Bolan jumped to his feet and sprinted for the steps. Beyond the doorway a small lobby, poorly lit, separated a curving flight of stairs from a corridor. A few yards along, a flimsy door was still swinging. Bolan charged through the door.
In the confined space the second shot, fired from a corner at the far end of the corridor, sounded even louder than the first. The muzzle-flash revealed peeling walls, a boarded-up window, broken floor tiles. Plaster flew from the wall beside Bolan's head as the heavy slug channeled an exit route through layers of stucco. The killer vanished before the Executioner could shoot.
He continued the chase, pounding along another dark passage, down more stairs and then out of the warren of old houses into a piazza where an immense brass ship's anchor lay cemented to a memorial plinth. Hunter and hunted dashed across the Via Dante Alighieri and passed Hell's Kitchen. Through an arch at the far end of the lane, fishing boats were visible on the sand by the jetty. But the gunman turned left and raced along an alley that led to the main highway. He was holding the unwieldy rifle slanted across his chest.
He continued straight over the roadway and through a tunnel that burrowed beneath the railroad embankment. At the top of a twisting grade on the far side there was a parking lot in front of a modern schoolhouse. The 320-series BMW that Bolan had rented in San Remo was there.
So was the killer's car. The Executioner was halfway up the grade when an engine roared to life and a Mercedes sedan rocketed past, tires screeching as it slewed around the corner in front of the tunnel. Bolan jerked open the driver's door of the BMW and slipped behind the wheel.
He had to make a quick decision whether to chase the hit man or head straight for Massimo Rinaldi's property. He opted for the former because the Executioner preferred action to the waiting game; and partly because he hoped to catch up with the killer, force him off the road and choke out of him some of the details Gandolfi had been about to reveal.
By the time Bolan wrenched the BMW out of the tunnel and into the main drag, the taillights of the Mercedes were disappearing around a curve four hundred yards away where the road followed the shore again at the far end of town. He floored the pedal and the German car howled in pursuit.
Laigueglia was a desert. It was the dead end of the season: most of the hotels were closed; green shutters blinded the severe rectangular facades of the waterfront houses. A scooter, ridden by a youth dressed like a speedway ace, and a small Fiat backing up out of a cul-de-sac were the only vehicles in sight. Bolan swerved around them both, trying to close the distance between himself and the fleeing Mercedes.
The Mercedes streaked up a long grade that led around a headland, past dormitory developments that sprawled over the hillside on the outskirts. The contorted strata of a cliff face showed up as the killer switched on his headlamps. Rounding the point after him, Bolan saw the lights of Laigueglia slide sideways in his driving mirror and then vanish. The two cars roared westward along the coast road.
Andora was a featureless downhill straight lined by apartment blocks bordering a marina. Traffic lights flashed green and amber at the far end of the street. The Mercedes raced through, leaving Bolan still two hundred yards short of the intersection when the signal changed from amber to red.
He gritted his teeth, shifted down, kept his foot on the gas. Horns blared, brakes squealed, angry shouts whipped away behind him as he shot between two cars, narrowly missed a bus and briefly clipped the curb. Gunning the engine, he heard the shrill of a police whistle fade.
Some miles before Diano Marina, the coast road swooped and twisted below high cliffs towering over the ocean. Traffic was heavier here. The lights of cars and trucks, strung out along the dark, curving littoral, disappeared, swung back into view, vanished again and then reappeared with dazzling brilliance around a shoulder of the mountain.
Yard by yard, making the most of the BMW's superior cornering power, Bolan was gaining on the Mercedes. He could hear the big car's tires screeching in protest on every bend. The hum of his own exhaust ricocheted off the rock face to his right.
He had closed up to within eighty or ninety yards when the killer pulled out to pass a slow-moving pickup. Through the sedan's wide rear window, Bolan could see the driver silhouetted against the glare of oncoming headlights. He was steering with one hand, holding a portable microphone in the other.
Bolan assumed he was calling up reinforcements. The Executioner began to keep a wary eye open for rockfalls, hidden marksmen, any kind of ambush. At the same time he glanced continually at the rearview mirror, on the lookout for vehicles coming up fast from behind.
There was a temporary lull in the traffic and Bolan saw a sign flash by, indicating that he was approaching a double S-bend at the head of a creek indenting the coastline.
The Executioner hurled the BMW around the first curve at close to seventy mph. The brake lights of the Mercedes blazed as it slowed for the second.
Suddenly a huge dump truck nosed out from behind a rock outcrop to block the roadway.
There was only one thing for Bolan to do. Straight ahead, no brakes in the world would save him from a collision that would certainly be fatal. On the right, the cliff face ran close to the truck. His one chance was to try and squeeze the BMW through between the truck's front fender and a low parapet bordering the road where it circled the steep slope at the head of the creek.
Holding the gas pedal to the floor, he flicked the wheel to the left.
The truck was still moving. To avoid it, Bolan was forced to run the BMW's offside wheels over rough ground between the roadway and the parapet.
A cloud of dust mushroomed into the air. Stones rattled against the bodywork; the engine screamed as spinning tires scrabbled in the loose surface. There was a jarring crash when the oil pan scraped solid rock. Then he was through and lurching back onto the macadam.
It was there that the ambushers played their trump. A second vehicle — a jeep hidden from view by the dump truck — accelerated obliquely across the road and nudged the fender of Bolan's rental with the iron bar protecting its own front wheels.
The BMW was barely under the Executioner's control.
The impact jerked the wheel from his hands. A front tire blew. The car slammed against the parapet, reared up into the air and then cartwheeled over the edge and plunged toward the sea.
The slope was almost vertical, steep and stony, with clumps of furze and brushwood among the rock outcrops. The car smashed onto its side halfway down, rolled over twice, bounced off a granite boss and dropped the final fifty feet upside down to hit the surface of the water with a noise like a grenade exploding.
It sank at once.
Before it hit the slope, Bolan had enough time to unsnap his safety belt, thrust himself away from the steering column and hunch down beneath the dashboard on the passenger side.
He was aware of space and darkness and the rush of air before the final impact… then blackness, a pounding behind his eyes and the cold, dead clutch of the ocean.
The car undulated down through forty feet of saltwater and settled on sand.
Chapter Six
Jason Mettner II folded his lean frame into an armchair by the window of his room on the second floor of Laigueglia's Albergo Splendido. He lit a cigarette. It was dark outside; the drizzle had been blown away by an offshore breeze, but the roofs of the old houses across the tiny piazza still shone with moisture in the misty lamplight.
Mettner picked up a tape recorder no bigger than a pack of Chesterfields and thumbed the button that set the miniature spools turning.
The message would be flown by courier the following morning. Personal to Allard Fielding, Mettner's editor in Chicago.
"I'm making this a verbal memo, Al," Mettner said, "because you know how many eyes scan a cable or a telex before it makes your desk, and I want to keep this strictly between the two of us.
"I'm holed up in this dinky fishing village in a hotel room not much bigger than a telephone booth, and I'm wondering what the hell I'
m doing here — not because there's no story but because there are too damned many! You sent me here to do research for a feature on the increase of terrorism in Europe, remember? So I'm checking out this Udine train wreck when an American industrialist's daughter gets snatched. Nobody knows who by. No ransom note received by distraught daddy. But — wait for this! — the girl was supposed to have been with a group of students written off in the sabotaged train. Yeah. You're dead right. There has to be a connection."
Mettner tipped ash from his cigarette into the saucer beneath an empty coffee cup, swallowed a slug of bourbon from a leather-covered hip flask and replaced the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He continued his report.
"Meanwhile, at my hotel in Udine, I find this Mack Bolan character. He wasn't registered under his own name, but I figured it out. You'll have a file on him in the morgue, but to save time and trouble I'll give you the rundown I got from the Paris bureau. It seems he was a Nam vet, a guy whose skill as a sniper and penetration specialist won him the title of the Executioner. And it seems he was known at the same time as Sergeant Mercy on account of his compassion for Viet civilians.
"According to the cuttings, it was compassion of a different kind that brought him back stateside. He received emergency leave to bury three members of his family in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Stories vary on the details. The most likely has old man Bolan in debt to Mafia loan sharks, kid sister hustling to raise the dough to pay them off and then Dad finding out and liquidating the girl, his wife and finally himself in a fit of rage and grief and humiliation. There was a kid brother, too, but he seems to have only been wounded.
"What's for sure is that the tragedy was the springboard for Mack Bolan's one-man war against the Mob."
As he spoke, smoke from the wagging cigarette at the corner of Mettner's mouth spiraled up into his eye. He picked the butt off his lower lip and dropped it into the coffee dregs. With a grimace of distaste, he gulped another mouthful of bourbon, lit another cigarette and resumed his message.
"With most of the Mafia families wiped out, Bolan was supposed to have croaked in an auto fire. But one of the Post's investigative specials a couple of years back turned up a cosmetic surgeon who claimed to have given a guy answering Bolan's description a new face. The piece asked us to believe that the face was owned by a certain Colonel John Phoenix, U.S. Army, Retired. The good colonel was said to have masterminded a worldwide antiterrorist campaign with tacit White House approval. But there was some kind of frame, supposedly organized by the KGB, which had taken some hard knocks during the operation. And suddenly, no colonel! Equally suddenly — surprise, surprise! — back onstage trots Mack Bolan. Except now, he's an outlaw. No more White House sanction. But still, apparently, on the warpath. You see, the woman in his life was killed by an attack on Bolan's command center somewhere in Virginia.
"Let me tell you, Al, this is one colorful character. He's big, around six-three, and muscle all the way. Big, too, by way of personality. He has these eyes that dare you to lie — and scorch through you when you're telling the truth, to find out why! He's a husky dude, attractive as hell, I'd think, in a macho way. Yet there's no lady in his life, although it's been some time since he lost his woman."
The newspaperman fished a small notebook out of his pocket, rested it on his knee and riffled through the pages.
"I'd like to read you a few lines," he said, "from a profile published a year ago in a London adventure weekly. Quote. Bolan believes that the savages, the evil legions of animal man, should not be allowed to inherit the earth; he considers their defeat his vocation; he is prepared to sacrifice love, a home life, a normal career, to fight those legions. He wants to halt their advance so that the gentle civilizers will no longer live in fear.
"Learning his deadly skills in the jungles of Vietnam, this modern crusader, who knows that each victory only brings him closer to the next threat, has transferred those skills to the urban jungles of the West in a cause to which he consecrates every ounce of his soldier's resolution. Unquote."
Mettner crushed out his second cigarette, closed the notebook, tossed it onto the bed and tipped the flask to his lips once more.
"Okay, so I've got Bolan, I've got the girl, and I've got the terrorists. You figure those for three separate stories? No way. Something tells me these three leads are all part of one big story.
"Now, don't blow your top, Al, but I'm asking you to let me stick with this Bolan dude. Because that's where I figure the action will be. It may take me some time, and you'll miss out on that terrorist piece, but believe me, if it comes off you're going to have a frontpage lead with a six-column heading that'll knock every other daily off the newsstands."
Mettner grinned. His battles with Fielding over where to go and what to write were legendary around the world's press clubs. He lit a third cigarette and blew a long plume of smoke at the ceiling.
"That's why I'm here," he said. "I followed Bolan from Turin, where he saw the missing girl's father. And he's not here a half hour before some two-bit crook from San Remo gets his head blown off in a waterfront cafe! Add to that the fact that Bolan's wanted by the Italian police for questioning in connection with three other killings. And then guess who the victims were. That's right. Terrorists. Members of the gang who sabotaged the train. You see what I mean?
"No kidding, Al, it's all happening. Because some maniac with a hunting gun shoots up the display window of a sporting goods store. And a few minutes later I'm backing my rented Fiat up along the main drag and what should I see but a Merc sedan hotfooting it out of town driven by some guy with a rifle leaning against the passenger seat. Seconds later I'm rocked on my springs by a BMW going like a bat out of hell.
"A goddamn chase. And guess who's behind the wheel of the BMW? Right, again. M. Bolan, Esquire.
"So listen, Al, whatever you say, I'm hanging in here until I get the lowdown on what goes on. I have to find out what's with this guy, okay?"
Mettner lifted the flask, shook it, scowled and lobbed it empty into the wastebasket. His cigarette had gone out. He picked up a box of matches. That was empty, too. He swore. "I'll be in touch," he growled into the recorder.
Chapter Seven
Panic was not a word that Mack Bolan cared to accept in his personal vocabulary. If he had permitted himself to panic, he would have drowned in the sunken BMW within two minutes, wasting his energy and exhausting the oxygen that remained in his bloodstream by battering vainly at the inverted wreck.
But he knew there must be a pocket of air trapped — as he was himself trapped — inside the car. He knew, too, that the imprisonment of the air was only temporary; the pressure of the water was forcing it to escape; he could hear it, hissing past the instrument panel, bubbling out the holes where the pedals projected into the cockpit.
Unless he could use that air while it lasted, his own imprisonment would be final.
A fleeting, ironic thought crossed Bolan's mind. He had survived Nam, and all the hell miles in his War Everlasting, only to die, trapped in a submerged car beneath the Mediterranean. No way was he going to go out like that. He had to replenish his lungs and make his escape before the cockpit was totally flooded. He'd try the doors. They were designed to open, after all, he should be able to inch one open wide enough to let his body through.
He dragged himself out from under the dash and pushed himself to the surface of the water inside the car. With the top of his head against the floor, it was lapping against his chin.
He took a deep breath and submerged. Then he stretched his frame fully across the width of the car and pulled on the door latch. With his feet fully braced against the other door; he found that his knees were still flexed because he was taller than the space across the inside of the car. He started pushing, his temples throbbing, the blood thundering in his chest. But the crumpled steel would not budge.
He came up for another gulp of air, and found that the water level had risen so much there was very little space between the surface and
the seat. Besides, the center console and gear lever pushing into his midriff made the whole exercise even more difficult.
He was running out of oxygen. Calling on all reserves of strength, Bolan tried it again.
Movement, and he pushed even harder, determined not to lose it all in what he considered would be an ignominious death. When he died, he wanted to be standing upright, facing the enemy.
Finally he had the aperture large enough to squeeze through.
With the last reserves of his energy, Bolan pushed himself under and out, still shoving upward with both hands.
A huge bubble of air, released from the suddenly opened door, burst out and sucked him with it. Lungs now bursting, too, he shot to the surface.
The dark wind was chill on his face. He lay on the sea, gratefully breathing in the cold.
Around the creek, he saw stationary headlights. A few flashlight beams probed the slope, moving down toward the water. There could be guns in their owners' free hands.
Bolan floated until his racing pulse had quieted. Then he dived beneath the surface and swam underwater with long, powerful strokes toward a jetty on the far side of the creek where a dozen pleasure boats were tied up, bobbing gently on the somber swell.
The water was warm in the shallows. He rested his arms on a weed-slimed wooden crosspiece beneath the planking of the deck. It was immediately clear to him what he must do now.
Salvage crews would be unable to locate the wreck of the BMW before daylight. By the time it had been winched up out of the water, it would probably be midday.
According to his waterproof digital it was not yet eight o'clock. That meant he had sixteen hours or more before anyone knew there was no drowned body trapped in the sunken vehicle. And even then nobody could be certain that he was not dead: submarine currents could sweep corpses out to sea; the drowned sank for some days before they surfaced.
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