Carter sprayed their legs with a burst of the Uzi, and they went down like cord wood. He came up to his feet and sprinted toward Wombo.
The big man's magnum had long ago clicked on empty. Now he was using it like a club, chopping down the SID men as fast as they got to him.
"Wombo!"
"Ugh?"
"This way, follow me!"
"Ugh."
He cracked two more heads and lumbered after Carter. They gained the first plateau of rocks, and Carter spotted a path, the giant right behind him.
They got past the lights and were just climbing toward the last summit, when bodies came down on them from above like huge black raindrops.
Carter went down under a swarm of men. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the beast do the same.
The SID boys were making it look good. They proceeded to beat the hell out of him. Of course they didn't know which one he was, so they weren't discriminating.
Santoni had probably told them: "Work all of them over to make it look good, but don't kill any of them if you can help it. You might kill the wrong one."
Carter played the game until he could feel blood running down his face and knew that his eyes were swelling shut. When the feeling started to leave his back and he was sure he was about to vomit, he gave up and folded into a fetal position on the ground.
The fists and feet gave up on him and turned their attention to Wombo.
Nick Carter could hardly believe his eyes.
There were at least ten men pummeling the big oaf all at the same time. Somehow he managed to mash his way through ail of them and take off.
Carter saw his burly outline briefly on the brow of the cliffs, and then he was gone.
Let him go, Carter was thinking. He'll prop up the story.
But he couldn't make words through his swollen and cracked lips.
He had just finished emptying his stomach when he was yanked to his feet. A stern-faced, jut-jawed young Italian officer's smiling features were inches from his own.
"You are under arrest."
"Screw you," Carter hissed.
An iron fist in his gut put out the last light.
Eight
Italian justice is swift, particularly when it comes down directly from government indictments and the charge is aiding and abetting revolution and arms smuggling.
It was even swifter in the case of Ali Maumed Kashmir aka AXE Killmaster Nick Carter. This, of course, was helped along by the mountain of evidence against him, and the very quiet interventions and urgings of the SID and the even quieter American secret agencies.
His photograph, the face partially swathed in bandages and almost unrecognizable after the severe beating on the beach, was splashed across every newspaper in the world.
His home in New Jersey was raided, and records of ten years of illegal arms smuggling were confiscated. Men in his employ were anxious to testify to save their own skins if Kashmir were brought back to the States to stand trial.
But that would be a long time in the future. Italy wanted him first.
A woman, Naomi Bartinelli, was arrested in New York City and charged with aiding Kashmir in his worldwide arms deals. Several other underground terrorist organizations and business dealings of international crime families were compromised when the woman's computer records were seized in her Manhattan apartment.
Two days after the affair on the beach south of Livorno, Kashmir was arraigned. Three days after that, the trial took place. A week later, he was found guilty and sentenced to fifty years in the maximum security prison, Castel Montferrato.
One piece of strange evidence leaked out during the trial. The SID men had been able to carry out this brilliant raid against the Liberta revolutionaries because of a tip. The leak — that it was an informant — of course was not made through newspapers or to the general public. It was slipped to the underworld and known terrorist cells in Rome, Florence, and Milan.
Clothing, a bag, and papers found in a pension in San Remo clearly stated that the arms had been purchased from a man named Oakhurst in Amsterdam. Oakhurst had tried to cross Kashmir, and he had paid for it with three of his best people.
It was all too apparent to Nicolo Palmori and his lieutenants that this man Oakhurst was the one who ripped the SID.
Two days after the sentencing of Kashmir and the seven members of La Amicizia di Liberta Italiana to Castel Montferrato, a meeting of Liberta leaders was called in Florence.
It was almost midnight when Cariotta Polti parked a Hat sedan in Florence's Piazza Indipendenza. In the passenger seat beside her sat Sophia Palmori, a blond wig entirely covering her raven black hair.
Wordlessly, the two women got out of the car and crossed the piazza. They reached the Via Zanobi and turned left. The street, lined with well-renovated old houses and an occasional cafe, was barely two cars wide.
Since it was so late, neither the street nor the cafes were overly crowded. The women turned into the second cafe they came to.
They sat in a rear booth and ordered wine. When the carafe of harsh local red came, both women poured glasses for themselves but neither drank.
They sat, stone-faced, barely glancing at the well-dressed young people around them.
One by one, three young men came up with open propositions. They were rebuffed or ignored. The men left quickly, and after the third one had made his try, no others approached.
Sophia was the first to rise. She moved through the tables and down the hall to the ladies' room. Inside, she opened the towel holder, withdrew a key from behind the roll, and unlocked a second door marked Storage. She replaced the key and moved into one of the stalls to wait.
Three minutes later Cariotta entered, and both women went through the door, locking it behind them. The stairs were steep and narrow, and they led deep into the subbasement beneath the cafe and apartments above.
At the bottom of the stairs was another door. Cariotta knocked, and light gleamed through a peephole.
"Yes?"
"It is Cariotta and Sophia."
The door opened at once, and the women entered. It was a large, barnlike room with little furniture. Two iron beds with dirty mattresses graced one corner. A makeshift kitchen with a coffeepot on a hot plate was in another. There was no rug on the bare floor, and the rotting boards looked as if they hadn't been swept in a year.
So went the glamorous life of a guerrilla terrorist constantly on the run.
Above a large round table flanked by several chain, a bare, low-watt yellow bulb hung, barely illuminating anything outside the sphere of the table.
"My baby!" Nicolo Palmori growled in a whiskey voice, and he folded his fat arms around his daughter.
He planted a sloppy kiss on each of her cheeks and turned to Carlotta, who was forced to undergo the same welcome. Her stomach turned as, over the terrorist leader's shoulder, she saw Wombo take the young girl in his huge arms and invade her mouth with his tongue.
There were two other men in the room besides Palmori and Wombo: Nordo Compari. and a man Carlotta knew only as Pocky.
Both of them were homicidal maniacs and were rarely out of Nicolo Palmori's sight. Compari was almost as big as Wombo, with flat, irregular features, black, greasy hair, and rotten teeth. Pocky had boyish features and unruly blond hair. He was over thirty, but he could easily pass for twenty. His most noticeable feature, other than his vacant blue eyes, was the steel claw he wore in a black leather rig in place of his right hand.
"Sit, sit, everyone sit," Palmori wheezed. "Nordo, pour soroe wine!"
Carlotta accepted the glass and managed not to wince when Compari's hand caressed hers while handing it over. He had been trying for over a year to seduce her, but Carlotta had always managed to keep him at bay. Once, she had done it by slicing an eight-inch gash across his belly when he was drinking and had tried too hard.