Don Pendleton: Renegade

The CIA informant had also informed his interrogators that there was a rumor going around that many of the hidden WMDs had come from Saddam Hussein himself just before the U.S. and Great Britain took over Iraq. But now, the surrounding countries had grown fearful that they might be invaded next. And they were adding their own mass-murder mediums to the mix.

The CIA agents had reported to their superiors at Langley, who in turn had told the President, as the Man had ordered them to do. But the President had then surprised the Central Intelligence Agency by ordering them to hold off acting on the tip.

Then the Man had called on America’s top-secret counter-terrorist organization, the sensitive Operations Group, based at Stony Man Farm.

The Farm, in turn, had called in the Executioner.

After a long pause, the voice somewhere inside the wall said, “We know no Rotislavsky.”

“Perhaps you do not,” Bolan replied, again in heavily accented French. “But Anton Sobor does.” His hand tightened slightly around the grip of the .45.

“One moment,” came back over the speaker.

Again, Bolan waited. The real Leon Rotislavsky had been another Soviet mole implanted in the U.S. banking industry to assist in sabotaging the economy. He had recently come forward one step ahead of being discovered, and in return for total amnesty spilled all he knew. Rotislavsky hadn’t mentioned Sobor, but he had had little time to do so. Before the name Russell James even came up the Russian had suffered a massive coronary and died.

Until yesterday, there had been no reason to link him to James. And there was still no proof that the two men knew each other. But a hurried background investigation of the Sobor identity had suggested that Sobor and Rotislavsky had graduated together from the university in Moscow. Russian Intelligence—only slightly more cooperative than the KGB had once been—had confirmed that the two men had gone to school together. But they would admit to no more.

So, the Executioner realized as he continued to wait, maybe Anton Sobor knew Leon Rotislavsky and maybe he didn’t. For that matter, the man who had masqueraded as Russell James might not even still be in Tehran. But if he was, and if he had known Rotislavsky, maybe he would open the door to his old friend. If he didn’t, the Executioner would have to hope the name would at least arouse his curiosity enough to open the door anyway. If the latter was the case, however, the Hezbollah men he was hiding out with here in Tehran were likely to greet him with guns blazing.

Bolan took a deep breath and began unbuttoning his overcoat. No one had ever promised him this mission would be easy. In fact if it had been easy, it would have been given to somebody else.

A few minutes later the voice came back. “Tell us more about yourself,” it said. “Tell us how you know Anton.”

Keeping the Russian accent, Bolan said, “Look, it is cold out here.” Then, with an audible sigh of exasperation, he went on. “We went to school together in Moscow. I graduated in business. He studied the sciences. Then we both moved to America.” He paused again, then finally added, “Do I have to spell out the rest for you? Can you not figure it out for yourself?” He looked nervously over both shoulders in case surveillance cameras were trained on him, then finished with, “Who knows who may be listening to us at this very moment?”

After another long pause, a new voice came on. And this one spoke flawless Russian. “Leon, is that really you?” it asked.

Bolan felt the adrenaline start to build in his chest. The voice had the timbre of a native-born Russian. But was it Sobor? Maybe, maybe not. There were hundreds of former Soviets in Iran—ex-KGB officers, Spetsnaz and others. The man on the other end of the intercom could be anyone. Or it could be Sobor. And the former American mole might not know Leon Rotislavsky, and be setting a trap for him by pretending he did.

The Executioner stood where he was, still aware that a hidden surveillance camera could be aimed at him even now. He knew only one thing for sure: whoever the new voice belonged to, the man was interested, which meant Bolan already had one foot in the door.

“Yes, Anton,” Bolan said. “It is me. Now let me in, please, before I freeze my ass off out here!”

The door buzzed and the Executioner pushed it open. Stepping across the threshold, he found himself in another of the dead-winter flower gardens. A cracked concrete sidewalk led through the mud to the front door of a two-story dwelling, and as he started along it a burly man stepped out and walked toward him. A Soviet-made AK-47 hung from a sling over the man’s shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the Executioner’s midsection.

The man looked Iranian, with dark skin and curly black hair. He wore green BDU pants and black combat boots, but above the trousers legs he was all Persian. A multicolored woven caftan fell past his waistline and was cinched with a wide leather belt. Hanging from the belt was a well-worn and cracked military flap holster, the grip of what appeared to be a 9 mm Tokarev pistol clearly visible.

The Hezbollah hardman walked with a strange sort of “side step” as he approached the Executioner, his right side moving forward ahead of his left. Bolan wondered if the strange gait might not be the result of some past injury as he shifted the .45-caliber wheelgun in his pocket, aiming the stumpy barrel up at the man’s chest. The two continued to walk toward each other.

“Halt there!” the Iranian ordered.

Bolan froze in his tracks, his hands still in his pockets.

“Do you have identification papers?” the man with the Kalashnikov asked in broken French.

Slowly, the Executioner pulled his left hand from the hand-warmer pocket of his overcoat and reached inside the coat. Forgery experts at Stony Man Farm had provided him with an old Soviet passport that had been altered to include his picture and Rotislavsky’s name. He handed it to the man with the rifle.

The terrorist kept the barrel of the AK-47 aimed his way, clutching the pistol grip with his right hand as he took the passport with his left. He thumbed it open to the picture and looked down, studying the face. Then, frowning, he looked up. “This passport expired many years ago,” he said.

Bolan laughed out loud. “Who are you, my friend?” he asked. “An Iranian immigration officer? The Soviet Union itself expired many years ago—what did you expect?” From the corner of his eye, the Executioner saw a head and shoulders appear in a window next to the door. Peering out at him to the side of a parted curtain was a light-skinned face with high cheekbones.

Blue eyes, sandy-blond hair—Anton Sobor.

Bolan waited as the burly man continued to look through his passport. With Sobor’s long years of deep cover in the U.S. there had been plenty of pictures of the man in his Stony Man file. The Executioner had studied them during the flight to Iran. As he watched the window now, in his peripheral vision, he saw the former mole raise a handheld walkie-talkie to his lips and speak.

The man with the rifle was in the process of handing the passport back to the Executioner when he suddenly stopped. His eyes rolled up slightly in their sockets and his face became a mask of deep concentration. It was only then that Bolan understood the reason the man had walked so strangely, and it had nothing to do with injury. The Hezbollah hardman had kept the right side of his body forward in order to hide his left ear.

Because his left ear contained a radio receiver.

The AK-47’s barrel rose slightly and the man’s knuckles turned white as his hand tightened around the pistol grip.

The Executioner didn’t hesitate. Stroking the smooth double-action trigger of the 625-10, he sent an RBCD Performance Plus .45 ACP round exploding from his pocket. The superlight 115-grain bullet left the snubby pistol at slightly under the 1650 feet per second it would have traveled from a longer barrel. But it still struck the terrorist’s chest with nearly 700 pounds of pressure, fragmented three inches beneath the skin and sent a thousand tiny scraps of shrapnel through the man’s torso.