Free Sunscream by Don Pendleton Page A

cover would be blown for good. He tried to change the subject.
    “Do you know Jean-Paul well?” he asked.
    “Since I was in diapers.”
    “I work for him, but I don’t really know him yet. What is he like?”
    “He’s nice,” Coralie said defensively. Bolan remembered the way the gang leader had taken her arm the night before. “He’s got a better brain than most of the others. He’s generous. And he’s a caring man.”
    “But he hires a guy like me to come down all the way from Hamburg. For what?”
    “Oh,” she said with a pout, tossing back her hair. She drained her glass and set it carefully on the wrought-iron table. “When I first saw you in that gallery, before I knew who you were, I thought you might be... Oh, well. I guess one can misjudge people.”
    Bolan suddenly realized the truth behind her mood swings. He was not a vain man, but he was objectively aware that he was attractive to many women. Coralie Sanguinetti was trying — and failing so far — to relate a natural liking for him to her own instinctive distrust of anyone in Sondermann’s line of business.
    He felt sorry for the girl — sorrier still because she was also fighting another, harder, battle: loyalty to her father on one side, loathing for his associates on the other — but there was nothing he could do to help her. “Have another drink?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “Thank you. I have a class at two o’clock.”
    Bolan watched her get up from the table. Many other eyes followed her as she walked to her car parked by the curb. A white Porsche 928 — what else?
    The Executioner frowned. He had a gut feeling that, given the right approach and the right conditions, he could make her into an ally. But right now he’d have to play it by ear. The one thing he knew was that any help she might offer in the future would not be to Kurt Sondermann...
    For the moment, however, it was better that he reinforced that alter ego in her eyes. Back in character, he called out as she unlocked the door of the Porsche, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”
    Coralie looked across the terrace at him as she slid behind the wheel. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do?” she retorted.

9
    The raid on the hideout used by gangsters from the Balestre mob was planned and carried out like a military operation, although there were no more than sixteen men involved. They were divided into two teams of three and a ten-man main force.
    Jean-Paul had insisted that the attack be restricted to soldiers from his own Marseilles family. Ancarani, the Unione Corse boss from Ajaccio, had offered a large contingent from his own gang, but Jean-Paul had refused. Blood ties, cross-relationships and loyalties were so intermixed on the island, he pointed out, that the risk of a leak, warning Balestre’s people, would be high if Corsicans were included. Ancarani was angry, but he had to admit it was true.
    Another reason — unstated, but one that Mack Bolan privately shared — was the fact that Jean-Paul was not one hundred percent certain of Ancarani’s reliability. Not because he was in sympathy with the Balestre mob, but because he seemed the least impressed of any of the capos by the idea of the KGB tie-up. And a refusal to go along with this had, after all, provoked the death of Balestre himself.
    The assault was timed for midnight. Smiler and his two shadows had arrived at Bastia by air from Marseilles earlier in the evening. They were to make their way to the rendezvous in a rented car.
    Jean-Paul, Bolan and a seven-foot ex-wrestler named Delacroix were making the trip by air, too... as jumpers, thanks to a bribed helicopter pilot who was supposed to be night-testing a new chopper slated for the Nice-Monaco shuttle. The others were coming by sea.
    Corsica, lying eighty miles south of the Gulf of Genoa, is shaped like a fist, with the index finger pointing north at the mainland. The index, protected by five-hundred-foot cliffs, is the twenty-two-mile