Sunscream (11 page)

Bolan cut the fuel feed on all four roaring engines as J-P and the giant hauled the security men from the cab and searched them for keys.

A second semi was now broadsided across the roadway to block the tunnel’s entrance. The driver, followed by Smiler and his two thugs, all of them wearing gas masks and balaclavas, ran to the stalled security vehicle. They were joined a moment later by the hood who had blocked the exit.

Everything now depended on timing. And it was here that Jean-Paul’s organizational genius paid off. Instead of loading their haul into cars and attempting a getaway on one of the expressway lanes, instead of leaving the tunnel and making it across the countryside to another road, he had come up with a smarter idea.

The sabotaged fans in the roof, when they were working, pushed the extracted air up into shafts that penetrated the hillside and emerged into the open air 150 feet above the twin tunnels.

These shafts were thirty-six inches wide.

J-P stood now beneath one of them and blew three shrill blasts on a police whistle.

Seconds later a steel loader’s hook on the end of a rope appeared at the shaft mouth in the tunnel roof. Rapidly it was lowered to the roadway. Working feverishly, Smiler and the other mobsters ransacked the armored truck, ranging boxes stuffed with bills and the heavy cylindrical coin sacks beneath the vent.

A second rope snaked down from the next shaft, fifty yards nearer the exit. Bolan, Raoul and Delacroix humped sacks and boxes over. Quickly now the hooks, loaded with three sacks at a time, rose upward and were swallowed in the darkness of the ventilator shafts, reappeared for another load, and then vanished again. On the hillside above two garage pickups equipped with powered hoists worked overtime.

It was a smart idea, all right. Bolan wondered with an inward grin just how much it had been influenced by his own ruse — as he had explained it to his boss — to get rid of the Husqvarna after the Telder “assassination.”

Except for a few sacks of coins, the contents of the armored truck had been hoisted by the time the men in the tunnel heard the distant bray of police sirens. Bolan guessed that the guards, before the gas got to them, would have had time to send out an SOS.

“Okay, guys, that’s it,” Jean-Paul ordered at once. “We’ll take the ropes ourselves now, two at a time.”

While the first four men ran for the ropes, the others ranged the unconscious cops and guards alongside the plundered truck.

Jean-Paul had been insistent that on this deal there were to be no deaths. Mobsters and bribed police along the coast had reached an understanding. The mafiosi, handing out their hush money, could continue their protection rackets, the organization of cathouses and gambling joints, the distribution of drugs, the sacking of bank strong rooms — on condition.

There were to be no public shootouts; no hostage situations; no killings.

It would be exactly what the do-gooders wanted: The kind of thing that would bring the law down on the mafiosi at a critical time.

The shooting came later. And there were deaths, too.

Each of the two ropes came down twice; each time, four men were hoisted up the shafts to the surface. Bolan and J-P were on the final delivery — and already the horns of impatient drivers blocked outside the tunnel entrance were being drowned by the clamor of approaching sirens.

The air shafts emerged on a barren slope of sun drenched mountainside. The four mobsters manning the pickups had already begun stacking the haul around the hoists projecting over the open shafts. Now they maneuvered the vehicles back toward the dirt trail that had led them there. The path, made some years ago when the expressway was engineered, was too stony and overgrown for the cars that would carry away the hijackers and their spoils: these were parked on a loop of country road far below.

So were the attackers’ vehicles — two jeeps and a 4x4 vehicle. But these were hidden behind a row of oaks, and the first the Marseilles gang knew of the assault was the burst of SMG fire that shattered the windshield of one of the pickups. Behind the crumbling glass the driver and Bertrand, who had climbed in beside him, were cut almost in two, leaving a pattern of blood and brains smeared over the back of the cab.

For a second the mobsters were stunned into immobility. Then the chatter of the gun was repeated from behind the pickup, followed at once by a volley of revolver shots.

Confusion.

Two more of the outside men were cut down, a third fell screaming with a slug through his kneecap, and the driver of the semi blocking the tunnel exit was hurled into the bushes by a heavy-caliber revolver bullet that slammed into his shoulder. Glass shattered and fell from the perforated cab of the second pickup.

“My God, it’s a hijack!” Jean-Paul shouted. “Take cover and kill the bastards!” He flung himself behind a low shelf of rock, a Walther PPK in his right hand.

For the moment there was no target, visible or audible. The first volley seemed to have come from a group of boulders 150 yards uphill, on the far side of the trail, the second from below a limestone outcrop some way to the west. But so far no gunners had showed themselves.

Smiler, Delacroix and the others dived behind bushes, into a ditch beside the trail, among the rocks that littered the slope. Bolan was already prone beneath the first pickup, his Beretta in one hand, the M-16, its launcher discarded, by his side. He had been expecting the attack.

He was responsible for it.

The fact that the woolen helmets, covering the whole head except for the eyes, would make them unrecognizable had given him the idea.

All he had to do was arrange an anonymous tip off to Lombardo, the Toulon capo, that a bunch of free lance amateurs planned to ambush the armored convoy on Mafia territory.

And add the details of the getaway plan.

Fury at the interlopers’ insolence — and greed at the thought of easy money — would surely provoke a hijack situation, Bolan figured.

So there would be an ambush. And whether or not Jean-Paul recognized the attackers while they were making their play, he would never believe that Lombardo had been ignorant of the original holdup teams’ identity.

Open hostility, then, between these two leaders and their gangs.

As to who won the fight and made it with the loot... hell, it didn’t really matter. Bitterness and suspicion would remain on both sides. With luck, some of the other teams, hearing of the screwup, would
take
sides and worsen the rift. It would do okay, Bolan thought, for a start....

He stared out from his hiding place. Jean-Paul’s men were lightly armed. Because of his no-deaths ruling and the fact that they were using gas canisters, they had not expected any opposition; they hadn’t expected any firefight at all.

The Marseilles mafioso’s meager arsenal would not go far against a team armed with SMGs — Bolan figured them for Ingrams or Heckler & Kock MP-5s.

The element of surprise, too, had a demoralizing effect. Some of the guys from the tunnel hadn’t even removed their gas masks when the first shots blasted off.

Jean-Paul himself was doing his damnedest. Three rounds cracked out from the Walther as a distant figure materialized between the boulders. There was a cry of pain. A stone rattled down the hillside toward the ambushed mobsters.

And then abruptly there was firing from all sides, a storm of lead hosing the pickups and the area around the ventilator shafts where the Marseilles soldiers were trapped.

The attackers were advancing now — silhouettes briefly seen as they leaped from bush to bush or wormed their way forward between the limestone outcrops.

Bolan snappped off a 3-round burst from the Beretta and saw a hoodlum fall. Slugs hailed against the steel sides of the pickup above the Executioner’s head and stung rock splinters from the stony ground.

Smiler and Raoul blazed away from behind the other vehicle. Jean-Paul half rose and drilled a killer who tried to sprint down the trail. But the Marseilles chief was too slow ducking back behind his protecting shelf: a single shot from a rifle downhill dropped him. The Walther fell from nerveless fingers and skated into the center of the track.

But the marksman, making his hit, had himself been exposed. Bolan mowed him down with the M-16.

The big guy moved quickly then. On elbows and knees, the 93-R still in his right hand, he shuffled to the rock shelf were J-P had fallen.

The gang leader lay with outflung arms, the balaclava dark with blood. Bolan pulled off the woolen helmet. The white cap of hair was bloodied on one side. But Bolan soon discovered that the wound was not serious: the slug had merely creased the skull above the right ear, knocking the gang boss out cold.

“Is it bad?” the hoarse voice of Delacroix asked from the grasses on the far side of the trail.

“Uh-uh,” Bolan replied. “He’s out of the fight for now. But apart from a headache he’ll be okay tomorrow and on his feet yelling blue murder the day after.”

And not just because of the head wound, the Executioner thought. Then he glanced over the edge of the rock as he sensed movement. There were figures advancing again beyond the pickups. Sudden shapes, dark-clothed in the glaring light, flitting across the gaps between five-foot-high clumps of wild grass.

If they were moving, they couldn’t fire accurately, Bolan reckoned. He made a quick dash back to the pickup, grabbed the M-16 and fired two bursts as the enemy came closer still and death hummed past on all sides.

He scored with both bursts. One of the ambushers fell, clawing at his shredded throat. Another gunman was carried backward by the impact of the high-velocity 5.56mm deathbringers that let the daylight into his rib cage.

The rate of firing increased once more. The air was shrill with ricochets.

Only five men remained now of the original Marseilles dozen: Smiler, Raoul, Delacroix, Bolan and the driver of the second semi.

“We’re gonna have to pull out,” Smiler growled from his foxhole nearby. “There must be ten of the bastards still on their feet.”

Bolan said nothing. It was all the same to him. He’d play the cards the way they were dealt. The vital thing now was that the attackers should be recognized as Lombardo men. Maybe he should tempt one to come close enough...

He didn’t have to.

Smiler was shouting orders. There was a flurry of activity, punctuated by bursts of rapid fire. The guy with the smashed kneecap was screaming again.

The remaining driver had gained the cab of the second pickup. Crouched below the dashboard, he had started the engine. Now, still huddled below the door line, he stomped the pedal and sent the pickup careering over the rough ground toward the trail.

Raoul and Smiler, unleashing all they had at the bushes concealing the attackers, leaped aboard on the near side and crammed into the cab. Delacroix, momentarily shielded by the bulk of the pickup, dragged the body of his unconscious leader from the ground, bundled him over the tailgate and then dived in after him as the vehicle gathered speed.

Bolan was left to race after the open truck, grab the side rails and vault over on his own. He had the impression that they would have left him behind if they could.

He lay panting beside the hoist, draped, like Delacroix and J-P, over the boxes and sacks that had already been loaded when the attackers opened fire. They were getting away with maybe one-third of the amount hauled up through the ventilator, leaving the bulk of the booty for Lombardo’s thugs.

If they got away.

The pickup shuddered and screamed as lead thunked into the bodywork, caromed off the chassis and ribboned three of the tires.

The guy with the busted arm emerged from behind a boulder and lurched toward them, shouting something unintelligible over the crackle of fire. Bolan and Delacroix slammed in fresh clips and tried to cover him, but the wounded hood never had a chance. He fell on his knees in the dust, choking out his lifeblood as the words ended in a bubbling scream, riddled by slugs from half a dozen guns.

The driver was sitting upright now, wrestling with the wheel, struggling to keep the pickup — limping and screeching on three steel rims — running straight along the track.

“What about Louis?” the driver asked as they slalomed toward the rock where the soldier with the shattered knee was lying.

“Fuck him,” Smiler grated. “Get us the hell outta here.”

It was ten boneshaking yards later that the nickel dropped. Passing the slope of rock where Bolan had downed a man, Raoul glanced below the gory trail to where the dead hood’s face stared sightlessly up from the grasses. “Jeez!” he gasped. “That’s... it can’t be, but — hell, that’s
Lombardo
there!”

“No way,” Smiler snapped. “How could it be?”

“ It is. I swear it. But what the
hell
?..“

Perhaps fortunately it was Smiler himself who witnessed the clincher. The driver swung wide to skate past the body of the man Jean-Paul had dropped in the middle of the trail. And now it was Smiler’s turn to stare.

“Sonovabitch,” he breathed again, “you’re goddamn right: that’s Michel Calvet, one of Lombardo’s soldiers!” He shook his head and then muttered between clenched teeth: “The double crossing bastards!”

On the whole, Bolan thought as they clattered away and then down toward the parked automobiles and safety, not a bad afternoon’s work...

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.