Kill Shot

Instead, he just kept such commentary to himself and went about his work with the utmost skill and dedication. As a result, he’d found himself on the career fast track, rising through the ranks faster than most of his compatriots, earning their respect in the process. Until the past couple of days he’d felt he earned that respect, but the insane events of the past two days had caused him to doubt his own abilities.

Yesterday there had been a murder in Kansas City. That was not unusual—the city had a fairly high murder rate, double the national average, in fact. But yesterday’s murder had been unlike any since Schletty had joined the force in that it had been part of a coordinated murder spree that had occurred across the entire country, from Maine to Hawaii.

Yesterday’s murders had all occurred exactly at the stroke of noon, and at noon eastern time this day another wave of murders had occurred on the East Coast. In all, at least 127 people had been killed in the eastern time zone. Given that, it didn’t take an IQ of 165, Schletty knew, to predict that a whole shitload of people were about to be assassinated in the central time zone. It was 11:58 a.m. central time, meaning that Schletty had two minutes to identify possible perpetrators to be of any use at all to the people he was supposed to protect and serve.

At that moment, Schletty wished he was an accountant or a store clerk instead of a cop.

SCHLETTY RODE SHOTGUN in a squad car that at that moment was crossing the Interstate 435 Bridge over the Missouri River. He usually sat at a desk; these days his duties were mostly supervisory, but after yesterday’s shootings he ordered every officer on his staff out on the street, including himself. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew it was probably something he had never seen before. And that’s exactly what he saw. At first it looked like a lump of metal on the girder of the bridge, but on closer inspection, he realized it was a man wearing material designed to make him invisible against the bridge—he wore a gray duster decorated with rust-colored patches designed to blend in with the bridge’s girders.

Schletty could make out some sort of long item in the man’s hands. Before he could point out the man’s location to the driver of the squad car, flame erupted from the item in the man’s hand. Schletty saw a car ahead of him careen out of control, crash into the guard rail and flip over into the Missouri River. Schletty watched the figure on the bridge rappel down the girder toward the base of the bridge. He lost sight of the figure.

“Floor it,” he told the officer driving the car.

“But sir,” the officer said, “we need to stop to help the crash victim.”

“He’s beyond help,” Schletty said. He’d seen the shot hit its target and knew that even if they could get to the victim in the car, he was almost certainly dead from the gunshot wound. “We need to find the shooter.”

“Shooter?” the officer asked.

“Yeah,” Schletty said. “He’s down at the base of the bridge.”

The officer turned on the lights and siren and accelerated around traffic. Just as they got to the south side of the bridge, Schletty saw a gray late-model Impala leaving the small parking area at the base of the bridge. The officer driving saw it, too; Schletty didn’t have to tell the man to pursue the vehicle.

The squad car was unable to exit the freeway and drive down to the road that ran parallel to the river for another quarter of a mile, giving the shooter a good head start. Schletty’s driver was good; he drove down the embankment along the freeway, crashed through the fence that kept animals off the freeway and slid sideways onto River Front Road, about half a mile behind the Impala. The squad car was an aging Crown Victoria and on its last legs, but it still had some snort and within a mile the officer had the speedometer past 100 mph and was closing in on the Impala.

They’d just about closed in on the Impala when gunfire erupted from both sides of the road from at least four shooters. Schletty and his driver never stood a chance. As the officer driving died, his last earthly act was to push the accelerator all the way to the floorboards. The old Crown Vic accelerated hard, clipping the Impala in the left rear quarter panel and causing it to spin out of control. The Impala spun into the ditch, rolled through the air twice then crashed into a small stand of trees.

Kansas City, Missouri

MACK BOLAN PUT AWAY HIS cell phone and turned to the man beside him. Jack Grimaldi manned the controls of the Cirrus Vision SF50 jet that was taking the Executioner to Minneapolis.

“Change of plans, Jack,” Bolan said. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

Without questioning the order, Grimaldi altered course. He’d been flying the soldier to and from battlefields around the world for years, as often as not fighting alongside him during those battles. Grimaldi trusted the Executioner like no other man on Earth, and if Bolan needed to go to Kansas City, Grimaldi would do whatever it took to get him there. But the pilot was curious.

“What’s in Kansas City?” he asked.

“Another shooting site, but this time a couple of police officers spotted a shooter.”

“Did they catch him?” Grimaldi asked.

“They chased him,” Bolan replied, “but they were ambushed. Both officers were killed.”

“Did they tag any of the bad guys?”

“It doesn’t look like they got any shots off,” Bolan said, “but something happened. The vehicle they were pursuing either crashed, or the pursuing officers managed to initiate a PIT maneuver.” Bolan referred to the police immobilization technique in which a pursuing vehicle nudged the right rear corner of the vehicle being pursued, causing the fleeing vehicle to spin out of control. “Whichever it was, the fleeing vehicle crashed.”

“Any bodies?” Grimaldi asked.

“No such luck. The scene was scrubbed clean by the time backup arrived.”

“How long did it take for backup to show up at the scene?”

“Eight minutes,” Bolan said. “In eight minutes they’d removed all evidence.”

Price had a squad car waiting to take Bolan to the shooting scene when Grimaldi landed the plane at the airport in downtown Kansas City. Grimaldi and Bolan had seen long lines of cars leaving the city, but unlike the previous day when traffic ground to a halt after the wave of shootings, that day the downtown area was a virtual ghost town and the squad car had Bolan to the ambush scene within twenty minutes.

Normally, local officers didn’t particularly like having federal agents involved in an investigation, particularly when a cop had died. They tend to prefer to catch the perpetrators themselves in such situations, but this situation seemed different. While Bolan sensed some hostility from the officers on the scene, it wasn’t the degree he’d expected to encounter. Instead, most of the members of the various law-enforcement agencies on hand—the Kansas City PD, along with the state police and representatives from various heriff’s departments—seemed to appreciate any help they were offered.

The scene looked disturbingly like the one he’d run across the previous day, right down to the team of experts poring over the remains of the vehicle. Again the vehicles had been burned. The team investigating the vehicle he’d chased the day before had discovered that the vehicle had been rigged to explode in the event of a crash, with explosives strategically placed to ensure the maximum amount of destruction. Whoever was behind these incidents wanted to make certain that they left behind as little evidence as possible.

Whoever it was, they were thorough. They’d scrubbed the crime scene clean. The officers in the squad car had been torn apart by a couple of thousand large-caliber bullets, meaning that they’d gotten caught in the cross fire of what had to have been heavy-caliber machine guns, most likely .50-caliber weapons.

Barbara Price had informed Bolan that the man in charge of the operation would be Detective Kevin Maurstad of the Kansas City Police Department. Bolan didn’t know what Maurstad looked like, but he had a pretty good idea that he’d be the big guy in the center of everything, the guy everyone else lined up to talk to. The soldier went up to the man who seemed to have the most control of the chaos and said, “Detective Maurstad?”

The man wheeled around, trying to identify a new irritant. He studied the tall stranger and said, “You must be the yahoo the Feds sent down to help us.”

“Yeah, I’m the yahoo to which you refer,” Bolan said.

Maurstad stood in a defensive stance, as if he expected Bolan to attack him. He relaxed a bit after assessing the soldier. “You don’t look like the usual dipshits they send down here.”

“We’ve been busy,” Bolan offered. “We’re fresh out of the usual dipshits, so they sent me instead. It looks like you’ve got a mess on your hands.”

“Yeah,” Maurstad said, “it’s a class-A clusterfuck, that’s for sure.”

“What have you got so far?” Bolan asked.

“Not a hell of a lot. Two cops shot to hamburger in that squad car over there.” He pointed at a black-and-white police car with a passenger compartment that was completely perforated. “Their squad car was blown to pieces by a .50-caliber machine gun, judging by the holes in the vehicle, most likely a Ma Deuce. There was barely enough left of the officers inside to identify them as human. We policed the area for spent .50-cal shell casings but found nothing.”

“How about the shooter’s vehicle? Find anything?” Bolan glanced at the burned-out carcass of the Impala and knew what Maurstad’s answer would be.

The detective saw Bolan looking at the destroyed vehicle and answered with a question of his own: “What do you think?”

“I think it looks like someone destroyed the evidence with military precision,” Bolan answered.

“And military weapons,” Maurstad replied. “It looks like they destroyed the vehicle with some sort of thermite antimatérial grenades.”

“Probably thermate-TH3,” Bolan offered, referring to a standard antimatérial grenade used by all branches of the military to destroy left-behind vehicles and weapons in a hurry.

“That would be my guess,” Maurstad said.

“You were in the military?” the soldier asked.

“Marines. You?”

“Army,” Bolan said. “Any bodies in the vehicle?”

“None,” Maurstad said. “The shooter either got out of the vehicle on his own or someone pulled him out. We did get a serial number off the car, though.”

“Let me guess,” Bolan said. “Stolen?”

“As of nine o’clock this morning, yes.”

One of the officers who had been scouring the edges of the ditch alongside the road came up with a rifle shell in a sealed plastic bag. “Sir,” he said to Maurstad, “I found this.”

Bolan let Maurstad examine the bag, and then asked to see it. Maurstad handed the soldier the evidence bag. The shell casing was a Hornady brass shell, chambered for the .338 Lapua Magnum round. The .338 Lapua Magnum round had been developed specifically as a round for military sniping. Its ballistics rivaled the .50 BMG round; a good shooter could hit targets out to 2,000 meters, and even an average shooter could count on a 1,200-meter effective range. But the round was uncommon in civilian use; only the most specialized gun shops carried the .338 Lapua Magnum round, and among those that did, most didn’t stock a firearm with which to fire it.

“If you don’t mind,” Bolan said, “I’m going to send this to our lab.”

Maurstad clearly minded, but he just said, “You’re the boss.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota

“I’M SORRY, SIR,” THE administrator at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota, told Mack Bolan, “but we can’t release that information to you regardless of how impressive your credentials might be.”

Bolan had expected as much. He knew getting the records released would be virtually impossible, but he had to give it a shot because the alternative didn’t stand a much better chance of success. He’d have to break into the VA hospital at night.

The soldier looked around the administrative offices, at the rows and rows of wide-drawer filing cabinets, knowing that the information he sought likely rested within one of them. One row, marked Vendors, looked especially promising. He had the name of a vendor, the ship date and the serial number. That should be enough to get him a name.

Getting in and out looked less promising. The administrative offices were on the top floor, off a twelve-story atrium around which the hospital was arranged. Several wings branched off from the central atrium area, with the head nurse of each floor posted at the end of each wing, near the edge of the atrium. It was a massive complex, one of the nicest VA hospitals Bolan had ever seen, modern and sophisticated in just about every aspect. Every aspect except record keeping, Bolan reminded himself. In this case, the Veterans Administration’s antiquated record keeping turned out to be an advantage; the only reason the information the soldier needed hadn’t been purged was because it hadn’t been in electronic form. It was a small oversight on the part of Bolan’s opponents, but so far it was the only clue the soldier had.

The hospital wasn’t located in Minneapolis proper, but rather in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, home of the Mall of America. Given that the gigantic shopping center was a tourist destination, the area had an abudance of hotels. Bolan had a room in a little low-budget motel about halfway between the Mega Mall and the VA hospital; the sort of place where he could lie low for a few hours without drawing any attention.

After scoping out the VA hospital campus, which wasn’t well-guarded, Bolan returned to his room to grab a nap. He set his alarm for 1:00 a.m., but he needn’t have bothered; he awoke at exactly 12:55. By the time his alarm went off he’d already brushed his teeth, showered and slipped into his blacksuit. He threaded a sound suppressor onto his Beretta 93R machine pistol and sheathed it in the shoulder holster. Normally he’d also pack a Desert Eagle on his hip, but this was a soft probe. The Beretta was an old habit. There were no bad guys in the hospital; there were just hardworking healthcare workers taking care of American heroes. Under no circumstances was Bolan going to let the situation devolve into a shooting match. Stealth, quickness and silence were much more important than heavy artillery in this mission, and the bulky Israeli hand cannon would just be a liability in all of those areas.

Instead, he carried nonlethal weaponry in its place: a canister of pepper gas, a roll of duct tape, some plastic restraints and a stun gun, which the soldier intended to use only in an extreme emergency, since the device had the potential to do serious damage; it could even be lethal to a security guard with a bad heart.

Bolan also carried a pouch filled with climbing gear: rope, carbiners, belays and rappelling devices. The security at the VA hospital was light, but it was heavy enough to turn the probe into an ugly situation. Shooting his way in and out wasn’t an option. To keep this probe soft, the Executioner was going to have to put his back into it.

The soldier parked his rental car, a Chevrolet Impala, about as nondescript as nondescript could be, in a residential neighborhood just west of the VA campus. The main entrance was to the east, and that put him as far away from any late-night activity as possible. Bolan scaled the ornate stone wall that surrounded the grounds with ease. The wall was strictly decorative, a pretty barrier that kept the local residents from having to accidentally see a wounded warrior.

The next climb Bolan would have to make wouldn’t be as easy. The east end of the wing housing the administration offices had no windows and was featureless. The gaps in the granite covering were too narrow and too far apart to use for hand jamming and foot jamming. A granite trough, however, that served as a character line in the bleak twelve-story-tall stone surface and also masked a drainage pipe for rain that accumulated on the roof. That would provide the soldier with an avenue into the offices. He would have to make his way up to the top of the building, and then gain access through the roof entrance.

Bolan had left the offices via the stairway rather than taking the elevator. Before he’d left, he’d gone up the stairs to the roof exit, disabled the alarm and slipped a thin piece of cardboard into the doorjamb, preventing the bolt from locking. He only hoped that no one had removed the cardboard or fixed the alarm. Judging from the thick layer of dust covering everything on the stairway landing leading to the roof, he guessed it didn’t see a lot of use and was probably safe.

Bolan wedged himself into the gutter, which was about eighteen inches deep and two feet wide. With his back against one side, his feet against the other, he was able to extend his legs enough to get the leverage he needed to shimmy up the gutter. Then he began the long, slow, grueling process of inching his way up twelve stories of rough granite, holding himself in place with the tension of his body while he raised one foot, then the other, then slid his back up the opposite side of the trough.

But that was the easy part. The trough ended in a rain chute that was too small for the soldier to crawl through. Instead, he was going to have to rely on a series of ornamental ridges on the overhang that jutted two feet beyond the gutter. Keeping his arms straight and perfect tension in his body, Bolan levered himself outward and reached for the lip that he had spotted in his earlier recon of the building. He trusted the lip would be in the exact spot he’d noted earlier; if his calculations were off by a single inch, he would plummet to his death, 130 feet below. When his hand connected with the ridge, he spared a millisecond to be grateful for the precision of his military sniper observation training. Using his entire body as a lever, Bolan lunged up around the overhang. His arms were melting from the abuse of climbing the wall, but he knew he only had to make it a few more feet and he was finished. Without missing a beat, the soldier used his momentum to scramble up the overhang and pulled himself over onto the roof of the hospital.

He took just a moment to rest his muscles from the strain of climbing and tied the rope he planned to use to rappel down the side of the building to a bracket holding an air-conditioning unit in place, then jogged over to the door. The thin cardboard still prevented the bolt in the door from engaging and he pushed it open. The alarm inside was still disabled. Bolan crept down the stairs with as much stealth as possible, but every footfall, though near silent, seemed to ring down the stairwell like a church bell. When he got to the next landing, the door into the administrative offices were locked. The soldier removed a small but powerful handheld computer from a drop pouch strapped to his left leg, took out a magnetic key card connected to a USB port and attached the card to the computer. He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text message to Kurtzman saying, “Get ready—about to transmit,” then swiped the magnetic key card through the slot on the scanner next to the doorway.

Moments later he received a text back from Kurtzman. Try it again. Bolan swiped the key card one more time, only this time instead of blinking red, the LED light turned solid green and Bolan entered the offices. The stairway was at the west end of the office suite; the east side of the suite was a glass window looking out at the balcony that in turn overlooked the atrium. Bolan saw a figure walk past on the balcony outside the suite and stop. It was a security guard, making his rounds. Bolan crouched behind a cubicle wall while the figure swiped a key card, opening the door into the office suite. The figure shone his flashlight around the suite, and then began walking toward the soldier.

The cubicle in which Bolan crouched had a desk along one side and a table along another. It was part of a two-person cubicle suite, and another table separated one work space from the other. He crouched and slid under the table separating the work spaces, then slowed his breathing almost to a standstill. A large courier mailing box sat on the floor next to him. As silently as possible, Bolan placed the box between himself and the opening into the aisle that formed the boundaries in this cubicle kingdom.

He slowed his breath even more as the security guard approached the cubicle in which he hid. In his mind, Bolan formulated a plan for neutralizing the guard in the most humane way possible. When the guard stopped to shine a light into the cubicle where Bolan hid, pausing longer than he had at other cubicles, the soldier thought he was going to have to put that plan into action, but after a few moments of scoping out the scene of the crime, the security guard moved on. An interminably long five minutes later, the guard left the office suite.

After the man had moved on, Bolan extricated himself from under the table, went over to the filing cabinets and found the one marked Vendors. The cabinet was locked, but the lock was a simple blade affair that the soldier was able to twist open simply by inserting the tip of his knife into the key hole and turning. Once he figured out the organizational system, he was able to locate the vendor that had provided the hardware. He coordinated the dates of the delivery with the names of patients receiving the hardware in just moments. A bit more searching revealed that the piece the technicians had extracted from the body at the lab in Quantico—titanium braces used to reshape mangled tibia and fibula plateaus—had been installed in one Theodore Haynes, a veteran of the Iraq war from Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Bolan took out a black cloth from the drop pouch, placed it over his head like a shroud, then crouched beneath the cloth and took digital photos of all the documentation regarding Mr. Theodore Haynes. The camera was connected to his notebook computer and downloaded the images directly to a secure FTP site at Stony Man Farm. In all, it had taken Bolan less time to gather the information than it had taken the security guard to make his rounds at the office.

He replaced his equipment and was getting ready to exit the way he’d came when the security guard once again shone his flashlight through the glass separating the suite from the atrium balcony. Bolan dived behind the cover of a cubicle wall, but he worried that the security guard had seen him. The man swiped his key card, which dangled from a chain around his neck, entered the suite, handgun drawn, and made his way to Bolan’s position.

The Executioner scurried around the corner of the cube wall before he could be discovered, and found that he’d backed himself into a narrow corridor without any cover. The soldier crouched and when the man rounded the corner, he sprang up, grabbed him around the neck, at the same time putting his hand over the man’s mouth to stifle an outcry. He guided his target to the ground, using his own body to absorb the impact of the fall to avoid hurting the man any more than necessary. Bolan grabbed the guard’s pistol in the process, and when he had the man down, he put the barrel of the pistol in the guy’s mouth. What the guard didn’t know was that Bolan had decocked the weapon and flicked on the safety; he had no intention of putting this innocent man in danger and regretted having to treat him so roughly, but there were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of lives on the line. There was no way the guard could know this, and he was terrified.

Bolan removed the gun and put a piece of duct tape over the man’s mouth and zip tied his hands behind his back and his feet together. Then he unloaded the pistol, tossed the magazine and bullet from the chamber to one side of the room and the gun toward the other, and bolted for the stairway. He pushed open the stairwell door, only to find that several other security guards were rushing up the stairway from lower floors. The guard had to have called for backup before entering the office suite. It sounded like there were at least four men pounding their way up the stairs. There was no way the soldier could subdue that many guards without someone getting hurt; his only chance for survival now was speed.