Jean-Paul drew a Colt Python from under his jacket. “You slimy bastard!” he snapped. And before anyone could stop him he had fired the .357 Magnum revolver twice.
The two 158-grain hollow points drilled into Ancarani’s chest before he could get out a word of denial. He choked on blood and fell, his monogrammed silk shirt already a scarlet ruin.
The sharp crack of the shots in the room was echoed by a volley of explosions from Stromboli’s distant crater. Once more the flagstones drummed beneath their feet, the porcelain shivered on the chimneypiece. Outside among the lemon trees the short Mediterranean twilight was brightened by pulses of crimson.
Inside the villa there was uproar. Not all the mobsters were for Jean-Paul. Ancarani had his followers, and even the neutrals were yelling their disapproval of the killing.
Young Scalese was shouting loudest of all: the hell with the damned Corsican and what about the raid on his father’s house? What about this bastard Bolan and the goddamn baron?
Jean-Paul snatched Bolan’s Beretta from Smiler and jammed the muzzle against the big guy’s solar plexus. Bolan knew he was once again near death. The mobster’s whole body was shaking with rage now.
“I don’t get it,” he snarled. “You were working for Ancarani? And now I am hearing that is was Etang de Brialy who put you up to it?”
Bolan had once written, “I am marked for death. I am as condemned as any man who ever sat in death row. My chief determination is to stretch that last mile to its highest yield, to fight the war to my last gasp.”
Now, when that grim prophecy seemed about to come true, the warrior clung to that resolve: he would inflict the maximum damage possible while there was still breath left in his body; he would wreak as much havoc as he humanly could among the slime-bucket hordes surrounding him.
The hell with those denials: he had laid a hot enough trail for his story to leave at least some suspicions and doubts.
“Yeah,” he said calmly. “It was the baron who picked up the tab.”
Bolan was used to surprises, but the next move in the game floored him. Jean-Paul turned to the Parisian boss. “Well,” he barked, “what do you have to say to that?”
The Executioner couldn’t believe his ears. Etang de Brialy said: “Quite correct. I planned the raid and paid this man Bolan to carry it out.”
The astounded silence that followed was broken by a high-pitched, wailing scream from Coralie Sanguinetti.
The girl was someplace down the corridor. As all heads turned that way there was a colossal thunderclap from the volcano, and the dark outside was split by a dozen different shades of red.
Bolan didn’t wait to ask himself questions. Jean-Paul was half turned away. Sensing a minimal relaxation of the pressure on his biceps, Bolan pinwheeled both arms violently — back and then over, like a discus thrower — hurling Smiler and Raoul forward above his head to crash heavily to the floor on their backs.
While they struggled, half-stunned, to realize what had happened, Bolan grabbed the Beretta by the barrel and wrenched it from Jean-Paul’s grasp before he could squeeze the trigger. With a long, looping left that carried all his weight — and all his impatience at the enforced inactivity he had suffered — he dropped the French mafioso. Then, before Antonin or any of the assembled mobsters could collect their wits, he shielded his head with both arms and hurled himself through the picture window into the night.
18
The warrior hit the terrace in a combat roll amid a shower of exploding glass, springing up between the two nearest trees to find the whole sky behind the crater above throbbing with orange fire.
The crater lip was a jagged loop of pulsating white heat and from the interior of this hellhole a constant stream of molten rock fountained into the air accompanied by subterranean rumbles as loud and menacing as the detonations of an artillery barrage. Bolan could see a fiery river of lava bubbling slowly downward from some split far up the mountainside.
Racing away, he glanced hastily right and left. This was no time to marvel at the awesome forces that could melt rock to a blazing liquid. Already the mobsters had knocked the last shards of glass from the shattered window and spilled through into the garden after him.
It was quite dark now on the seaward side of the island, a moonless night lit only by the fitful glare from the erupting volcano. Three terraces below the lemon trees shielded the Executioner, a rocky trail girdled the tiny harbor, but there were guards strung along the track, cutting him off from the power launch and the other boats moored there. More men surged out from beneath the arbor as he watched, racing along the lowest terrace to encircle him and block his retreat from the villa.
He could hear Jean-Paul and Zefarelli shouting orders. Dim shapes fanned out at the rear of the buildings, scattering over the higher ground to bar his way to the village.
The only route open to him now was upward — toward the flaming inferno that was boiling from Stromboli’s crater and filling the night with the stench of sulfur.
Bolan scrambled up the stone wall retaining the terrace above him, ran across the narrow strip of black earth and climbed again. Torchlight beams lanced the darkness between the lemon trees below.
Above the house on the village side there was a confused hubbub. Once again he heard Jean-Paul shouting commands, and another voice — Smiler’s? — repeating Etang de Brialy’s name. Suddenly winking points of fire sparkled all around the villa, and a fusillade from rifles and automatics punctuated the roaring explosions from the crater above.
Bolan hurled himself flat... and then realized the shots couldn’t possibly be aimed at him. Not yet. They were in the wrong direction and too far away. He rose cautiously and continued, terrace by terrace, his silent upward progress.
Perhaps Ancarani’s goons had taken the opportunity to open fire on J-P and his men? If so, that was great... but where was Etang de Brialy?
No way of telling. What was certain was that they — or some of them — were still after Bolan. The flashlight beams were probing the hillside now, sending shadows from fruit trees and vines leaping over the old stone walls.
More shots. A cry of agony. From outside the smashed window a stream of orders ending with the words, “Whatever happens, bring in that bastard Bolan dead or alive.”
The soldier was high above the building, threading his way between the wires on a terrace where the vines had long ago run wild, when the lights focused on his position. He ran for the next wall.
It was about six feet high. As he climbed hurriedly, his foot dislodged a stone. Bolan cursed, slipped — and a whole section of the ancient buttress collapsed in a shower of pebbles and dust. In a momentary lull stilling the eruption above, the clatter of falling stone was appallingly loud.
A triumphant shout from below and a volley of shots, this time undoubtedly aimed at him. A near miss ricocheted away with a shrill whine, and several slugs hummed past uncomfortably close.
He was now on a wider strip of land. On the far side, a small, square structure was silhouetted against the flames: a black rectangle blotted from the burning sky.
It was a stone cabin, no more than fifteen feet square, with no windows and an open doorway. Part of the roof was gone now: smoke tinged with scarlet was visible through the gaps.
Bolan crawled in and thumbed off the Beretta’s safety.
This time the auto-loader was fitted with a 20-round box magazine. But those twenty shots were all that stood between Bolan and death. It depended on how long the mobsters continued firing at one another. But there were, he knew, automatic rifles and at least one SMG backing up the handguns down there. Grenades, too, perhaps.
To fire now would reveal his position. And until the moon rose much later, to remain invisible offered the best chance he had of getting out of there.
But the hunt had already been vectored in the right direction by the collapsed wall. It could only be a matter of time before the flashlight beams swept over, and then into, the cabin.
Bolan
’s problem now was twofold. He had to figure out some way to get out of there. And fast. Or he could work his way back down in the hope of worsening still more the Mafia position in relation to the KGB.
His brief, after all, was to create discord to the point that the Russians refused to play ball any longer, and he had no means of knowing whether that point had been reached.
He was pondering the alternatives when a familiar voice spoke softly in the darkness behind him.
“It would be best to leave this shack as quickly as possible. Once they know we are here, a single grenade lobbed through that doorway would be more than enough...”
Bolan whirled. “De Brialy! How the hell did you get in here?”
“I was here before you were,” the Frenchman said. “A lot of fellows down there would be happy to see me dead.”
“Why?” Bolan demanded brusquely. “Why did you agree that you sent me to rough up Scalese? You knew damned well that story was a lie.”
“It was on the spur of the moment,” Etang de Brialy confessed. “It occurred to me that I could capitalize on your lie.”
“What do you mean, capitalize? When it meant you’d be run out of the house with three dozen heavily armed gorillas on your tail?”
“That suited me fine. It was just one more piece of Mafia craziness, all that shooting.”
“I don’t get it. What’s your angle?”
The shooting had stopped now. The flashlight beams were stationary. The volcano crater, still pulsing redly, remained silent.
“We run a clean racket in Paris,” the baron replied. “No underage kids in the houses. The shit we push is what we say it is, not cut to hell. The gambling’s honest: there’s no point rigging it — the house wins, anyway. Guys who pay for protection do get it. No bystanders are involved. There are no muggings in our territory: any free lance who steps out of line is very severely... disciplined.”
“Well, great for you,” Bolan said sarcastically. “And so?”
“We work with certain families, but we are not actually Mafia. I think that should be obvious,” the Frenchman said with dignity. “My... associates... don’t go along with this KGB tie-up. Nor do I. We are, after all, first and fore most a French association. We don’t want any part of some deal that could mean we’re told what to do and when to do it by damned foreigners. No offense to you, sir.”
“You mean...” Bolan began.
“I considered that I could work as a... modifying influence more successfully from the inside, as it were, than if I made my opposition public, the way Scotto and Balestre and the others did. It would also be somewhat safer.” Etang de Brialy’s tone was wry and dry. “Of course until tonight I had not actually been able to achieve very much. Simply a word here, a doubt there. But...”
“Are you telling me,” Bolan interrupted, “that you’re working against the merger?”
“Things are satisfactory as they are. A neat, tidy life with no complications,” the baron said primly. “Why spoil it for nothing better than money? We can get that anytime.”
“Then, at least for now, we’re on the same side. Because you must know now that my own...” The Executioner stopped in midsentence. Somewhere below voices were raised in argument. Inside the villa a door slammed.
“Impossible, impossible!” Antonin’s harsh accents carried clear to the cabin on the night air. “The situation is totally unacceptable.”
The next few words were lost because Jean-Paul’s furious voice kept interrupting. From time to time contemptuous phrases from the Russian punctuated the gang leader’s outcry.
“Acting like children in a slum... absolutely essential that we deal with adults behaving as adults... public killings, bomb attacks, open gang warfare here, in France, in Italy, in California... An intolerable situation.”
Bolan lost the thread again as Jean-Paul’s near-hysterical argument drowned the KGB officer’s words. Then, quite clearly, the mobster yelled, “Your whole aim, you said, was to promote insecurity and chaos!”
“Not among yourselves, you imbecile!” Antonin shouted. “We will deal only with a unified organization. Yet here you present me with quarreling, feuding, shooting. Worst of all, you allow the mercenary Bolan to infiltrate your own group.”
Jean-Paul’s reply was lost in the angry stamp of booted feet on the flagstones. Antonin was striding away from the villa.
Eventually, over the Frenchman’s impassioned arguments, his distant voice could be heard icily declaiming, “No! You have shown yourselves, all of you, undisciplined, stupid, unreliable. Now it is over. I shall report to my superiors that on further examination the project has been found to be unworkable.”
A fresh outburst from Jean-Paul. Was he pleading, cajoling, even threatening? There was no way of telling: the two men were now too far away for individual phrases to be recognizable. All that Bolan and the baron could say with certainty was that the tirade was cut short with a single sharp expletive in Russian, followed instantly by a shot from a heavy-caliber revolver.
Silence.
Receding footsteps.
A gruff, guttural command, and then the rising whine of a turbojet cutting in.
A minute later the Soviet helicopter rose into the air over the landing stage and flew away toward the southwest.
Before the noise of its rotors faded, the volcano renewed its eruption with a rumbling bellow that shook the ground beneath their feet and sent flames and molten debris shooting upward from the crater.
“Did he kill Jean-Paul?” Etang de Brialy’s voice could scarcely be heard over the uproar.
“It sounded that way,” Bolan said cheerfully.
In the darkness of the cabin behind them, suddenly a third voice spoke.
“You’d better get out of here fast: they’re setting up a searchlight down there, and this is the obvious place to look.”
Coralie Sanguinetti!
“How did you get here?” Bolan exclaimed for the second time that night.
“There’s an underground passageway. It leads here from a ruined chapel on a rock above the house.”
“Could we go that way?” the baron asked.
“Yes. There’s a place where the roof of the tunnel has fallen in. About halfway, in the middle of an old olive grove. We’d have some cover if we scrambled out there.”
“We?” Bolan asked.
“Yes. I’ll show you the way. Your only chance is to make it to the other side of the island — over the shoulder below the crater, and then down to a creek where they keep a couple of fishing boats.”
“Below the crater?” Etang de Brialy repeated nervously.
“Some way below. We’ll be all right. But hurry...”
Coralie stopped talking. From the roof of the villa below a blinding white beam split the night and began to sweep left and right up the terraces. It was joined by a less powerful spotlight from the bridge of the power launch moored at the landing stage, and then by the hand-held torches that had been searching earlier.
The light from Coralie’s own pocket flashlight was shielded by a red silk scarf held over the lens. In the dim illumination Bolan saw in the back of the cabin a trapdoor standing open in the floor.
As Coralie lowered herself down the crumbling stone steps, light blazed in through the open doorway. Bolan and the Frenchman followed hastily and closed the trapdoor over their heads.
The tunnel was vaulted brickwork. Despite the proximity of the volcano, the walls were damp, and there were pools of moisture on the floor. It twisted and turned for quite a distance before Coralie’s flashlight revealed the slant of rubble and the patch of scarlet sky that marked the place where the roof had collapsed.
They fought their way out into the open air. Red light ahead and white light behind transformed the gnarled trunks of the olives into a grotesque tableau. “The big searchlight below,” Bolan asked the girl, “is it mobile?”
“No,” she replied. “It’s mounted permanently on the roof.”
“So once
we make the far side of the ridge there’s no more danger from the light?”
“No,” Coralie said dubiously, “not from the light.”
There was plenty of danger on the near side of the ridge. They had made less than fifty yards when the powerful beam brightened among the trees and there was a shout from lower down the slope. They had been seen.
A ragged volley of automatic-rifle fire brought leaves tumbling down from the branches above their heads. “Split up and zigzag,” Bolan ordered tersely. “What’s on the far side of this grove?”
“Rough ground sloping upward, covered with long grasses, rocky outcrops. There’s no more cultivation,” Coralie said.
“For how far?”
“In height? Maybe another eight hundred, nine hundred feet. After that, it’s volcanic stuff: old lava flows and ash.”
“Let’s go,” Bolan said.
Because it was all over now except for the shouting. He could report that the mission was accomplished; the Soviets abandoned their project and the enemy forces were in disarray.
Those forces who were not actively tracking him down, anyway, with orders to bring him in dead or alive. Maybe, Bolan thought, instead of just getting the hell out, he would stick around awhile first and try shouting a little....
At the far end of the olive grove he dropped to one knee. The power launch was way out of range now, but flashlights were still bobbing around and the big searchlight silhouetted shadowy figures among the trees. Bolan let off a couple of rounds and thought he saw one of the figures stumble and fall. Etang de Brialy, who was carrying a Detonics .45 Combat Master, pumped half a dozen rounds in the same direction.
As their fire was returned, the two fugitives ran out from under the trees and followed Coralie, who was already wading through waist-high grasses.
Out in the open, Bolan realized that the wind had risen.
The tower of black smoke billowing from the crater was now leaning over to the northeast, and the incandescent fragments showering thunderously skyward were all falling on the nearer slopes of the cone. From this position high on the mountainside they could look over the basalt headland to the riding lights of Bloody Mary, where she lay rocking at anchor in the freshening sea.
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