escaping gas and steam within the volcano, the gunshots sounded strangely insignificant.
Soon they ceased, and Bolan saw that the battle between the two rival Mafia factions was over. There was no more firing from the platform: Ancarani’s supporters had been eliminated.
For the survivors of Zefarelli’s squad — there were nine or ten of them — a single objective remained.
The obliteration of Bolan and Coralie.
The Executioner saw them swarming down the sides of the depression now, spread out in a rough semicircle to flank the rock cluster where they were hidden.
Well, the fact that he was outgunned and outnumbered had never deterred Bolan before. He posted the girl behind a barricade of fragments where two of the columns had split and tumbled. “Don’t shoot and give away your position until I open fire,” he warned her.
Crouching, Bolan himself advanced behind a rampart of tuff — the solidified residue of a liquid lava so aerated with gas bubbles that it had once formed a molten froth. The porous rock left when this cooled was brittle enough for chunks to be broken off by hand.
Bolan separated a fragment the size of a football and waited. Zefarelli’s men were advancing cautiously, not knowing where he was hidden, ducking behind outcrops as they came.
He hefted the fragment, drew back his arm and hurled it toward a channel lower down the valley. The tuff landed with an audible thump, broke into pieces, and rattled down the incline.
At once four or five mobsters pounced, firing as they ran. Bolan was left in the position of an enfilade. Steadying the powerful .45 with his left hand, he blazed off the remainder of the magazine and saw at least three men fall.
But now the enemy knew where he was. Snapping in a fresh clip, he dodged away and took up a new position on the far side of the cluster.
No mistake about the gunshots this time: revolver and rifle bullets hummed between the pillars, splatting against basalt, chipping splinters from the rock. From some way off, Bolan heard the girl firing carefully once, twice, three times. Below the pathway a man cursed and then screamed.
The mobsters were closing in. The Executioner knew that unless they were to be trapped, he and Coralie must retreat up the farther valley wall toward the trail she was looking for. But this meant they would have to quit their shelter. Bolan dropped to his hands and knees below a hail of lead and crawled to the rear of the rock cluster to see what cover there was on the far side.
Suddenly he was aware that Coralie was no longer firing. Bolan strained his ears to listen.
It was then that he heard the scream.
Coralie’s voice.
Bolan rose upright and ran to the barricade of rocks where she had been positioned.
There was no sign of her.
He looked up the slope toward the crater... and saw Delacroix with the girl, kicking and screaming, slung over his shoulder.
The mobster’s head and shoulders were outlined against the pulsing red glare. Bolan lifted the Combat Master slowly. In the shifting light, he was going to risk hitting the woman. But he had to try.
An abrupt flare from the crater as long flames streamed out in the wind made up his mind. In the brighter light he could see more of the big hood’s body. The Executioner held his breath, aimed well below the shoulder supporting the girl and squeezed the trigger.
Delacroix cried out, clapping his hands to his left arm and allowing Coralie to drop. She fell on her feet, staggered and then lost balance on the edge of the outcrop and plummeted to a lower level, where she hit her head on a smoothly rounded boulder and lay still.
Delacroix was swaying, reaching for the gun in his waistband. As the glare subsided, Bolan dropped him with a well-placed round.
Zefarelli was calling again. “Close in! Surround those columns! Flush the bastard out!”
Bolan sprinted across the tortured surface of the valley floor toward the unconscious girl, shooting blind as he ran.
He was wearing combat boots with his summer rig. It was the odor of burning rubber that tipped him off, even before he sensed the fiery heat under his feet.
At the same time he became aware of the ground shaking, trembling, and saw small spirals of vapor rising all around him.
He was standing on the surface of a fresh lava flow!
Streaming from a fissure below the crater, the flow had made it this far already. The outer layer, congealing, cooling and partially hardening in the air, had formed a dark crust.
But beneath, Bolan knew, the magma, still glowing at 900 degrees C, the temperature of melted gold, would still be tunneling relentlessly downward.
He leaped for the sheet of basalt where Coralie was lying, beating out the flames that had begun to lick the outside of his boots. On the far side of the rock the ground was visibly in motion, a sinister, sluggish flow the color and consistency of molasses, with occasional patches of cherry red.
She had fallen between two advancing tongues of lava.
Bolan felt her pulse. She groaned feebly and stirred. There was an ugly bruise on her forehead but the skin was not broken. Fortunately the boulder had no sharp edges and she had merely knocked herself out.
He looked hastily around them. For the moment they were shielded by the outcrop on which Delacroix’s body lay. But they had to move fast, and as soon as they did it would be open season for hunters.
To cross the flow that still glowed with inner fire was out of the question. The other tongue had supported Bolan on his own and running. But he doubted that the crust would hold up if he moved slowly, with the extra weight of the girl in his arms. That left two alternatives: advance toward the enemy, or make it up the valley wall, where they would be sitting ducks.
Before Bolan could make a decision a violent blow between the shoulders sent him crashing to the ground.
One of the mobsters had jumped him from a higher shelf of rock behind.
The guy would have done better to have risked a shot.
The impact sent the Detonics spinning from the Executioner’s grip, but the attacker also lost his hold on the Kalashnikov assault rifle he was toting. That left them even: the element of surprise was in the hood’s favor, experience on Bolan’s side.
It was no contest. The mobster grabbed for Bolan’s windpipe, kneeing him in the lumbar region. But the warrior twisted onto his back, slashing upward with the edge of his hand to break the choking grip. He planted the hot soles of his boots in the guy’s belly and flexed his knees.
The attacker was Smiler — his features twisted into a mask of hate, the red light of the volcano reflected in his maniac eyes.
For a timeless moment they stared at each other. Then Bolan kicked with a savage thrust, and Smiler flew over his head beyond the rock, to land on his back in the center of the solidifying flow Bolan had crossed.
Even then the mobster might have gotten away with it... if he had lain still or tried rolling slowly to the side of the flow. But he panicked and sat up, struggling to push himself upright, and put all his weight on one foot.
The foot broke through the crust.
Smiler sank to his knee in red-hot liquid magma.
Before the animal shriek had burst from his lips, a sheet of flame shot up the whole length of his body, consuming his clothes and setting fire to his hair. He thrashed, wildly waving arms already ablaze. And then pitched forward into the seething hellhole he had made in the flow.
Bolan closed his ears to the dreadful sucking gurgle as the lava closed over his jerking body and carried him slowly away.
Still sprawled on the rock, Bolan turned... to see Raoul standing, revolver in hand, on the shelf where Delacroix lay.
“Too bad for Smiler,” Bolan shouted, playing for time as he felt desperately around him for the fallen Detonics.
Raoul raised the revolver.
Ten feet away Mack Bolan stared up at the small, round, black hole of death.
