Dead Reckoning. Don Pendleton

More traps waiting to close around him, if he didn’t watch his step.

      More places for Walid Khamis to hide himself.

      Shooting on the street side of the house had lagged for just a moment, but it started up again now, drawing Bolan toward the fight. He still had no idea how many Hezbollah gunners were in the house, how many more might be arriving from some errand or in answer to a hurried cell phone call once Grimaldi had breached the front door, but the racket they were making now would surely prompt at least one neighbor to alert police.

      There was no time to waste.

      Bolan had only two rules that he followed without deviation in his endless war. First, he would always minimize the risk to innocent civilians before he made a move or pulled a trigger. Second, he would not kill a cop. He viewed police in general as soldiers of the same side, earning danger money in pursuit of criminals.

      If cops arrived, he had two choices: slip away somehow, or go to jail.

      And jail, inevitably, would mean death.

      Hearing the clock tick in his head, he left the kitchen, edged along the hallway toward the sounds of combat, closing on the next two doors in line. One ought to be a dining room, judging by proximity to the kitchen, while the other would be up for grabs.

      The door to Bolan’s right flew open as he neared it, someone coming late to join the party, with a toilet and a dripping shower in the background. It was not Walid Khamis, which made the new arrival Hezbollah. He had a pistol in his hand, a towel around his waist and an expression on his face that might have been excitement, maybe fear. Whichever, Bolan shot him through his naked chest before the man had an opportunity to attack him.

      Four down, including Grimaldi’s kill in the entryway, but from the sound of it, there were enough defenders left to hold the house if they could pull themselves together and decide on a strategy.

      His job was to make sure they died before they had that chance.

      * * *

      ASHRAF TANNOUS SPENT a moment in the open doorway, wondering if he should fight or flee. He was a leader, with a certain standard to uphold, but that was only useful if he lived to fight another day.

      The neighborhood would surely be aroused by now. The police were not loved there, were rarely called, and never to a simple family disturbance, but he knew that someone would alert them to a full-scale battle going on. Arrest meant prison, once they found Khamis and matched the bullets from his body to Tannous’s pistol. There was no death penalty in Paraguay, but he would rather die than spend his life inside a stinking prison cell.

      With that in mind, Tannous began to plan his exit from the house. The room where he had killed Khamis was windowless—the very reason he had chosen it—so he would have to find another exit. That meant moving toward the sounds of gunfire and away from safety for the moment, until he could break off to the left or right, choosing a door and slipping through it, hopefully unseen.

      Get on with it, a harsh voice in his mind commanded, spurring Tannous into motion. Three of his men passed by his doorway, one of them—Maroun Rahal—pausing to stare at him and ask, “Are you all right, Ashraf?”

      “Fine,” he replied. “I’m right behind you.”

      With a jerky nod, Rahal moved on, seemingly anxious for his chance to face the unknown enemy.

      Young fools. At Rahal’s age, Tannous had felt the same, but he had quickly learned to bide his time, strike without warning and retreat, keeping survival foremost in his mind. Let others wear the vests with high explosives packed in scrap metal and cow dung, hastening their flight to Paradise. Tannous was happy to remain on Earth and plot his moves against the enemy from safety, letting others do his killing for him—and the dying, too.

      What famous general in history was not the same?

      He stepped into the hallway, saw Rahal and his companions jogging off to meet whatever fate awaited them, and followed at a cautious distance. When they reached the central, east-west corridor, Rahal and company turned left. Tannous had picked the opposite direction as his best path to escape, and he would hold to that unless something prevented him from using it.

      “There is no shame in living,” Tannous muttered to himself. In fact, it was his duty to their sacred cause.

      An explosion rocked the house as Tannous neared the central hallway. A hand grenade, he thought, and that was bad, because his men had none, even assuming they were fools enough to set one off indoors, where it could kill or wound their comrades. That told Tannous that his enemies had come prepared for anything and did not plan on taking prisoners.