Don Pendleton - Sunscream

The dead were all associates of the late Pasquale Lombardo.

Telder glanced only briefly at the third clipping. He was already familiar with the contents: he had himself supplied the background information for the story. It reported that police frogmen dragging a flooded chalk pit outside Marseilles had recovered the body of Maitre Gaspard Delpeche, a well-known defense attorney who had been missing for some days. The lawyer had been shot once in the nape of the neck.

Readers were reminded that a second prominent citizen of the city, the columnist Georges Dassin, was also missing and must be presumed dead; that the body of the popular television personality, Michel Lasalle, had been found floating in the ocean; and that a high official of Interpol, a guest of the city government, had only a few days before been cold-bloodedly gunned down at a public meeting.

A spokesman for the police described the recent increase in violent crime in the area as “intolerable and wholly unacceptable.”

Telder grinned. He hoped the subjects of the story appreciated its irony in the safety of their reluctant hideouts.

Bolan was doing all right, anyway. The forces of law and order along the coast would have at least to make a pretense of acting... and that would add to the instability of the Mafia situation whether or not they actually got around to busting anyone.

The Interpol chief nodded in satisfaction now as he thought of the Executioner. The American warrior was risking everything — his life — to thwart the planned coalition between the KGB and the Mafia in Europe. So far the soldier’s strategy — whatever it was — seemed to be working fine, and Telder had a feeling that before the Executioner was finished, the Red menace would cover the land. The threat would not be from the Russians, however. Instead it would be spilled Mafia blood.

Bolan swung the Jaguar off the highway and parked it discreetly in a multistory parking lot on the outskirts of Civitaveccia, forty miles west and north of Rome. He took a cab to the town center and walked to the docks.

It was a blisteringly hot day and the tourists on the waterfront were dressed in the minimum, but Bolan wore a spotless white coverall that sheathed him from wrist to ankle. Stitched to the breast pocket was a yellow shield bearing a rampant horse in red, with the word Ferrari above it. To complete a picture immediately identifiable by any Italian, he had allowed a day-old haze of stubble to blue his jaw.

A freighter from Marseilles had docked early in the morning, and its cargo was being unloaded. Among the merchandise was an automobile. It belonged to Baron Etang de Brialy, the Parisian underworld boss, who was to take delivery of it in Rome the following day and then drive south to Reggio de Calabria on the Strait of Messina.

From here, along with the other Mafia chiefs, he was to be ferried in a private yacht, not to Sicily but to the island of Stromboli, where Sanguinetti owned another property.

After the intensive newspaper, radio and television coverage of the past few days’ excesses, all hell had broken loose along the Riviera coast, and Jean-Paul had figured it would be tempting fate to reorganize a gathering of so many high powered Mafia men in one place until the heat was off.

Italy and Sicily were out of the question since Tommaso Buscetta, late in 1984, had broken the Law of Silence and blown half the Mafia operations there and in the United States so wide open that all the law had to do was step in and snap on the handcuffs.

An island in the middle of the ocean, with no roads, no police and no regular transport service to the mainland seemed an ideal place to thrash out the final terms of the amalgamation with Colonel Antonin.

Bolan, Smiler, Raoul and Delacroix, together with a score of side men owing allegiance to other bosses, were to make their own way to Reggio di Calabria.

Right now, Bolan was ahead of schedule. He had gained twelve hours by driving through the night instead of stopping off to eat and sleep at a motel. During those twelve hours he intended to “borrow” Etang de Brialy’s car, use it on a private operation, and then continue on south in his own Jaguar.

The car was a 400 hp, twin-turbo Ferrari GTO, a sleek road racer whose center-mounted 3.8 liter V8 engine could power the car from 0 to 60mph in 4.8 seconds.

The 190 mph roadster was painted lemon yellow with a broad black stripe running from the nose, over the squat roof to the stubby tail. With Paris license plates, it was not the kind of vehicle to escape attention, even in race-mad Italy, the home of supercars. That suited the Executioner just fine.

There were gasps of admiration from dockers and tourists alike as the Ferrari was swung from the freighter’s hold and lowered gently to the wharf. Nobody thought for a moment to dispute Bolan as an official driver from the Ferrari factory at Maranello when he strode forward, unsmiling, and waited for the longshoremen to free the five-spoke alloy wheels from their chains.

Owner’s instructions were to park the car in a dockside lot and leave the keys with the harbormaster, from whom Etang de Brialy’s driver would collect them the following morning. But nobody questioned Bolan’s authority when he said that plans had been changed: he was to deliver the car to the Baron in Rome immediately. A fistful of 10,000-lire bills distributed left and right served to validate his authenticity further still.

Bolan sank into the perforated black leather driving seat and twisted the key. There was a momentary hum from the roadster’s Weber-Marelli injection system, and then the engine crackled to life. Bolan raised a languid hand in farewell and allowed the Ferrari to rumble slowly toward the dock gates.

He drove south until he hit the outskirts of Rome, bypassing the city on the parkway that circled the center. On the famous southern expressway beyond, he floored the pedal and howled up through the gears until the tachometer’s red needle was nudging the 7,500 rpm danger line. Then, easing the stick into fifth, he settled down the low, wide sportster at just over 150 mph and prepared to enjoy the ride.

It was an exhilarating experience. Bolan was a skillful driver and his big hands, tweaking the three-branched wheel only fractionally as the Ferrari streaked past the lunchtime traffic, held the car steady as an arrow in flight.

Behind his head the throaty aspirations of the inter-cooled IHI turbochargers, the whine and chatter of thirty-two valves and twin overhead camshafts mingled with the bellow of exhaust from the big-bore tailpipes to exult in the achievement of man the engineer.

Bolan wished he could leave it at that. But it was man the animal that his business was with. The Camorra, he had read, was believed to be behind a nationwide child prostitution racket in Italy, a scandal that involved boys as well as girls. It was a subject on which he found it hard to keep his cool.

His own crusade against the Mafia had started after a compassionate repatriation from Nam had brought him face-to-face with murder and suicide in his own family. And that had been the direct consequence of his kid sister’s turning whore in a desperate attempt to find enough cash to pay off Mafia loan sharks.

Bolan shook his head sadly. Sure, the battleground changed, but the story remained the same. And it would, he knew, always be the same. But while he was alive, he’d do his best to change the plot. And with any luck he could at the same time toss another wrench into the proposed alliance of the KGB and European Mafia.

Valmontone, Montecassino and Caserta dropped behind the roaring Ferrari. Soon the autostrada looped down toward Naples and the impossibly blue bay beyond. The Ferrari GTO had made the 129 miles from Rome in exactly one hour.