It was even more vital now that he quit the shelter of the last row of pumps and find cover in the bushes.

Suddenly the wind started to blow again. It was a typical mistral — one minute still as death, the next, rushing at full bore, flattening the grasses. Bolan took advantage of the abrupt change.

This time he fired no warnings to keep the opposition heads down. He was on his feet and running, dodging, racing for the safety of that bank as a fusillade roared out behind him, ripping apart the night with their hellfire din.

Slugs scuffed the macadam to left and right and punctured pumps in the final row. At the last moment, a bullet took away the heel of Bolan’s shoe, to send him hurtling forward on hands and knees.

The fall saved his life: a murderous volley fanned the air above him as he fell, the deathstream savaging the space he’d occupied a moment before. He remained prone on the hard ground, bellying rapidly toward the bushes.

He was in the shrubbery now, branches and leaves threshing angrily above him, breathless in the shadows beneath the howling wind.

With blinding brilliance the headlights swamped the neon beneath the canopy. A voice from behind the car shouted instructions. There was a brief reply from farther along the bank. The gunman approaching from the access strip was now as vulnerable to Bolan’s fire as the soldier was to the sedan. The hardman would be worming his way toward the Executioner at ground level.

The Beretta 93-R was Bolan’s favorite shoulder-rig weapon. It was also, Telder had told him, the gun usually carried by Kurt Sondermann. To keep in character, Bolan was therefore armed with the pistol recovered from the German’s dead body.

The German hit man’s Beretta sported the front handgrip that folded beneath the barrel and could be used to steady the gun and minimize the rise in accurate firing. Now that he had a little more time to think, Bolan figured he could use it. Something he had seen glinting on the station forefront in the lights of the sedan had given him an idea.