Sunscream te-85 Page 15

  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.

  Bolan had to be more careful. He knew he had to make every shot count. There were eighteen rounds left in the magazine, and unless he could liberate a gun from the attackers, that was it.

  Both groups had seen them leave the pathway; both were unleashing a murderous hail of lead down the valley. But they were also, crazily, firing at each other.

  The Executioner smiled grimly and prepared to join in. It was the first time in his life that he had been involved in a battle where he could fire — was obliged to fire — on both sides at the same time; and the second time, after the Corsican adventure, that he didn’t give a goddamn which side won!

  As long as his own small group survived.

  Squinting against the deceptive light, he fired half a dozen rounds at selected targets. Or what he figured were targets. There had already been casualties on both sides, but the changing rock silhouettes, the moving shapes of men, the bounding shadows, swelling and dwindling with the glow from the cone, made it impossible to see how often he scored. He would have to wait until they were at closer quarters before he could be certain.

  That wouldn’t be long.

  Crouching behind rocky projections... running, bent double, from boulder to buttress... the two groups were fast approaching each other — and the fugitives clinging to the valley side.

  “You keep after the guys coming down,” Bolan called to the baron. “I’ll see how many I can take out on the other side.” Sighting carefully, he fired twice more at the gunmen on the platform. One at least, he could see this time, spun away from his fellows and collapsed on the basalt shelf.

  “I’ll do my best,” Etang de Brialy replied. “Shooting against the fireworks from that damned crater makes it difficult. But that big bastard Delacroix is the easiest mark. If I could...”

  The sentence was unfinished. After a moment Bolan turned around. There was a metallic clatter as the heavy Detonics automatic slid to the ground. The Frenchman was draped over the pumice.

  As the Executioner touched him he flopped limply away, a fist-sized hole gaping horribly in the back of his head. Two sightless eyes stared blankly at Bolan; a third, making a neat triangle with the other two, yawned blackly at the top of his forehead, expressionless witness to the high-velocity slug that had blasted his brains away.

  Bolan cursed. He laid down the body, took the gun and the spare clips and scrambled farther down the slope. Without the baron to cover his flank, he would be enfiladed if he stayed that near the pathway.

  It was curious, he thought as he headed for the rocks where the girl was hiding — the Frenchman had been involved with drugs, prostitution, gambling, protection. He was a classic underworld racketeer. Yet somehow Bolan could not resist a sneaking admiration for him. Even if he hadn’t achieved much, he’d had the guts to take on the whole of the southern Mafia.

  It wasn’t just because he desperately needed a backup that the Executioner would miss him.

  Among the rock columns on the floor of the depression the eruption seemed nearer and more dangerous than ever. The hot wind blowing down from the cone dried the inside of Bolan’s mouth with sulfurous fumes and choked his nostrils with fine ash. Trapped gases forcing their way through the viscous molten magma inside the crater were now escaping with explosive violence, hurling fountains of liquid fire high into the night sky.

  The gunmen on Stromboli had changed their tactics. Although most of the gang descending from the ridge were already below the pathway, they had switched their line of attack to concentrate on the remainder of the Ancarani group. The Sicilian boss, Arturo Zefarelli, was shouting orders. The liquidation of
Bolan and the girl would be much easier if the dissident mobsters on the platform were eliminated first.

  He found Coralie among the rocky pillars. He asked her, “Can you handle an automatic?” When she nodded, he added, “Take this one. The recoil is rugged, but the Baron’s .45 is tougher still.”

  He handed her the Beretta. “Don’t shoot until you’re certain of a hit. There are only ten shots left in the magazine.”

  Higher up the valley, white-hot projectiles of lava, cooling and hardening as they spiraled away from the crater, were clattering back to the ground and rolling toward the pillars. Between this noise and the hissing of escaping gas and steam within the volcano, the gunshots sounded strangely insignificant.

  Soon they ceased, and Bolan saw that the battle between the two rival Mafia factions was over. There was no more firing from the platform: Ancarani’s supporters had been eliminated.

  For the survivors of Zefarelli’s squad — there were nine or ten of them — a single objective remained.

  The obliteration of Bolan and Coralie.

  The Executioner saw them swarming down the sides of the depression now, spread out in a rough semicircle to flank the rock cluster where they were hidden.

  Well, the fact that he was outgunned and outnumbered had never deterred Bolan before. He posted the girl behind a barricade of fragments where two of the columns had split and tumbled. “Don’t shoot and give away your position until I open fire,” he warned her.

  Crouching, Bolan himself advanced behind a rampart of tuff — the solidified residue of a liquid lava so aerated with gas bubbles that it had once formed a molten froth. The porous rock left when this cooled was brittle enough for chunks to be broken off by hand.

  Bolan separated a fragment the size of a football and waited. Zefarelli’s men were advancing cautiously, not knowing where he was hidden, ducking behind outcrops as they came.

  He hefted the fragment, drew back his arm and hurled it toward a channel lower down the valley. The tuff landed with an audible thump, broke into pieces, and rattled down the incline.

  At once four or five mobsters pounced, firing as they ran. Bolan was left in the position of an enfilade. Steadying the powerful .45 with his left hand, he blazed off the remainder of the magazine and saw at least three men fall.

  But now the enemy knew where he was. Snapping in a fresh clip, he dodged away and took up a new position on the far side of the cluster.

  No mistake about the gunshots this time: revolver and rifle bullets hummed between the pillars, splatting against basalt, chipping splinters from the rock. From some way off, Bolan heard the girl firing carefully once, twice, three times. Below the pathway a man cursed and then screamed.

  The mobsters were closing in. The Executioner knew that unless they were to be trapped, he and Coralie must retreat up the farther valley wall toward the trail she was looking for. But this meant they would have to quit their shelter. Bolan dropped to his hands and knees below a hail of lead and crawled to the rear of the rock cluster to see what cover there was on the far side.

  Suddenly he was aware that Coralie was no longer firing. Bolan strained his ears to listen.

  It was then that he heard the scream.

  Coralie’s voice.

  Bolan rose upright and ran to the barricade of rocks where she had been positioned.

  There was no sign of her.

  He looked up the slope toward the crater... and saw Delacroix with the girl, kicking and screaming, slung over his shoulder.

  The mobster’s head and shoulders were outlined against the pulsing red glare. Bolan lifted the Combat Master slowly. In the shifting light, he was going to risk hitting the woman. But he had to try.

  An abrupt flare from the crater as long flames streamed out in the wind made up his mind. In the brighter light he could see more of the big hood’s body. The Executioner held his breath, aimed well below the shoulder supporting the girl and squeezed the trigger.

  Delacroix cried out, clapping his hands to his left arm and allowing Coralie to drop. She fell on her feet, staggered and then lost balance on the edge of the outcrop and plummeted to a lower level, where she hit her head on a smoothly rounded boulder and lay still.

  Delacroix was swaying, reaching for the gun in his waistband. As the glare subsided, Bolan dropped him with a well-placed round.

  Zefarelli was calling again. “Close in! Surround those columns! Flush the bastard out!”

  Bolan sprinted across the tortured surface of the valley floor toward the unconscious girl, shooting blind as he ran.

  He was wearing combat boots with his summer rig. It was the odor of burning rubber that tipped him off, even before he sensed the fiery heat under his feet.

  At the same time he became aware of the ground shaking, trembling, and saw small spirals of vapor rising all around him.

  He was standing on the surface of a fresh lava flow!

  Streaming from a fissure below the crater, the flow had made it this far already. The outer layer, congealing, cooling and partially hardening in the air, had formed a dark crust.

  But beneath, Bolan knew, the magma, still glowing at 900 degrees C, the temperature of melted gold, would still be tunneling relentlessly downward.

  He leaped for the sheet of basalt where Coralie was lying, beating out the flames that had begun to lick the outside of his boots. On the far side of the rock the ground was visibly in motion, a sinister, sluggish flow the color and consistency of molasses, with occasional patches of cherry red.

  She had fallen between two advancing tongues of lava.

  Bolan felt her pulse. She groaned feebly and stirred. There was an ugly bruise on her forehead but the skin was not broken. Fortunately the boulder had no sharp edges and she had merely knocked herself out.

  He looked hastily around them. For the moment they were shielded by the outcrop on which Delacroix’s body lay. But they had to move fast, and as soon as they did it would be open season for hunters.

  To cross the flow that still glowed with inner fire was out of the question. The other tongue had supported Bolan on his own and running. But he doubted that the crust would hold up if he moved slowly, with the extra weight of the girl in his arms. That left two alternatives: advance toward the enemy, or make it up the valley wall, where they would be sitting ducks.

  Before Bolan could make a decision a violent blow between the shoulders sent him crashing to the ground.

  One of the mobsters had jumped him from a higher shelf of rock behind.

  The guy would have done better to have risked a shot.

  The impact sent the Detonics spinning from the Executioner’s grip, but the attacker also lost his hold on the Kalashnikov assault rifle he was toting. That left them even: the element of surprise was in the hood’s favor, experience on Bolan’s side.

  It was no contest. The mobster grabbed for Bolan’s windpipe, kneeing him in the lumbar region. But the warrior twisted onto his back, slashing upward with the edge of his hand to break the choking grip. He planted the hot soles of his boots in the guy’s belly and flexed his knees.

  The attacker was Smiler — his features twisted into a mask of hate, the red light of the volcano reflected in his maniac eyes.

  For a timeless moment they stared at each other. Then Bolan kicked with a savage thrust, and Smiler flew over his head beyond the rock, to land on his back in the center of the solidifying flow Bolan had crossed.

  Even then the mobster might have gotten away with it... if he had lain still or tried rolling slowly to the side of the flow. But he panicked and sat up, struggling to push himself upright, and put all his weight on one foot.

  The foot broke through the crust.

  Smiler sank to his knee in red-hot liquid magma.

  Before the animal shriek had burst from his lips, a sheet of flame shot up the whole length of his body, consuming his clothes and setting fire to his hair. He thrashed, wildly waving arms already ablaze. And then pitched forward into the seething hellhole he ha
d made in the flow.

  Bolan closed his ears to the dreadful sucking gurgle as the lava closed over his jerking body and carried him slowly away.

  Still sprawled on the rock, Bolan turned... to see Raoul standing, revolver in hand, on the shelf where Delacroix lay.

  “Too bad for Smiler,” Bolan shouted, playing for time as he felt desperately around him for the fallen Detonics.

  Raoul raised the revolver.

  Ten feet away Mack Bolan stared up at the small, round, black hole of death.

  “This is where you get yours, smartass,” Raoul snarled.

  The shot was deafening.

  Raoul leaned slowly forward and fell face down, his arms and legs spread, into the hotter of the two tongues of lava. Flaming, he sank without trace, leaving a whiff of roasting meat to spice the odor of sulfur in the overheated air.

  Bolan shook his head to chase the ringing from his ears. Immediately behind him, Coralie laughed shakily as she leaned against the boulder with the smoking Combat Master in her hand.

  There was no more shooting after that. Like so many crooked bosses, Zefarelli was only brave when he held the upper hand, using the guts of his forward troops instead of his own.

  Bolan had seized the Kalashnikov and sprung to his feet, but as soon as he saw he no longer had a numerical advantage, the Sicilian fled. It was only five minutes later that he became visible — with his remaining soldier, supporting a wounded man between them, moving as fast as he could up the far side of the depression, heading for the pathway and home and safety.

  Bolan looked at the rifle. It was an early model AK-47. There were three shells in the magazine.

  He bit his lip. Retreating troops? From behind? What the hell, in his position the gorillas would have shown no mercy. And wasn’t he, after all, committed to the elimination of the Mafia? If none of them were left, they couldn’t reopen negotiations with the KGB...

  He raised the gun to his shoulder and fired three times.