Angela's eyes narrowed. She suspected a verbal trap. "Maybe. I never knew him to go fishing, though. He fish a lot when he's up here?"
"No. No, can't say he does."
"Anyway, can you tell me where his house is?"
"You go on about a mile," the old man said, pointing north. "There's a sand lane goes off to your left. Can't see the house from the road. No sign. You just have to know which lane it is."
"Well, how can I tell? Is there some kind of landmark?"
The old man pondered for a moment. "Tell you what," he said. "Day before yesterday some tourists tossed a sack of cans and stuff off the side of the road. When I came by this mornin', it was still there. Prob'ly there yet. If not, you'll just have to try a lane or so till you get the right one."
* * *
"Any of those houses!" DePrisco complained. "Or maybe none of them. God, how could I know?"
Joe Coppolo held the muzzle of the Browning against DePrisco's crotch.
"Hey, I really don't know!"
Bolan spoke quietly to Kruger. "I don't see any choice but to land and ask."
"I'll put 'er down on the airport. Less conspicuous."
Five minutes later the helicopter sat on the edge of the ramp at the Provincetown Airport. A black-and-white police car approached.
"I'll talk to them," Coppolo said, scrambling out of the back seat. "I've got credentials."
He walked toward the police car, where a man in sunglasses, a straw hat and a tan shirt looked at him suspiciously and spoke into his radio microphone. As the Justice agent walked up to the car he noticed that the badge on the shirt read Chief.
"Hi, Chief," he said. "Joe Coppolo, United States Department of Justice." He pulled out the little leather case containing his badge and the laminated identification card that bore his picture.
The chief of police pulled off the sunglasses and squinted at the ID. "Jack Schriver," he said as he handed the case back. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm looking for a man named Natale Plumeri. Understand he has a house here."
"You aren't going to find him," Chief Schriver said. "He was murdered last night in New York."
"I know. But there's somebody at his house."
"Lots of 'somebodys. A Lear jet came in here about an hour ago and brought four more."
"Four more?"
"Well, there's been a couple of guys in the house since yesterday evening. I've been trying to find out who they are."
Coppolo turned and signaled to Bolan to come over and talk to the policeman.
"Let me introduce Mike Belasko, Chief. He's my boss. He ought to hear what we're saying. So, you figure there's six men out there?"
"Five men and a woman," the chief replied. "A tall black woman."
Bolan nodded, his lips grimly tight. "Figures," he said. "Actually there's almost certainly another woman in the house. A kidnap victim."
"You sure of that?" the chief asked. "What's comin' down?"
"A gang war," Bolan told him. "Natale Plumeri was a very big man in the Rossi crime family in New York. The black woman is an assassin with at least half a dozen murders on her record. The other woman is a hostage. Also, she's pregnant."
"I've got me and one man here," the chief said dubiously. "I'll notify the Massachusetts State Police."
"Do us a favor and don't," Bolan continued. "It's a federal operation. It's going to be damned delicate, getting the hostage out alive. Also, it's important that some degree of confidentiality be maintained."
"Besides which, we don't have time to wait for reinforcements," Coppolo added.
"But there are only two, three, four…"
"Three," Bolan said. "The one in back's a prisoner."
"Want me to take him off your hands?"
"What we'd really like for you to do, Chief Schriver, is to keep people away. Can you get the people out of adjoining houses?"
The chief nodded. "I'll block the highway. HI send my man down the beach to clear it. Then he can clear two houses that might be in range if there's shooting."
"There's going to be shooting," Bolan promised. "Now. How do we identify the house?"
* * *
The paper bag of roadside litter remained where the old man in the gas station had said it was. Sandy Mac turned the Cadillac into the lane, and the two hardmen in the white Buick followed.
Angela hefted the Uzi submachine gun, trying its weight. She had never fired one, and she regretted their plan, which put the Uzi in the hands of Sandy Mac.
"If the old boy lied to us…" the Irishman began to say. His thought was that Plumeri might have lied to them about how many men he had at this house. His revenge.
"Do you think he was lying?" she asked scornfully. "Are you starting to feel chicken?"
Sandy Mac shook his head.
"We take out two wise guys and the girl belongs to us. It won't take Bolan long to figure out who snatched her, and when he finds out she's dead…"
"He'll take out Rossi for us," Sandy Mac concluded.
He was skeptical of the whole idea, but Angela had made up her mind, and he was in no position to dispute Angela Corone. He wasn't sure she hadn't killed her own brother. He had watched her kill a kid last night, and then Plumeri. She'd sent Augie Karas after Samenza; and, knowing Augie, Samenza was likely dead. Her only failure had been the try on Staten Island, when they'd fouled up the hit on Segesta. It wasn't out of the question that she was going to wind up boss of a hell of a lot of business. Anyway, she had him by the short hairs. A word from her would put him back in the slammer.
As the car rolled and heaved through the soft sand of the lane, the sea was occasionally in view through gaps in the low dunes. Then the roof of the house was visible.
"Step on it a little," Angela demanded.
Sandy Mac pressed the accelerator, and the wheels churned in the sand and whipped up plumes behind the car. Angela put the Uzi down between them, opened her purse and checked her Beretta. As the Cadillac emerged from among the dunes and was in full view of the house, Sandy Mac leaned on the horn.
The door opened, and a bearish man in a golf shirt and slacks stepped out on the porch. It was the back porch, really; the house faced the sea. He hesitated for a moment, frowning, then came down the two wooden steps and walked across the sand toward the Cadillac.
Angela opened the door and got out. "Hi," she said. "You're, uh, Malatesta?"
The big man nodded.
"I'm Angela Corone. Natale sent me. Plan's changed a little. He wanted you to get the new word in person."
Malatesta nodded. "Okay," he said. "You wanna come in?"
"Sure. I guess. Where's O'Brien?"
Malatesta glanced back over his shoulder just as O'Brien came through the screen door and stepped out on the porch.
Angela grinned. Then, as quick as a cat, she threw herself to the side and down on the sand as Sandy Mac thrust the Uzi through the open window of the Cadillac.
The muzzle of the machine pistol was still pointed at the roof of the house, where the short burst he managed to fire ripped away some gingerbread. The bullet that had exploded in his upper chest, just below his throat, dealt him instant death. The Uzi fell to the ground, and "Sandy Mac" McMahon fell back across the seat of the car.
Angela screamed in terror as she snatched open her shoulder bag and clutched at her Beretta. Malatesta had done exactly what she had done — thrown himself to the sand — and was rolling out of the way.
O'Brien reached through an open window and grabbed an Uzi from a table just inside. He stepped to the edge of the porch, spread his legs to steady his aim and loosed a burst that caught Angela in the belly and threw her on her back. He fired another burst that shook her inert body. Then he stepped down from the porch, leveled the Uzi at her head and pumped 9 mm slugs into it until she was unrecognizable.
The two Corone hardmen in the Buick witnessed all this with shock and horror. The one in the passenger seat grabbed another Uzi, but the man behind the wheel had already
thrown the Buick in reverse and had it churning backward.
O'Brien shoved another clip into the Uzi. He fired from the hip at the retreating Buick. Slugs ripped through the grille and tore up the radiator. The driver floored the accelerator, and the Buick kept lurching and rolling backward. When the engine locked, the car was out of sight to O'Brien. The two Corone men abandoned it and ran.
* * *
No one in the house — and certainly no one in the Corone group — had noticed the helicopter overhead hovering at a thousand feet. But Bolan had watched the firefight through binoculars and knew that Angela Corone was dead. He watched the two men from the Buick scrambling in panic toward the road.
Just before leaving Chief Jack Schriver, they had given him one of the handie-talkies they would use. It operated on a restricted frequency, and the talk was scrambled and unscrambled in circuits. Now Bolan spoke to the chief of the Provincetown police.
"You've got two Mafia types on foot running away from the gunfire you heard. Be careful. They're armed with automatic weapons. If you get them, you can hold them on weapons possession charges. But be careful, Chief."
Chief Schriver was careful. He left his car blocking the road, emergency lights blinking, and climbed a dune, carrying a short automatic shotgun. When the two Corone hardmen came close enough, he let fly two blasts, one near the feet of each man.
Each was hit by pellets that ricocheted up and shredded their shoes and pants, giving them painful, bloody pellet wounds on their feet and legs. They threw their weapons as far as they could and stood with their hands above their heads until the chief handcuffed them together.
* * *
"What the hell was that?" Rossi asked tensely. He had heard the two shotgun blasts. "Explosions?"
Salina shrugged. "Those wise guys telling us goodbye. A couple of parting shots, as they say."
"Hell of a piece of shooting," Malatesta said to Salina. "Thanks."
Salina nodded. She was disassembling the rifle, replacing it in its case. "I figure we have three to five minutes before the cops come," she said. "Half of Cape Cod must have heard that Uzi. O'Brien is a total idiot."
"Why's the chopper up there?" Appiano asked nervously.
"Tourists," Malatesta replied. "They sell helicopter rides at the airport. The cops out here don't have a chopper."
Rossi glanced at the redheaded hardman, still on the porch, threatening the landscape with his submachine gun. "Granted," he said.
"We've got a corpse lying in the sand, a corpse lying in that Caddy. I don't see how we're going to explain how those parties got dead," Salina said.
"O'Brien!" Rossi yelled. "Pull the body out of the Cadillac. See if that car's drivable. We're going to use it if we can."
"Pull the bodies inside and torch the house," Malatesta directed. "That'll distract the locals for a little while."
"What do we do with the Indian?" Uccello asked.
"We bring her," Rossi said. "She's money in the bank."
* * *
Kruger circled the Plumeri house, letting Bolan and Coppolo get a good look at it from every angle. Then he swept out over the water and across the hook of Cape Cod, out of sight from the house.
He brought the chopper in very low, no more than fifty feet above the ground, and landed not far from Chief Schriver's car.
They took Johnny DePrisco out of the helicopter and used his handcuffs plus the ones on the Corone hardmen to attach all three of them to a steel-cable guardrail.
Bolan's impulse was to warn the small-town policeman that he had three dangerous men in custody, but on watching the Corone men limp painfully, their legs bleeding from dozens of little flesh wounds, he decided Jack Schriver knew his business.
Beside the helicopter and in view of a few gaping tourists who were stopped by the chief's roadblock, Bolan and Coppolo changed into combat clothes and hooked combat weapons onto their belts. Bolan fastened a flak jacket around his upper body, then pulled on desert-tan combat fatigues and heavy combat boots. The Desert Eagle, with the six-inch.44 Magnum barrel screwed in, hung in a quick-draw holster on his hip. He carried a knife and extra ammo in pouches hung from a web belt.
Coppolo dressed the same and carried the same equipment, except that he stuck with his Browning Hi-Power 9 mm.
Both men carried Heckler & Koch G-11 caseless assault rifles. A very special weapon, the G-11 doesn't fire cartridges in the traditional sense. Its bullets are set into solid blocks of propellant, so when the G-11 fires a round, there is no empty shell-casing to expel. It can fire two thousand rounds per minute. The 4.7 mm slugs travel at such velocity that they can penetrate steel helmets, body armor, or the bodies of light vehicles. The mechanism of the rifle is contained within a seamless plastic casing, so that water, mud or sand are effectively sealed out. It's an ideal weapon for fighting among sand dunes or along a beach.
The aerial recon had given Bolan a thorough knowledge of the terrain around the Plumeri house. Coppolo and Kruger had studied it, too, though not with Bolan's practiced eye.
"How the hell are we gonna do it?" Kruger asked. "I mean, you have the guns to blast them out of there, but Gina's in that house. How…"
"I've been thinking about that," Bolan said.
"Classic hostage situation," Chief Schriver added.
"Not really," Bolan said. "In this one you might make a concession."
"What do they want?" the chief asked.
"A life for a life," Coppolo informed him.
"Joe," Bolan snapped, meaning to cut him off.
Coppolo continued. "They want to trade Gina's life for his."
Chief Schriver shook his head. "You can't make a deal like that," he said. "Guys who take hostages… Weak, cowardly… You can't make deals with them. You give them something they demand, they demand something more. Get back this hostage, they take another one."
"Does that mean we give up on saving Gina?" Kruger asked bitterly.
"No," Bolan said firmly. "Let's get in close and take a look."
* * *
"The Cadillacs drivable?" Rossi asked O'Brien.
The gunner nodded. With the help of Appiano, he had just dragged the body of Sandy Mac into the house, where it lay on the living-room floor beside the nearly decapitated corpse of Angela Corone.
"And the Chevy wagon? It's okay? Got gas in it?"
"You got here in it," O'Brien reminded him.
"Right. Okay. You and Appiano take the Cadillac. Get out of here as fast as you can. We'll unchain Gina Claw, torch the house and be right with you. Now listen. When you get to Barnstable, there's an Irish restaurant right across the road from the big airport. We'll meet you and talk about where we go from there."
O'Brien hesitated for a moment, fixing a skeptical eye on Rossi. He didn't trust guys like this, businessman types, particularly this one, with his tanned face and square jaw. The hardware in his holster didn't make him what O'Brien looked for in a made man.
Even so, he was capo di capi, and Piumeri had worked for him. O'Brien had taken orders from Piumeri, and so had indirectly taken them from Rossi, for a long time. This wasn't the time to think about doing anything different.
"I'll drive," O'Brien offered.
Appiano got in on the other side. As he settled himself in the passenger's seat of the Cadillac, wrinkling his nose over the wet blotches of McMahon's blood on the seat and floor, he checked his Uzi. It was ready.
O'Brien wrestled the big Cadillac around in the sand. He hit the accelerator and forced it forward, gaining speed.
Salina stood beside Rossi on the porch, watching the lurching car. "Smart," she said. "If they get out, we can get out."
* * *
Bolan and Coppolo were walking toward the house and the beach, Bolan on the north side of the road, the Justice agent on the south. Each was off the track in the sand, a little up the dunes. They had passed the Buick abandoned by the two Corone men and had walked maybe half the distance to the house when the Cadillac roared into sight.
> Bolan raised the assault rifle, pressed the optical sight to his eye, aimed at the hood of the Cadillac and loosed a burst. Fifty 4.7 mm slugs ripped through the sheet metal and tore everything off the left side and top of the engine — carburetor, air cleaner, fuel line, wires. They shattered three spark plugs. The big car still rolled forward, growling as it died. A second, shorter burst shredded the left front tire.
Appiano was out before the car stopped. Dropping behind the engine to use it as a shield, he jerked up the Uzi and fired a burst toward Bolan. Then he risked standing for two seconds as he fired a second burst.
Joe Coppolo had never before experienced the power of the H&K G-11. He had Appiano in his sights and pulled the trigger. He was astonished at how a short burst — what he'd thought was a short burst — ripped a man's body apart. He was in fact horrified to see bits of the man's flesh sprayed over the Cadillac.
O'Brien threw himself over the seat, into the back. He grabbed his own Uzi, blew out the right rear window with a short burst, and rose on his knees to fire a longer burst at Coppolo.
The agent threw himself onto the sand and rolled down the dune, barely escaping the force of O'Brien's fire, which chopped up sand only inches from his scrambling legs.
Bolan ran down the slope from the other side, G-11 at his hip, firing short bursts. High-velocity slugs whipped through the windshield of the Cadillac, filling the whole interior of the car with a storm of glass. O'Brien was scored with shallow, bloody cuts, including ones across his forehead and eyelids. He screamed, rolled over and fired the Uzi blindly toward Bolan. Bolan cut him apart with one short burst.
* * *
"Now we know," Rossi said to Salina.
Malatesta and Uccello came up from the cellar, where they had been piling up trash and wood to start a fire. They had found a small can of gasoline — fuel for the outboard motor on a small boat Plumeri had kept in the little garage — and they were ready to pour the gasoline on their heap of kindling.
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