Bolan excused himself as quickly as he could and rejoined Bjornstrom. This time he was really shaken. Not only was Erika in the hands of the Russians, a party of college kids were being shown over the upper section of the mine workings at the very time the charges they had so carefully timed were due to explode.
Somehow, within the next three hours, they had to spirit the girl away and save the students from almost certain death.
"We must go back in and alter the timing," Bjornstrom said. "Push the hour hands right back again so the charges will not go off until late this evening."
"No way." Bolan shook his head. "There are twelve of them. Each one has to be located, unwrapped, retimed, taped back in position and then concealed again. That takes a lot more time than just shoving a prepared package in among the machinery. We'd never make it; there wouldn't be enough work stoppages for one thing."
"But if we concentrated first on those nearest the shaft, the charges putting the kids in most danger?"
"We might not be able to concentrate on any. For all we know they may not be blasting at all this afternoon. Especially if they have a conducted tour planned."
"Then?.." The Icelander looked crushed.
"We'll play it another way. We'll go back in all right. But we won't touch the charges; we won't go near them. We'll simply use the caves as an entry to the surface workings."
"You're crazy."
Like a fox, Gunnar. We'll have to play it damned dose to the chest, but it can be done. We have three objectives destroy the base, rescue Erika and save the kids, right?"
"So?"
"So what's wrong with making all three in a single operation?"
"I cannot see how it is possible," Bjornstrom said.
"I'll tell you," Bolan told him. "If we leave the charges the way they are we achieve objective number one, anyway. So all that remains is to get Erika out and stop the students going in."
"This is where I come in, Bolan. How the hell ?"
"Listen. All we have to do is get to that elevator. If they are still blasting, we do it while they're in the shelter; if not, we'll blast our own way in there. With lead. Once we make the cage, we take it to the top and come out shooting. We locate Erika... and then we stage the biggest, boldest, most ear-shattering battle the Russians have seen for a long time."
"After we have Erika? Why don't we just get out? If that is not just a pipe dream anyway?"
"You don't understand. The Sovs are obviously asking these Danish kids and their instructor around as a PR exercise. They won't allow them anyplace near the submarine pens. But it consolidates their position, strengthens their cover if independent witnesses actually see them doing their mining number. If we raise enough hell, on the other hand, the Russians themselves will find some way to stop the kids coming in. The last thing they'll want is an audience if the place is humming with live rounds from Ingrams and Kalashnikovs!"
Bjornstrom passed a hand over his face. "Well," he said, "it might work." He sighed heavily. "I suppose."
"It's got to work," the Executioner said.
17
The security guards got Erika Axelsson to the pithead she was already under the effects of the pill. They took her to a room behind the chief overseer's office, ripped the latex dry-suit down around her ankles, hosed her with icy water and beat her naked body with rubber hoses. But though her breasts, belly and buttocks turned black and blue she showed no reaction.
She remained comatose when a 12-volt electric current from a hand-cranked generator was jolted through her body, and there was no muscular reflex when one of the guards stubbed out a cigarette on her wrist.
"It's no good," the station doctor told them. "It's pointless applying stimuli, useless to ask questions. She is genuinely, deeply unconscious."
The KGB colonel in charge of security was furious. "How long," he raged, "before the bitch will be in a fit state to be questioned?"
The doctor shrugged. "Difficult to say. Depends on the exact composition of the drug it's some kind of chloral hydrate compound. And of course on the amount in the pill. Clearly it will be fairly efficient, or she would not have been provided with it. I say several hours at least."
Colonel Dmitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin became increasingly frustrated as he pondered his present circumstances.
He had once been liaison between the KGB and GRU military intelligence. In that function he had been assistant to the infamous Major General Greb Strakhov of the KGB hierarchy. The Iceland posting was a demotion. It had come as a result of Antonin's failure to organize a worldwide Mafia confederation that was to have been backed with KGB money.
The man responsible for that failure, for provoking such internecine strife among the various Mob families that the idea had to be abandoned as impracticable, was Mack Bolan.
Not Colonel Antonin's favorite character, now or at any time.
It was bad enough that they had crossed swords not just that once but many times... and the American had always come out on top. The worst thing of all was that Bolan should have turned up right here, in Iceland, at the exact time Antonin hoped for a spectacular success that would reestablish him in the eyes of Moscow.
How had the bastard known?
The commercial attache from the Soviet embassy who happened to recognize him on the plane from Denmark had done well to signal Antonin at once. Yet the capitalist lackey had four times outwitted KGB assassins before he even arrived at the sinkhole in the glacier.
Since then there had been nothing but disasters.
The crews of two outposts on the river annihilated, a helicopter and its occupants destroyed at the pumping station near Grimsstadir by Bolan and some as yet unidentified accomplice, five men and a raft vanished without trace at the Fjallagfoss, a vehicle and another five operatives lost on the road near the lakehead. And Bolan, unscathed, was still advancing as remorselessly, as the tides that Antonin had made part of his own blueprint for success.
The man was not human.
Worst of all, he had somehow wormed out the secret of the caves and attempted for once, thank God, unsuccessfully to penetrate the base.
Now this unknown woman associated with the foreign terrorist and his companion had materialized. And even here Antonin was temporarily blocked from wringing the information he craved out of her.
No matter. She was in his hands. He had learned how to play the waiting game. The moment she regained consciousness she would be made to talk.
It would be a pleasure to assist at the ceremony. And then he would know precisely how much the mercenary, Bolan, had discovered... and how best to rid himself of the implacable Westerner who had so often too often proved a stumbling block in Antonin's own carefully prepared plans.
It never occurred to the wily Russian that the whole series of setbacks might derive from a simple coincidence. That if the attache had not been so overzealous Bolan might simply have continued his vacation and not noticed anything amiss. If the Executioner had not been pursued so doggedly by KGB killers, which made him so determined to find out what was going on, he might have shrugged the whole thing off as none of his business. But those who make a profession out of deceit are incapable of comprehending the truth themselves.
Antonin stalked across to the video display terminal. A naval enlisted man, cleared for top-secret work, sat at the VDT console. On the dark green fluorescent screen, multiple blips located units of the NATO and Soviet fleets operating in the area.
Russia's northern fleet, largest and strongest of four, was based well over one thousand miles away at Murmansk and other ports on the Kola Peninsula.
Yet the Soviet blips outnumbered the NATO units by more than ten to one.
There were eighty surface-combat vessels in the fleet, which included nine guided-missile cruisers, seven missile destroyers, two carriers and more than one hundred submarines. Most of them were steaming to a rendezvous sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle for an exercise designed to test their maneuverability in time of emergency and, incidentally, to probe NATO reaction to large-scale fleet maneuvers.