He waded out toward the center of the flow.
Froth forming around his hips was visible. Or maybe some small unexpected noise, some subtle change in the myriad level of sound tipped the ambusher off.
Hellfire ripped out from the rocky bank.
A deadly hail splatted into the water as Bolan lifted his feet and thrust himself farther downstream.
But his gun hand was well above the surface... and this time there were muzzle-flashes to aim at.
Before the long burst of automatic fire was exhausted he touched down on the riverbed, steadied himself against the tug of the water and loosed off three triple bursts.
Livid flame flickered in turn from the Beretta, momentarily printing the image of the cavern against the dark as the rock walls hurled back the reports in shattering confusion, explosion drowning echo until the reverberations faded into the distance.
The 9 mm death bringers found their mark. Bolan heard a strangled cry followed by a loud splash. A moment later the stream swept something heavy and inert against his legs and then carried it away.
He moved cautiously to the far bank.
The killer might not have been alone.
He wasn't.
Bolan heard a voice raised in query.
He could even distinguish a slither of feet over the sounds of the river. A faint glimmer of a flashlight, a hand-held model, far less powerful than the one Bolan had destroyed, wavered someplace above the rock shelf, where the marksman had been located. The question was repeated.
Either the backup man must have been deafened by the sounds of the river, or he hadn't realized how far the engagement had gone. There were four rounds left in the Beretta's magazine.
Bolan set two of them free.
The 93-R bucked in his hand, choking out its lethal message. The walls of the cavern repeated it. The torchlight beam described an arc over the edge of the shelf and plummeted down toward the water, carrying its owner with it.
For an instant the illumination reappeared beneath the hurrying flow.
Then, lit from beneath, the surface froth turned pink, darkened to scarlet, clouded over and finally raced away into the blackness.
There was no more movement from the ledge above the water.
Bolan pulled himself out from the river, retrieved his own heavy flashlight and climbed to the ledge.
Empty cans of Icelandic beer, cigarette butts and husks of cheese, bread and fruit showed that the would-be murderers had been there some time. But the eye-opener for the Executioner was the surface of the shelf itself.
The spent shells glistening in the beam of his flashlight lay scattered on a level concrete platform that led back to an alcove hollowed from the cavern wall in which were stowed cartons of food and drink, an inflatable rubber raft and a sophisticated radio transceiver that sat on a wooden bench.
The killers had been lying in wait for him all right. But this was no hasty ambush set up following a report from the airplane that had overflown the ULM while Bolan was preparing his descent into the sinkhole.
What he was looking at was a lookout post that had clearly been in existence for some time.
Bolan switched off the light and sat down in the dark. The questions clamoring for an answer could be put off no longer.
Were these cavern killers, the guys piloting the unidentified airplane and the hardmen making the four previous attempts on his life part of the same team, working out of the same base?
It would be crazy to think otherwise.
Was there something, anything at all that he had noticed that could be a clue to their identity?
Negative.
Clearly, knowing Bolan's reputation and seeing him arrive in Iceland, they had mistakenly assumed he was on the track of some evil project that they were planning. Was there any indication what this could be?
Uh-uh.
Were the lethal methods of "dissuasion" they practiced angled specifically at Mack Bolan, or would they be contingency plans designed to stop anyone wising themselves up on the project?
Until now Bolan had assumed they were specific, but the ambush proved otherwise.
He was sitting in what was obviously a permanent lookout post; materials to fashion a concrete platform and install a two-way radio could hardly have been conveyed to a location deep inside the biggest glacier in Europe in a matter of hours or even days. The place had to have been in existence before he even knew himself that he would be boating past it.
The gunmen had been stationed there to block any caver or canoeist who figured he might like to make it along the underground headwaters of the Jokulsa a Fjollum.
Another thought occurred to Bolan the river must somehow during its course hold the secret these guys were so anxious to keep under wraps.
So what the hell could be so special about a river that rose in an inaccessible subterranean cave and then ran more than one hundred miles through some of the world's coldest, bleakest country?
He had to find out. Because one thing was now crystal clear.
Whatever he may have thought after the earlier attacks, the Executioner's own standpoint was now radically changed.
He decided to carry on with his planned itinerary; there was nothing else he could do. But the aim of the operation would be different. As of now.
To hell with the R and R. This was no longer a vacation trip. No way. The kayak voyage was now a fact-finding mission. Yeah, the unknowns had tried Mack Bolan's patience too far.
He would find out what was brewing along the course of the damned river and put a stop to it.
Or die in the attempt.
Bolan smiled grimly. It seemed he was back on a search-and-destroy kick after all. Despite all those innocent holiday plans. Just the way his unknown enemies had figured he was since the takeoff. They had talked him into it!
He rose and stretched. Suddenly aware that blood still dripped from his ear, he realized that he had completely forgotten that first shot, the very near-miss that had almost ended the Bolan legend.
Adrenaline was the answer. The stuff had been raging through his veins faster than the river ran, fast enough to momentarily make him forget that murderous initial attack until the threat had been mastered by the violence it unleashed.
Yet it was no more than an abrupt swirl in the stream, or maybe an unexpected roll of the kayak's hull, that had saved the warrior's life a deflection of one single inch in the wrong direction and the killer slug would have severed the carotid artery, wasting his lifeblood in less than two minutes. It would have been Bolan's body then that was washed anonymously away to rot in some backwash creek below the ice-cap mountain. A chilling thought.
He eased off the helmet with its dangling strap.
The wound was no more than a scratch, a raw furrow at the tip of the lobe.
He found a thin spray of icy water cascading from a cleft in the rock and bathed the wound alternately with this and the warm water from the river until the bleeding stopped.
Some you win... to Bolan said to himself. He smiled again. And froze.
Gutturally, from someplace behind, a deep voice had boomed in reply. And amid a stream of words incomprehensible among the hollow echoes of the cavern, he had caught the three syllables of his own name.
Mack Bolan.
It was a moment before he caught on; the voice came from the speaker of the radio stashed in the rock alcove.
Base called the lookouts to check whether or not the Executioner had showed. Not so strange.
What did jolt Bolan was the fact that the voice was speaking in Russian.
6
Bolan whistled softly. Pieces of the puzzle locked snugly into place. He remembered the Soviet factory ship at Akureyri, the seaman in the watch cap, snatches of conversation.
Stuff that bored him then had now, suddenly, become loaded with significance.
We buy our oil from the Soviets.