A squad of police was gesticulating on the Rialto Bridge. The radio confirmed the presence of the fugitives on a stairway above an extra-narrow canal. Someone reported a vintage gondola with a curtained center section in a similar canal. The choppers had come down to within fifty feet of the rubberneckers thronging the Riva del Ferro quayside.
Bolan and Brognola saw it at the same time: one gondola among many, but the only one with a curtained pavilion. And the only one propelled by a stocky man with wide shoulders and a prominent jaw.
The craft was three-fourths of the way across the Grand Canal, weaving skillfully among the small vessels dawdling near the bridge. Bolan wrestled with the wheel, feeding the engine brief bursts of power to jockey the cruiser nearer the narrow opening — little more than a water-filled alley — for which Baracco was clearly heading. But he was too late. The gondola glided out of sight while he was still fifty yards away.
Bolan raced for the opening, throttling back and throwing the engine into reverse at the last moment as he saw that the alley was too narrow to take the cruiser's broad beam. The bow crunched against stone piles at the entrance to the canal.
"Tie her up!" the Executioner called. "Brief the choppers and wait for me here."
Springing over the low glass screen, he ran to the stem and dived into the polluted waters of the canal. He was wearing his blacksuit and the H&K G-11 assault rifle was slung over his back. The weapon, with its smooth, sealed, plastic casing, was completely waterproof. The tiny 4.7 mm slugs that it fired were set into solid blocks of propellant, with no empty shells to be cleared or ejected.
Bolan's crawl arrowed him through the water after the slow-moving gondola.
Because of its ornamentation, the replica was heavy and sluggish. Plunging in the pole with redoubled energy, Baracco looked back at his pursuer, his features twisted into a snarl of hate. Was he never to be rid of this son of a bitch?
Bolan was forty yards behind now, and gaining, his muscular frame cleaving the water with scarcely a splash. His arms scythed through the surface as cleanly as the titanium screws of the launch.
Baracco was in a quandary. His mini-Uzi was slung over one shoulder, but although it was small enough to be fired with one hand, he needed both hands to punt the gondola. And if he once lost his way... well, he might not waste the blacksuited bastard with his first burst. Plus the damned helicopters kept passing and repassing the thin strip of sky above. Plus there was a good eight or nine hundred yards to go before he made the Grand Canal again opposite the railroad station. Cursing, he called out to the two Red Brigades terrorists hidden behind the curtains.
Delrenzio's swarthy face appeared in the gap as one of the drapes was edged back. "I thought you told us not to show..."
"Forget it," Baracco rasped, thrusting the pole with all his force. "I didn't expect they'd be so smart — or onto us so quick. I didn't figure on this bastard behind us and I didn't think I'd need to risk bringing guns for you people. But here..." he plucked a Beretta automatic from a holster beneath his jacket and tossed it to the terrorist "...kill him. Then maybe we can start making time to the damned station."
"I thought you were the one who was paid to be smart," Delrenzio growled. But he sighted the gun two-handed and fired.
The reports were loud in the narrow space between the high stone walls, two 3-shot bursts. But the gondola was rocking as Baracco heaved it forward; a head-on target almost totally submerged wasn't the easiest thing to hit, especially when it twisted and moved fast in the water.
Slugs smacked into the surface in front of Bolan's face and whipped small spurts of spray from the ripples on either side of him. He sensed a slight jar as part of the assault rifle's plastic casing was smashed away, but he was untouched. Swiftly the warrior changed direction and swam behind a flight of stone steps that led to a brassbound oak door four feet above the canal.
He dragged himself from the water and lay along the ancient smooth-worn stones with his elbows resting on the platform in front of the door. The Heckler & Koch was unslung, with the butt pressed to his shoulder. He squinted through the optical sight incorporated in the carrying handle above the gun's pistol grip, and his forefinger tightened around the trigger.
Bolan shot very carefully. He didn't want Baracco dead... yet. There were still too many things to find out. He aimed for the hull of the gondola, just below the waterline. The craft wouldn't sink, that was for sure, but he could punch in enough holes to let in water and slow it down.
The Heckler & Koch G-11 was capable of firing 3-round bursts at a rate of two thousand rounds per minute, each ninety-millisecond trio clearing the muzzle before the recoil began. The Executioner ripped out four bursts.
Baracco shouted with fury as wood splintered by his feet and water began to well into the gondola. Curses from inside the curtained pavilion testified that Bolan's groups had been artfully spaced. Delrenzio poked the Beretta through the curtains again, and the weapon chugged out another burst. But Bolan had already ducked behind the top step, and the kilistream only chipped away stone.
It was then, perhaps for the first time since he had started his getaway business, that Baracco lost his cool. Suddenly it was all too much for him, the dice were loaded, and he panicked.
He ran the gondola in to another flight of steps on the far side of the canal and leaped ashore. "Come on! Move your asses," he shouted at the terrorists. "We'll make it quicker and safer on dry land."
"What do you mean, dry land?" Zanussi grated. "There's God knows how many canals between here and..."
"I know a way across the rooftops. There's an arch over one of the canals, high up. Then a bridge. And a backup boat." The Corsican ran across a courtyard at the top of the steps and led the way along a twisting lane that curved around the rear of a church.
Bolan slung the G-11, dived into the water again and swam to the second flight of stairs. On the top step he looked back to the entrance to the canal. The cruiser was moored, and Hal Brognola stood on the foredeck ahead of the screen, shading his eyes with one hand as he stared down the narrow waterway. The gondola had swung out from the steps and was drifting slowly backward toward the Grand Canal.
Bolan waved to the Fed and plunged across the courtyard in pursuit of the fugitives. If Brognola used the radio, there should be cops all over the area within minutes. He could already hear sirens in the distance.
Beyond the church was a rubble-strewn vacant lot where an old building had been demolished. Only the steel girders that formed the skeleton of a new structure had been erected. A cement mixer, several truckloads of cement and a stack of lumber had been delivered, but no construction crew was working the site.
The three fugitives were swarming up the tubular scaffolding that covered two sides of the five-story girdered frame. Shielded by the metal crisscross, Baracco and his clients were poor targets for a man with a small-caliber rifle. Determined not to waste time — for he could see that it was an easy jump from the top girders to an adjacent building — Bolan raced to an open-sided service elevator on the far side of the lot.
Gunshots reverberated from girder to girder as he flung himself down behind the grillwork of the elevator gates. From somewhere above, Baracco had opened fire with the Uzi. A ricochet whined off the counterweight and splatted against a quarter-inch steel stanchion.
Bolan rose to his knees and reached for the control panel. When he thumbed the button, the pulleys and cables remained stationary — the electrical supply had been disconnected.
Two heavier reports from Delrenzio's Beretta rang out as the warrior ran for the scaffolding at right angles to the complex the gunners were climbing. He leaped for the lowest tubular crosspiece and pulled himself up.
Bolan used all his tigerish strength in a supreme effort to overhaul Baracco and the terrorists before they made it to the plank walkway that circled the block above the fifth floor. But he was still six feet below the fourth level when he heard their footsteps clatter on the boards.
; Baracco shouted something and one of the terrorists replied, but Bolan couldn't make out the words. They vanished over the crumbling balustrade that topped the facade of the old house adjoining the site.
Above the warrior's head an H-section girder that would one day support the building's floor slanted diagonally out to join the scaffold wall Baracco and his companions had been scaling. Bolan reckoned it was a quicker way to close in on them than continuing vertically to the walkway. He dragged himself up, sat astride the ironwork and began to work himself out over the fifty-foot drop.
He was less than halfway over when Delrenzio's head and shoulders appeared above the balustrade. The Beretta in the terrorist's right hand spit fire. Sighting through the close-meshed network of steel, it was tough drawing a bead, but Bolan knew he would be a sitting duck once the gunner maneuvered himself into a position where his sightline was unobstructed. None of the slugs in the first burst made it as far as the crosspiece girder, but there were plenty more in the magazine...
Marooned on his six-inch steel strut with nothing but space between him and the ground, Bolan did the only thing he could do: he drew up on one knee, then the other, pushed himself upright and ran.
His feet were still slippery from the weed-slimed canal, but he sprinted for the far wall of scaffolding. Lungs pumping, eyes staring — and refusing to look down — legs pistoning, he hurled himself along the narrow girder.
Delrenzio fired two more single shots. One whistled past the Executioner's head; the other slammed against the girder and jarred it when Bolan was no more than a yard from his goal. The slight shock was enough to make his foot slip just as he placed his weight on it. For a dizzying moment he overbalanced and hung in midair, then his out flung arm hit the scaffolding tubes, his hands clenched around smooth steel, and he dropped to the full stretch of his arms with a shock that jolted the breath from his body. By the time he made it up to the walkway and crossed to the balustrade, Baracco and the two Italians were nowhere to be seen.
On the far side of the stone barrier he found himself in an unreal landscape of tiled slopes, chimney pots, television aerial, and laundry drying on wooden frames. Here and there the rectangular bulk of an elevator housing lent a touch of modernity, but the great domes of San Marco and the bell towers of more than fifteen churches within a radius of a quarter mile emphasized the antiquity of the fabled city.
There were many houses crowded around the construction site, and Bolan was suddenly aware of the interest his private war was provoking. Over the sound of music from a dozen radios he heard shouts and cries. Men were gesticulating on flowered balconies. Somewhere a woman was screaming. He unslung the G-11 and advanced cautiously.
Between two chimneys he saw the blue of the lagoon... and a sudden shadow that fell across the slates between them — a bulky shadow with a short, stubby projection that slanted his way. Bolan flung himself to the slope as Baracco's mini-Uzi ripped a deadly 9 mm hail his way. Stone splinters fountained from the balustrade and cracked the slates. Bolan fired a short burst from the assault rifle, but the Corsican had already pulled back behind the stack: the slugs only stained the sky with a cloud of pulverized brick dust.
Scrambling to his feet, the Executioner felt the sodden blacksuit chill against his skin as the rotor wash from one of the choppers swirled through the laundry lines. The machine roared down to hover above the roof.
A rope ladder swung below the open hatch at one side of the bubble, with a carabinieri gunner wearing a bulletproof vest clinging to the lower rungs. A harsh voice shouted something unintelligible through a bullhorn.
From behind an elevator housing fifty yards away, Bolan saw a wild eyed, bearded figure — Zanussi, the terrorist who was unarmed — dash for the far side of the roof and gather himself for the six-foot leap that would carry him over an alley and down to the coping surmounting the facade of a building with a lower roofline.
The helicopter sank farther, and the man clinging to the ladder gestured with his gun. Zanussi panicked and jumped before he was ready. He made the sandstone coping, but his weight wasn't far enough forward. Feeling himself about to topple backward, he made a desperate grab for the open window of a dormer projecting from the steeply shingled roof next door. His fingers clenched around the frame, but the wood was cracked and rotten. Glass flashed in the sunlight as the window disintegrated, and he dropped with a wild cry into the void.
A woman in a flowered housecoat ran to the window, her mouth open in astonishment. She leaned out and looked down, one hand flying up to stifle a scream when she saw the terrorist's broken body crumpled across the edge of a stone basin in a fountain. Water spilled from the basin, staining the flagstones of a small patio red.
Bolan was standing between two lines of drying sheets. The crack of Delrenzio's Beretta was simultaneous with the three holes that appeared in a quilted bedcover within inches of the warrior's head. He dropped to one knee and swung around in time to see the Italian himself drop out of sight behind an improvised barrier that had been erected to protect a cracked skylight from the wind.
That was Delrenzio's mistake. The barrier was made of tin roofing material, a strip of corrugated iron popped up between a chimney, and a small stack of lumber. The Heckler & Koch G-11 caseless assault rifle was capable of punching its high-velocity, small-caliber rounds through a steel helmet at a distance of five hundred yards. That made the terrorist's cover about as useful as the sheets hanging on the line above Bolan.
The Executioner hosed a stream of death up, down and across the corrugated strip, emptying the rifle's magazine in a single lethal burst. For a moment the roar of the shots and the clangor of tortured metal drowned out the rotors of the second chopper, which was now hovering above the building.
There were no more shots from the Beretta.
Bolan pushed himself upright and walked over to the skylight. Behind the drilled metal sheet, Delrenzio had been torn almost in two by Bolan's skullbusters. Thin slivers of splintered bone pricked whitely through a mess of steaming organs in the center of a great fan of blood already congealing in the sun.
The choppers had landed two men. "Good work," one praised. "The state should be grateful. The treasury will be saved the expense of feeding these bastards for thirty years."
"It's the third man I'm interested in," Bolan stated.
"He was blown apart by one of our rockets," the other cop replied.
"Not him. The one with the Uzi."
They looked at each other and shook their heads. "We got the three terrorists," the first man said. "I didn't see anyone else up here."
Bolan cursed. He ran to the edge of the roof and looked out across the alley beyond the patio. There was no sign of Baracco, but he saw another skylight propped open on a roof two houses away. Beyond the fountain where Zanussi's body lay, Byzantine arches flanked a paved passage that led to a street market bright with vegetables, fruit and flowers.
Bolan swore again. He jerked open the cracked skylight near the remains of Delrenzio and dropped into the building below. Fifteen minutes later he was standing at the corner of the Grand Canal where he had left Brognola and the powerboat. The cruiser, efficiently hitched, was nudging the mooring post as it bobbed on the swell. The gondola, which had been drifting back down the narrow waterway, had disappeared. The Fed was nowhere to be seen, but the windshield of the boat was shattered, and three bright medallions of blood stained the polished timbers of the foredeck.
23
Mack Bolan played his hunches. That was an integral part of his character. They were of course a minor part of his mental armory. "But," an intelligence analyst had once written, compiling a dossier on the warrior, "these hunches are no wild, off-the-cuff guesses: they are based on the instinctive interpretation of data stored and retrieved without conscious effort by that most sophisticated of computers — the mind of a natural fighter."
It was a hunch — programmed perhaps by his continuing belief that the whole Venetian operation was at odds with Baracco
's normal MO — that put him back on the Corsican's track. And that of the missing Brognola.
"The powerboat and the chopper were decoys," he told Gudrun back at the hotel. "They couldn't be used again, and there was no sign of any others. You can't make a 350-mile flight across the ocean in three ultralights. And yet the final destination was Albania. How was your ex planning to get his clients there?"
"You tell me."
"Same as he always did," Bolan said. "By road — through Trieste and Yugoslavia, using a series of old trucks and jalopies that nobody would look at twice. That's the way I figure it."
"Yes, but there are no vehicles in Venice. It's not..."
"Okay, okay," the Executioner cut in. "But he was stuck with Venice because that's where his clients were escaping from. So what's he going to do once they make contact? Transfer them to the mainland, where he can pick up one of his old wrecks, ASAP. Right? And what's the quickest — the only — way of making that crossing when half the army and all of the police force are looking for you?"
Gudrun frowned and shook her head. "It would be too slow and too risky by boat," she said, her red hair swinging from side to side like a tawny bell. "So it has to be the causeway, straight across by road or rail."
"Got it. So the police are going to have to earn their bread with a little more legwork."
The police weren't keen. They'd been working since dawn, some of them all night. Honor was saved and three Red Brigades thugs were dead. They weren't concerned about locating a supposed Corsican whom none of them had seen — and what charge could you bring against a man who'd tried to help escaping prisoners... and failed?
As well, they weren't sure of the Executioner's exact status. It was the federal agent from Washington who'd had the letters of introduction. Now if he was to ask them for further help...
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