Sujic jumped down onto a lower ledge.
And stopped dead.
A helmeted figure in a shining black dry-suit was facing him. He saw from the curves of breast and hip molded by the skintight rubber that it was a girl. She held a Beretta 93-R in her right hand. "Drop the gun," she said quietly.
Sujic dropped it.
Then he had second thoughts. He began walking toward her.
"Stop!" she warned. "Or I'll shoot."
He shook his head. "You dare not," he said. And of course he was right. "You'd have a half a dozen men with SMG's running down that cliff path before I hit the deck. Come on you give me your gun. I think we'll take you in for a little questioning." Still walking, he held out his hand.
"Come and get me," Erika Axelsson said.
Sujic had guts. He came. Backing his hunch that she would not shoot, he ran at her a heavy, thickset man with a bull neck and mean eyes.
Erika dropped the Beretta. Sujic didn't know exactly what happened after that. She reached up and grabbed the hand clawing out toward her, dipped one shoulder, jerked and then swiveled from the hips.
Sujic flew through the air. He dropped over the edge of the shelf, landed on his back on a steep slope with a sickening thump and slid off into the fjord.
Dipping an oar over the stern of the rowboat, Bjornstrom was beside him in a few strokes. They grasped his ankles and held his feet up in the air so that the upper half of his body was immersed. He died quickly, probably without regaining consciousness.
Ten minutes later, Erika was swallowed up in the mist, rowing the boat back to their hiding place, and the two men were perched on the shelf linking the spur with the cliff face above the caves.
"Those guys were probably on a four-hour watch," Bolan muttered. "Work in the cavern had already started when we arrived, but we should have plenty of time for our recon before they're missed." He tensed as whistles shrilled through the mist. "Okay, Gunnar, this is it!" he said.
Facing the cliff with arms outstretched and toes flexed, he led the way along the shelf toward the caves.
Despite the overhang formed by the roof of the arch, they found handholds and footholds in the weathered rock, ducked into the main cave and inched their way around the curve that hid the inner basin from any watcher on the fjord. By the time the sounds of voices and retreating footsteps had died away, they were clambering over the rail of the gallery that circled the dock.
Beside the control room on the far side of the gallery, a spiral stairway snaked down to the quay. Next to it, in a gray steel housing, was a main transformer flanked by a panel covered with complicated switch gear.
"That's target number one," Bolan whispered.
"And number two's not far away," the Icelander replied, pointing to a second chamber that opened off the dock. Fed by one of the smaller entrances from the fjord, this was evidently intended for small craft, for there was a shallow slipway leading up out of the dark water with bays on either side. A rowboat was moored in one of the bays.
And at the back of the slipway, pipes emerged from the rock to curl through a second opening beyond which the massive, humped shapes of generators were visible.
Bolan nodded, mentally noting other vulnerable points that he could see drain covers, junction boxes, parts of the sluice mechanism. "Anyone in the control room?" he murmured.
Bjornstrom, who was farther along the gallery, craned over the rail. He shook his head. "All in the shelter, I guess. But where is the place for the men who set the charges?"
Bolan indicated a doorway beyond the top of the spiral stairway. An arrow with the Russian characters for the word Shelter pointed to a warren of passageways, which he guessed must eventually connect with the mine shaft sunk from the pithead on the ridge far above them.
Inside this opening there was a glassed-in hutch with slatted steel shutters covering the windows through which they could make out the silhouettes of two men with their backs to the dock basin, looking down into the construction chamber.
One of the men raised his arm.
Abruptly a jet of brown smoke boiled up behind the scaffolding. A muffled explosion shook the fabric of the gallery and a shock wave assaulted the intruders' eardrums. Seconds later two more detonations filled the air beneath the arcs clustered below the roof with a fog of rock dust.
Bolan and the Icelander were racing around the gallery toward the control room. By the time the whistles blew for the workers to come out of the shelter, the two invaders were concealed behind a stack of forty-gallon oil drums between the stairway and the transformers.
Now, for the first time, they were able to study the opposition at close quarters.
The Russians working in the cavern fell into three categories. The majority perhaps twenty-five or thirty were evidently skilled construction men, hard-bitten, professional, experienced. They emerged from the shelter and fled at once down the stairway to restart work on the caisson, some operating compressors and pneumatic drills, others handling concrete mixers, but most of them around the rock face behind the lock gates.
Among them were half a dozen overseers. Equipped like the workers with steel mining helmets, they were distinguished by white oilskin slickers, white boots and black arm bands each with a red star.
The third party, again perhaps half a dozen men, were of an entirely different type tough, muscular, with bleak and ruthless expressions on their flat Slavic faces.
These were the guards. They wore jackboots over the same gray fatigues that Bolan knew so well, and each was armed with a Skorpion machine pistol.
They had nothing to do with the work in progress but maintained a constant patrol throughout the base.
Two went through to the smaller cave, another couple penetrated the maze of passageways between the basin and the mine shaft, one lounged on the quay, staring down at the laborers in the dry-dock. The last strode to the gallery on the far side from the control room.
"Low-grade KGB material," Bolan whispered. "Rank and file heavies, but dangerous and efficient. There'll be more of them up top."
The control room remained unoccupied. It was obviously designed to operate the whole complex when it was completed, but for the moment orders were transmitted through loudspeaker relays from the two guys in the armored hut at the entrance to the shelter.
For thirty minutes Bolan and the Icelander watched the activity on the rock face. The guard passed their hiding place three times, but he seemed more interested in the basin below than anything at gallery level.
When he reached the far side for the third time, Bolan raised his head cautiously and peered over the top of the nearest drum.
"The two dudes behind the steel shutter are looking the other way all the time," he said quietly. "Down into the chamber. The guard up here scrutinizes the cave with the slipway at the end of his promenade. Nobody uses the control room. What do those facts suggest to you?"
"We invade the control room," Bjornstrom replied, "when everybody's back is turned."
"Yeah. It'll save time when the next whistle blows plus we can probably wise ourselves up on the eventual operations technique, which should save time when we place the charges."
As soon as the guard turned his back and leaned over the rail again, Bolan and Bjornstrom crawled out from behind the drums, sped noiselessly to the control room and slipped inside.
On the floor, out of sight below the glass windows, Bolan stifled a gasp of astonishment when he saw the complexity of equipment in the small room.
Neatly labeled in Cyrillic lettering he saw multiple banks of switch gear and levers to operate the gates and dams of the lock, controls for the shaft and elevator, the generator turbines and all the pithead mechanism.