Free Sicilian Slaughter by Don Pendleton, Jim Peterson Page A

a moment, then got to her feet, held onto the back of her chair, and asked her guide, please, for a glass of water, she felt so faint. She awoke with a crushing sick headache, and cottony mouth turned wrong-side out. She lay sick, thirsty, hungry, cold, and terrified for what seemed days, until an incredibly cruel little man, hardly five feet tall, came for her. She had not believed such pain as the little man could inflict truly existed. She had been brought up on the myth that God provided His children with an automatic cutout device, so that when pain became unendurable, you became unconscious. Once she learned this an absolute falsehood, her training began … and now here she was, hoping
Signor
Mezzano would be good to her because she had graduated with honors and could make the
signor
very, very happy. No, she had never seen her sister again, since that night in Paris, why?
    Mezzano giggled and buried his face between the vast pillowy milk-white bosoms, and he suddenly felt Hilde's entire body grow tense, then stiff as a corpse.
    Mezzano raised up. "Hey, that's no way to be nice."
    He saw her face. The total terror in her unblinking green eyes. Mezzano whirled around and looked up at the man in black. The man in black thrust out his hand, and Mezzano automatically accepted the preferred object. He stared at it. What the hell? It had the shape of a Formee Cross. A bar across the bottom read marksman.
    Recognition came in an instant to Mezzano and he lunged back, trying to squirm beneath the girl, and death forever darkened the light. He heard a faint
phutt
and felt a millisecond of pain, then nothing.
    By the time he left Mezzano's establishment, The Executioner left a total of ten deads.
    Before midnight Bolan hit another union boss and his underbosses, leaving six dead in a central-city private dining room, and leaving the Neapolitan teamsters leaderless. He struck the waterfront numbers bank, doubled back, destroyed all the betting slips and set fire to the
lira.
He destroyed every last vehicle of a car rental agency which had been taken over by Mafia through extortion and terror. On the outskirts of the city he blew up a Mafia-owned bank which the feds had learned did most of the financing of international smuggling operations between Italy and the U.S.
    At midnight, The Executioner made a telephone call: "Get your women out of the house."
    In panic, the Naples
Capo di tutti Capi,
Boss of Bosses, fled with his women and most of his retinue, and Bolan virtually destroyed the Frode estate with his most recent acquisition, an M79 grenade launcher. Much lighter and more portable than a bazooka, it also had the advantage of not gushing out a huge black-blast of flame and dust when fired. True, it did not have the knock-down penetration power of a rocket launcher, but with practice, and The Executioner had gotten plenty in Nam, he could put one frag after another through doors and windows from maximum range.
    Shortly after eight o'clock the following morning, two events occurred almost simultaneously. First, a non-union truck driver/owner who had barely managed to feed his large family for the past six years, carried a lighted lamp into a closet, pulled the door shut and locked it, and then counted the money again, just to be sure. It had not been a dream. The peculiar big man with the eyes that ran shivers up Fretta's back really had bought Fretta's ancient truck, for cash, in U.S. dollars, and paid more than a new Italian model would cost. He
knew
dealing with that customs man would pay off some day, and it had!
    At the same time, on a dusty road a hundred miles down the peninsula, in Calabria not far south of Castrovallari, a big man in worn clothing, face grimy, cap pulled low over his ice-blue eyes, drove an old rattling truck with a crate lashed down behind the cab. The Executioner took a bite of the moldy cheese he'd bought just after dawn from a farmer's wife on the road. He washed the cheese down with some