Sunscream by Don Pendleton Read Free Book Online Page A

with before Antonin arrived. So that the racketeers could present a front that at least looked united, with no opposition visible.
    Bolan frowned. It followed that the mafiosi gathered together in Sanguinetti’s house had already made up their minds in principle. Details apart, the KGB-Mafia partnership was on.
    He was about to ask the girl what part her father was playing in the scheme when they were both startled by a fusillade from the far side of the house.
    Bolan grabbed the Beretta. It sounded like heavy-caliber stuff — 9 mm machine pistols or SMGs firing something weightier than the standard 5.56 mm Armalite rounds. “Come on,” he rasped. “It sounds as if someone’s trying to shoot their way into the party.”
    Followed by the girl, he sped around the pool and skirted the eastern wing of the house. As he had thought, the gunfire — punctuated now by deeper, heavier reports from single-shot revolvers and the crackle of automatic weapons wielded by the defenders — was concentrated at the head of the stairway leading up from the landing stage.
    Reflected light from a gallery bordering the landward side of the house dimly illuminated a paved slope that ran up from the entrance gates to a porch sheltering the main doors. Two formless dark shapes on the porch steps marked the spot where a couple of patrolling guards had fallen. A third lay with outflung arms a few yards from the stair-head gates.
    The attackers appeared to be entrenched on the rock steps immediately behind these, on a ledge that traversed the cliff off to one side, and on an open platform of the cable car.
    The livid orange and yellow hellfire flashes stabbing the gloom lanced out from these three places and from shrubbery and a storehouse on the far side of the porch. Evidently there were still enough guards alive to prevent the invaders from rushing the house.
    But they were too well protected to be picked off one by one, and for anyone trying to get to close quarters, that lethal slope of flagstones meant instant annihilation.
    Bolan pulled the girl down behind a row of flowers on the cliff top. Below, in the wan light of a moon that had just risen, he could see the bodies of the two power-launch crewmen stretched out on the stone jetty. A rubber dinghy bobbing beside the white boat showed how the attackers had arrived at the island.
    Bolan whispered. “Who are these dudes? Are they gunning for your old man or for his friends?”
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” Coralie murmured. He saw a white blur of her face turn toward him in the milky light. “Better, perhaps. For all I know...” She left the sentence unfinished.
    Bolan was amused. “You think I was some kind of advance guard for these creeps? Think again. I’m on your side — yours and that of those other thugs your dad is hosting.”
    “Can you prove it?”
    “Damn right,” Bolan said easily, as he began to move.
    On elbows and knees, he pushed his way between the flowers. On the cliff edge he leaned over and gazed toward the stairway.
    The killers perched on the rock traverse were invisible in deep shadow now. Beyond them an overhang in the limestone face hid the men on the steps and at the top of the cable. When he and the girl arrived, Bolan had briefly seen bejeweled women huddled behind the windows under the narrow roof of the gallery. Now the lights had all been extinguished, and he could hear the angry voices of the Mafia bosses shouting orders.
    The gunfire, which had died away to a sporadic exchange of single shots, broke out again on both sides with renewed fury. Tongues of flame stabbed the darkness from windows on the upper floors of the building. The hidden guards, who seemed to have received reinforcements, redoubled their rate of fire. The attackers raked the facade of the house with a murderous hail of lead.
    “Try this way!” Bolan yelled during a lull in the clamor. There was a shout of surprise from the traverse. At once the muzzle-flashes swung his