“Hal,” the President said, “what do I do?”

“I wish I could help you, sir, but I honestly don’t know. My best people are on it.”

“I’ve got people on one side of me telling me to declare martial law,” the Man said. “There’s a group of people in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who have already drawn up a contingency plan, but my instincts tell me that’s the wrong approach. I need your honest opinion.”

“I think you should level with the people, sir,” Brognola replied. “You should go on television and tell them we have a dangerous situation to deal with. They should be vigilant, but not fearful.”

The President pondered the advice. “That might work for a short time,” he said. “But if we have a wave of shootings tomorrow, people are going to riot. And if that happens, I’ll have no option but to declare martial law.”

Kill Shot

Mack Bolan®

Don Pendleton’s

www.mirabooks.co.uk

I’ve seen enough cruelty and brutality to understand the difference between garden-variety guilt and genuine evil. Some people claim that there’s no such thing as genuine evil, but they haven’t seen what I’ve seen. I know that pure evil exists because I’ve stared it down countless times. And as long as it continues to appear, I will continue to face it unflinchingly.

—Mack Bolan

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

—Ovid

43 BC–AD 17

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

Boston, Massachusetts

Tom Gardner pushed the two-wheeled truck cart out into the bright sunlight that bathed the loading dock. He let his eyes adjust to the sun, then continued toward the orange Cantus Uniform and Linen Service van he’d backed up to the concrete ramp. After pushing the cart a few steps, he gave up on his aging eyes ever adjusting to the bright light after emerging from the gloomy interior of the diesel repair shop. He stopped to put on a pair of sunglasses. Even though the clock had yet to strike twelve, Gardner had already had a long day. He’d gotten an early start, making the first stop on his route before 5:00 a.m., and he only had two stops left.

Once he had the sunglasses in place, Gardner looked around at the bright blue sky rising above the tops of the warehouses, workshops and processing plants that comprised the Boston Marine Industrial Park. It was a sweet route; rather than driving all over the state, most of his stops were clustered around Logan International Airport and the Charles River Basin, meaning he could hit twice as many stops in half as much time as most Cantus drivers, which in turn meant that he earned twice as much money as most other drivers since they worked on commission. The choice route was a perk he’d earned for spending twenty-nine years on the job. The drivers with the most seniority got the best routes, and Gardner had the best of the best. It was hard work, and lugging uniforms and linens in and out of the truck year in, year out had taken a toll on his knees, but they only had to hold out another six months and he could retire.

Gardner glanced at his watch, which was synchronized with the atomic clock used to measure International Atomic Time. A precise man, Gardner knew that the international system of units defined a second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation, and when his watch showed that it was exactly noon eastern time, it was exactly noon eastern time. His watch showed that it was seven seconds away from noon, meaning that he’d arrive at his delivery van at two seconds past noon. Gardner left no detail to chance.

He began the countdown in his head. As always, his timing was perfect. Barring unforeseen traffic jams, he’d finish his route at 1:15 p.m., be home eating lunch by 1:50 p.m. and be napping in front of his television by 2:30 p.m.

He looked at his watch to see the digital display flicker from 11:59.59 to 12:00.00. At that moment he felt a massive blow to the back of his head, and then all consciousness ceased. He didn’t feel the bullet penetrate the back of his skull, drive through his reptilian brain stem, then exit out through his face in a geyser of blood, bone fragments and brain matter. He didn’t hear the report, and he didn’t feel a thing as his body was pitched forward over the two-wheeled truck cart and hurled to the concrete floor of the loading platform. For all his careful planning, Gardner’s retirement had come early.

Manhattan, New York

STEVE GANSEN COULDN’T WIPE the stupid grin off of his face. He’d gambled everything, his entire career as a stockbroker, making a massive investment in what appeared to be a dying industry: book publishing. It had cost him his credibility, the respect of his peers and nearly his job—and his marriage—but today it had paid off. Big.

Not that Gansen was surprised that his apparent long-shot bet had come through. He’d studied a decade’s worth of the company’s quarterly business reports and he knew it was undervalued precisely because publishing was a dying industry. It was dying, but not quite dead yet, and Gansen knew that there were still a few dollars left to be made in the archaic technology of books. Now he clutched the Wall Street Journal in a white-knuckled death grip, rereading the lead story about a giant German publishing operation purchasing the publishing house in which he’d invested, quadrupling his investment, as well as the investments of those clients with the testicular fortitude to stay with him throughout this endeavor.

Gansen now had approximately fifty percent of the client base he’d had going into this investment. Now those fifty percent were much richer for having believed in him.

He glanced up over his paper to see the clock face on the wall of the bank on the opposite side of the small park. It was just about noon. He noticed what appeared to be a person on top of the roof, just above the clock. The person appeared to be crouched down along the edge of the roof, pointing what appeared to be a black broom handle in Gansen’s direction. The clock chimed the first recorded bell tone to indicate that it was exactly noon and Gansen saw a small burst of flame spread out from the end of the broom handle. What he didn’t see was the .30-caliber bullet being propelled his direction at nearly three thousand feet per second. He felt a blow when the bullet entered the top of his head, but when it penetrated his skull, he felt nothing. And he never would feel anything again.

Baltimore, Maryland

SPENCER LOUCKS NURSED his ancient green Jeep Cherokee up to the gas pump. Like everything else in his life, his Jeep—Teal Steel, as he liked to call it—was falling apart. He’d always skated through life, counting on his sense of humor to grease the skids when the going got rough, but things had gone so wrong that even that wasn’t enough anymore. First he’d lost his job. Next, a bout of post-breakup sex with his psychotic ex-girlfriend had led to a situation that Loucks had carefully avoided his entire life: fatherhood.

The kid was the one thing that kept Loucks going. He glanced into Teal Steel’s backseat to make sure the little guy was secure in his car seat. The kid lived with his mother, technically, but she wasn’t really equipped to handle a child so the boy spent most of his time with his dad. She’d been—there was really no way to sugarcoat it—a crack whore. She’d ended up in prison where she served five years for committing multiple felonies. In prison, she’d finally shed her various drug addictions, but she’d picked up an attitude. Now she reacted to every situation as if she was being attacked with a shank in the prison lunchroom.

She’d also found Jesus in prison, and she considered it her mission in life to ensure that everyone else on Earth shared that experience. Unfortunately, the confrontational way with which she dealt with every person she encountered led to her making few converts. Not that she didn’t try; most of the time she left the boy with Loucks because she was busy out working with her church group.

The one thing she had going for herself was a superb body, which was what had attracted Loucks to her in the first place. Now, because of that hot body, Loucks was hopelessly intertwined with a psycho baby mama who would be part of his life for the rest of his life. At least he had the boy. He carried the little guy into the gas station, where he prepaid the attendant five bucks for gas. Five bucks would be barely enough for him to return the boy to his home, the way Teal Steel sucked gas, but it was all he had left after buying diapers and groceries.

Loucks set the nozzle in Jeep’s filler spout and locked in the lever. He looked in at the boy, once again sleeping in his car seat, and waited for the lever to click off when the pump hit five dollars. He didn’t have to wait long before he heard the “click.” He looked at the pump. The pump had shut off at $4.88. Christ. Twelve cents worth of gas was barely a dribble, but given his current financial situation, Loucks needed every penny’s worth that he could get. He looked at the baby in the backseat of the Jeep, then at the man working in the gas station’s partitioned operator’s booth inside the station. His over-developed sense of justice made him want to go and get his twelve cents worth of fuel, but the guy running the station probably didn’t even speak English. Loucks was torn.

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.

BY 3:10 P.M. EASTERN TIME, Hal Brognola had received reports of thirty-seven shootings on the West Coast, and the calls kept coming in. Even more disturbing was the fact that the snipers had targeted law-enforcement officials whenever possible. By 3:30 p.m. Stony Man Farm had received reports of more than one hundred shootings, the majority of which were law-enforcement personnel. The final count was 129 dead, 103 of whom were law-enforcement officers of various levels, ranging from a meter checker to a chief of police. There were 129 more murders and zero new leads. In each case the shooters had remained unseen, but they had gotten their message across—they could kill with impunity, and the only thing that the law-enforcement community could do about it was to be fodder for their rifles.

By the time reports of shootings started coming in from Alaska, Brognola had already flown to Washington to meet with the President. The big Fed had seen many different presidents dealing with many different crises, but he’d never seen a President who seemed at a loss as to how to proceed.

“Hal,” the President said, “what do I do?”

“I wish I could help you, sir, but I honestly don’t know.”

“I’ve got people on one side of me telling me to declare martial law,” the President said. “There’s a group of people in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who have already drawn up a contingency plan. But my instincts tell me that’s the wrong approach.”

“Mine, too, sir,” Brognola said. “It seems to me that whoever is coordinating all this, their goal is to create so much chaos that they force you to declare martial law. You’d be serving their goal, whatever that may be, by declaring martial law.”

“My thoughts exactly,” the President said. “But if I don’t declare martial law, what do I do? The American people expect the government to do something to stop this crisis.”

“I wish I knew the answer to that, sir, but I don’t. We’ve got our very best people working on this and for now that’s all we can do.”

“I understand that, Hal, but just between us, man-to-man, what do you think I should do?”

“I think you should level with the people, sir,”

Brognola replied. “You should go on television and tell them that we have a very dangerous situation to deal with, but that you think we need to go on with our lives. The American people need to be vigilant, but not fearful.”

The President pondered Brognola’s advice. “That might work for a short time,” he said, “but not for long. If we have a wave of shootings tomorrow, people are going to riot. If that happens, I don’t think I’ll have any options but to institute the Joint Chiefs’ plan.”

Quantico, Virginia

WHEN REPORTS OF SHOOTINGS in Hawaii started coming in two hours after the Alaska shootings, Mack Bolan was at the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, where a forensic team pored over the charred remains pulled from the Tahoe the soldier had pursued earlier in the day. So far the team hadn’t discovered much, but the corpses in the incinerated SUV were the only leads to a murder spree that had taken hundreds of victims in a matter of hours.

The coordination required to pull off something of this magnitude boggled Bolan’s mind. In some cases the hits could only have been pulled off by one or two individuals, but an unknown number of them had to have been carried out in teams like the one Bolan took out. That meant that there were hundreds of organized killers roaming the country, killing at random. To have an operation of this scope take place without alerting anyone—the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and most especially the cyberteam at Stony Man Farm—seemed incomprehensible.

Bolan watched the technicians examine the wreckage of the Tahoe and felt a weight descend upon his shoulders. He’d been fighting for justice for a long time, and it seemed like every time he made a step forward he was eventually pushed three or four steps back. It was like trying to push back the tide with a straw broom. The Executioner knew that he possessed an immense reservoir of inner strength. Over the many years he had been fighting this seemingly endless battle, he’d watched countless comrades crack and break under the stress. Yet he’d always remained strong, had always been able to draw on reserves of strength that so many others seemed to lack. He hadn’t thought the others weak; he just recognized that he had abilities that most people didn’t possess.

Usually, Bolan had at least some sort of an idea of what he was up against; this time there were no leads.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Patricia Jensen standing beside him. She knew very little about him—he’d purposely kept her in the dark all these years for her own safety. All she knew was that he worked for the Department of Justice, which wasn’t exactly true. He had worked for Brognola in an official capacity once, many years ago, but that had not turned out well for anyone involved. These days he was more of a lone wolf. But that information wasn’t something he shared with Jensen; the less she knew about the soldier, the longer she could expect to live.

The one thing she knew about him was that, regardless of everything else, he worked on the side of good. As did she. She’d returned the child to his mother earlier in the day, but instead of going home, she’d returned to the FBI lab in Quantico. Though she wasn’t on the forensic team investigating the charred Tahoe, she was under contract with the FBI and had top-secret clearance at the lab. She’d become involved with crime-scene investigation, and had proved to be a particularly adept investigator, one of the top forensic investigators in the nation, in fact.

Though she wasn’t officially involved with this investigation, she was lending her expertise to help out. Not that she’d been much help. There wasn’t a lot left to investigate. The team had identified the vehicle, but it had been reported stolen earlier in the day. The theft was legitimate—someone had boosted the Tahoe and modified it for the shooting. The dealership placard that had been mounted in place of a license plate had obviously been stolen, but since such placards were literally worthless and were almost always thrown away after the actual license plates for a new vehicle arrived, no one had reported the theft.

That left the bodies themselves, and there wasn’t much left of those to investigate. So far, all they knew for certain was that each person in the vehicle had had their teeth fixed in a manner that precluded identifying the bodies through dental records. All this told the investigators was that they were dealing with extremely sophisticated perpetrators, one with access to their own dentists. This only confirmed the vastness of the conspiracy against which they did battle.

All that was left was to perform a thorough autopsy on the bodies recovered from the wreck. If they were extremely lucky, there would be some sort of clue, something that the perpetrators hadn’t counted on. They needed a break.

CHAPTER THREE

Mack Bolan awakened in Patricia Jensen’s studio apartment and carefully extricated himself from her embrace. He took a quick shower and went out to see if the forensic team had discovered anything overnight. Upon stepping out of the apartment he was accosted by a team of technicians, all speaking at once.

“Quiet!” he ordered, and everyone quit speaking. “Can one of you tell me what’s going on?”

“We were unable to extract dental records from any of the corpses,” the woman in charge of the team said.

“I knew that last night when I went to sleep,” Bolan said.

“We learned a bit more overnight. Each of the corpses had recently undergone extensive orthodontic surgery, not to repair any damage, but solely to prevent identification through dental records. But they all had one other thing in common—each corpse had been fitted with a hollow false tooth.”

“Did you find any cyanide capsules in the hollow compartments?” Bolan asked.

“No, but we did find traces of cyanide. Each person must have had cyanide capsules in that tooth, but the fire destroyed the capsules.”

“That means that if we capture any of the shooters alive, we’d better act fast to make sure they don’t kill themselves before we can interrogate them,” the soldier said, more to himself than to the woman. “Were you able to learn anything?”

“Only that one corpse had stainless steel hardware in his left leg,” the woman said. “Pretty high-tech stuff for such a young man. Appears to be military.”

“How can you tell?” Bolan asked.

“From the serial number on the hardware. According to production records the manufacturer shipped the hardware to the Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

“Did you identify the person who had the hardware installed?” Bolan asked.

“We can’t legally gain access to medical records,” the woman said. She gave the soldier a look that said she knew that sort of technicality might not impede him as much as it did her, but remained silent.

Bolan went back into the apartment to call Stony Man Farm on his secure cell line.

Jensen was just getting out of the shower when he returned. The apartment was set up like a hotel room, with a kitchenette between the bathroom and the bedroom area. He watched Jensen towel off her naked body, missing rivulets of water rolling off her blond hair and down her back between her shoulder blades. He stepped into the bathroom, took her towel from her and wiped off the water from her back. She was really a lovely woman, with a body that bordered on perfection. She turned around to kiss him, but instead of responding to her lips, he said, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“What?” she asked, obviously disappointed. She had hoped for another session of lovemaking.

“Go out and get me a newspaper. The New York Times.” Bolan had no need of a newspaper, but he did need some privacy to call Stony Man Farm. It wasn’t because he didn’t trust Jensen, but what he needed to discuss with the crew at Stony Man was top secret. She clearly didn’t appreciate being sent on such a menial errand, but she got dressed and left without questioning Bolan. He wished he’d been able to think of a better excuse for getting her to leave, but at least it had worked.

After she’d dressed and left, Bolan called Kurtzman at Stony Man and told him what he’d learned. “Can you get into the VA records?” Bolan asked.

“The problem is that the VA has been slow to switch to computerized record keeping, so most of the VA information is likely in a filing cabinet at the VA hospital in Minneapolis. But if the guy was active military when he had the surgery, which seems likely, given his age, his records should be on file with the Pentagon.”

“Can you hack into those records?” Bolan asked.

“I already have,” Kurtzman replied, “or at least what’s left of them. They appear to have been altered.” He paused. “Well, altered isn’t exactly the correct word. Destroyed would be more accurate. I found a record of the hardware being delivered to Minneapolis, but no purchase order, no information on who ordered it and no information on the end user. All that information appears to have been purged from the system.”

“How is that possible?” Bolan asked.

“It’s not, at least in theory,” Kurtzman replied. “Whoever did this had some help in extremely high places.”

“How high?” Bolan asked.

“I’d almost have to say as high as the office of the President,” Kurtzman said, “but that’s highly unlikely.”

“Where do we go from here?” Bolan asked.

“We’ll start looking into possibilities at the highest level of government,” the computer expert said. “And I mean the highest.”

“I’ll head to Minneapolis to see if I can learn anything at the VA hospital,” Bolan said. “The electronic records may have been destroyed, but maybe there’s still some information hidden in the physical records.”

Bridgeport, Connecticut

THE FEAR EVERYONE ACROSS the United States felt as noon approached the following day hung over the country like the shimmering haze created by the unseasonably warm spring weather. Much of the country had, in fact, shut down, and work ground to a halt because many people were too afraid to leave their houses.

Jim Parkinson counted himself among the fearful who remained indoors as noon approached, though that wasn’t too difficult for him since he worked at home. Parkinson really wasn’t afraid of the squads of snipers that seemed to have descended on the entire nation. In fact, he was secretly grateful; the chaos couldn’t have come at a better time. For the previous decade Parkinson, a British expatriate, had been embezzling huge sums of money from the publishing house for which he worked, for which he’d been the CEO for twenty years. About ten years earlier he’d been punted aside, replaced by a much younger man and given the lofty title of “Senior Vice President of Global Publishing.”

Senior vice president of nothing, Parkinson thought. If he went into the offices once per month it was a busy month, and if he skipped his monthly visit, he was dead certain that no one missed his presence. He’d been replaced because the then-new owners of the company had wanted to hire someone who was more resourceful. It was at that moment that Parkinson decided to show them the meaning of the word resourceful. No one knew the intricacies of the publishing house’s finances like Parkinson—he’d been the one who set up the system back when he’d been the company’s original comptroller. He was the only person who really understood how it worked, and he also knew how to skim large amounts of money without anyone ever finding out. For the past decade he’d been siphoning off over $1 million per year and laundering it through a dummy corporation in the Cayman Islands.

Now, with the country roiling from the turmoil caused by the previous day’s sniper attacks, he had the perfect opportunity to bail out, go spend the rest of his days sipping icy rum cocktails on a sandy beach of his choosing. He was at that very moment checking flight schedules, planning to get out of the country before all flights in and out were canceled. In his address to the nation the previous night, the President had said that he intended for business as usual to continue, but there were rumors that the federal government was making plans very much counter to the President’s public statements. Parkinson had heard that those plans included shutting down all international airports.

Parkinson looked at the clock on the right side of the lower toolbar on his computer screen and saw that it was one minute until noon. He sat at the kitchen table of his seventh-story apartment where he had a terrific view of Bridgeport Harbor, sipping a cup of coffee while he scheduled his flight. At exactly noon he looked outside to see if he could detect any action. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone dying, and he didn’t see any terrorist snipers. Most importantly for him, he didn’t see the man on the roof of the building across the street, aiming a high-powered rifle at his kitchen window. And he didn’t see the .30-caliber bullet that sped directly at his forehead, spraying his brains across the stainless-steel appliances and leaving more than $10 million orphaned in the account of a fictional company headquartered in the Caymen Islands.

Kansas City, Missouri

PETER SCHLETTY DOUBTED his career path. He’d wanted to be a cop since he was old enough to know what a cop was. He’d excelled in the police academy and had landed a sweet job with the Kansas City Police Department upon graduating. Up until a couple of days prior, it had been the job of his dreams. Schletty was an exceptionally intelligent person, with an IQ of 165. This made him smarter than ninety percent of the world’s civilians and smarter than ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of all police officers.

In some ways his intelligence had been a hindrance in his career as an officer because it caused him to question exceptionally stupid orders, but overall it had put him on the fast track for advancement because, frankly, most of his colleagues could politely be described as dolts. In his less charitable moments, Schletty conjured the word retards, but his politic sensibilities kept him from ever uttering such insensitive terminology aloud.

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.

The soldier lunged up the stairwell toward the roof, the security guards hot on his heels. He kicked the door open and ran at top speed for the rope he’d anchored to the air-conditioning unit. Grabbing the figure-eight descenders he’d clipped to the ropes, he flung himself over the edge of the roof. By the time the first of the guards had emerged from the stairwell Bolan was in a near free fall toward the ground below. He plunged down in a barely controlled descent, braking only as he neared the ground. It was hard to judge his progress in the dark, and he’d slowed his descent barely enough to keep from doing serious damage to his body when he landed.

When his feet touched the grass, Bolan pitched himself into a roll, which turned out to be a good move because gunfire from the roof tore up the turf on which he’d just landed. The gunfire tracked him as he sprang up from his roll and ran at top speed for the wall. When he reached the wall, he grabbed the top and powered over the top of it. By this time he’d put enough distance between himself and his pursuers that he only needed to worry about catching a stray bullet, but he also knew a stray bullet could kill him as dead as an aimed bullet could, so he didn’t stop running until he was at his car.

He could hear sirens approaching the VA hospital. Rather than panic, Bolan calmly drove through the residential district in which he’d parked, following a route that he’d prepared in advance, one that led him to Cedar Avenue. He followed it south until it turned into State Highway 77, which in turn led him straight to his motel. When he pulled into the lot, pimps and dealers were doing business in the lot. They sized him up, decided he was more trouble than he was worth and let him pass into the motel unmolested.

CHAPTER FOUR

“So what have you got on Theodore Haynes from Plainfield, Wisconsin?” Bolan asked Kurtzman over his cell phone once he was safely ensconced in his two-bit motel room.

“Army Ranger,” Kurtzman replied, “one tour in Afghanistan, two tours in Iraq, heavily decorated, had his left knee crushed when his Humvee hit an IED and flipped over. He was the only survivor. His three buddies were killed in the blast. He recovered full use of his leg, but not quite to the degree required to remain a Ranger, so he left the military.”

“I’m going to take a wild guess and say he was trained as a sniper.”

“Right first time.”

“Anything else?” Bolan asked.

“Yeah. He’s been officially dead for years. According to every record I could access, he committed suicide soon after washing out of the Rangers.”

“I don’t believe that,” Bolan said. “I sincerely doubt that these killings are the work of some sort of undead zombie.”

“There wasn’t much we could tell from what was left of the bodies you brought in yesterday,” the computer expert said, “but one thing we could tell was that the bodies inside the vehicle had been alive prior to the vehicle crashing, so I don’t think we have to worry about zombies.”

“Where is Haynes buried?” Bolan asked.

“Plainfield, Wisconsin, and I know what you’re thinking. I’m one step ahead of you. Hal is having the body exhumed tomorrow morning.”

“I take it that means that I’m heading to Plainfield tonight,” Bolan posited.

“You take it correctly,” Kurtzman said. “I’ve already called Jack and told him to get the plane ready.”

“You pull any information off that shell casing I sent you yesterday?” Bolan asked.

“Yes and no.”

“Give me the ‘no’ first.”

“We didn’t pull any prints or DNA off the brass,” Kurtzman replied.

“And the ‘yes’?”

“We traced the lot number on the case and found out where it had been shipped. You’re not going to like this.”

“Where did it go?” Bolan asked.

“McNair.” Kurtzman was referring to Fort Lesley J. McNair, located on the confluence of the Potomac River and the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., the third oldest military base in the United States. It was the home base for most of the top Army brass in the D.C. area, including the Army’s chief of staff, who also happened to be the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It was part of a special production run of precision casings designed for sniper and competition use. It looks like we’ve got two possibilities here. One, someone at McNair is stealing supplies and selling them on the black market.”

“And two,” Bolan interjected, “we’ve got a person or persons at the highest level of the military involved in this mess. How much of this is Hal going to share with the President?”

“He hasn’t decided yet,” Kurtzman said. “but before you leave for Wisconsin, you need to know one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The President warned Hal that if there is another wave of killings tomorrow, he plans to declare martial law.”

Plainfield, Wisconsin

NORMALLY BOLAN USED FLIGHTS to catch a nap and rest up, but the short hop from Minneapolis to Plainfield aboard the fast little jet barely allowed for a single z, so Bolan sat up front and chatted with Grimaldi, who appreciated the company.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Plainfield,” Grimaldi said.

“Why?” Bolan asked.

“It’s the home of Ed Gein,” Grimaldi replied. Ed Gein had been a notorious murderer and grave robber from Plainfield.

“You a fan of serial killers?” Bolan asked.

“Not a fan, exactly,” Grimaldi said, “but I find the guy fascinating. He cut off his victims’ heads and stole other body parts from local graveyards. What could motivate a man to do something like that?”

“My money’s on a brain disorder,” Bolan offered. “That would give him more of an excuse to do what he did than most of the people we go up against. They’re usually motivated by greed for wealth or power.”

“You do know that he wasn’t a serial killer, technically, right?”

“I have to admit I’m not up to speed on the particulars of Wisconsin’s second most famous cannibal.”

“Gein was only tried and convicted for one murder,” Grimaldi said. “Back then prosecutors exercised a little more common sense than today. They figured since he got life for one killing there wasn’t a lot to be gained by spending the money to try him for the other murders. Can you imagine a time when such logical thought ruled the day?”

Bolan thought it was a rhetorical question and remained silent.

“You know that you poking around here digging up bodies might bring back some bad memories for the old-timers who were alive back when Geins was doing much the same thing,” Grimaldi said.

“I’m not any happier about having to dig up a local war hero than the folks around here will be, but we don’t have a choice. And we don’t have much time.”

The sun had yet to rise over the eastern horizon when Jack Grimaldi brought the Cirrus Vision SF50 jet in for a landing at the Plainfield International Airport, an extremely pretentious name for a facility that consisted of two dirt runways and a steel shed. It wasn’t a fit place to land a jet, even a small jet like the SF50, but a seasoned pilot like Grimaldi had no problems. He brought the little hot-rod jet in as easily as most pilots would bring in a small two-seat Cessna.

Brognola had arranged for a federal agent to meet Bolan at the airport. It wasn’t hard for either party to find the other. The Cirrus wasn’t only the first jet of the day to land in the airport, but it was also the only jet to ever land there. And if the vehicle driven by the federal officer—a gunmetal gray Crown Victoria sedan—wasn’t a dead giveaway, his conservative dark suit was. Besides, he was the only person waiting at the airport. The agent, a somber Nordic-looking fellow named Tracy Anderson, said, “It’ll be another hour or so before we finish exhuming the body. Want to stop for breakfast?”

Bolan accepted the agent’s offer.

“It looks like we’ve got a few options,” Anderson said as they cruised the town’s main drag, along which stood several diners and cafés. “Any of them look promising?”

“Pick that one,” Bolan said, pointing to the diner that had the most big pickup trucks parked out front. A lot of pickups usually meant that the place had the best food, but it also meant that it was a spot where the locals congregated, and Bolan hoped to use this opportunity to learn a bit more about Mr. Haynes.

Rather than taking a booth, Bolan, Grimaldi and the agent sat down at the counter, where the soldier could have better opportunities to interact with the locals. Sure enough the local sitting next to Bolan struck up a conversation before the waitress had even poured them a cup of coffee. “Mighty nice weather we’re having for this time of year,” the man said. The weather was always a safe ice breaker and a favorite topic of conversation in northern states.

“It’s close to perfect,” Bolan replied. “Summer’s come early this year.”

“It’s global warming,” the man said.

“Yep,” Bolan replied.

“My name’s Myron,” the man said, extending his weathered hand. “Myron Haynes.”

“Matt,” the soldier replied, using his undercover name, “Matt Cooper.”

“You in the military?” Haynes asked.

“Was,” Bolan replied. “Now I’m doing some contract work for the Department of Justice.”

“What are you guys doing about those shootings that have been going on the past couple of days?”

“Everything we can,” Bolan replied.

“Well,” Haynes said, “we ain’t had none around here. What are you investigating in these parts?”

“I hate to ask you this,” Bolan said, “but are you related to Theodore Haynes?”

The man got quiet. Then he said, “Everyone around here is pretty much related to everyone else. Our family trees are more like family wreaths. Teddy was my cousin’s boy. Damned shame what happened to him.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said, “it sure was.”

“Not that we didn’t expect the boy to come to a bad end. He was in trouble from the time he was ten years old. Earlier than that, even. He stole his parents’ car when he was twelve. When he went in the army, we thought that might turn him around. And it seemed to. He’d done good in there, made sergeant, but when he come out, he was worse than ever. He got into the drugs real bad. I think that’s what made him go and kill himself.”

“What kind of drugs?” Bolan asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Drugs is drugs, I suppose. I imagine he was doing meth—everyone around here was doing meth, it seems like. And I know he had a problem with prescription pain pills ever since he got out of the VA hospital. He got caught robbing the drugstore in town once, but they let him go because he was a war hero. If they’d locked him up then, he might be alive today.” The man paused for a response, and Bolan gave a slight nod of his head, which passed for conversation in rural areas, and the man continued, “Then again, maybe he’d be just as dead in prison. He was messed up with those damned Slaves.”

“Slaves?” Bolan asked.

“Satan’s Slaves,” Haynes replied. The Satan’s Slaves were a mid-sized motorcycle club, located primarily in the upper Midwest, and they currently controlled Minneapolis. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul had been the territory of the Hellions, one of the biggest outlaw motorcycle clubs in the world, but the Hellions had imploded following a series of arrests that had decimated the club. Since nature abhored a vacuum, the Slaves had filled that vacuum and now controlled the area, at least temporarily, until the Hellions could regroup and regain control. The Slaves had a reputation for over-the-top violence, as if they were trying to overcompensate for being a second-tier club by living out an extreme example of the motorcycle gang stereotype. They were also much more political than most motorcycle clubs; they harbored extremist political views and were associated with a number of white supremacist organizations.

“Those guys are bad news,” Bolan said. If given the choice, the soldier would have taken the Hellions over the Slaves any day. He had run up against members of the Hellions before, and they were definitely no angels, but the Hellions were a motorcycle club in which some of the members happened to be criminals, whereas the Slaves were an outright criminal organization. Maybe even more than criminal—the Slaves were known to be active in a number of hardcore white supremacist organizations, and Bolan had heard rumors that the club had been involved in terrorist activities against minority groups. The Hellions weren’t exactly civil rights activists themselves, but in general they tolerated their neighbors. They tended to police their territory, especially in the neighborhoods around their clubhouses, which tended to be located in the seediest parts of the cities in which the Hellions operated, but they were equal opportunity haters. If someone caused trouble on Hellion turf, that person usually ended up enduring a beating whether he was black, white or any other hue found in the natural world.

“You’re telling me,” Haynes said. “You know what I think? I don’t think Teddy killed himself.”

“Oh?” Bolan said. Haynes definitely had the soldier’s interest by this point.

“Hell, no,” Haynes said. “I saw him the night he died. We had a few beers down at the tavern. He was in a good mood. Then some of those damned Slaves rode up and he left with them. Next thing you know, they found him in his trailer house with his head blown off. He was holding his own shotgun and it sure as hell looked like he’d shot himself, but that could have been anyone in Teddy’s bed without his head.”

Normally, Bolan would have dismissed such talk as the desperate grasping of a bereaved relative, but in this case he happened to know that Haynes’ suspicions were correct. He thought about this while he took the last bite of his hash browns, but his thoughts were interrupted by the ring of Agent Anderson’s cell phone.

“We’ll be right there,” Bolan heard Anderson say.

BOLAN CONTEMPLATED WHAT he’d learned on the ride to the cemetery. After they’d overseen the loading of the remains into the van that would transport them to the federal crime lab in Minneapolis, Anderson returned Bolan and Grimaldi to the airport. As soon as the plane was airborne, Bolan called Kurtzman to debrief.

“What have you learned about the supposed Haynes suicide?” Bolan asked.

“There was no autopsy,” Kurtzman stated. “The death certificate was signed by a general practitioner at the local clinic, a fellow named Lee Klancher who was eighty-eight years old at the time. A year later he was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, so the odds are good that he didn’t do the most thorough examination.”

“We can be certain of one thing,” Bolan said. “That headless corpse we pulled out of the ground just now wasn’t Theodore Haynes.”

“I think we’re one hundred percent on that one,” Kurtzman replied. “But that begs the question, who was it?”

“My guess is someone that the Satan’s Slaves wanted to eliminate,” Bolan stated, “or at least found expendable.”

“The Slaves are involved in this?”

“I think so. At least, they’re the only lead I have right now. See what you can find out about them.”

Washington, D.C.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK I should do, Hal?” the President asked.

“I think declaring martial law would be a mistake, sir,” Brognola told the man.

“I believe you’re right. Once we go down that road, nothing will ever be the same. But my national security adviser and the Joint Chiefs of Staff don’t believe we have any other option. People are screaming for us to do something. They’re afraid to leave their houses. People aren’t going to work. Food, fuel and medicine aren’t being delivered. The economy has nearly shut down.”

“We’re doing everything we can to solve this situation, sir.”

“Please, Hal, tell me that you’re close to finding the shooters.”

“I wish I could, sir, but I can’t lie to you.”

“Then I’m going to have to declare martial law.”

“Sir,” Brognola said, “once you’ve turned the United States into a police state, it will never again be a beacon of freedom. I know this is supposed to be a temporary state of affairs, but what guarantee do you have that bringing the military in will stop the shootings? You’re risking turning these terrorist attacks into something resembling an insurgency. I think recent history has shown us how long an insurgency can drag on.”

“My instincts tell me you’re right, Hal. But what do we do? If I don’t go along with the Joint Chiefs, I’m risking a low-grade insurgency in my own administration. They’re adamant about declaring martial law.”

“Well, sir, far be it from me to tell you what to do, but you are their boss. You are the commander in chief.”

The President pondered Brognola’s comments and said, “If I give you three more days, do you think you can wrap this thing up?”

“We’ll give it everything we’ve got.”

“Fair enough,” the man said. “We’ll meet in three days. I pray to God that the purpose of that meeting will be for you to debrief me on the capture of the terrorists. In the meantime, please keep me informed every step of the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

Minneapolis, Minnesota

BOLAN DOWNSHIFTED THE black Mustang as he approached the Slaves’ north Minneapolis clubhouse, located in an industrial area along the west bank of the Mississippi River. The twin tailpipes barked with authority as the 412-horsepower V-8 picked up revs on the downshift. The soldier hadn’t wanted such a flashy car, but he needed something fast. The only cars the Farm had been able to line up that met his performance criteria were this Mustang, a red Corvette and a yellow Porsche 911 Turbo. Of the bunch, the Mustang was the slowest, but it was also the least conspicuous. At least it was black, and it had something resembling a backseat so the soldier could keep his war bag within easy reach.

It was almost noon and there was hardly another vehicle on the road. As expected, there’d been another wave of shootings up and down the eastern seaboard at noon eastern time, but this day’s kill rate was down somewhat. People weren’t moving around much, especially at the stroke of noon. Still, the body count was climbing. Most of the victims had been officers from various law-enforcement agencies, since they were pretty much the only people out at noon, but a few stray civilians had also been killed. Some were people who simply refused to succumb to the fear of the terrorists that was paralyzing the country, but several had been killed in their own homes, shot through windows and doorways. This new development was worrisome; taking out a target inside a building required much more skill than simply shooting someone out in the open and indicated that the skill level of the opponents Bolan faced was of the highest order.

It looked like Teddy Haynes wasn’t the only terrorist with military sniper training. It seemed inconceivable that military veterans could be behind this, but that appeared to be the case, and judging from the access needed to scrub the identities of the shooters this clean, there had to be military involvement at an extremely high level.

As hard as that fact was for the soldier to swallow, he found it even more unlikely that some sort of paramilitary operation could involve a group of people such as Satan’s Slaves. Bolan slowed even more as he rolled past the Slaves’ clubhouse.

The Slaves had taken over the building the Hellions had used as their clubhouse when they’d controlled this territory. It was an old garage that had once served as the headquarters for a taxicab company. Bolan had studied the layout of the place from photos and blueprints that Kurtzman had sent him and knew that getting in would be no easy task. The layout had been designed to keep the taxicabs and employees safe in what was one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the entire Midwest. Several years earlier the city had earned the nickname “Murderapolis,” and it had earned that moniker because of killings that had, for the most part, occurred within twenty blocks of the clubhouse. The taxi company’s headquarters had been a virtual fort, with razor-wire fences, thick brick walls and entrances that were well-controlled and easily defensible.

Bolan didn’t expect any activity outside the clubhouse since it was almost noon and the city seemed virtually deserted, but when he drove past the clubhouse he saw a group of five men beating another man senseless in the vacant lot adjacent to the Slave’s property. The men doing the beating all wore Slave cuts—the sleeveless denim jackets on which club members displayed their colors or club patches.

So much for inconspicuous, Bolan thought. He flicked off the traction-control switch, downshifted again and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The rear tires broke loose in a cloud of smoke, and he power slid the Mustang onto a concrete slab that had to have been the driveway of whatever structure had once occupied the vacant lot. Before the car came to a complete stop, Bolan threw open the driver’s door and bolted toward the group of men, crossing the thirty-foot distance in several long strides. The five assailants had barely had time to look up from their victim before Bolan was on top of them.

The Executioner snap-kicked the man closest to him in the head, which jerked back at an impossible angle. His neck broken, the man toppled to the ground. Two of the other men stopped beating the victim and brought the broken pool cues they’d been using as clubs to bear on Bolan. Before the wooden sticks could contact the soldier’s skull, he reached up and grabbed them both, one in each hand. Bolan flipped the cue in his right hand around so that he was holding the fat end of the club and speared its original owner through the eye with the jagged broken end. The soldier felt the bone in the eye socket give way and the cue penetrate the man’s brain pan. Two down, three to go.

By this time, the remaining assailants had turned their attention from the man on the ground and attacked Bolan. With the pool cue in his left hand Bolan whacked the man closest to him across the temple, and the man went down, but this left Bolan vulnerable to the other two attackers. One of them, a burly giant with a long red beard and even longer hair, tackled him, knocking him flat on his back, while the other one smashed a cinder-block-size fist into the soldier’s face. Bolan brought a knee up into the groin of the man who’d tackled him but was unable to avoid another blow from that oversized fist. This time the soldier saw stars. He knew he had to end this fight soon, or his attackers would end it for him.

But ending the fight would be a challenge. Bolan’s knee to the groin had slowed his attacker, but the man was tough and it hadn’t taken the fight out of him. Bolan kicked the man in the jaw, driving him up and away. The other attacker tried to drive his fist into Bolan’s face one more time, but the soldier managed to twist to the side and avoid the blow. As he did this, he reached down and pulled a custom-made eight-inch bowie knife from a sheath in his boot and in one sweeping motion he brought the knife around in an arc and drove it through the man’s ribs, just below his armpit. He pulled out the blade and a geyser of blood erupted in its wake. Bolan had severed the man’s aorta as well as both his pulmonary arteries; he’d bleed out in a matter of seconds.

Knife in hand, the Executioner turned to face the final assailant, but the man standing over Bolan held something in his hand that trumped the soldier’s bowie knife: a Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan revolver. Judging from the diameter of the bore in the barrel staring down at Bolan’s face, the revolver was chambered for a .454 Casull cartridge.

The man pulled back the hammer and aimed the sights of the stubby revolver on a spot that looked to be directly between Bolan’s eyes. Just as he seemed about to pull the trigger, the soldier detected movement behind the man. An instant later a steel pipe swung through the air and caught the Slave on his temple. Bolan heard the crunch of breaking bone and saw the man’s eyes roll up in his head. He collapsed, revealing the bloody figure of the beating victim.

“We have to get out of here,” the man said. “There’s twenty or thirty more where these guys came from, and they’ll be out here any minute.” Bolan didn’t need any more explanation than that and both men raced back to the Mustang. By the time the doors to the clubhouse opened and men started pouring out, Bolan had rowed through three of the Mustangs six gears and the speedometer needle had hit 100 mph. Someone from the club house managed to fire off a few shots at the fleeing Ford, but by that time Bolan was already three blocks away.

When they were out of sight of the clubhouse, Bolan asked his passenger, who appeared to be taking inventory of his injuries, “Are you hurt bad?”

“I think I have some broken ribs,” he said, “but I’ll live. You okay?”

Bolan rubbed his swelling jaw. “Nothing an ice pack won’t take care of. What did you do to those guys to make them want to kill you?”

“It’s not what I did,” the man said. “It’s what I am.”

“What’s that?” Bolan asked.

“A Hellion.”

“What were you doing at the Slaves’ clubhouse?”

“I wasn’t there by my own choice,” the man said. “They grabbed me at a bar in Anoka and brought me here.”

“Were you wearing Hellion colors?” Bolan asked.

“No. I wasn’t trying to commit suicide, if that’s what you’re asking. But they know who I am, and apparently they knew where to find me.”

“Were they going to kill you?”

“I suspect that was their plan,” the man said. “I appreciate your putting a stop it.”

“Don’t appreciate anything just yet,” Bolan said. “I’ve got some questions for you, and if I don’t like your answers, you might wish I’d never broken up your little tea party back there.”

“You a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

The man pondered the soldier’s question a moment. “You just killed three Slaves, and the two we left breathing looked like they’ll be sucking their meals through tubes for the rest of their lives. If you’re a cop, you aren’t like any of the cops I ever saw.”

“If you don’t tell me what I want to know,” Bolan said, “you’re going to wish I was a cop.”

“Look, man, you saved my life and you just took out a bunch of Slaves. Even if you were a cop, you’d have my respect. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Where do you want me to start?”

“How about you start with your name?”

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