“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 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 confronting the guys who were to carry it out.

And it was better, for the moment, to remain Kurt Sondermann, arrived on the scene in time to help his new boss.

The girl was beside him again. She held two bottles filled with pinkish fluid and an old newspaper. Bolan sniffed the aromatic odor of gasoline. “I didn’t have to break the necks,” Coralie said. “There was a stack of empties in the store.”

“Good. Did you get the corks?”

She nodded, fishing them out of her jacket pocket and handing them over. Bolan took a bottle, twisted a double sheet of newspaper into a funnel shape, wedged a cork down into the narrowest part and stoppered the bottle so that the paper stood above the neck like a fan. He took a lighter from the neoprene sack.

“What are you doing?” Coralie whispered.

“Wait and see.”

He prepared the second bottle in the same way and handed it to the girl.

Using one hand as a shield against the breeze, Bolan flicked the lighter and set fire to the paper above his bottle. He gave the lighter to Coralie. “Light yours and hand it to me as soon as I’ve tossed mine,” he told her.

Blue flames curled the edge of the paper and then the whole mass flared brightly. Boland drew back his arm and hurled the bottle high into the air, toward the stairway.

The girl lit the paper above the second bottle.

Bolan stood. Firing two-handed, he tracked the flaming missile and ripped off a 3-round burst as it began to drop from the sky.

One of the slugs struck home and the bottle exploded. The burning paper ignited gasoline and vapour with a thumping report, showering the hoods on the stone steps with liquid fire.

Bolan reached for the second bottle, lobbed it in a lower trajectory, over the traverse along the cliff. The 93-R chattered again and the bottle disintegrated, igniting the volatile liquid with a dull roar. Once more the night was torn apart with shrieks of pain and panic while the hell-fire rain splashed over the trapped gorillas.

Two of them spiraled flaming into the sea. A third clasped scorched hands to the blistered ruin of his face and yelped like a wounded dog. The others beat vainly at their clothes and rolled against the rock in an attempt to extinguish the terrible fire.

It was the same scene on the stairway: writhing bodies, incandescent clothes and hair, animal howls. The guys on the cable-car platform were luckier. Only two of the five men there had been licked by the blazing gasoline and a couple of their comrades manhandled them on the wooden floor, trying to smother the flames.

The last man was on his feet shouting, firing an SMG blindly toward the house. Bolan raised the Beretta, squinted along the sights in the flickering light and dropped him with the last three rounds in the magazine. He tumbled over the edge of the platform and bounced all the way down the rocky slope to the jetty.