As the ferry swung around, stern toward dock, Bolan moved toward the bow. He let his narrowed gaze rove over the crowd, picking out the mafiosi and the gunsels he'd spotted earlier in the day. He spotted the gunsels as easily as before. A gun gave some types of guys a lot of balls. He felt his hackles bristle again. Where was Rana, the frog-faced dude? He'd been obviously in charge of the dockcrew, all during the day while Bolan watched from the hayloft room. Now he was gone.

Then Bolan saw them.

Alma had a huge jawbust lump on the left side of her face, and a glob of red showed on the top of her bonnet. On her left stood a gangly spiderlike man with his hand in his right pocket, bulging. On her right stood Astio, and Bolan saw his lips moving.

Alma shook her head.

As though there were no one, much less the more than a hundred people on the dock, disembarking and waiting to board the ferry, Astio turned and almost casually drove his right fist into Alma's face and broke her nose. Blood sprayed, and Bolan saw her buckle at the knees under the force of the deliberately smashing punch. Then she shook her head, raised her chin, and spat a mouthful of blood into Astio's face.

Somehow, someway, Mack Bolan vowed to himself, he would make it up to that girl. He would find a way, by God. Alma, it meant soul; and she had it, from the core out.

First, though, he had to save her life. Astio would never stand for that spitting in his face.

Almost reluctantly, Mack pulled the Beretta, checked that the silencer was screwed firmly in place, rested his elbows on an engine-room blower stack, sighted, and shot Astio Traditore through the head. He swung a fraction to his right and shot Spider between the eyes.

Immediately, the wheelman leaped from the car, gun drawn, staring around. He moved around the front of the car and Bolan shot him through the throat.

Without discipline, eager only for heroics and a big payday, the gunsels came to Astio's "rescue." Then stood in a muttering gang, looking about, seeking a target.

The people of Reggio paid them no attention. Since time began, the old stories and even the Bible itself told of such happenings in the streets of Reggio, Rome, Bethlehem, along the ancient Appian Way.

There were people in the crowd who would have traded places with the deads, despite their abject suffering poverty.

The priests had warned them that pain and torture and suffering beyond imagination awaited those who suicided themselves. So the people of Reggio plodded onwards, unseeing. That men had achieved a walk on the moon meant absolutely nothing to them. Most of them did not know. Of those who knew, nearly all did not believe. Blood running in the streets was Reggio. Was Calabria. Italy. They walked on past, looking neither right or left, minds purposely blank.

The dockworkers, too, accustomed to oppression by Mafia labor bosses, knowing the less seen and heard the better, simply went about their work as though three dead men and the gunwaving gunsels did not exist. Mack watched, and saw the bustarella, the little bribe, tip, had worked. Bolan's crated warchest was first aboard.

Then it was tune to break it up and let Alma out. The cheap gunsels had started some big behavior. In a ludicrous imitation of the real merchandise, one gunsel twisted up a handful of Alma's hair and jerked her head back so the cords in her neck stood out like cables and her outsized bosom seemed ready to burst through her dress.

Bolan saw the longshoremen return to dockside after loading his crate. He holstered the Beretta and drew the .44 Automag. He shot the gunsel holding Alma. The big, high-impact slug went in just under the gunsel's chin, hit with crushingly expanding force, and tore the man's head from his body. It rolled down the slight incline toward the dock, and became lost among the shuffling feet of the people who refused to look, refused to acknowledge they walked between the front lines of a war between two opposing forces.

Bolan fired again, twice more, shooting lower now, taking the guts out of the cheap thugs who'd come ganging around Alma. He wanted them to have a look at what it was all about, this hiring out cheap, packing heat, strutting before the girls, bragging it up. Bolan wanted their brothers and sisters and all their relatives to see what it cost. Working a dirt farm in Calabria wasn't much of a life, and grubbing for coins along the waterfront little better; but they did not get you dead like mixing with "that thing of theirs" did. It didn't get your bloody yellow guts slopped out on the quay with a hole the size of a football in your back where the .44 Magnum emerged, spraying bone splinters, sticky wet red, slimy yellow.

Bolan got them all, a cleansweep. A Reggio Repulisti!

In Messina, in Catania, and for damned sure in Agrigento the "membership" awaited him, Bolan knew. But right now he was on the way ... to the Mafia's homeground, its birthplace. Sicily. Because he went into the wheelhouse and told the captain, "Get underway."

The captain shouted just three words, slowly, so there would be no misunderstanding. "Cut all lines."

He looked at Bolan, and The Executioner nodded. With the "Med moor" all the captain had to do was call the engine room and order, "All ahead flank."

It was like putting a car in passing gear. Going past full-speed-ahead, asking for maximum revs the engines could make.

Mack picked up the captain's binoculars and looked back at dockside. He saw brave Alma standing among the littered deads, waving. Bolan owed that girl plenty, and somehow he would see she got paid. He knew that by now if the "members" or the gunsels had not looted her milkcan, the street punks of Reggio had. He vowed to square it with her.

In the meantime, thanks to his ragazza, his girl Alma, he'd made a cleansweep: Reggio Repulisti!

13

Crossing & beachhead

No more than fifty passengers had managed to board the ferry before Bolan ordered the lines cut and all-ahead flank. There was one policeman aboard, an "airplane" as the carabinieri were called because of their hats, which looked like slick shellacked sailplanes about ready to lift into flight on the outspread wings. Bolan had determined that the captain of the ferry spoke passable English, the kind of English many fishermen working boats out of San Francisco, California spoke.

That was to say, he understood every word, and the inflection Bolan placed upon every word; but he did not speak good English because he was ashamed of his accent.

At Bolan's command, the captain called the airplane to the wheel house. When the carabinieri stepped into the cramped quarters, still quite neat and stylish despite his ordeal, Bolan put the cold wet muzzle of the .44 Automag in the airplane's ear. The man stiffened and raised his hands high above his head, and Bolan disarmed him of his submachine gun and belt pistol.

Bolan asked the captain. "You have a raft?"

"Certainly."

"Are these waters dangerous this time of year."

"Not at all."

"Have a man break out a raft. Supply it well with water and some food. Drop it over the side on a tow line. Put this airplane into the raft safely, then proceed."

Bolan smiled nonchalantly. "I'll kill the first man moves wrong. You first, Captain."

"Not worry!"

Three minutes later a furious, disarmed carabinieri wearing nothing but his underwear and his hat floated alone in the darkness of the Strait of Messina. In an enraged fury of anger, the policeman ripped off his hat and threw it with all his strength. To his amazement, the hat flew like a goddam airplane! All his career he'd resented the whispered defamatory term, "airplane," and now in the moon and starlight he found it true.