Dead Man's Tale Read online

  The sniper did neither. He breasted the rise and walked slowly down, across a rock outcrop, through a patch of brushwood and into a dip before the next rise. This time he did disappear.

  Gazing intently through the rock fissure, Bolan weighed the pros and cons. The fact that he could no longer see the killer didn't necessarily mean that the guy wouldn't see him if he made a break — particularly if he was waiting for Bolan to do just that.

  Attack was the best method of defense, not that this was attack in a military sense. But psychologically? It was worth a try.

  As far as he could see through the crack in the rock, he estimated the farthest distance the rifleman could have traveled in either direction since he vanished from view. Then vectoring in on the boulder from those two points, he drew a mental line from his hiding place to the road below that would give him the maximum protection from the rocky mass.

  The Executioner bolstered the Beretta in his quick-draw shoulder rig, took three quick steps away from the boulder and hurled himself down the stony slope, flinging himself against the hard surface of the outcrop, then going into a shoulder roll after a half dozen strides.

  Two shots were fired immediately, then two more, moments later.

  The first pair must have been fired when Bolan was on his feet, still partly hidden by the boulder, because they went wide. He was rolling when the next two blasted from the ridge.

  They were close. One sent small stones tumbling a foot from his face; the second jarred his left leg as it tore the heel from his shoe. Then he dropped over the edge of the rock, bouncing down a grassy bank to sprawl on the road ten feet below.

  He was safe, but only temporarily. For fifty or sixty yards he was covered by the bank from a marksman anyplace on the hillside above. As well, on each side there were hairpin curves, leading up on his left, down on the right. And from any position level with those he would be a sitting duck. He had merely exchanged one refuge for a wider one.

  What he had to do now was reach the shelter of the trees below the Alfa before the gunman picked him off.

  The Executioner crawled to the top of the bank, parting the grasses to scan the slant of hillside, and the trees bordering it, between him and the escarpment.

  The sun disappeared behind a tower of clouds. A flight of small birds darted through the scrub higher up the slope. Nothing else moved.

  Bolan's hawk eyes ranged slowly across the terrain from left to right, alert for a telltale swaying branch, a shape that moved behind a screen of leaves, a shadow behind a rise. The sun reemerged, splashing the trees with light, then vanished again behind another cloud bank. But in that moment, for the second time, a flash of light reflected from the sniper's scope and betrayed the killer's position: on Bolan's left, under the trees, perhaps two hundred yards away.

  Now that he knew where to look, the warrior could see the man stealthily advancing downhill, partially screened by bushes. In two minutes, maybe three, he'd be level with the hairpin curves, Bolan locked in his sights...and still out of effective range.

  The warrior's mind raced. While he deliberated, a puff of warm wind blew the sharp smell of gasoline his way. He flicked a glance across the road and saw that fuel was dripping from the ruptured tank of the Alfa Romeo. The shale beneath the capsized rear end was dark with the spilled liquid and the air above vibrated as the gas vaporized.

  The tank was between the rear wheels, just ahead of the suspension arms. To reach the ground, therefore, the leaking gas had to percolate through the crumpled tank and out past the lid. So the tail would be full of an explosive mixture, vapor mixed with air.

  Bolan unleathered the Beretta.

  More than once in his combat career he'd ignited spilled gasoline by firing slugs off a hard surface to strike a spark. He squeezed off two experimental rounds, but there were no flints in the crumbling shale and the slugs buried themselves in the weathered shale.

  He felt in his pocket and drew out a king-sized box of matches. Then sliding down the bank, he crawled out across the road until he could just see that sector of the wood where he'd located the gunman.

  Two shots cracked out with frightening rapidity. Bolan drew back a microsecond before the pavement was pitted where he had stood an instant before.

  Barely out of the gunman's sight, allowing a couple of feet extra for the killer to move farther downhill, the Executioner struck a match and flung it toward the wreck.

  The breeze killed the flame and blew the matchstick back toward the Executioner. He tried again, and again, but had the same result.

  Bolan attempted splitting a match, wedging a second into the split, and then a third, to gain more weight so that the flame would carry. No good.

  Finally he slid the matchbox one-third open, so that the phosphor-impregnated heads were exposed. He removed three more matches, scraped them into flame and held them together beneath the open end of the box. The entire box erupted into a mini-fireball that hissed like a steam valve. Bolan wound up like a man on the mound and pitched.

  The flaming matchbox arrowed across the road, hit the side of the wrecked convertible and dropped to the gasoline-soaked shale beneath.

  The thump of the igniting fuel was swamped by a cracking shellburst of sound as the volatile mixture inside the trunk exploded, flaming debris spewing outward. A curved steel panel scythed across the road to plunge into the bank ten feet from the Executioner; a blazing seat cushion landed at his feet.

  Within seconds the rear end of the Alfa was a seething inferno, and it was then that the incandescent mass produced the result Bolan had hoped for.

  The spare tire, then those on the rear wheels, caught fire, billowing black smoke into the air.

  The wind that had foiled Bolan's initial efforts with the matches now worked in his favor, rolling the dense cloud toward him and up the bank.

  Screened by the choking smoke, he sprinted across the road, ran down the slope and in among the trees.

  10

  The tires burned for a long time, the black smoke boiling across the road and up the hillside. The flames licking the rest of the wreck gradually dwindled and died. Bolan crouched in the fork of an oak tree and waited.

  The sun had vanished behind the escarpment, and the light was already beginning to thicken before the smoke screen thinned enough for him to see the two curves and the woods on either side. So far there'd been no further sign of the rifleman, but Bolan sensed that he wouldn't be far away. His orders were to kill; he wasn't going to quit until he had relocated his target.

  Bolan wasn't about to quit either; he didn't like people tampering with his car and shooting at him. Right now there wasn't anywhere he could go. The warrior was savvy enough to know it was in the cards that the killer would have stashed buddies farther down the road — just in case he should try to escape that way.

  So he waited and watched.

  While he was waiting, he allowed himself to review the courier's briefing in Liege. At first he'd been as surprised as hell. Brognola was exacting "payment" for the help Bolan had requested. He was asking Bolan to get involved in a mission that any half-assed rookie spook could have handled: an attempt to backtrack on an operation some other agent had already screwed up.

  Then, when the earnest little courier had pointed out that the search for the missing hologram factor was connected with the Executioner's own kidnapping, which explained Latta and the girl's insistence on systems of communications, he'd been mollified.

  Obviously he'd been grabbed because the conspirators figured he was already involved in the Zulowski operation.

  When he learned the significance of the list — and the Mafia angle — Bolan couldn't turn his back on this mission.

  "It's rather more than a list, actually," the courier had said. "What we have here is a report, specially compiled for a man named Vito Maccione, one of the Mob's most important and ruthless capos."

  Bolan nodded. "I know Maccione. He was deported from the States in 1967 and now lives in Cologne, West
Germany, where he hopes to penetrate industry in the Ruhr."

  "That's just the beginning," the courier said somberly. "This report is in fact a listing of all the European industries, cartels, companies and multinational subsidiaries that the Mafia intends to infiltrate by means of takeovers, front organizations and, in many cases, blackmail of stockholders."

  Bolan whistled. "And Fraser Latta's the financial genius who's going to make it legal?"

  "You got it. If it's successful, the plan will give the Mob effective control of the major part of electronics, telecommunications, aerospace accessories and armaments, among other things."

  "That's heavy-duty," Bolan said.

  "Such a concentration of power would gravely compromise the stability of the Middle East if one country in need of arms was played off against another — guns to the highest bidder. It could be used as a lever for extortion on a global scale if, as Maccione intends, threats were made to let sensitive enterprises into Soviet or Chinese hands."

  "Yeah," Bolan said. "And if they employ the usual strong-arm persuasion — digging up dirt, blackmailing people in key positions, making threats — it could lead to an increase in crime that would make Europe look like Chicago in the days of Prohibition."

  The courier was pacing up and down the esplanade overlooking the river. Although it was a warm spring day and striped parasols shaded the shirt-sleeved drinkers at a sidewalk cafe across the street, he was wearing a belted trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat. He looked, Bolan thought, like a junior bank clerk kidding himself he was Philip Marlowe. It was difficult to believe that anyone could take him seriously as an intelligence agent. "The report," the courier announced, "details the methods to be used for each takeover, the financial clout already deployed in the target industries, and most importantly the names of the moles — the suborned department chiefs and financial advisers in each company who will secretly aid the plan."

  "We have a copy of this report, but we can't read it, right?"

  "That is correct. Zulowski was once a safecracker. He stole the original from Maccione's place in Cologne. Before they repossessed it and gunned him down, he'd copied each page and sent it to Mr. Brognola in the form of a hologram. The effect is analogous optically to that of a telephone scrambler."

  "And all I have to do is find out what he used to make the hologram so that the photos can be unscrambled?"

  "Exactly. Did you know Zulowski?"

  Bolan shook his head.

  "He was a good man." Thick-lensed spectacles glinted in the sun as the courier looked Bolan in the eye. "I don't need to tell you," he said, "that such a document is vital to our own as well as to the European governments if we're to prevent a worldwide Mafia tyranny."

  "I get the picture."

  "Let us hope so... literally," the courier replied.

  A few minutes later, having fed the Executioner another ration of background from Brognola, he hopped onto a bus heading for the railroad station and vanished from sight.

  Later, alone in his tree in the Ardennes, Bolan examined the implications of the courier's story.

  The Mob must have been breathing down Zulowski's neck: they knew he'd made holograms of the stolen report, and where. Otherwise Latta would never have been at the NATO base asking questions.

  They knew he'd dispatched the holograms stateside, and they must have also known that he hadn't yet sent the complementary medium through which they'd been shot. But they didn't know what medium he'd used. And because they couldn't catch up with Zulowski in time to force him to tell them, they'd killed him to stop him from sending it.

  It was then that Bolan had been kidnapped — mistakenly — in the hope that he was part of the mission and could give them the information they needed.

  Too bad.

  And because he escaped when he did, they still didn't know whether or not he knew the secret of the holograms.

  They could, of course, have picked him up again easily enough, simply by keeping watch on Heller's optical research station. But how had Latta gained access to that ultrasecret installation? Because there were Mafia contacts inside?

  That made sense. Otherwise, how could someone have been on hand to sabotage the Alfa Romeo? And how would they have known that Bolan was armed only with a handgun?

  A lot of questions went unanswered, such as who was the mole? Heller himself?

  At first that seemed the obvious choice. But if he was, why wouldn't he simply have stuck with Zulowski when he made the holograms and called up Latta to eliminate him then and there? In any case, why tell Bolan that Latta had been there?

  That cap didn't fit after all. Just the same, the Executioner made a mental note to ask Brognola's office to run a trace on Colonel Stefan Heller.

  He'd have to take care of that some other time. Right now there was a more urgent question demanding an answer.

  Where was the sniper? How long would it be before he revealed himself? And was he still hunting?

  Suddenly Bolan saw him. He was standing at the left-hand end of the ditch, staring fixedly at the gutted convertible. One moment the landscape had been deserted; the next, there he was, the twin-barrel rifle slung across his back, a mini-Uzi machine pistol gripped in his hands.

  Bolan's right hand was raw and blistered, scorched by the flaming box of matches. But he managed to wrap the palm around the butt of his Beretta, wincing slightly as the burned flesh of the index finger contacted the cold, steel trigger.

  The killer was on the move. Unhurriedly he crossed the road and vanished among the trees.

  Bolan hesitated. Should he drop to ground level to give himself the same maneuverability as the gunman? Or should he capitalize on concealment and a wider range of visibility and stay where he was... at the risk of finding himself cornered if the guy was smart enough to flush him out first?

  The question prompted another. The rifleman had orders to kill, but how could he be sure that Bolan was still around, that he hadn't penetrated the woods and made a cross-country escape?

  The answer to that one came fast.

  Away to the Executioner's left, hidden somewhere in a denser part of the wood, he heard an unmistakable sound — the crackling rasp of a voice issuing from a shortwave radio receiver.

  He couldn't make out the words, and he couldn't hear the killer's reply, but it didn't take an Einstein to read the score.

  There was a backup team somewhere farther down the road, and they were telling the hunter no, the quarry hadn't passed that way.

  Bolan balanced mobility against the long view, and time and motion came out on top.

  At close quarters like this, his Beretta was accurate over a much longer range than a mini-Uzi. But within its 150-yard killground, the little SMG's 1200 rounds-per-minute deathblast was something that the smart fighter was wise to avoid.

  Bolan dropped silently from the tree onto a bed of last year's dead leaves. He ran for the bare, noiseless earth behind a thick clump of evergreen bushes and lowered himself into a combat crouch, the muzzle of the Beretta questing right and left as his steely gaze swept the complex of trunks, branches and fresh green leaves between his hiding place and the section of woods where he'd last seen the man with the Uzi.

  There was a heavy and oppressive silence beneath the trees — the evening air seemed suddenly to have grown damp and clammy. Clouds of insects drifted like smoke in the gathering dusk.

  A dry twig snapped, shattering the forest calm. The noise sounded as deafening as a cannon shot. A startled bird flapped heavily away among the treetops, and there were rustlings in the undergrowth near the Executioner's screen of bushes.

  He crouched lower, his eyes straining to pierce the gloom for a movement, a shadow, a swaying bough not caused by the occasional gusts of wind that stirred the foliage.

  It was impossible in these conditions to estimate with any accuracy the distance or the precise direction of a noise that didn't belong. But Bolan guessed the twig had been snapped around sixty or seventy yards away, still o
ff to his left but deeper into the woods.

  Another dry branch snapped, much nearer this time.

  Clearly the killer's woodcraft was not up to the standard of his long-distance sniping technique.

  Bolan lowered himself to the forest floor and eeled his way toward a patch of thorny undergrowth that was less than waist high — the last place an inexperienced stalker would expect a big man to be hiding.

  Breathing shallowly beneath the lowest strands of spicy scrub, Bolan waited...

  It was five minutes before he saw the stalker, and then it was only a fleeting glance, a glimpse between two close-growing trees of a miniature glade, perhaps forty yards away. But it was enough for the warrior to register the fact that the rifle was still slung across the man's back, that his right hand held the mini-Uzi by its pistol grip, leaving the left free to push aside and hold back branches that might block his way or swish noisily as he soft-footed past.

  Bolan noticed too that the subgun was fitted with the short, 20-round box magazine. Which meant — in theory at least — that at full blast the weapon would be out of ammunition after a single second's continuous firing.

  Once more it was the Executioner's strategy to draw the killer's fire, then move in while he reloaded. But the Uzi's deathstream wasn't to be underestimated: that one-second burst could rip the human body in two. So the fire, if possible, had to be drawn to where Bolan wasn't.

  His mind raced, trying to think of a suitable decoy.

  The killer was drawing nearer. Every few seconds now Bolan could distinguish a stealthy footfall among the thickly growing stalks and stems to his left. He held his breath, listening to the thump of his own heart against the earth.

  And something else — faint but unmistakable, a high-pitched whine that was abruptly killed.

  It was something called negative feedback, generated by badly-adjusted microphones, radios that were clumsily tuned... and short-range high-frequency transceivers?