"Sure," Bjornstrom croaked, massaging his bruised throat. "What did you find?"
"Well, the caves do connect. We can get to the main cavern through any of them. Also, the place is enormous inside there. Deep water, too. That main archway must go down at least forty feet below the surface. And there's a hell of a lot of work going on."
"What kind of work?"
"That's what we are going to find out," Bolan said. "Come back in with me and we'll check. We better get some idea of the geography of the place before the guard's absence is discovered."
They slid back into the water and headed for the smallest of the arches.
To Bjornstrom, an interminable time seemed to pass before Bolan signaled that it was safe to surface. They had navigated a curving channel perhaps seventy yards long and joined the main entry, where it opened out into an immense cavern.
It was from this that the light reflected in the fjord had come. Now, treading water at the outer margin of this huge chamber hollowed from the rock, they could see under a blaze of arc lights the extent of the work that had already been secretly completed.
What had once been an irregular underground basin had been widened and transformed into a rectangular dock bordered by concrete quays. Beyond this pool two giant lock gates with sluices blanked off a caisson crisscrossed with scaffolding on which an army of laborers worked. A drydock was evidently under construction.
Electric wires and compressor tubes tangled the quay nearest the two intruders, and in the far depths of the cave the shafts of rock drills and boring equipment gleamed. Above these a railed gallery circling three parts of the cavern led to a glassed-in box that was clearly some sort of control room.
Two men carrying submachine guns emerged from a passageway carved from the rock and began patrolling the gallery toward the entrance tunnel.
Bolan touched the Icelander on the arm. They submerged and began swimming back along the main channel leading to the fjord.
There was a lot more to check out but the Executioner had already seen enough to know that at last he held the final section of the puzzle in his mind.
This was no underground base for radio misinformation, no simple KGB disaffection headquarters what he had been looking at were bombproof Russian submarine pens.
The Russians were building a clandestine underwater naval station beneath the territory of a NATO country.
13
"For the new SSK-class minisubs," Bolan said. "There's space for two in that basin, and a third in the dry-dock."
"Minisubs?" Bjornstrom objected. "You mean those two-man undersea motorboats the Italians developed in the Second World War?"
"Hell, no. Mini in relation to the four or five-thousand-ton nuclear maxis that are too easy to pinpoint with modern sonar and electronic detectors. The SSK's are 200-ton subs with a crew of only twelve, all-electric engines and a sea-to-sea strike capability of no more than half a dozen short-range nukes."
"Harder to detect, though, than the nuclear-powered ships?"
"Sure. They're silent, the heat emanation is minimal, they are fast and maneuverable as a pursuit plane."
"Better than these so-called factory ships then, for monitoring all the NATO and other Western shipping in the North Atlantic?"
"Uh-huh. Preying on them, too. Acting as a hidden strike force if the Soviets ever decide to unleash a hot war. But they do have one big disadvantage."
Bjornstrom nodded. "The batteries."
"Yeah. Prenuclear subs used electric engines for undersea work, diesels on the surface. The SSK's are too small to carry auxiliary engines and in any case it would louse up to their low profile, write them a bigger signature on the detector screens. But electric motors restrict them to a very short range each accumulator needs to be recharged every X miles or every so-many hours."
"So from Russian bases, Murmansk, Archangel or even the Baltic, an SSK North Atlantic patrol is not a proposition?"
"Right. It was a pretty smart idea, though, to use Iceland." Bolan shook his head in reluctant admiration. "Equidistant from Greenland, the Faroes, Spitsbergen and Norway. Smack in the center of the operations area! They could be in among any NATO concentration, anyplace, within a couple of hours. Even under the ice. And it saves them around a thousand miles each way!"
"But the entry to these caves?" Bjornstrom looked dubious. They were sitting in the rubber raft, hidden behind the rocks, waiting for the pale gloom of the sub-Arctic night to establish itself.
"A piece of cake," Bolan told him. "The fjord is long but it's also dark and deep, with a rock bottom and no sand to show up underwater craft in silhouette. An SSK could slip in from the open sea and make the whole journey submerged, including entry to the main cave through that drowned arch. It wouldn't need to surface until it was safely out of sight inside the basin."
"Then they should be building generators in there as well as maintenance and repair facilities?"
"Damn right, they should. Recharging those accumulators will be the most important part of the deal. My guess is that all the water-tapping you come across is not so much for the heating as for generator turbines. They won't want to siphon off too much current from the normal domestic power supply to the fake mine workings above. People might start to ask questions. So they aim to install their own hydroelectric plant below."
Bjornstrom was feeding shells into a clip destined for the magazine of his Ingram. "So what do we do?" he asked.
"I have kind of a personal stake in this," Bolan said grimly. "We wage a two-man war and destroy the place. Blow it clear to hell."
"We don't just report it to the government and let them handle it?"
"Uh-huh. Like you said, that makes it a diplomatic issue. You got an international incident, violation of sovereignty. Imagine what a help that would be with the next round of SALT talks coming up! Hell, it would make the East-West situation more unstable than ever and kill any chance at all the talks have of reducing the arms racer. Whereas a nice quiet little private raid..." He left the sentence unfinished.
Bjornstrom looked relieved. "I agree," he said. "If this base is destroyed anonymously, before it is complete, the Russians cannot complain because they are here building it illegally. And Iceland can say nothing because it will know nothing about it."
"Right," Bolan said. "Nobody kicks up hell if a place that doesn't officially exist is wiped out." He smiled. "So all we have to do now is find ourselves a stack of explosives. You got any quarries around here?"
"I do not think that will be necessary," the Icelander said. He held up his hand. "Listen."
Faintly, approaching from the direction of the village on the far side of the fjord, they could hear the creak of rowlocks.
Soon a small boat materialized out of the gloom. A single figure in a frogman suit stowed the oars as the dinghy glided in among the rocks. Then the new arrival leaped nimbly ashore with a canvas satchel. Even in the mist, Bolan could see it was the woman, Erika.
"I hope I have forgotten nothing," she said to Bjornstrom.
"I hope not," Bjornstrom said.
Shielding the beam from a pocket torch with one hand, he opened the satchel and laid out the. contents.
A handful of crimped detonators, three dozen sticks of C4 plastic explosive, twelve cheap wristwatches, one dozen four-and-a-half-volt flashlight batteries, a tube of super-glue, a small transparent plastic tube containing drawing pins, Scotch tape, copper wire on a cardboard spool and a pair of long-nose pliers with rubber-covered handles.
"Yes," he said. "All is here. Thank you, Erika."
"Okay," Bolan said firmly. "I've let you guys string me along long enough. You may have a cover job with the Icelandic Water Board, Bjornstrom, but don't give me any more of this curiosity-of-a-private-citizen crap. And don't tell me your girlfriend just happened to take all this stuff off the shelf in the local supermarket and walk out with it in a wire basket. Who the hell are you two?"