The Teeth of the Tiger

  “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 it 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 an 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 full 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.

  “ THAT ’ S TWO down,” Brian said. “Now what?”

  The screaming had abated, but not by much. But the gunfire was still there, and it had changed character ...

  ABDULLAH blessed fate for putting the suppressor on his weapon. His shooting was more accurate than he’d ever hoped.

  He was in the Sam Goody music store, which was filled with students. It was also a store with no rear exit, because it was so close to the westernmost entrance. Abdullah’s face was grinning broadly as he walked into the store, firing as he went. The faces he saw were full of disbelief—and for an amused moment he told himself that disbelief was the reason he was killing them. He emptied his first magazine quickly, and indeed the suppressor allowed him to hit with half his shots. Men and women—boys and girls—screamed, stood still and staring for a few precious, deadly seconds, and then started running away. But at less than ten meters, it was just as easy to hit them in the back, and they really had nowhere to run. He just stood there, hosing the room, letting the targets select themselves. Some ran up the other side of the CD racks, trying to escape out the main door. These he shot as they passed, hardly two meters away. In seconds, he’d emptied his first magazine pair, and dumped it, pulling another from his pants pocket and slamming it home and cocking the bolt. But there was a mirror on the store’s back wall, and in it he saw—

  “JESUS, another one!” Dominic said.

  “Okay.” Brian darted to the other side of the entrance and took position against the wall, bringing his Beretta up. This put him on the same pseudo-corridor as the terrorist, but the setup didn’t benefit a right-handed shooter worth a damn. He had to choose between shooting
weak-hand—something he didn’t practice as much as he should have done—or exposing his body to return fire. But something in his Marine mind just said Fuck it and he stepped to his left, pistol up in both hands.

  Abdullah saw him and smiled, bringing his weapon to his shoulder—or trying to.

  Aldo fired off two aimed shots into the target’s chest, saw no effect, and then emptied his magazine. More than twelve rounds entered the man’s body—

  —ABDULLAH FELT them all, and he felt his body jerk with each impact. He tried firing his own weapon, but he missed with all of his shots, and then his body was no longer under his control. He fell forward, trying to recover his balance.

  BRIAN EJECTED his empty magazine and pulled the other one from his fanny pack, slapping it in and dropping the slide-release lever. He was going on autopilot now. The bastard was still moving! Time to fix that. He walked over to the prone body, kicked the gun aside, and fired one round right into the back of his head. The skull split open—blood and brains exploded out onto the floor.

  “JESUS, ALDO!” Dominic said, coming to his brother’s side.

  “Fuck that! We got at least one more out there. I’m down to one clip, Enzo.”

  “Me, too, bro.”

  Amazingly, most of the people on the floor, including the shot ones, were still alive. The blood on the floor could have been rain in a thunderstorm. But both brothers were too wired to be sickened by what they saw. They moved back out into the mall and headed east.

  The carnage was just as bad here. The floor was defiled by numerous pools of blood. There were screams and whimpers. Brian passed a little girl, perhaps three years old, standing over the body of her mother, her arms fluttering like a baby bird’s. No time, no damned time to do anything about it. He wished Pete Randall were close. He was a good corpsman. But even Petty Officer Randall would be overwhelmed by this mess.

  There was still more chatter from a suppressed submachine gun. It was in the Belk’s women’s store, off to their left. Not all that far off by the sound of it. The sound of automatic-weapons fire is distinctive. Nothing else sounds quite the same. They split up, each taking one side of the short corridor leading past the Coffee Beanery and Bostonian Shoes into the next combat area.

  The first floor of Belk’s started off with perfumes and makeup. As before, they ran to the sound of the guns. There were six women down at perfume, and three more in makeup. Some were obviously dead. Others were just as obviously alive. Some called out for help, but there was no time for that. The twins split up again. The noise had just stopped. It had been off to their left front, but it wasn’t there now. Had the terrorist run away? Was he just out of ammo?

  There were expended cartridge cases all over the floor—nine-millimeter brass, they both saw. He’d had himself a good old time here, Dominic saw. The mirrors affixed to the building’s internal pillars were nearly all shattered by gunfire. To his trained eye, it seemed as though the terrorist had walked in the front, sprayed the first people he’d seen—all women—and then worked his way back and to the left, probably going to wherever he saw the most potential targets. Probably just one guy, Brian’s mind told him.

  Okay, what are we up against? Dominic wondered. How’s he going to react? How does he think?

  For Brian it was simpler: Where are you, you motherfucker? For the Marine, he was an armed enemy, and nothing else. Not a person, not a human being, not even a thinking brain, just a target holding a weapon.

  ZUHAYR EXPERIENCED a sudden diminution of excitement. He’d been more excited than at any moment in his life. He’d had only a few women in his life, and surely he’d killed more women here today than he’d ever fucked . . . but to him, here and now, somehow it felt just the same.

  And all that struck him as very satisfying. He hadn’t heard the shooting from before, none of it. He’d scarcely heard his own gunfire, so focused was he on his business. And good business it had been. The look on their faces when they saw him and his machine gun...and the look when the bullets struck . . . that was a pleasing sight. But he was down to his last two magazine pairs now. One was in his gun, and the other in his pocket.

  Strange, he thought, that he could hear the relative silence now. There were no live women in his immediate area. Well . . . no unwounded women. Some of those he’d shot were making noise. Some were even trying to crawl away . . .

  He couldn’t have that, Zuhayr knew. He started walking toward one of them, a dark-haired woman wearing whorish red pants.

  BRIAN WHISTLED to his brother and pointed. There he was, about five-eight, wearing khaki pants and a similarly colored bush jacket, fifty yards away. A playground shot for a rifle, something for a boot at Parris Island to do, but not quite so easy for his Beretta, however good a marksman he was.

  Dominic nodded and started heading that way, but swiveling his head in all directions.

  “TOO BAD, woman,” Zuhayr said in English. “But do not be afraid, I send you to see Allah. You will serve me in Paradise.” And he tried to fire a single round into her back. But the Ingram doesn’t allow that easily. Instead he rippled off three rounds from a range of one meter.

  BRIAN SAW the whole thing, and something just came loose. The Marine stood up and aimed with both hands. “You motherfucker!” he screamed, and fired as rapidly as accuracy allowed, from a range of perhaps a hundred feet. He fired a total of fourteen shots, almost emptying his weapon. And some of them, remarkably, hit the target.

  Three, in fact, one of which got the target right in the belly, and another in center chest.

  THE FIRST one hurt. Zuhayr felt the impact as he might have felt a kick in the testicles. It caused his arms to drop as though to cover up and protect from another injury. His weapon was still in his hands, and he fought through the pain to bring it back up as he watched the man approach.

  BRIAN DIDN’T forget everything. In fact, a lot came flooding back into his consciousness. He had to remember the lessons of Quantico—and Afghanistan—if he wanted to sleep in his own bed that night. And so he took an indirect path forward, dodging around the rectangular goods tables, keeping his eyes on his target and trusting Enzo to look around. But he did that, too. His target didn’t have command of his weapon. He was looking straight at the Marine, his face strangely fearful . . . but smiling? What the hell?

  He walked right in now, straight at the bastard.

  FOR HIS part, Zuhayr stopped fighting the suddenly massive weight on his weapon, and stood as straight as he could, looking in the eyes of his killer. “Allahu Ackbar,” he said.

  “ THAT’S NICE, ” Brian replied, and fired right into his forehead. “I hope you like it in hell.” Then he bent down and picked up the Ingram, slinging it over his back.

  “Clear it and leave it, Aldo,” Dominic commanded. Brian did just that.

  “Jesus, I hope somebody called 911,” he observed.

  “Okay, follow me upstairs,” Dominic said next.

  “What—why?”

  “What if there’s more’n four of ’em?” The reply-question was like a punch in Brian’s mouth.

  “Okay, I got your six, bro.”

  It struck both of them as incredible that the escalator was still working, but they rode it up, both crouching and scanning all around. There were women all over the place—all over meaning as far from the escalator as possible—

  “FBI!” Dominic called. “Is everybody okay here?”

  “Yes,” came multiple, separate, and equivocal replies from around the second floor.

  Enzo’s professional identity came back into full command: “Okay, we have it under control. The police will be here shortly. Until they get here, just sit tight.”

  The twins walked from the top of the “up” escalator to the top of the “down” one. It was immediately clear that the shooters hadn’t come up here.

  The ride down was dreadful beyond words. Again, there were pools of blood on a straight line from perfume to handbags, and now the lucky ones who were merely wounded were
crying out for help. And, again, the twins had more important things to do. Dominic led his brother out into the main concourse. He turned left to check the first one he’d shot. This one was dead beyond question. His last ten-millimeter bullet had exploded out through his right eye.

  On reflection, that left only one, if he was still alive.

  HE WAS , despite all of his hits. Mustafa was trying to move, but his muscles were drained of blood and oxygen, and were not listening to the commands that came through the central nervous system. He found himself looking up, somewhat dreamily it seemed, even to him.

  “You have a name?” one of them asked.

  Dominic had only halfway expected an answer. The man was clearly dying, and not slowly, either. He turned to look for his brother—not there. “Hey, Aldo!” he called, to no immediate response.

  BRIAN WAS in Legends, a sporting-goods shop, taking a quick look. His initiative was rewarded, and he took it back to the mall corridor.

  Dominic was there, talking to his “suspect,” but without getting much of a response.

  “Hey, raghead,” Brian said, returning. Then he knelt down in the blood beside the dying terrorist. “I got something for you.”

  Mustafa looked up in some puzzlement. He knew that death was close, and while he didn’t exactly welcome it, he was content in his own mind that he’d done his duty to his Faith, and to Allah’s Law.