LITMIR.BIZ

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position. “M-m-me?” he stammered.

      “You.” Bolan nodded. “How many armed guards?”

      “What?”

      “Armed guards. Men with firearms. How many in this facility?”

      “J-ju…just those two,” the young man managed to tell him. “Plus the guy at the door. Jesus, you killed them. You killed them both.”

      “Stay with me,” Bolan said, kicking one of the man’s feet with his own combat boot. He didn’t bother to point out that he hadn’t, in fact, killed the door guard. “Focus, kid. Why were they here? Why attack me?”

      “I don’t know,” the young man admitted. “We…we just work here, man. We just work here.”

      “Work here doing what? What are you building?”

      “How should I know?” the man said, indignant. “They give us the specs and we build the boards. I don’t ask. I get paid by the board. I just do my job.”

      “Get up,” Bolan said. “Get the rest of the workers together. Get out of here.”

      “Why?” the kid asked, pulling himself up, using the workbench for support. He was rapidly regaining his composure; it was dawning on him that Bolan didn’t intend to kill him.

      “You’re out of a job, kid,” Bolan told him. “Get the others and get gone. Don’t make me tell you again.”

      The young man did not need any further urging. He ran among the benches, grabbing each of his fellow assemblers, urging them on and even shouting at them when they hesitated. Under Bolan’s watchful eye, the workers hit the bullet-pocked double doors and ran for it.

      The numbers were ticking down in the soldier’s head. One of those workers was bound to call the police, if a silent alarm hadn’t already been triggered. He thought it unlikely, though, that there was such an alarm, at least not one connected to local law enforcement. Those whose facilities were guarded by gunmen wielding presumably illegal, full-auto Kalashnikovs probably didn’t welcome police involvement in their affairs.

      Still, one of the assemblers was probably on a wireless phone to the cops right now. Bolan would have only a little time before the place was overrun.

      The wounded gunman was still rolling around on the floor, holding his legs and groaning. Bolan walked up and stood over him, the Tavor held loosely in one hand, the barrel of the rifle pointed at the man’s forehead.

      “I want to know everything you know about your employers and this facility,” Bolan said. “I don’t have a lot of time. If you can’t tell me anything, your usefulness to me is limited. If I have to hurt you to make you talk, I will.” This was a bluff, of course; Bolan, the man once known as Sergeant Mercy, would never torture a helpless, unarmed and wounded man. The Executioner had seen far too many victims of torture and interrogation in the course of his personal war. He would never join the ranks of the butchers who did such things to prisoners. This particular prisoner, however, couldn’t know that.

      “Don’t, man, don’t,” the gunner said, clenching his teeth through the pain. “I got nothin’ here.… Let me—”

      The revolver appeared in the man’s hand as if by magic, pulled from a holster in his waistband, behind his hip. Bolan triggered a single round from the Tavor into the man’s head, the shot echoing across the assembly plant floor.

      Searching the dead man’s pockets, Bolan finally found something of value: a laminated identity card bearing the corporate logo of a company called Security Consultants and Researchers. The letters SCAR were emblazoned in heavy block letters across the bottom of the card, which also bore the man’s name. Bolan took a moment to remove his secure phone, snap a digital photograph of the card and transmit the image to the Farm. He took and sent a picture of the dead man, too, for confirmation of ID if nothing else.

      There wasn’t much more time. Bolan began to move among the assembly tables, snapping photos of the components he saw waiting there. These, too, were transmitted automatically to the Farm for analysis. He gave the rest of the room a cursory search, then paused outside the door to the office, ajar by perhaps two inches.

      Standing to one side of the threshold, he reached out and gave the door a push. As he yanked his hand back, a shotgun blast ripped through the flimsy hollow-core door, throwing splinters in every direction. There was the unmistakable sound of a pump-action shotgun being racked. A second blast, deafening in the close quarters, followed the first.

      Bolan wasted no time. As the gunner beyond desperately racked his pump shotgun again, the soldier planted a combat-boot sole in what was left of the door, shoving it aside as he plunged through. The man standing in the cluttered office looked up in stark terror as the soldier hurtled toward him. Bolan slammed the butt of the Tavor into the shotgunner’s head. He collapsed without a sound. The shotgun hit the floor, its action still open, another round from the tubular magazine waiting to be pushed into the chamber.

      The man was dazed but not completely unconscious. Bolan propped him up against the scarred wooden desk that dominated the little office. A name tag on the man’s stained and rumpled white, button-down shirt read Hal West, Manager. He didn’t have the look of a professional; he looked like exactly what he was, the manager of a mechanical assembly plant. Bolan searched the man’s pockets and turned up a wallet, a pair of car keys and a few other personal items. Bolan found a pair of glasses in a vinyl case in the man’s shirt pocket. He took these out, unfolded them and placed them on West’s face.

      “West,” Bolan said. He snapped his fingers in front of the man’s face a few times.

      “Wha…?” West sputtered.

      “West,” Bolan said more forcefully. “Wake up.”

      “Who…who are you?” West managed to focus on the soldier.

      “I’m with the government,” Bolan said. He risked flashing his Justice credentials. It was a test, and he wasn’t disappointed. West’s eyes went wide and he visibly paled.

      “You…you’re…”

      “That’s right,” Bolan said. “You just took a shot at a government official.”

      “I’m sorry!” West blurted. “I didn’t know! I thought… I mean… I thought you were…”

      “Slow down,” Bolan said, though he was keenly aware that his own time was running out. He would have to move fast if he wanted to get out of the building before becoming entangled with the local law.

      “They just told us to keep an eye out,” West stated. “They said if anyone ever showed up and got violent, it was the terrorists. We couldn’t trust the workers, of course, but I brought the shotgun in from home, kept it here in the office.”

      “Terrorists?” Bolan asked. “What terrorists?”

      “You don’t know? That isn’t why you’re here?”

      “Why don’t you tell me,” Bolan said.

      “The parts—” West gestured toward the wrecked door “—the assemblies. We’re making transmitters.”

      “Transmitters,” Bolan said. “Not, say, parts for DVD players.”

      “No, no,” West said. “That’s the cover. That’s what they told us to say if anybody asked. They said it was top secret. The folks on the floor didn’t know, just management. Just me.”

      “Who is ‘they,’” Bolan said, “and what exactly did they tell you?”

      “Consolidated Funding and Liability,” West said. “That’s who pays us, anyway. That’s who hired me to run this place. They told me it was top secret, told me I would be helping my country. They said the transmitters are used by the Department of Defense. Missiles or something, hell, I don’t know. I didn’t need to know. The components showed up, and the plans were given to me, and my people just put the boards and everything

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