But he knew Lavelva’s theoretical ambushers would have been alerted by the flashbangs as well as his own shooting, and he wheeled, still in the two-hand, low isosceles stance, and saw them-goddamn, the girl was right! — as they both emerged from a shop about sixty feet away, rifles flying to hips to take the infidel down. The P7 lived up to its rep; a long shot for a 9-mil, he still made it neatly and crisply, put one into the lead shooter, rocking him to stagger and sit-down. He rotated smoothly, telling himself not to hurry, onto the second target, tracked it as the man was moving, laid the front sight on the leading edge of the mover. Then Ray saw flash-he heard silence because his war brain had shut the world down to nothing but target-and knew instantly that his opponent, shooting fast without aiming, firing from the hip, had missed, and Ray felt his trigger pull break, the gun leaped in its little way, and the runner slowed, staggered by a solid hit, stopped, straightened up a little. At that moment from across the hallway, a door flew open and Lavelva, with her AK-74, fired, and although she shot more or less wildly, at least three of her twenty or so rounds went home, and the second Somali himself slid into coma and death on the floor of the mall.
“Bring a gun!” he screamed, and she picked up one of the fallen AKs and ran to him.
He took it as if it were a baton in a relay race, pivoted, looked over the sights for targets in the chaos and scramble below, vectored in on one muzzle flash as yet unquelled, and put three or four rounds into that spot directly behind where instinct told him a shooter crouched. If a man was there, he either went down hard or scampered back, under the overhang of the balconies, so that no angle was available to Ray.
Then Ray’s eyes were drawn to a melee in the center of the space below him, and he saw that some kind of fight had broken out, a pile-on, as hostages had trapped and were beating on one of their tormentors. But he had no shot.
The coup de SWAT consisted of some neatly tuned disobedience.
“That’s my unit moving back,” the officer had said twenty minutes back, as they crouched in the shadows of the parking lot across from the Rio Grande entrance. “They all have the black helmets from Bravo Company for that cool Delta look.”
“It is cool,” another guy had said. “We tried to get them, but the budget-”
“Go ahead,” Jefferson had said.
“Okay, so why don’t we go to them, trade helmets, and send them back to Incident Command. If they keep their helmets on, nobody’s going to know it’s them and not us. I know Nick Crewes, who commands over there. He’ll go for it.”
“And then we’re real close if the fucking balloon goes up,” said someone else. “And if it doesn’t, who knows?”
So this meant Jefferson and his ad hoc team of all-star SWAT mutineers were still in strike distance to the Rio Grande entrance, and they didn’t need an official order to go. When they heard Andrew’s orders to his gunmen, they just went.
It was a quick dash to the entrance, and both shotgunners laid muzzles next to the same metal door lock and fired simultaneously. Metal hit metal with a clang of super energy that, combined with the percussion of the two shells firing, sounded nuclear in its decibel level. Nobody blinked, they were so full of adrenaline, so ready to close and shoot, after the hours of doing nothing. The door torqued under the double slam of two hard-metal missiles being sent into its innards at a thousand feet per second and warped, twisting, showing two blisters and two smears of superheated carbon where the breaching rounds had tunneled through. Jefferson gave a hard wrench and-the door didn’t budge.
“Goddamn!” he screamed, and yanked and pulled, but it didn’t move. Inside they could hear the shots.
“They’re shooting, oh Christ, it’s a war!” came a terrified voice.
Oh, Christ, thought Neal. Think. Think!
Thank God for television. Was it a World War II movie? Nazis hunting a clandestine radio in an apartment building. They have the signal, they just don’t have the floor. One by one, they turn off the power on each floor, and when the radio broadcast is interrupted, they know their guy is on that floor.
Thank you, Nazis. Thank you, television.
Neal dragged the icon to POWER DOWN ALL and turned off every single RealDeal outlet in every single mall, strip mall, town, suburban shithole, whatever, in America. From Toledo to Tucson, from New York to Natchez, and along any other axis you cared to chart, they all went blank, all four hundred-odd of them.
For a second. Then one by one by ten by twenty, they came back on, as branch managers went to their boards, pressed RESTORE, and got their juice back on fast and the two hundred screen images back on. That is, all except one, where the branch manager was lying on the floor hoping not to get shot, surrounded by weepy clerks and sobbing customers, all clenched in prayer. Neal dragged to that one, clicked on it to bring it up, looked for LINKS, clicked on that, and found himself in a program called MEMTAC 6.2, went to the pictorial, found LOCKDOWN ENGAGED, put the cursor on it, and clicked.
LOCKDOWN DISENGAGED came the message. You’re terminated, fucker, he thought.
With the clunky sound of large pieces of metal shifting, the doors shivered and popped amid the stench of burned powder.
“Go, go,” shouted Jefferson, as his people raced in. “Semiauto, lasers on, look for targets.”
But the order was largely meaningless, as all six of them knew that.
What they found was the corridor called Rio Grande overflooded with a torrent of escapees coursing down the hallway at them, as the outer margins of the hostage crowd had already begun its race to freedom and safety, overwhelming the gunner meant to stop them by sheer numbers. He got off a few shots and then was pierced from above by one of Dave McElroy’s. 308s and taken from the fight and from the planet, both forever.
So the SWAT team formed a flying wedge, waving MP5s, screaming, “Police, Police, make way!” and magically the torrent spread, admitting them. They could hear shooting up ahead, see more chaos, had no idea other shooters were already engaging the killers.
The team spread out, bent low, looking for targets as they moved to circle those who still stood and fired. Two spotted a gunman fleeing into a CD store and pursued him, saw his feet as shadows where he crouched in terror behind a free-standing shelf unit, popped their fire selection levers to full auto, and hosed the rack with thirty rounds apiece, blowing images of rap groups, CW stars, and gospel music groups to shreds as they destroyed all that stood between them and their target. The gunman himself took close to forty hits in the few seconds that he remained standing against the onslaught, and when they got to him, they found him as dead as ancient history.
Meanwhile, in the center of Silli-Land, amid a pile of squirming hostages, a man rose in majestic thunder with his AK-74, a Conan, a Shaka Zulu, an Attila, as if he’d just crushed his enemy, driven them to the sea and heard the lamentations of their women, and in character he shouted a medieval bellow of warriorhood, as if he dared anyone to shoot him.
They shot him anyway.
Could this really be happening? Possibly it wasn’t really happening. You know, it was so unlikely that it almost certainly wasn’t happening.
But it seemed to be happening.
Colonel Obobo closed his eyes, held them tight shut, and when he opened them… yes, dammit, it still seemed to be happening.
The monitors leaped to life as Andrew Nicks restored the mall’s security cameras with the click of a mouse, and the imagery poured into the Command van. The assembled police officers watched as the young men of Brigade Mumbai opened fire on the crowd. The contrast between the muzzle flashes and the unlit darkness of the crowd was so marked that the imagery resolved itself quickly enough into abstraction, the piercing stab of the flash essentially blowing all detail out of the backdrop so that the screens only showed white-hot light and jumble, incomprehensible to the eye.