Sunscream (7 page)

Mack Bolan took the early railcar east from Marseilles to the small shipbuilding port of La Ciotat. A sultry humidity had hazed the air and turned the sea from Mediterranean blue to a dull pewter color that merged with the sky.

Still, the long curving strip of shore that lined the bay beyond the old town was crowded. Oiled vacationers lay packed like sardines on the blistering sand. The water was busy with swimmers, windsurfers and pleasure boats. It seemed a far cry from the murderous exchanges less than twelve hours ago at La Rocaille.

Bolan intended it to be. Of the handful of passengers who had left the diesel railcar at the station, none, as far as he could see, had followed him to the beach. And he was sure no one had followed him when he boarded a bus bound for Bandol, farther along the coast. But there were such things as walkie-talkies and phones. He had already been tailed from Lyons to the gas station ambush and noticed nothing. And he still didn’t know how many different teams might be gunning for him.

But today it was vital that none of the hoods, that nobody at all, knew of his rendezvous.

He left the bus at Bandol, dodged through a crowded fruit market and installed himself at a sidewalk cafe. There he ordered and paid for a drink, walked through to the men’s room and left by a back entrance without returning to his table. After that he threaded his way around two floors of a department store and jumped another bus as the doors were closing.

The bus took him back to Aubagne, on the outskirts of Marseilles. From here he took a cab to Aix-en-Provence.

Telder was waiting for him in the fossil room of the city’s natural-history museum. “Chamson’s too well-known in these parts,” the Swiss Interpol chief said. “We agreed that I should come alone.”

“Good,” Bolan said. “I’m pretty sure I wasn’t tailed. But if I was, I think I lost him.”

He glanced around. Bolan and Telder were the only visitors professing interest in the glass display cases.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” Bolan murmured. “There’s a KGB plot to weld all the world’s Mafia families into one supersyndicate of international crime, armed, funded, supplied — and probably directed eventually — by Moscow.”

Telder pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “To what end?”

“To undermine the power of all the Western police forces, of shooting and bombing and looting every country into a state of total anarchy. With the resulting chaos and panic... well, they figure the whole system will collapse, making way for a Red takeover.”

“And the four murders we were investigating?”

“Gang bosses who didn’t want to play ball. They were killed in a hurry to stop them from forming some kind of rival, non-KGB coalition.”

Telder’s eyes widened, but he remained silent. He was pretending to take notes from a caption inside one of the showcases. “What are the mafiosi supposed to get out of the partnership?” he finally asked.

“Money,” Bolan said. “More than they ever dreamed of, even in their slime-bucket business. And I think they’re dumb enough to believe they’ll be allowed to exist, even to warrant special treatment, after the takeover!”

“Stupid asses,” Telder said. “They’d get special treatment, all right. A private room in the Lubyanka. Can you imagine the comrades setting up a directorate for social-realist crime? Hell, they don’t even admit they
have
any crime!”

“They’ve got crime,” Bolan said soberly. “For export only. It’s labeled KGB.”

The Swiss smiled faintly. “Very well. What do we do about it?” he asked.

“There’s nothing
you
can do about it,” Bolan said. “You and Chamson, that is. No public crime’s officially been committed... yet. There’s only one line to take, and I’m the fall guy in the hot seat. It has to be done from the inside. And right now that’s where I’m at.”

“Done how?” Telder queried. “Killing all the family chiefs who are in on the deal? Even unofficially, I can’t give a go-ahead on that.”

Bolan shook his head. “They would be replaced, anyway. Same goes for the Russian masterminding the scheme. No, the only way is for the Mob as a whole to be unwilling to go through with it. That would choke off the KGB, make them see it’s a no-go situation.”

“But you said the Mafia already had agreed?..”

“Sure, for the moment. But to make it work, they have to be solid for this one-Mob, one-leader routine. Like the Nazis under Hitler. Without that, the KGB won’t play. So the way I figure it, the Mob must be disunited.”

“But how?” Telder asked again.

“Play one family against another. Arrange it so they’re gunning for each other rather than the law. There were enough dissenters left to raid La Rocaille, even without leaders. It shouldn’t be too difficult to play on existing rivalries and find a few more. It’s been done before, back home. Working from the inside, I think I can do it here.”

“But it’s got to be quick. The whole deal has to fall apart while Antonin’s still down here.”

“You’ll need help, then,” Telder said. “What can we do?”

“There is something,” Bolan said. “I have to keep my nose clean with my new boss. I already know of several contracts that Sondermann’s been hired for. But I don’t want to take out innocent guys just to keep my cover secure.”

The Swiss was still looking at him expectantly.

“They’ll have to disappear all the same,” Bolan said. “It has to look as if I really did zap them. But I can’t fake gunning them down, maybe in front of witnesses. If I handed them over to your people, could you keep them under wraps, totally out of circulation, until the ball game’s over?”

“It’s strictly illegal, but... yes. We could even arrange news items reporting that the bodies had been found floating in the river, out at sea, whatever.”

“Great. That should keep my hardman image intact. And if the victims don’t like being held incommunicado, you can tell them they’re damned lucky not to be incommunicado forever.”

“I think you can leave the details to us,” Telder said.

Bolan said, “As for the rest... well, I’ve made enemies already inside the organization. I can make more. Then it’s just a question of pitting one group against the other.”

“We are aware of the risks you run,” Telder said. “We are most... appreciative.” His voice sank to a more conspiratorial note. “When you want us, you know the number to call.” He nodded briefly, turned and walked out of the room.

Ten minutes later Bolan emerged from the museum and made his way toward the railroad station.

“Well, well. If it isn’t the big man himself! And what are you doing in a dusty old museum in Aix?” a voice exclaimed just behind him.

Bolan swung around... and found himself face-to-face with Coralie Sanguinetti.

Bolan sat with the girl at a cafe table drinking
pastis.
Bright shafts of sunlight speared the shade beneath the broad leaves of the plane trees.

“I could ask you the same question,” he said.

Bolan wondered if she had been ordered to shadow him.

“I’m studying philosophy,” Coralie said. “Here at the university in Aix.” She was friendly again now. Bolan didn’t have the time to figure out why. “I’m not just a poor little rich girl, you know. I shall have to earn my own living sometime.”

“Not taking over Daddy’s business?”

“Do I look like that kind of person?”

“Frankly,” Bolan said, “I’m not exactly sure what business your father is in. We’re kind of sheltered up in northern Germany.”

She flashed him a suspicious look. “He has the biggest machine-tool factory in Italy,” she said. “He has controlling interest in a company that manufactures digital watches and calculators in Alsace. He imports computer hardware from Japan, and he’s on the board of two major oil companies.”

“But why would a guy that successful have friends like... like the people I work for?” Bolan queried.

“Let me ask you a question,” Coralie said. “Why are you badmouthing people like Jean-Paul — a man with your reputation? I’ve heard about you, Herr Sondermann: you’re what they call a hit man; you kill people — for money. They tell me you murdered nine already.”

“Only folks I didn’t like,” Bolan said gravely. He would dearly have liked to set the girl straight, but the words he wanted to say would come uneasily from the mouth of a Teutonic killer... and if he allowed himself to show her what he really felt about the mafiosi, his cover would be blown for good. He tried to change the subject.

“Do you know Jean-Paul well?” he asked.

“Since I was in diapers.”

“I work for him, but I don’t really know him yet. What is he like?”

“He’s nice,” Coralie said defensively. Bolan remembered the way the gang leader had taken her arm the night before. “He’s got a better brain than most of the others. He’s generous. And he’s a caring man.”

“But he hires a guy like me to come down all the way from Hamburg. For what?”

“Oh,” she said with a pout, tossing back her hair. She drained her glass and set it carefully on the wrought-iron table. “When I first saw you in that gallery, before I knew who you were, I thought you might be... Oh, well. I guess one can misjudge people.”

Bolan suddenly realized the truth behind her mood swings. He was not a vain man, but he was objectively aware that he was attractive to many women. Coralie Sanguinetti was trying — and failing so far — to relate a natural liking for him to her own instinctive distrust of anyone in Sondermann’s line of business.

He felt sorry for the girl — sorrier still because she was also fighting another, harder, battle: loyalty to her father on one side, loathing for his associates on the other — but there was nothing he could do to help her. “Have another drink?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Thank you. I have a class at two o’clock.”

Bolan watched her get up from the table. Many other eyes followed her as she walked to her car parked by the curb. A white Porsche 928 — what else?

The Executioner frowned. He had a gut feeling that, given the right approach and the right conditions, he could make her into an ally. But right now he’d have to play it by ear. The one thing he knew was that any help she might offer in the future would not be to Kurt Sondermann...

For the moment, however, it was better that he reinforced that alter ego in her eyes. Back in character, he called out as she unlocked the door of the Porsche, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Coralie looked across the terrace at him as she slid behind the wheel. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do?” she retorted.

The raid on the hideout used by gangsters from the Balestre mob was planned and carried out like a military operation, although there were no more than sixteen men involved. They were divided into two teams of three and a ten-man main force.

Jean-Paul had insisted that the attack be restricted to soldiers from his own Marseilles family. Ancarani, the Unione Corse boss from Ajaccio, had offered a large contingent from his own gang, but Jean-Paul had refused. Blood ties, cross-relationships and loyalties were so intermixed on the island, he pointed out, that the risk of a leak, warning Balestre’s people, would be high if Corsicans were included. Ancarani was angry, but he had to admit it was true.

Another reason — unstated, but one that Mack Bolan privately shared — was the fact that Jean-Paul was not one hundred percent certain of Ancarani’s reliability. Not because he was in sympathy with the Balestre mob, but because he seemed the least impressed of any of the capos by the idea of the KGB tie-up. And a refusal to go along with this had, after all, provoked the death of Balestre himself.

The assault was timed for midnight. Smiler and his two shadows had arrived at Bastia by air from Marseilles earlier in the evening. They were to make their way to the rendezvous in a rented car.

Jean-Paul, Bolan and a seven-foot ex-wrestler named Delacroix were making the trip by air, too... as jumpers, thanks to a bribed helicopter pilot who was supposed to be night-testing a new chopper slated for the Nice-Monaco shuttle. The others were coming by sea.

Corsica, lying eighty miles south of the Gulf of Genoa, is shaped like a fist, with the index finger pointing north at the mainland. The index, protected by five-hundred-foot cliffs, is the twenty-two-mile promontory of Cap Corse. Bastia is located at the base of that finger; Calvi — the nearest town to the Balestre hideout — is on the other side of the fist.

Between Calvi and the Cap stretches a treeless, uninhabited strip of granite known as the Desert of Agriates. It was here that the seaborne mafiosi were to land.

Inland from this bleak wilderness, Jean-Miguel Balestre had inherited several hundred acres of pasture that began on the far side of the Calvi-Bastia highway and rose toward the foothills of the mountains in the interior.

Bolan was told that the property was a sheep farm. Balestre had made his headquarters in a ranch-style frame house surrounded by dipping pens, a shearing barn and outbuildings. These were spacious enough to accommodate the few workers who tended the flock and the much larger number of villains who looked after his real business.

This had involved the smuggling of liquor, arms and stolen cigarette consignments from North Africa to France and Italy; the distribution of cocaine, heroin and hashish from the Middle East; and the supply to brothels in Ajaccio, Naples and Marseilles of young Arab girls bought in the slave markets of Somali and the Sudan.

Daringly, for there was an elite parachute regiment of the French Foreign Legion quartered in Calvi, the team had used desolate creeks on the deserted Agriates coast for the landing of this merchandise. Much of it was then forwarded to its ultimate destination by supposed tourists using commercial sea, land and air services, and in the false bottom of a high-speed diesel cruiser berthed at St. Florent, between the Agriates and Cap Corse.

For many months the operation had infuriated Ancarani and the other Unione Corse leaders based on Ajaccio, Bastia, Propriano and Bonifacio. If Balestre’s murder had not been contracted because of his opposition to the KGB-Mafia alliance, it was likely, the Executioner had learned, that he would have been liquidated, anyway, because of the inroads his operation was making on their own business.

Balestre’s team, working with him ever since he started on his own after the death of his father and a Camorra apprenticeship, were satisfied with the rackets they already controlled. And raking in more money would not compensate them for the loss of autonomy they would suffer as a small unit in a worldwide association.

“Bastards are smart, too,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in the chopper. “Disciplined, crack shots and at least two good enough to lead if the boss is taken out. That pair will be your piece of the action.”

“Where did Balestre get them?” Bolan asked.

“Young kids mostly. Trained them himself after he’d worked with the Camorra. Unemployment. Poor background. No prospects on the island.”

And now, Bolan thought, even fewer prospects, because many of them soon would die. It bugged him like hell, that poverty notwithstanding, they lacked an ethic, a code for living that distinguished between good and bad.

But that was no view he could air in front of the underworld boss from the hottest town in France.

Bolan was wearing his combat blacksuit with the Beretta leathered beneath his left arm, two ammunition belts and half a dozen HE grenades clipped to the webbing of his chute harness. A Husqvarna 561 Express hunting rifle with an IR nightscope leaned against the empty seat beside him.

Jean-Paul, the white cap of hair hidden beneath a black knitted balaclava, was armed with an Uzi SMG and a French police-style Browning automatic. The ex-wrestler carried an Ingram MAC-10, but there was an African knobkerrie — a long-shaft nightstick with a weighted spherical head — looped to his belt. With his huge frame, abnormal height and a shaven, battler’s skull, he looked formidable.

“You’re the expert marksman, Sondermann.” The gang leader returned to the subject as the chopper overflew the massive red granite fortress that dominated the huddled shingles of the old town and the pale crescent of Calvi’s pleasure beach. “I want you to keep back and, like I say, pick off individual targets as I call them out. You’d be risking your life at close quarters if the boys storm the ranch house. We’ll find you a good concealed position, not too far away. And only use the pistol if you’re threatened, okay?”

“It’s your money,” Bolan said. “I’m only here to carry out orders.”

The Frenchman shot him a sideways glance. “Just as long as that’s understood,” he said.

An enigmatic character, Bolan reflected. Their conversation so far had been restricted to banalities: confirmation of details already agreed upon with the real Sondermann through an intermediary; arrangements for where Bolan was to stay; when and where they met; how he was to be paid and what weapons he would need. Yet it was clear that the mafioso from Marseilles was a cut above the other mobsters in the south. He was cultured, intelligent rather than just smart, determined, ruthless... and lacking altogether the crudeness that characterized the others.

Bolan had not been consulted when the raid was planned. He was interested to see how it went. And how J-P reacted under fire.

The moon was already high in the cloudless sky. Bright light shone from the wrinkled surface of the sea.

The coastline slid away behind them as the chopper whined over citrus groves and the geometrical patterns of vineyards. For one of the few times in his life, Bolan was going into battle not giving a damn whether his side won or lost. He viewed the raid totally objectively: morally, each side was as bad as the other. Win or lose, his only concern was the chance that he might find some situation arising out of the operation that could be used to weaken the solidarity of the mobs who intended to combine under KGB rule.

A thin white ribbon of road curled among the patches of cultivation below them. Jean-Paul looked through the plexiglas at a mass of mountains to their right. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Down to two thousand and we jump,” he said.

Bolan rose from his seat and slung on the Husqvarna. There was no question of serial jumping after a hookup here: it was simply slide back the panel of the blister and go.

J-P was pointing to the moonlit countryside below. “The thick stand of trees enclosed by that big loop in the highway,” he called over the helicopter’s rotor whine. “The southern fringe, away from the road in ten minutes. Okay?”

Bolan nodded. He pulled the panel aside and jumped.

At that height it was necessary to pull the ripcord at once. Even then he was left little time to take in the landscape floating up with increasing speed to meet him. He was already well below the jagged crests of the mountains.

To his left the bleak expanse of the Desert of Agriates lay bone-white beneath the night sky. Somewhere among these granite outcrops was Jean-Paul’s ten-man squad — who would have been offloaded from a trawler and landed in rubber dinghies two hours earlier. Somewhere down there those guys were humping heavy machine guns, Kalashnikovs, grenade launchers and certain other pieces of equipment over the stony ground toward the ranch.

Smiler and his men would already be in place. Bolan gazed upward. There was no sign of the other two canopies against the stars. The droning clatter of the chopper died away in the direction of Cap Corse and the ocean.

He maneuvered the shrouds, spilling air from the chute. The wood was rushing toward him. He could no longer see the highway. Beyond a slope of meadow, half-hidden among another grove of trees, the pale light gleamed on the roofs of what he guessed was the Balestre farm.

Bolan skimmed the upper branches of pines, flexed his knees and made a perfect landing fifty feet from the edge of the wood. He was an experienced jumper, remaining upright and rocksteady as the canopy bellied down behind him and collapsed in the long grass. One minute later his harness undipped, the grenades transferred to the belt of his blacksuit, it was rolled up and hidden behind a bush under the trees.

He unslung the Husqvarna and waited. He neither heard nor saw the other two come down, but it seemed almost at once that his ears detected the low whistle, repeated three times, that he was waiting for. He replied — only once — and made his way toward the sound.

Delacroix and his leader were together two hundred yards nearer the ranch.

“Smiler, Raoul and Bertrand will have worked their way into the woods behind the ranch,” Jean-Paul told Bolan in a low voice. “They’ll hold their fire until the rats begin to leave the ship.

“Come again?”

“We want the Balestre gang — there may be between twenty and thirty of them in there — to think the frontal attack by the guys crossing the road from the desert, the detail advancing from the sea, is the only one. If they’re getting the worst of it, they’ll most likely run out the back and head for the interior.”

“And into Smiler and his boys?”

“Right. If they figure they have a chance, they may fan out in front of the buildings and try a counterattack.”

“And that’s where we three start to operate?”

“You got it. In that case, they’d probably try some kind of encircling move from in back, as well.”

Bolan nodded. “Toward Smiler. Okay. Seems simple and sensible. They won’t have patrols out? Or dogs?”

“Uh-uh. They don’t know that we know they aimed to be part of last night’s scene. If the punk Smiler wasted was telling the truth, they’ll all be in there working on a plan where they hit us.”

“No electrified fences? Trip wires? Booby traps? No sensors or closed-circuit TV?” Bolan sounded surprised.

The Frenchman laughed. “Hell, no. You can do that kind of thing on a private island like La Rocaille. But this is right by a public highway. There
may
be sensors nearer the house, but we want them to know we’re coming when we’re that close, anyway!”

They were skirting the edge of the wood, the night breeze warm on their faces. Jean-Paul led the way through a gap in a stonewall, and suddenly the details of the ranch buildings were visible in the radiance of the moon.

The place lay at the top of a long slope of pastureland that was broken nearer the house by a complex of pens and sheep-dip troughs spread below the largest of the barns. A line of trees on the far side of the slope marked the course of the driveway that curled up from the road.

The gang leader stopped near a ramshackle shepherd’s cabin with a tumbledown gap where the door had been and a gaping window that looked toward the ranch.

“You stay here,” J-P said. “The range to the stoop is exactly 360 yards — we worked it out on a large-scale survey map. The average slope of the meadow is six degrees.” He added further instructions, and then departed into the night with the silent ex-wrestler.

Bolan moved across to the glassless window and looked up at the house. Louvered shutters were closed all the way around the two stories. The moonlight was too bright to see if there were lights shining inside. It was very quiet in the abandoned hut.

The Husqvarna was propped against the rough stone wall. He picked up the rifle and hefted it experimentally. It was a beautifully crafted weapon — a .358 Magnum, with a two-foot blued steel barrel, a rosewood stock and a corrugated butt plate. It weighed, Bolan estimated, just under eight pounds.

He had chosen it because his briefing demanded a large-bore rifle, dead accurate at long ranges, with a heavy, high-velocity bullet and colossal stopping power. Some of the hoods had laughed at the gun because it was bolt-action with only a 3-shot magazine.

Bolan had retorted that it might be the slowest of all the repeaters for follow-up shots, but it was also the most reliable, since the marksman commanded the climb on each shot... and anyway, with the nightscope he had fitted, follow-up shots were rarely necessary!

The scope was a Balvar X5 by Bausch and Lomb. This, and a breech pressure of more than twenty tons p.s.i. and a superhigh muzzle velocity that gave the 150-grain slugs an almost flat trajectory, were enough to guarantee a gunner of Bolan’s expertise better than an eighty percent chance of a first-time hit whenever the cross-hairs centered on a target.

He brushed dust and small fragments of stone and mortar from the flat sill of the window frame and leaned his elbows on it. With the butt pressed into his right shoulder, the big gun was heavy but beautifully balanced. Bolan wrapped his fingers around the pistol grip, hit a full magazine into the chamber, and flicked the bolt. The safety was already set in the firing position.

The scope’s rubber eyeguard caressed his cheek and brow. Through the magnifying IR lens he could see the moonsplashed facade of the ranch-house. Testing the strength of the first-pressure prelim spring, he curled his right index around the trigger. The cross hairs were centered on the entrance doors.