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.

A cloudy mist of pink shot out from the hole in the caftan.

The man with the AK-47 dropped to the sidewalk like a felled redwood tree. For a moment, time seemed to stand still as the blood cloud hung in the air, then began to dissipate.

Bolan released the grip of the revolver inside his pocket. He had unbuttoned his overcoat outside the wall, and now his hands shot beneath the wool. When they appeared again, the right hand held a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. In his left was his Beretta 93-R.

The Executioner turned both weapons toward the window where he had just seen Sobor. But the man’s face had disappeared and the curtain had fallen back into place.

Bolan had no time to contemplate the situation. A second after he had drawn his weapons a fusillade of gunfire erupted from the house. Bullets struck the sidewalk at his feet. Other rounds ripped past his ears, striking the wall behind him. One caught the shoulder of his long overcoat, slicing the wool as cleanly as if it had been a flying razor blade.

The Executioner looked to both sides and saw that there was no cover available in the garden. So with the resolve of a man who had nothing to lose, he dived forward toward the gunners trying to kill him.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan knew his only chance was to get close enough to the house, to take cover below the line of fire from the doors and windows. He soared over the body in front of him, hit the sidewalk on his shoulder and rolled back to his feet. The storm of bullets followed him and another round struck the tail of his coat, whipping it around into his face. Temporarily blinded, he lifted both the Beretta and Desert Eagle and cut loose.

By the time he had reached the door, his coattail had fallen back away from his face. But the men inside the house had seen where he was headed and now round after round poured through the hollow-core door. The Executioner stepped to the side, letting the onslaught pass by. As he waited, movement above caught his attention and he spotted a man with a pistol leaning out of a second-story window.

The man had long unkempt hair and a black beard beginning to turn gray. Bolan’s right hand shot up over his head. The terrorist was a split second late in his attempt to aim his weapon, and a massive 240-grain hollowpoint from the Desert Eagle blew the top of his head from his body.

The pistol fell from the overhead window, landing on the concrete next to the Executioner and bouncing. A moment later a shower of bone fragments, blood and brain fluid followed. The man—what was left of him—slumped over the windowsill. He looked like something out of a carnival spook house as he came to rest half in, half out, of the opening.

As the assault through the door continued, Bolan leaned as close to the splintering plywood as he dared, then screamed as if in pain. Then, certain that the men inside the house had to have heard him even amid the explosions, he crouched and moved stealthily toward a window directly below the half-headed terrorist above him. Dropping beneath the windowsill, he kept one eye on the door, the other on the second story windows as he waited for the rounds still coming through the door to die down.

A few seconds later, the rifle cracks and pistol pops disappeared. Bolan heard tentative footsteps approach the front of the house from inside. From where he squatted, he could see the gaping holes in the door and knew what was about to happen. One of the men inside the house had been sent to check out the scream. He would look through the holes in the door first. But then, seeing no dead or injured body on the ground, he would conclude that the Executioner had to have fallen to one side.

Which would force him to open the door to make sure.

Five feet from the doorway, Bolan waited, his ears finely tuned. He heard the footsteps halt just behind the door and the sound of heavy breathing replace them. A moment later, a faint but familiar odor came wafting through the holes in the hollow-core door. It was a scent the Executioner had smelled all of his adult life and he recognized it immediately.

It was the smell of fear.

A second later the creak of a doorknob turning sounded softly above the heavy breathing. The Executioner duck-walked closer to the doorway. Then the shattered door began to swing back on rusty hinges and at last a bearded face peered tentatively out of the opening and turned toward him.

Bolan pressed the Beretta’s sound suppressor into the Hezbollah hardman’s forehead. During the split second it took the terrorist to realize what had happened, the Executioner pulled the trigger. A 9 mm hollowpoint round whispered, through the sound suppressor and drilled through the man’s brain.

The Executioner wasted no time, rising to his feet and elbowing the man away from the door and out of his way. Crouching once more, he rounded the corner of the doorway and stepped into what appeared to be a living room. A cheap chandelier hung from the ceiling but expensive Persian carpets covered the wooden floor. An ornately carved couch, a table and several overstuffed chairs made up the furniture.

None of which mattered to Bolan at the moment. What did matter were the three Hezbollah men aiming two rifles and one submachine gun his way.

Bolan’s sudden appearance after they’d suspected him dead caused a moment of shock in the three men. The Executioner took advantage of it, diving forward. He rolled behind a puffy white reclining chair, leveled the Desert Eagle over the headrest and dropped the front sight on the forehead of a man wearing a white turban. A massive .44 Magnum round spit from the Desert Eagle’s beak and the terrorist’s face disintegrated. The AK-47s fell from his hands, and the gunner toppled forward on top of it.

A Hezbollah hardman holding an Uzi had stood next to the falling terrorist, and now he raised his subgun toward the Executioner. But blood from his partner’s fragmenting face had flown into his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He cut loose with a wild stream of 9 mm rounds that sailed high over Bolan’s head.

The Eagle screamed again, sending another Magnum round into the fanatic’s chest. He fell on top of his friend.

The third man in the living room was dressed in Western wear. Clean shaved, and wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots and a hat, the Executioner wondered exactly what dastardly role he was about to play—or had already played—in the outfit. But he had no time to find out.

The “cowboy” came out of shock and turned the barrel of his rifle toward the reclining chair as an expression worthy of Satan himself twisted his features.

Bolan double-tapped the big .44. One round drilled through a white-pearl snap-closure in the middle of the bright orange cowboy shirt the man wore. A dark stain had already begun to spread across his chest as the Executioner’s second round caught him in the throat. A fire-hose spray of crimson shot forth as the terrorist dropped his rifle. He fell to the floor in death, the scowl on his face in place for all eternity.

Suddenly the house was as quiet as the tomb it had become.

The Executioner stayed where he was, both guns resting over the arm of the reclining chair as he took in the situation. He had taken out five of the terrorists—the man in the garden, the three here in front of him and the one in the upstairs window. But none of them had been Anton Sobor. And unless he missed his guess, the gunfire that had showered him while he was still in the garden had come from far more than three AK-47s and one Uzi. In the bedlam surrounding him, it had been difficult to pick out the distinctive sounds of specific weapons, but in addition to the rifles and submachine gun he was almost certain he had heard at least one pistol.

There were more Hezbollah gunmen in the house. Bolan didn’t just think so, he knew it; he could sense it.

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.