A few people had noted their presence—four men of identically exotic appearance was unusual—but an American shopping mall is the nearest thing to a zoo for humans, and it took a lot for people to take much note of anything unusual, much less dangerous.
In the men’s room, they all took their weapons from the shopping bags and assembled them. Bolts were pulled back. Magazines were inserted in the pistol grips. Each man slipped the five magazine pairs into pants pockets. Two screwed the lengthy suppressors onto their weapons. Mustafa and Rafi did not, deciding after rapid reflection that they preferred to hear the noise.
“Are we ready?” the leader asked. The replies were only nods.
“Then we shall eat lamb together in Paradise. To your places. When I shoot first, you will all begin.”
BRIAN WAS trying on some low-top leather boots. Not quite the same as the boots he wore in the Marine Corps, but they looked and felt comfortable, and they fitted his feet as though custom designed. “Not bad.”
“Want me to box them up?” the clerk—a girl—asked.
Aldo thought for a moment and decided: “No, I’ll break them in right away.” He handed her his disreputable Nikes, which she put in the box for the boots, and led him to the cash register.
MUSTAFA WAS looking at his watch. He figured two minutes for his friends to get in place.
Rafi, Zuhayr, and Abdullah were walking into the main concourse of the mall now, holding their weapons low, and, amazingly, largely escaping notice from the shoppers who bustled along and minded their own business. When the sweep hand reached twelve, Mustafa took a deep breath and walked out of the men’s room, and to the left.
The security guard was at his chest-high desk, reading a magazine, when he saw a shadow on the desktop. He looked up to see a man of olive complexion.
“Can I help you, sir?” he asked politely. He had no time to react after that.
“Allahu Ackbar!” was the shouted reply. Then the Ingram came up. Mustafa held the trigger for but a second, but in that second, a total of nine bullets entered the black man’s chest. The impact of nine bullets pushed him backward half a step, and he fell, dead, to the tiled floor.
“WHAT THE hell was that?” Brian instantly asked his brother—the only person nearby—as all heads turned to the left.
RAFI WAS only twenty-five feet to their right-front when he heard the gunfire, and it was time for him to start. He dropped into a half crouch and brought his Ingram up. He turned right toward the Victoria’s Secret store. The customers there all had to be women of no morals even to look at such whorish clothing, and perhaps, he thought, some would serve him in Paradise. He just pointed and held the trigger down.
The sound was deafening, like a colossal zipper of explosions. Three women were immediately hit and went down at once. Others just stood still for a second, their eyes wide with shock and disbelief, not taking any action at all.
For his part, Rafi was disagreeably surprised by the fact that more than half of his rounds had not hit anything. The poorly balanced weapon had jerked in his hand, spraying the ceiling. The bolt closed on an empty chamber. He looked down at it in surprise, then ejected the first magazine and reversed it, slapping it back into the port and looking for more targets. They’d started to run now, and so he brought the Ingram to his shoulder.
“FUCK!” Brian said. What the hell is going on? his mind shouted.
“Fuckin’ right, Aldo.” Dominic swiveled his fanny pack to the front of his belly and jerked at the string that opened the two-zipper closure. A second later, his Smith & Wesson was in his hands. “Cover my ass!” he commanded his brother. The shooter with the SMG was a bare twenty feet away, on the other side of a jewelry kiosk, facing away, but this wasn’t Dodge City, there were no rules about facing down a criminal.
Dominic fell to one knee, and bringing the automatic up in both hands, he loosed two ten-millimeter hollow points into the center of the man’s back, and then one more into the center of the back of his head. His target dropped straight down, and judging by the red explosion from the third shot, wouldn’t be doing much else. The FBI agent jumped to the prostrate body and kicked the gun away. He noted immediately what it was, and then he saw that the body had extra magazines in its pockets. The immediate thought was Oh, shit! Then he heard the crackling roar of more gunfire to his left.
“More of ’em, Enzo!” Brian said, right at his brother’s side, his Beretta in his right hand. “This one’s all gone. Any ideas?”
“Follow me, cover my ass!”
MUSTAFA FOUND himself in a low-end jewelry store. There were six women in view, in front of and behind the counter. He lowered his weapon to his hip and fired, emptying his first magazine into them and feeling the momentary satisfaction of seeing them fall. When the gun stopped shooting, he ejected the empty magazine and reversed in to reload, cocking the bolt as he did so.
BOTH TWINS came to their feet and started moving west, not fast, but not slow either, with Dominic in the lead and Brian two steps back, their eyes mainly going to where the noise was. All Brian’s training; came flooding back into his consciousness. Use cover and concealment wherever possible. Locate and engage the enemy.
Just then a figure came left to right from Kay jewelers, holding a SMG and spraying to his left into another jewelry store. The mall was a cacophony of screams and gunfire now, with people running blindly toward exits instead of first looking for where the danger was. A lot of those went down, mostly women. Some children.
Somehow this all passed the brothers by. They scarcely even saw the victims. There just wasn’t time for that, and what training they’d had took over completely. The first target in view was the one standing there hosing the jewelry store.
“Going right,” Brian said, darting that way with his head down but looking in the direction of his target.
BRIAN ALMOST died that way. Zuhayr was standing at Claire’s Boutique, having just turned away from dumping a full magazine into it. Suddenly unsure of which way to go next, he turned left and saw a man with a pistol in his hand. He carefully shouldered his weapon and squeezed the trigger—
—two rounds fired off uselessly, then nothing. His first magazine had been expended, and it took two or three seconds for him to realize it. Then he ejected and reversed it, ramming it back into the bottom of his machine gun and looking back up—
—but the man was gone. Where? Without targets, he reversed direction and walked with a measured pace into the Belk’s women’s store.
BRIAN CROUCHED by the Sunglass Hut, peeking around the right side.
There, moving to the left. He brought his Beretta into his right hand and squeezed off one round—
—but it missed the head by a whisker when the man ducked.
“Fuck!” Brian then stood and put both hands on the pistol, leading just a hair and firing off four rounds. All four went into the thorax, below the shoulders.
MUSTAFA HEARD the noise but didn’t feel the impacts. His body was fully of adrenaline, and, under such circumstances, the body simply does not feel pain. Just a second later, he coughed up blood, which came as quite a surprise. More so, when he tried to turn to his left, his body didn’t do what his mind commanded. The puzzlement lasted just another second or two when—
—DOMINIC WAS facing the second one, gun up and aimed. Again, he fired, as trained, for center-of-mass, and the Smith was on single-action, barking twice.
So good was his aim that the first round hit the target’s weapon—
—THE INGRAM jumped in Mustafa’s hands. He barely held on to it, but then he saw who’d attacked him and took careful aim and squeezed—but nothing happened. On looking down, he saw a bullet hole in the steel side of the Ingram, just where the bolt was. He took another second or two to realize that he was now disarmed. But his enemy was still before him and he raced toward him, hoping to use his gun as a club if nothing else.
DOMINIC WAS amazed. He’d seen at least one of his rounds take him in the chest—and the other one had broken his weapon. For some reason, he did not fire again. Instead he clubbed the bastard in the face with his Smith and headed forward, where there was more gunfire.
MUSTAFA FELT his legs weaken. The blow in the face did hurt, even though the five bullets had not. He tried to turn again, but his left leg would bear no weight, and he fell, turning to land on his back, where, suddenly, breathing came very hard indeed. He tried to sit up, even to roll, but as his legs had failed him, so the left side of his body was useless.