Don Pendleton: Kill Shot

“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.