Don Pendleton - Sunscream

A third guard, similarly armed, would be in the back of the truck, with instructions not to come out under any circumstances, but to fire at once if anyone unauthorized tried to break in.

He wouldn’t be coming out.

He wouldn’t be firing when they broke in, either. There was a grill between the strong room and the cab, open too because of the heat, and a small ventilator revolving on the roof. Enough to allow in sufficient gas to render the guy unconscious.

There were ventilator fans also set in the tunnel roof, their five-foot blades designed to extract gasoline and diesel fumes. Buy they lay motionless now in the yellow light. The mobsters working outside had cut the current powering their motors and dismantled the blades minutes before the convoy was due.

Sensing trouble, the two cops riding shotgun had accelerated the moment they’d seen the semi blocking the exit. Passing the truck, they rode straight into the motionless gas cloud... and straight out of action, the BMW 650s toppling over and spinning to the tunnel walls as the cops slumped over their handlebars.

Bolan cut the fuel feed on all four roaring engines as J-P and the giant hauled the security men from the cab and searched them for keys.

A second semi was now broadsided across the roadway to block the tunnel’s entrance. The driver, followed by Smiler and his two thugs, all of them wearing gas masks and balaclavas, ran to the stalled security vehicle. They were joined a moment later by the hood who had blocked the exit.

Everything now depended on timing. And it was here that Jean-Paul’s organizational genius paid off. Instead of loading their haul into cars and attempting a getaway on one of the expressway lanes, instead of leaving the tunnel and making it across the countryside to another road, he had come up with a smarter idea.

The sabotaged fans in the roof, when they were working, pushed the extracted air up into shafts that penetrated the hillside and emerged into the open air 150 feet above the twin tunnels.

These shafts were thirty-six inches wide.

J-P stood now beneath one of them and blew three shrill blasts on a police whistle.

Seconds later a steel loader’s hook on the end of a rope appeared at the shaft mouth in the tunnel roof. Rapidly it was lowered to the roadway. Working feverishly, Smiler and the other mobsters ransacked the armored truck, ranging boxes stuffed with bills and the heavy cylindrical coin sacks beneath the vent.

A second rope snaked down from the next shaft, fifty yards nearer the exit. Bolan, Raoul and Delacroix humped sacks and boxes over. Quickly now the hooks, loaded with three sacks at a time, rose upward and were swallowed in the darkness of the ventilator shafts, reappeared for another load, and then vanished again. On the hillside above two garage pickups equipped with powered hoists worked overtime.

It was a smart idea, all right. Bolan wondered with an inward grin just how much it had been influenced by his own ruse — as he had explained it to his boss — to get rid of the Husqvarna after the Telder “assassination.”

Except for a few sacks of coins, the contents of the armored truck had been hoisted by the time the men in the tunnel heard the distant bray of police sirens. Bolan guessed that the guards, before the gas got to them, would have had time to send out an SOS.

“Okay, guys, that’s it,” Jean-Paul ordered at once. “We’ll take the ropes ourselves now, two at a time.”

While the first four men ran for the ropes, the others ranged the unconscious cops and guards alongside the plundered truck.

Jean-Paul had been insistent that on this deal there were to be no deaths. Mobsters and bribed police along the coast had reached an understanding. The mafiosi, handing out their hush money, could continue their protection rackets, the organization of cathouses and gambling joints, the distribution of drugs, the sacking of bank strong rooms — on condition.

There were to be no public shootouts; no hostage situations; no killings.

It would be exactly what the do-gooders wanted: The kind of thing that would bring the law down on the mafiosi at a critical time.

The shooting came later. And there were deaths, too.

Each of the two ropes came down twice; each time, four men were hoisted up the shafts to the surface. Bolan and J-P were on the final delivery — and already the horns of impatient drivers blocked outside the tunnel entrance were being drowned by the clamor of approaching sirens.

The air shafts emerged on a barren slope of sun drenched mountainside. The four mobsters manning the pickups had already begun stacking the haul around the hoists projecting over the open shafts. Now they maneuvered the vehicles back toward the dirt trail that had led them there. The path, made some years ago when the expressway was engineered, was too stony and overgrown for the cars that would carry away the hijackers and their spoils: these were parked on a loop of country road far below.

So were the attackers’ vehicles — two jeeps and a 4x4 vehicle. But these were hidden behind a row of oaks, and the first the Marseilles gang knew of the assault was the burst of SMG fire that shattered the windshield of one of the pickups. Behind the crumbling glass the driver and Bertrand, who had climbed in beside him, were cut almost in two, leaving a pattern of blood and brains smeared over the back of the cab.

For a second the mobsters were stunned into immobility. Then the chatter of the gun was repeated from behind the pickup, followed at once by a volley of revolver shots.

Confusion.

Two more of the outside men were cut down, a third fell screaming with a slug through his kneecap, and the driver of the semi blocking the tunnel exit was hurled into the bushes by a heavy-caliber revolver bullet that slammed into his shoulder. Glass shattered and fell from the perforated cab of the second pickup.

“My God, it’s a hijack!” Jean-Paul shouted. “Take cover and kill the bastards!” He flung himself behind a low shelf of rock, a Walther PPK in his right hand.

For the moment there was no target, visible or audible. The first volley seemed to have come from a group of boulders 150 yards uphill, on the far side of the trail, the second from below a limestone outcrop some way to the west. But so far no gunners had showed themselves.

Smiler, Delacroix and the others dived behind bushes, into a ditch beside the trail, among the rocks that littered the slope. Bolan was already prone beneath the first pickup, his Beretta in one hand, the M-16, its launcher discarded, by his side. He had been expecting the attack.

He was responsible for it.

The fact that the woolen helmets, covering the whole head except for the eyes, would make them unrecognizable had given him the idea.

All he had to do was arrange an anonymous tip off to Lombardo, the Toulon capo, that a bunch of free lance amateurs planned to ambush the armored convoy on Mafia territory.

And add the details of the getaway plan.

Fury at the interlopers’ insolence — and greed at the thought of easy money — would surely provoke a hijack situation, Bolan figured.

So there would be an ambush. And whether or not Jean-Paul recognized the attackers while they were making their play, he would never believe that Lombardo had been ignorant of the original holdup teams’ identity.

Open hostility, then, between these two leaders and their gangs.

As to who won the fight and made it with the loot... hell, it didn’t really matter. Bitterness and suspicion would remain on both sides. With luck, some of the other teams, hearing of the screwup, would take sides and worsen the rift. It would do okay, Bolan thought, for a start....

He stared out from his hiding place. Jean-Paul’s men were lightly armed. Because of his no-deaths ruling and the fact that they were using gas canisters, they had not expected any opposition; they hadn’t expected any firefight at all.