To fire now would reveal his position. And until the moon rose much later, to remain invisible offered the best chance he had of getting out of there.
But the hunt had already been vectored in the right direction by the collapsed wall. It could only be a matter of time before the flashlight beams swept over, and then into, the cabin.
Bolan’s problem now was twofold. He had to figure out some way to get out of there. And fast. Or he could work his way back down in the hope of worsening still more the Mafia position in relation to the KGB.
His brief, after all, was to create discord to the point that the Russians refused to play ball any longer, and he had no means of knowing whether that point had been reached.
He was pondering the alternatives when a familiar voice spoke softly in the darkness behind him.
“It would be best to leave this shack as quickly as possible. Once they know we are here, a single grenade lobbed through that doorway would be more than enough...”
Bolan whirled. “De Brialy! How the hell did you get in here?”
“I was here before you were,” the Frenchman said. “A lot of fellows down there would be happy to see me dead.”
“Why?” Bolan demanded brusquely. “Why did you agree that you sent me to rough up Scalese? You knew damned well that story was a lie.”
“It was on the spur of the moment,” Etang de Brialy confessed. “It occurred to me that I could capitalize on your lie.”
“What do you mean, capitalize? When it meant you’d be run out of the house with three dozen heavily armed gorillas on your tail?”
“That suited me fine. It was just one more piece of Mafia craziness, all that shooting.”
“I don’t get it. What’s your angle?”
The shooting had stopped now. The flashlight beams were stationary. The volcano crater, still pulsing redly, remained silent.
“We run a clean racket in Paris,” the baron replied. “No underage kids in the houses. The shit we push is what we say it is, not cut to hell. The gambling’s honest: there’s no point rigging it — the house wins, anyway. Guys who pay for protection do get it. No bystanders are involved. There are no muggings in our territory: any free lance who steps out of line is very severely... disciplined.”
“Well, great for you,” Bolan said sarcastically. “And so?”
“We work with certain families, but we are not actually Mafia. I think that should be obvious,” the Frenchman said with dignity. “My... associates... don’t go along with this KGB tie-up. Nor do I. We are, after all, first and fore most a French association. We don’t want any part of some deal that could mean we’re told what to do and when to do it by damned foreigners. No offense to you, sir.”
“You mean...” Bolan began.
“I considered that I could work as a... modifying influence more successfully from the inside, as it were, than if I made my opposition public, the way Scotto and Balestre and the others did. It would also be somewhat safer.” Etang de Brialy’s tone was wry and dry. “Of course until tonight I had not actually been able to achieve very much. Simply a word here, a doubt there. But...”
“Are you telling me,” Bolan interrupted, “that you’re working against the merger?”
“Things are satisfactory as they are. A neat, tidy life with no complications,” the baron said primly. “Why spoil it for nothing better than money? We can get that anytime.”
“Then, at least for now, we’re on the same side. Because you must know now that my own...” The Executioner stopped in midsentence. Somewhere below voices were raised in argument. Inside the villa a door slammed.
“Impossible, impossible!” Antonin’s harsh accents carried clear to the cabin on the night air. “The situation is totally unacceptable.”
The next few words were lost because Jean-Paul’s furious voice kept interrupting. From time to time contemptuous phrases from the Russian punctuated the gang leader’s outcry.
“Acting like children in a slum... absolutely essential that we deal with adults behaving as adults... public killings, bomb attacks, open gang warfare here, in France, in Italy, in California... An intolerable situation.”
Bolan lost the thread again as Jean-Paul’s near-hysterical argument drowned the KGB officer’s words. Then, quite clearly, the mobster yelled, “Your whole aim, you said, was to promote insecurity and chaos!”
“Not among yourselves, you imbecile!” Antonin shouted. “We will deal only with a unified organization. Yet here you present me with quarreling, feuding, shooting. Worst of all, you allow the mercenary Bolan to infiltrate your own group.”
Jean-Paul’s reply was lost in the angry stamp of booted feet on the flagstones. Antonin was striding away from the villa.
Eventually, over the Frenchman’s impassioned arguments, his distant voice could be heard icily declaiming, “No! You have shown yourselves, all of you, undisciplined, stupid, unreliable. Now it is over. I shall report to my superiors that on further examination the project has been found to be unworkable.”
A fresh outburst from Jean-Paul. Was he pleading, cajoling, even threatening? There was no way of telling: the two men were now too far away for individual phrases to be recognizable. All that Bolan and the baron could say with certainty was that the tirade was cut short with a single sharp expletive in Russian, followed instantly by a shot from a heavy-caliber revolver.
Silence.
Receding footsteps.
A gruff, guttural command, and then the rising whine of a turbojet cutting in.
A minute later the Soviet helicopter rose into the air over the landing stage and flew away toward the southwest.
Before the noise of its rotors faded, the volcano renewed its eruption with a rumbling bellow that shook the ground beneath their feet and sent flames and molten debris shooting upward from the crater.
“Did he kill Jean-Paul?” Etang de Brialy’s voice could scarcely be heard over the uproar.
“It sounded that way,” Bolan said cheerfully.
In the darkness of the cabin behind them, suddenly a third voice spoke.
“You’d better get out of here fast: they’re setting up a searchlight down there, and this is the obvious place to look.”
Coralie Sanguinetti!
“How did you get here?” Bolan exclaimed for the second time that night.
“There’s an underground passageway. It leads here from a ruined chapel on a rock above the house.”
“Could we go that way?” the baron asked.
“Yes. There’s a place where the roof of the tunnel has fallen in. About halfway, in the middle of an old olive grove. We’d have some cover if we scrambled out there.”
“We?” Bolan asked.
“Yes. I’ll show you the way. Your only chance is to make it to the other side of the island — over the shoulder below the crater, and then down to a creek where they keep a couple of fishing boats.”
“Below the crater?” Etang de Brialy repeated nervously.
“Some way below. We’ll be all right. But hurry...”
Coralie stopped talking. From the roof of the villa below a blinding white beam split the night and began to sweep left and right up the terraces. It was joined by a less powerful spotlight from the bridge of the power launch moored at the landing stage, and then by the hand-held torches that had been searching earlier.
The light from Coralie’s own pocket flashlight was shielded by a red silk scarf held over the lens. In the dim illumination Bolan saw in the back of the cabin a trapdoor standing open in the floor.