Sunscream

“I am Mack Bolan,” he said.

“The Executioner?”

“Some call me that.”

“What the hell are you doing here, passing yourself off as Sonderma

“Sonderma

“Why? Whose idea? What was the point?”

“I was put in,” Bolan said truthfully, “to find out what was brewing and why four capos had been killed... and then to mix it so that your big deal with the colonel here fell through.”

“What!” Antonin roared. “There! You see! The man is a spy, a renegade, a cheap mercenary. Let me...”

“Easy, Colonel,” J-P interrupted. “Your turn later. Let me handle this my way first, okay?”

As the KGB man lapsed into angry mutterings, Jean-Paul turned back to Bolan and asked, “You said you were ‘put in.’ That means you’re not working on your own, that you are, as Colonel Antonin says, a hired man. Who are you working for?”

As long as he avoided any mention of Telder or Interpol, Bolan could still use the situation to confuse matters and sow even more discord among the mobsters.

Instead of admitting that he was working for a law-enforcement agency, he would land the shit squarely in the fan by implicating another mafioso. The hell with denials and proofs and counterclaims: once the accusation was made, doubts would remain.

Bolan’s choice was based on the fact that, on the features of a man taken completely unaware, bewilderment, stupefaction and guilt leave much the same pattern.

That and the electric tension that was almost tangible.

“Who hired me?” he repeated. “Renato Ancarani.”

The effect of his words was more dramatic than he had anticipated, the result more spectacular than he had dared hope.

A sudden stu

The Corsican was in fact still outside on the patio, talking to a group of hardmen. He had taken no part in the heated discussions that followed the arrival of Scalese and the man with the bandaged throat. Now he pushed his way through into the room. “Who’s calling names?” he cried angrily.

“Silence, you goddamn Corsican traitor!” Jean-Paul’s voice was again trembling with wrath. “Your hired man sold you out. What made you think you could get away with it, you sonovabitch — planting a fucking mole on me, putting in this Bolan to wreck our plans from the inside?”

Ancarani’s eyes widened at the stream of accusations. His jaw dropped. His hands made ineffectual gestures and although his lips moved convulsively, no words emerged.

Bolan was right. Taken totally by surprise, he looked in his stupefaction to be the picture of guilt.

Jean-Paul drew a Colt Python from under his jacket. “You slimy bastard!” he snapped. And before anyone could stop him he had fired the .357 Magnum revolver twice.

The two 158-grain hollow points drilled into Ancarani’s chest before he could get out a word of denial. He choked on blood and fell, his monogrammed silk shirt already a scarlet ruin.

The sharp crack of the shots in the room was echoed by a volley of explosions from Stromboli’s distant crater. Once more the flagstones drummed beneath their feet, the porcelain shivered on the chimneypiece. Outside among the lemon trees the short Mediterranean twilight was brightened by pulses of crimson.

Inside the villa there was uproar. Not all the mobsters were for Jean-Paul. Ancarani had his followers, and even the neutrals were yelling their disapproval of the killing.

Young Scalese was shouting loudest of all: the hell with the damned Corsican and what about the raid on his father’s house? What about this bastard Bolan and the goddamn baron?

Jean-Paul snatched Bolan’s Beretta from Smiler and jammed the muzzle against the big guy’s solar plexus. Bolan knew he was once again near death. The mobster’s whole body was shaking with rage now.

“I don’t get it,” he snarled. “You were working for Ancarani? And now I am hearing that is was Etang de Brialy who put you up to it?”

Bolan had once written, “I am marked for death. I am as condemned as any man who ever sat in death row. My chief determination is to stretch that last mile to its highest yield, to fight the war to my last gasp.”

Now, when that grim prophecy seemed about to come true, the warrior clung to that resolve: he would inflict the maximum damage possible while there was still breath left in his body; he would wreak as much havoc as he humanly could among the slime-bucket hordes surrounding him.

The hell with those denials: he had laid a hot enough trail for his story to leave at least some suspicions and doubts.

“Yeah,” he said calmly. “It was the baron who picked up the tab.”

Bolan was used to surprises, but the next move in the game floored him. Jean-Paul turned to the Parisian boss. “Well,” he barked, “what do you have to say to that?”

The Executioner couldn’t believe his ears. Etang de Brialy said: “Quite correct. I pla

The astounded silence that followed was broken by a high-pitched, wailing scream from Coralie Sanguinetti.

The girl was someplace down the corridor. As all heads turned that way there was a colossal thunderclap from the volcano, and the dark outside was split by a dozen different shades of red.

Bolan didn’t wait to ask himself questions. Jean-Paul was half turned away. Sensing a minimal relaxation of the pressure on his biceps, Bolan pinwheeled both arms violently — back and then over, like a discus thrower — hurling Smiler and Raoul forward above his head to crash heavily to the floor on their backs.

While they struggled, half-stu

18

The warrior hit the terrace in a combat roll amid a shower of exploding glass, springing up between the two nearest trees to find the whole sky behind the crater above throbbing with orange fire.

The crater lip was a jagged loop of pulsating white heat and from the interior of this hellhole a constant stream of molten rock fountained into the air accompanied by subterranean rumbles as loud and menacing as the detonations of an artillery barrage. Bolan could see a fiery river of lava bubbling slowly downward from some split far up the mountainside.

Racing away, he glanced hastily right and left. This was no time to marvel at the awesome forces that could melt rock to a blazing liquid. Already the mobsters had knocked the last shards of glass from the shattered window and spilled through into the garden after him.

It was quite dark now on the seaward side of the island, a moonless night lit only by the fitful glare from the erupting volcano. Three terraces below the lemon trees shielded the Executioner, a rocky trail girdled the tiny harbor, but there were guards strung along the track, cutting him off from the power launch and the other boats moored there. More men surged out from beneath the arbor as he watched, racing along the lowest terrace to encircle him and block his retreat from the villa.

He could hear Jean-Paul and Zefarelli shouting orders. Dim shapes fa