Sunscream

9

The raid on the hideout used by gangsters from the Balestre mob was planned and carried out like a military operation, although there were no more than sixteen men involved. They were divided into two teams of three and a ten-man main force.

Jean-Paul had insisted that the attack be restricted to soldiers from his own Marseilles family. Ancarani, the Unione Corse boss from Ajaccio, had offered a large contingent from his own gang, but Jean-Paul had refused. Blood ties, cross-relationships and loyalties were so intermixed on the island, he pointed out, that the risk of a leak, warning Balestre’s people, would be high if Corsicans were included. Ancarani was angry, but he had to admit it was true.

Another reason — unstated, but one that Mack Bolan privately shared — was the fact that Jean-Paul was not one hundred percent certain of Ancarani’s reliability. Not because he was in sympathy with the Balestre mob, but because he seemed the least impressed of any of the capos by the idea of the KGB tie-up. And a refusal to go along with this had, after all, provoked the death of Balestre himself.

The assault was timed for midnight. Smiler and his two shadows had arrived at Bastia by air from Marseilles earlier in the evening. They were to make their way to the rendezvous in a rented car.

Jean-Paul, Bolan and a seven-foot ex-wrestler named Delacroix were making the trip by air, too... as jumpers, thanks to a bribed helicopter pilot who was supposed to be night-testing a new chopper slated for the Nice-Monaco shuttle. The others were coming by sea.

Corsica, lying eighty miles south of the Gulf of Genoa, is shaped like a fist, with the index finger pointing north at the mainland. The index, protected by five-hundred-foot cliffs, is the twenty-two-mile promontory of Cap Corse. Bastia is located at the base of that finger; Calvi — the nearest town to the Balestre hideout — is on the other side of the fist.

Between Calvi and the Cap stretches a treeless, uninhabited strip of granite known as the Desert of Agriates. It was here that the seaborne mafiosi were to land.

Inland from this bleak wilderness, Jean-Miguel Balestre had inherited several hundred acres of pasture that began on the far side of the Calvi-Bastia highway and rose toward the foothills of the mountains in the interior.

Bolan was told that the property was a sheep farm. Balestre had made his headquarters in a ranch-style frame house surrounded by dipping pens, a shearing barn and outbuildings. These were spacious enough to accommodate the few workers who tended the flock and the much larger number of villains who looked after his real business.

This had involved the smuggling of liquor, arms and stolen cigarette consignments from North Africa to France and Italy; the distribution of cocaine, heroin and hashish from the Middle East; and the supply to brothels in Ajaccio, Naples and Marseilles of young Arab girls bought in the slave markets of Somali and the Sudan.

Daringly, for there was an elite parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion quartered in Calvi, the team had used desolate creeks on the deserted Agriates coast for the landing of this merchandise. Much of it was then forwarded to its ultimate destination by supposed tourists using commercial sea, land and air services, and in the false bottom of a high-speed diesel cruiser berthed at St. Florent, between the Agriates and Cap Corse.

For many months the operation had infuriated Ancarani and the other Unione Corse leaders based on Ajaccio, Bastia, Propriano and Bonifacio. If Balestre’s murder had not been contracted because of his opposition to the KGB-Mafia alliance, it was likely, the Executioner had learned, that he would have been liquidated, anyway, because of the inroads his operation was making on their own business.

Balestre’s team, working with him ever since he started on his own after the death of his father and a Camorra apprenticeship, were satisfied with the rackets they already controlled. And raking in more money would not compensate them for the loss of autonomy they would suffer as a small unit in a worldwide association.

“Bastards are smart, too,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in the chopper. “Disciplined, crack shots and at least two good enough to lead if the boss is taken out. That pair will be your piece of the action.”

“Where did Balestre get them?” Bolan asked.

“Young kids mostly. Trained them himself after he’d worked with the Camorra. Unemployment. Poor background. No prospects on the island.”

And now, Bolan thought, even fewer prospects, because many of them soon would die. It bugged him like hell, that poverty notwithstanding, they lacked an ethic, a code for living that distinguished between good and bad.

But that was no view he could air in front of the underworld boss from the hottest town in France.

Bolan was wearing his combat blacksuit with the Beretta leathered beneath his left arm, two ammunition belts and half a dozen HE grenades clipped to the webbing of his chute harness. A Husqvarna 561 Express hunting rifle with an IR nightscope leaned against the empty seat beside him.

Jean-Paul, the white cap of hair hidden beneath a black knitted balaclava, was armed with an Uzi SMG and a French police-style Browning automatic. The ex-wrestler carried an Ingram MAC-10, but there was an African knobkerrie — a long-shaft nightstick with a weighted spherical head — looped to his belt. With his huge frame, abnormal height and a shaven, battler’s skull, he looked formidable.

“You’re the expert marksman, Sondermann.” The gang leader returned to the subject as the chopper overflew the massive red granite fortress that dominated the huddled shingles of the old town and the pale crescent of Calvi’s pleasure beach. “I want you to keep back and, like I say, pick off individual targets as I call them out. You’d be risking your life at close quarters if the boys storm the ranch house. We’ll find you a good concealed position, not too far away. And only use the pistol if you’re threatened, okay?”

“It’s your money,” Bolan said. “I’m only here to carry out orders.”

The Frenchman shot him a sideways glance. “Just as long as that’s understood,” he said.

An enigmatic character, Bolan reflected. Their conversation so far had been restricted to banalities: confirmation of details already agreed upon with the real Sondermann through an intermediary; arrangements for where Bolan was to stay; when and where they met; how he was to be paid and what weapons he would need. Yet it was clear that the mafioso from Marseilles was a cut above the other mobsters in the south. He was cultured, intelligent rather than just smart, determined, ruthless... and lacking altogether the crudeness that characterized the others.

Bolan had not been consulted when the raid was planned. He was interested to see how it went. And how J-P reacted under fire.

The moon was already high in the cloudless sky. Bright light shone from the wrinkled surface of the sea.

The coastline slid away behind them as the chopper whined over citrus groves and the geometrical patterns of vineyards. For one of the few times in his life, Bolan was going into battle not giving a damn whether his side won or lost. He viewed the raid totally objectively: morally, each side was as bad as the other. Win or lose, his only concern was the chance that he might find some situation arising out of the operation that could be used to weaken the solidarity of the mobs who intended to combine under KGB rule.

A thin white ribbon of road curled among the patches of cultivation below them. Jean-Paul looked through the plexiglas at a mass of mountains to their right. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Down to two thousand and we jump,” he said.

Bolan rose from his seat and slung on the Husqvarna. There was no question of serial jumping after a hookup here: it was simply slide back the panel of the blister and go.

J-P was pointing to the moonlit countryside below. “The thick stand of trees enclosed by that big loop in the highway,” he called over the helicopter’s rotor whine. “The southern fringe, away from the road in ten minutes. Okay?”

Bolan nodded. He pulled the panel aside and jumped.

At that height it was necessary to pull the ripcord at once. Even then he was left little time to take in the landscape floating up with increasing speed to meet him. He was already well below the jagged crests of the mountains.

To his left the bleak expanse of the Desert of Agriates lay bone-white beneath the night sky. Somewhere among these granite outcrops was Jean-Paul’s ten-man squad — who would have been offloaded from a trawler and landed in rubber dinghies two hours earlier. Somewhere down there those guys were humping heavy machine guns, Kalashnikovs, grenade launchers and certain other pieces of equipment over the stony ground toward the ranch.

Smiler and his men would already be in place. Bolan gazed upward. There was no sign of the other two canopies against the stars. The droning clatter of the chopper died away in the direction of Cap Corse and the ocean.

He maneuvered the shrouds, spilling air from the chute. The wood was rushing toward him. He could no longer see the highway. Beyond a slope of meadow, half-hidden among another grove of trees, the pale light gleamed on the roofs of what he guessed was the Balestre farm.

Bolan skimmed the upper branches of pines, flexed his knees and made a perfect landing fifty feet from the edge of the wood. He was an experienced jumper, remaining upright and rocksteady as the canopy bellied down behind him and collapsed in the long grass. One minute later his harness undipped, the grenades transferred to the belt of his blacksuit, it was rolled up and hidden behind a bush under the trees.

He unslung the Husqvarna and waited. He neither heard nor saw the other two come down, but it seemed almost at once that his ears detected the low whistle, repeated three times, that he was waiting for. He replied — only once — and made his way toward the sound.

Delacroix and his leader were together two hundred yards nearer the ranch.

“Smiler, Raoul and Bertrand will have worked their way into the woods behind the ranch,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in a low voice. “They’ll hold their fire until the rats begin to leave the ship.

“Come again?”

“We want the Balestre gang — there may be between twenty and thirty of them in there — to think the frontal attack by the guys crossing the road from the desert, the detail advancing from the sea, is the only one. If they’re getting the worst of it, they’ll most likely run out the back and head for the interior.”

“And into Smiler and his boys?”

“Right. If they figure they have a chance, they may fan out in front of the buildings and try a counterattack.”

“And that’s where we three start to operate?”

“You got it. In that case, they’d probably try some kind of encircling move from in back, as well.”

Bolan nodded. “Toward Smiler. Okay. Seems simple and sensible. They won’t have patrols out? Or dogs?”

“Uh-uh. They don’t know that we know they aimed to be part of last night’s scene. If the punk Smiler wasted was telling the truth, they’ll all be in there working on a plan where they hit us.”

“No electrified fences? Trip wires? Booby traps? No sensors or closed-circuit TV?” Bolan sounded surprised.

The Frenchman laughed. “Hell, no. You can do that kind of thing on a private island like La Rocaille. But this is right by a public highway. There may be sensors nearer the house, but we want them to know we’re coming when we’re that close, anyway!”

They were skirting the edge of the wood, the night breeze warm on their faces. Jean-Paul led the way through a gap in a stonewall, and suddenly the details of the ranch buildings were visible in the radiance of the moon.

The place lay at the top of a long slope of pastureland that was broken nearer the house by a complex of pens and sheep-dip troughs spread below the largest of the barns. A line of trees on the far side of the slope marked the course of the driveway that curled up from the road.

The gang leader stopped near a ramshackle shepherd’s cabin with a tumbledown gap where the door had been and a gaping window that looked toward the ranch.

“You stay here,” J-P said. “The range to the stoop is exactly 360 yards — we worked it out on a large-scale survey map. The average slope of the meadow is six degrees.” He added further instructions, and then departed into the night with the silent ex-wrestler.

Bolan moved across to the glassless window and looked up at the house. Louvered shutters were closed all the way around the two stories. The moonlight was too bright to see if there were lights shining inside. It was very quiet in the abandoned hut.

The Husqvarna was propped against the rough stone wall. He picked up the rifle and hefted it experimentally. It was a beautifully crafted weapon — a .358 Magnum, with a two-foot blued steel barrel, a rosewood stock and a corrugated butt plate. It weighed, Bolan estimated, just under eight pounds.

He had chosen it because his briefing demanded a large-bore rifle, dead accurate at long ranges, with a heavy, high-velocity bullet and colossal stopping power. Some of the hoods had laughed at the gun because it was bolt-action with only a 3-shot magazine.

Bolan had retorted that it might be the slowest of all the repeaters for follow-up shots, but it was also the most reliable, since the marksman commanded the climb on each shot... and anyway, with the nightscope he had fitted, follow-up shots were rarely necessary!

The scope was a Balvar X5 by Bausch and Lomb. This, and a breech pressure of more than twenty tons p.s.i. and a superhigh muzzle velocity that gave the 150-grain slugs an almost flat trajectory, were enough to guarantee a gunner of Bolan’s expertise better than an eighty percent chance of a first-time hit whenever the cross-hairs centered on a target.

He brushed dust and small fragments of stone and mortar from the flat sill of the window frame and leaned his elbows on it. With the butt pressed into his right shoulder, the big gun was heavy but beautifully balanced. Bolan wrapped his fingers around the pistol grip, hit a full magazine into the chamber, and flicked the bolt. The safety was already set in the firing position.

The scope’s rubber eyeguard caressed his cheek and brow. Through the magnifying IR lens he could see the moonsplashed facade of the ranch-house. Testing the strength of the first-pressure prelim spring, he curled his right index around the trigger. The cross hairs were centered on the entrance doors.

In the distance a whistle shrilled.

It was echoed, louder, from closer at hand. Three piercing blasts. The seaborn detail had arrived; Jean-Paul had instructed them to go ahead.

Inside the house a dog barked. The sound was at once drowned by a staccato burst of automatic fire from the far side of the meadow. Bolan could see the muzzle-flashes winking in the shadow beneath the trees lining the driveway.

A shutter banged open and was slammed shut. Voices shouted inside the building. Glass shattered and fell, and a single ricochet screeched off the stone facing to the frame house.

The attackers unleashed another volley. It was repeated from the edge of the wood fifty yards to Bolan’s left. And now there was an answering fire from the ranch. Flame stabbed the dark on the shadowed side of the building. Louvers were smashed aside, and guns sprouted from the shutters. Revolvers, automatic rifles and at least one SMG were aiming at the muzzle-flashes of the assault force.

Mack Bolan waited in the cool semidarkness of the shepherd’s hut, watching the action.

The men from the sea were advancing up the driveway under cover of bushes that grew beneath the trees. The leading guns were within a hundred yards of the house now. Fire from the defenders redoubled: there were a lot of guys shooting from all windows on both floors, although automatic fire was shredding some of the wooden structures and making the position untenable. Bolan heard a high-pitched scream of agony, but whether it came from inside or outside he couldn’t say.

Suddenly the seaborne detail’s heavy machine gun opened up, the hard stammer of the belt-fed rounds punctuating the lighter crackle of machine pistols and SMGs. Beside it there was an abrupt glare, an express-train shriek and a streak of fire arrowing toward the ranch. Bolan knew the sound. Someone had fired a rocket grenade from a Russian RPG-7 launcher.

The shoulder-borne, bazooka style weapon fired a five-pound missile with directional fins that opened as soon as the grenade left the launch tube and the rocket booster ignited.

There was a thunderclap report as the deadly projectile hit the ranch-house stoop, burst on impact and ripped open the heavy double doors. Moments later a second grenade exploded in the hallway beyond. In the momentary flash of the detonation, Bolan saw masonry fall and splintered wood spin through the air, trailing spirals of smoke.

It was then that the attackers played their trump card. Somehow, from somewhere, Jean-Paul had acquired an ex-warplane 20 mm cannon and a single feed belt alternating high-explosive, armor-piercing and incendiary shells. Mounted on a modified tripod, the weapon roared to life, stitching the night with tracers that homed in on the gap blasted by the RPG-7.

The HE shells laid waste the front half of the house’s lower floor. The armor-piercers, unsuited to this kind of assault, sheared through furniture, interior walls and anything else in their path until inertia and gravity overcame their speed and they dropped to burst somewhere in the back.

But the incendiaries did the real damage. A score of them, burning on impact for one-seventieth of a second at 2,000 degrees Celsius, screamed through the hole and ripped into the pine walls and wooden staircase at the rear of the hallway, setting them alight instantly.

Within seconds, flames, fanned by the draft sweeping in through the gap, were seething upward to set the floor of the upper story ablaze.

But the remnants of the Balestre gang were not without their own surprises. Indoors, men were yelling, but from one of the outbuildings at the side of the ranch an ancient four-wheel farm wagon loaded with bales of hay trundled into the moonlight. There were flames here, too, small ones that licked the tinder-dry bales... and spread… and increased... and then boiled skyward until the whole load had become a blazing torch.

A torch that was accurately directed down the slope, increasing speed as it hurtled with murderous aim at the place where the machine gun, the RPG-7 and the cannon were hidden; a torch that was piloted by the four hoods with SMGs who had started it rolling and were now racing behind it, sheltered by the flames and shooting as they ran.

Firing from the hip, they scored some hits among the attackers, but it was the blazing wagon that wreaked havoc.

Crashing into the undergrowth where the gun crews were hidden, it tipped over onto its side, spilling the burning fodder right and left. At once the sun-dried brushwood flared up; desiccated leaves on the lower branches of the trees caught fire; a ring of fire forty yards in diameter consumed the fringe of the wood and swelled outward across the grass of the pasture.

Ammunition buried beneath the flaming hay discharged like exploding firecrackers. A rocket grenade, ignited by the fierce heat, streaked a fiery trail into the sky and then self-destructed.

Once again Bolan savored the paradox of his situation, ready to fire but owing allegiance to neither side. If the Marseilles mob won, and he had helped them do it, this would obviously consolidate his position as Sondermann, the hit specialist, and prove his “loyalty” to J-P. If the defenders gained, on the other hand, it would surely widen the rift among the various Mafia factions and make the KGB tie-up less likely... which after all was the reason for Bolan’s Sondermann masquerade in the first place.

From the branches of a tree behind the shack, Bolan heard the ripping-calico snarl of the gang boss’s Uzi. Two of the gunmen stumbled and fell, jerking uncontrollably as their lifeblood soaked the moonlit grass.

And then the towering figure of Delacroix emerged from the fire, his singed hair smoking, tiny flames still traversing the shoulders of his flak jacket. Oblivious to the danger, the giant started swinging his knobkerrie, crushing the skull of one of the remaining hoods and dealing the last such a terrible blow on the temple that he dropped like a stone.

Delacroix beat out the flames with his bare hands and called in a hoarse voice, “Okay now, boss? Let ’em have it?” It was the first time Bolan had heard him speak.

“Go ahead,” Jean-Paul’s voice replied from the branches above.

The giant shouted an order. Immediately a dazzling beam of light sliced through the night from a spotlight located halfway along the driveway, illuminating every detail of the burning house.

The place was rapidly becoming an inferno. The whole upper floor was ablaze, and flames roared skyward beneath a pillar of black smoke that streamed out and up through the blasted porch.

Dark man shapes were running frantically right and left. Other figures were motionless on the stoop, one slumped head-downward over the sill of a shattered window.

“Sondermann!” Jean-Paul yelled. “Fat boy and the man in red! Coming out now!”

Staring through the nightscope, Bolan saw a group of defenders, firing what looked like Skorpion machine pistols, swarm through the charred doorway and fling themselves behind a stone balustrade that confined a terrace below the entrance steps.

They would be invisible to the attackers along the driveway and at the edge of the wood, Bolan figured, but from where he was he could see the heads and torsoes of several men.

Among them was a rugged type wearing a red nylon parka. Near him crouched a short, fat guy with massive shoulders and thick arms. The two of them seemed to have taken charge of the survivors: the man in red was waving his arms at men out of sight in the yard between the house and the shearing barn; Fat Boy was looking over his shoulder, shouting to someone in back of the house, where gunfire from Smiler and his companions now added to the pandemonium.

Bolan squinted again through the sight until the cross hairs settled between the shoulder blades of the guy in the parka. He held his breath.

Concentrated.

Squeezed the trigger.

The report of the big gun was deafening. His shoulder throbbed from the massive recoil. The bullet hurled the man in red across the terrace and tossed him like a rag-doll on the steps.

Bolan snicked the Husqvarna’s bolt and swung the barrel slowly sideways until Fat Boy was in the center of the scope. The cross hairs sank until the junction was steadied above his shoulders on the column of his throat.

Bolan fired again. The 150-grain slug slammed into the guy’s neck and almost tore his head from his body. He catapulted back against the stoop post and slid lifeless to the ground.

“Okay!” Jean-Paul shouted. “In for the kill now!”

Someone near the house fired a long burst from an SMG, and the searchlight faded to orange and died in an explosion of smashed glass. Now there were men running toward the house from all sides, zigzagging among the long pasture grass, firing as they came. Half a dozen spilled from the bushes lining the driveway; a couple more gave them covering fire; a survivor of the RPG-7 crew ran with Delacroix; Smiler and his companions raced around the corner of the barn. The sound of gunfire rose to a crescendo.

Jean-Paul dropped from his command post in the tree and followed. Bolan, obeying instructions, left the Husqvarna in the ruined cabin and brought up the rear. He unleathered the 93-R deathbringer, flipped off the safety catch and ran.

He was level with the sheep pens, dodging between the troughs when the hidden gunman fired.

He must have been lying low, waiting for the chance to bring someone down from behind. Bolan was less than ten yards away when the gunner triggered a 3-shot burst.

The Executioner owed his life to a tussock of coarse sheep grass, which tripped him the instant the killer fired.

He pitched forward as the triple report rang in his ears, momentarily deafening him. He felt the wind of the heavy slugs stir the hair on top of his head... and at the same time a searing pain across his left shoulder.

Bolan hit the ground, rolled over and lay still.

The Beretta, knocked from his grasp by the unexpectedness of the attack, had spun out of reach. If he moved, the hidden gunman could hardly miss a second time. He used the oldest trick in the trade: he played possum.

Lying on his back at an unnatural angle, the injured arm doubled beneath him, he allowed his jaw to drop, breathing as shallowly as possible and forcing his eyes to remain open. He hoped that any movement he made would be mistaken for a trick of the red light flickering from the burning house.

Ten seconds passed... twenty... half a minute.

Slowly a bulky silhouette rose into view from behind a fallen tree to one side of the pens. Cautiously, his gun close to the hip to minimize recoil, he advanced on Bolan’s supine figure.

Bolan held his breath, hearing the shots and the shouting at the ranch as if from a great distance. He knew that he was very near death. If the gunman was not satisfied...

The man stood over him, staring down.

Would he fire a final shot, just to make sure?

Inserting a toe beneath the Executioner’s waist, he began levering the body over onto its face. So it was to be the neck.

Pain streaked through Bolan as he moved, but he kept on rolling, fast, and the shot was deflected as he went for the guy’s wrist. Stooping over a man he thought was dead or dying, the killer was off balance and unprepared, and it was not too difficult for Bolan to take him by surprise.

The hood was big and strong. But a man in fear of imminent death is desperate. Bolan worked on his attacker with the strength of a crazy man. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he hurled the two of them across five yards of rough earth and bent the mafiosi backward over one of the troughs.

The shallow wooden trench was still half full of the chemical-smelling dip. Bolan locked his good arm around the guy’s neck and forced him around. Then the Executioner struggled with all his strength until the man’s head was down and his face touched the disinfectant.

His head went under the surface of the tar water and a shrill bubbling sounded over the distant gunfire. His legs kicked convulsively and he scrabbled to bring up his gun arm, but Bolan felt for the thumb and bent it back until it snapped and the killer screamed under the liquid.

Bolan increased the pressure on the neck lock, freeing the hand on his wounded arm to feel for the weapon. The hardman’s fingers were nerveless and Bolan pried them away, jerking the gun clear. It splashed into another trough behind them.

The hood bucked violently, kicking his legs and twisting his body so that he fell entirely into the trough.

The killer’s arms flailed uselessly, his hands clawed for a purchase, his breath gargled in his tortured throat as the fluid in the trough foamed and splashed.

Bolan wrenched his neck again, remorselessly forcing his nose and mouth beneath the surface, holding the man there until the bubbling deathscream subsided and the body went limp.

He left the corpse in the trough and hurried, still panting, up to the house. The flames were dying; the fight was over.

Jean-Paul was sitting on the steps. He looked up as the Executioner approached. “Good shooting,” he said. “Once those two were down it was just a matter of time.”

Bolan grinned. It was the first time since Vietnam that he had fought a battle under another’s orders... and the first battle in which he had fired only three shots.

“How many did we lose?” Bolan asked Jean-Paul.

“Three under that blazing hay wagon. Two when we rushed the house. One on the driveway. And there’s two wounded, one badly.”

“So counting those two, if Smiler junks the car, that still leaves ten to make it across the Agriates, take the dinghies and get back to the trawler?”

“That’s right,” the gang boss agreed cheerfully. “It all works out fine in the end, you see.”

“There’s one more question,” Bolan said, rising to his feet. “You said this was a sheep farm. Where are the sheep? And the shepherds?”

Jean-Paul laughed. “Summer pastures. They take them up into the mountains for three months while the weather’s hot. I wouldn’t want to run the risk of this kind of operation if there were animals around that could get hurt.”