Brinato was dressed in silk almost worth one Large, from the skin out, when he heard the thudding beat of the helicopter blades. He went to the big window and watched the ship settle slowly in atop the reinforced roof of the villa, then said, "Let's go, kid," and they took the elevator up.
According to instructions, standing orders, the pilot had shut down and the blades at rest when the boss and Razziatore came out of the elevator. The boss liked dust blown on him about as well as he liked getting peed on in the face, so the pilot had everything ready — because the boss liked delays even less than he liked dust.
Brinato paused beside the pilot. "You're set, right?"
"Yes, sir!" Donato answered, touching his cap. "The extra fuel tanks topped off, the rockets in place," he touched the seemingly out-sized landing skids which actually served the purpose of being rocket launchers as well as landing gear. "We've got the usual armament aboard. And the other thing, too," the pilot added, swallowing.
"Okay, that you get rid of."
The boss had just made the pilot a happy man. Donato drew a fantastic wage, the equivalent of almost three thousand U.S. dollars a week. But there was a catch to it. His work was not only frequently dangerous, often involving the assassin in some way or other; but also in various smuggling operations, sometimes narcotics. Since the helicopter was completely open— that is, it was openly registered to Brinato under the name of one of Brinato's many interlocking corporations, the helicopter had a self-contained self-destruct device aboard, just in case it was ever seized by the cops in a smuggling operation, most specifically dope.
The device was absolutely fail-safe, but Brinato still didn't trust it, just as he trusted nothing on earth, not even his wife. That's why he had her run over by a truck four years ago.
It took but a few moments to remove the device, then they were airborne, with the pilot going fullballs on direct course toward Agrigento.
Brinato had neglected to advise his fellow dons of this trip. He would let them in on the action, what was left of it, after he took the lean meat and gravy from the remains of Cafu's operation, said don being now deceased. As he lit a fat Havana, Brinato again congratulated himself for having sent a man over to the island when Cafu failed to show up for Frode's table. The hotline call had given Brinato the Word, and probably a several-hour edge on the other dons. Agrigento was a shambles. Cafu dead, his two main underbosses dead, a bunch of grease-balls running around the hills looking for that Bolan bastard. Meantime, what the hell were the other underbosses doing? The shylockers, bagmen, taxi operators, dock-bosses, whoremasters, olive oil monopoly guys . . . all the real, solid, tried and true and proved moneymakers —
The sons of bitches were stuffing their own pockets, that's what, without a boss of bosses. Piss on that assassin school. What was a grand a day for soldiers? Nothing. Brinato's own numbers syndicate, out of the three poorest most poverty stricken slums in Rome, nickle and dime stuff, made twice that, net, on the average. That was net. That was after paying off a standard ten percent for the runners, after fixing the cops, after paying off a few winners, unless he'd rigged it so there were no winners. And the goddam payoff wasn't all the way across the goddam Atlantic and Mediterranean, either. On the other side of the world, for Christ's sake! So you looked up some morning with shit on your face because the Angeletti kid didn't pay off and there wasn't a friggin' thing you could do about it. It was crazy.
And besides that —
The commissione had turned the idea down, absolutely, one hundred percent, unanimously.
All it got Cafu, his big plan, his big moneymaker, was dead. His head in his lap. Brinato shuddered.
You fool, Bolan told himself, you did not come here to die. That's not why you go to war, to die. You go to fight and win, and survive.
He pulled up.
No man on the island was half as physically well conditioned as Bolan. Not even the malacarni. They hadn't done their training properly. The outposts he'd scouted out, all of them, had been a mile, sometimes more, farther down the mountain than originally planned and laid out. They had doped off, and now they paid the penalty. They could not overtake Bolan, even when The Executioner was shot to pieces and leaking life from his wounds every step.
He sat down, dragging deep, shuddering painful breaths, getting his wind. He could hear them, far below now, using lanterns and lights, calling back and forth. Once, two groups got into a firefight between themselves. Bolan looked up, got his bearings from the stars, then moved out again, slowly and carefully, conserving himself, and searching.
If the malacarni stuck with it, they could still stalk him down, just by following Bolan's spoor — the dripping trail of blood.
Then he found what he sought.
At the base of a bush, he saw a hole, kicked it apart, found the thick spider webs, plastered them over his chest wound. In a few minutes the bleeding stopped. Bolan went on. In an hour he came to the abandoned sulphur mine, his cache. Once inside, he forced open the case of medical supplies and went to work on himself. First a transfusion of albumin to replace lost blood. He bound himself up in tight and proper fashion. He found the bottles and took a handful of vitamin B-12 and almost as many vitamin E pills. He shot a half-rnillion units of penicillin into his butt. He crammed his mouth full of high energy chocolate bar rations, munching as he worked. He went to the mouth of the mine shaft and looked at the sky. He had another four hours till first light. It might be just enough, if he didn't cave in.
Because what he had been through was nothing to what now faced him, Bolan set to it with the professional soldier's understanding and frame of mind.
In combat, more than in garrison, an infantryman is more packmule than fighting man, until the fighting starts. An infantryman carries all he owns, all he needs, on his own back — his chow, his water, his ammo, his weapon, his dry socks and sleeping bag; he is, and he is supposed to be, a self-contained unit with his own life-support system. If he happens also to be a gun crewman, he has the additional load of mortar or bazooka or machinegun ammunition added to his personal load.
Bolan was all of these and more.
With the albumin blood replacement, the antibiotics, the high-energy vitamins and concentrated chocolate steadily revitalizing him, Bolan set to work.
He took the mortars out of the mine shaft first, set the baseplates, sunk the spike-ended bipods in place, laid the tubes. He made another round trip and came back with the ammo and aiming stakes. He unpacked the ammo, laid out all the bomb-shaped, finned shells, and put maximum propellant charges on each shell. These were small bags of gunpowder that fit at the base of the fins and were ignited by the primer, the primer fired by the weight of the shell when dropped down the mortar tube, striking the fixed firing pin. Besides the flesh-shredding HE — high explosive — shells, Bolan had flare shells and one William Peter, a WP, white phosphorous, for marking. The William Peter not only caused casualties, burning fiercely, but it marked targets with a dense white cloud of smoke.
Bolan went back to his cache and brought the M79 grenade launcher up with a case of grenades. He rested then, and listened.