Читать книгу Kill Shot - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

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.