Bjornstrom nodded. "Guess you're right." He looked at his watch. The minute hand was well past the hour. "She will be waking now."
Swiftly Bolan surveyed the terrain.
Antonin was still talking, turning the bullhorn this way and that across the ranks of men before him. The admiral gazed impassively ahead over his folded arms. They were both turned slightly toward the pithead. Beyond them the land dropped away toward the dark water of the fjord. The sunshine, pale but bright, would be directly in their eyes. If Bolan and his companion could steal out of the elevator without attracting their attention and make the shadow between the two nearest huts.
The Russian colonel droned on. But the briefing could stop at any minute and the workers disperse to their positions.
Bolan tiptoed toward the bar of shadow.
Bjornstrom followed him out into the sunshine.
The Executioner had estimated that the guard outside the overseer's of lice would be hidden from Antonin, the sightline blocked by the last hut in the row. From the shadow he saw that he was right.
Bjornstrom joined him between the two huts.
Bolan made his decision. He whispered instructions. Bent low, the two black-suited frogmen figures slipped around behind the huts and sped silently uphill toward the mess hall and the HQ block.
Behind the block they were invisible both to the guard and the assembly below. On a raveled apron in front of the entrance there was a black ZIL limo with diplomatic license plates and a consulate flag above one front fender.
Bolan crawled gingerly over the granite chips until he was level with the front wheels. He raised himself high enough to peer over the top of the hood. Around the corner of the overseer's office, the guard was just visible, perhaps seventy-five or eighty yards away.
At that range the assault rifle would be more accurate.
But Bjornstrom's Ingram was silenced.
Bolan beckoned the Icelander forward. He pointed to the guard and then drew his finger across his own throat. Bjornstrom nodded. He raised the compact SMG.
Erika Axelsson was spread-eagled naked on a scrubbed wooden table in the back room, her wrists and ankles strapped to the four table legs. She opened her eyes to see two expressionless heavies standing on either side of her. The blue-jowled, balding one held a cheap cigarette lighter in his hand. The blond with pale, red-rimmed eyes poised a surgeon's scalpel as if it was a pen he was about to write with.
There was a sheet of typescript in his other hand.
Blue Jowls slapped Erika's face heavily three times. She gasped and jerked away her head, striving to clear her mind from the effects of the drug. Her body ached all over, and there was a burning sensation in one wrist where the strap bit into a sore spot, but otherwise she was undamaged.
"At last," the blond goon grated. "You kept us waiting long enough. Now there's a list of questions you have to answer..." he held up the paper "...but first we are going to hurt you a little to show that we mean what we say, to give you a sample of what will happen to you if you fail to answer correctly."
The girl bit her lip. So this was it.
The pill had only brought her a respite. She hoped the zen training she had received would permit her to rise above the pain, the humiliation. She hoped she would be strong enough to resist using the second pill, the cyanide one that could be tongued out of a hollow tooth.
Blue Jowls was leaning over the table, his forearm resting between her spread thighs. "They tell me the singeing of hair is very much the fashion among Western beauty specialists," he said conversationally.
"It can be cut out by the roots," said the man with the scalpel.
"Yeah, but singeing is quicker," Blue Jowls said. He thumbed the lighter into flame.
Erika screamed.
The door burst open.
At first the Norwegian woman did not realize who the two helmeted, rubber-clad figures were. She screamed again when Bjornstrom's hand clamped down to extinguish the smoldering hair at her loins, thinking it some psychological twist in the tormentors' game.
Then she recognized the cold blue eyes and inflexible features of the Executioner.
Bolan sprang for the guy with the scalpel as Bjornstrom whirled to attack Blue Jowls.
The scalpel gleamed wickedly, scything through the air in search of flesh. Bolan dropped to one knee and whipped the commando knife from his boot. The scalpel blade, sharper than ten razors, ripped the sleeve of his wet suit from shoulder to wrist, opening a ten-inch gash in his forearm.
He pivoted on the knee, seizing the torturer's killer arm and pulling it over his shoulder before the guy could attempt a second sweep with the scalpel. The Russian fell forward across Bolan's body.
In the same fluid movement Bolan stabbed viciously upward with the knife. The broad, flat blade sliced through clothing and skin, penetrating the gut.
Bolan twisted and then ripped with all his force.
The Russian uttered a strangled scream and dropped facedown on the floor, the stomach and intestines spilling from his ruptured belly.
Bjornstrom had caught Blue Jowls with a roundhouse right to the side of the head as the hardman tried to pull a Stetchkin automatic from his waistband. Then, as the goon staggered off balance, he swung up the Ingram and jammed the grooved suppressor into his face. The snarling jowls opened to yell, and the fat barrel smashed through teeth to home on the Russian's palate.
Bjornstrom favored the trigger with an instant squeeze.
The triple shot, the splat of blood and brain tissue on the partition wall behind Blue Jowls's head and the smack of .45-caliber bullets tearing through the wood made a single sickly sound.
The torturer slid to the floor.
Bolan's knife was slashing the straps that bound Erika to the table.
"You're bleeding!" was all she could gasp as she sat up to rub circulation back into her cramped limbs.
"It's nothing," Bolan said. "A scratch; luckily it didn't go deep." He helped her to stand up, staring at the angry bruises covering her body. "We have to find clothes for you. Sure you're okay?"
"A little sore," she admitted. And then, contriving a grin, she added, "Luckily it didn't go deep."
In a closet in the outer office they found a suit of the nowfamiliar gray coveralls, a white slicker and a spare pair of boots.
"With your short hair you could pass for one of the overseers at a distance," Bolan said when she had dressed herself. He was binding the wound on his arm with strips torn from a shirt that had been hanging in the closet. "Maybe we could use you to fool them some, once we start shooting."
"Shooting? Are we not getting out?"
He explained the position to her.
"It's three-fifteen," he said, glancing again at his watch. "We have to raise hell for at least a quarter hour to make sure they send those kids away."
"But make sure also that we are not still around at four o'clock!" Bjornstrom said.
"Too right," Bolan agreed. "Come on, guys, let's go."
The body of the guard was lying crumpled by the steps outside. Bolan pulled the AKM out from under him.
"You know how to use one of these?" he asked the woman. And when she nodded, he simply handed her the gun and said, "Shoot straight, then."
Bjornstrom unclipped two plastic grenades from the man's belt. "These will come in useful also maybe," he said.
They made it to the shadow between the huts opposite the pithead. "We'll cross over behind the shack with the winding mechanism," Bolan decided. "We open up once we're on the far side of the motor pool. We shall be between them and the gates then.. With enough ground cover to keep them busy thirty minutes."
"And after that?"
"We'll work that out when we get to it," Bolan said.
20
Antonin had stopped speaking. The workers and overseers were preparing to disperse to their positions. The shooting would have to start soon, yeah, if it was to be effective enough to have the Russians refuse entry to the professor and his charges.