The craft shuddered crazily, almost capsized in the wild water... and at last floated out into the center of a placid pool three hundred feet wide.
Bolan grasped the paddle and propelled the kayak toward the far side of the pool with swift, sure strokes.
Ten minutes later, the darkness thinned, dissolved, and the lightweight craft glided out between dirty gray ice crags into the open air.
The snipers were posted behind a group of boulders a mile downstream from where the river emerged.
There were, in fact, Bolan discovered, several streams flowing out from beneath the glacier. Some meandered through the conglomerate calf rocks, stones, mud and sand scoured from the earth's surface by the glacier and deposited around its outer fringe.
Some formed pools in which ice masses, broken off from the main flow, floated like miniature bergs. Some channeled straight through the moraine to join the main stream.
A dozen hit teams would have been needed to cover all these exits. It was logical therefore, the Executioner reasoned, that the Russians would wait until all these watercourses joined to form one waterway and place a single patrol there.
But the theory had to be checked. He beached the kayak on a gravel spit where the last tributary flowed in and climbed a fifteen-foot bank of shale to make his initial recon.
It was late afternoon. Low cloud cover transformed the sky into a uniform gray. A chill wind blew over a bare rock plateau that stretched as far as he could see in every direction.
Crouched low so that he would not be silhouetted against the skyline, Bolan scanned the bleak terrain. The dun-colored plateau eroded remains of an age-old lava flow was marked with a darker, winding trail that charted the course of the river.
A quarter mile away, the channel gouged from the basalt looped into a wide oxbow. It was on the outside of this curve, Bolan guessed, that a backup team would most likely be posted.
He was right.
It was hard to see at first, because a camouflage tarp had been rigged above the emplacement to minimize detection from the air. But there was movement above a rockfall rampart, a dull glint of metal, maybe a reflection from a pair of binoculars, that attracted Bolan's attention.
He guessed there were two gunners beneath the tarp. Perhaps three. And he had to take them out before continuing his voyage, although, with every voice that failed to respond to radio queries from base, the vigilance of the Soviet HQ personnel would be sharpened and increased.
The snipers were alert, too.
Discreet as Bolan's movements had been, they were spotted by the lookouts. He saw rock chips fly and heard the screech of a ricochet before the crisp, sharp explosion of the rifle shot reached him.
The marksman fired twice more before Bolan dropped from sight, momentarily shaken. The gunner was a fair shot, considering the distance.
Bolan felt the hot wind of one slug above his hair; the other sliced a fragment of rock away moments before he was to grab it as a handhold. The soldier decided it was healthier down by the riverside!
Reinstalled in the kayak, the warrior allowed himself to drift downstream between the rocky banks, using the paddle only if the craft threatened to backtrack into an eddy or snag on an obstruction. He left the spray skirt stowed in the bow compartment the river ran smooth and fairly deep here, and he might have to spring out in a hurry.
He was, he judged, two bends above the oxbow when a sight line past a two-hundred-yard reach and between two opposing bluffs gave him a glimpse of the killers hideout.
It was a momentary view, before the emplacement disappeared behind one of the bluffs. But it was not reassuring.
One guy was left beneath the tarp, toting what looked like a submachine gun. Two others had left the shelter, one on either side, to scramble away between the boulders. Each had a hunting rifle slung across his back.
But they weren't after caribou, Bolan felt certain. The Russians were planning to bracket him with a double enfilade.
He took up the paddle and pin-wheeled the canoe out into the center of the current. With swift strokes he belted the craft toward the nearer of the two bluffs. A couple of handguns, however efficient and however skilled the shooter, were no match for the weapons arrayed against him. Especially if he was going to be under fire from three separate points.
There was no way he could shoot his way out of this one in open confrontation stealth and wits were the operative words. And the number-one priority there was to find a hiding place.
He stroked the kayak into a pool hollowed from the basalt and overhung by a shelf of harder rock. Here he would be visible only to someone standing immediately opposite on the other side of the river.
Right now there was no watcher. But Bolan's own view was similarly restricted. He climbed out of the kayak and waded to the inner margin of the pool. He carried the Beretta, its 20-round magazine in place, in his right hand. The .44 AutoMag, fully loaded, was stashed inside the zippered front of his wet suit.
He trod across a narrow strip of shingle and hauled himself up onto the projecting shelf. The sound of the water cascading from his wet suit would be lost in the burble of the river.
From the shelf there was a wider view of the far bank, of the boulders bordering the entrance to the oxbow, of the bare plateau above.
But there was no sign of the Russians. The emplacement was out of sight around the bend. Nothing moved among the rocks at the edge of the ancient lava flow. No bird flew, no vegetation stirred in the wind, even the lowering clouds appeared stationary.
For Bolan there was only one course of action he must take out his adversaries one by one. But first he had to know where they were. Before they could become targets for the Executioner's hellfire attacks they had to show themselves.
He decided to draw their fire.
Above the rock shelf, weathered by frost, eroded by millennia of freezing storms, the strata were soft. He broke off a chunk and lobbed it out beyond the ledge to tumble down a shaley slope and splash into the river.
It was the oldest trick in the book.
And it didn't work.
There were no more revealing shots.
Nobody plunged down among the boulders to check whether Bolan had missed his footing on the slope. Bolan waited.
There was silence, except for the chuckle of the stream.
The sky darkened, then scattered drops of rain began to fall. Soon the light would thicken into the Icelandic dusk.
Prone on his shelf, the warrior breathed shallowly, every nerve alert for the slither of a foot brushing rock, the click of a cocking hammer, the telltale rattle of a stone.
He heard nothing.
Then suddenly there came a bellow, a harsh voice distorted by a bullhorn.
"Bolan! We know you are there! Come out and surrender and no harm will come to you. Our superiors only wish to ask you some questions. Give yourself up and you will be fairly treated as a prisoner."
Bolan smiled grimly. Fair treatment?
Oh, sure with every imaginable kind of torture they could think of.
"Be sensible, Bolan," the amplified voice continued when he made no reply. "If you do not show yourself we shall come in with grenades."
Bolan replied in Russian. "I am waiting come and get me!"
There was no further communication from the bullhorn.
Soon afterward, he heard the distant drone of the airplane. He had been expecting it. It didn't bother him. The kayak was beneath the overhang, invisible from the air; Bolan's neoprene wet suit was almost the same color as the basalt. Lying facedown he would be indistinguishable from the rocky background.
It was the same light plane that had checked him out above the sinkhole, he saw from the corner of his eye. The pilot made perhaps a dozen passes over the oxbow and the surrounding wilderness. He flew up and down the course of the river.
Evidently he saw nothing and his radio reports to the emplacement were negative, because there was no reaction from the hidden gunmen. Soon the plane vanished in the darkening sky to the north.