Bolan didn't wait for them to fire first. Maybe they had orders simply to get the drop on him and bring him in alive for questioning. At any rate the SMG's did not open up the moment his head and shoulders appeared in view.
The Executioner flung himself to the side of the roadway, finger tight around the Heckler and Koch's trigger.
Fired from inside the plastic suitcase, the gun spewed out a blaze of dead that ripped through the fifty yards separating Bolan from the truck so quickly that the killers behind the hood died before they had a chance to shoot. The diminutive 4.7 mm rounds drilled through metal, mangled pipes and hoses and wiring, and cored through human flesh. A cloud of blood sprayed through the air as the hardmen fell.
By the time the three others opened fire, Bolan was prone on the hill, his body shielded by the stone heaps.
Flame spurted from between the truck's open rear doors. Hollowpoint death bringers scuffed the tarmac at the roadside and whistled through the coarse grass above the ditch.
Bolan jerked the G-11 from the carryall, snuffed out the smoldering edges where the gun's muzzle-flashes had melted the plastic, and fired again.
He stitched a double line of destruction hip-high across the doors.
The gunner crumpled to the ground, with northern daylight showing through his skull.
Two hitmen remained in the ditches.
Bolan dropped the case, leaped to his feet and sprinted across to the far side of the road with the HandK.
A stream of slugs struck sparks from the granite chips in the pavement as he ran. But the gunman on the far side had revealed his position. Flattening himself behind the opposite stone pile, Bolan hammered another burst low down through the moorland sedge. Small clods of earth fountained into the air and spattered the roadside. He heard a strangled scream.
In the far ditch something flopped briefly among the grasses and then lay still. There were no more shots from that side of the highway.
Four down and one to go. Bolan crawled stealthily along the depression, inching his way downhill in the hope of seeing the last killer before he had a chance to fire. Figuring he could finish it with a single blast, the guy stood upright with a grenade in his hand.
He hadn't reckoned with Bolan's split-second reactions or the G-11's rate of fire. Bolan caught him with the full force of a half-second burst when his arm was still drawn back to throw.
The bomber collapsed into a huddle of blood-stained rags. The grenade flew from his hand and exploded harmlessly on the upland turf near the truck.
Shattered glass tinkled to the roadway.
Bolan rose to his feet, replaced the assault rifle in the damaged plastic holdall and walked to the truck. The engine refused to start carburetor, feed pipes and inlet manifold had been mangled by the G-11's first murderous eruption. He pushed it into the ditch, hauled the bodies into the rear section, closed the doors and continued on his way. He was in sight of the lake before the next vehicle passed him on the way to Grimsstadir.
12
Bjornstrom arrived punctually at midday at the tiller of a Hypalon raft exactly like the one he had lost at the Fjallagfoss.
But this one carried large white numerals painted on the inflated gunwales.
It was clearly some kind of official craft.
Another section of the puzzle clicked into place.
"I get it," Bolan said.
"This guy from the Icelandic Water Board, the inspector you say checks out the pump houses and the pipelines 'once in a while,' that's you, am I right?" Bjornstrom nodded.
"And you found out that the Russians were tapping your supply and decided to carry out a more detailed inspection... on your own?"
"That is correct."
"But why? Why not just tip off your bosses? Why not call in the army or the police or whatever? Tell these bastards where they get off."
"There is no army," Bjornstrom said. "As for the police, it would require action at diplomatic level. The real reasons could be buried or the plot abandoned and restarted a different way. I prefer first to find out the truth. Then, maybe, when we know what the project is, it can be stopped."
"Okay," Bolan said, "I understand that. But... are Ingrams and G-11's part of your normal inspector's kit?"
"Absolutely," the Icelander joked. "I got dozens of them. I give them to my friends at Christmas!"
"And the girl? Erika?"
"She is a friend."
And the Executioner had to be content with that unsatisfactory answer once more.
Bjornstrom started the outboard, and they nosed out into the lake. It was in fact no more than a sinuous drowned valley gashing the bare landscape, dammed at the far end by a shelf of harder rock. Its narrow, fifteen-mile length was dotted with small islands, but they saw very few boats, most of them were solitary fishermen and nobody fired on them from above the walls of the canyon. Beyond the natural dam, the Jokulsa a Fjollum thundered down beneath a dense cloud of spume into Iceland's largest, deepest, widest cataract, the Dettifoss. Three miles farther on the two men were faced with a shorter but no less arduous portage on account of a smaller waterfall called the Rettarfoss.
After that, the stream wider and slower now, there were bleak lowlands to cross, high ground to the east with the fifteen-hundred-foot smoking cone of Pristikluvatn, one of the island's many active volcanoes, and at last the division of the river into several branches that ran out into the great northern bay named the Axarfjordur.
The trip took them two days.
They passed beneath the bridge near the Russian concession exactly one week after Bolan had driven over it on his way from Akureyri to Egilsstadir.
He looked at the surface workings a lot more closely this time.
They crested a ridge that separated the steep-sided fjord from a smaller arm of the sea that pierced the indented coastline to the west. The narrow neck of land between these two inlets was blanked off by a ten-foot wall approached by a winding mountain track.
"The gates are guarded by men with shotguns," Bjornstrom said, "and there are dog handlers with Doberman pinschers patrolling the perimeter."
The ridge, isolated in this way as much as an island, was leased in its entirety to the Russians, he told the Executioner. The tin roofs of pithead buildings were half hidden by a swell of moorland, but the twin wheels of the colliery-style hoist on their iron pylons were clearly visible against the gray sky.
"What exactly are they supposed to be mining?" Bolan asked.
Bjornstrom shrugged. "Prospecting actually. Tin lodes, veins rich in other minerals, certain ores among the granites and quartzites that form the promontory. Uranium, for all I know. Enough, anyway, to make a believable reason for having surface plant, bore-sinking equipment, the pithead gear that you can see and a shaft with a cage."
"And at the foot of the shaft?"
"That is what we have to find out."
"Any chance of scaling that cliff?" Bolan jerked his head toward the seamed rock face that lay between the coarse grass on top of the ridge and the deep water of the fjord.
"It is possible, but guards patrol all the time. We better can make some entry through the caves."
"Caves?"
Bjornstrom cut the engine and allowed the raft to drift. "If I go farther, they may suspect. We inspect as far as the bridge, where the river becomes tidal."
"You mentioned caves?"
"Yes. This site is well chosen. By road, the nearest village is seven miles away. In a direct line, the nearest is Pvera, on the other side of the fjord." He pointed at the opposite cliff. Some way farther north, slate roofs and chimneys could be seen on the skyline. "But to get there by road is twice as far."
"The caves!" Bolan insisted.
The Icelander pointed seaward once more, this time below the ridge on which the concession was located. A grass-topped spur jutted out from the cliff and curled around toward them.