Sunscream

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 gu

He brushed dust and small fragments of stone and mortar from the flat sill of the window frame and leaned his elbows on it. With the butt pressed into his right shoulder, the big gun was heavy but beautifully balanced. Bolan wrapped his fingers around the pistol grip, hit a full magazine into the chamber, and flicked the bolt. The safety was already set in the firing position.

The scope’s rubber eyeguard caressed his cheek and brow. Through the magnifying IR lens he could see the moonsplashed facade of the ranch-house. Testing the strength of the first-pressure prelim spring, he curled his right index around the trigger. The cross hairs were centered on the entrance doors.

In the distance a whistle shrilled.

It was echoed, louder, from closer at hand. Three piercing blasts. The seaborn detail had arrived; Jean-Paul had instructed them to go ahead.

Inside the house a dog barked. The sound was at once drowned by a staccato burst of automatic fire from the far side of the meadow. Bolan could see the muzzle-flashes winking in the shadow beneath the trees lining the driveway.

A shutter banged open and was slammed shut. Voices shouted inside the building. Glass shattered and fell, and a single ricochet screeched off the stone facing to the frame house.

The attackers unleashed another volley. It was repeated from the edge of the wood fifty yards to Bolan’s left. And now there was an answering fire from the ranch. Flame stabbed the dark on the shadowed side of the building. Louvers were smashed aside, and guns sprouted from the shutters. Revolvers, automatic rifles and at least one SMG were aiming at the muzzle-flashes of the assault force.

Mack Bolan waited in the cool semidarkness of the shepherd’s hut, watching the action.

The men from the sea were advancing up the driveway under cover of bushes that grew beneath the trees. The leading guns were within a hundred yards of the house now. Fire from the defenders redoubled: there were a lot of guys shooting from all windows on both floors, although automatic fire was shredding some of the wooden structures and making the position untenable. Bolan heard a high-pitched scream of agony, but whether it came from inside or outside he couldn’t say.

Suddenly the seaborne detail’s heavy machine gun opened up, the hard stammer of the belt-fed rounds punctuating the lighter crackle of machine pistols and SMGs. Beside it there was an abrupt glare, an express-train shriek and a streak of fire arrowing toward the ranch. Bolan knew the sound. Someone had fired a rocket grenade from a Russian RPG-7 launcher.

The shoulder-borne, bazooka style weapon fired a five-pound missile with directional fins that opened as soon as the grenade left the launch tube and the rocket booster ignited.

There was a thunderclap report as the deadly projectile hit the ranch-house stoop, burst on impact and ripped open the heavy double doors. Moments later a second grenade exploded in the hallway beyond. In the momentary flash of the detonation, Bolan saw masonry fall and splintered wood spin through the air, trailing spirals of smoke.

It was then that the attackers played their trump card. Somehow, from somewhere, Jean-Paul had acquired an ex-warplane 20 mm ca

The HE shells laid waste the front half of the house’s lower floor. The armor-piercers, unsuited to this kind of assault, sheared through furniture, interior walls and anything else in their path until inertia and gravity overcame their speed and they dropped to burst somewhere in the back.

But the incendiaries did the real damage. A score of them, burning on impact for one-seventieth of a second at 2,000 degrees Celsius, screamed through the hole and ripped into the pine walls and wooden staircase at the rear of the hallway, setting them alight instantly.

Within seconds, flames, fa

But the remnants of the Balestre gang were not without their own surprises. Indoors, men were yelling, but from one of the outbuildings at the side of the ranch an ancient four-wheel farm wagon loaded with bales of hay trundled into the moonlight. There were flames here, too, small ones that licked the tinder-dry bales... and spread… and increased... and then boiled skyward until the whole load had become a blazing torch.

A torch that was accurately directed down the slope, increasing speed as it hurtled with murderous aim at the place where the machine gun, the RPG-7 and the ca

Firing from the hip, they scored some hits among the attackers, but it was the blazing wagon that wreaked havoc.

Crashing into the undergrowth where the gun crews were hidden, it tipped over onto its side, spilling the burning fodder right and left. At once the sun-dried brushwood flared up; desiccated leaves on the lower branches of the trees caught fire; a ring of fire forty yards in diameter consumed the fringe of the wood and swelled outward across the grass of the pasture.

Ammunition buried beneath the flaming hay discharged like exploding firecrackers. A rocket grenade, ignited by the fierce heat, streaked a fiery trail into the sky and then self-destructed.

Once again Bolan savored the paradox of his situation, ready to fire but owing allegiance to neither side. If the Marseilles mob won, and he had helped them do it, this would obviously consolidate his position as Sonderma