Bolan was right. Taken totally by surprise, he looked in his stupefaction to be the picture of guilt.
Jean-Paul drew a Colt Python from under his jacket. “You slimy bastard!” he snapped. And before anyone could stop him he had fired the .357 Magnum revolver twice.
The two 158-grain hollow points drilled into Ancarani’s chest before he could get out a word of denial. He choked on blood and fell, his monogrammed silk shirt already a scarlet ruin.
The sharp crack of the shots in the room was echoed by a volley of explosions from Stromboli’s distant crater. Once more the flagstones drummed beneath their feet, the porcelain shivered on the chimneypiece. Outside among the lemon trees the short Mediterranean twilight was brightened by pulses of crimson.
Inside the villa there was uproar. Not all the mobsters were for Jean-Paul. Ancarani had his followers, and even the neutrals were yelling their disapproval of the killing.
Young Scalese was shouting loudest of alclass="underline" the hell with the damned Corsican and what about the raid on his father’s house? What about this bastard Bolan and the goddamn baron?
Jean-Paul snatched Bolan’s Beretta from Smiler and jammed the muzzle against the big guy’s solar plexus. Bolan knew he was once again near death. The mobster’s whole body was shaking with rage now.
“I don’t get it,” he snarled. “You were working for Ancarani? And now I am hearing that is was Etang de Brialy who put you up to it?”
Bolan had once written, “I am marked for death. I am as condemned as any man who ever sat in death row. My chief determination is to stretch that last mile to its highest yield, to fight the war to my last gasp.”
Now, when that grim prophecy seemed about to come true, the warrior clung to that resolve: he would inflict the maximum damage possible while there was still breath left in his body; he would wreak as much havoc as he humanly could among the slime-bucket hordes surrounding him.
The hell with those denials: he had laid a hot enough trail for his story to leave at least some suspicions and doubts.
“Yeah,” he said calmly. “It was the baron who picked up the tab.”
Bolan was used to surprises, but the next move in the game floored him. Jean-Paul turned to the Parisian boss. “Well,” he barked, “what do you have to say to that?”
The Executioner couldn’t believe his ears. Etang de Brialy said: “Quite correct. I planned the raid and paid this man Bolan to carry it out.”
The astounded silence that followed was broken by a high-pitched, wailing scream from Coralie Sanguinetti.
The girl was someplace down the corridor. As all heads turned that way there was a colossal thunderclap from the volcano, and the dark outside was split by a dozen different shades of red.
Bolan didn’t wait to ask himself questions. Jean-Paul was half turned away. Sensing a minimal relaxation of the pressure on his biceps, Bolan pinwheeled both arms violently — back and then over, like a discus thrower — hurling Smiler and Raoul forward above his head to crash heavily to the floor on their backs.
While they struggled, half-stunned, to realize what had happened, Bolan grabbed the Beretta by the barrel and wrenched it from Jean-Paul’s grasp before he could squeeze the trigger. With a long, looping left that carried all his weight — and all his impatience at the enforced inactivity he had suffered — he dropped the French mafioso. Then, before Antonin or any of the assembled mobsters could collect their wits, he shielded his head with both arms and hurled himself through the picture window into the night.
18
The warrior hit the terrace in a combat roll amid a shower of exploding glass, springing up between the two nearest trees to find the whole sky behind the crater above throbbing with orange fire.
The crater lip was a jagged loop of pulsating white heat and from the interior of this hellhole a constant stream of molten rock fountained into the air accompanied by subterranean rumbles as loud and menacing as the detonations of an artillery barrage. Bolan could see a fiery river of lava bubbling slowly downward from some split far up the mountainside.
Racing away, he glanced hastily right and left. This was no time to marvel at the awesome forces that could melt rock to a blazing liquid. Already the mobsters had knocked the last shards of glass from the shattered window and spilled through into the garden after him.
It was quite dark now on the seaward side of the island, a moonless night lit only by the fitful glare from the erupting volcano. Three terraces below the lemon trees shielded the Executioner, a rocky trail girdled the tiny harbor, but there were guards strung along the track, cutting him off from the power launch and the other boats moored there. More men surged out from beneath the arbor as he watched, racing along the lowest terrace to encircle him and block his retreat from the villa.
He could hear Jean-Paul and Zefarelli shouting orders. Dim shapes fanned out at the rear of the buildings, scattering over the higher ground to bar his way to the village.
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.