He glanced toward the access strip leading from the expressway.
Bolan frowned. A cord with small triangular flags was strung across the entrance to the rest area.
There had been no cord when Bolan arrived.
That meant they had been waiting for him. It also meant that there was a third killer at large. The guy who had positioned those flags would be on his way to join the battle. And unless Bolan moved now he would be enfiladed.
Behind him there were four more rows of pumps, and then a strip of hardtop bordering a shrub-covered bank that separated the station from the expressway. He slammed a fresh magazine into the Beretta.
The thug with the shattered ankle was firing from the far side of the BMW. The hardman with the Uzi was up and running. Bolan waited until the gunner was almost beneath the canopy, braced his weapon in the classic shooting stance and dropped the killer with a 3-round punch.
The third man was approaching now. His silhouette was lost against the dark mass of shrubbery, but Bolan could hear his footsteps swishing through long grass. Maybe thirty yards away.
Bolan raced toward the seventh row... the eighth... the ninth. Panting, he dropped behind the concrete ledge. He had to make those bushes before Number Three was within accurate target range.
Halfway to his feet, he froze. A big sedan with no lights was crawling into view from behind the candy shop.
Bolan was momentarily stymied. He had not counted on any reinforcements for the hit team. He dismissed it, as another question crowded his mind.
Were they waiting for The Executioner... or for Kurt Sondermann, the dead German he was impersonating?
It had to be the hit man, Bolan thought. A helicopter had ferried him from Interpol headquarters in Geneva to the place where the German had been killed. But even if anyone had known Bolan was in Geneva, had seen him board the chopper, there was no way they could have ferreted out its destination.
And unless the Interpol chief or the French Counter-intelligence man were tied in with the Mob, there was no way anyone could have guessed at the Executioner’s involvement.
On the other hand, Chamson and Telder had known of the hit man’s plans, so perhaps others closer to his own line of business could have been equally well briefed.
Sondermann’s BMW had run off the road at 100 plus miles per hour, the Swiss and French lawmen had told Bolan. The German had been thrown clear of the blazing wreck, killed instantly. In his pocket, there was a reservation confirming a two-day stopover at a motel outside Lyons. Bolan — provided with a similar car, Sondermann’s license plates, and the dead man’s papers — had taken up the second of those days.
The Executioner spent a moment reasoning out how the killers had known which gas station the BMW would stop at the following night on its way south.
They knew the car and its fuel capacity. So, it was simple to estimate roughly where the BMW would need to refuel. The filling stations on the expressways were between ten and twenty miles apart, as a rule. If the killers covered three they should be ninety percent certain to catch the BMW.
So, sure, it all made sense to the soldier. What did not make sense was why they were so anxious to keep Kurt Sondermann away from Marseilles.
Right now, Bolan had no time to squander on guessing games.
The sedan had stopped on the far side of the canopy, out of effective range for the Beretta. Bolan was familiar with the pattern. Once the guy coming up through the bushes was in position, the car would move forward again, high beams lancing the darkness. Anyone caught in the open would be pinned against the night, as effectively as a moth on a display board, target for a hail of death hosing in from three directions.
It was even more vital now that he quit the shelter of the last row of pumps and find cover in the bushes.
Suddenly the wind started to blow again. It was a typical mistral — one minute still as death, the next, rushing at full bore, flattening the grasses. Bolan took advantage of the abrupt change.
This time he fired no warnings to keep the opposition heads down. He was on his feet and running, dodging, racing for the safety of that bank as a fusillade roared out behind him, ripping apart the night with their hellfire din.
Slugs scuffed the macadam to left and right and punctured pumps in the final row. At the last moment, a bullet took away the heel of Bolan’s shoe, to send him hurtling forward on hands and knees.
The fall saved his life: a murderous volley fanned the air above him as he fell, the deathstream savaging the space he’d occupied a moment before. He remained prone on the hard ground, bellying rapidly toward the bushes.
He was in the shrubbery now, branches and leaves threshing angrily above him, breathless in the shadows beneath the howling wind.
With blinding brilliance the headlights swamped the neon beneath the canopy. A voice from behind the car shouted instructions. There was a brief reply from farther along the bank. The gunman approaching from the access strip was now as vulnerable to Bolan’s fire as the soldier was to the sedan. The hardman would be worming his way toward the Executioner at ground level.
The Beretta 93-R was Bolan’s favorite shoulder-rig weapon. It was also, Telder had told him, the gun usually carried by Kurt Sondermann. To keep in character, Bolan was therefore armed with the pistol recovered from the German’s dead body.
The German hit man’s Beretta sported the front handgrip that folded beneath the barrel and could be used to steady the gun and minimize the rise in accurate firing. Now that he had a little more time to think, Bolan figured he could use it. Something he had seen glinting on the station forefront in the lights of the sedan had given him an idea.
From beneath the gas-station canopy a slight grade led toward the exit strip, and a thin rivulet of the volatile fuel, reflecting in the harsh illumination, was trickling slowly down the slope.
The sedan was moving again. It was halfway across the staggered rows of pumps, veering from side to side as the headlamp beams swept the shrub-covered bank.
Bolan folded down the foregrip and wrapped the fingers of his left hand around it. The Beretta’s butt nestled in his right palm, and the index was curled around the trigger.
Prone in the shadows, he leaned on his elbows and sighted carefully. He thumbed the auto-catch and put a couple of 3-round bursts in a tight pattern at the base of a pump. The spirit gushed out; from where he lay he could smell the odor of the fuel.
The light beams had jerked his way when the shots rang out. Now livid flashes winked from the driver’s window.
Heavy slugs ripped through the branches above him. The sound of the burst was muffled, snatched away by the wind.
Bolan rolled farther down the bank, crouched behind a larger bush. For the moment, he had to forget the killer who would be trying to enfilade him: he needed all his concentration for the task at hand.
The mistral screeched through dry stalks and sang in the wires somewhere overhead, that fed electricity to the station. Occasionally headlamp beams from traffic on the expressway swept through the foliage, but the sound of the engines was lost in the wind.
Bolan waited.
Gasoline from the drilled pump had flooded out to flow down the grade. He could see the vapor shimmering above it in the glare from the approaching sedan. Back on single-shot action, he sighted the Beretta between the car’s front wheels and squeezed the trigger.
The slug plowed into the moist macadam. He crouched lower, flattening the trajectory, fired again. A ricochet. The car’s radiator grill was a yard from the high-octane gas flow.
Bent lower still, straining his eyes, Bolan held his breath and coaxed a third shot from the 93-R.This time the heavy slug, traveling almost parallel to the tarmac, homed in on one of the flints surfacing in the worn matrix of the macadam.
The round glanced off the stone and thunked into the underside of the vehicle, leaving a spark behind it.
The spark jumped into the inflammable vapor rising from the spreading gasoline.
The whole sweep of gasoline ignited with an explosion that rocked the ground as the sedan passed over it.
Instantly, the car was transformed into a blazing fireball. The pump that Bolan had holed went up with a roar. Flames flattened, teased out, driven by the wind, reached white-hot fingers around other damaged pumps and squeezed smoke, then fire, from their shells. Out of the holocaust that had been the sedan, a blackened scarecrow figure seething with tongues of flame flopped screaming onto the pavement.
Within seconds the whole area beneath the canopy was an inferno. From the center of the fiery maelstrom there was a colossal explosion as an underground tank blew. The concrete roofing collapsed and flames boiled skyward, pillowing a huge column of black smoke.
Bolan’s eyebrows, lashes and hair were singed by the furious heat. The killer from the car now lay motionless with smoke and steam wisping from his charred body.
Bolan scrambled around to face the slope rising from the rest area. The last assassin was someplace there among the dancing shadows between the bushes.
The Beretta’s first magazine had been emptied and nine shots had already sneezed out from the 15-round spare. Expecting no trouble before he reached Marseilles, Bolan had carried no more. He would have to be damned sure of his target if the last six rounds were to get him out of here.
Another smaller detonation cracked out from the far side of the blaze. He guessed the fumes in the empty tank of his BMW had erupted.
Lit by the leaping flames, the bushy slope was a chaos of flying shadows and branches tossed by the gale.
When the first shot came, it was from a point nearer down the bank than Bolan had expected. He heard nothing over the moan of the wind, saw only a pale twinkle of fire stabbing the shadows among the redder reflections of the flames.
A stream of lead from an SMG on full-auto thwacked through the branches above Bolan’s head. Twigs and leaves fluttered down around him. A sudden gust blew them away across the bank. The killer saw the movement and fired again.
Aiming above the muzzle-flashes, Bolan sacrificed a couple of rounds, but the light was deceptive and this time he didn’t score.
Four shells left in the magazine.
Now the invisible gunman was nearer, perhaps no more than twenty yards away. Bolan ducked and rolled once more to a new position.
There was a long burst, uncomfortably close.
Bolan uttered a realistic cry of pain and sprawled, still in shadow, on his back. He snicked the Beretta to 3-shot mode. The Executioner was counting on the carelessness born of confidence, something he had seen happen to the enemy many times in Vietnam: not making sure of the kill. Suddenly, Bolan realized that he was dealing with a professional.
Because the killer was running toward him. But it did not necessarily mean that the guy wanted to finish him off. Maybe they had orders to take Sondermann alive.
No matter. The gunner was playing the Executioner’s kind of game.
There was a clatter of loose stones and a sudden rush of feet as a dark silhouette materialized, dashing down the slope to leap on Bolan’s barely visible body.
The guy was suddenly in mid-air, flailing the SMG like a club.
Bolan drew up his knees. As the killer plummetted toward him, the Executioner impacted his heels in the man’s belly and kicked out ferociously.
The guy emitted a yell of astonishment and fear as he flew up over Bolan’s head. While he was airborne, a cartwheeling target against the roaring flames, Bolan raised the Beretta and caressed the trigger.
One of the shots drilled the hood’s shoulder, one screamed into the sky, the third took away the top of the man’s head.
The impact of the 9 mm parabellum spun him sideways and he crashed into the branches behind Bolan.
Still clutching the 93-R, Bolan stood and ran toward the candy store behind the raging fire.
He had to leave fast. A couple of semis and several cars had already pulled up at the entrance to the rest area, and there was a small crowd of rubberneckers advancing toward the flags.
He skirted the raging fire and approached the store. The lights had gone but the structure was intact. Bolan peered over the counter.
The attendant lying there had been shot in the neck. The body of a second man, stripped of its coverall, had been dragged farther back, beneath the soft-drink dispensers. There was nothing Bolan could do for either of them.
He figured his best plan would be to climb the fence sealing off the rest area and strike out cross-country until he came to a highway. It would be easier to find transport — and risk fewer questions — than a return to the expressway.
He was hurrying away from the building when he heard a faint cry over the crackle of the flames.
He looked over his shoulder and saw something moving between him and the fire. He moved closer. It was the man with the shattered ankle. Bolan had assumed he’d been incinerated when the gasoline ignited, but he had managed to drag himself fifty yards beyond the blaze.
The guy was in a bad way. The flesh that showed through gaps in his charred clothing was puffed and blistered with third-degree burns.
As Bolan stooped over him the eyes turned his way and the ruined mouth opened. “Finish it, please,” the injured man croaked.
“Who sent you?” Bolan asked.
“Screw you,” the hood whispered.
Bolan was holding the Beretta in his right hand. He started to releather the weapon.
“No!” the gunman said frantically. “Please... all right, damn you, Scotto sent us.”
“Scotto’s dead,” Bolan said roughly.
“Aren’t we all?” The voice was faint now, showing no curiosity. “We got our orders a week ago. Let you have it someplace between... Lyons and the... coast.”
“Why?”
The eyes looked up pleadingly. Bolan waited, his gun hand arrested halfway to the holster.
“He was... afraid,” the burned man gasped. “He... figured you for... J-P’s answer to... splinter group...”
J-P, Bolan knew, stood for Jean-Paul, the Unione Corse’s big wheel in Marseilles, and the man who had hired Sondermann. If he had a family name it was never used. “What splinter group? Where?” Bolan demanded.
The blackened head rolled from side to side. The hood gave a strangled scream. When next he spoke, his voice was so low that Bolan could barely catch the words.
“Meeting...” he choked. “Tomorrow night... at La R-R-Rocaille...”
The words lapsed into an incoherent mumble punctuated by gasps of agony. Bolan was going to get no more from him.
The face contorted. Froth appeared between the cracked lips.
There was a single bullet left in the Beretta. Bolan pointed the muzzle at the center of the dying man’s forehead and triggered a mercy round.
3
“Maybe I’m the ultimate optimist,” Mack Bolan had once written in his journal. “I believe my sword hand is guided by thoughts of victory. I command myself to win. Therefore, I have the advantage.”
The advantage, yeah. But too often in his everlasting war, the hellfire warrior had to forge that advantage in the flames of overwhelming disadvantage.
Bolan was no superman. He knew the limits of his abilities. And he also knew that at any moment a stray, indeed a well-placed bullet, could finish him in the hellgrounds. The thought made him frustrated and anxious because he sensed a growing possibility of victory by the dark forces of the world.
Bolan believed that the savages, the evil legions of animal man, should not be allowed to inherit the earth. The Executioner considered their defeat his vocation. He was prepared to sacrifice love, a home life, a normal career, everything to fight those legions, and if possible to halt the advance of evil man so that gentle civilizers would no longer live in fear. And every ounce of his soldier’s resolution was dedicated to that cause.
Learning his deadly skills in the jungles of Vietnam, Bolan had subsequently, in the murderous one-man war that virtually destroyed the Mafia, transferre
d those skills to the urban jungles of his homeland.
Later, there had been the antiterrorist crusade, fought with covert government approval from Stony Man Farm, a fortress headquarters in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. As Colonel John Phoenix, he had in this phase of his life escalated his efforts into open war with the KGB. And it was this sinister arm of Soviet oppression that had stage-managed the demolition of the Stony Man operation and the frame-up that had made Bolan an outlaw.
It was as a loner, therefore, a supreme warrior who knew that each victory only brought him face-to-face with a new threat, that Bolan had been coopted for the present campaign.
So he understood now why Telder, Chamson and their superiors had chosen him. If the deal went sour for Bolan, they would not be responsible and they’d have nothing to worry about. Because he was an outlaw on just about every continent. If something big was planned and Bolan stopped it... well, they’d simply smile and relax, reap the honors. In any case, Telder and Chamson would come out of it with clean hands.
Okay, if that was the way the cards were dealt, he’d play the hand.
His mandate was to uncover the “something big” that was being planned in the Riviera underworld, to find out what black conspiracy was being hatched in the cold minds of the men running that crime empire.
Before he ventured on the inside, where his movements might not be as free as he wished, he determined to follow up the only lead he had: a few strange words choked from the scorched lips of a dying goon.
A meeting was about to take place. And it was, according to the burned hardman’s last words, important, to be held somewhere called La Rocaille.
Bolan was experiencing a gut reaction that it was important for him to be around when that happened.
Once in Marseilles, Bolan wasted no time. He knew precisely who would give him the information he needed.
He entered a noisy bar on the Canebiere. “La Rocaille?” the swarthy man behind the counter repeated. “Sure. It’s the old Delamour joint, on the coast between here and Cassis.”
Bolan took a cab. La Rocaille was an islet, no more than two hundred yards offshore, below jagged cliffs separating the city from the famous little fishing port. There were a couple of acres of undulating ground above the limestone wall surrounding the islet, and here, sheltered by tall hedges and set in a cypress grove, an extraordinary building had been erected.
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