'How about those whirly birds?'
'Taken care of. Grimaldi says it'll take about an hour.'
'An hour from when?' Lavagni wanted to know.
'Well… about fifty-five minutes from right now.' Dragone heaved to his feet and motioned to a man in bathing trunks who was standing just down-range. 'Bring that radio, Kelly,' he growled.
The man hurried over with a small transistorized two-way radio and thrust it toward the chief gunner.
'Lavagni was saying, 'Tell Latigo…' and Dragone was reaching for the radio when suddenly it took flight, propelled with a screech from Kelly's hand by a sizzling lump of hot metal.
Another sizzler came in a heartbeat ahead of any possible reaction, this one squarely between the startled Kelly's eyes, and the man in the swimsuit toppled over and slid toward the water without a sound.
The other two found themselves lying shoulder to shoulder on the sand, their weapons up and searching for a target.
'Where'd it come from?' Lavagni puffed.
'It just came,' the crewchief replied in a taut voice. 'He got Kelly.'
'Fuck Kelly, where's that sonuvabitch at!'
'I don't see a goddam thing, Tony. I didn't even hear nothing.'
'Bastard! He's using his silencer.'
Silencer or not, the line of gun soldiers flanking the two men had become aware of the drama at their center, and all were sprawled in the sand and anxiously watching for some sign of the enemy.
Dragone said, 'I guess he ain't making for no sugar farm, Tony.'
'He shot up the damn radio, didn't he.'
'Yeh.'
Lavagni was building toward a huge rage. 'Dammit, we just can't lay here. Listen. Now listen close! Work your way along your side of the line, but dammit keep yourself down! Tell your boys we move on my signal. I'll take this side and clue everybody in on the action. When I get to the far end I'll fire two shots. That's the signal to
Bolan's angle of vision onto the beach had given him a limited choice of targets. It had been like looking through a twenty-yard length of two-foot diameter pipeline and seeing clearly only those objects which happened to pass by the far end. Another foot or two to the right and he could as easily have taken out Lavagni himself, instead of settling for an anonymous soldier and a radio. Just the same, the message had been sent and received, and this had been the primary consideration.
He wanted those guys to get the taste of sand in their mouths and a fresh vision of death in their consciousness. And he'd wanted them to eat sand long enough to allow him a chance to advance to the next firing line.
That objective had been accomplished also, and now he was lying at the very edge of the forest, in a prone firing position and with good cover behind the rotting remains of a fallen tree. The terrain dropped away sharply just beyond that point, with the beach sloping abruptly to meet the water. From his ground-level point of view, only the glassy surface of the bay lay directly ahead of him. Off to either flank, however, he had an excellent view of the activities underway on the beach itself.
To his right he saw Lavagni emerge from the blind spot, moving quickly in a low scamper along a line of rifle-toting gunners. The guys were flaked out there like a landing party in an amphibious assault, awaiting the signal to proceed inland. Then the other guy, obviously Lavagni's good right arm, appeared on the other flank in a similar movement.
Bolan precisely understood what they were doing.
He final-checked the Thompson and made a quick calculation of the firing angle which would be immediately available to him. He decided to set his limits at thirty degrees of horizon, then fed this into his observations of the enemy line.
They were spaced at ten or twelve feet. He would begin at dead center, and immediately sweep five degrees to either side. This should bring down the four or five closest threats.
His right flank was the most exposed, and the most vulnerable to an effective return-fire from the more distant points. So his second pattern would be sweeping out to fifteen degrees right, to at least minimize the retort from that angle. Then, if everything was on the numbers, he'd try to sweep some away from the left.
That was the battle plan. The entire fire mission should last no more than a few seconds. It had to be quick and brutal and over with, before the enemy fully realized that it was happening. If properly executed, the play would mean, in actual numbers of those engaged, reducing the odds of the firefight to about 10 to 1 at the very worst. With a good automatic weapon, jungle cover, and the element of initiative in his favor, Bolan would ride those odds any time.
He watched Lavagni reach the far end of the line, saw the revolver lifting into the air, and heard the double report signaling the game to commence.
And then the line was up and running in a ragged advance across the white sands. Bolan's impression was of about twenty men to each flank, plus two rising up from the blind spot.
He spotted them three strides into the soft stuff, then the heavy chopper began its guttural doomsday report. The two guys directly ahead were accorded the initial burst, each receiving a closely packed wreath of .45 caliber expanders in the chest. They went over backwards and out of view as the chopper swung on and the horrible sounds of automated death swept across the sands of paradise.
Bolan executed the fire mission to its planned parameters, no more and no less, and it was all over in a matter of seconds. Then he withdrew, back into the bosom of his home — the jungle, and left paradise to the company of the friendly dead.
Fire Mission number three was next on tap.
Lavagni and Dragone met at the center and reformed their line, under the cover of trees — minus eight gunners who had not made it that far.
'What do you figure the guy thinks he's doing, Tony?' Dragone asked.
Lavagni was perspiring heavily from a combination of over-exertion in the tropical heat and strained emotions. 'I don't know, Charlie,' he replied disgustedly. 'He's a hard case, that guy. If I was him, I'd have been halfway out of this place by now.'
'Maybe he didn't get away clean. From the plane, I mean. Maybe he ain't
'It's something to think about,' Lavagni admitted. 'Anyway it don't matter. Look, I know what I'm doing, Charlie. Don't worry, the guy will run out of bullets before we run out of bodies.'
'Don't let the boys hear you talking like that,' Dragone cautioned in a hushed voice. 'They're worried enough as it is.'
Lavagni was about to make a heated comment to that when the chatter of the Thompson again erupted, this time from far along the line.
'Contact,' Lavagni growled. Let's go.'
Before the two Mafia leaders could close on the new trouble spot, however, that third fire mission had been completed and the Executioner was moving swiftly through the jungle toward number four.
Bolan's battle plan was a basic guerilla maneuver. It was meant to draw the enemy line forward along a course of Bolan's choosing, to widen the spaces between the teeth of the grinder, and to slip through them.
This objective was neatly accomplished during the confused aftermath of the next brief firefight. Bolan stood quietly in the branches of a giant tree and watched the shaken enemy re-form their line beneath him and sweep on northward.
He noted that they had carefully collected the weapons of their fallen dead — and he smiled at this, accurately reading Lavagni's game of numbers. Quick Tony was willing to give the prey a few dead bodies, so long as he continued spending his precious ammo for them.
But that game was ending now.
