Sunscream by Don Pendleton Page A

“the dude wasted those punks holed up above the jetty, after all.”
    “I don’t care how many creeps he wasted. I’m still the number-one gun in this neighborhood.” He strode after Bolan and tapped him on the shoulder. “You hear me?”
    Bolan whirled and seized the front of the hood’s sweater in one steely hand, half lifting the hardman off his feet. “No,
you
hear
me,
loudmouth,” he growled. “I work alone and I don’t aim to take nobody’s place. Jean-Paul hired me personally, so I don’t reckon to be bugged by no smartass provincial gorilla, understand?”
    He thrust Smiler away with force enough to make him stumble.
    Choking with fury, the hood moved his hand involuntarily toward his SMG, but Bolan had already hurried down to join a couple of guards lying behind the rampart of flat stones bordering the sunken garden.
    Badmouthing J-P’s number-one enforcer in front of his soldiers would have made Sondermann an enemy, for sure. Good, the Executioner thought. As yet he had no clear plan how he would approach the Mafia-KGB threat. But the more discord he could sow around here the better. If he was unable to conceal his dislike and contempt for carrion like Smiler it could at least provoke some kind of future action. And Bolan was a firm believer in mixing it and waiting to see what happened.
    Right now it seemed that the battle for the island was damned near through. Most of the raiding party climbing up from the inlet had already been blown away by guards posted behind the house.
    At least he need worry no longer about the body floating in the pool and the guy he had killed on the terrace: the attackers would be blamed for those.
    He crouched near one of the guards sheltering behind the stones. The remainder of the invading force seemed to be holed up behind the summerhouse where he had first talked to Coralie Sanguinetti.
    “How many d’you reckon?” he asked the man.
    “Three or four,” the hood replied. “Maybe a couple more inside the shack. Some of the boys are making it through the plantation...” he nodded toward a clump of trees on the seaward end of the isle “...and take ’em from the rear.”
    “We don’t have to wait,” Bolan said. He noticed a grenade hooked to the man’s belt. “Mind if I borrow this?”
    “Go ahead,” the hood said. “But you’ll never make it, guy. That cabin’s more’n a hundred yards away. You can’t throw that far on target.”
    “I don’t figure on trying,” Bolan said. “Give me covering fire, okay?”
    He rose, holding the grenade in his right hand. Then, as the guard and his companions opened fire with a motley collection of shotguns and carbines, he dashed, bent double, through flower beds and rows of dwarf azaleas to dive headfirst into the pool.
    He swam underwater to the far end, surfaced and pulled the pin from the grenade.
    The gunners behind the summerhouse, who had opened up as soon as he began his run, were raking the patio with automatic fire.
    Bolan braved the death hail and climbed the ladder. He flung the grenade with all his force over the shingled roof of the building, judging the throw accurately so that the deadly missile dropped among the raiders taking cover behind it.
    The bomb exploded with a shattering roar, a vivid flash that momentarily lit the flowers and shrubs with an unnatural glare. There were no more gunshots.
    The instant’s silence that followed was broken by a man screaming. At the same time a heap of dead brushwood and garden refuse ignited by the explosion burst into flame behind the hut. Within seconds the flimsy wooden back wall was ablaze.
    Flames shot skyward, fanned by the breeze. The rafters caught. Tiles fell and then the whole roof collapsed.
    Two men ran out from the miniholocaust and were shot down at once by the guards. In the gory shambles behind the burning shack, one body still writhed.
    “Bring him inside — and keep him alive until he’s talked,” Jean-Paul called from the