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  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!

  Bolan didn’t know it, but he wasn’t going to be allowed to remain on the sidelines much longer.

  * * *

  Marcel Sanguinetti’s property on Stromboli satisfied the same desire for privacy that was apparent at La Rocaille. It was separated from the houses of the island’s one poor fishing village by a low headland of black volcanic basalt that ran out under the sea.

  The villa was in the style peculiar to the islands: square, flat roofed, spread over many terraces and approached beneath an arbor of grapevines supported on lime washed masonry pillars. A rough track led there from the village: the arbor was directed toward an expensive landing stage.

  The volcano on the island, no more than three thousand feet high, is active, liable to erupt at any time.

  As they neared the island, the boatload of mafiosi saw with some trepidation that a wisp of dark smoke curled upward from the crater.

  “Hell,” a minor mobster from Marseilles exclaimed. “The bastard’s gonna puke hot rocks and bury us all!”

  “Nah!” commented one of the bodyguards accompanying Zefarelli, the Sicilian chief. “She’s always blowin’ a little steam — nothing to worry about.”

  Some of the hoods laughed. One or two looked as dubious as the guy from Marseilles. Otto Schuyler, a hood from Amsterdam who had not been at the original meeting in Marseilles, scowled and spat on the floor. “Hell, I thought this was supposed to be a goddamned get-together of guys with guts,” he sneered.

  Bolan listened to the interplay and wondered what was the best way to capitalize on such paranoia that it would complete the disintegration he himself had started.

  Right now, he had to let the subject drop. There was a long rattling rumble as Bloody Mary dropped anchor.

  Jean-Paul walked into the bar with Sanguinetti and the Sicilian boss. “Okay, you guys,” he called, “break it up. We’re going ashore.”

  * * *

  Antonin’s chopper was due before dusk. Before that, Coralie Sanguinetti, who had arrived on the island the previous day, organized an open air meal prepared and served by locals, on a huge patio.

  It was suffocatingly hot on that windless afternoon. The sun glared from a sky the color of hammered pewter, the sea scarcely stirred and the wisp of smoke veiling Stromboli’s crater remained motionless.

  Jean-Paul had decided to deliver a last-minute pep talk on the necessity for a united front. He strode up and down among the senior mafiosi — Bolan, along with strongarm men, was being fed in an adjoining courtyard — brandishing a leg of cold chicken as he urged the vital importance of total agreement.

  He was emphasizing how essential it was for Antonin to be convinced that there was not the slightest hint of discord, when the clatter of an approaching helicopter floated over the murmur of voices around the patio.

  Almost at once the rotor whine was itself drowned out by the rasp of a powerboat surging in toward Sanguinetti’s private landing.

  For an instant Jean-Paul paused, and then he resumed his harangue. He had hardly spoken when hurrying footsteps echoed along the stone walk beneath the arbor that led from the harbour.

  Two thickset men burst onto the patio, each carrying a Walther PPK automatic. One of them wore a white hospital bandage around his neck.

  Through the archway separating the two courtyards, Bolan recognized the hood whose throat he had pierced with the paper knife. The other guy looked as though he could be Scalese’s son. Surreptitiously Bolan checked that the Beretta slid easily in its leather.

  Jean-Paul stopped in midspeech. “What the hell?..”

  “What kind of shit are you bastards trying to pull?” the guy who looked like Scalese’s son shouted. “Where the hell does this mother get off...” the two men surged toward Jean-Paul, furious and menacing “...sending in his goddamn gorilla to break up my old man’s place, trying to crease the old guy?”

  “All right. Cool it, damn you.” Two angry spots of color burned on J-P’s cheeks. “What do you mean by busting in here like this! Who the hell are you talking about?”

  “De Brialy, that’s who,” Scalese Jr. yelled. “Where is the creep? I’ll tear him to pieces!”

  Pandemonium all around the patio. Some of the hoods were protesting, some laughed, some stood up to see better. There was a sudden increase of noise as the helicopter passed low over the villa and hovered above the landing stage.

  De Brialy rose slowly to his feet, small, prim, gray. “Just what exactly am I supposed...” he began.

  “My old man may not live: his skull is cracked, his bones are broken, he’s all busted up inside,” Scalese raved. “Seven of his housemen are wasted. And all because of some crap relating to cathouse kids. Don’t deny it, you frog bastard: it’s all on the tape.”

  The guy with the bandaged throat obviously found it too painful to speak, but he nodded violently, gesturing with his gun at Etang de Brialy. One or two of the mafiosi had unobtrusively circled behind the two intruders and now they were covered on all sides.

  Jean-Paul sighed. “Maybe it would be better if we continued this indoors,” he said
.

  Together with the two enraged Italians, Etang de Brialy and a handful of the other capos, he hurried toward a colonnade running outside Sanguinetti’s quarters along one side of the patio.

  Passing the arch that led to the second courtyard, Scalese’s companion looked up and saw Bolan sitting among the gorillas. He froze, tugging at Scalese’s sleeve as he croaked something unintelligible in a raucous ghost of a voice. Scalese whirled. “That dude? He’s the bastard did the job?”

  Bandaged-throat nodded, his own eyes murderous.

  The barrel of the PPK swung up.

  “Cut that out!” Hard as a plank, J-P’s hand chopped down on Scalese’s wrist, knocking the gun to the ground. At the same time Etang de Brialy twisted the other Walther away from the bandaged hood.

  “This is a time for talking, not shooting,” the Marseillais rapped sharply. He glanced up as a shadow swept across the patio. Swooping low above the building, Antonin’s chopper was about to set down. “And a damned awkward time it is,” Jean-Paul muttered.

  He looked across at the inner courtyard. “Sondermann, you’d better come along, too, until we get this whole mess sorted out.”

  Bolan was already on his feet. Time for the showdown, yeah, just as he had expected. He flipped open the single button of his jacket for easier access to the shoulder rig, but from behind two hands closed in on his biceps and Smiler’s voice drawled: “Not so fast, Fritz. I always did think there was something creepy about you. Now I smell a rat — a rat with a not-quite-strong-enough German accent.”

  Chuckling to himself, Raoul snared the Beretta from its armpit rig and the two of them marched Bolan indoors after the others. “Better for the boss he should be in no danger when he gets wise,” Smiler rasped.

  Inside the villa they crowded into a wide, low-ceilinged room with huge windows looking out onto a terrace of black volcanic ash planted with orange and lemon trees. The branches of the trees thrashed as the helicopter settled down between the terrace and the landing stage.

  Jean-Paul stood with his back to a vast marble chimneypiece. The remainder of the mafiosi stood awkwardly among the cane tables and chaise longues furnishing the room.

  “Okay,” Jean-Paul said tightly. “Now let’s have it. One guy at a time. One idea at a time. And it better be good.” He turned to the Camorra boss’s son. “Scalese?”

  Before the young man could reply, Otto Schuyler, the Dutchman, erupted into the room. “Just a minute!” he shouted. “Did I hear you call this guy Sondermann? Kurt Sondermann, from Hamburg?” He strode up to Bolan and stared into his face. “Well, you’re being taken for a ride. This ain’t Sondermann. I know the dude: I worked with him. There’s a resemblance, sure, but this ain’t him!”

  There was a sudden silence in the room. Bolan tensed.

  The grip on his biceps tightened. “Here’s where you get yours, asshole,” Smiler’s voice snarled gleefully in his ear.

  Jean-Paul stepped forward. His eyes had a puzzled look. Obviously he was recalling Bolan’s help during the tunnel raid, his support in the fight with Lombardo that followed, the four hits he had carried out. He seized the lapels of the Executioner’s jacket.

  “If you’re not Sondermann, who the hell are you? And you have one chance to come across with the truth….”

  Jean-Paul paused, looking over his shoulder.

  Footsteps clacked along the stone corridor leading from the room to the villa gardens. Dimitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin stood in the doorway, resplendent in the dress uniform of a colonel in the KGB, his shaven head gleaming in the dim light.

  He took in the scene at a glance, frowned and then centered his gaze on the group before the chimneypiece and in particular on the tall, muscled guy held by Jean-Paul and his two henchmen.

  This time his eyes widened in recognition.

  “What the devil are you doing with that man here?” he shouted. “How did he get in? Don’t you have any sense at all, any of you? That’s the capitalist mercenary, Mack Bolan.”

  17

  “Bolan!” It was clear from Jean-Paul’s stupefied voice that the name meant plenty to him. He fell back a pace, half releasing his grip. As he opened his mouth to speak again, a long, shivering tinkle agitated all the china on the chimneypiece behind him.

  The air in the room trembled. The ground shook.

  There was a continuous, low rumbling roar that crescendoed in a distant explosion. It was followed by another.

  The volcano on Stromboli was flexing its muscles.

  For a moment there was silence in the big crowded room. Then everyone began to speak, some denouncing Bolan, others concerning Antonin, most of them scared by the eruption.

  Coralie Sanguinetti ran in from the servant’s wing. “Papa,” she said breathlessly, “it’s spitting fire up there. There’s a huge cloud of black smoke, with sparks and flames underneath. Maria and Giancarlo and the others are frightened; they want to go back to the village.”

  “Let them go...” Bolan had not noticed the industrialist before: he was sitting in a cane chair by the windows “...they should be familiar enough with Stromboli by now: no harm will come to them.”

  The brunette stared at him for a moment, glanced briefly at the tableau that had Mack Bolan as its centerpiece and then left the room.

  “Well, Bolan? If that is who you are?” Jean-Paul resumed as though there had been no interruption. “Like I said: I want an explanation.”

  He stepped forward and struck the Executioner viciously across the face, backhand and forehand, with the full sweep of his arm. The blows were strong enough to rock the big guy’s head on his shoulders and leave livid welts marking his cheeks. But he remained rigid in the grip of J-P’s two goons, staring unflinchingly and expressionlessly at the gang boss.

  “I don’t like people who try to make a fool out of me,” Jean-Paul growled. “That’s something you’re gonna regret for sure. But before you suffer, believe me, you’re gonna sing.”

  At Bolan’s ear there was a shrill, infantile giggle. “He’s gonna sing for his suffer!” Raoul sniggered.

  “I insist this paid killer be handed over to me,” Antonin’s thickly accented voice cut in. “We have old accounts to settle. His life is forfeit ten times over... but that is a matter I intend to deal with personally.”

  “Very well.” It was clear that Jean-Paul was struggling to master the anger that had swept over him at the discovery of “Sondermann’s” double deceit. “But first there must be explanations. And quickly. We have more important things to discuss than traitors.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Bolan said evenly. “I’m sure you won’t like the explanations.”

  He had long ago decided on the strategy he would employ if his true identity was discovered. And it had occurred to him that even if the worst arrived, it could still be turned into a plus.

  “We are waiting,” Jean-Paul said harshly.

  Bolan could see his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, symptoms of that nervous instability Bolan had several times filed away mentally as being potentially useful. He was determined to play on it now.

  “I am Mack Bolan,” he said.

  “The Executioner?”

  “Some call me that.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, passing yourself off as Sondermann?”

  “Sondermann was killed in a freeway pileup on his way down here. Like the man said, there’s a resemblance. It seemed an idea to take his place.”

  “Why? Whose idea? What was the point?”

  “I was put in,” Bolan said truthfully, “to find out what was brewing and why four capos had been killed... and then to mix it so that your big deal with the colonel here fell through.”

  “What!” Antonin roared. “There! You see! The man is a spy, a renegade, a cheap mercenary. Let me...”

  “Easy, Colonel,” J-P interrupted. “Your turn later. Let me handle this my way first, okay?”

  As the KGB man lapsed into angry mutterings, Jean-Paul turned
back to Bolan and asked, “You said you were ‘put in.’ That means you’re not working on your own, that you are, as Colonel Antonin says, a hired man. Who are you working for?”

  As long as he avoided any mention of Telder or Interpol, Bolan could still use the situation to confuse matters and sow even more discord among the mobsters.

  Instead of admitting that he was working for a law-enforcement agency, he would land the shit squarely in the fan by implicating another mafioso. The hell with denials and proofs and counterclaims: once the accusation was made, doubts would remain.

  Bolan’s choice was based on the fact that, on the features of a man taken completely unaware, bewilderment, stupefaction and guilt leave much the same pattern.

  That and the electric tension that was almost tangible.

  “Who hired me?” he repeated. “Renato Ancarani.”

  The effect of his words was more dramatic than he had anticipated, the result more spectacular than he had dared hope.

  A sudden stunned silence followed by a chorus of angry shouts. Then Jean-Paul’s voice, shuddering with fury: “Ancarani! Come in here, you double-crossing twister!”

  The Corsican was in fact still outside on the patio, talking to a group of hardmen. He had taken no part in the heated discussions that followed the arrival of Scalese and the man with the bandaged throat. Now he pushed his way through into the room. “Who’s calling names?” he cried angrily.

  “Silence, you goddamn Corsican traitor!” Jean-Paul’s voice was again trembling with wrath. “Your hired man sold you out. What made you think you could get away with it, you sonovabitch — planting a fucking mole on me, putting in this Bolan to wreck our plans from the inside?”

  Ancarani’s eyes widened at the stream of accusations. His jaw dropped. His hands made ineffectual gestures and although his lips moved convulsively, no words emerged.

  Bolan was right. Taken totally by surprise, he looked in his stupefaction to be the picture of guilt.