. Nobody wanted to make the big mistake and get creamed. And no one seemed to notice that Nick had mavericked himself aloft, but even Nick knew he was the exception and that his connection to the even more maverick Bob Lee Swagger had been a fantastic aid. So these guys always played it cautious, and somehow career considerations came into play in command decisions in ways that couldn’t be anticipated. It was nobody’s fault, it was the culture.
So Nick said, “You know, he’s got a lot on his mind, Webley. And I don’t want him trying to conceal anything from Obobo. So until we see how this is going to work out, we’ll keep it to ourselves, okay? If Ray moves, he may have to move fast, and I don’t want him fighting Bureau culture and Command doubt among his many enemies.”
“I am on board, sir,” said Webley.
Nothing scared Mom. Her wrinkled old face had knitted up tight and now showed nothing but fighting rage. And she knew a little about fighting rage: she’d been born into the tribal mountain zones of a country that had been destroyed, into a war culture, and had grown up to the smell of aviation fuel from the coming and going of the American helicopters, the fluttery lights of illumination flares parachuting down outside the wire in the night, the far-off and sometimes not so far-off popping of small-arms fire. She knew how to fieldstrip both an AK-47 and a carbine. She knew how to lay a mine, cut a man’s throat, read sign, and stay dead still when the northerners, in their ridiculous uniforms (were they monkeys? she thought they looked like monkeys) stalked her. She’d lost three brothers by the time she was fifteen, and her father, Gua-Mo Chan, had worked with a variety of young American commandos on missions against the same hated northerners. She married at seventeen to a fighter named Jang, the bravest of the brave. Then one day he didn’t come back, and so she mourned for a year and a day, and at eighteen married another fighter, her current husband, Dang Yan, called Danny, now a travel agency owner on Central Avenue in Saint Paul.