Don Pendleton - Continental Contract

Very quietly she said, "What are you trying to tell me?"

"I'm telling you that I am not under any circumstances taking you with me on a hit."

"Not even when I promise to blow the wheestle?" she asked meekly.

"Not even then. If you won't bug out, then at least resign yourself to staying put, right here, until I get back."

"I would theenk you would want me where you could see me."

"Why?"

She delicately shrugged her shoulders. "I 'ave been dishonest with you, no? I do not onderstand if you tell me now that you trost me."

He said, "Sometimes a guy just has to trust his instincts."

"You trost the instincts then, not Cici?"

He grinned. "Same thing, isn't it?"

She smiled back. "I guess so."

"Okay. Help me pinpoint these locations on the map. I need absolute accuracy, so don't let me down."

"I weel not lat you down."

Bolan hoped not. Together they put the finishing touches to the battle order, then he began gathering his equipment. "What's that other car in the garage?" he asked her.

"It is the American Sting Ray."

"In good condition?"

"Yes. You will use it?"

"Uh huh"

She asked, "What if the plan does not work? What if there is nothing any of these men can do to rescue these girls?"

"They'll find a way, once the message is in loud and clear." He looked at his watch. "Which reminds me, can you get the Nice television channel here?"

She nodded her head and went to the set and turned it on. "Why do you want the television?"

"It's about time for the story to break." He continued rounding up his things and asked her, "Do you have a pair of good binoculars?"

She replied, "Yes," and went to a closet, returning with a leather case.

"Put it with the stuff," he requested.

She giggled, a release of nervous excitement. "I thought you would look at the television with them."

Bolan laughed and said, "Cici, I want you to..." He let the instruction dangle and followed her intent gaze to the television screen and to himself. He was there in a huge video blowup, backdropping a man at a desk who was reading something in that polished tone used by newscasters everywhere. "What's he saying?" Bohn asked the girl.

She waited until the narration ended, then told Bolan, "It is the same as you have told me before. A high criminal will die each hour until the keednapped girls are returned. Thees man say that you are a bloodthirsty killaire, and that the police are determined to prevent you."

Bolan grinned and said, "Fine." He had the miscellany of equipment in his arms, the big gun slung at his shoulder, and was going out the door. He turned back to tell her, "If you want to help, keep watching that channel. I'm supposed to get word there when the girls are surrendered."

She ran out the door after him, hopped about nervously as he stowed the gear in the Sting Ray, then grabbed him in a wild embrace. He kissed her, gently pushed her away, and put himself in the car.

"There is a lamp on the gate," she told him. "If in daytime and the lamp is burn, or night time and the lamp is not burn — this is warning of dangair within. Oh-kay?"

"Oh-kay," he said, grinning. He cranked the engine and spun onto the drive. Moments later he was out the gate and on his way.

First stop, just south of Monaco.

Target, Claude de Champs, society hood.

Weapon, Belgian Safari rhino-stomper.

Mission, squeeze the enemy.

Method, execution.

The Riviera War was on.

Wilson Brown came through the doorway with an awed look wreathing his broad face. "Man, did you hear what this Bolan cat is?.."

"Sure, sure I heard!" Lavagni growled. His hand rested on the telephone, as though commanding it to ring. "I already got most of the boys headed for the airport. Now if Sammy will just check in..."

Brown was not to be put down. "Well, that's just the grooviest thing I ever heard of," he declared. "Man, that Bolan cat is clear outta sight, he's..."

"He's stupid!" Lavagni said. "Leave it to a schnook to get all lathered up over a bunch of whores. We got 'im now, Wils, don't you worry about that."

"That's what makes it so groovy," the Negro persisted. "He must've known he was exposing his position. But that's just Bolan. Even over in 'Nam you could always depend on this cat to be the one draggin' in the sick kids and scared old women, even with a pack of Charlies chasing 'im. I think he actually liked those gooks. I remember one time..."

"Aw, shut up!" Lavagni yelled. "Don't gimme no hero stories about that bastard! Have you got yourself packed? We gotta be leavin' for Nice soon as Sammy checks in!"

"I'm packed, man," the black giant replied, his eyes dulling and seeming to recede into their sockets. He went back out the door, muttering to himself, "... but that don't say I'm ready."

In an earlier age, Claude de Champs would have looked most natural in a powdered wig and holding a jeweled snuff box, perhaps at the court of Louis XIV, or dancing gracefully in the royal ballroom while his less privileged countrymen quietly starved in the streets. This would-be aristocratic Frenchman actually claimed a lineage from The Man in the Iron Mask — a claim difficult to dispute since the identity of the man so grimly punished by the king of France was never historically established.

Claude de Champs insisted, however, that the man in the mask was a secret son of the crown and half-brother of the grand dauphin, and he often visited the fort at Ste. Marguerite, near Cannes, to stare sadly into the tiny cell where his purported ancestor was imprisoned for eleven years.

Copies of the iron mask were set into each side of the gates opening onto the de Champs seaside estate, and a massive coat of arms showing the mask beneath crossed swords dominated the ballroom of the castle-like villa.

The Man in the Iron Mask had never had it so good.

Nor would have Claude de Champs, except for his robber-baron approach to life. His first handle on personal wealth had presented itself during the German occupation in World War II, when the then young de Champs had discovered that collaboration with the enemy was far more practical and comfortable than resistance. Always the clever opportunist, de Champs had managed to greet the liberating Allied armies with a French underground rifle in his arms and a cache of looted art treasures to tide him through the post-war adjustments. This latter was parlayed into ever-increasing involvements with various illegal trade centers and, by the mid-fifties, de Champs was rather securely established in the higher levels of organized crime in France. As his personal fortunes increased, so also did his social ambitious. At the time that Mack Bolan was matriculating from high school to U.S. Army, Claude de Champs was travelling with the international jet set and had "discovered" his link with a glorious past.

Perhaps this accounts for the Frenchman's personal disdain for the Executioner's ultimatum. As he told his friend and close associate, Paul Vicareau, in the final telephone conversation of his misspent life, "There is no reason for worry, Paul. This is the American way, to make the noise and apply the pressure. It is an empty threat. This man has been in France — for what? — one day? Two? He is being pursued from quarter to quarter and does not dare show his face anywhere. How could he know of us? How could he hurt us?"

"Perhaps this is true," came the worried-cultured voice of Vicareau, a true socialite who had fallen onto hard times some years back, and thus into de Champs' area of influence. "Just the same, I would feel better if we could contact Rudolfi and have done with this mad adventure. Will you try once more to telephone him?"

"Certainly, Paul, I promise that I will continue until I reach him. The important thing is that we remain calm. Fear alone could be our undoing. To act frightened at this time is to confess guilt. Do you understand?"