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