Sunscream

“Bastards are smart, too,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in the chopper. “Disciplined, crack shots and at least two good enough to lead if the boss is taken out. That pair will be your piece of the action.”

“Where did Balestre get them?” Bolan asked.

“Young kids mostly. Trained them himself after he’d worked with the Camorra. Unemployment. Poor background. No prospects on the island.”

And now, Bolan thought, even fewer prospects, because many of them soon would die. It bugged him like hell, that poverty notwithstanding, they lacked an ethic, a code for living that distinguished between good and bad.

But that was no view he could air in front of the underworld boss from the hottest town in France.

Bolan was wearing his combat blacksuit with the Beretta leathered beneath his left arm, two ammunition belts and half a dozen HE grenades clipped to the webbing of his chute harness. A Husqvarna 561 Express hunting rifle with an IR nightscope leaned against the empty seat beside him.

Jean-Paul, the white cap of hair hidden beneath a black knitted balaclava, was armed with an Uzi SMG and a French police-style Browning automatic. The ex-wrestler carried an Ingram MAC-10, but there was an African knobkerrie — a long-shaft nightstick with a weighted spherical head — looped to his belt. With his huge frame, abnormal height and a shaven, battler’s skull, he looked formidable.

“You’re the expert marksman, Sonderma

“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 Sonderma

Bolan had not been consulted when the raid was pla

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 may be sensors nearer the house, but we want them to know we’re coming when we’re that close, anyway!”

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.