Sunscream

5

She wore a flame-colored scarf tucked into the neck of her jacket. Her eyes were green and her hair fell softly about her shoulders. She must be, Bolan guessed, all of twenty-two years old.

She was cautious, never allowing the Executioner close enough to make any attempt to disarm her as she maneuvered him back outside the terrace and then into a small summer house on the far side of the pool.

“Sit on that bench,” she said, indicating a seat opposite her, “and tell me why you are eavesdropping on my father’s friends.” She switched on a pink-shaded light in the wooden roof of the building. “Why you swam out here to eavesdrop on my father’s friends,” she amended, seeing the wet suit and helmet Bolan wore.

Seeing her in the half light of the gallery, he decided she was even prettier than he had thought. “Who is your father?” he countered.

“The owner of the property, of course.” She sounded irritated. “I am Coralie Sanguinetti.”

“Some friends,” Bolan said. He pulled off the rubber helmet. The girl took in the rakish lines of his face, the blue eyes and determined jaw.

“I have to admit you’re better looking,” she said with the hint of a smile.

He was unclipping the neoprene satchel from his belt. “You don’t mind,” he began.

“Yes, I do mind.” The voice was suddenly hard. “Drop that on the floor — kick it over to me...” She broke off, picking up the satchel. “Just as I thought!”

Keeping her eyes on the Executioner, the little gun steady in her hand, Coralie Sanguinetti unclasped the neoprene container. “A 93-R!” she said. “That’s quite a... Wait a minute!” She stared at him again. “I know that face,” she said. “I’ve seen photos. You’re J-P’s new trigger man, Sondermann. From Hamburg. Am I right?”

“Kurt Sondermann,” Bolan said gravely. “At your service, Fraulein.”

“You don’t sound German.” Coralie was puzzled. “You don’t have much of an accent.”

“In my line of business, it’s best to be as inconspicuous as possible. Know what I mean?”

She was still looking doubtful. “But if you are working for Jean-Paul, why do you have to spy on him? Why not come to the front door and say who you are?”

Bolan had an answer ready in case he was discovered by the hoods themselves. “Put the gun away and I’ll tell you,” he said.

She hesitated, then thumbed the automatic to safety and thrust it into the pocket of her jacket. But she didn’t return the Beretta to Bolan; it lay on the bench within easy reach of her right hand.

Smart, he thought. “Some gorillas tried to stop me from getting here. I’d been tailed. I was set up at a gas station on the expressway. I had to shoot my way out.”

She remained unconvinced. “So?”

“So I heard there was some kind of a meet on this island. But I’d never heard of your father. I didn’t know Jean-Paul was a buddy of his. I figured I’d make it here secretly and find out the score. If it was the same team that tried to waste me, there’d be hell to pay. But as soon as I saw who it was, I knew I had it wrong. I was leaving when you got the drop on me.”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“Guys from an outfit run by someone called Scotto.”

“Oh,” she said contemptuously. “Scotto. Anyway, he’s dead now.”

“So they tell me. But they didn’t tell the guys trying to liquidate me; they didn’t know the boss was long gone, so I was nearly dead, too. How come Scotto was killed, anyway?”

“My father told me that J-P and his friends were going into business with... some foreigners. And it seems Scotto and some others didn’t like the idea. They wanted to stay the way they were. They were going to get together and...” She shook her head. “I don’t really know.”

Bolan knew. The pieces were falling into place. Those four murdered mobsters had to be the splinter group. Yeah, that figured. Scotto, Ralfini and the others had been knocked off because they refused to join the ball game. But the KGB offer was contingent on the Mafia chiefs forming a single organization. If four of them were thinking maybe of forming a rival stay-as-you-are group, the Russian offer would be withdrawn.

That explained why the contracts had been put out in a hurry. Any signs of dissension had to be dealt with before Antonin arrived. So that the racketeers could present a front that at least looked united, with no opposition visible.

Bolan frowned. It followed that the mafiosi gathered together in Sanguinetti’s house had already made up their minds in principle. Details apart, the KGB-Mafia partnership was on.

He was about to ask the girl what part her father was playing in the scheme when they were both startled by a fusillade from the far side of the house.

Bolan grabbed the Beretta. It sounded like heavy-caliber stuff — 9 mm machine pistols or SMGs firing something weightier than the standard 5.56 mm Armalite rounds. “Come on,” he rasped. “It sounds as if someone’s trying to shoot their way into the party.”

Followed by the girl, he sped around the pool and skirted the eastern wing of the house. As he had thought, the gunfire — punctuated now by deeper, heavier reports from single-shot revolvers and the crackle of automatic weapons wielded by the defenders — was concentrated at the head of the stairway leading up from the landing stage.

Reflected light from a gallery bordering the landward side of the house dimly illuminated a paved slope that ran up from the entrance gates to a porch sheltering the main doors. Two formless dark shapes on the porch steps marked the spot where a couple of patrolling guards had fallen. A third lay with outflung arms a few yards from the stair-head gates.

The attackers appeared to be entrenched on the rock steps immediately behind these, on a ledge that traversed the cliff off to one side, and on an open platform of the cable car.

The livid orange and yellow hellfire flashes stabbing the gloom lanced out from these three places and from shrubbery and a storehouse on the far side of the porch. Evidently there were still enough guards alive to prevent the invaders from rushing the house.

But they were too well protected to be picked off one by one, and for anyone trying to get to close quarters, that lethal slope of flagstones meant instant annihilation.

Bolan pulled the girl down behind a row of flowers on the cliff top. Below, in the wan light of a moon that had just risen, he could see the bodies of the two power-launch crewmen stretched out on the stone jetty. A rubber dinghy bobbing beside the white boat showed how the attackers had arrived at the island.

Bolan whispered. “Who are these dudes? Are they gunning for your old man or for his friends?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Coralie murmured. He saw a white blur of her face turn toward him in the milky light. “Better, perhaps. For all I know...” She left the sentence unfinished.

Bolan was amused. “You think I was some kind of advance guard for these creeps? Think again. I’m on your side — yours and that of those other thugs your dad is hosting.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Damn right,” Bolan said easily, as he began to move.

On elbows and knees, he pushed his way between the flowers. On the cliff edge he leaned over and gazed toward the stairway.

The killers perched on the rock traverse were invisible in deep shadow now. Beyond them an overhang in the limestone face hid the men on the steps and at the top of the cable. When he and the girl arrived, Bolan had briefly seen bejeweled women huddled behind the windows under the narrow roof of the gallery. Now the lights had all been extinguished, and he could hear the angry voices of the Mafia bosses shouting orders.

The gunfire, which had died away to a sporadic exchange of single shots, broke out again on both sides with renewed fury. Tongues of flame stabbed the darkness from windows on the upper floors of the building. The hidden guards, who seemed to have received reinforcements, redoubled their rate of fire. The attackers raked the facade of the house with a murderous hail of lead.

“Try this way!” Bolan yelled during a lull in the clamor. There was a shout of surprise from the traverse. At once the muzzle-flashes swung his way. Slugs splatted against the rock, ripped through the flower bed and stung his face with stone chips.

Bolan was ready with the Beretta, the folded-down foregrip snug in his left hand. Aiming above the flashes, he let off four 3-shot bursts, the big auto-loader bucking in his hands.

Somebody screamed and fell. A second figure leaned out into the moonlight and dropped, cartwheeling dizzily down the limestone face.

“Enough?” Bolan called to the girl. “Or do you want to make it a trio?”

“Okay, I believe you.” She sounded angry again.

Glass shattered on one of the upper stories and a heavy object crashed to the floor inside the house. A woman screamed and a man yelled an obscenity.

Jean-Paul’s less hysterical voice called from farther along the facade, “Can’t you flush out these bastards, Smiler? There’s a meeting we have to finish here.”

“Not as long as they stay where they are, J-P,” a hoarse voice replied from the storehouse. “We’d be mowed down if we tried to make it across the terrace. You can see...”

The guard called Smiler bit off his words. A fresh volley of automatic fire sounded in the distance, on the eastern side of the house. A second wave of attackers was advancing up the slope from the inlet where Bolan had landed.

The Executioner was still stretched out along the lip of the cliff, the barrel of the Beretta now supported on his left forearm. The gun stuttered the moment the marksmen on the traverse opened up in the direction of Smiler’s voice.

An SMG spewed a load of hate uselessly at the sky as another of the killers slammed down on his back, his clothes stitched to his ribs with 9 mm thread.

But now they had located Bolan’s position. He was forced to retreat to the other side of a hedge as a savage storm of shot pulverized the limestone where he had been lying.

Shouts now from the far side of the house. The gunfire — swelled by shooting from the defenders — increased in rapidity and volume. “Your guys in back will be swamped and the dudes on this side taken in the rear and wiped out if we can’t waste the squad at the stair head,” Bolan said fiercely to Coralie. “That storehouse over there — what’s in it?”

“Oh, mostly junk, gardening stuff, chemicals,” she said.

“Do they store fuel there?”

“Yes. There’s a tank of diesel for the launch, and I think...”

“Diesel’s no good. Is there any gasoline?”

“Not much, but we keep a couple of cans for the outboard.”

“Can you get to the store? Through the house, without crossing the line of fire? Good. Get me a couple of bottles. Knock off the necks, throw out the wine and replace it with gasoline. Bring them back to me with two corks and some newspaper. Make it fast.”

For a moment the girl stared at him uncomprehendingly, then she turned obediently and ran into the dark.

While she was away, Bolan reloaded the Beretta. He was acting in support of the Mafia. That was a laugh. He had spent years of his life successfully eliminating most of that sinister brotherhood in his own country! The soldier shrugged. The thought had occurred to him in the gallery above the conference room that from there a single magazine fired from an Ingram MAC-11, or even a couple of clips from his own Beretta, could wipe out the whole damned roomful and save the world from a new threat. But a massacre of unsuspecting men, even evil ones, was not the Executioner’s way.

And again he had wondered, in a brief moment of self-doubt when he and the girl had arrived at the cliff top, if perhaps her suspicions ought not to have been well-founded, if he shouldn’t have been helping the attackers rather than the defenders.

Yeah, but that was a question of the devil you knew. And he didn’t know who the thugs storming the fortress were. Could be they were even worse than the mafiosi meeting here. There was no way of knowing; better to wait and find out the full extent of the plan masterminded by Antonin before confronting the guys who were to carry it out.

And it was better, for the moment, to remain Kurt Sondermann, arrived on the scene in time to help his new boss.

The girl was beside him again. She held two bottles filled with pinkish fluid and an old newspaper. Bolan sniffed the aromatic odor of gasoline. “I didn’t have to break the necks,” Coralie said. “There was a stack of empties in the store.”

“Good. Did you get the corks?”

She nodded, fishing them out of her jacket pocket and handing them over. Bolan took a bottle, twisted a double sheet of newspaper into a funnel shape, wedged a cork down into the narrowest part and stoppered the bottle so that the paper stood above the neck like a fan. He took a lighter from the neoprene sack.

“What are you doing?” Coralie whispered.

“Wait and see.”

He prepared the second bottle in the same way and handed it to the girl.

Using one hand as a shield against the breeze, Bolan flicked the lighter and set fire to the paper above his bottle. He gave the lighter to Coralie. “Light yours and hand it to me as soon as I’ve tossed mine,” he told her.

Blue flames curled the edge of the paper and then the whole mass flared brightly. Boland drew back his arm and hurled the bottle high into the air, toward the stairway.

The girl lit the paper above the second bottle.

Bolan stood. Firing two-handed, he tracked the flaming missile and ripped off a 3-round burst as it began to drop from the sky.

One of the slugs struck home and the bottle exploded. The burning paper ignited gasoline and vapour with a thumping report, showering the hoods on the stone steps with liquid fire.

Bolan reached for the second bottle, lobbed it in a lower trajectory, over the traverse along the cliff. The 93-R chattered again and the bottle disintegrated, igniting the volatile liquid with a dull roar. Once more the night was torn apart with shrieks of pain and panic while the hell-fire rain splashed over the trapped gorillas.

Two of them spiraled flaming into the sea. A third clasped scorched hands to the blistered ruin of his face and yelped like a wounded dog. The others beat vainly at their clothes and rolled against the rock in an attempt to extinguish the terrible fire.

It was the same scene on the stairway: writhing bodies, incandescent clothes and hair, animal howls. The guys on the cable-car platform were luckier. Only two of the five men there had been licked by the blazing gasoline and a couple of their comrades manhandled them on the wooden floor, trying to smother the flames.

The last man was on his feet shouting, firing an SMG blindly toward the house. Bolan raised the Beretta, squinted along the sights in the flickering light and dropped him with the last three rounds in the magazine. He tumbled over the edge of the platform and bounced all the way down the rocky slope to the jetty.

Bolan ran out from behind the flowers, calling to the astonished guards hiding in and around the storehouse, “Come on, you guys: all we have to do now is zap those bastards trying to take us from the other side!”

Four or five men in jeans and dark sweaters emerged from the shadows and followed him as he dashed through the shrubbery. There was a crispness, the decisive tone of the born leader, in the Executioner’s voice that commanded instant respect and obedience.

But one guy — the guard Jean-Paul had addressed as Smiler — was ready to query Bolan’s authority. Smiler came out of the storehouse toting a Smith & Wesson M-76 subgun — a tall, swarthy man with two heavies in tow. “Just a minute, you,” he snarled. “Who the fuck you think you are?”

“Sondermann,” Bolan said, not pausing in his stride.

“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m the guy gives the orders around here — remember that. Where d’you think you get off, orderin’ the boys like some sonovabitch four-star general?”

One of the other men unslung an M-16 from his shoulder. “Aw, hell, Smiler,” he protested, “the dude wasted those punks holed up above the jetty, after all.”

“I don’t care how many creeps he wasted. I’m still the number-one gun in this neighborhood.” He strode after Bolan and tapped him on the shoulder. “You hear me?”

Bolan whirled and seized the front of the hood’s sweater in one steely hand, half lifting the hardman off his feet. “No, you hear me, loudmouth,” he growled. “I work alone and I don’t aim to take nobody’s place. Jean-Paul hired me personally, so I don’t reckon to be bugged by no smartass provincial gorilla, understand?”

He thrust Smiler away with force enough to make him stumble.

Choking with fury, the hood moved his hand involuntarily toward his SMG, but Bolan had already hurried down to join a couple of guards lying behind the rampart of flat stones bordering the sunken garden.

Badmouthing J-P’s number-one enforcer in front of his soldiers would have made Sondermann an enemy, for sure. Good, the Executioner thought. As yet he had no clear plan how he would approach the Mafia-KGB threat. But the more discord he could sow around here the better. If he was unable to conceal his dislike and contempt for carrion like Smiler it could at least provoke some kind of future action. And Bolan was a firm believer in mixing it and waiting to see what happened.

Right now it seemed that the battle for the island was damned near through. Most of the raiding party climbing up from the inlet had already been blown away by guards posted behind the house.

At least he need worry no longer about the body floating in the pool and the guy he had killed on the terrace: the attackers would be blamed for those.

He crouched near one of the guards sheltering behind the stones. The remainder of the invading force seemed to be holed up behind the summerhouse where he had first talked to Coralie Sanguinetti.

“How many d’you reckon?” he asked the man.

“Three or four,” the hood replied. “Maybe a couple more inside the shack. Some of the boys are making it through the plantation...” he nodded toward a clump of trees on the seaward end of the isle “...and take ’em from the rear.”

“We don’t have to wait,” Bolan said. He noticed a grenade hooked to the man’s belt. “Mind if I borrow this?”

“Go ahead,” the hood said. “But you’ll never make it, guy. That cabin’s more’n a hundred yards away. You can’t throw that far on target.”

“I don’t figure on trying,” Bolan said. “Give me covering fire, okay?”

He rose, holding the grenade in his right hand. Then, as the guard and his companions opened fire with a motley collection of shotguns and carbines, he dashed, bent double, through flower beds and rows of dwarf azaleas to dive headfirst into the pool.

He swam underwater to the far end, surfaced and pulled the pin from the grenade.

The gunners behind the summerhouse, who had opened up as soon as he began his run, were raking the patio with automatic fire.

Bolan braved the death hail and climbed the ladder. He flung the grenade with all his force over the shingled roof of the building, judging the throw accurately so that the deadly missile dropped among the raiders taking cover behind it.

The bomb exploded with a shattering roar, a vivid flash that momentarily lit the flowers and shrubs with an unnatural glare. There were no more gunshots.

The instant’s silence that followed was broken by a man screaming. At the same time a heap of dead brushwood and garden refuse ignited by the explosion burst into flame behind the hut. Within seconds the flimsy wooden back wall was ablaze.

Flames shot skyward, fanned by the breeze. The rafters caught. Tiles fell and then the whole roof collapsed.

Two men ran out from the miniholocaust and were shot down at once by the guards. In the gory shambles behind the burning shack, one body still writhed.

“Bring him inside — and keep him alive until he’s talked,” Jean-Paul called from the terrace.

Lights came on all around the house. The gangsters’ women, huddled together, could be seen anxiously peering through the windows. The capo from Marseilles stepped down into the garden and approached Bolan. “It seems we have to offer you a vote of thanks, guy,” he said. “Like twice this same night.”

“Part of the job.” Bolan made his voice gruff. “That’s what you’re paying me for, isn’t it?”

“Paying you?..” Jean-Paul stared at the wet-suited warrior, his brow knitted into a frown. Then suddenly the handsome face cleared. “Sondermann!” he exclaimed. “You’re Kurt Sondermann, right?”

“When I’m not playing with fire!” Bolan said.