As Coralie lowered herself down the crumbling stone steps, light blazed in through the open doorway. Bolan and the Frenchman followed hastily and closed the trapdoor over their heads.
The tunnel was vaulted brickwork. Despite the proximity of the volcano, the walls were damp, and there were pools of moisture on the floor. It twisted and turned for quite a distance before Coralie’s flashlight revealed the slant of rubble and the patch of scarlet sky that marked the place where the roof had collapsed.
They fought their way out into the open air. Red light ahead and white light behind transformed the gnarled trunks of the olives into a grotesque tableau. “The big searchlight below,” Bolan asked the girl, “is it mobile?”
“No,” she replied. “It’s mounted permanently on the roof.”
“So once we make the far side of the ridge there’s no more danger from the light?”
“No,” Coralie said dubiously, “not from the light.”
There was plenty of danger on the near side of the ridge. They had made less than fifty yards when the powerful beam brightened among the trees and there was a shout from lower down the slope. They had been seen.
A ragged volley of automatic-rifle fire brought leaves tumbling down from the branches above their heads. “Split up and zigzag,” Bolan ordered tersely. “What’s on the far side of this grove?”
“Rough ground sloping upward, covered with long grasses, rocky outcrops. There’s no more cultivation,” Coralie said.
“For how far?”
“In height? Maybe another eight hundred, nine hundred feet. After that, it’s volcanic stuff: old lava flows and ash.”
“Let’s go,” Bolan said.
Because it was all over now except for the shouting. He could report that the mission was accomplished; the Soviets abandoned their project and the enemy forces were in disarray.
Those forces who were not actively tracking him down, anyway, with orders to bring him in dead or alive. Maybe, Bolan thought, instead of just getting the hell out, he would stick around awhile first and try shouting a little....
At the far end of the olive grove he dropped to one knee. The power launch was way out of range now, but flashlights were still bobbing around and the big searchlight silhouetted shadowy figures among the trees. Bolan let off a couple of rounds and thought he saw one of the figures stumble and fall. Etang de Brialy, who was carrying a Detonics .45 Combat Master, pumped half a dozen rounds in the same direction.
As their fire was returned, the two fugitives ran out from under the trees and followed Coralie, who was already wading through waist-high grasses.
Out in the open, Bolan realized that the wind had risen.
The tower of black smoke billowing from the crater was now leaning over to the northeast, and the incandescent fragments showering thunderously skyward were all falling on the nearer slopes of the cone. From this position high on the mountainside they could look over the basalt headland to the riding lights of Bloody Mary, where she lay rocking at anchor in the freshening sea.
The night had been warm; the hot wind blowing down from the active cone was suffocating. By the time they at last breasted the ridge, each of them was soaked with sweat.
The darkness on the far side of the crest was relative. Instead of the harsh searchlight brilliance, the ground was suffused with a wavering red glow reflected from the underside of the vast cloud streaming from the erupting crater.
Immediately below them, a wide, shallow depression separated the ridge from high ground overlooking the sea on the far side of the island. And, as Coralie had warned, it was a lunar landscape, witness to countless eruptions in the past, which had inundated, stratified, seared and tortured the surface until now it resembled nothing so much as a giant black Christmas cake whose frosting had been whipped into frightening shapes by a fork.
At the upper end of the depression, glimmering in the tawny light, a fresh flow of molten lava dripped heavily from crag to crag.
“We take this path,” Coralie called over the express-train roar of the volcano. She began edging down a narrow shelf of rock that slanted across the face of the depression.
Following close by, Bolan took in with pleasure her slender form, clothed now in tight-fitting jeans and lightweight T-shirt, her dark hair tied back with a ribbon that matched the shirt. “That scream,” he said, “just before I busted out of the villa: it was you, wasn’t it?”
“There was nothing wrong,” she said. "It was the only thing I could think of to make some kind of diversion.”
“You probably saved my life,” Bolan said. “How come?”
Coralie turned to grin at him. “As soon as I knew you weren’t that German hit man, that you were not a killer for hire, I figured my first impression must have been right, after all. When I found out you were doing your damnedest to wreck this Russian deal, I decided to help all I could.”
“You were trying to wreck it yourself? All the time?’
“Not exactly. I just wanted my father out of it. When he’s away from these creeps, he’s nice. But if that KGB merger had gone through, he’d have been in over his head, and I couldn’t stand for that.”
“You figure he’s out of it now?”
She smiled again. “After tonight — and after what happened at La Rocaille — I think he’ll be a little more careful next time he has house guests!”
They were two hundred yards along the shelf. Each time the volcano blasted out its flaming debris, bright glares of scarlet and crimson augmented the pulsating ruby light so that the rocky landscape seemed constantly to change its shape.
What didn’t change at all was the compact squad of men positioned on a lava platform some way farther on and a hundred feet below. The ruddy light glinted now bright, now faint, on the metalwork of their guns, but the hands holding guns were as steady as the rocks themselves.
“Damn,” Coralie said. “That must be Ancarani’s buddies. There was a jeep at the villa. I guess they hotfooted around the coast to cut us off.”
“Cut us off, or cut off the gorillas chasing us?”
“Both, probably,” the girl said. She glanced behind them. The pursuers had already appeared above the rim, were filing down onto the pathway. “We’ve got to make a trail on the far side of the valley. It looks like we’ll have to quit this path and scramble down among the boulders and up the other side.”
Bolan heard the shooting when they were only a few yards below the shelf. Muzzle-flashes were invisible in the leaping light, but the reports rebounded from the walls of the canyon like minor echoes of the detonations shaking the crater above.
The pro-Ancarani group on the lower platform numbered eight or nine; there were probably at least a dozen on the way down from the ridge. Smiler and Raoul would be among them for sure, and at one point Bolan caught sight of the great bulk of Delacroix.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked Coralie.
“No.”
“Then you better make it to the floor of the depression,” he told her. “Stash yourself in among those boulders...” he pointed to a cluster of tall rocks “...while we see what we can do for the opposition.”
She nodded and hurried on down amid a scattering of pebbles and stone fragments. Etang de Brialy carried spare clips for his Combat Master. He was already blazing away at the mobsters working their way down from the ridge, firing two-handed with his elbows supported on a pumice outcrop.