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
“No way,” Smiler snapped. “How could it be?”
“ It is. I swear it. But what the
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...
14
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
Telder put the cutting aside and picked up the second. It was much shorter. Taken from an inside page of that day’s
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.
15
Bolan swung the Jaguar off the highway and parked it discreetly in a multistory parking lot on the outskirts of Civitaveccia, forty miles west and north of Rome. He took a cab to the town center and walked to the docks.
It was a blisteringly hot day and the tourists on the waterfront were dressed in the minimum, but Bolan wore a spotless white coverall that sheathed him from wrist to ankle. Stitched to the breast pocket was a yellow shield bearing a rampant horse in red, with the word Ferrari above it. To complete a picture immediately identifiable by any Italian, he had allowed a day-old haze of stubble to blue his jaw.
A freighter from Marseilles had docked early in the morning, and its cargo was being unloaded. Among the merchandise was an automobile. It belonged to Baron Etang de Brialy, the Parisian underworld boss, who was to take delivery of it in Rome the following day and then drive south to Reggio de Calabria on the Strait of Messina.
From here, along with the other Mafia chiefs, he was to be ferried in a private yacht, not to Sicily but to the island of Stromboli, where Sanguinetti owned another property.
After the intensive newspaper, radio and television coverage of the past few days’ excesses, all hell had broken loose along the Riviera coast, and Jean-Paul had figured it would be tempting fate to reorganize a gathering of so many high powered Mafia men in one place until the heat was off.
Italy and Sicily were out of the question since Tommaso Buscetta, late in 1984, had broken the Law of Silence and blown half the Mafia operations there and in the United States so wide open that all the law had to do was step in and snap on the handcuffs.
An island in the middle of the ocean, with no roads, no police and no regular transport service to the mainland seemed an ideal place to thrash out the final terms of the amalgamation with Colonel Antonin.
Bolan, Smiler, Raoul and Delacroix, together with a score of side men owing allegiance to other bosses, were to make their own way to Reggio di Calabria.
Right now, Bolan was ahead of schedule. He had gained twelve hours by driving through the night instead of stopping off to eat and sleep at a motel. During those twelve hours he intended to “borrow” Etang de Brialy’s car, use it on a private operation, and then continue on south in his own Jaguar.
The car was a 400 hp, twin-turbo Ferrari GTO, a sleek road racer whose center-mounted 3.8 liter V8 engine could power the car from 0 to 60mph in 4.8 seconds.
