Sunscream

14

In his office high above the lake in Geneva, Colonel Mathieu Telder took three pieces of paper from a brown manila envelope and spread them on his desk between the two telephones.

The papers were news clippings. He read them slowly, a slight smile on his lips.

The first was the longest. It had been clipped from the main news page of Nice-Matin and gave details of the daring tunnel raid and subsequent shootout on the hillside west of La Turbie.

Telder put the cutting aside and picked up the second. It was much shorter. Taken from an inside page of that day’s France-Soir, the two-inch news item recounted a bombing incident that wrecked a bar frequented by criminals in the dock quarter of Toulon the previous night. The attack, Telder read, was thought to be a “reprisal” for the hijack that followed the daring $500,000 “tunnel holdup” with the loss of ten lives. The story stated that three men had been killed and a fourth was missing after the explosion, which was thought to have been caused by a suitcase bomb left under a table in the bar.

The dead were all associates of the late Pasquale Lombardo.

Telder glanced only briefly at the third clipping. He was already familiar with the contents: he had himself supplied the background information for the story. It reported that police frogmen dragging a flooded chalk pit outside Marseilles had recovered the body of Maitre Gaspard Delpeche, a well-known defense attorney who had been missing for some days. The lawyer had been shot once in the nape of the neck.

Readers were reminded that a second prominent citizen of the city, the columnist Georges Dassin, was also missing and must be presumed dead; that the body of the popular television personality, Michel Lasalle, had been found floating in the ocean; and that a high official of Interpol, a guest of the city government, had only a few days before been cold-bloodedly gunned down at a public meeting.

A spokesman for the police described the recent increase in violent crime in the area as “intolerable and wholly unacceptable.”

Telder grinned. He hoped the subjects of the story appreciated its irony in the safety of their reluctant hideouts.

Bolan was doing all right, anyway. The forces of law and order along the coast would have at least to make a pretense of acting... and that would add to the instability of the Mafia situation whether or not they actually got around to busting anyone.

The Interpol chief nodded in satisfaction now as he thought of the Executioner. The American warrior was risking everything — his life — to thwart the planned coalition between the KGB and the Mafia in Europe. So far the soldier’s strategy — whatever it was — seemed to be working fine, and Telder had a feeling that before the Executioner was finished, the Red menace would cover the land. The threat would not be from the Russians, however. Instead it would be spilled Mafia blood.