Bolan thought, this isn't possible. The brachial artery runs right through there somewhere; it's probably nicked and I'm bleeding to death like a faucet inside my body cavity. Bolan remained there on his knees, waiting for the dizziness, the faintness proceeding death. Nothing happened ... except the excruciating pain that went on and on and on.
Bolan retrieved the Beretta and knee-walked to the dead.
He searched the man, astonished to find two morphine syrettes wrapped in a handkerchief in one pocket, exactly the same kind of syrettes used by combat medics. Bolan did not hesitate. The pain was too bad. He could not hope to function, keep his senses clear and alert while fighting such intense pain. He peeled back his left sleeve, made a fist, felt with his fingertips and found the vein, slipped the needle in and squeezed the small plastic container, shooting the morphine into his bloodstream.
Within a minute, Bolan felt the pain diminish enough so he could think past it. He also felt drowsy, but knew he could overcome that. He dropped the remaining syrette into one of the leg pockets of his blacksuit in case he absolutely had to use it later on.
Bolan took a compress from his combat med-kit, put it over the bullet-exit hole and clamped his left arm down over it; he put another compress on the hole in his back. With his right hand, Bolan slipped the dead man's belt from the body, then the necktie. Holding his arm clamped to his side, but leaving his left hand free, Bolan tied the belt and tie together, fashioned a loop, slipped it over his head, fitted it across both compresses, then drew it as tight as he could stand, mashing the bandages into place over the wounds. For a moment he rested there on his knees, head hanging, dripping sweat, muzzy and faint. He'd have given almost anything for a cigarette, and the safety in which to enjoy the smoke.
He bolstered the Beretta and drew the dead's submachine gun to him, an MP40/1 Erma — 9mm Parabellum full automatic, fitted with a folding stock made of two metal rods and a buttplate. When full, the long box magazine held thirty-two rounds, so it should still have twenty-nine loads in it, Bolan thought. Even many would-be experts called this weapon a Schmeisser machine-pistol, but it was an Erma even though some of the million-plus made during World War Two had been turned out by Schmeisser under subcontract. Bolan found two more full magazines and slipped them into his carrying pouches just as the front door of the big house flew open and a man stepped out, shouting, "Who shot? Who fired those rounds?"
No one answered and the man shouted again. "Check in, by the numbers!"
To Bolan's surprised pleasure, the man shouted in English, and the answers came back likewise. At least some of them were studying their English: Post One, okay; Post Two, okay....
At Post Three the answers stopped. Tony Guida cursed, then shouted viciously, "Riarso, you son of a bitch! Answer up!"
Bolan knew then who'd shot him, who'd he'd killed, whose Erma he now held.
Guida called for Four, Five and Six, and the soldiers answered at once. "Okay, scout around. That stupid goddam Riarso shot one of the soldiers coming down from camp, so fan out and find them. The soldier's name is Gino, maybe's he's still alive."
"Hey, Tony," one of the guards called, "you wanna use the jeep?"
"No, you lazy shit, I don't wanna use the jeep. Find that Gino first, dumbhead, scout up the road. I'll personally take care of that buttfaced Drymouth."
Mack Bolan could hardly believe his luck, except he'd made his luck.
Muttering curses, the hardmen left the house grounds and came out to the road, formed a loose line across it and the drainage ditches, and began moving toward the camp. Bolan watched them go, but he kept track of them by their shouting back and forth even after they vanished in the darkness.
Bolan sprinted across the road and the grounds and came to a halt in the shadows of the house, back pressed against the ancient stone wall a few feet from the front door.
This was not how he'd planned it, but now he had a target of opportunity.
The target of opportunity.
Inside this house, protected by at least one, but probably no more than three hardmen, was the man Bolan had come to Agrigento to kill. The man who'd put a whole new face on "this blessed thing of ours"; training hitmen, assassins, enforcers, ruthless malacarni who could turn the streets of any American town into a vicious, deadly jungle. Men who could turn back the clock in the States, so that parks, and front lawns and streets became open fire-fields between warring factions. Some dream Frank, The Kid, Angeletti had for himself, seeing himself as Scarface Al Capone, ruling whole cities by armed force, so powerful even the police became powerless — the corrupt bought off, the straight cops blown up.
Bolan slipped to the corner of the house. In the back yard, beside an old-fashioned barn with stone walls and a tiled steep roof, stood a U.S. military jeep. Bolan grunted with satisfaction. If he took the house down quick, fast, right, it wouldn't be so far back to his heavy weapons cache. Now he had wheels.
Bolan stepped out of the shadows and banged on the front door with the Erma muzzle, shouting, "Hey! Tony! Open up! We got Gino!"
Bolan waited. He heard heels rapping across the tile floor inside. The door snapped open. Tony Guida stood with a scowl on his face, snarling, "You don't have to wake the whole fu — "
Tony's voice trailed off into choked silence, jaw hanging. Then, as though he finally remembered, his right arm jerked, pulling the P38 machine-pistol up.
Bolan shoved the muzzle almost against Tony's head and pressed the trigger. Ten slugs made obscene wallpaper of Tony Guida's brains and skull and scalp.
Bolan stepped over the body, crouched and ran down the short hallway to an open door on the left. He shoved the submachine gun around the doorframe and ripped off the last nineteen rounds in the clip, dropped the gun and leaped into the room unsheathing both the Automag and Beretta.
Don Cafu looked almost like a withered old woman as he sat frozen with fear in his big chair, staring, unblinking. Without a touch of remorse, Bolan sighted the .44 Automag and blew the don's head off, literally. The cannonlike impact of the big slug took Cafu just under the chin, drilling through the soft skin of his throat, exploding against his neckbone, shredding the muscles and flesh. The head slammed against the high back of the chair, bounced up into the air, came down and landed in Cafu's lap. The pale, thin old hands gripped convulsively, so Cafu held his own head tightly in his own lap, as though demonstrating the most fantastic parlor trick of all time to guests who had failed to show up for the party.
This would show them, the death-grimaced face seemed to say, eyes bulging, lips drawn back, upper denture plate slipped half out, covering the lower lip.
Then Bolan heard the house hardmen returning. One, then another shouted, and one of them fired at a shadow. Bolan ran back to the hallway, then to the front door. He slammed it shut, took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, placed the grenade against the door and slid a hat-rack over to hold the grenade in place. He rolled Tony's body-over, put another grenade under him, pin pulled, then let Tony's weight back down to hold the spoon in place. He scooped up Tony's P38 after bolstering the .44 Automag. He sheathed the Beretta and recovered the submachine gun, pushed the release and dumped the empty clip, shoved in a fresh one as he ran down the hallway to the back door. He threw the back door open and shots shattered wood around the frame. Bolan backed up, found a small table, pulled it forward, then lifted and hurled it out the door. He saw the muzzle flash from one hard-man's chopper, sighted and ripped off two three-round bursts. The gunman screamed, came staggering out of the shadows gripping his chopper convulsively, spraying bullets in every direction as he spun and finally fell, dead.
Bolan heard others at the front door. He moved behind a wall, heard the crash as the hatrack went flying as the hardmen kicked in the front door, and Bolan counted silently to himself: one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and the grenade exploded.
Bolan heard the screams. He crouched and looked around the edge of the wall. A bloody arm, sheared off
at the elbow, shot past him.
The concussive force of the first grenade had lifted Tony Guida's body enough so the spoon flew and ignited the detonator of the second frag. Two more gunmen, not killed by the first blast, charged into the house and down the hallway. The second grenade went off directly under the first man, shrapnel and concussion literally splitting him in half from the crotch up.
The second man was knocked back and down, but he was as tough as he hired out to be. Shaking his head, wiping blood from his eyes that came from a scalp wound, he lunged to his feet. Bolan snap-drew the Automag and blew a hole through tough-guy's chest.
He had two grenades left. He pulled the pins on both, flung one down the hallway to bounce out the front door and wheeled and underhanded the last through the back door.
The first went and he heard screams. Then the second went and while sizzling hot shrapnel still razzled through the air, Bolan charged out the back door, spraying with the P38 until it emptied and he threw it. Never slowing, Bolan hosed the Erma in sweeping arcs. A huge slug of adrenaline hit him and he ran with his feet hardly touching ground. He leaped over the front end of the jeep, its windshield folded down, and landed in the seat. It needed no key, the military model, probably stolen during that last big war, and he started it.
A huge fire had started in the big house and everything became as light as day, with a yellowish glow. A burst of fire ripped into the rightside seat of the jeep. The hardmen searching for Gino had come running back when Bolan hit the house. Bolan jerked the jeep into low, raced the engine and popped the clutch. He held the Erma by its pistolgrip, extended metal stock's buttplate jammed against his bicep.
A man rose from hiding on the roof, sighted, and Bolan poured a five-round burst of 9mm Parabellum chest dissolvers into the hardman. He reared straight up, and for a moment stood there, then fell forward dead, still clutching his own Erma in his right hand.
Two more armed men ran from the door at the end of the barn as Bolan wheeled around in a circle. Still holding the Erma one-handed, buttplate braced, Bolan drove with his left hand. He emptied the magazine at the two men, saw them staggering and going down as he cleared the yard and drove careening past the fire-roaring big house, dropped the submachine gun in his lap and used both hands to take the corner onto the road leading back toward the soldiers' camp.
He roared into the camp and, for a moment, thought he might pull off a headlong surprise rush and make it through unrecognized, or too fast for any reaction.
He almost made it, but then someone opened up with a long burst. The first rounds went high, crack!—ling overhead. Then Bolan felt and heard slugs hit the back of the jeep. The spare tire blew up with a pow! that made him jump outside his skin. Then another burst got both back tires and the jeep slewed around, almost overturning.
Bolan dived clear and ran, hearing the voices of the soldiers from camp.
The belt or the necktie had broken, the compresses were gone from his wounds. As he ran, Bolan tasted his own blood spraying into his face. It were as though he drank his own life.
He kept running, once more the prey, not the hunter.
17
Stalk
Brinato hung up the radio telephone and closed the door of the safe in which he kept the ultrasecret "hotline" in his Roman villa.
He turned to his boia, Razziatore. "Get the helicopter."
The assassin, who looked like a pink-cheeked all-American college lad, nodded without speaking and went to a desk with four telephones. He picked up the green one, after a moment said, "Bring in the ship, full equipment."
That's what Brinato liked most about the lad. No bullshit. No crap about, "What's up, boss?" He told the kid, "Do this, hit that bastard, bring the girl," and Razz nodded, sometimes smiled, especially if it was a hit, and he did it. No bullshit. And no bullshit afterwards, either. No preening and strutting around like some peacock with his fan spread. Brinato thought the kid was maybe queer, or asexual so that kind of stuff never entered his mind. Whichever, Brinato knew it never interfered. He'd thought about bringing the kid along, giving him experience in shylocking, numbers, muscle stuff along the docks, bagman for cops on the take, giving him an inside view of everything in this thing of ours, but the kid showed no interest. He was a pure out and out fucking killer and that's all there was to it. He didn't even care about clothes. Brinato wouldn't have been seen inside his villa wearing less than half-a-Large worth of raw silk underwear and robe, except when stark naked under the shower; but Razz, Christ, he took any kind of crap off the rack down at the phony high-class clothing shop Brinato had so he could rape the tourists. Trash he wouldn't bury an enemy in, he got two, three hundred bucks (discount for dollars or Deutchmarks) for, because they had counterfeit high-class labels sewed in them. Suckers!
Brinato was dressed in silk almost worth one Large, from the skin out, when he heard the thudding beat of the helicopter blades. He went to the big window and watched the ship settle slowly in atop the reinforced roof of the villa, then said, "Let's go, kid," and they took the elevator up.
According to instructions, standing orders, the pilot had shut down and the blades at rest when the boss and Razziatore came out of the elevator. The boss liked dust blown on him about as well as he liked getting peed on in the face, so the pilot had everything ready — because the boss liked delays even less than he liked dust.
Brinato paused beside the pilot. "You're set, right?"
"Yes, sir!" Donato answered, touching his cap. "The extra fuel tanks topped off, the rockets in place," he touched the seemingly out-sized landing skids which actually served the purpose of being rocket launchers as well as landing gear. "We've got the usual armament aboard. And the other thing, too," the pilot added, swallowing.
"Okay, that you get rid of."
The boss had just made the pilot a happy man. Donato drew a fantastic wage, the equivalent of almost three thousand U.S. dollars a week. But there was a catch to it. His work was not only frequently dangerous, often involving the assassin in some way or other; but also in various smuggling operations, sometimes narcotics. Since the helicopter was completely open— that is, it was openly registered to Brinato under the name of one of Brinato's many interlocking corporations, the helicopter had a self-contained self-destruct device aboard, just in case it was ever seized by the cops in a smuggling operation, most specifically dope.
The device was absolutely fail-safe, but Brinato still didn't trust it, just as he trusted nothing on earth, not even his wife. That's why he had her run over by a truck four years ago.
It took but a few moments to remove the device, then they were airborne, with the pilot going fullballs on direct course toward Agrigento.
Brinato had neglected to advise his fellow dons of this trip. He would let them in on the action, what was left of it, after he took the lean meat and gravy from the remains of Cafu's operation, said don being now deceased. As he lit a fat Havana, Brinato again congratulated himself for having sent a man over to the island when Cafu failed to show up for Frode's table. The hotline call had given Brinato the Word, and probably a several-hour edge on the other dons. Agrigento was a shambles. Cafu dead, his two main underbosses dead, a bunch of grease-balls running around the hills looking for that Bolan bastard. Meantime, what the hell were the other underbosses doing? The shylockers, bagmen, taxi operators, dock-bosses, whoremasters, olive oil monopoly guys . . . all the real, solid, tried and true and proved moneymakers —
The sons of bitches were stuffing their own pockets, that's what, without a boss of bosses. Piss on that assassin school. What was a grand a day for soldiers? Nothing. Brinato's own numbers syndicate, out of the three poorest most poverty stricken slums in Rome, nickle and dime stuff, made twice that, net, on the average. That was net. That was after paying off a standard ten percent for the runners, after fixing the cops, after paying off a few winners, unless he'd rigged it so there were no winners. And the goddam payoff wasn't all the way across the goddam Atlantic and Medite
rranean, either. On the other side of the world, for Christ's sake! So you looked up some morning with shit on your face because the Angeletti kid didn't pay off and there wasn't a friggin' thing you could do about it. It was crazy.
And besides that —
The commissione had turned the idea down, absolutely, one hundred percent, unanimously.
All it got Cafu, his big plan, his big moneymaker, was dead. His head in his lap. Brinato shuddered.
You fool, Bolan told himself, you did not come here to die. That's not why you go to war, to die. You go to fight and win, and survive.
He pulled up.
No man on the island was half as physically well conditioned as Bolan. Not even the malacarni. They hadn't done their training properly. The outposts he'd scouted out, all of them, had been a mile, sometimes more, farther down the mountain than originally planned and laid out. They had doped off, and now they paid the penalty. They could not overtake Bolan, even when The Executioner was shot to pieces and leaking life from his wounds every step.
He sat down, dragging deep, shuddering painful breaths, getting his wind. He could hear them, far below now, using lanterns and lights, calling back and forth. Once, two groups got into a firefight between themselves. Bolan looked up, got his bearings from the stars, then moved out again, slowly and carefully, conserving himself, and searching.
If the malacarni stuck with it, they could still stalk him down, just by following Bolan's spoor — the dripping trail of blood.
Then he found what he sought.
At the base of a bush, he saw a hole, kicked it apart, found the thick spider webs, plastered them over his chest wound. In a few minutes the bleeding stopped. Bolan went on. In an hour he came to the abandoned sulphur mine, his cache. Once inside, he forced open the case of medical supplies and went to work on himself. First a transfusion of albumin to replace lost blood. He bound himself up in tight and proper fashion. He found the bottles and took a handful of vitamin B-12 and almost as many vitamin E pills. He shot a half-rnillion units of penicillin into his butt. He crammed his mouth full of high energy chocolate bar rations, munching as he worked. He went to the mouth of the mine shaft and looked at the sky. He had another four hours till first light. It might be just enough, if he didn't cave in.
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