Foxy-face was on his hands and knees, diving from the shelter of the chest for an overstuffed settee. With the 93-R in 3-shot mode, Bolan drilled the guy through the calf and cored the faded upholstery with the next two rounds. The mobster flopped out from behind it, spurting blood, and Bolan finished the job with a single shot to the guy's head.
The warrior was up and running. The sudden explosive rasp of a submachine gun erupted from the distant end of the gallery, followed by two revolver shots and then a second kill-burst from the stuttergun. He heard the clatter of a heavy body falling, a smothered curse, footsteps receding.
Katrina and the Uzi?
She was white-faced. "They came up the main stairway," she said shakily. "Two of them. I... I decked the first, but the other got away."
"Nice work. You okay?" He flashed a glance at the landing as she nodded. Through the open doorway he saw two legs, two loafers pointed at the ceiling, a trace of blood still glinting as it sank into the dusty floorboards. Men were climbing up from below.
Katrina opened a narrow door that slanted across a corner behind a seven-foot stack of mildewing bed mattresses. "This way," she whispered.
The door slammed behind them. The turret was no more than twelve feet in diameter, with stone steps spiraling around a central core — six flights of sixteen stairs each, ninety-six in all with a half-landing and a door at each floor of the castle.
They were down one and a half stories before the top door was jerked open and shots echoed thunderously down the masonry shaft. Maccione or one of his heavies was attempting to wing them with ricochets. But although lead screeched off the rounded wall nothing lethal came near. Bolan loosed two rounds from the Beretta, and they raced on down, Katrina's penlight splashing curves of damp stone ahead of them as they took the steps three at a time.
There were no more shots from above, just the clatter of feet following at a discreet distance.
Light, dazzling and intense, flooded the turret as they approached the second-floor landing. Behind the suddenly opened door and the beefy silhouette of a gun-slinging mafioso, Bolan saw the spectacled, narrow skull of Giordano, the Liege capo.
The warrior's reaction time was faster than the contraction of the hardguy's trigger finger.
A violent shove sent Katrina hurtling down the stairway past the door to sprawl against the stonework of the turret's outer wall. At the same time the Beretta bucked convulsively in Bolan's iron fist, choking a 3-blast deathstream toward the enemy gunners.
The beefy hardman's lower jaw sagged as he gazed disbelievingly at a pulped hand from which the heavy six-shot .45 had been blown away, at the twin rosettes bubbling scarlet from the waistline of his pale blue seersucker jacket. He sat down, hard, rolled onto his right side, twitched once, and never closed his eyes again. The one shot fired from his gun levered a foot-long splinter from the wooden floor.
Giordano was already safely out of sight behind the door, flat on his face and trembling. His spectacles had fallen off in his haste to quit the firing line, and lay beside the dead gunner.
Bolan squandered a single round from the 93-R to pulverize the thick lenses. For a fleeting moment, his lips twisted into a shadow of a grin. Nobody but himself would appreciate the irony of the situation... and it meant one man less behind them who could aim on target.
"You okay?" he whispered to Katrina. "I'm sorry, but..."
"Forget it," Katrina cut in. "A couple bruised forearms are a better bet any day than a bullet in the gut!"
A knife-edged rectangle of white marked the outline of the first-floor doorway as they ran on down. Bolan unleathered the Magnum and blasted a single skullbuster through the timbers as a warning. Simultaneously two shots crashed out from the far side of the door, leaving three thin light beams probing the darkness of the turret. The door wasn't opened.
At basement level, the stairway stopped. There was no door here, just a narrow oblong trapdoor set in the floor.
"Down to the waterway?" Bolan queried.
She nodded. The penlight beam was starting to fade. "A ladder, I think. It's where the workmen used to come down to fix the Tunnel of Love stuff."
He was already tugging at an iron ring bolted to one end of the trap. At different distances above them, movements, voices, the stealthy opening of doors indicated a concentration of Maccione's remaining forces. "Good thing they have to take us alive," Bolan observed, "otherwise they could just roll a grenade down and finish it."
His legs were braced as he fought to free the trap. Corded muscles stood out on his forearms and neck. At last, with a screech of metal, the trapdoor opened, tearing away at the same time from its rusted hinges.
Below was darkness, a sound of rushing water, a current of air carrying the dank odors of decay, and a vertical ladder plunging into the unknown.
"They'll figure they have us trapped now," Katrina said. "There's a stone shelf beside each of the canals down there, but the exits are all barred with iron grilles."
"How deep is the water?"
"Just deep enough to float the boats. Not more than waist-high, most places."
"And the other places?"
"Beneath the grilles, about seven feet."
"Okay. Let's go." Bolan helped her down the ladder. The pursuit — at least four men, he thought — was drawing closer: a stealthy shuffling somewhere in the turret above. He maneuvered the torn away trapdoor through the gap in the floor, supporting its weight on one arm, and made it down the ladder. "You're wise to the way this place works," he said. "Brief me, but make it fast."
"There was a museum once, beneath the entrance lobby. They boarded the boats there. The water is siphoned off from a stream that runs through the property and down into the lake. But the boats weren't carried along by the current. There was machinery that pulled them through a network of narrow canals on wires, and they ended up in a basin with a landing, near the old stables."
"Does the water flow back into the stream that way?"
"No. It runs through these grilles, beneath the driveway out front, and then past the maze. It runs into the stream there and makes the lake down a series of cascades."
"That's the way we'll go," Bolan decided. He zippered his two guns into the waterproof neoprene pouch at his waist and lowered himself into the stream. It was ice-cold, almost up to his armpits, and tugged strongly at his legs. Katrina sat on the shelf and slid, gasping, into the water. From above and behind them, a hoarse shout echoed in the turret. The mafiosi had spotted the open trapdoor.
Bolan grabbed the wooden rectangle and pulled it off the ledge. It splashed down beside him. "Lean on it, lift your feet and use it as a surfboard!"
Together, grabbing the leading edge of the trap with outstretched hands, they raised their legs from the floor of the tunnel and were swirled away into the dark beneath the arched brick roof.
Light blazed down through the opening above the ladder. A powerful spot beam lanced the blackness of the underground waterway, fingering the green-slimed walls, shimmering off the frothed surface of the current. "Get after them!" Maccione's voice yelled. "They can't be far! Get the spot down on that goddamn walkway!"
The dazzling beam dipped, fell, and then swung the Executioner's way as boots clanged on the iron ladder. But the improvised raft had nudged the wall and then eddied away around a curve in the tunnel before the first fusillade roared out behind them and slugs plowed harmlessly into the brickwork.
It was an eerie voyage. Floating past the wires, jigs and hanging frames from which rubber skeletons had once grinned and nameless monsters veiled in artificial spiderwebs thrilled nineteenth-century ladies into their escorts' embrace, Bolan watched over his shoulder the play of light signaling the very real dangers threatening him and the young woman with him.
The spotlight shifted from one dripping wall to another as the ancient tunnel twisted and turned among the castle foundations. The water hissed and gurgled beneath the walkways, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, occasionally b
eneath a crumbling miniature bridge. Over it all reverberated the cries and the footsteps of his pursuers.
Strange mission, he thought, kicking the raft away from an obstruction projecting from the wall: dead men were supposed to tell no tales, but Zulowski had a tale to tell — and because Bolan had the key to it, here he was, the hunter, forced to spend the second half of the operation running from the people it was his natural inclination to attack.
If he made it, the Mob would be attacked all right, and hit where it hurt most — smack in the center of the pocketbook. By then, too, if luck was with him, there would be less of them to register the shock.
The darkness ahead was paling. Around a sharp bend daylight flooded down through a grimed glass roof onto a landing platform. Rusting machinery — a winch with toothed gears, pulleys, some kind of overhead gantry — stood at one side of the stage. Campos, his shattered arm still in a sling, stood at the other with two hardmen holding submachine guns.
But before the calm surface of the basin in front of the stage, most of the water spilled to the left and gushed through three iron grilles set ten feet apart in the tunnel wall. "Swim under water?" Bolan murmured.
"No problem," Katrina whispered in his ear.
"Okay. Let the raft float on. Give the boys some target practice. Grab my ankle with one hand and follow me."
In the narrow confines of the tunnel, their voices had carried. As the makeshift raft floated out into the basin, the stutterguns opened fire with a deafening clamor.
But Bolan was already underwater. With Katrina clinging to him, he dived deep beneath the first of the iron grilles.
24
Blood was hammering behind Bolan's eyes and a band of steel had tightened around his chest before the total blackness of the submarine tunnel at last lightened to a distant greenish-gray.
The tug of the underwater current, rushing slightly downhill now, aided by the Executioner's own powerful strokes carried the fugitives beneath the castle's entrance driveway, under a terrace and out finally into an ornamental pond.
They broke surface between the leathery leaves of water lilies, gasping for life-giving air. Scouring the bottom of the basin, the current escaped through a sluice to rejoin the original stream, leapfrogging over stone steps hidden beneath the undergrowth down to the lake. Twenty yards away on the opposite side of the pond was the unkempt mass of yew that formed the old maze.
And below that was the weed-grown slope dropping to the boat house, the rotting jetty... and the possibility of freedom.
It was raining again, heavy drops pockmarking the water surface and pattering on the lily leaves. "We've got to make the lake," Bolan said, "but they'll be onto us the moment we climb out of this pond."
"The maze," Katrina panted, tossing the wet hair out of her eyes. "There's overgrown shrubbery and briars as high as your head all the way down to the waterside beyond it."
He stared at her.
"I've studied it. I know the plan. It hasn't been clipped for years, but you can still make out the old passages. We'll be through it in a flash, before they have time to surround it."
Bolan grinned suddenly. "Whatever you say, lady."
He studied the slope on the near side of the maze. She was right. The weeds there were waist-high, and they could certainly drop down beneath them and crawl, but the waving grass tops would chart their progress as clearly as if the slope were freshly mown. "Okay, you go first," he said. "I'D cover you." He lifted the neoprene pouch above the level of the water and took out the Beretta.
"The formula's simple enough," Katrina said. "First left, first right, first right again. Then left, right, right two more times and a final double left to exit. Okay?"
The warrior nodded. "Get going."
The stone coping that bordered the rectangular basin was hidden by the weeds. Bolan leaned his elbows on it, folded down the autoloader's front handgrip, and held the gun two-fisted, parting the stalks with the muzzle so that he could see the weathered facade of the castle. Campos and his two henchmen were climbing steps from an area. Giordano was leading three more men around from the stableyard. Latta stood in front of the open entrance doors with a bullhorn. Bolan had noticed that the laundryman was always somewhere safe in the background whenever there was a chance of a shooting war.
Over the hiss of falling rain, Bolan heard leaves rustle as the young woman scrambled out of the basin and made for the entrance to the maze. Campos and Giordano couldn't hear, but they could see. Latta's bullhorn erupted, and the other two mafiosi yelled orders. The SMGs spit fire.
But the Executioner was in there pitching, too. The range was less than three hundred feet. With three single shots he blew away Giordano's gunners, and a second lethal hail sent Campos and his thugs scuttling away. Before they could get it together and work out the odds, the warrior had pulled himself up out of the basin and made a defense tackle's dive for the yew hedge covering the entrance to the maze.
He landed on hands and knees among the untrodden grasses and heard Katrina's encouraging call from farther inside the living puzzle. Scrambling upright, he cat-footed past intruding branches of the ancient evergreen with the woman's instructions echoing in his ears. Left, right, right; left, right, right — that was one hell of a drill sergeant's marching order for a military man!
Her voice was calling softly from somewhere ahead. He turned through a gap in the closely packed yew. Was that the first left turn? No, one of the bushes forming the hedge had died. He was in a cul-de-sac, facing a lichened marble nymph on a pedestal. He hurried back to the main alley. Yeah, the real openings were wider, still recognizable although long strands of greenery trailed out from the dense green walls.
He made the first five turns in double time, no problem; missed the sixth because it was overgrown and found himself facing an alley with no exit; retraced his steps and got it right. Katrina's voice — barely audible over the pelting of the rain — appeared to be behind him now. He reckoned, making a hasty orientation from the position of the low clouds scurrying overhead, that the route she'd given him zigzagged mainly around the outer confines of the maze without ever penetrating to the center.
He guessed right. After two more turns he passed a thinner section of the yew buttress and realized that he could peer through and make out the huge briar thicket blanketing the slope between the maze and the boat house.
And the saturnine figure of the Liege capo, Giordano, standing ten feet away with a submachine gun he must have snatched from one of his fallen hardmen.
Thinking Bolan and his companion would be trapped inside the maze, Giordano was about to rake the whole width of the yew complex with a lethal burst. Without glasses, it was easier than trying to aim.
He started at the far corner, the stubby deathblaster shuddering in his grasp as the muzzle belched flame. The killstream was halfway to Bolan's position, spewing twigs, branches and leaves into the alley, when the Executioner dropped the guy with a single shot from the Desert Eagle.
Giordano was flung backward with a spreading scarlet buttonhole, and lay among crushed grasses whose bloodied stalks were soon washed clean by the rain.
Shouts from the remainder of the hoods were now dangerously near. Bolan made it to the exit and found that, as Katrina had said, it was concealed beneath a great arched tangle of briars.
From outside, this spiny wilderness looked to be an impenetrable barrier, but beneath the inextricable ten-foot crisscross of thorned bushes there was room to crawl. And the bare earth, screened from daylight as well as rain by the briar barrier, was dry and free of the undergrowth that choked the rest of the slope.
Katrina was already fifteen or twenty yards ahead, negotiating on hands and knees the broken stone of a shallow flight of steps that had once separated two terraces. Bolan bypassed a cracked and fallen urn and joined her.
From somewhere outside the thicket came a sudden staccato burst of automatic fire. And then a voice — Campos, the Executioner thought — yelling, "Come out, th
e two of you. We know you're in there somewhere. You've got two minutes before we spray the yew with gasoline and smoke you out."
By the time the ultimatum expired Bolan and Katrina, at the expense of a dozen deep scratches from the tougher thorns, had scuttled to the foot of the slope. Between the briars and the water's edge there was nothing but a strip of long grass.
Bolan motioned Katrina to stay out of sight while he made a brief recon. He wormed his way forward until he could see each way along the narrow, twisting surface of the lake. Eastward, a quarter of a mile distant, was the dam that had turned the valley of the Sure River into a reservoir. On his right, where the lake gleamed dully between densely wooded banks, was the sector reserved for boating, fishermen and swimmers. The water was deserted today, but a small craft was visible between the rotted timbers of the castle boat house, an inflatable dinghy, with the blue-striped white fiberglass cowling of a 40 HP Couach outboard tilted up over the gray rubber stern.
"All systems go!" Bolan whispered to the girl hidden in the briar thicket. "Vector in on the boat house, rear entrance."
He lowered himself into the water, which was between three and four feet deep below the bank. Bent forward so that his head and shoulders wouldn't show above the grasses, he began wading slowly toward the boat house.
Over the drumming of rain on the sagging roof he could now hear a sharper crackling noise. He looked over his right shoulder and saw that the crumbling western wing of the castle was obscured by a pall of black smoke. Campos was carrying out his threat to burn down the maze.
Bolan didn't know whether century-old yew hedges would blaze up all that easily in a downpour, even with gasoline as a boost, but the smoke was dense and choking enough: after a very short time without any visible or audible reaction, the wounded capo would realize the birds had already flown. After that, there was only one way he and the remaining killers would come: downhill to the lake.
Okay, so speed was now the number-one priority, surpassing silence, security and concealment. He leaned forward into the lake water and made it to the boat house entrance with a fast crawl.
Dead Man's Tale Page 19
