Kill Shot. Don Pendleton

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