The guy was in a bad way. The flesh that showed through gaps in his charred clothing was puffed and blistered with third-degree burns.

As Bolan stooped over him the eyes turned his way and the ruined mouth opened. “Finish it, please,” the injured man croaked.

“Who sent you?” Bolan asked.

“Screw you,” the hood whispered.

Bolan was holding the Beretta in his right hand. He started to releather the weapon.

“No!” the gunman said frantically. “Please... all right, damn you, Scotto sent us.”

“Scotto’s dead,” Bolan said roughly.

“Aren’t we all?” The voice was faint now, showing no curiosity. “We got our orders a week ago. Let you have it someplace between... Lyons and the... coast.”

“Why?”

The eyes looked up pleadingly. Bolan waited, his gun hand arrested halfway to the holster.

“He was... afraid,” the burned man gasped. “He... figured you for... J-P’s answer to... splinter group...”

J-P, Bolan knew, stood for Jean-Paul, the Unione Corse’s big wheel in Marseilles, and the man who had hired Sondermann. If he had a family name it was never used. “What splinter group? Where?” Bolan demanded.

The blackened head rolled from side to side. The hood gave a strangled scream. When next he spoke, his voice was so low that Bolan could barely catch the words.

“Meeting...” he choked. “Tomorrow night... at La R-R-Rocaille...”

The words lapsed into an incoherent mumble punctuated by gasps of agony. Bolan was going to get no more from him.

The face contorted. Froth appeared between the cracked lips.

There was a single bullet left in the Beretta. Bolan pointed the muzzle at the center of the dying man’s forehead and triggered a mercy round.

“Maybe I’m the ultimate optimist,” Mack Bolan had once written in his journal. “I believe my sword hand is guided by thoughts of victory. I command myself to win. Therefore, I have the advantage.”

The advantage, yeah. But too often in his everlasting war, the hellfire warrior had to forge that advantage in the flames of overwhelming disadvantage.

Bolan was no superman. He knew the limits of his abilities. And he also knew that at any moment a stray, indeed a well-placed bullet, could finish him in the hellgrounds. The thought made him frustrated and anxious because he sensed a growing possibility of victory by the dark forces of the world.

Bolan believed that the savages, the evil legions of animal man, should not be allowed to inherit the earth. The Executioner considered their defeat his vocation. He was prepared to sacrifice love, a home life, a normal career, everything to fight those legions, and if possible to halt the advance of evil man so that gentle civilizers would no longer live in fear. And every ounce of his soldier’s resolution was dedicated to that cause.

Learning his deadly skills in the jungles of Vietnam, Bolan had subsequently, in the murderous one-man war that virtually destroyed the Mafia, transferred those skills to the urban jungles of his homeland.

Later, there had been the antiterrorist crusade, fought with covert government approval from Stony Man Farm, a fortress headquarters in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. As Colonel John Phoenix, he had in this phase of his life escalated his efforts into open war with the KGB. And it was this sinister arm of Soviet oppression that had stage-managed the demolition of the Stony Man operation and the frame-up that had made Bolan an outlaw.

It was as a loner, therefore, a supreme warrior who knew that each victory only brought him face-to-face with a new threat, that Bolan had been coopted for the present campaign.

So he understood now why Telder, Chamson and their superiors had chosen him. If the deal went sour for Bolan, they would not be responsible and they’d have nothing to worry about. Because he was an outlaw on just about every continent. If something big was planned and Bolan stopped it... well, they’d simply smile and relax, reap the honors. In any case, Telder and Chamson would come out of it with clean hands.

Okay, if that was the way the cards were dealt, he’d play the hand.

His mandate was to uncover the “something big” that was being planned in the Riviera underworld, to find out what black conspiracy was being hatched in the cold minds of the men running that crime empire.

Before he ventured on the inside, where his movements might not be as free as he wished, he determined to follow up the only lead he had: a few strange words choked from the scorched lips of a dying goon.

A meeting was about to take place. And it was, according to the burned hardman’s last words, important, to be held somewhere called La Rocaille.

Bolan was experiencing a gut reaction that it was important for him to be around when that happened.

Once in Marseilles, Bolan wasted no time. He knew precisely who would give him the information he needed.

He entered a noisy bar on the Canebiere. “La Rocaille?” the swarthy man behind the counter repeated. “Sure. It’s the old Delamour joint, on the coast between here and Cassis.”

Bolan took a cab. La Rocaille was an islet, no more than two hundred yards offshore, below jagged cliffs separating the city from the famous little fishing port. There were a couple of acres of undulating ground above the limestone wall surrounding the islet, and here, sheltered by tall hedges and set in a cypress grove, an extraordinary building had been erected.

It was a huge house, built on several different levels, combining gothic turrets with Oriental domes above a fantasy of Moorish arches and windows.

“Who owns it?” Bolan inquired.

“It was built by Deborah Delamour, the silent screen star of the twenties,” the cabbie said. “After her death, the property remained empty until the mid-sixties. It was bought recently and restored by an industrialist named Sanguinetti.”

“Are visitors allowed?” Bolan asked conversationally.

“Are you kidding?” the cab driver replied. “Sanguinetti’s got guard dogs, closed-circuit TV, electrified fences, you name it.” He gestured across the stretch of calm blue water. “In Delamour’s time, there used to be a suspension bridge, but that’s the only way you can get there now.”

He was indicating a small concrete jetty projecting from the base of the cliff on the landward side of the islet. Steps cut from the rock zigzagged to the top of the limestone face, and there was what looked like a cable car rail, with an open car, rising directly from the jetty.

A white power launch was tied next to the steps, with two burly men wearing blue sailors’ jerseys lounging nearby. Another guard stood by a tall wrought-iron gateway at the top of the stairway. “No beaches on the other side of the island?” Bolan asked.

The taxi driver shook his head. “Sheer cliffs all the way around,” he said.

Bolan glanced right and left. The heat had gone from the sun, but there were still vacationers bronzing themselves on the sandy strip below the road. Kids swam in the shallows, and there were half a dozen windsurfers offshore, waiting for a breeze.

Beyond a line of automobiles parked on a low bluff, he could see striped umbrellas and a beach restaurant at the inner end of a pleasure pier. A thicket of sailboat masts clustered around the wooden piles. “They use that pier?” Bolan asked.

“Uh-uh. They got a regular service of those floating bars...” he nodded toward the launch “...bringing them out, sometimes from the city, mostly from Cassis.”

Bolan nodded, as if dismissing the subject but the whole area intrigued him. Boatloads of people were ferried from Cassis to a heavily guarded property owned by an industrialist, and there was to be an important secret meeting... more than ever Bolan determined to smuggle himself onto that islet. “Okay, let’s go to Cassis now,” he told the driver.