Bolan was alert for any sudden moves. He was off the mark and diving the instant the hidden shutter opened in the base of the bronze piece.
The deadly steel dart ripped the lobe of his ear as it hurtled past him. Bolan rammed Scalese’s chest with his shoulder and carried the two of them back over the polished top of the desk. A black letter case, an inkwell, a jeweled paper knife and a Venetian ashtray crashed to the floor. The two men landed in a heap beneath the windows.
Scalese was quick for his age. A stiletto was already in his hand as he twisted out from under the Executioner. But anger had fueled Bolan’s strength and determination. Ignoring the menace of that flickering point, he went straight for the man’s arm.
The blade slashed the strap of his shoulder rig, pricked blood through the sleeve of his blacksuit and scratched his hand before his fingers closed in on the bony wrist.
Violently, he jerked the arm down against an upthrust knee. The weapon clattered away; the bone snapped dryly as a dead branch in winter.
Scalese screamed.
Bolan picked him up by his ankles and swung him. He whirled the mafioso around like an Olympic athlete winding up a hammer throw, then crashed the old man’s head against one of the picture windows.
Scalese’s skull shattered the glass. The pane exploded with a jangling concussion.
Once more Bolan swiveled. At the completion of the turn, he hurled the Camorra chief savagely out through the broken window.
Blood laced the air as Scalese’s ribboned body dropped fifteen feet in a cascade of razor-sharp fragments to a terrace planted with olives and fruit trees.
He lay groaning feebly, with streams of scarlet fanning out from his broken body to sink into the sunbaked earth. Even if he lived, Girolamo Scalese wasn’t going to be propositioning underage kids for quite some time.
Bolan turned back into the room. A swarthy gorilla in a cream-colored suit was standing in the doorway, his right hand diving between his lapels.
In one fluid movement Bolan scooped up the fallen paper knife by the point and thrust it with murderous aim at the hood. The sharp blade sank into the guy’s throat and he subsided to the floor with a bubbling moan.
Bolan jumped over the body and raced for the patio. Another mobster, attracted by the noise of smashing glass, was running along the passage toward Bolan. The big guy wasted him as he ran, a single shot from the Beretta impacting below his breastbone, pulverizing liver and spleen.
On the far side of the patio, between Scalese’s quarters and the kitchen wing, three more hoods were approaching the Executioner. The girl was still in the pool, her blond hair and frightened face incongruous above the surface of the blue water.
“Keep your head down!” Bolan yelled.
He unhitched a small plastic grenade from the black-suit harness, pulled the pin and threw it across the pool.
A momentary flash dimmed the blaze of the sun. A cracking thunderclap of an explosion. More glass shattered and fell. Masonry dropped and broken tiles slid into the patio from the roof.
A shower of blood stained the walls.
Bolan reholstered the Beretta. “You can come out now,” he told the blonde. “Don’t look behind you... and get the hell out of here.”
He walked around to the kitchen passage and descended the stairs to the garage.
At the end of the driveway he pressed the button to open the electrically operated gates and regained the Ferrari.
Turning the roadster so that he could go back the way he had come, he backed up into the villa entrance. The hood with the paper knife in his throat could still be alive; there might be other guys on Scalese’s payroll in other rooms; the girl might be watching. Whatever, he wanted to be quite sure somebody saw him leaving in that yellow-and-black car.
With their reports, and the evidence on the tape, whether Scalese himself lived or died, Baron Etang de Brialy was going to have a lot of explaining to do when the story broke on his arrival on Stromboli.
And nobody was going to believe some fool story about his Ferrari having been stolen. Not when it would be found tomorrow right where it should be, in the dockside parking lot, with the keys in the harbormaster’s office!
Bolan wore a satisfied smile as he floored the pedal, heading for Naples and Rome.
16
Sanguinetti’s yacht was in the Onassis class. Below the streamlined stack that funneled the vapors from its twin 1200 hp diesels into the sky, three promenade decks accommodated a dining room, a lounge, a bar and sleeping quarters for thirty-two people. Two of the latest powered self-righting lifeboats were stowed aft of the wheelhouse and bridge, and there was a small helipad with a Dassault chopper above the crew’s mess hall.
Perhaps in ironic allusion to his own name — or even to the activities of his friends — Sanguinetti had christened his sixty-million-dollar status symbol Bloody Mary.
Neither the richness of the appointments nor the elegance of Bloody Mary’s, thoroughbred line drew Mack Bolan’s attention after he had left the Jaguar in Reggio and come aboard on the afternoon of the day following his visit to Scalese. It was something much more mundane that attracted him to the luxuriously equipped bar on the upper promenade deck.
A giant-screen television set sat above the rows of bottles and glasses.
He had heard the initial news flash on the car radio, but he was anxious for the fuller version that TV would provide. And there it was! Seven people were dead and a dozen injured after a street battle in downtown San Francisco.
Gunmen from the East Coast had invaded the city’s dock area in a fleet of cars and shot up local racketeers in a running battle that had lasted more than an hour. Among the dead was an underworld boss named Luigi Abba.
A handful of mobsters sprawling in the soft seats around the bar stopped drinking long enough to comment jeeringly on the bulletin. “Just like old times,” one of them guffawed. “Hey, Sondermann, is that the way they run things where you come from, too?”
“At least we try to keep our private quarrels off the TV screen,” Bolan said.
A dispute over Mafia “territory” was thought to be at the root of the dispute, the newscaster said. Vincente Borrone, one of the leading New York mafiosi, was being held as a material witness although he denied any knowledge of the affair.
Bolan took in the pictures of bullet-riddled sedans and the chalked sidewalk outlines of corpses and nodded with satisfaction.
He looked out beyond the forested masts and rigging of the harbor, to the open sea that lay on the far side of the narrow passage separating Reggio de Calabria from Sicily.
Stromboli and the seven other islets comprising the Lipari group were forty nautical miles away. With the power churned out by Bloody Mary’s twin screws, they should be there in less than two hours.
There would be absences, though. Apart from Borrone and Abba. Bolan figured from his knowledge of the mob scene Stateside that the bosses from Chicago, Detroit — and maybe New Orleans and Florida, as well — would be too anxious to put their weight behind the remnants of Abba’s gang, too busy trying to chisel themselves a piece of the action, to make the trip. Barrone’s nationwide stranglehold on the organization was not popular.
Still, it was kind of ironic — the Executioner permitted himself a grim smile — the role he himself was playing.
Instead of his usual hellfire attacks, his anti-Mafia tactics here were based on thinking that paralleled the worldwide strategy favored by the KGB: precisely in the style of that evil organization, having laid his plans, he was standing aside and allowing his adversaries to destroy themselves from the inside!