Bolan stood. Firing two-handed, he tracked the flaming missile and ripped off a 3-round burst as it began to drop from the sky.
One of the slugs struck home and the bottle exploded. The burning paper ignited gasoline and vapour with a thumping report, showering the hoods on the stone steps with liquid fire.
Bolan reached for the second bottle, lobbed it in a lower trajectory, over the traverse along the cliff. The 93-R chattered again and the bottle disintegrated, igniting the volatile liquid with a dull roar. Once more the night was torn apart with shrieks of pain and panic while the hell-fire rain splashed over the trapped gorillas.
Two of them spiraled flaming into the sea. A third clasped scorched hands to the blistered ruin of his face and yelped like a wounded dog. The others beat vainly at their clothes and rolled against the rock in an attempt to extinguish the terrible fire.
It was the same scene on the stairway: writhing bodies, incandescent clothes and hair, animal howls. The guys on the cable-car platform were luckier. Only two of the five men there had been licked by the blazing gasoline and a couple of their comrades manhandled them on the wooden floor, trying to smother the flames.
The last man was on his feet shouting, firing an SMG blindly toward the house. Bolan raised the Beretta, squinted along the sights in the flickering light and dropped him with the last three rounds in the magazine. He tumbled over the edge of the platform and bounced all the way down the rocky slope to the jetty.
Bolan ran out from behind the flowers, calling to the astonished guards hiding in and around the storehouse, “Come on, you guys: all we have to do now is zap those bastards trying to take us from the other side!”
Four or five men in jeans and dark sweaters emerged from the shadows and followed him as he dashed through the shrubbery. There was a crispness, the decisive tone of the born leader, in the Executioner’s voice that commanded instant respect and obedience.
But one guy — the guard Jean-Paul had addressed as Smiler — was ready to query Bolan’s authority. Smiler came out of the storehouse toting a Smith & Wesson M-76 subgun — a tall, swarthy man with two heavies in tow. “Just a minute, you,” he snarled. “Who the fuck you think you are?”
“Sondermann,” Bolan said, not pausing in his stride.
“Oh, yeah? Well, I’m the guy gives the orders around here — remember that. Where d’you think you get off, orderin’ the boys like some sonovabitch four-star general?”
One of the other men unslung an M-16 from his shoulder. “Aw, hell, Smiler,” he protested, “the dude wasted those punks holed up above the jetty, after all.”
“I don’t care how many creeps he wasted. I’m still the number-one gun in this neighborhood.” He strode after Bolan and tapped him on the shoulder. “You hear me?”
Bolan whirled and seized the front of the hood’s sweater in one steely hand, half lifting the hardman off his feet. “No, you hear me, loudmouth,” he growled. “I work alone and I don’t aim to take nobody’s place. Jean-Paul hired me personally, so I don’t reckon to be bugged by no smartass provincial gorilla, understand?”
He thrust Smiler away with force enough to make him stumble.
Choking with fury, the hood moved his hand involuntarily toward his SMG, but Bolan had already hurried down to join a couple of guards lying behind the rampart of flat stones bordering the sunken garden.
Badmouthing J-P’s number-one enforcer in front of his soldiers would have made Sondermann an enemy, for sure. Good, the Executioner thought. As yet he had no clear plan how he would approach the Mafia-KGB threat. But the more discord he could sow around here the better. If he was unable to conceal his dislike and contempt for carrion like Smiler it could at least provoke some kind of future action. And Bolan was a firm believer in mixing it and waiting to see what happened.
Right now it seemed that the battle for the island was damned near through. Most of the raiding party climbing up from the inlet had already been blown away by guards posted behind the house.
At least he need worry no longer about the body floating in the pool and the guy he had killed on the terrace: the attackers would be blamed for those.
He crouched near one of the guards sheltering behind the stones. The remainder of the invading force seemed to be holed up behind the summerhouse where he had first talked to Coralie Sanguinetti.
“How many d’you reckon?” he asked the man.
“Three or four,” the hood replied. “Maybe a couple more inside the shack. Some of the boys are making it through the plantation...” he nodded toward a clump of trees on the seaward end of the isle “...and take ’em from the rear.”
“We don’t have to wait,” Bolan said. He noticed a grenade hooked to the man’s belt. “Mind if I borrow this?”
“Go ahead,” the hood said. “But you’ll never make it, guy. That cabin’s more’n a hundred yards away. You can’t throw that far on target.”
“I don’t figure on trying,” Bolan said. “Give me covering fire, okay?”
He rose, holding the grenade in his right hand. Then, as the guard and his companions opened fire with a motley collection of shotguns and carbines, he dashed, bent double, through flower beds and rows of dwarf azaleas to dive headfirst into the pool.
He swam underwater to the far end, surfaced and pulled the pin from the grenade.
The gunners behind the summerhouse, who had opened up as soon as he began his run, were raking the patio with automatic fire.
Bolan braved the death hail and climbed the ladder. He flung the grenade with all his force over the shingled roof of the building, judging the throw accurately so that the deadly missile dropped among the raiders taking cover behind it.
The bomb exploded with a shattering roar, a vivid flash that momentarily lit the flowers and shrubs with an unnatural glare. There were no more gunshots.
The instant’s silence that followed was broken by a man screaming. At the same time a heap of dead brushwood and garden refuse ignited by the explosion burst into flame behind the hut. Within seconds the flimsy wooden back wall was ablaze.
Flames shot skyward, fanned by the breeze. The rafters caught. Tiles fell and then the whole roof collapsed.
Two men ran out from the miniholocaust and were shot down at once by the guards. In the gory shambles behind the burning shack, one body still writhed.
“Bring him inside — and keep him alive until he’s talked,” Jean-Paul called from the terrace.
Lights came on all around the house. The gangsters’ women, huddled together, could be seen anxiously peering through the windows. The capo from Marseilles stepped down into the garden and approached Bolan. “It seems we have to offer you a vote of thanks, guy,” he said. “Like twice this same night.”
“Part of the job.” Bolan made his voice gruff. “That’s what you’re paying me for, isn’t it?”
“Paying you?..” Jean-Paul stared at the wet-suited warrior, his brow knitted into a frown. Then suddenly the handsome face cleared. “Sondermann!” he exclaimed. “You’re Kurt Sondermann, right?”
“When I’m not playing with fire!” Bolan said.
6
The man in the cellar was screaming again. Marcel Sanguinetti walked to the stereo and turned up the volume. He snapped his fingers at a white-coated waiter, ordering him to circulate more rapidly with his tray of champagne-filled glasses.
Conversation among the wives and mistresses of the gang bosses became shriller, boosting the pretense that they had heard nothing.