things down. Panic-induced decisions had a nasty way of leading to bad, or in this case, fatal outcomes. Rapp’s angle and concealment were as good as he could hope for, considering the fact that he’d been caught so off guard, and he used these few seconds to look at the tactical situation from 360 degrees.
The natural mistake was to get so caught up in your situation that you failed to analyze the motives, maneuvers, and talent of your opponent. The motive of this group was clear. They wanted to kill him. As to how they knew he’d be here and how they had avoided detection from the advance team, Rapp would have to search for those answers later. His mind now seized on a critical detail in the blink of an eye. They were not a trained SWAT team. Tactical teams practiced disciplined fire. They didn’t simply enter a room and begin hosing it down with bullets. From that, Rapp discerned a very comforting fact—he could kill them.
Police were off limits. He could maim or physically subdue, but he was forbidden to kill a law enforcement officer. Such were the rules of restraint that were placed on him, and he did not argue. Governments could look the other way when certain unsavory individuals were killed on their soil, but kill an innocent bystander, or worse, a law enforcement officer, and you could create an international incident that would bring the kind of attention that they could not afford.
Rapp realized quickly that these guys were making a big mistake. They assumed their overwhelming firepower would win this battle in the opening salvo, but as Hurley had told Rapp repeatedly, “You never want to blow your wad in the first few seconds of a gunfight. Better to take cover and let the other guy empty his gun.” Taking this several steps further, Hurley and the other instructors forced him to learn how to classify different guns by sound alone, and more important, to keep track of rounds fired.
The latter was hopeless in this situation. Three or more submachine guns firing on full automatic were impossible to count with any accuracy, but at this rate of fire it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that they would all be reloading in the next few seconds. Rapp anticipated what would happen next. He was on the verge of losing his cover. Rather than wait for the first shooter to move far enough into the room and get the angle on him, Rapp would broaden the angle first. He stayed low and crawled forward two feet. With his head near the edge of the foot of the platform, he could now see close to three-quarters of the room. Standing no more than fifteen feet away, he saw his first target.
The man was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and was in the midst of ejecting a long, curved magazine. Rapp swung his left arm around and shot him once in the face. He kept moving his pistol and found two more targets. One was still firing wildly and the other was reloading. Rapp shot the second man in the nose and the third man in the throat, and then before he could find the next target, bullets began thudding into the carpeting near his face. Rapp yanked his arm back and scurried in reverse for cover. He’d fired five rounds, which meant he had fourteen left in the magazine and two full magazines of eighteen rounds plus his backup gun.
Now was not the time to stay pressed against the floor. If the man or men who were left standing decided to rush him, he’d be toast. Rapp popped up onto one knee and raised the pistol above the bed. Again, firing from left to right he squeezed off six quick shots. On the fifth one, he heard a grunt and knew he’d hit someone in the torso. He moved his muzzle back a few degrees to the left and fired four more shots, and then all was quiet. Rapp paused and then squeezed off his last four shots at the door. He quickly switched out magazines, hit the slide release with his thumb, and seated a fresh round in the chamber. He brought up his gun and took a quick peek over the top of the mattress. There, silhouetted in the doorway, was a stunned man, clutching his belly with both hands. It was time to move.
Rapp stood, and as he took his first step to his left, he saw more movement in the hallway. Staying in a crouch with his gun leveled, he squeezed off one round. He buried it in the man’s chest rather than his head, sending him stumbling over the threshold. A gun appeared in the gap between the door frame and the dying man. Rapp kept moving and squeezing off shots that were splintering the edge of the door frame. When he reached the heavy curtains, he fired one more volley and then pushed through, out onto the balcony. The rope was right in front of him and he dove for it with his right hand while still holding on to his Beretta with his left.
As his gloved hand closed around the rope, he launched himself over the railing. His upper body was clear when he felt a solid punch hit him from behind. Rapp knew at that exact moment that he’d been shot, and his brain became overly focused on the fact that a piece of lead had just blasted its way into his body. The shock drew his attention away from the rope to the pain in his left shoulder, and he began to fall. Desperately, his right hand reached out in search of the black rope as he stared up at the night sky, the hard pavement rushing up to meet him from below.
CHAPTER 4
ABDUL continued straight into the room, sweeping his suppressed rifle from left to right, laying down a steady stream of bullets. Right on his heels, Jamir joined the fight, spraying his bullets in a zigzag pattern. Muhammad was next and then Samir’s brother Habib.
Samir’s feet felt heavy, as if he was suddenly wading through sand. He forced himself to move forward as the gap grew between him and his brother. For all of his bravado and threats of violence, there’d been a sliver of his ego that feared facing this assassin. He did a good job keeping it in check and made sure the men never got a whiff of it, but it weighed on him. As the line of men pressed into the suite, Samir was steadily falling behind. He listened as the hail of bullets reached a fevered pitch—objects crashing and shattering under the fusillade of metal.
Samir suddenly felt woozy. His chest tightened and his vision grew fuzzy at the edges. “Breathe,” he rebuked himself. He was almost to the door now, and he took two deep breaths as he watched his brother enter the room. Samir stopped at the door frame and listened to the barrage of bullets shredding the room. With fresh air in his lungs, he allowed a nervous smile to spread across his face. There was no way the assassin could escape this. “The hunter will become the hunted.” It was a mantra Samir had repeated for months.
Samir was just about to enter the room when the clamor came to an abrupt stop. In the silence that followed he heard a sound he couldn’t quite place. Cocking his head to one side in thought, he tried to figure out what was the cause of the strange gurgling noise. At the precise moment he figured it out, he heard his brother grunt in agony. Samir froze where he was. A second later his brother began to stumble back through the doorway without his weapon, his hands clutching his stomach. No more than a foot or two in front of him, Samir saw a bullet hit his brother in the chest, exiting out his back and spraying blood all over the wall across the hall. Horrified, Samir reached out to grab him and the door frame suddenly exploded, sending splinters of wood flying. Samir jerked back, feeling the sting in his cheek.
His right eye began blinking frantically as he watched his brother fall, and then fear seized his every muscle as it occurred to him that the assassin might be coming for him. Without really thinking, Samir moved his submachine gun to his left hand and swung it around the door frame, closed his eyes, and unleashed a volley on full automatic.
Samir stayed in the hallway and fired two more quick bursts into the room. In the quiet that suddenly fell over the scene he looked down at his brother, who was staring up at him with vacant eyes. The guilt hit him like a knife in the chest and his anger took over. Samir swung the black suppressor into the room and held down the trigger. He moved forward, wildly sweeping the weapon back and forth until he was out of bullets.
