Don Pendleton - Renegade

Slowly, the Executioner rose from behind the chair. Somewhere in the two-story house, more men waited to murder him. One of them was Anton Sobor. The trap had been set. But if he wanted Sobor, he had no alternative but to step directly into it.

With the Desert Eagle and Beretta 93-R leading the way, the Executioner moved silently across the blood-stained Persian carpets toward an archway leading into a deserted dining room. A long dining table with matching chairs—each as elaborately carved as the couch in the living room—stood in the center of the room. An equally intricate china closet and buffet had been placed along one wall. A silver service set shone brightly atop the buffet.

Perhaps, like all terrorists claimed, these men hiding Anton Sobor were fighting for God and the “common man.” But while they did, they were living like kings and had brought as much Paradise as they could right here to Earth.

Moving cautiously, the Executioner stepped under the archway into the dining room and saw two doors leading into different parts of the house. The Beretta rose almost of its own accord to cover the door to his left. The Desert Eagle did the same on his right. Which way first? One path had to lead to a staircase that, in turn, would lead to the second story. And the second story was where he suspected Sobor, and whatever men still remained, had taken refuge.

But the floor plan was unknown to him, and from where he stood there was no indication as to where the steps might be found.

So which way first?

One of the terrorists answered the question for the Executioner, suddenly appearing in the doorway to his right and cutting loose with a hurried, and inaccurate, burst of fire from a Czech Skorpion machine pistol. As the 9 mm rounds flew wide to Bolan’s side, he triggered the Desert Eagle and sent two more rounds into the muslin overgarment the man wore beneath his long thin beard. Stepping toward the falling body, he almost missed the man who suddenly stepped out of the other doorway.

Bolan whirled, dropping low, as a double tap of .45 ACPs barely missed his head. He flipped the Beretta’s selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, then sent a trio of 9 mm slugs blazing into the man in the other doorway. He, too, fell to the ground.

With one eye still watching the doorway to his left, the other to his right, Bolan stepped over the first terrorist he had shot and took the hallway to his right. It became almost immediately apparent that no staircase stood in this direction. But two doors led off the hall. Bedrooms, probably. And since he was already there, it only made sense to check them. If he didn’t, and they were occupied, the men hiding there could sneak up behind him and blindside him after he’d found the steps to the second floor.

Besides, his guess that Sobor had moved upstairs was just that—a guess. The Russian might well be just a few feet ahead of him even now.

Slowly, his back against the wall, the Executioner slid down the hallway to the first door. Dropping to a knee, he edged an eye around the corner and saw a sleeping mat on the floor, a wicker chest covered with dirty clothes, and other typical Middle Eastern bedroom furnishings. A closet set in the wall directly across from him. He rose quietly back to his feet and slid noiselessly across the room. Staying to the side, he pressed his ear against the edge of the door.

The heavy breathing coming from the closet was reminiscent of what he’d heard earlier just before entering the house.

Jamming the Desert Eagle into his belt, Bolan transferred the Beretta to his right hand, curled his wrist around the door and grasped the knob with his other hand. He tapped the trigger twice, sending two 3-round bursts of fire up and down through the door, then threw it open and aimed inside the closet.

There was no need. At least one of the rounds had caught the terrorist hiding inside in the top of the head and drilled on down through his brain. He had been squatting inside the closet, and now he fell forward onto his face.

The Executioner heard a faint sound behind him and twirled in time to tap the Beretta’s trigger again. A man clad in flowing white robes, armed with another of the Uzis, fell a second before he could pull the trigger and shoot Bolan in the back. Rising to his feet, the Executioner moved out of the room and on down the hall.

The second bedroom, and the closet inside, were deserted. With the same caution he had used before, the Executioner stepped over the bodies he had left in his wake, retracing his steps to the dining room. Again, the house had grown quiet.

Too quiet.

The body of the man who had appeared in the doorway still lay where it had fallen, just inside the dining room. Bolan moved swiftly that way, dropping the partially spent magazines from both the Beretta and Desert Eagle as he went. The big .44 returned to the hip holster under his coat. When he reached the body, he set the Beretta’s safety, then let it fall out of his hand, holding it by the guard with his index finger. With both hands he lifted the dead man from the floor, turned him to face the hallway, then pushed him through the door.

A half-dozen rounds of fire exploded from somewhere down the hall, and the dead man jerked in his second dance of death before falling to the ground once more.

Excited voices erupted from down the hall. The Executioner moved swiftly now, acting before the confusion he had created in the minds of his enemies disappeared. Stepping forward just enough to get both pistols inside the hall, he stared straight ahead as guns rose to both of his sides.

In his peripheral vision, Bolan saw terrorists at both ends of the hall. The Hezbollah man to his left wore green BDUs like the man in the garden, and aimed a short, double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun his way. From the corner of his right eye, the Executioner saw a sight almost as strange as the “Iranian cowboy” he’d encountered earlier. The man crouching at the foot of the staircase wore a navy-blue, thousand-dollar Brooks Brothers suit, and a carefully knotted red silk tie. He was clean-shaved with carefully coiffured hair. A briefcase stood next to him on the floor where he had set it, and he looked more like an American bank president than a terrorist.

Except for the Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun that now stuttered in his hands.

Bolan stepped back into the dining room, out of the line of fire, as 9 mm slugs sailed toward him from one direction, 12-gauge buckshot from the other. He heard a scream at one end of the hall, a groan at the other. Dropping to one knee again, he peered out into the hall and that the buckshot had hit the man in the suit squarely in the chest.

At the other end of the hall, the man wielding the shotgun had taken a 9 mm round in the knee and fallen to a sitting position. But the cross fire hadn’t finished him as it had the man in the suit, and even now he was attempting to aim the shotgun’s second barrel at the Executioner.

A lone .44 Magnum round through the nose ended the attempt.

Moving swiftly now, the Executioner hurried to the bottom of the steps, leaping over the briefcase and the man next to it. He wondered again exactly what deadly plans this terrorist cell was about to put into motion. It was somewhat odd to run into a rodeo cowboy and a stockbroker in the same Tehran terrorists’ safehouse.

But Bolan knew he would probably never get the answer to that question as he began to mount the steps toward the second floor. Even now, he could hear the distinctive sound of Iranian police sirens in the distance. The houses behind the brownstone wall were built directly up against one another, and dozens of neighbors would have heard every gunshot that had exploded since his arrival.

One of them—probably several—had phoned that information in to the cops. There would be no time to search the house for clues as to what the terrorists were up to. He’d be lucky just to find Anton Sobor before the police arrived. If possible, he wanted to capture and interrogate the man in regard to the cached WMDs. But barring that possibility, he would kill him and hope he still had time to escape the Iranian authorities.