Sunscream

The only route open to him now was upward — toward the flaming inferno that was boiling from Stromboli’s crater and filling the night with the stench of sulfur.

Bolan scrambled up the stone wall retaining the terrace above him, ran across the narrow strip of black earth and climbed again. Torchlight beams lanced the darkness between the lemon trees below.

Above the house on the village side there was a confused hubbub. Once again he heard Jean-Paul shouting commands, and another voice — Smiler’s? — repeating Etang de Brialy’s name. Suddenly winking points of fire sparkled all around the villa, and a fusillade from rifles and automatics punctuated the roaring explosions from the crater above.

Bolan hurled himself flat... and then realized the shots couldn’t possibly be aimed at him. Not yet. They were in the wrong direction and too far away. He rose cautiously and continued, terrace by terrace, his silent upward progress.

Perhaps Ancarani’s goons had taken the opportunity to open fire on J-P and his men? If so, that was great... but where was Etang de Brialy?

No way of telling. What was certain was that they — or some of them — were still after Bolan. The flashlight beams were probing the hillside now, sending shadows from fruit trees and vines leaping over the old stone walls.

More shots. A cry of agony. From outside the smashed window a stream of orders ending with the words, “Whatever happens, bring in that bastard Bolan dead or alive.”

The soldier was high above the building, threading his way between the wires on a terrace where the vines had long ago run wild, when the lights focused on his position. He ran for the next wall.

It was about six feet high. As he climbed hurriedly, his foot dislodged a stone. Bolan cursed, slipped — and a whole section of the ancient buttress collapsed in a shower of pebbles and dust. In a momentary lull stilling the eruption above, the clatter of falling stone was appallingly loud.

A triumphant shout from below and a volley of shots, this time undoubtedly aimed at him. A near miss ricocheted away with a shrill whine, and several slugs hummed past uncomfortably close.

He was now on a wider strip of land. On the far side, a small, square structure was silhouetted against the flames: a black rectangle blotted from the burning sky.

It was a stone cabin, no more than fifteen feet square, with no windows and an open doorway. Part of the roof was gone now: smoke tinged with scarlet was visible through the gaps.

Bolan crawled in and thumbed off the Beretta’s safety.

This time the auto-loader was fitted with a 20-round box magazine. But those twenty shots were all that stood between Bolan and death. It depended on how long the mobsters continued firing at one another. But there were, he knew, automatic rifles and at least one SMG backing up the handguns down there. Grenades, too, perhaps.

To fire now would reveal his position. And until the moon rose much later, to remain invisible offered the best chance he had of getting out of there.

But the hunt had already been vectored in the right direction by the collapsed wall. It could only be a matter of time before the flashlight beams swept over, and then into, the cabin.

Bolan’s problem now was twofold. He had to figure out some way to get out of there. And fast. Or he could work his way back down in the hope of worsening still more the Mafia position in relation to the KGB.

His brief, after all, was to create discord to the point that the Russians refused to play ball any longer, and he had no means of knowing whether that point had been reached.

He was pondering the alternatives when a familiar voice spoke softly in the darkness behind him.

“It would be best to leave this shack as quickly as possible. Once they know we are here, a single grenade lobbed through that doorway would be more than enough...”

Bolan whirled. “De Brialy! How the hell did you get in here?”

“I was here before you were,” the Frenchman said. “A lot of fellows down there would be happy to see me dead.”

“Why?” Bolan demanded brusquely. “Why did you agree that you sent me to rough up Scalese? You knew damned well that story was a lie.”

“It was on the spur of the moment,” Etang de Brialy confessed. “It occurred to me that I could capitalize on your lie.”

“What do you mean, capitalize? When it meant you’d be run out of the house with three dozen heavily armed gorillas on your tail?”

“That suited me fine. It was just one more piece of Mafia craziness, all that shooting.”

“I don’t get it. What’s your angle?”

The shooting had stopped now. The flashlight beams were stationary. The volcano crater, still pulsing redly, remained silent.

“We run a clean racket in Paris,” the baron replied. “No underage kids in the houses. The shit we push is what we say it is, not cut to hell. The gambling’s honest: there’s no point rigging it — the house wins, anyway. Guys who pay for protection do get it. No bystanders are involved. There are no muggings in our territory: any free lance who steps out of line is very severely... disciplined.”

“Well, great for you,” Bolan said sarcastically. “And so?”

“We work with certain families, but we are not actually Mafia. I think that should be obvious,” the Frenchman said with dignity. “My... associates... don’t go along with this KGB tie-up. Nor do I. We are, after all, first and fore most a French association. We don’t want any part of some deal that could mean we’re told what to do and when to do it by damned foreigners. No offense to you, sir.”

“You mean...” Bolan began.

“I considered that I could work as a... modifying influence more successfully from the inside, as it were, than if I made my opposition public, the way Scotto and Balestre and the others did. It would also be somewhat safer.” Etang de Brialy’s tone was wry and dry. “Of course until tonight I had not actually been able to achieve very much. Simply a word here, a doubt there. But...”

“Are you telling me,” Bolan interrupted, “that you’re working against the merger?”

“Things are satisfactory as they are. A neat, tidy life with no complications,” the baron said primly. “Why spoil it for nothing better than money? We can get that anytime.”

“Then, at least for now, we’re on the same side. Because you must know now that my own...” The Executioner stopped in midsentence. Somewhere below voices were raised in argument. Inside the villa a door slammed.

“Impossible, impossible!” Antonin’s harsh accents carried clear to the cabin on the night air. “The situation is totally unacceptable.”

The next few words were lost because Jean-Paul’s furious voice kept interrupting. From time to time contemptuous phrases from the Russian punctuated the gang leader’s outcry.

“Acting like children in a slum... absolutely essential that we deal with adults behaving as adults... public killings, bomb attacks, open gang warfare here, in France, in Italy, in California... An intolerable situation.”

Bolan lost the thread again as Jean-Paul’s near-hysterical argument drowned the KGB officer’s words. Then, quite clearly, the mobster yelled, “Your whole aim, you said, was to promote insecurity and chaos!”

“Not among yourselves, you imbecile!” Antonin shouted. “We will deal only with a unified organization. Yet here you present me with quarreling, feuding, shooting. Worst of all, you allow the mercenary Bolan to infiltrate your own group.”

Jean-Paul’s reply was lost in the angry stamp of booted feet on the flagstones. Antonin was striding away from the villa.

Eventually, over the Frenchman’s impassioned arguments, his distant voice could be heard icily declaiming, “No! You have shown yourselves, all of you, undisciplined, stupid, unreliable. Now it is over. I shall report to my superiors that on further examination the project has been found to be unworkable.”