"It won't be too soon," the Fed grumbled. The hearing was now scheduled for nine. It had been put forward one hour at the last moment, in the hope of foiling any Mafia plans that depended on split-second timing — "Although," the commendatore had observed acidly, "you can be certain that someone on their payroll, one of the few people here who know about the change in plan, will have informed them within ten minutes of the decision being made."
At a quarter to nine the sun broke through as Bolan had forecast, and the mist rolled away, thinned and then vanished. According to the baton transceiver Brognola carried, all was quiet on the Murano front. Nothing unexpected had happened; no suspicious characters had appeared. The armored convoy was about to transport the three Red Brigades prisoners from their cells to the converted casino-courtroom. Bolan and his companion could clearly hear the crackle of exhausts across the calm water as the escort vehicles wanned up their engines.
The noise was lost seconds later when the six police launches put out from the main landing stage and resumed their patrol around the island. Two helicopters appeared from the direction of Mestre and circled the improvised courtroom at a height of five hundred feet.
"At least the locals are taking this thing seriously," Brognola said. "Those Nightstalkers carry a seven-tube rocket launcher and twin 7.62 mm machine guns in their pods!"
Bolan had flipped the lever into neutral, allowing the engine to idle while he kept the cruiser head-on to the swell with deft turns of the wheel. "Let's hope they don't totally annihilate everything they get in their sights."
The third helicopter appeared at 9:05, flying over the water from the northeast and skimming the sandbanks that sheltered the land on the inner shores of the lagoon. It was a large twin-rotor machine with civil markings that Bolan couldn't identify. The cabin looked spacious enough to carry twelve to fifteen people.
The two army choppers soared away from the island to intercept it, and for several minutes the three aircraft hovered in close formation. Bolan could imagine the exchange, by radio and by gestures: interrogation, protestation, commands, expostulation. Eventually the army choppers forced the interloper down on flat land beyond the sandbanks.
The police launches had intercepted and were about to board a 120-foot ocean cruiser creaming into the lagoon past the Lido.
"For my money," Bolan said, "there'll be fifteen blue-chinned dudes with shotguns in that third chopper. They'll look as suspicious as hell, but they'll say they're on their way to an innocent duck shoot on the marshes. And they'll be right. A crowd of similar hardcases will be on the cruiser, and they'll have an equally plausible excuse for being there. The Mob has always been pretty good on alibis."
"You mean the chopper and the boat are decoys? You think none of those men have anything to do with the heist?" Brognola demanded.
"That's the way I read it — that's what I always thought. They've probably been paid by the Mob to act as decoys, but who can prove it? And how can you jail a guy for going on a duck shoot?"
"Then who the hell springs the prisoners?"
"Wait and see," the Executioner said cryptically.
Before the Fed could reply, his radio crackled to life and a voice said urgently, "Signor Brognola?.. Something is wrong! Something has happened in the courtroom. Transmission has been interrupted. We are no longer in radio contact with the trial."
"Shit!" Brognola exploded. "This is it! Get your men in there and start rolling. Block every route to the waterfront ... and keep in touch, okay?"
"I don't understand why..."
The voice broke off abruptly, and the radio went dead. Two seconds later the sound of three dull, flat detonations echoed across the water. They were followed by a confused rattle of automatic fire and several single rifle shots.
Brognola shouted into the mike, his thumb jammed on the Send button. Bolan touched his arm and gestured seaward. An oil tanker, bound for the storage depot and refinery at Venice's Porto Marghera, was lying off the lone spit of land on which the Lido was built, waiting to steam into the lagoon.
'There's the attackers' base," Bolan said as he raised his binoculars. "Iranian registration. No sweat stowing a command of guerrilla terrorists aboard that baby. Finance courtesy the Mafia, killings by permission of Khomeini or Khaddafi."
There was a lot more shooting now, the rapid-fire volleys punctuated by cracking explosions from mortars or grenades. But no smoke spiraled above the seminary or the old casino; the action seemed to be concentrated on the far side of the island.
"You think we should speed around there, see if we can lend a hand?" Brognola asked.
Bolan shook his head. "Wait. It would take us farther away from the city, and that's where Baracco is. Either the cops can handle it or they can't. If they can't we're in a better position to help staying where we are."
The Fed was no longer listening. He was staring out to sea, a finger pointing at the tanker. "What the hell?.."
Bolan swung around. There was movement aboard the ship. On the long foredeck that covered the storage tanks in front of the superstructure, groups of men maneuvered curious spidery objects about five feet high that moved on small wheels. Bolan raised the binoculars again.
The wheeled devices were moving faster than the men. They headed for the bow of the ship, increasing speed, then suddenly took to the air. There were three of them, triangular batlike shapes swooping up over the tanker and then down to glide over the ornate roofs of the Lido on their way to Murano.
"Son of a bitch!" Brognola breathed softly. "You have to hand it to them!" He was looking at a trio of ultralights — in effect, powered delta wings, hang gliders driven by engines no larger than those of lawn mowers.
A helmeted pilot sat at the controls in the spiderweb of struts beneath each wing, and beneath each pilot's seat hung a webbing harness something like a ski lift chair.
"Scoop up the terrorists somewhere on the far side of the island, lift them off without having to land," Bolan said, somewhat impressed. "God knows what happened to the guards, but the ultralights wouldn't be airborne if the cargo wasn't ready. Then dump them behind some tall building in the city while the choppers are still grounded with the duck shooters and before the police water patrols can reembark from that cruiser. A crack operation."
"What do we do? Try to intercept?"
"We wait," the Executioner said again. "Then, if they get away with it, we follow."
The ultralights dived over the ramparts of the island fortress of Sant' Andrea, vanishing behind the buildings on Murano. Then suddenly the put-put of their diminutive engines throbbed again and they flew out from behind San Cipriano, soaring upward on a thermal to head for the city. A man now hung suspended beneath each hang glider.
"They used the deck of that tanker like an aircraft carrier," Brognola said. "There'll be a few questions for the master of that ship to answer!"
"If they catch him before he makes the three-mile limit," Bolan replied dryly. He jerked his head toward the Lido. Beyond the spit of land, the tanker had put about and was hightailing it for the open sea, its smokestack trailing a long plume of diesel fumes blown landward by the breeze.
There was frenzied activity among the police patrol boats, cops swarming back from the big cruiser as whistles blew and the outboards started to roar. A Nightstalker chopper clattered into view above one of the inner sandbanks.
The leading ultralight was halfway to the city, no more than one hundred feet above the surface of the lagoon. "They'll never make it," Bolan shouted, slamming his own throttles wide open. "Those wings can make anything up to fifty, sixty. They'll be out of sight behind San Marco or the Doge's Palace or one of the museums in half a minute. All they have to do then is slow down, allow the passengers to step off, then junk the wings somewhere on the mainland beyond."
"Unless that's where they meet Baracco anyway."
Bolan shook his head. "It's in the city," he insisted.
The crew of the helicopter shared Bolan's doubts. Two of t
he hang gliders were nearing the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century palazzi that rose straight from the water at the entrance to the Grand Canal, when the chopper opened fire on the third.
A spurt of flame exploded from the helicopter's right-hand pod, a streak of white against the blue sky, and a 2.75-inch heat-seeking rocket arrowed toward the defenseless ultralight. The pilot didn't even see it coming. The harnessed fugitive, dangling in the webbing below, windmilled his arms frantically as the missile zeroed in on the tiny engine.
A blinding white flash momentarily dimmed the early-morning sunlight, and a ball of orange fire daubed with brown boiled over the lagoon. Dark fragments trailing spirals of smoke arced through the air, and part of the wing canopy, still blazing, hissed into the water. The remaining hang gliders were out of sight before another missile could be launched.
"Are we going to make it?" Brognola asked, glancing at the creaming bow waves of the patrol boats a quarter of a mile astern and at the other chopper soaring above the sandbanks.
"We're going to have a damned good try!" Bolan returned.
The engine howled, the deck shuddered beneath their feet and the stem of the launch rose high out of the water as he hurled them toward the great waterway looping through the city.
22
The assault on the island of Murano that sprung the jailed prisoners was as daring — and in its way as simple — as the aerial operation that spirited them back to Venice.
The problem facing the Mafia planners was simple, too: how did they rescue three hardmen from an island courtroom bristling with guards when the place was surrounded by heavily armed reinforcements and both air and sea approaches to the isle were totally blocked?
The Milan-based mafiosi and their Camorra friends in Naples had decided that they had to lay a false trail to lure away the air and sea cover. Then they had to neutralize the people in the courtroom and eliminate the reinforcements. The hardmen could walk into the open air free and be picked up.
But how could they neutralize the courtroom without affecting the prisoners? And how could they lay enough firepower on to block the opposition when the approaches were being policed?
They had to have an accomplice inside the courtroom of course, and they had to put the bite on someone. Phase Two was no more than a matter of tactics. Those things could always be arranged.
The bite was put on an attorney — one of the prosecution lawyers, ironically enough — on account of certain irregularities concerning clients' money held in escrow, and certain photographs that linked the attorney intimately with the son of a high court judge.
The court was neutralized by a lethal nerve gas pumped into the room through a sabotaged radiator in the steam heating system. The gas, developed by chemical warfare experts and stolen from a secret biological research station in Lombardy, was a less virulent derivative of Tabun. It oxidized rapidly in the open air and was rendered harmless in less than fifteen minutes — but by that time its deadly work was done.
All the attorney had to do was twirl the wheel on the doctored radiator that allowed the gas to escape, and then whisk four lightweight gas masks from his briefcase. Three masks were to be tossed over the armored glass partition to the prisoners; the fourth was for himself.
It was left to him to find an explanation of how he came to be the sole survivor, although there would, of course, be no witnesses to explain what had actually happened.
The signal for the assault on police and carabinieri outside the courtroom was the detonation of three stun grenades lobbed into the seminary to put the reinforcements out of action.
The mobsters who opened fire had been on the island since before dawn. Off-loaded from the Iranian tanker on inflatable rubber rafts, they had landed on the spit between Punta Sabbioni and the Treporta Bridge, carried the rafts across to the lagoon and paddled between two of the islands to Murano. Too low on the water to register on a radar screen, with no heat-producing engines to print an IR signature, they had landed under cover of the fog and stolen away to await the signal to attack.
The battle was short and fierce. By the time the three hang gliders winged in from the ocean to pick the escaped prisoners off the ramparts, only the commendatore and two of his men were left alive, and all of them were wounded. Four surviving mafiosi left their automatic arms, grenade launchers and mortars on the quayside, pushed off one of the rafts and headed for Torcelio in the northern sector of the lagoon. The last act of the last man aboard was to put a bullet through the head of the attorney. "No witnesses," the capo who had organized the escape had said, "means no witnesses."
* * *
Baracco stood in the stern of a gondola, dressed as a traditional gondolier. With one hand he held on to a striped mooring post that projected from the water by the door of a house on one of the narrowest canals in Venice. The gondola was high-prowed with a curtained center section, an eighteenth-century replica designed to attract tourists.
The canal ran behind the city's famous clock tower and crossed the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge; then it twisted between older, poorer buildings, eventually leading into the Grand Canal again opposite the railroad station.
And at the station, waiting to be loaded onto a baggage car, were three laundry hampers similar to the one he had used to smuggle Mack Bolan's unconscious body out of the Grand Hotel Terminus in The Hague. The hampers were consigned to Mestre, and each one was large enough to accommodate one escaped Red Brigades prisoner.
Baracco stole the obligatory glance at his watch. They should be climbing into the harness below the ultralights just about now — Cristoforo Zanussi, the brains behind the Bologna railroad station massacre, Giuseppe Ognano, the muscle man, and Alex Delrenzio, who had gunned down three United Nations diplomats in Rome.
The Corsican listened, his head tilted to one side. Was that, very distantly over the lapping of water and the hum of the city, the rumble of distant gunfire?
He stooped to pick up the gondola pole with his free hand. The canal was perfect. There were no promenades on either side: the tall houses with their stained stucco and rotting brick facades rose straight from the gray-green water; no footbridges arched over the surface, and there were no picturesque squares full of rubbernecking tourists to break the monotony of those towering walls. The waterway could have been designed to baffle pursuers. Throughout its sinuous length there was never more than an eighty-yard reach without a corner, and most of the deeply recessed windows above were barred.
Baracco nodded his satisfaction. He always could pick them. He let go of the hitching post and began to pole the gondola toward the stone staircase where his clients were due to arrive.
A sharp double explosion cut through the air. He didn't know it, but there was going to be one empty hamper making the rail trip to Mestre. Ognano, stronger but slower than the others, had paid the price of a fumble with the harness that had caused his hang glider pilot to lag behind his companions.
Baracco frowned. He looked up at the narrow strip of sky above the canal. No sunlight penetrated these canyon depths, but the sheets, shirts and underwear hanging from laundry racks that projected from windows on the upper floors were bright against the blue.
There was no doubt about it now: he could hear the rasp of ultralight engines. He poled the gondola more powerfully ahead.
* * *
"They landed them on a roof!" The two hang gliders appeared from behind the domes of San Marco — without their passengers. The launch was two hundred yards away on the Grand Canal, and Bolan sent it surging forward between the river traffic.
Gondoliers and the pilots of water taxis shouted abuse. A pleasure boat loaded with sightseers veered dangerously near the bank as the wash from the powerboat rolled forcefully out to slap against the worn stone walls. In the center of the canal a bargeman standing in the stern of a heavily loaded sail-freighter lost his balance and shook an angry fist.
Brognola was scanning a large-scale map of the city waterways. "They must have put them
down somewhere between San Zaccaria and the Querini Stampalia Palace." He snatched the transceiver from the padded seat. "Police headquarters is less than two blocks away, across the water from the Campo San Lorenzo. There's a network of narrow streets around there. I'll tell them to throw a cordon around the whole area and call up those choppers."
"Baracco's a specialist at avoiding cordons," Bolan said. "There's also a network of very narrow canals, and several derelict blocks that are either condemned or waiting to be restored. My guess is that the terrorists have been lowered to the roof of one of those, with Baracco waiting below with some kind of transport — I'd say a boat."
Brognola was speaking rapidly into the mike, checking out tactics with the carabinieri liaison office that had been set up. "They'll be under cover by the time the choppers are positioned overhead," the Executioner called from the wheel. "Tell them to question every last person in the streets. People always look up at low-flying aircraft, especially offbeat ones like those hang gliders. Someone must have seen those guys put down."
It was 350 yards from the Querini Stampalia Palace to the Rialto Bridge. For Bolan's big cruiser — obliged to follow the course of the Grand Canal on its huge loop through the city — the distance was more than two thousand. To the observers in the two choppers hovering above the city center it was no contest. Contradictory police messages crackled through their earphones — the fugitives had been seen on the roof of an abandoned palazzo; they had climbed down a stairway into a canal; they were trapped on the "leads" between the domes of San Marco; they had been sighted by the Colleoni statue a quarter of a mile to the north. But it was impossible for them to distinguish two escaped prisoners and a would-be rescuer among the antlike thousands crowding the squares, bridges and promenades below; impractical to separate one boat from the hundreds waterborne between the canalside spires and colonnades. They were unable to chart the progress of the race — the launch zigzagging at full speed between the craft jamming the water; the phony gondolier desperately poling the short distance that remained to the Grand Canal, in the hope of crossing it before the pursuit closed in.
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