Sunscream

The attackers were advancing now — silhouettes briefly seen as they leaped from bush to bush or wormed their way forward between the limestone outcrops.

Bolan snappped off a 3-round burst from the Beretta and saw a hoodlum fall. Slugs hailed against the steel sides of the pickup above the Executioner’s head and stung rock splinters from the stony ground.

Smiler and Raoul blazed away from behind the other vehicle. Jean-Paul half rose and drilled a killer who tried to sprint down the trail. But the Marseilles chief was too slow ducking back behind his protecting shelf: a single shot from a rifle downhill dropped him. The Walther fell from nerveless fingers and skated into the center of the track.

But the marksman, making his hit, had himself been exposed. Bolan mowed him down with the M-16.

The big guy moved quickly then. On elbows and knees, the 93-R still in his right hand, he shuffled to the rock shelf were J-P had fallen.

The gang leader lay with outflung arms, the balaclava dark with blood. Bolan pulled off the woolen helmet. The white cap of hair was bloodied on one side. But Bolan soon discovered that the wound was not serious: the slug had merely creased the skull above the right ear, knocking the gang boss out cold.

“Is it bad?” the hoarse voice of Delacroix asked from the grasses on the far side of the trail.

“Uh-uh,” Bolan replied. “He’s out of the fight for now. But apart from a headache he’ll be okay tomorrow and on his feet yelling blue murder the day after.”

And not just because of the head wound, the Executioner thought. Then he glanced over the edge of the rock as he sensed movement. There were figures advancing again beyond the pickups. Sudden shapes, dark-clothed in the glaring light, flitting across the gaps between five-foot-high clumps of wild grass.

If they were moving, they couldn’t fire accurately, Bolan reckoned. He made a quick dash back to the pickup, grabbed the M-16 and fired two bursts as the enemy came closer still and death hummed past on all sides.

He scored with both bursts. One of the ambushers fell, clawing at his shredded throat. Another gunman was carried backward by the impact of the high-velocity 5.56mm deathbringers that let the daylight into his rib cage.

The rate of firing increased once more. The air was shrill with ricochets.

Only five men remained now of the original Marseilles dozen: Smiler, Raoul, Delacroix, Bolan and the driver of the second semi.

“We’re go

Bolan said nothing. It was all the same to him. He’d play the cards the way they were dealt. The vital thing now was that the attackers should be recognized as Lombardo men. Maybe he should tempt one to come close enough...

He didn’t have to.

Smiler was shouting orders. There was a flurry of activity, punctuated by bursts of rapid fire. The guy with the smashed kneecap was screaming again.

The remaining driver had gained the cab of the second pickup. Crouched below the dashboard, he had started the engine. Now, still huddled below the door line, he stomped the pedal and sent the pickup careering over the rough ground toward the trail.

Raoul and Smiler, unleashing all they had at the bushes concealing the attackers, leaped aboard on the near side and crammed into the cab. Delacroix, momentarily shielded by the bulk of the pickup, dragged the body of his unconscious leader from the ground, bundled him over the tailgate and then dived in after him as the vehicle gathered speed.

Bolan was left to race after the open truck, grab the side rails and vault over on his own. He had the 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 — ru

“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 Lombardo there!”

“No way,” Smiler snapped. “How could it be?”

“ It is. I swear it. But what the hell?..“

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 Nice-Matin and gave details of the daring tu

Telder put the cutting aside and picked up the second. It was much shorter. Taken from an inside page of that day’s France-Soir, the two-inch news item recounted a bombing incident that wrecked a bar frequented by criminals in the dock quarter of Toulon the previous night. The attack, Telder read, was thought to be a “reprisal” for the hijack that followed the daring $500,000 “tu

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 gu