they at last breasted the ridge, each of them was soaked with sweat.
The darkness on the far side of the crest was relative. Instead of the harsh searchlight brilliance, the ground was suffused with a wavering red glow reflected from the underside of the vast cloud streaming from the erupting crater.
Immediately below them, a wide, shallow depression separated the ridge from high ground overlooking the sea on the far side of the island. And, as Coralie had warned, it was a lunar landscape, witness to countless eruptions in the past, which had inundated, stratified, seared and tortured the surface until now it resembled nothing so much as a giant black Christmas cake whose frosting had been whipped into frightening shapes by a fork.
At the upper end of the depression, glimmering in the tawny light, a fresh flow of molten lava dripped heavily from crag to crag.
“We take this path,” Coralie called over the express-train roar of the volcano. She began edging down a narrow shelf of rock that slanted across the face of the depression.
Following close by, Bolan took in with pleasure her slender form, clothed now in tight-fitting jeans and lightweight T-shirt, her dark hair tied back with a ribbon that matched the shirt. “That scream,” he said, “just before I busted out of the villa: it was you, wasn’t it?”
“There was nothing wrong,” she said. 'It was the only thing I could think of to make some kind of diversion.”
“You probably saved my life,” Bolan said. “How come?”
Coralie turned to grin at him. “As soon as I knew you weren’t that German hit man, that you were not a killer for hire, I figured my first impression must have been right, after all. When I found out you were doing your damnedest to wreck this Russian deal, I decided to help all I could.”
“You were trying to wreck it yourself? All the time?’
“Not exactly. I just wanted my father out of it. When he’s away from these creeps, he’s nice. But if that KGB merger had gone through, he’d have been in over his head, and I couldn’t stand for that.”
“You figure he’s out of it now?”
She smiled again. “After tonight — and after what happened at La Rocaille — I think he’ll be a little more careful next time he has house guests!”
They were two hundred yards along the shelf. Each time the volcano blasted out its flaming debris, bright glares of scarlet and crimson augmented the pulsating ruby light so that the rocky landscape seemed constantly to change its shape.
What didn’t change at all was the compact squad of men positioned on a lava platform some way farther on and a hundred feet below. The ruddy light glinted now bright, now faint, on the metalwork of their guns, but the hands holding guns were as steady as the rocks themselves.
“Damn,” Coralie said. “That must be Ancarani’s buddies. There was a jeep at the villa. I guess they hotfooted around the coast to cut us off.”
“Cut us off, or cut off the gorillas chasing us?”
“Both, probably,” the girl said. She glanced behind them. The pursuers had already appeared above the rim, were filing down onto the pathway. “We’ve got to make a trail on the far side of the valley. It looks like we’ll have to quit this path and scramble down among the boulders and up the other side.”
Bolan heard the shooting when they were only a few yards below the shelf. Muzzle-flashes were invisible in the leaping light, but the reports rebounded from the walls of the canyon like minor echoes of the detonations shaking the crater above.
The pro-Ancarani group on the lower platform numbered eight or nine; there were probably at least a dozen on the way down from the ridge. Smiler and Raoul would be among them for sure, and at one point Bolan caught sight of the great bulk of Delacroix.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked Coralie.
“No.”
“Then you better make it to the floor of the depression,” he told her. “Stash yourself in among those boulders...” he pointed to a cluster of tall rocks “...while we see what we can do for the opposition.”
She nodded and hurried on down amid a scattering of pebbles and stone fragments. Etang de Brialy carried spare clips for his Combat Master. He was already blazing away at the mobsters working their way down from the ridge, firing two-handed with his elbows supported on a pumice outcrop.
Bolan had to be more careful. He knew he had to make every shot count. There were eighteen rounds left in the magazine, and unless he could liberate a gun from the attackers, that was it.
Both groups had seen them leave the pathway; both were unleashing a murderous hail of lead down the valley. But they were also, crazily, firing at each other.
The Executioner smiled grimly and prepared to join in. It was the first time in his life that he had been involved in a battle where he could fire — was obliged to fire — on both sides at the same time; and the second time, after the Corsican adventure, that he didn’t give a goddamn which side won!
As long as his own small group survived.
Squinting against the deceptive light, he fired half a dozen rounds at selected targets. Or what he figured were targets. There had already been casualties on both sides, but the changing rock silhouettes, the moving shapes of men, the bounding shadows, swelling and dwindling with the glow from the cone, made it impossible to see how often he scored. He would have to wait until they were at closer quarters before he could be certain.
That wouldn’t be long.
Crouching behind rocky projections... running, bent double, from boulder to buttress... the two groups were fast approaching each other — and the fugitives clinging to the valley side.
“You keep after the guys coming down,” Bolan called to the baron. “I’ll see how many I can take out on the other side.” Sighting carefully, he fired twice more at the gunmen on the platform. One at least, he could see this time, spun away from his fellows and collapsed on the basalt shelf.
“I’ll do my best,” Etang de Brialy replied. “Shooting against the fireworks from that damned crater makes it difficult. But that big bastard Delacroix is the easiest mark. If I could...”
The sentence was unfinished. After a moment Bolan turned around. There was a metallic clatter as the heavy Detonics automatic slid to the ground. The Frenchman was draped over the pumice.
As the Executioner touched him he flopped limply away, a fist-sized hole gaping horribly in the back of his head. Two sightless eyes stared blankly at Bolan; a third, making a neat triangle with the other two, yawned blackly at the top of his forehead, expressionless witness to the high-velocity slug that had blasted his brains away.
Bolan cursed. He laid down the body, took the gun and the spare clips and scrambled farther down the slope. Without the baron to cover his flank, he would be enfiladed if he stayed that near the pathway.
It was curious, he thought as he headed for the rocks where the girl was hiding — the Frenchman had been involved with drugs, prostitution, gambling, protection. He was a classic underworld racketeer. Yet somehow Bolan could not resist a sneaking admiration for him. Even if he hadn’t achieved much, he’d had the guts to take on the whole of the southern Mafia.
It wasn’t just because he desperately needed a backup that the Executioner would miss him.
Among the rock columns on the floor of the depression the eruption seemed nearer and more dangerous than ever. The hot wind blowing down from the cone dried the inside of Bolan’s mouth with sulfurous fumes and choked his nostrils with fine ash. Trapped gases forcing their way through the viscous molten magma inside the crater were now escaping with explosive violence, hurling fountains of liquid fire high into the night sky.
The gunmen on Stromboli had changed their tactics. Although most of the gang descending from the ridge were already below the pathway, they had switched their line of attack to concentrate on the remainder of the Ancarani group. The Sicilian boss, Arturo Zefarelli, was shouting orders. The liquidation of Bolan and the girl would be much easier if the dissident mobsters on the platform were eliminated first.
He found Coralie among the rocky pillars. He asked her, “Can you handle an automatic?” When she nodded, he added, “Take this one. The recoil is rugged, but the Baron’s .45 is tougher still.”
He handed her the Beretta. “Don’t shoot until you’re certain of a hit. There are only ten shots left in the magazine.”
Higher up the valley, white-hot projectiles of lava, cooling and hardening as they spiraled away from the crater, were clattering back to the ground and rolling toward the pillars. Between this noise and the hissing of
