Sunscream by Don Pendleton Read Free Book Online Page B

way. Slugs splatted against the rock, ripped through the flower bed and stung his face with stone chips.
    Bolan was ready with the Beretta, the folded-down foregrip snug in his left hand. Aiming above the flashes, he let off four 3-shot bursts, the big auto-loader bucking in his hands.
    Somebody screamed and fell. A second figure leaned out into the moonlight and dropped, cartwheeling dizzily down the limestone face.
    “Enough?” Bolan called to the girl. “Or do you want to make it a trio?”
    “Okay, I believe you.” She sounded angry again.
    Glass shattered on one of the upper stories and a heavy object crashed to the floor inside the house. A woman screamed and a man yelled an obscenity.
    Jean-Paul’s less hysterical voice called from farther along the facade, “Can’t you flush out these bastards, Smiler? There’s a meeting we have to finish here.”
    “Not as long as they stay where they are, J-P,” a hoarse voice replied from the storehouse. “We’d be mowed down if we tried to make it across the terrace. You can see...”
    The guard called Smiler bit off his words. A fresh volley of automatic fire sounded in the distance, on the eastern side of the house. A second wave of attackers was advancing up the slope from the inlet where Bolan had landed.
    The Executioner was still stretched out along the lip of the cliff, the barrel of the Beretta now supported on his left forearm. The gun stuttered the moment the marksmen on the traverse opened up in the direction of Smiler’s voice.
    An SMG spewed a load of hate uselessly at the sky as another of the killers slammed down on his back, his clothes stitched to his ribs with 9 mm thread.
    But now they had located Bolan’s position. He was forced to retreat to the other side of a hedge as a savage storm of shot pulverized the limestone where he had been lying.
    Shouts now from the far side of the house. The gunfire — swelled by shooting from the defenders — increased in rapidity and volume. “Your guys in back will be swamped and the dudes on this side taken in the rear and wiped out if we can’t waste the squad at the stair head,” Bolan said fiercely to Coralie. “That storehouse over there — what’s in it?”
    “Oh, mostly junk, gardening stuff, chemicals,” she said.
    “Do they store fuel there?”
    “Yes. There’s a tank of diesel for the launch, and I think...”
    “Diesel’s no good. Is there any gasoline?”
    “Not much, but we keep a couple of cans for the outboard.”
    “Can you get to the store? Through the house, without crossing the line of fire? Good. Get me a couple of bottles. Knock off the necks, throw out the wine and replace it with gasoline. Bring them back to me with two corks and some newspaper. Make it fast.”
    For a moment the girl stared at him uncomprehendingly, then she turned obediently and ran into the dark.
    While she was away, Bolan reloaded the Beretta. He was acting in support of the Mafia. That was a laugh. He had spent years of his life successfully eliminating most of that sinister brotherhood in his own country! The soldier shrugged. The thought had occurred to him in the gallery above the conference room that from there a single magazine fired from an Ingram MAC-11, or even a couple of clips from his own Beretta, could wipe out the whole damned roomful and save the world from a new threat. But a massacre of unsuspecting men, even evil ones, was not the Executioner’s way.
    And again he had wondered, in a brief moment of self-doubt when he and the girl had arrived at the cliff top, if perhaps her suspicions ought not to have been well-founded, if he shouldn’t have been helping the attackers rather than the defenders.
    Yeah, but that was a question of the devil you knew. And he didn’t know who the thugs storming the fortress were. Could be they were even worse than the mafiosi meeting here. There was no way of knowing; better to wait and find out the full extent of the plan masterminded by Antonin before