LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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