It was McElroy’s last kill and the one that would haunt him. The others were armed and had been dropped as a lifesaving necessity, as duty compelled. But this guy was wide open from the back, his rifle hung by sling over a shoulder, and for all the world he looked like nothing more menacing than some kind of haute-bourgie recreational climber, the guy who reads Outside magazine and shops at REI and tells everybody he wants to “do” Mount McKinley, then the Matterhorn, and as for the Hindu Kush, well, we’ll see. There’d been a guy just like that in the Cleveland field office.
At the same time, the guy was armed and he was heading vigorously to an elevation from which he could do violence to SWAT guys and citizens. So McElroy’s pause lasted less than a second and was shortened even further by his spotter saying, “Dave, target on roller coaster structure, about ten o’clock, looks to be over a hundred.”
It wasn’t so radical a downhill angle, so McElroy didn’t hold low but rather let the crosshairs settle between the shoulder blades as he began his press, and maybe they’d passed a little beneath that ideal spot when the trigger broke.
The results were pathetic, of course. The gunman didn’t fall immediately. He was too strong and limber. His feet went, one of his arms spasmed out, and he hung for maybe three seconds by one arm, and one of his legs twitched. Then his final four fingers yielded on the death grip, he slid off into gravity, the tip of his shoe hit a strut and flipped him backward, and he fell almost horizontally, striking the earth backside first so that his legs and arms splayed outward in the dust that rose from the flower bed whose buds he crushed.
“Great shot,” said the spotter. “That’s three, or is it four?”
“He was three, but it’s like prairie dog shooting,” said McElroy, “in that it gets thin fast.”
Ray could see no one left to shoot. And by this time, from somewhere, SWAT operators had broken into the amusement park and were clearing. He’d watched them take down a big guy in a scrum of angry women, pursue another into a store, where a double burst of full auto suggested Game Over, and finally his vision was provoked by rapid movement on the periphery and he saw a gunman in midfall from the top of the roller coaster’s biggest hill to hit and bounce and then go limp in a flower bed.
Yells reached him from the operators below.
“Clear left, tangos down.”
“Clear right, tangos down.”
“Clear in center, I think all tangos down.”
“Check tangos, be careful, shoot if you see movement.”
The SWAT team moved through the melancholy ritual of mop-up, never fun for anybody, and then Nick heard, “We are clear, we are clear, many civilians down, get medical in here fastest.”
Someone from Command came over the net.
“This is Command. Clear for medical, clear for medical. Get those medics in there and begin to assist the wounded. All aid stations, wounded incoming.”
“Okay,” Ray said to Lavelva as he reloaded a fresh mag in his Kalash. “Now I’m going into the place where I think this kid is hiding. You stay here, you stay down. Do not move fast, do not go down on your own. This is a tricky time, you could get shot by some hot dog real easily, do you hear?”
“Ray, you don’t have to do this thing.”
“Well, I’m closest.”
“Ray, it’s over. Let them police take that boy. That’s their job, let ’em do it for once. You just sit here by me and rest. We get some french fries.”
He smiled.
“I hear you, yes I do. But that’s not how it works. I have to finish this thing, I’m closest. Maybe he knows secret ways out or places to hide, maybe he means to set up and kill a lot of people one last time-whatever, the sooner he is put down, the better. And as it has worked out, I represent sooner.”
“I’m going with you,” said Lavelva.
“Sweetie, this is tactical entry, close-quarters battle; you need to know what you’re doing and I can’t be thinking on you. I’m giving you a Marine Corps order: you sit down over there and wait till the good guys arrive.”
He turned, went back to his iPhone.
“McElroy and anyone else, I’m now going into First Person Shooter after this kid and whoever.”
“Cruz, this is Memphis. Take off your scarf and whatever you’re wearing on the outside. You have a white T-shirt on?”
“It’s Marine OD.”
“Webley, you direct all first responders not, not, I say again, to engage an armed figure in an OD T-shirt.”
“There’s a young African American woman here too,” said Ray. “Lavelva, she is tops, she was with me the whole way. She should not be engaged either. She will be sitting outside unarmed with her hands in plain sight.”
“Get that, Webley?”
“I’m putting it out now,” said Webley. “They should be up there soon. Ray, go get ’em.”
“I’m off.”
“Good luck, Marine,” said McElroy. “I’m on you with backup far as I can go.”
Ray clambered up, but Lavelva tried one last time.
“Ray, why are you such a goddamned hero? Heroes die young and hard and leave their girlfriends all swole up with weepy snot on their faces.”
“Maybe so, but I have ancestors to answer to.”
“From China?”
“No, much worse: from Arkansas.”
The shooting had stopped. Andrew turned to face the grave demeanor of the imam, who also realized that it was almost time. Andrew felt a little like another one of his heroes, Hitler, in the Fuhrerbunker with the Russian peasant army up above.
He rose, went to the game console, pushed a button, and a memory stick popped out, which he in turn dropped into a buffered envelope, already addressed and stamped. He sealed it and handed it over to the imam.
“You will be all right. I will take you to the doorway, you will go up, your pilot will land, and you will be gone. In the mess no one will even notice. It’s going to get way crazy around here. Then you drop that in a Canadian mailbox and it goes to a Canadian letter drop for WikiLeaks. They’ll know what to do with it. A little editing, a little tightening, add a timeline and some production values, and you have the greatest FPS game ever made. You have the greatest story ever told. It will live for a million years, do you understand?”
“I do, my brother. But it is not too late. You can come with me.”
“Nah, never in the cards. I always knew and I’m prepared: narrative rules. It needs a climax. We’ve got a hero, I’m the villain of the piece. We need a dueclass="underline" he and I must fight to the death. Whichever one of us goes down, it’ll make the narrative complete. WikiLeaks will patch that stuff in from CNN and from all the cell phone vid, don’t worry.”
“So be it, then, my friend.”
“If I see Allah, I’ll say hello to him for you and hope there are some virgins left.”
“I will see you in paradise.”
“Or hell. Whatever.”
The two men hugged, yet there was nothing left to say, and time was short. The imam turned with his treasure, exited the back door.
Andrew picked up his iPad, checked to see that it was receiving wireless feeds from all the gun cameras, selected number four, and brought it up. He saw what the gun muzzle of the man stalking him saw, which was the steady progress down Rio Grande toward the FPS store, where he, Andrew, awaited.
Andrew picked up his own AK-74, the one without the gun camera, and slung it. He turned and slipped into the interior corridor, raced past doorways, and finally pushed one in and stepped into the back of a Payless shoe store. A group of women crouched in horror nearby.
“Are you the police?” one of them asked.
“Not exactly,” he said.
Ray did a quick pass-by on the First Person Shooter doorway, saw that the store inside appeared to be empty. He ran a last check on the AK, making sure he was cocked and unlocked, then went in hard and low, CQB-style, gun at the shoulder, moving erratically, eyes dilated so wide in the scan for data you could have landed a plane in them. Posters of ubermenschen with the latest in stylized assault rifles stood heroically on all the walls, like in some sort of Waffen-SS fantasyland, as well as a couple of bulletin boards that tracked I, Killer tournament progress, quotes from battle gurus like Napoleon, Bedford Forrest, Jeff Cooper, Sun Tzu, all very nerd technowar. The place, however, didn’t have that Marine smell of sweat but the scent of something else: plastic wrapping.