He would follow the damned thing through to its conclusion, whatever the odds.
And if he drew the short straw, if in the final reckoning those odds ran against him, well, at least he would have tried. The Executioner knew no other way.
As soon as the resin had hardened, Bolan unloaded a spare spray skirt from the storage compartment, relaunched the kayak and sped downriver.
There was obviously a limit to the amount of harassment the Russians could get away with. It was unlikely they would dare operate a full-scale manhunt in a foreign country; even in a remote area such as this there would be the risk of an international incident, repercussions at the United Nations, a threatened breakdown of diplomatic relations.
Helicopter recon flights could be similarly restricted. In a country with an unusual number of small airstrips and many private aircraft flying the domestic airlanes because of the rudimentary surface communications, they would soon be spotted. Such sorties would be counterproductive, drawing attention to a situation the Russians wished to keep secret.
Still, Bolan decided to rest during the hours of full daylight and ride the river only during the short northern half night. He had perhaps two hours left before sunrise. Each precious moment must be used to distance him as far as possible from the destroyed emplacement.
For several miles below the oxbow, the current ran smooth between fifty-foot cliffs channeled from the ancient lava. Then the canyon widened, the margins of the stream drew apart, the landscape flattened even farther into a region of tundra floored with multicolored mosses and patches of lichen covering the rocky outcrops.
Bolan paddled as fast as he could.
Beyond the plain, his maps showed another track of volcanic country crisscrossed by steep-sided ravines.
And until he reached that, there wasn't a hope in hell of concealment scarcely a boulder impeded the shallow course of the river as it flowed easily over the flat land, and there was certainly no place a kayak could be hidden.
Bolan's arms moved back and forth with the regularity of a metronome, water droplets trailing from the long paddle, blades biting deep into the current as he forced the craft downstream.
Conical peaks flanked by a line of low hills materialized out of the gloom ahead, but they were still several miles away when the sky lightened in the east and clouds took shape out of the darkness overhead.
The rain had stopped but an icy wind still whined across the plain, riffling the surface of the water and scourging the lone boater's face.
Bolan plowed doggedly on. There was nothing else he could do; he had no place else to go.
There were no signs of pursuit by the time, almost an hour later, he stroked the kayak in among the first of the hills. But before he could think of resting there was another major obstacle the Jokulsa a Fjollum itself.
The river was turning sour on him, and there was fast water ahead!
Huge granite boulders, dumped by some forgotten glacier aeons ago, lay strewed across the watercourse, some with their craggy summits above the flow, others submerged dangerously close to the surface.
Foaming white water seized the kayak and accelerated it into a cleft between two of these towering sentinels. On the far side Bolan was faced by a ferocious row of high waves, tall whitecaps facing upstream that came pounding down on the bow of his lightweight craft as he sliced a path through the rapid.
The swiftest flow ran along the base of a cliff that rose sheer on his right. He slipped cross-channel, braced momentarily upstream to allow the kayak to be swept into it, then hurtled onward, washed over from bow to stern, his eyes blinded by spray.
A saw-tooth rock ridge cut the surface. He braced again to shoot around that, slalomed past a shark fin of basalt and then snapped his hips sideways and paddled fiercely to steer into calmer water as he felt the canoe begin to dump.
It was then that he saw the concrete pumping station built out on a ledge overlooking a river.
And a guy with the machine pistol covering him while the raging current threw them closer together.
Bolan had no choice to lift the spray skirt and reach for one of his own guns he was too busy using the paddle to keep himself afloat. The guard was on a catwalk surrounding the concrete cabin. When the kayak was within twenty yards, he jerked the muzzle of the machine pistol in an unmistakable order stroke the kayak into dead water beneath the ledge.
Bolan accepted the invitation.
"You better had come up here," the gunman called in heavily accented English. "It is drier, and you can hide your boat beneath."
The pumping station stood on a platform that projected beyond the ledge, two and a half feet above the surface of the river. Its outer edge was supported on two pillars rising from the water. Bolan unfastened his spray skirt, climbed out of the kayak and slid it in below this makeshift boathouse. He scrambled up a rocky bank and approached the guy with the gun.
It was an Ingram MAC-11, a deadly machine pistol.
The finger on the trigger belonged to a husky dude, almost Bolan's height, with straight blond hair above blue eyes deep set in a tanned weather-beaten face. He was wearing a fisherman's sweater, denim pants and rubber wading boots. He didn't look much like the other hardmen who had tried, unsuccessfully, to get the drop on the Executioner.
But he looked as dangerous.
Bolan halted two feet away at the far end of the catwalk, keeping his hands in sight and well clear of his body. He eyed the flesh-shredder held unwaveringly in the guy's big hands.
"Who are you? What do you want?" he asked evenly realizing as he heard the sound of his own voice that these were the first words he had spoken in his own language since he led Egilsstadir almost forty-eight hours before.
"I wish only to talk," said the man holding the Ingram. "You and me, I think we maybe are fighting on the same side."
8
His name was Gunnar Bjornstrom. He was an Icelandic citizen, Bolan learned, but his family came from Norway.
Before that, there was a brief interrogation.
"You are Mack Bolan, the man known as the Executioner?"
Bolan did not deny it.
"More recently known as Colonel John Phoenix, of Stony Man Farm, in Virginia?"
"Recently? It seems a long time ago," Bolan said.
"You have waged what they call a one-man war against, first, the Mafia, and then terrorists all over the world?"
"What of it?"
"And lately it is against the KGB especially that you have been fighting?"
"You are well informed."
"It is important that I know who you are," the Icelander said.
"Look, you've got the drop on me with that;" the soldier nodded toward the SMG. "So what do you intend to do?" Even as he spoke the warrior sensed that this man was not the enemy.
"So what do you do in Iceland, Mr. Bolan?" Bjornstrom asked in turn, ignoring Bolan's question.
"I'm on vacation," Bolan said.
"A vacation? And you shoot always on vacation some Russians maybe? In caverns and along the river at night? You are on a hunting trip perhaps hunting for men?"
"I planned to make a source-to-mouth trip along this river. Some guys tried to kill me for no apparent reason. So I killed them."
Bjornstrom smiled. Strong teeth flashed white against the tan of his face. "I am coming upriver myself when you fight. So I halt myself to see what happen."
"Thanks for your help!" Bolan said dryly.
"You do not understand. First, I have to know where you fight. I mean on which side."
"So it is a fight, is it?"
Bjornstrom shrugged. "A fight. An investigation. A curiosity to satisfy. Call it what you want."
"Okay, so who are you working for?"
"I am very inquisitive man," Bjornstrom said evasively. "When I see strangers making much secret work in my country strangers who pretend they operate only a mining concession I ask myself why. I ask myself why they wish nobody along the river, why they have gunmen beneath Vatnajokull when the concession is more than one hundred miles away. I ask myself but there is no answer. So I try to find out myself."