Kill Shot

He leaned against the Jeep, contemplating not just the situation at hand, but all the bad decisions he’d made that led him to this point in his life. He was forty years old, and he could barely afford to be screwed out of twelve cents worth of gas. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice the bright yellow sports car that pulled up beside him. At that moment he vaguely heard a crack in the distance, but before he could register the sound, his brain ceased functioning because of the .30-caliber bullet that pierced his head, splashing gore across the green expanse of the Jeep’s roof.

MACK BOLAN TURNED THE Ferrari 599 GTO into the gas station, driving up the approach at a slight angle to avoid scraping the undercarriage of the low-slung Italian sports car on the pavement. It was, after all, a borrowed ride, a loaner from Hal Brognola, a top official at the Department of Justice and also the man in charge of the supersecret forces operating out of Stony Man Farm. As such, Brognola was the closest thing to a boss that the Executioner had, but he was also one of the soldier’s oldest friends. When the rare opportunity for a vacation had arisen, Bolan had asked the big Fed if he could borrow a set of wheels. He’d expected a well-worn government fleet vehicle just about ready to make the transition to taxicab duty, at best a Crown Victoria with steel wheels and dog-dish hubcaps, at worst some toady little crap wagon.

Instead, Brognola had surprised him with the keys to the Ferrari, luxurious sports coupe with a potent V-12 engine lurking beneath its long, sleek hood. The car, painted a shade of yellow so bright staring at it too long might cause permanent burns on the corneas of a viewer’s eyes, had been confiscated as part of the estate of a drug kingpin that Bolan had brought down. It was a rare treat for the Executioner to be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors.

And he was enjoying the Ferrari very much, as well as the long weekend itself, spent in Nags Head, North Carolina. But even more than the Ferrari, he’d enjoyed the company of the long, lithesome blonde seated in the car beside him.

Patricia Jensen, the stunning woman riding shotgun in the Ferrari, was an old friend. In truth, she was more than a friend; Bolan supposed she was what the hipsters called a friend with benefits. He’d met her years ago, while working on a case in Washington, D.C. He’d been shot in the thigh, and she was the doctor who stitched him up. Bolan knew she would gladly be more than a friend with benefits if he asked her, but the soldier had long since accepted the fact that his life didn’t allow for long-term attachments. People who got too close to him ended up dead.

Bolan inserted his credit card into the pump and began filling the tank with the high-octane gasoline that the finicky Italian thoroughbred demanded. While the fuel filled the tank, he thought about the woman sitting inside the car. He’s known her for nearly twenty years, and she seemed even more beautiful now than when he’d met her. Back then she was fresh out of medical school, finishing her internship. When he first met her, she’d had big hair, as did most other young women at the time. Now her hair was cut in a stylish bob, which made her gray eyes look even more startling than they had when framed by the big MTV hair she’d worn when they’d first met. She maybe had a few lines on her face that she hadn’t had back then, but they just gave her face more character. The rest of her hadn’t seemed to have changed much at all.

Something made Bolan break off his meditation on Jensen’s charms. He couldn’t place it, but for some reason he sensed danger. He had no reason to expect danger in a gas station just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, but the soldier hadn’t survived countless battles by ignoring his intuition. He’d scanned the surroundings for potential danger when he drove into the gas station, as he always did whenever he entered a place, an action that was as unconscious as breathing for him, and he’d noted nothing out of place. The only other people at the station were the clerk and a sad sack-looking man filling gas in a rusty old Jeep, neither of whom seemed to present an obvious threat. Bolan noted that the sad sack had a toddler in a car seat in the back of the Jeep, making him an even more unlikely source of danger.

But something was wrong; Bolan could feel it. He started scoping out the surrounding buildings, his hand automatically resting on the Beretta 93-R in the shoulder harness beneath his charcoal sport jacket. There wasn’t much for buildings in the surrounding area. The freeway bordered the station to the west and another gas station sat across the road to the north, but that station was out of business and completely deserted. A fast-food burger joint shared a parking lot with the station, and behind that was a storage rental facility. The only thing even slightly out of the ordinary was an SUV parked along the road to the east of the station, next to a large empty lot. Bolan couldn’t tell if the SUV, an older Chevy Tahoe SS, was empty or not because of the dark tinted windows, but something seemed out of place.

Bolan tapped on the Ferrari’s passenger window to get Jensen to roll down the window and hand him his binoculars so he could get a better look at the Tahoe, but before she could get the window down, Bolan heard a muffled crack and saw the head of the man driving the green Jeep burst open. The angle with which the bullet hit the man’s head told Bolan that it had to have come from the vicinity of the Tahoe.

The soldier threw open the Ferrari’s passenger door and he pulled Jensen from the vehicle. “Get down!” he told her, pulling her down behind the front fender, where the engine block would provide better protection between her and the Tahoe than would the thin aluminum bodywork that cloaked the car’s chassis. Once she was safely behind the fender, Bolan pulled his .50-caliber Desert Eagle from the holster on his hip and leveled it at the Tahoe, but the vehicle had already taken off, all four tires laying down dark stripes on the pavement. The vehicle was conceivably within range of the powerful handgun, but Bolan couldn’t be certain that the vehicle belonged to the shooter so he held his fire.

When he was certain the threat had passed and no further shots were coming, he went to check on the victim, though he knew he would find a corpse. No one could have survived a direct head shot like that, especially when it came from what must have been a high-powered rifle. The man was dead, as Bolan had expected. The child in the back smiled at Bolan.

“Patricia,” Bolan shouted, “take care of the kid.”

Jensen went to remove the child from the hot cab. Before she’d even begun to unbuckle the complex car-seat safety harness, Bolan had jumped into the Ferrari’s driver’s seat and punched the starter button. The 670-horsepower 12-cylinder engine roared to life. Ferrari had built the GTO version of the 599 in extremely small quantities to homologate a production race car, and although it bore superficial similarities to the ordinary 599, the GTO was really a barely civilized race car. Bolan accelerated hard out of the gas station, no longer worried about scraping the undercarriage. Unlike the Tahoe, the Ferrari didn’t leave any rubber, thanks to its Formula One–inspired traction control system. Instead, it accelerated like a Saturn V rocket blasting off for the moon.

The Tahoe had about a minute lead on Bolan. In SS trim the Tahoe was no slouch, its V-8 engine cranking out 345 horsepower, but it was still a three-ton truck with the aerodynamics of an oversized cinder block, while Bolan’s Ferrari, with a top speed of almost 210 mph, was the fastest street-legal vehicle ever built. By the time he was half a mile away from the gas station his speedometer read 170 mph and he’d caught sight of the Tahoe. Ten seconds later he’d closed up the gap enough to read the license-plate numbers, or at least he could have read the license plate numbers if the Tahoe had license plates. A plastic placeholder proclaiming the name of a local used-car dealership occupied the space in the rear bumper reserved for license plates. Bolan noted the name of the dealership but seriously doubted that information would be of use. Most likely the vehicle was stolen and the thief had just tossed the license plates and screwed a random placeholder onto the bumper to avoid suspicion.

There was nothing random about what Bolan saw just above the license plate: a metal panel moving aside to reveal a three-inch hole. Bolan saw a faint flash of light from behind the hole and a bullet pierced his windshield, embedding in the headrest of the Ferrari’s driver’s seat, just millimeters from the soldier’s right ear. A spiderweb of cracks crept out from the hole in the windshield. The speed at which Bolan drove most likely produced enough of a slipstream around the car to move the bullet slightly off its intended path, or else it could have been a kill shot.

The soldier didn’t give the shooter enough time to line up a second shot. He squeezed the paddle shifter on the steering wheel twice, dropping the car into Fourth gear, steered into the left lane and floored the accelerator. The Ferrari took off like it had been shot from a cannon, and before the shooter’s weapon had time to cycle another round he was up beside the Tahoe’s rear bumper, leveling his Desert Eagle at the driver’s window. The soldier’s first round shattered the weakened windshield of his own vehicle and thousands of tiny chunks of safety glass exploded across the Ferrari’s hood, most of which were then blown back into the cabin by the air blast. The second shot penetrated the driver’s window of the Tahoe. Bolan had aimed for a spot just behind the driver’s head, knowing that the spalling that the bullet would experience when hitting the glass at that angle would deflect its course.

His estimate appeared to be correct because the Tahoe suddenly veered hard right and plunged nose-first into the ditch alongside the road. The vehicle was still traveling at well over 100 mph and the right front of the hood caught the edge of the embankment opposite the road, flipping the truck in a barrel roll. The Tahoe cartwheeled across a weed-covered lot until it hit what looked like a rusted old storage tank of some sort, wrapping itself around the tank is if the two were part of some modern-art sculpture.

Bolan braked hard and came to a quick stop. He ran across the lot to try to find survivors to interrogate, but knew the odds were against him when he saw the flames rising up from the vehicle. The Tahoe had careened several hundred yards before hitting the tank, and by the time Bolan had crossed half that distance, the small flickers of flame had turned into a raging inferno. When he was within thirty yards, the Tahoe’s gas tank exploded, sending a wave of heat over the soldier, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Bolan got as close as he could to the burning vehicle, but it was far too late to extract any survivors. Flames rose one hundred feet in the air above the remains of the truck. The wreck might still hold some clues, but they would have to be ferreted out by a team of forensic specialists. The soldier watched the flames consume the vehicle, wondering what he had just stumbled across. Was it a hit of some sort? Bolan knew very little about the victim, but from what he had seen, the man seemed an unlikely target for organized crime. The guy had the air of desperation about him, to be sure, but it didn’t strike Bolan as the sort of desperation of a drug addict or gambler who might owe money to the Mafia. The guy looked like he’d fallen on hard times, but he looked healthy, without the pallor and gauntness of a meth addict. And his baby looked healthier and cleaner than had any child of drug-addicted parents that Bolan had ever encountered. Gambling debts might be more likely, but again, the man didn’t look like he even had the resources to gamble at any level high enough to incur the wrath of the Mob.

But what made even less sense, and what Bolan found more worrisome, was that the victim might have been chosen at random. That made the least sense. Why would someone expend the effort to create a vehicle that was in effect an elaborate mobile sniper hide just to assassinate some random citizen? The only possible answers to that question were all chilling to consider.

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

At the exact moment the clock struck noon eastern time, snipers had hit targets in every major metropolitan area from Bangor, Maine to Key West, Florida. In all, fifty-six innocent Americans had lost their lives. Exactly one hour later, when the clock struck noon central time, snipers had taken out another seventy-five people in cities from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Mobile, Alabama. By the time Mack Bolan arrived at Stony Man Farm, headquarters of an intelligence organization that operated so far under the radar that only the President of the United States and a few select people knew of its existence, snipers had hit targets in cities within the mountain time zone, killing another forty-nine people, again striking exactly at noon.

Bolan arrived at Stony Man in the battered Ferrari at exactly 2:49 p.m. eastern time. The soldier knew that they had just eleven minutes before more innocent civilians were slaughtered up and down the West Coast. Eleven minutes, and there wasn’t a damned thing Bolan could do about it. He’d been in constant contact with Hal Brognola and the crew at Stony Man Farm since just after the Tahoe had burst into flames. He’d returned to the Farm as quickly as possible, but the panic that had ensued after the shootings had ground traffic to a halt. Even though Bolan had been at the wheel of one of the fastest cars on the planet, it still couldn’t fly, and flight would have been the only way to circumvent the miles and miles of snarled traffic that Bolan had been forced to negotiate.

Normally the state of the borrowed Ferrari would have required a bit of explanation, but Brognola and the crew at Stony Man had far more important matters to attend. Like trying to prevent another wave of killings on the West Coast when clocks in the pacific time zone struck noon. Bolan entered the War Room.

“What security measures have we got in place on the West Coast?” Bolan asked without preamble. There wasn’t time for him to get out there himself before the clock struck twelve, but Bolan hoped that Brognola and the crew had done everything possible to prevent a slaughter on the West Coast.

“We’ve activated every former blacksuit we could contact,” the big Fed said. Blacksuits were operatives who’d been trained for duty at Stony Man Farm. Mostly blacksuit candidates came from the ranks of law-enforcement personnel or active military, but occasionally the Farm recruited qualified candidates from other fields.

“Any leads on the shootings that have already occurred?” Bolan asked.

“Just the crew that you took out,” Brognola said, “and there wasn’t much left of them to identify. We’ve got forensic teams working on it. All we know at this point was that there were four bodies in the vehicle, charred beyond recognition.”

“That’s it?” the soldier asked. “No other witnesses?”

“None,” Price interjected. “As far as we know, no one saw anything. We’ve had at least 180 separate people or groups of people making coordinated hits on random victims. I don’t know how that’s possible.”

“It’s obviously possible,” Bolan said. “It’s happened. Making the hits wouldn’t be the hard part. With the element of surprise, making arbitrary hits on random targets would be child’s play for a trained sniper team. What’s hard to believe is that something that would require this degree of coordination could happen under our radar, without us picking up at least some chatter. Hal, have you got anything that might help?”

“Nothing,” Brognola said. “At least nothing out of the ordinary. We keep our ears open, but to be honest, the way things are today, the incendiary rhetoric has become an indecipherable cacophony. We’ve got everyone from ivory-tower academics to three-toed swamp runners threatening to kill the President on a daily basis, but as near as we can tell, it’s all just talk. We’ve detained a few low-rent jihadists recently, basically guys who hooked up with the wrong people in the wrong internet chat rooms. They spout off about destroying America over their cell phones and get together to do a little target practicing on the weekends, but we haven’t picked up any credible terrorist threats.”

“What we’ve got here is credible,” Bolan said, “and it shows a level of organization that would be almost impossible to achieve without alerting the authorities. At least impossible if it was planned within U.S. borders.”

“You think this was coordinated outside the country?” Brognola asked.

“It had to be,” Bolan said. “If this had been masterminded on U.S. soil, we’d have heard at least some rumblings about it.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman chimed in. Kurtzman, who had been paralyzed from the waist down in an attack on Stony Man Farm many years earlier, headed Stony Man’s team of crack cyber-sleuths. Price and Brognola had been so wrapped up in their discussion with Bolan that they hadn’t noticed Kurtzman roll into the room in his wheelchair.

“I’ve been going over everything,” Kurtzman said. “I’ve analyzed every voice, email and text intercept we’ve had in the past six months, and I’m coming up with nothing. These people are displaying extraordinary communications discipline.”

Bolan looked at his watch. The digital seconds were sweeping toward 3:00 p.m.—noon on the West Coast.

Seattle, Washington

OFFICER WILLIAM NELSON LOOKED at his watch. 11:55 a.m. The past hour and a half had been the longest ninety minutes of Nelson’s life.

“Willie,” a younger officer asked, “what time have you got?”

“Fuck you,” Nelson said. He hated being called “Willie.” He hated country music with a passion—he was an opera fan—and he especially hated that long-haired degenerate Willie Nelson. As a younger man he hadn’t minded being called “Willie,” but as the years went on he began to resent sharing a name with the country singer. But he’d been Detective Willie Nelson of the Seattle Police Department for so long now that there was no way he was going to stuff that particular cat back in a bag, regardless of how much the name irritated him. In fact, the more he tried to get people to call him “William,” or even just “Bill,” the more people seemed to relish calling him “Willie Nelson.” Sometimes they called him worse things, like “The RedHeaded Stranger,” which was more of a reference to the famous album by Willie Nelson than to his own hair, which had long since faded from shocking red to bluish white.

Three more years, Nelson thought to himself. Three more years of this bullshit and I can retire. Three goddamned more years, and then I’m retiring on a Mexican beach, where no one will call me anything but “Señor Nelson.” Then these clowns can all go fuck themselves.

He might have shared a name with a famous singer, but Detective William Nelson was good police—as good as police got. Still, even with decades of experience, this was something new; the situation he was dealing with this day was beyond even his experience. In his twenty-two years on the force he thought he’d seen everything, but he’d never seen anything like this. Apparently, an army of snipers was assassinating random people across the country. Had someone suggested something like that was even possible to the detective when he woke up that morning, he would have written off the person as insane. But it was happening. Nelson tapped the trauma plates in the bulletproof vest he wore. He’d sworn that he would never wear the vest. He felt that if he had to resort to that, it was time to quit the force because it meant that the bad guys had won. In spite of everything he’d seen in his years on the force, he still believed that people were basically decent. It was that belief that kept him going to work every morning, the belief that people were worth protecting. His refusal to wear the vest symbolized that belief, but this day he’d been ordered to wear the vest, and given what had been happening across the nation, he put up only token resistance.

Nelson felt a tingling in his arms, a sensation that he’d learned to interpret as a sign that something was about to go down. He didn’t tell his colleagues about this sixth sense. He received enough ribbing about his name; the last thing he needed was for them to start giving him shit about his paranormal powers. In truth, there was nothing paranormal about it. Long years of experience had simply honed his ability to detect when something was slightly out of the ordinary and discern when that something might pose danger. And right now those instincts were telling him that he was in a hot spot.

No one had any idea where the snipers might hit; they only knew when—the moment the clock struck 12:00 p.m. It was now 11:57 a.m. Trying to predict where the snipers would hit was the equivalent of picking the right numbers on a lottery ticket. Nelson decided to check out Anderson Park, just east of Seattle Central Community College. It was a warm spring day, and even if he didn’t find any signs of snipers, at least he’d be able to enjoy watching the college girls catching a little sun on the benches around the fountain at the south end of the park.

He parked his Dodge Charger and pulled out his binoculars, but instead of focusing on the healthy young breasts barely contained in halter tops and bikinis, he scoped out the streets and rooftops around the park.

Something caught his eye on the east side of the park, a flash of light reflecting off of something in the steeple of the church. He took a closer look, but only saw the horizontal slats that covered the windows in the steeple tower. He stared at the slats for a bit and thought he could make out a shape behind the slats. Then he thought he saw something poking out through the slats. It looked like it might be the barrel of a gun. He saw a subdued flash erupt from the end of the object and a heartbeat later he felt a blow to his forehead. Then his lifeless body slumped out the open window of his car.

Washington, D.C.