LITMIR.BIZ

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      “As of nine o’clock this morning, yes.”

      One of the officers who had been scouring the edges of the ditch alongside the road came up with a rifle shell in a sealed plastic bag. “Sir,” he said to Maurstad, “I found this.”

      Bolan let Maurstad examine the bag, and then asked to see it. Maurstad handed the soldier the evidence bag. The shell casing was a Hornady brass shell, chambered for the .338 Lapua Magnum round. The .338 Lapua Magnum round had been developed specifically as a round for military sniping. Its ballistics rivaled the .50 BMG round; a good shooter could hit targets out to 2,000 meters, and even an average shooter could count on a 1,200-meter effective range. But the round was uncommon in civilian use; only the most specialized gun shops carried the .338 Lapua Magnum round, and among those that did, most didn’t stock a firearm with which to fire it.

      “If you don’t mind,” Bolan said, “I’m going to send this to our lab.”

      Maurstad clearly minded, but he just said, “You’re the boss.”

      Minneapolis, Minnesota

      “I’M SORRY, SIR,” THE administrator at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota, told Mack Bolan, “but we can’t release that information to you regardless of how impressive your credentials might be.”

      Bolan had expected as much. He knew getting the records released would be virtually impossible, but he had to give it a shot because the alternative didn’t stand a much better chance of success. He’d have to break into the VA hospital at night.

      The soldier looked around the administrative offices, at the rows and rows of wide-drawer filing cabinets, knowing that the information he sought likely rested within one of them. One row, marked Vendors, looked especially promising. He had the name of a vendor, the ship date and the serial number. That should be enough to get him a name.

      Getting in and out looked less promising. The administrative offices were on the top floor, off a twelve-story atrium around which the hospital was arranged. Several wings branched off from the central atrium area, with the head nurse of each floor posted at the end of each wing, near the edge of the atrium. It was a massive complex, one of the nicest VA hospitals Bolan had ever seen, modern and sophisticated in just about every aspect. Every aspect except record keeping, Bolan reminded himself. In this case, the Veterans Administration’s antiquated record keeping turned out to be an advantage; the only reason the information the soldier needed hadn’t been purged was because it hadn’t been in electronic form. It was a small oversight on the part of Bolan’s opponents, but so far it was the only clue the soldier had.

      The hospital wasn’t located in Minneapolis proper, but rather in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, home of the Mall of America. Given that the gigantic shopping center was a tourist destination, the area had an abudance of hotels. Bolan had a room in a little low-budget motel about halfway between the Mega Mall and the VA hospital; the sort of place where he could lie low for a few hours without drawing any attention.

      After scoping out the VA hospital campus, which wasn’t well-guarded, Bolan returned to his room to grab a nap. He set his alarm for 1:00 a.m., but he needn’t have bothered; he awoke at exactly 12:55. By the time his alarm went off he’d already brushed his teeth, showered and slipped into his blacksuit. He threaded a sound suppressor onto his Beretta 93R machine pistol and sheathed it in the shoulder holster. Normally he’d also pack a Desert Eagle on his hip, but this was a soft probe. The Beretta was an old habit. There were no bad guys in the hospital; there were just hardworking healthcare workers taking care of American heroes. Under no circumstances was Bolan going to let the situation devolve into a shooting match. Stealth, quickness and silence were much more important than heavy artillery in this mission, and the bulky Israeli hand cannon would just be a liability in all of those areas.

      Instead, he carried nonlethal weaponry in its place: a canister of pepper gas, a roll of duct tape, some plastic restraints and a stun gun, which the soldier intended to use only in an extreme emergency, since the device had the potential to do serious damage; it could even be lethal to a security guard with a bad heart.

      Bolan also carried a pouch filled with climbing gear: rope, carbiners, belays and rappelling devices. The security at the VA hospital was light, but it was heavy enough to turn the probe into an ugly situation. Shooting his way in and out wasn’t an option. To keep this probe soft, the Executioner was going to have to put his back into it.

      The soldier parked his rental car, a Chevrolet Impala, about as nondescript as nondescript could be, in a residential neighborhood just west of the VA campus. The main entrance was to the east, and that put him as far away from any late-night activity as possible. Bolan scaled the ornate stone wall that surrounded the grounds with ease. The wall was strictly decorative, a pretty barrier that kept the local residents from having to accidentally see a wounded warrior.

      The next climb Bolan would have to make wouldn’t be as easy. The east end of the wing housing the administration offices had no windows and was featureless. The gaps in the granite covering were too narrow and too far apart to use for hand jamming and foot jamming. A granite trough, however, that served as a character line in the bleak twelve-story-tall stone surface and also masked a drainage pipe for rain that accumulated on the roof. That would provide the soldier with an avenue into the offices. He would have to make his way up to the top of the building, and then gain access through the roof entrance.

      Bolan had left the offices via the stairway rather than taking the elevator. Before he’d left, he’d gone up the stairs to the roof exit, disabled the alarm and slipped a thin piece of cardboard into the doorjamb, preventing the bolt from locking. He only hoped that no one had removed the cardboard or fixed the alarm. Judging from the thick layer of dust covering everything on the stairway landing leading to the roof, he guessed it didn’t see a lot of use and was probably safe.

      Bolan wedged himself into the gutter, which was about eighteen inches deep and two feet wide. With his back against one side, his feet against the other, he was able to extend his legs enough to get the leverage he needed to shimmy up the gutter. Then he began the long, slow, grueling process of inching his way up twelve stories of rough granite, holding himself in place with the tension of his body while he raised one foot, then the other, then slid his back up the opposite side of the trough.

      But that was the easy part. The trough ended in a rain chute that was too small for the soldier to crawl through. Instead, he was going to have to rely on a series of ornamental ridges on the overhang that jutted two feet beyond the gutter. Keeping his arms straight and perfect tension in his body, Bolan levered himself outward and reached for the lip that he had spotted in his earlier recon of the building. He trusted the lip would be in the exact spot he’d noted earlier; if his calculations were off by a single inch, he would plummet to his death, 130 feet below. When his hand connected with the ridge, he spared a millisecond to be grateful for the precision of his military sniper observation training. Using his entire body as a lever, Bolan lunged up around the overhang. His arms were melting from the abuse of climbing the wall, but he knew he only had to make it a few more feet and he was finished. Without missing a beat, the soldier used his momentum to scramble up the overhang and pulled himself over onto the roof of the hospital.

      He took just a moment to rest his muscles from the strain of climbing and tied the rope he planned to use to rappel down the side of the building to a bracket holding an air-conditioning unit in place, then jogged over to the door. The thin cardboard still prevented the bolt in the door from engaging and he pushed it open. The alarm inside was still disabled. Bolan crept down the stairs with as much stealth as possible, but every footfall, though near silent, seemed to ring down the stairwell like a church bell. When he got to the next landing, the door into the administrative offices were locked. The soldier removed a small but powerful handheld computer from a drop pouch strapped to his left leg, took out a magnetic key card connected to a USB port and attached the card to the computer. He pulled out his cell phone and sent a text message to Kurtzman saying, “Get ready—about to transmit,” then swiped the magnetic key card through the slot on the scanner next to the doorway.

      Moments later he received a text back

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