Kill Shot

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.

The man I have been sent to kill will finally die, and I will be rewarded handsomely, Samir thought. Samir had played this out in his mind evening after evening, and the end result was always the assassin lying dead in a pool of his own blood. Four men with submachine guns against a single man with a pistol, and he was in reserve just in case - hundreds of bullets against a handful. This would surely end in his favor.

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.

Stopping in the half light of the hallway, he took in the mess. Three of his men lay dead at his feet, but there was no sign of the assassin. Samir ejected the spent magazine and inserted a new one while his eyes settled on the drapes that blocked the balcony doors. His feet were moving before he'd made a conscious decision. He fired a quick burst through the curtain and then threw the fabric back to the side. The first thing he saw when he stepped onto the balcony was the rope. He followed it to the ground, where he saw a man in black running across the street.

Samir shouldered his weapon and put the gun's hoop sight over the moving target. He squeezed off a quick three-round burst, but had no way of knowing if he'd hit low, high, right, or left. The assassin changed course and Samir adjusted, this time holding the trigger down and sending a steady stream of bullets after the man. After a few seconds the bolt suddenly slammed into the open position, telling him he was out of rounds. Samir watched the assassin disappear into the shadows and fought back the urge to scream.

He moved back into the room and looked at the carnage. He'd lost three of his men and his own brother was dead in the hallway. He had failed miserably. He began to shake with a mix of fear and white-hot rage. What would he tell their mother? What would he tell the Spaniard and Rafique? Where had he gone wrong? Samir shook his head in disgust but somewhere deep in his brain he knew he was lucky to be alive. He could never say that to the others, though. He could never look so frail in front of them, or they might kill him.

Samir's mind was shocked back to his current predicament by a sound in the hallway. He needed to get the hell out of there, and quickly, before the police showed up. He slid a fresh magazine into his gun and hit the slide release. At the doorway his eyes were drawn to his brother, but he couldn't handle the grief. Fighting back the tears, he moved down the hallway toward the stairs. A door on his left opened, revealing a skinny woman in a white bathrobe. Samir raised his weapon and without breaking stride, pumped five rounds into her chest. Two doors later a man stepped into the hallway on his right. Samir squeezed off another burst. He rushed down the stairs, through a short hallway, and into the back alley where he came face to face with a hotel worker. The young man saw the gun and raised his hands. Samir didn't hesitate. He pulled the trigger back as far as it would go and sent the man sprawling backward into a pile of garbage bags.