“You must convert to-”
“Not hardly. Oh, I know. I’ll give you a nice present. That will convince you. Would you like some delicious candy? What about a gift certificate for Walmart? Possibly a new clock radio, one that goes ding-dong five times a day.”
The imam said nothing in the face of such blasphemy.
“Okay, my friend. Reach down under the dashboard in front of the seat to your right. There’s your present. Enjoy it in good health.”
The imam thought this was another joke. But he looked and, indeed, in the darkness of the space beneath the dashboard thought he made out a shape. He bent, and his fingers closed around some kind of green plastic garbage bag. He pulled it up to the seat, feeling its four pounds of weight. He set it down, studied the drawstrings of bright yellow plastic, and pulled it open.
It was the large, florid, and quite excited head of the Reverend Reed Hobart.
“Won’t that look great on the mantel?” said the boy as he slipped out the back and disappeared into the darkness. Then, suddenly, the dashboard display came alive and the radio blared.
Stones. “Paint It Black.”
5:55 P.M.-6:14 P.M
Ray slid the answer icon to the right and put the phone to his ear.
“This is Special Agent McElroy,” he heard.
“No,” he said, “it’s Chucklehead McElroy. Dumbbell and dope. You ever shoot down-angle, McElroy?”
“I guess not,” said McElroy.
“You have to hold low. If you hold straight on, you hit high. You owe me fifty.”
“Dollars?”
“Push-ups.”
“I’m a little busy now,” said McElroy.
“And you’re going to get busier. Put that rifle down, you’re too dangerous with it. You find me isolated targets out of visual contact with their main force and I will put them down. We’ll reduce their team one by one before they even notice it.”
“Uh, Sergeant, that’s against policy. I’d have to get some sort of higher approval on that, and to be honest, I don’t think an agent has ever acted under such a wide license. It would definitely be against our policy.”
“It’s against your policy. It’s not against my policy. My policy is stalk and kill, one-shot variety. It’s what I do. It’s all I do. I can shoot suppressed, so noise isn’t an issue. Now I am going to move out and try and take these people down. Having you bird-dog for me from on high like my private satellite would be very helpful. Or I can do it on my own. Either way, it will happen, McElroy. You decide right now who you are with.”
He heard McElroy pause and even imagined that the phone picked up the vibrations of a dry swallow. But then McElroy said, “Okay. I’m in. Nothing’s happening here anyway.” Then he said, “First, maybe you have some intel I can forward to Command. You got your gear from one of them, right?”
“He didn’t seem to mind. Black male, age twenty-two or so. Somali, I’d guess, from what I’ve seen of them in Minnesota. Handsome dude, even with a broken neck. Didn’t do an ID check.”
“You took his stuff though. Equipment data?”
“Okay, the pistol is a Heckler and Koch P7, much battered, I’m guessing some European police department trade-in. You have to squeeze it to make it shoot, very unusual gun. The 9-mil ammo has a foreign head stamp, I don’t have time to check it exactly. It looked grungy, as if it had been stored in tins for three decades. The AK is a 74, not a 47. It’s overmarked WTI, Laredo, Texas. Looks to be a Bulgarian or Romanian clone, I can’t really read the serial number. The ammo is 5.45?39, which is the Eastbloc variant on 5.56 NATO. Small, lethal, fast, 50-60-grain round, looks surplus too, no recognizable head stamp, crappy OD steel case, red band at base of bullet, copper gilding. The mags are sort of plum-orange color, and I saw that shade all over the Mideast and Afghanistan, so I’m guessing Eastbloc junk too. The commo shit is Radio Shack, low-end. The knife was some kind of surplus AK bayonet. The whole thing could have been supported out of some shit-city surplus store, so maybe that’s a place for you to look.”
“Got it. I’ll get this to Command, we can get ATF hacking on it.”
“You do that. Meanwhile, I’m on the stalk. The more we kill, the easier any kind of assault will be when the heavy hitters go in. And when that happens, I can provide distracting fire and then suppressive if they have to maneuver. You’re my spotter, McElroy, clear on that?”
“Yes sir,” said McElroy.
“Good. Now find me targets.”
McElroy closed up the phone and pressed his radio. He got Webley’s assistant on the wave and fed him the weapon info he had just acquired. Then he signed off, eased over the edge of Lake Michigan, and went to work through his binoculars. Nothing much had changed one hundred feet below. From his nine-zero-degree perspective, he could see a mass of humanity gathered on the walkways of the amusement park, shaded here and there by the foliage of trees, plastic or real unknown. Santa, still dead, still on his throne. Why didn’t somebody throw a blanket over the guy? The people were crowded together so tightly it was hard to make out the individual from the herd. Most were on their haunches, some still with hands on head or behind necks, looking nowhere except straight ahead. Many were trying to talk inconspicuously on their cell phones. On their outskirts he could make out the more vigorous movements of the gunmen, who strolled about the perimeter, AKs showily in hand. They were easy to spot because of the bright tribal scarves, which made excellent target markers. Someone either hadn’t thought that one through or had thought it through very carefully and didn’t particularly care that if the assault came, targeting the gunmen would be much easier. McElroy himself didn’t know what to make of it, nor did he know what to make of a situation in which so few controlled so many so completely.
He thought about it: yes, indeed, if all the hostages rose and ran at one of the gunmen-say that dude there, who lounged against a mall pillar, smoking an illegal cigarette, looking not particularly terrorist but more teen punk-they could almost certainly overcome him and flee en masse down the corridor. But to do that they’d have to act as one, and the first twenty-five or so would have had to have made friends with their own death. No twenty-five middle-class Americans were about to do that; whatever, that spirit was gone and nobody down there today would die of crazed courage. They would sit, try to wait it out, pray for the authorities to run the rescue, and pray that they’d be spared when that happened. The guy behind this puppy knew his victim psychology a la America, the Mall, and America, the country.
He looked for evidence of explosives rigging, canisters of gas, maybe tanks of ignitable propane, all emblems of weapons of mass destruction mall-style, and saw nothing: just men-young, if he read their rangy, undisciplined postures correctly-and their rifles. The five executed hostages had been dragged over to the railing that separated the Wild Mouse ride from the public areas.
Targets? None to be had. If the Marine sniper pegged one of the gunmen, he’d go down in full view; the crowd would react, the other gunmen would see, and the whole game would be up. They’d shoot ten more, then ten again until he gave himself up; that was the message in the first five deaths.
But then-yes. Okay, maybe, yes.
On the second floor, three jihadis had emerged from their posts below and now overlooked the crowd. Concentrating hard, he saw that all three had the bigger forty-round magazines that probably were designed to feed the gun in its light machine-gun role. These three leaned on the balcony, smoking, joking, joshing, goosing, goofing around. They’d been put there obviously because their vantage post was so much higher, their angle better, and in the event of an assault, they could bring fire not through the crowd but on the crowd. They were on the Marine sniper’s level, but not across from him, rather to his right one corridor. He was Colorado, they were Rio Grande. He couldn’t engage them from where he was, but if he rotated another corridor in the opposite direction, over to Hudson, he’d have a good shot at them. If he were above them, he’d have an even better angle.