McElroy traced the imaginary clock hand out to the two o’clock orientation and found the flash, saw a thin black youth in black and green tribal scarf pumping rounds from his AK, the flash lighting the boy’s face, displaying his excitement, his joy, his pleasure as he shot from the hip into the screaming herd before him, and McElroy put the X-marks-the-spot on the bridge of the nose-10 power blew it up big as a movie screen, HD no less-remembered he was shooting radically downhill and so brought point of aim down a minute of angle or so, and then felt the gun recoil-he had fired instinctively, without order, his trigger finger making all decisions for him-and took his first kill, as the bullet split the head, spewing a foam of black liquid, and the boy’s limbs melted, as he went down hard and forever.
“Clean hit,” screamed the spotter.
McElroy raced through the bolt ritual, up hard, back hard, seeing the empty pop like a muffin in his mom’s kitchen, forward hard, down soft.
“Go left to ten, I see more flash, two of them, take them, Dave, knock them down.”
McElroy found the shooter at the end of blurred transit across space and frenzy, felt he was too low on the body to take time to find the head, and his oh-so-clever trigger finger put a 175-grain hollowtip through the top of the guy’s chest, so that it would follow its downward angle, opening like an umbrella or some kind of steel rose with razor petals, find and explode the heart, which is what it did, the result being another instant splash and collapse.
“Next to him, next to him, next to him,” screamed his spotter, and McElroy jacked the spent shell out, planted a new one in the chamber, and found his next target just as that young man was reacting to the death of his partner and looked up to see Dave one hundred or so feet straight up from him.
But he vanished in a split second, withdrawing under the canopy of the second-floor balcony and Dave felt a surge of groaning frustration.
“Find me targets,” he screamed.
“Looking, looking, looking,” the spotter said.
“Oh no,” said Mr. Girardi.
A flash, followed by the crack of a detonation, seemed to blossom upon the roof of the great building.
Suddenly, activity burst out all over the compass.
The explosion seemed to galvanize every figure on the landscape, and in seconds, people were running by them, cars were mobilized, even the hovering helicopters seemed to descend from the sky. They heard, though muted, the sounds that could only have been gunshots.
“I thought it was all fixed,” said Mr. Girardi.
“Something must have gone wrong,” said his wife.
“I thought it was all over,” Mr. Girardi said. “And now this.”
Each gunman heard, over his earphones, the scream of the imam.
“My pilgrims,” the man raged, “it is time to avenge the sins of the Crusaders and the murder of the Holy Warrior. Kill the infidels. Kill them, my brave warriors, and purify the world of their filth and disease.”
Faaid put down his box of Caramel Corn and winked at Hani, who was eating cold french fries out of a cardboard box, and Hani winked back merrily. Now for the fun part!
The remaining boys spread around the perimeter of the large, docile crowd of white sheep in the amusement park, lifted his rifle to hip, and pivoted, a candy-sticky finger going to the safety levers for those who had bothered to put their safeties on, and each opened fire.
Only Nadif and Khadar were reluctant. They had spent most of the time eating and never really made eye contact with any of the white people. They had more or less found each other over the long ordeal of travel and hiding, each reading the other’s lack of killer zeal among the harder faces of the truly demented. By nature passive, they had done their duty with a minimum of aggression and frenzy. They had strolled down Mississippi at the beginning, shooting out ceiling lights and blowing holes in store windows and watching mannikin strumpets dissolve under the multiple impacts of 5.45mm bullets traveling at close to 3,000 feet per second, which they found very amusing. As for actually blowing large holes in human flesh, not so much. Then they had more or less strolled the perimeter of the mass of huddled hostages, making no eye contact with the victims, interacting reluctantly, taking frequent bathroom and food stand raid breaks.
They were not particularly into jihad. Nadif had dreamed of being a doctor and Khadar a poet. A poet! He had soft eyes and gentle ways, was almost girlish in his winsomeness. But when General Aweys’s militia had wiped out his village, and his parents as well, he had been given a choice: carry a rifle or die.
He chose the rifle and, alone among the boys, had never killed a soul. Today was supposed to be his first, but the approach of it had left a queasy feeling in his stomach.
Khadar said, “It’s time to do the work of Allah,” though without much enthusiasm. Both knew punishment of all sorts awaited them if they did not perform as expected. Numbly they turned to do the necessary.
But at that moment, from above, the sky exploded. All looked up to see the aftermath of some sort of blast at the tip of the oddly shaped skylight, and besides the unpleasantness of the noise, it rained sparkles upon them, a kind of sudden dry wind of interfering debris, and each involuntarily blinked, closed eyes, averted face.
Only a second or two, but possibly it was tactically significant, in that its violence was so unexpected and overwhelming, it stirred the torpid crowd in unanticipated directions. Suddenly, many rose, saw the rescue had commenced just as shooting had commenced, and at last found the courage to run. They scattered outward like cinders fleeing a fire.
Faaid fired at one runner, bringing him down, turned, fired fast at the crowd that suddenly roared toward him, was astounded that none went down and realized that there’s a lot of air in a crowd and at that time figured he was much better off aiming instead of crazily cracking off rounds from the hip, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and McElroy’s first shot splattered his brains.
The others didn’t notice. They too tried to master the crowd-massacre learning curve, and they too discovered that shooting blindly into the belly of the beast is likely to produce displeasing results, and in the time it took them to bring rifles to shoulders and brace knees tightly for supported shooting, several others, assisted by McElroy, Ray Cruz, and others, lost interest in the point of the operation as they were felled for keeps.
Ray got the news. Dropping the cell, he rose to the balcony railing, winced as above him McElroy’s flashbang bouquet flashed and banged with stunning malevolence, blew a hole in the Lake Michigan skylight, and a blast-propelled spray of glass spewed downward, and leaned over the balcony looking for shots. He only had a P7, the German police trade-in the killers had somehow come up with on the surplus market, though he knew it by reputation to be an accurate pistol. Two hands locked onto the small thing, the lever that bisected the grip compressed by the adrenaline-pumped psycho strength coursing down his wrists, Ray stepped out, oriented on a flash-he couldn’t see well enough to pick out an actual shooter-guesstimated where the shooter had to be relative to the flash, and squeezed off three fast rounds. The gun popped in his hands at each shot, spitting an empty, yet its jump wasn’t radical and the barrel axis was so low to his hand that it just ate up recoil, so Ray got back on target fast. Three fired, the flash disappeared, and whether he’d made a kill or just scared the guy to cover, Ray didn’t know.