Soft Target by Stephen Hunter Read Free Book Online

Renfro—were in a state police communication van parked across the highway from the huge structure of the mall. They were roughly in the position of Bermuda, about 250 yards out from the Middle Atlantic states, directly to the east.
    He had made some early organizational decisions: one major was liaising with incoming SWAT teams from the local area, assigning the men positions on the perimeter. But the colonel had authorized no entry or engagement. The situation was too unclear; he had no idea what he was up against, who these people were, what they wanted. The last thing he needed was an out-of-control gunfight between his heavily armed operators and equally heavily armed terrorists or whatever in the middle of a crowd of civilians. Hundreds would die. But he also knew that people inside were bleeding out with wounds, suffering heart attacks, anxiety overloads, had been separated from children or other siblings or relatives, were hiding in stores, panicking, maybe plotting a rebellion of their own.
    Then he had a major running communications, trying to get everybody on the same met and organizing the inflow of information.
    “Any news on the feds?”
    “A skeleton team is inbound from Minneapolis fast under siren. They’re still collecting their SWAT people. They’ve got their HRT team gearing up at Quantico, but they’re still three hours out, and then when they land, they’ve got to get here. It’s going to take a while. Colonel, are we going in? I’ve got people in body armor at every exit now. Maybe we shouldn’t wait. Reports are that there’s a lot of wounded inside. Those folks need medical attention.”
    “Ah,” he said. An issue of jurisdiction was looming. By federal law, the FBI took charge in any situation that was defined as “terrorism” and ran the show. But things at America, the Mall, were still unclear: despite reports of terrorist-like gunmen and terrorist-like tactics and ruthlessness, he thought it could still be some crazed white militia, some NRA offshoot, some screwball Tea Party gone berserk. In his mind, one never could tell about the right in this country, particularly deep in the glowering Midwest, where men clung to guns and religion, cursed bitterly as America changed, and still believed, fundamentally, in the old ways.
    Renfro said, “Colonel, you cannot let the FBI people run this show. It can’t be a Washington thing. There are sound policy reasons for it—harder for them to coordinate with the locals, unfamiliarity with the territory, lack of intelligence on the local scene—but the politics count here too. Washington will want in, but you’ve got to hold Washington at bay.”
    “I know, I know,” said the colonel. “I’ve got a plan.”
    Obobo’s idea was to use the FBI as the primary investigative tool of this operation. They would interview witnesses, run the databases, check the photo IDs and the fingerprint files; they would liaise with ATF on ballistics. That would be plenty for them. But in no way was he prepared to relinquish command. This one was his.
    “Negative, negative on any kind of assault,” he announced to his gathered majors. “I am not going to tell the governor that he has presided over the largest bloodbath in American history. Establish the perimeter, hold the medical people and the ambulance in a zone,keep the media in the loop because we do have a responsibility to inform a panicked public, and try and set up some kind of contact with these people. They must want something, and I know I can influence them positively, given the chance.”
    “Maybe they just want to kill a lot of folks,” someone said. “Maybe the longer we wait . . .”
    This was Mike Jefferson, another major, head of SWAT and by nature aggressive; he’d won three gunfights and could be a pain in the ass. Obobo mistrusted him, as he mistrusted that kind of man, bodacious, body-proud, thick-armed, tattooed, and a little too hungry to go to guns. If you went to guns, he