Don Pendleton - Sunscream

“Acting like children in a slum... absolutely essential that we deal with adults behaving as adults... public killings, bomb attacks, open gang warfare here, in France, in Italy, in California... An intolerable situation.”

Bolan lost the thread again as Jean-Paul’s near-hysterical argument drowned the KGB officer’s words. Then, quite clearly, the mobster yelled, “Your whole aim, you said, was to promote insecurity and chaos!”

“Not among yourselves, you imbecile!” Antonin shouted. “We will deal only with a unified organization. Yet here you present me with quarreling, feuding, shooting. Worst of all, you allow the mercenary Bolan to infiltrate your own group.”

Jean-Paul’s reply was lost in the angry stamp of booted feet on the flagstones. Antonin was striding away from the villa.

Eventually, over the Frenchman’s impassioned arguments, his distant voice could be heard icily declaiming, “No! You have shown yourselves, all of you, undisciplined, stupid, unreliable. Now it is over. I shall report to my superiors that on further examination the project has been found to be unworkable.”

A fresh outburst from Jean-Paul. Was he pleading, cajoling, even threatening? There was no way of telling: the two men were now too far away for individual phrases to be recognizable. All that Bolan and the baron could say with certainty was that the tirade was cut short with a single sharp expletive in Russian, followed instantly by a shot from a heavy-caliber revolver.

Silence.

Receding footsteps.

A gruff, guttural command, and then the rising whine of a turbojet cutting in.

A minute later the Soviet helicopter rose into the air over the landing stage and flew away toward the southwest.

Before the noise of its rotors faded, the volcano renewed its eruption with a rumbling bellow that shook the ground beneath their feet and sent flames and molten debris shooting upward from the crater.

“Did he kill Jean-Paul?” Etang de Brialy’s voice could scarcely be heard over the uproar.

“It sounded that way,” Bolan said cheerfully.

In the darkness of the cabin behind them, suddenly a third voice spoke.

“You’d better get out of here fast: they’re setting up a searchlight down there, and this is the obvious place to look.”

Coralie Sanguinetti!

“How did you get here?” Bolan exclaimed for the second time that night.

“There’s an underground passageway. It leads here from a ruined chapel on a rock above the house.”

“Could we go that way?” the baron asked.

“Yes. There’s a place where the roof of the tunnel has fallen in. About halfway, in the middle of an old olive grove. We’d have some cover if we scrambled out there.”

“We?” Bolan asked.

“Yes. I’ll show you the way. Your only chance is to make it to the other side of the island — over the shoulder below the crater, and then down to a creek where they keep a couple of fishing boats.”

“Below the crater?” Etang de Brialy repeated nervously.

“Some way below. We’ll be all right. But hurry...”

Coralie stopped talking. From the roof of the villa below a blinding white beam split the night and began to sweep left and right up the terraces. It was joined by a less powerful spotlight from the bridge of the power launch moored at the landing stage, and then by the hand-held torches that had been searching earlier.

The light from Coralie’s own pocket flashlight was shielded by a red silk scarf held over the lens. In the dim illumination Bolan saw in the back of the cabin a trapdoor standing open in the floor.

As Coralie lowered herself down the crumbling stone steps, light blazed in through the open doorway. Bolan and the Frenchman followed hastily and closed the trapdoor over their heads.

The tunnel was vaulted brickwork. Despite the proximity of the volcano, the walls were damp, and there were pools of moisture on the floor. It twisted and turned for quite a distance before Coralie’s flashlight revealed the slant of rubble and the patch of scarlet sky that marked the place where the roof had collapsed.

They fought their way out into the open air. Red light ahead and white light behind transformed the gnarled trunks of the olives into a grotesque tableau. “The big searchlight below,” Bolan asked the girl, “is it mobile?”

“No,” she replied. “It’s mounted permanently on the roof.”

“So once we make the far side of the ridge there’s no more danger from the light?”

“No,” Coralie said dubiously, “not from the light.”

There was plenty of danger on the near side of the ridge. They had made less than fifty yards when the powerful beam brightened among the trees and there was a shout from lower down the slope. They had been seen.

A ragged volley of automatic-rifle fire brought leaves tumbling down from the branches above their heads. “Split up and zigzag,” Bolan ordered tersely. “What’s on the far side of this grove?”

“Rough ground sloping upward, covered with long grasses, rocky outcrops. There’s no more cultivation,” Coralie said.

“For how far?”

“In height? Maybe another eight hundred, nine hundred feet. After that, it’s volcanic stuff: old lava flows and ash.”

“Let’s go,” Bolan said.

Because it was all over now except for the shouting. He could report that the mission was accomplished; the Soviets abandoned their project and the enemy forces were in disarray.

Those forces who were not actively tracking him down, anyway, with orders to bring him in dead or alive. Maybe, Bolan thought, instead of just getting the hell out, he would stick around awhile first and try shouting a little....

At the far end of the olive grove he dropped to one knee. The power launch was way out of range now, but flashlights were still bobbing around and the big searchlight silhouetted shadowy figures among the trees. Bolan let off a couple of rounds and thought he saw one of the figures stumble and fall. Etang de Brialy, who was carrying a Detonics .45 Combat Master, pumped half a dozen rounds in the same direction.

As their fire was returned, the two fugitives ran out from under the trees and followed Coralie, who was already wading through waist-high grasses.

Out in the open, Bolan realized that the wind had risen.

The tower of black smoke billowing from the crater was now leaning over to the northeast, and the incandescent fragments showering thunderously skyward were all falling on the nearer slopes of the cone. From this position high on the mountainside they could look over the basalt headland to the riding lights of Bloody Mary, where she lay rocking at anchor in the freshening sea.

The night had been warm; the hot wind blowing down from the active cone was suffocating. By the time they at last breasted the ridge, each of them was soaked with sweat.

The darkness on the far side of the crest was relative. Instead of the harsh searchlight brilliance, the ground was suffused with a wavering red glow reflected from the underside of the vast cloud streaming from the erupting crater.

Immediately below them, a wide, shallow depression separated the ridge from high ground overlooking the sea on the far side of the island. And, as Coralie had warned, it was a lunar landscape, witness to countless eruptions in the past, which had inundated, stratified, seared and tortured the surface until now it resembled nothing so much as a giant black Christmas cake whose frosting had been whipped into frightening shapes by a fork.

At the upper end of the depression, glimmering in the tawny light, a fresh flow of molten lava dripped heavily from crag to crag.

“We take this path,” Coralie called over the express-train roar of the volcano. She began edging down a narrow shelf of rock that slanted across the face of the depression.