“Colonel, should I send in SWAT?” asked Major Carmody.
“Find Jefferson!” somebody else said. “Where the hell is that guy, why isn’t he doing anything?”
“Colonel, it would probably be a good idea to tell SWAT to blow the doors, and meanwhile, I think we ought to alert the FBI and our own snipers on the roof to engage.”
“Where the fuck is Jefferson?” came another cry. “He was bitching all day about standing around and now the party’s started and he’s out to lunch.”
But Obobo said nothing. He seemed utterly baffled by the craziness on the screens above him. After all, who could make sense of that insanity?
Finally, he said, “I don’t want undue risk vis-a-vis the hostages. Let’s let the situation clarify before-”
“Sir, they’re shooting the hostages, for God’s sake,” said Carmody. “We have to stop them.”
“I don’t want to judge hastily. Maybe they’re bluffing, maybe this is another warning, maybe they’ll stop shooting. I see no need to further agitate them.”
“Sir, I-”
What was wrong with these people? When he spoke, with his calm deliberation, his firm, perfect eye contact, his empathy and compassion welling in his voice, he expected to be listened to. It had always been that way.
“That’s all, gentlemen,” he said. “That’s my decision. Now, you all wait until it clarifies and then contact me. Mr. Renfro, call my car, will you please? I’ll be outside.”
With that he turned, grabbed his coat, and left the room.
For a moment the officers stared at each other stupefied. Then one by one, they went back to the monitors.
“I think,” someone said, “we must have some people in there. I don’t know where they came from, but that sounds more like a gun battle than a massacre.”
All watched as fleet SWAT operators, black-clad and bent aggressively as if their posture alone could protect them, entered the screens from various angles, shooting as they moved, their laser beams also vivid slashes against the confusion, darting this way and that. The monitors captured two SWAT heroes blowing the hell out of a terrorist in a CD shop, and then on another screen, a man in the center of the crowd was brought down by multiple hits.
“Good fucking shooting,” someone said.
“There was some kind of blast from up top,” somebody said. “Somehow the snipers blew the skylight and I think they’re firing too.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Carmody. He turned to Mr. Renfro. “I’m going to send SWAT in for backup,” he said, almost tentatively.
“You’ll be violating the colonel’s orders,” said Renfro, but without much conviction. His pasty white face, normally so flaccid, displayed strain through tightened jowls and harsh cords standing out on the neck. “But maybe you should,” and a tide of phlegm rose in his throat, and he cleared it with a growl of breath, “ Urggghhhh — I don’t know. I–I just don’t know.”
“All units,” Carmody said into his throat mike, “you are authorized to close and engage. As soon as SWAT deploys, I’m authorizing first responders to set up triage units at each entranceway and have stretcher teams and gurneys ready to deploy when and if the mall is secure. Alert all emergency medical sites to prepare for incoming under siren but we have no idea as to casualty figures yet. It could be considerable. They’d better get all their people in and suited up.”
“Ambulances, Larry,” someone said.
“And get ambulances to the entrances to ferry the wounded. Do that ASAP.”
Then it was quiet for a second, until a major’s voice arose from the darkness, as the battle on the screens played out, with the SWAT guys shooting from standing, from moving, from kneeling, pushing in, getting closer.
“Go, babies, go,” he said.
Maahir had more or less forgotten about jihad, and martyrdom; he’d forgotten everything except for the sex part. He liked killing too, and taking money from the wallets of the dead, but the best part was the sex, and further, sex and rape, to him, were the same thing or, at least in his experience, always had been. When the order came from the imam, he alone among the gunmen did not unsling his weapon to open fire. Instead, with his strength, his majesty, his fearsome warrior’s vitality, he strode through the crowd, as the kneeling mortals rolled away from him, screaming and begging for mercy. Scum! No warriors here this day! Hah!
Death did not frighten him, as he had faced it and dealt it many times, and not just for jihad. Secretly, he didn’t give a fuck one way or the other for jihad. It was just that jihad offered the best opportunity for brigandage, which was his calling, for loot, which was his love, and for flesh, which was his obsession, particularly on the wren-like bones of a child virgin. He knew exactly where the child was. He smashed and pummeled his way to her. Now she was his.
And he had never seen one like this Chinese. So pale, so frightened, so delicate. He loved the tendrils of her tiny ears, the perfection of her mouth, a rosebud yet to open, the length and smoothness of her arms, the grace of her hands and fingers. He imagined her naked, in fear of him, obedient to his will, forced to this blasphemy or that, and the result was a tumescence as hard and gigantic as a mountain. He would have her.
He reached her, cowering in the arms of her ancient protector-mother, aunt, grandma, whatever-and he kicked that old biddy aside, freeing the child for his taking. He bent, reached her, clasped his strong hand on her frail biceps, and pulled her to him, and the lights went out big-time, except behind his eyes, where Soviet rockets detonated, filling the night sky with incandescence. He blinked his way back to reality.
The old bitch had hit him hard with her bag, swung full-crescent around her head, and it had landed with such force, he realized now she must have filled it with lead.
But just as his vision restored itself, she hit him again, flush to the head, and his mind filled with stars. It was as if the heavens had collapsed on his skull, and he experienced a moment of utter stupidity, and then a tide of other bitches swarmed on him. The audacity of them, the fury, the arrogance! None alone had the strength to prevent him from blowing snot from his nostrils, but taken together, their weight and squirmy, ripping rage kept him flat longer than he expected.
He bucked, he writhed, he shouted, finally he bit some limb that presented itself and was rewarded with the sound of a scream and the taste of hot blood, and he got a leg free to kick someone away, he shimmied to the right, and then he rose, screaming, the mob of women rolling off him. Hyenas! Vultures! Exiled old lionesses with dried-up ovaries! Scavengers of the plains! He would kill them all. He snatched his rifle up, eyes blazing with hatred, and screamed in Somali, “Whores and sluts, now I shall rip hearts from your bodies before I fuck them,” and then noted the constellation of red dots upon his chest. Fireflies?
Actually they were laser dots, followed immediately by 9mm bullets that struck him so hard and fast, they felt like the coming of rain, and he had a last, sad sense of the long topple to earth.
Nikki was looking for the sniper she called Chicago, who seemed to be all over the place. She spotted him in a crowd of snipers roughly at Racine halfway up the western shore of Lake Michigan.
“Film on the snipers, film on the snipers,” she screamed, and in another second or two he had fallen away, and in the second after that, a shear of light blew a hole in Lake Michigan, unleashing a sharp hit of percussion felt even by her.
“Jesus, I got it,” screamed Larry the camera vet, who had just recorded the only image of the skylight demolition, which would be seen around the world for the next seventy-two hours.
“They’re assaulting,” Nikki yelled, even as she watched Chicago reassemble himself at the shattered hole in the glass lake and begin the hunt for targets.
“Go, go, goddammit,” she commanded, and because she was so fast, the WUSScopter led the mad airborne charge of media helicopters, heretofore locked in obedient formation at three thousand feet, as it broke and scattered. Theirs not to reason why, theirs only to get really cool vid for a network feed.