The rain fell more heavily, dimpling the surface of the river. Wind moaned through crevices in the lava massifs.
Bolan was shivering, the insulating layer of moisture inside his wet suit chilled by inactivity.
When it was dark, he clambered down to the pool, ate and drank, and then made some changes to the loading of the kayak.
He stowed a spare paddle, a two-piece model assembled with an aluminum sleeve and a set screw, in the stern compartment. He snapped the spray skirt in place around the coaming, wedged each of the paddle halves under the belt that normally fit around his waist and then propped them up so that the skirt rose above the level of the deck. He bulked out the tentlike silhouette with PVC sacks from the two storage compartments and laid the one-piece paddle across the foredeck.
Bolan hoped the mock-up could fool watchers unbelieving here was a boater in the cockpit, hunched up to avoid detection.
Because he had to end this stalemate pretty damned quick as soon as full daylight returned, he was certain there would be a chopper loaded with reinforcements over head.
Pushing the kayak in front of him, he waded out into the center of the river.
The water reached almost to his armpits; the pull of the current was strong enough to make it hard keeping on his feet.
He shoved the boat away and moved toward the opposite bank, his silenced Beretta held above the surface.
The kayak was carried downstream, gathering speed as the oxbow approached.
Bolan was taking two chances that the current would dump the canoe in still water at the far end of the oxbow, where he could recover it; secondly that the snipers would fire at what they figured for a man and not the boat, so that damage would be minimal.
The bow of the kayak angled in to the curve.
Bolan heard a shout over the patter of rain on the water. He raised the Beretta, finger curled around the trigger, left hand grasping the foregrip.
Pinpoints of flame flickered high among the boulders. Three single shots came in quick succession. The rifleman was hiding above, behind the shelf on the same side of the river as the overhang.
Had been hiding.
Bolan triggered two bursts before the echoes of the first shot died away, aiming below and fractionally to the left of the rifle's muzzle-flash. The 9 mm skull busters smashed through the killer's rib cage and fisted his life away while two of his own slugs were puncturing the kayak's spray skirt.
His third shot went into the sky as he was flung back lifeless among the rocks.
Bolan lifted his feet and allowed the buoyancy of his life jacket to carry him after the kayak.
He approached the curve fifty yards behind the canoe.
Fire spit down on the craft from the bluff on the outer edge of the oxbow.
And this time the hardman had allowed the long hours of waiting to sap his concentration. He was silhouetted against the almost dark sky.
Bolan drifted against a rock that showed above the surface of the water.
His feet touched ground. He hauled himself out of the river and sighted the 93-R.
The guy was reloading. He had only a 3-shot rifle. Probably a Husqvarna .358 Express. Very long range. Dead accurate. Hyperhigh muzzle velocity that gave the 150-grain slugs an almost flat trajectory and huge knockdown power.
Providing you hit something.
Bolan mowed him down. But not before the gumnan had made his play. The executioner must have stirred foam from the surface as he landed. Two shots splatted into the water in front of him; a third caromed off the rock into the night.
By this time the rifleman was on his way. A stream of death had hosed across his chest. The gun splashed into the river; the shooter landed on his back across a narrow crescent of shingle that the current had deposited on the inside of the bend.
Bolan submerged again and swam over there. The guy was dead, open eyes dulled in the northern twilight, his torso black with blood. Two plastic grenades were slipped to his web belt.
Bolan unfastened one and went back into the water.
He swam now, openly, a fast crawl that churned the water, and accelerated by the current, brought him rapidly to the apex of the oxbow.
The Beretta, together with Big Thunder and the grenade, was belted to his waist in a waterproof sack.
His kayak had been carried around the bend and was now within range of the last Russian beneath the tarp. The guy opened up with his SMG short, sharp bursts that ripped out with shattering force and stitched the gloom with points of flame.
The kayak appeared to shudder from the force of the shells. It spun, heeled over, righted itself and headed stern first for the opposite bank.
Bolan was below the emplacement, waist high in the stream, the PVC sack unzippered. His right hand dipped in, came out holding the grenade. He pulled the pin. His arm swung back.
As the gunner got wise to the fact that the kayak was pilotless either that or he had two enemies to deal with! Bolan uncoiled and pitched.
The grenade streaked through the air, hit the stony rampart and bounced in under the tarp.
The Russian had time to unleash one brief burst in the Executioner's direction before the explosion. The slugs perforated the PVC sack.
Then came the cracking detonation and a livid sheet of yellow flame. Brown smoke laced with scarlet ballooned out and drifted away. The collapsed tarp flared momentarily and then subsided onto the debris of charred flesh and splintered the wooden flooring of the emplacement.
Bolan sighed and headed for the canoe. He would have wished it some other way. But so long as animal man chose to play by the devil's rules.
Hell, there just was no other way.
7
Grimsstadir, the only village anywhere near the river on the first half of its journey to the sea, was fifty miles downstream. There was an airstrip there and a road junction at the head of a lake. For most of the distance the Jokulsa a Fjollum channeled its course through the bare lava uplands. There was only one other sector where a mountain track veered within half a mile of the river valley.
The Executioner wondered how many more humans he would be forced to kill, how many lookout posts he would have to overcome, before he unearthed the secret of this wild countryside and its clandestine invaders.
The kayak was beached, as Mack Bolan had guessed, on the far side of the oxbow.
It was tipped onto its side, with water washing over the coaming and into the cockpit. The spray skirt was riddled with bullet holes, one of the spare paddle halves was snapped in two and several waterproof sacks had been damaged. The fiberglass hull was perforated in twelve places three individual holes in the foredeck and seven stitched in a near row that slanted from gunwale to keel line.
Bolan removed the contents, inverted the vessel to tip out the water and carried it to a slope of dry rock above the river.
There was a can of resin filler among his supplies, originally included in case the craft was punctured while running the rapids.
Working with the help of the flashlight beam, he plugged the holes and smoothed over the filler with a palette knife. The repairs might not withstand a battering by submerged rocks in a really rugged stretch of white water, but at least they would keep him afloat.
If he did lose the kayak, he would still follow the river by other means a rented all-terrain vehicle, on horseback or even on foot. But he was determined to carry out his initial vacation plan. But the overriding priority now was to learn what these Russians were up to. He hoped for their sake that it was not something sinister.
Navymen, commercial personnel or KGB, it was all the same to him he was personally involved now.
That challenge was enough for the warrior.
He would unravel the mystery, uncover the intruders plan and wreck the project, whatever it was. Nothing less would satisfy him now.