overflew the massive red granite fortress that dominated the huddled shingles of the old town and the pale crescent of Calvi’s pleasure beach. “I want you to keep back and, like I say, pick off individual targets as I call them out. You’d be risking your life at close quarters if the boys storm the ranch house. We’ll find you a good concealed position, not too far away. And only use the pistol if you’re threatened, okay?”
“It’s your money,” Bolan said. “I’m only here to carry out orders.”
The Frenchman shot him a sideways glance. “Just as long as that’s understood,” he said.
An enigmatic character, Bolan reflected. Their conversation so far had been restricted to banalities: confirmation of details already agreed upon with the real Sondermann through an intermediary; arrangements for where Bolan was to stay; when and where they met; how he was to be paid and what weapons he would need. Yet it was clear that the mafioso from Marseilles was a cut above the other mobsters in the south. He was cultured, intelligent rather than just smart, determined, ruthless... and lacking altogether the crudeness that characterized the others.
Bolan had not been consulted when the raid was planned. He was interested to see how it went. And how J-P reacted under fire.
The moon was already high in the cloudless sky. Bright light shone from the wrinkled surface of the sea.
The coastline slid away behind them as the chopper whined over citrus groves and the geometrical patterns of vineyards. For one of the few times in his life, Bolan was going into battle not giving a damn whether his side won or lost. He viewed the raid totally objectively: morally, each side was as bad as the other. Win or lose, his only concern was the chance that he might find some situation arising out of the operation that could be used to weaken the solidarity of the mobs who intended to combine under KGB rule.
A thin white ribbon of road curled among the patches of cultivation below them. Jean-Paul looked through the plexiglas at a mass of mountains to their right. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Down to two thousand and we jump,” he said.
Bolan rose from his seat and slung on the Husqvarna. There was no question of serial jumping after a hookup here: it was simply slide back the panel of the blister and go.
J-P was pointing to the moonlit countryside below. “The thick stand of trees enclosed by that big loop in the highway,” he called over the helicopter’s rotor whine. “The southern fringe, away from the road in ten minutes. Okay?”
Bolan nodded. He pulled the panel aside and jumped.
At that height it was necessary to pull the ripcord at once. Even then he was left little time to take in the landscape floating up with increasing speed to meet him. He was already well below the jagged crests of the mountains.
To his left the bleak expanse of the Desert of Agriates lay bone-white beneath the night sky. Somewhere among these granite outcrops was Jean-Paul’s ten-man squad — who would have been offloaded from a trawler and landed in rubber dinghies two hours earlier. Somewhere down there those guys were humping heavy machine guns, Kalashnikovs, grenade launchers and certain other pieces of equipment over the stony ground toward the ranch.
Smiler and his men would already be in place. Bolan gazed upward. There was no sign of the other two canopies against the stars. The droning clatter of the chopper died away in the direction of Cap Corse and the ocean.
He maneuvered the shrouds, spilling air from the chute. The wood was rushing toward him. He could no longer see the highway. Beyond a slope of meadow, half-hidden among another grove of trees, the pale light gleamed on the roofs of what he guessed was the Balestre farm.
Bolan skimmed the upper branches of pines, flexed his knees and made a perfect landing fifty feet from the edge of the wood. He was an experienced jumper, remaining upright and rocksteady as the canopy bellied down behind him and collapsed in the long grass. One minute later his harness undipped, the grenades transferred to the belt of his blacksuit, it was rolled up and hidden behind a bush under the trees.
He unslung the Husqvarna and waited. He neither heard nor saw the other two come down, but it seemed almost at once that his ears detected the low whistle, repeated three times, that he was waiting for. He replied — only once — and made his way toward the sound.
Delacroix and his leader were together two hundred yards nearer the ranch.
“Smiler, Raoul and Bertrand will have worked their way into the woods behind the ranch,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in a low voice. “They’ll hold their fire until the rats begin to leave the ship.
“Come again?”
“We want the Balestre gang — there may be between twenty and thirty of them in there — to think the frontal attack by the guys crossing the road from the desert, the detail advancing from the sea, is the only one. If they’re getting the worst of it, they’ll most likely run out the back and head for the interior.”
“And into Smiler and his boys?”
“Right. If they figure they have a chance, they may fan out in front of the buildings and try a counterattack.”
“And that’s where we three start to operate?”
“You got it. In that case, they’d probably try some kind of encircling move from in back, as well.”
Bolan nodded. “Toward Smiler. Okay. Seems simple and sensible. They won’t have patrols out? Or dogs?”
“Uh-uh. They don’t know that we know they aimed to be part of last night’s scene. If the punk Smiler wasted was telling the truth, they’ll all be in there working on a plan where they hit us.”
“No electrified fences? Trip wires? Booby traps? No sensors or closed-circuit TV?” Bolan sounded surprised.
The Frenchman laughed. “Hell, no. You can do that kind of thing on a private island like La Rocaille. But this is right by a public highway. There
They were skirting the edge of the wood, the night breeze warm on their faces. Jean-Paul led the way through a gap in a stonewall, and suddenly the details of the ranch buildings were visible in the radiance of the moon.
The place lay at the top of a long slope of pastureland that was broken nearer the house by a complex of pens and sheep-dip troughs spread below the largest of the barns. A line of trees on the far side of the slope marked the course of the driveway that curled up from the road.
The gang leader stopped near a ramshackle shepherd’s cabin with a tumbledown gap where the door had been and a gaping window that looked toward the ranch.
“You stay here,” J-P said. “The range to the stoop is exactly 360 yards — we worked it out on a large-scale survey map. The average slope of the meadow is six degrees.” He added further instructions, and then departed into the night with the silent ex-wrestler.
Bolan moved across to the glassless window and looked up at the house. Louvered shutters were closed all the way around the two stories. The moonlight was too bright to see if there were lights shining inside. It was very quiet in the abandoned hut.
The Husqvarna was propped against the rough stone wall. He picked up the rifle and hefted it experimentally. It was a beautifully crafted weapon — a .358 Magnum, with a two-foot blued steel barrel, a rosewood stock and a corrugated butt plate. It weighed, Bolan estimated, just under eight pounds.
He had chosen it because his briefing demanded a large-bore rifle, dead accurate at long ranges, with a heavy, high-velocity bullet and colossal stopping power. Some of the hoods had laughed at the gun because it was bolt-action with only a 3-shot magazine.
Bolan had retorted that it might be the slowest of all the repeaters for follow-up shots, but it was also the most reliable, since the marksman commanded the climb on each shot... and anyway, with the nightscope he had fitted, follow-up shots were rarely necessary!
The scope was a Balvar X5 by Bausch and Lomb. This, and a breech pressure of more than twenty tons p.s.i. and a superhigh muzzle velocity that gave the 150-grain slugs an almost flat trajectory, were enough to guarantee a gunner of Bolan’s expertise better than an eighty percent chance of a first-time hit whenever the cross-hairs centered on a target.
