Don Pendleton - Sunscream

The Marseilles mafioso’s meager arsenal would not go far against a team armed with SMGs — Bolan figured them for Ingrams or Heckler & Kock MP-5s.

The element of surprise, too, had a demoralizing effect. Some of the guys from the tunnel hadn’t even removed their gas masks when the first shots blasted off.

Jean-Paul himself was doing his damnedest. Three rounds cracked out from the Walther as a distant figure materialized between the boulders. There was a cry of pain. A stone rattled down the hillside toward the ambushed mobsters.

And then abruptly there was firing from all sides, a storm of lead hosing the pickups and the area around the ventilator shafts where the Marseilles soldiers were trapped.

The attackers were advancing now — silhouettes briefly seen as they leaped from bush to bush or wormed their way forward between the limestone outcrops.

Bolan snappped off a 3-round burst from the Beretta and saw a hoodlum fall. Slugs hailed against the steel sides of the pickup above the Executioner’s head and stung rock splinters from the stony ground.

Smiler and Raoul blazed away from behind the other vehicle. Jean-Paul half rose and drilled a killer who tried to sprint down the trail. But the Marseilles chief was too slow ducking back behind his protecting shelf: a single shot from a rifle downhill dropped him. The Walther fell from nerveless fingers and skated into the center of the track.

But the marksman, making his hit, had himself been exposed. Bolan mowed him down with the M-16.

The big guy moved quickly then. On elbows and knees, the 93-R still in his right hand, he shuffled to the rock shelf were J-P had fallen.

The gang leader lay with outflung arms, the balaclava dark with blood. Bolan pulled off the woolen helmet. The white cap of hair was bloodied on one side. But Bolan soon discovered that the wound was not serious: the slug had merely creased the skull above the right ear, knocking the gang boss out cold.

“Is it bad?” the hoarse voice of Delacroix asked from the grasses on the far side of the trail.

“Uh-uh,” Bolan replied. “He’s out of the fight for now. But apart from a headache he’ll be okay tomorrow and on his feet yelling blue murder the day after.”

And not just because of the head wound, the Executioner thought. Then he glanced over the edge of the rock as he sensed movement. There were figures advancing again beyond the pickups. Sudden shapes, dark-clothed in the glaring light, flitting across the gaps between five-foot-high clumps of wild grass.

If they were moving, they couldn’t fire accurately, Bolan reckoned. He made a quick dash back to the pickup, grabbed the M-16 and fired two bursts as the enemy came closer still and death hummed past on all sides.

He scored with both bursts. One of the ambushers fell, clawing at his shredded throat. Another gunman was carried backward by the impact of the high-velocity 5.56mm deathbringers that let the daylight into his rib cage.

The rate of firing increased once more. The air was shrill with ricochets.

Only five men remained now of the original Marseilles dozen: Smiler, Raoul, Delacroix, Bolan and the driver of the second semi.

“We’re gonna have to pull out,” Smiler growled from his foxhole nearby. “There must be ten of the bastards still on their feet.”

Bolan said nothing. It was all the same to him. He’d play the cards the way they were dealt. The vital thing now was that the attackers should be recognized as Lombardo men. Maybe he should tempt one to come close enough...

He didn’t have to.

Smiler was shouting orders. There was a flurry of activity, punctuated by bursts of rapid fire. The guy with the smashed kneecap was screaming again.

The remaining driver had gained the cab of the second pickup. Crouched below the dashboard, he had started the engine. Now, still huddled below the door line, he stomped the pedal and sent the pickup careering over the rough ground toward the trail.

Raoul and Smiler, unleashing all they had at the bushes concealing the attackers, leaped aboard on the near side and crammed into the cab. Delacroix, momentarily shielded by the bulk of the pickup, dragged the body of his unconscious leader from the ground, bundled him over the tailgate and then dived in after him as the vehicle gathered speed.

Bolan was left to race after the open truck, grab the side rails and vault over on his own. He had the impression that they would have left him behind if they could.

He lay panting beside the hoist, draped, like Delacroix and J-P, over the boxes and sacks that had already been loaded when the attackers opened fire. They were getting away with maybe one-third of the amount hauled up through the ventilator, leaving the bulk of the booty for Lombardo’s thugs.

If they got away.

The pickup shuddered and screamed as lead thunked into the bodywork, caromed off the chassis and ribboned three of the tires.

The guy with the busted arm emerged from behind a boulder and lurched toward them, shouting something unintelligible over the crackle of fire. Bolan and Delacroix slammed in fresh clips and tried to cover him, but the wounded hood never had a chance. He fell on his knees in the dust, choking out his lifeblood as the words ended in a bubbling scream, riddled by slugs from half a dozen guns.

The driver was sitting upright now, wrestling with the wheel, struggling to keep the pickup — limping and screeching on three steel rims — running straight along the track.

“What about Louis?” the driver asked as they slalomed toward the rock where the soldier with the shattered knee was lying.

“Fuck him,” Smiler grated. “Get us the hell outta here.”

It was ten boneshaking yards later that the nickel dropped. Passing the slope of rock where Bolan had downed a man, Raoul glanced below the gory trail to where the dead hood’s face stared sightlessly up from the grasses. “Jeez!” he gasped. “That’s... it can’t be, but — hell, that’s Lombardo there!”

“No way,” Smiler snapped. “How could it be?”

“ It is. I swear it. But what the hell ?..“

Perhaps fortunately it was Smiler himself who witnessed the clincher. The driver swung wide to skate past the body of the man Jean-Paul had dropped in the middle of the trail. And now it was Smiler’s turn to stare.

“Sonovabitch,” he breathed again, “you’re goddamn right: that’s Michel Calvet, one of Lombardo’s soldiers!” He shook his head and then muttered between clenched teeth: “The double crossing bastards!”

On the whole, Bolan thought as they clattered away and then down toward the parked automobiles and safety, not a bad afternoon’s work...

In his office high above the lake in Geneva, Colonel Mathieu Telder took three pieces of paper from a brown manila envelope and spread them on his desk between the two telephones.

The papers were news clippings. He read them slowly, a slight smile on his lips.

The first was the longest. It had been clipped from the main news page of Nice-Matin and gave details of the daring tunnel raid and subsequent shootout on the hillside west of La Turbie.

Telder put the cutting aside and picked up the second. It was much shorter. Taken from an inside page of that day’s France-Soir, the two-inch news item recounted a bombing incident that wrecked a bar frequented by criminals in the dock quarter of Toulon the previous night. The attack, Telder read, was thought to be a “reprisal” for the hijack that followed the daring $500,000 “tunnel holdup” with the loss of ten lives. The story stated that three men had been killed and a fourth was missing after the explosion, which was thought to have been caused by a suitcase bomb left under a table in the bar.