Most of them... except the submarines.
The naval authorities had considered it wasteful to employ more than half a dozen nuclear craft when soon enough the new SSK's to be clandestinely based on Iceland would so radically change the pattern of naval operations in the region.
Antonin turned to a wall hanger and pulled down a large-scale polar map of the North Atlantic, a projection that emphasized the too-often-ignored proximity of the Soviet Union and the United States across the ice cap.
And the vital strategic importance of Iceland in that context.
Anchored like a monumental aircraft carrier between Greenland and Norway, the country effectively controlled all three of the sea passages through which the Russians could move their fleet into offensive positions that would be menacing to the NATO forces the gaps between Iceland and Greenland, Iceland and the Farce Islands and between the Faroes and Scotland.
How much easier it would be to plan such movements when the SSK hunter-killer minisubs, themselves secretly operating from the bowels of an Icelandic glacier, could monitor and, if necessary, influence the concentrations of enemy shipping that blocked any Soviet advance!
How agreeable to reflect that responsibility for the existence of a base actually within the NATO bastion would largely be his!
Antonin saw himself at a Kremlin ceremony, the Order of Lenin being pinned to his chest. He saw himself in a vie office with a carpeted floor at Dzerzhinsky Square, the KGB headquarters in Moscow; in his own imported automobile; at a country dacha with servants.
He saw himself in total charge of all the KGB directorates, planning secret operations worldwide.
The Soviet admiral in overall charge of the real-life submarine pen project on which Antonin's hopes were founded had come into the room.
He was staring at the VDT screen, a replica of the one that would shortly become operative in the control room of the cavern more than two hundred feet below them.
"Much NATO activity?" he asked the navy man at the console.
"Very little, Comrade Colonel," the man replied. "Just the flotilla engaged on this so-called goodwill mission."
He pointed to a small cluster of blips at the left of the screen.
"There will be British submarines skulking around on the seabed someplace on the fringe of the exercise area," the admiral growled, "spying on our fleet and feeding the information into their damned computers in the hope of a printout that will allow them to extrapolate what we would do in any given situation." He turned to Antonin. "I shall call up the Ilyushins to make sure that we have eyes and ears underwater; we shall beat them at their own game." The Ilyushins converted long-range transport planes sowed undersea sensors copied from captured American SOSUS detectors that could chart the course of a submarine wherever it went. The latest models were so sophisticated that they could identify individual submarines from the noise of their engine print."
"It will not be long, Comrade Admiral," Antonin said, "before such intricacies will become redundant. The short-range recon hunter-killers deployed from this base will provide quicker, better, more accurate information than any computed."
"If the base is ever finished," the admiral interrupted tartly. "We are already weeks behind schedule. It should have been in operation well before the long-night season. And provided its existence has not been splashed over every newspaper in Northern Europe." He looked coldly at Antonin. Neither the KGB nor the GRU were popular with the Soviet armed forces. "Your much-vaunted 'security' has not proved very secure, Comrade Colonel, has it? Our pipelines uncovered, our site penetrated, our outposts destroyed. Your professional en forcers outwitted at every turn by a single amateur guerrilla. A man still at liberty moreover. And even the guards charged with the security of our fjord entries prove incapable of resisting this terrorist. It would seem that they themselves require guarding," the admiral said sarcastically. "You have in fact already lost three of them if I am not mistaken?"
Antonin's face was suffused with rage. A vein in his temple twitched uncontrollably. He had forgotten to include the men missing from the spur in his catalog of Bolan attacks.
"By nightfall the man will be in our hands and the affair terminated," he said in a choked voice.
He strode to his desk, snatched up the interphone and savagely punched buttons on the handset.
"Rodsky?" he snapped. "Prepare the woman for sharpened interrogation at once. I know she is not conscious, you dolt. Prepare her nevertheless. The interrogation is to commence as soon as she shows signs of consciousness."
18
For Mack Bolan and his Icelandic ally the most difficult part of the operation was getting back into the caves.
The sun, low in the sky but fiercely bright, flashed reflections from the binoculars wielded by four guards deployed around the spur. Two hundred feet higher, security men silhouetted against the skyline constantly scanned the fjord. And within the connecting caverns it was certain that special orders would have been given in case the impudent intruders of the morning were rash enough to try a second time.
The impudent intruders left Pvera in a beat-up Citroen that Bjornstrom had somehow acquired and raced across the bridge at the head of the fjord to take the highway leading to Akureyri.
Two miles farther on, Bjornstrom swung right onto a dirt road that looped up toward the Russian concession.
While the mine workings and the wall barring the entrance were still hidden on the far side of a swell in the landscape, he turned off the road and steered between scattered boulders across a depression that ended in a steepsided valley slanting down to the water.
Once out of sight of the road, he cut the engine and coasted. The noisy clatter of the air-cooled twin-cylinder engine died away, and they bumped across a slope of coarse moorland grass to halt in the shelter of a granite outcrop.
Below them the valley plunged toward a cascade that foamed into a creek leading off the fjord. And there, shielded by a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their Hypalon raft was concealed.
They clambered down and retrieved their wet suits from beneath the seats of the raft.
The one thing in their favor, the only factor that gave them a chance to make the caves unseen, was the fact that the concession was on the western side of the fjord.
Because of this, a combination of low afternoon sun and high cliffs threw a shadow across the water.
"Even so," Bolan said, "we shall have to make the whole distance underwater, with snorkels for both of us all the way."
"The bottom of the fjord is black basalt and marine vegetation grows below the cliffs," Bjornstrom pointed out. "There's no pale seabed sand for us to show up against. You don't think?"
"No way," Bolan insisted. "It's okay for minisubs they will be at some depth; no danger of them leaving a telltale wash. But even if we are invisible below, the moment we broke surface to gulp in a breath of air we'd risk making enough of a commotion to draw the attention of the goons on that spur. Or one of the guards above. They might take it for a fish after a fly the first time, but not the next. Anyway, they'd probably loose off a burst just in case."
"Whatever you say," Bjornstrom agreed.
He sloshed water around inside the eyepiece of his mask, pulled it down over his face and took the hard rubber breathing bit between his teeth.
Followed by the Executioner, he submerged and swam slowly out of the creek into the fjord.
Even with the snorkels they had to take it slowly. In the circumstances it was difficult to remain underwater for much more than a minute. And each time the head of a breathing tube with its caged ball valve periscoped above the surface there was a chance it might leave enough wake to alert a watcher.