Sunscream (3 page)

The guy was suddenly in mid-air, flailing the SMG like a club.

Bolan drew up his knees. As the killer plummetted toward him, the Executioner impacted his heels in the man’s belly and kicked out ferociously.

The guy emitted a yell of astonishment and fear as he flew up over Bolan’s head. While he was airborne, a cartwheeling target against the roaring flames, Bolan raised the Beretta and caressed the trigger.

One of the shots drilled the hood’s shoulder, one screamed into the sky, the third took away the top of the man’s head.

The impact of the 9 mm parabellum spun him sideways and he crashed into the branches behind Bolan.

Still clutching the 93-R, Bolan stood and ran toward the candy store behind the raging fire.

He had to leave fast. A couple of semis and several cars had already pulled up at the entrance to the rest area, and there was a small crowd of rubberneckers advancing toward the flags.

He skirted the raging fire and approached the store. The lights had gone but the structure was intact. Bolan peered over the counter.

The attendant lying there had been shot in the neck. The body of a second man, stripped of its coverall, had been dragged farther back, beneath the soft-drink dispensers. There was nothing Bolan could do for either of them.

He figured his best plan would be to climb the fence sealing off the rest area and strike out cross-country until he came to a highway. It would be easier to find transport — and risk fewer questions — than a return to the expressway.

He was hurrying away from the building when he heard a faint cry over the crackle of the flames.

He looked over his shoulder and saw something moving between him and the fire. He moved closer. It was the man with the shattered ankle. Bolan had assumed he’d been incinerated when the gasoline ignited, but he had managed to drag himself fifty yards beyond the blaze.

The guy was in a bad way. The flesh that showed through gaps in his charred clothing was puffed and blistered with third-degree burns.

As Bolan stooped over him the eyes turned his way and the ruined mouth opened. “Finish it, please,” the injured man croaked.

“Who sent you?” Bolan asked.

“Screw you,” the hood whispered.

Bolan was holding the Beretta in his right hand. He started to releather the weapon.

“No!” the gunman said frantically. “Please... all right, damn you, Scotto sent us.”

“Scotto’s dead,” Bolan said roughly.

“Aren’t we all?” The voice was faint now, showing no curiosity. “We got our orders a week ago. Let you have it someplace between... Lyons and the... coast.”

“Why?”

The eyes looked up pleadingly. Bolan waited, his gun hand arrested halfway to the holster.

“He was... afraid,” the burned man gasped. “He... figured you for... J-P’s answer to... splinter group...”

J-P, Bolan knew, stood for Jean-Paul, the Unione Corse’s big wheel in Marseilles, and the man who had hired Sondermann. If he had a family name it was never used. “What splinter group? Where?” Bolan demanded.

The blackened head rolled from side to side. The hood gave a strangled scream. When next he spoke, his voice was so low that Bolan could barely catch the words.

“Meeting...” he choked. “Tomorrow night... at La R-R-Rocaille...”

The words lapsed into an incoherent mumble punctuated by gasps of agony. Bolan was going to get no more from him.

The face contorted. Froth appeared between the cracked lips.

There was a single bullet left in the Beretta. Bolan pointed the muzzle at the center of the dying man’s forehead and triggered a mercy round.

“Maybe I’m the ultimate optimist,” Mack Bolan had once written in his journal. “I believe my sword hand is guided by thoughts of victory. I command myself to win. Therefore, I have the advantage.”

The advantage, yeah. But too often in his everlasting war, the hellfire warrior had to forge that advantage in the flames of overwhelming disadvantage.

Bolan was no superman. He knew the limits of his abilities. And he also knew that at any moment a stray, indeed a well-placed bullet, could finish him in the hellgrounds. The thought made him frustrated and anxious because he sensed a growing possibility of victory by the dark forces of the world.

Bolan believed that the savages, the evil legions of animal man, should not be allowed to inherit the earth. The Executioner considered their defeat his vocation. He was prepared to sacrifice love, a home life, a normal career, everything to fight those legions, and if possible to halt the advance of evil man so that gentle civilizers would no longer live in fear. And every ounce of his soldier’s resolution was dedicated to that cause.

Learning his deadly skills in the jungles of Vietnam, Bolan had subsequently, in the murderous one-man war that virtually destroyed the Mafia, transferred those skills to the urban jungles of his homeland.

Later, there had been the antiterrorist crusade, fought with covert government approval from Stony Man Farm, a fortress headquarters in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. As Colonel John Phoenix, he had in this phase of his life escalated his efforts into open war with the KGB. And it was this sinister arm of Soviet oppression that had stage-managed the demolition of the Stony Man operation and the frame-up that had made Bolan an outlaw.

It was as a loner, therefore, a supreme warrior who knew that each victory only brought him face-to-face with a new threat, that Bolan had been coopted for the present campaign.

So he understood now why Telder, Chamson and their superiors had chosen him. If the deal went sour for Bolan, they would not be responsible and they’d have nothing to worry about. Because he was an outlaw on just about every continent. If something big was planned and Bolan stopped it... well, they’d simply smile and relax, reap the honors. In any case, Telder and Chamson would come out of it with clean hands.

Okay, if that was the way the cards were dealt, he’d play the hand.

His mandate was to uncover the “something big” that was being planned in the Riviera underworld, to find out what black conspiracy was being hatched in the cold minds of the men running that crime empire.

Before he ventured on the inside, where his movements might not be as free as he wished, he determined to follow up the only lead he had: a few strange words choked from the scorched lips of a dying goon.

A meeting was about to take place. And it was, according to the burned hardman’s last words, important, to be held somewhere called La Rocaille.

Bolan was experiencing a gut reaction that it was important for him to be around when that happened.

Once in Marseilles, Bolan wasted no time. He knew precisely who would give him the information he needed.

He entered a noisy bar on the Canebiere. “La Rocaille?” the swarthy man behind the counter repeated. “Sure. It’s the old Delamour joint, on the coast between here and Cassis.”

Bolan took a cab. La Rocaille was an islet, no more than two hundred yards offshore, below jagged cliffs separating the city from the famous little fishing port. There were a couple of acres of undulating ground above the limestone wall surrounding the islet, and here, sheltered by tall hedges and set in a cypress grove, an extraordinary building had been erected.

It was a huge house, built on several different levels, combining gothic turrets with Oriental domes above a fantasy of Moorish arches and windows.

“Who owns it?” Bolan inquired.

“It was built by Deborah Delamour, the silent screen star of the twenties,” the cabbie said. “After her death, the property remained empty until the mid-sixties. It was bought recently and restored by an industrialist named Sanguinetti.”

“Are visitors allowed?” Bolan asked conversationally.

“Are you kidding?” the cab driver replied. “Sanguinetti’s got guard dogs, closed-circuit TV, electrified fences, you name it.” He gestured across the stretch of calm blue water. “In Delamour’s time, there used to be a suspension bridge, but that’s the only way you can get there now.”

He was indicating a small concrete jetty projecting from the base of the cliff on the landward side of the islet. Steps cut from the rock zigzagged to the top of the limestone face, and there was what looked like a cable car rail, with an open car, rising directly from the jetty.

A white power launch was tied next to the steps, with two burly men wearing blue sailors’ jerseys lounging nearby. Another guard stood by a tall wrought-iron gateway at the top of the stairway. “No beaches on the other side of the island?” Bolan asked.

The taxi driver shook his head. “Sheer cliffs all the way around,” he said.

Bolan glanced right and left. The heat had gone from the sun, but there were still vacationers bronzing themselves on the sandy strip below the road. Kids swam in the shallows, and there were half a dozen windsurfers offshore, waiting for a breeze.

Beyond a line of automobiles parked on a low bluff, he could see striped umbrellas and a beach restaurant at the inner end of a pleasure pier. A thicket of sailboat masts clustered around the wooden piles. “They use that pier?” Bolan asked.

“Uh-uh. They got a regular service of those floating bars...” he nodded toward the launch “...bringing them out, sometimes from the city, mostly from Cassis.”

Bolan nodded, as if dismissing the subject but the whole area intrigued him. Boatloads of people were ferried from Cassis to a heavily guarded property owned by an industrialist, and there was to be an important secret meeting... more than ever Bolan determined to smuggle himself onto that islet. “Okay, let’s go to Cassis now,” he told the driver.

The village was five miles away, around a bend in the cliffs, but to get there the road circled behind some wild rocky slopes. Sanguinetti sure had picked himself an isolated retreat, Bolan reflected.

Bolan paid the cabbie, rented a Volkswagen and drove down to the dockside. From a ship’s chandler store he rented scuba equipment, a waterproof neoprene satchel and a spear gun. Then he drove back toward Marseilles and down to the coastal road, which petered out a few hundred yards beyond the bluff where he had stopped the taxi.

At the end of the road, he concealed the VW behind an immense boulder and returned to the bluff on foot. He changed into the diving suit, strapped on the oxygen tank, drew on helmet and facemask and stowed the Beretta in the satchel. Picking up the flippers and his spear gun, he moved toward the water’s edge.

The night was very warm. The three-quarter moon was not due to silver the cloudless sky for another hour. The sea was calm. Bolan stepped into the flippers and waded in.

Several boats had already chugged out from Cassis to Sanguinetti’s jetty. He could see the riding lights bobbing at the base of the cliff. Voices and laughter drifted across the water, and there was a hint of music from the house above.

Bolan submerged and swam slowly and steadily toward the small island, using a luminous waterproof wrist compass to maintain direction. The sea became progressively colder as he approached the islet. There were deeps along this stretch of coast and the fissured limestone let in many small creeks, one of which he hoped to find on the seaward side of Sanguinetti’s fortress.

Fifteen minutes after he had entered the water, Bolan surfaced. He was west of the property, about thirty yards out from the cliff. There was a swell here that had not been evident from the shore; he could hear the suck of the waves as they lapped against the rocks.

He continued swimming. When the dark mass of the island was between him and the shore, he turned east and struck out on the surface for the limestone face.

He could see no sign of an opening in the sheer rock wall.

Although the tide fall was minimal, a strong current ruled out any close approach to the cliff: if he swam in and tried to locate a foothold from which he could climb to the top, he risked injury on some underwater obstruction or being dashed against one of the jagged outcroppings. Treading water, he allowed the tide to carry him farther toward the east.

When he could see the mainland again, he turned once more and made for the cliffs.

There were two creeks in the eastern face.

From the shore, the farthest was little more than a gash in the limestone. Bolan dismissed it at once: the walls bordering the creek were almost as high as the cliff itself, and in some places they overhung the water.

The second was better. The strata dipped, plunged beneath the surface, leaving a narrow inlet, from whose inner end the rock rose steeply but was not sheer.

Bolan thought he could make the climb. The disadvantage was that he had almost completed a circuit of the island: the creek was shielded from the jetty by a single shoulder of limestone.

He had come too far to turn back. Besides, the shuttle service from Cassis seemed to have stopped. No more guests climbed the stairway or were whisked aloft by the cable car. Only the two burly guards from the launch remained talking there. Bolan would have to take a chance, scaling the slope with as little noise as possible. Fortunately, there was still music and occasional laughter drifting down.

Bolan floated, letting himself be washed into the creek by the waves. At the shallow end he rose cautiously, allowing the seawater to cascade from his wet suit as gently as he could.

Rock climbing in darkness is hazardous at the best of times, and tonight any trace of daylight lingering in the western sky was blocked by the mass of the island itself. He grasped a projection, a layer of harder rock that formed a thin shelf, and started to haul himself up the slope.

It took what seemed an eternity and innumerable teeth-gritting seconds of his determination to make the stealthy ascent. Once or twice small fragments of limestone broke off under the pressure of his fingers or toes and rattled to the water below. Once his foot slipped and he almost fell. But the small sounds of the sea appeared to have covered the noise, for there was no reaction from the far side of the rock shoulder; the voices from the jetty did not pause in their low-toned conversation.

Finally Bolan gained the flat ground at the top of the cliffs. The grotesque mass of the house lay directly ahead, on the far side of some tropical shrubbery. The music was louder now, and there was a dim luminescence reflected from some outside light around a corner of the building.

Waiting, he saw that there were indeed guards patrolling the grounds, but he neither saw nor heard any dogs. If there were sensors installed, the guards either knew to the inch the right path to take between the beams or they were equipped with desensitizer pads, for no alarm was sounded.

Finally, Bolan discarded the flippers that had been slung around his neck, picked up the spear gun and moved silently after one man, following exactly in his tracks.

He was almost at an ornamental terrace when another guy, a bruiser whose height dwarfed Bolan’s own six foot three, stepped out from behind a bank of oleanders and barred his way.

The confrontation, as sudden as it was unexpected, astonished both men equally. The guard, who was wearing a black turtleneck sweater over jeans, was holding a Heckler & Koch 9-6 automatic. Seeing the dark, helmeted figure of the Executioner, squarely in front of him, wet suit still gleaming in the reflected light, he brought up the gun instinctively.

There was no time for Bolan to unfasten the neoprene satchel and whip out the Beretta. Hand-to-hand combat was unthinkable with the gorilla’s finger already curling around the trigger. Bolan was carrying the spear gun at port. He had no time to sight the weapon. At arm’s length he canted up the long, thin launch tube and fired.

A heartbeat before the gunman’s finger squeezed tight, the steel-barbed tip of the harpoon took him in the throat.

Arrowing in with terrible force, the razor-sharp head sliced through the jugular vein, flattened the ridges of the trachea and severed the carotid artery. The barb forced an exit to one side of the topmost cervical vertebra and left the shaft stuck in the gorilla’s savaged neck. He fell, clawing at his throat, and died.

Bolan dragged the body away to the cliff top and dropped it, together with the spear gun, into a crevice.

He turned the corner of the house, the Beretta now in his right hand. He was facing a sunken rock garden. Behind it, light escaped from windows under an arched colonnade. Through the windows he could see women in evening gowns walking back and forth. Apart from a white-coated waiter with a tray of drinks, no men were visible.

Hugging the shadows, Bolan crossed the garden, skirted a wing of the building and found himself on an open balustraded terrace that overlooked an Olympic-size pool. He was halfway across the terrace, threading his way between glass topped tables and lounging chairs, when he heard footsteps crunch on gravel.

He looked swiftly around. No place to hide here. He vaulted the balustrade, crossed a strip of flagstones and lowered himself silently into the shallow end of the pool.

He kept his head just above the surface and now he heard footsteps approaching, halt too near the corner of the pool where he was half submerged.

“Frank?” the guard called in a low voice. “You there?”

There was no reply.

The man shouted again, louder this time.

Bolan’s thoughts were racing. This guard must have a rendezvous... with the gorilla he had harpooned.

Bolan no longer had any compunction. This was no honest millionaire’s summer party. The first guard’s readiness to kill proved that. Bolan rose and reached for the guard’s ankle.

Hearing the swirl of water, the guy swung around. Before his eyes could register in the dark, Bolan’s steely fingers closed around flesh and bone. He heaved. Caught off balance, the guard staggered, almost fell.