Renegade

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.

With the Desert Eagle leading the way, the Executioner started up the steps. He caught a flash of white at the top of the railing above his head, but by the time he had swung the big .44 that way it had disappeared.

Bolan had nearly reached the top of the steps when he saw the white flash again. This time, the man had moved to the other end of the railing and didn’t retreat. The Executioner’s eyes took in the fact that the “white” was a T-shirt, and that it provided not only a clear background for the blackened submachine gun in front of it, but a clear target.

Leaning slightly backward, Bolan fired behind him and over his head. His first round struck the subgun and the weapon went spinning out of the terrorist’s hand. The man shrieked in both surprise and pain, and grabbed one hand with the other.

The Executioner’s second .44 Magnum round perforated the clasped hands before traveling on to explode the terrorist’s heart.

Bolan crouched again as he reached the top of the staircase. Three doorways led off the large stairwell landing, and he stopped, cocking an ear for sounds of movement in any of the directions. He heard nothing.

The Executioner slid silently across yet another of the expensive woven carpets, concentrating on the doorway to the far left. Stopping at the entryway, he glanced inside. Another bed mat. But this room was larger than the ones below. The master bedroom. Two closet doors stood wide open.

Bolan moved on to the middle doorway, looking in to see yet another sleeping mat on the floor. This closet door was closed. He hurried up to it and listened. No breathing. No sounds at all. There was no sense of human presence at all emanating from the closet so, without bothering to shoot through the wood this time, he swung the door open.

A variety of clothes hung from the hangers on the bar suspended at eye level. More clothing was folded and stacked on the shelf. A quick jab of the Desert Eagle through the hangers proved that no one was hidden behind the garments, and he stepped back out of the closet.

Just in time to hear a soft scraping sound drift down the hall from another part of the house.

The Executioner pivoted back toward the door, the big .44 at arm’s length in front of him. He couldn’t identify the sound, but it could only have come from the final upstairs room—the only one he hadn’t yet checked. Sprinting back to the hallway, he hurried toward the final bedroom. This time, he was close enough to hear the sound of a window sliding open.

Bolan dropped low as he neared the doorway. Speed had taken precedence over silence now, and he knew whoever was in the room would have heard him as well as he’d heard the window rising. He came to halt just to the side of the opening, the Desert Eagle gripped in both hands and pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle in front of him.

The Executioner edged an eye around the corner. The window in the back wall of the house had been opened, and a man wearing a bright red shirt had already stuck one leg through the opening. Bolan could see his face as he bent over and began to pull his chest and shoulders through the opening. The face had light skin, green eyes and was topped by a shock of sandy-blond hair.

Sobor.

Bolan turned slightly, lifting the Desert Eagle and dropping the sights on the back of the man’s left thigh. A bullet here would “hamstring” the former Soviet, and perhaps there would still be time to whisk him away for questioning before the cops hit the house. The Executioner had already started to squeeze the trigger when the sound of footsteps pounding up the staircase behind him forced him to whirl.

The head and shoulders of another terrorist in green BDUs and a long wispy beard suddenly appeared on the steps. A split second later the AK-47 in his hands followed. Then the man’s dark brown eyes caught sight of the Executioner and opened wide in both shock and horror.

Bolan pumped two rounds into the terrorist’s chest and saw the body fly back against the side wall before tumbling out of sight down the steps. When he turned back to the bedroom, the window was still open.

But Anton Sobor was nowhere to be seen.

THE SIRENS THAT HAD SOUNDED in the distance now screamed from the front of the house. As the Executioner sprinted into the bedroom to the window, he saw that it led out onto the flat, tar roof over the single-story rooms at the rear of the house. Ducking beneath the glass, he looked out to see Anton Sobor sprinting toward the edge of the roof. With the cops outside now, there was no way he was going to get Sobor away for questioning. So, gripping the Desert Eagle with both hands, he extended it through the opening. But before he could fire, Sobor whirled as if he’d felt eyes on his back and sent two rounds from a Russian Makarov pistol toward the window.

Bolan was forced to scramble to the side as both 9 mm rounds flew through the opening and slammed into the wall behind him.

In the house below, excited voices shouted in Farsi. The cops were definitely here now, and Bolan knew if he stayed where he was he’d soon be in handcuffs.

The soldier moved back in front of the window in time to see Sobor drop over the edge of the roof, out of sight. Climbing quickly through the opening, he heard more shouts as the cops raced up the stairs. He looked out to see rooftops at every level imaginable from one story to four. And the houses extended as far as the eye could see in every direction. He had noted how close together they were built earlier, but now he saw that Sobor could easily run for miles, zigzagging up and down the various levels and hopping from one roof to the next. He wouldn’t have to drop to the ground until he came to a major cross street. Or he could leave the roofs and disappear into the ground-level maze between the dwellings at any time he chose.

The bottom line was that if the Executioner didn’t catch sight of him soon, and keep him in sight, he’d lose him for good.

Sprinting to the spot where Sobor had disappeared, Bolan looked down to see that the adjacent roof was only a few feet lower than the one on which he stood. The Russian had been forced to hunch down as he ran to avoid being seen, and that had slowed his progress. Still, he had already crossed the tops of two more houses and was now roughly thirty yards away.

Bolan raised the Desert Eagle and lined up the sights on the running man’s back. He was again squeezing the trigger when the crack of a gunshot roared behind him. He felt the roof tremor slightly as a bullet bore itself into the tar at his feet, and twisted to see a uniformed police officer at the window he’d just climbed through.

Bolan had never killed an honest cop doing his job, and he wasn’t about to start now. On the other hand, letting the Iranian police kill him didn’t do much for him, either. Raising the huge Desert Eagle to shoulder level, he aimed to the side of the window and sent two 44 Magnum rounds into the shingles to the side. The cop shrieked in terror and fell backward, frightened but unhurt.

As he dropped over the same edge where Sobor had disappeared, Bolan saw more blue uniforms enter the bedroom behind him.

He sprinted across the roof directly behind the terrorist house, then leaped over a ledge and landed on another roof roughly the same height. In the distance, he saw the bright red shirt. Sobor had increased his lead to forty yards. But as the Executioner continued pursuit, he saw that the Russian was now limping with each step. He had no idea what had happened—a pulled muscle, a twisted ankle, maybe an old knee injury popping back up at an inopportune time—but whatever it was had slowed Sobor’s pace. By the time Bolan reached the next house, the Russian’s lead had dropped back to thirty yards again.

The Executioner came to another house whose roof rose two feet higher than the one he was on. Without breaking stride, he stepped up onto the retaining wall and sailed high into the air. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the Tehran roof levels, with houses rising to whatever height the builder’s whimsy called for. Perhaps that very irregularity had been the cause behind Sobor’s limp. Each leap from house to house, while not far, was deceptive, and could easily be misjudged.

Behind him, several gunshots popped. Bolan turned as he continued to run and saw a half dozen blue-clad men jogging his way. But their efforts were halfhearted, at best. None of them showed much enthusiasm for confronting the man whose big-bore pistol had blown holes in the wall next to the safehouse window.

By the time he had crossed the fourth roof behind the Hezbollah house Bolan had closed to within fifteen yards of the Russian. As the man limped toward the edge of another roof, Bolan dropped to one knee and raised the Desert Eagle. The big .44 rose and fell with each limping stride of the bright red shirt as the Executioner fell into the rhythm of the Russian’s pace. Then he aimed the weapon a few yards ahead of the running man, centering it slightly higher than waist level, and waited for the red shirt to enter his sight pattern.

He would shoot a split second before Sobor left his feet to leap onto the next roof. His finger took up the creep on the trigger and he held his breath.

Just as the Russian reached the edge of the roof an alley cat seemed to spring from nowhere. Bolan heard it screech as it struck Sobor in the side, paws flailing the air. The Russian’s jump to the next roof thrown off, Sobor tumbled over the edge and fell out of sight between the houses.

Bolan rose and raced forward, making a final leap to the last rooftop on which he’d seen the Russian. The cat scampered away, hissing, as the Executioner slowed, nearing the edge. This was hardly Bolan’s first gunfight and he didn’t intend to burst into view only to find Sobor waiting there to kill him. Slowly, carefully, the Desert Eagle still leading the way, Bolan peered over the edge of the roof and down between the houses.

Sobor wasn’t laying at the bottom as he’d hoped. But the deep impression the man had left in the mud where he landed was still there.

The Executioner was about to drop down between the houses and follow the footprints the Russian had left when he heard a crash on the other side of the house to his right. Knowing he’d make better time on the roofs, he turned and leaped across yet another small gap between the houses. Running along the edge of the building, he could see the muddy footprints Sobor had left behind. They were leading directly toward the sound he had heard.