He rose and stretched. Suddenly aware that blood still dripped from his ear, he realized that he had completely forgotten that first shot, the very near-miss that had almost ended the Bolan legend.
Adrenaline was the answer. The stuff had been raging through his veins faster than the river ran, fast enough to momentarily make him forget that murderous initial attack until the threat had been mastered by the violence it unleashed.
Yet it was no more than an abrupt swirl in the stream, or maybe an unexpected roll of the kayak's hull, that had saved the warrior's life a deflection of one single inch in the wrong direction and the killer slug would have severed the carotid artery, wasting his lifeblood in less than two minutes. It would have been Bolan's body then that was washed anonymously away to rot in some backwash creek below the ice-cap mountain. A chilling thought.
He eased off the helmet with its dangling strap.
The wound was no more than a scratch, a raw furrow at the tip of the lobe.
He found a thin spray of icy water cascading from a cleft in the rock and bathed the wound alternately with this and the warm water from the river until the bleeding stopped.
Some you win... to Bolan said to himself. He smiled again. And froze.
Gutturally, from someplace behind, a deep voice had boomed in reply. And amid a stream of words incomprehensible among the hollow echoes of the cavern, he had caught the three syllables of his own name.
Mack Bolan.
It was a moment before he caught on; the voice came from the speaker of the radio stashed in the rock alcove.
Base called the lookouts to check whether or not the Executioner had showed. Not so strange.
What did jolt Bolan was the fact that the voice was speaking in Russian.
6
Bolan whistled softly. Pieces of the puzzle locked snugly into place. He remembered the Soviet factory ship at Akureyri, the seaman in the watch cap, snatches of conversation.
Stuff that bored him then had now, suddenly, become loaded with significance.
We buy our oil from the Soviets.
They got a right to put in here.
They started a mining concession.
The Russians are flying in heavy equipment through Husavik.
Right.
Husavik was not far from Jokulsa a Fjollum. From a bluff overlooking the river he was now navigating, Bolan had seen the mine workings during his drive from Akureyri to Egilsstadir.
It all fit. He figured the workings were no more than a cover for some illicit activity connected with the river. And the lookout post beneath the glacier maybe one of several along the river's course was just a fail-safe precaution to make sure nobody stumbled on the secret.
If that was so, it was no surprise the plotters had gotten nervous when the Executioner showed... and announced his intention to explore the Jokulsa a Fjollum!
And that would be reason enough for the chain of attempts by the death squads to write him off. Because they would have to get him out of the way, whether he was making the trip because he knew about the plot or just by coincidence.
And the hardmen he wasted could well have been Russians. Their MO, too especially the hypo-and-brandy ploy at the Reykjavik hotel was worthy of the KGB at that insidious organization's most devious.
But if a corner of the puzzle was now completed, the center remained blank.
Bolan knew who his enemies were and why they wanted him fixed. For good.
But he was no nearer uncovering the secret they were so anxious to protect.
What could the Russians be planning in Iceland? ICBM silos? Antimissile sites?
No way. With the ranges at their disposal firing from home, who needed Iceland?
Launching pads for cruise missiles or short-range nukes aimed, on the Cuban pattern, at NATO shipping or the more vulnerable countries belonging to the alliance?
Uh-uh. No mine workings could serve as a cover for that kind of stuff.
Practically every town in the country boasted an airstrip there would be far too many overflights by coast-guard choppers and private planes for surface projects of that nature to remain undetected. In any case the concession was officially leased; plant was being flown in openly; presumably the authorities enjoyed some kind of inspection facility.
It seemed obvious, too, that the whole deal was tied in with the river.
And the sailor in Akureyri had mentioned Red navy specialists.
Some kind of marine detection unit then? Some monitoring aid for those so-called factory ships in the North Atlantic? Something in any case that must, for Bolan's money, be located underground? Or underwater?
Whatever, he would find out the truth.
Bolan drank a can of beer, helped himself to some fruit that was left in the alcove and returned to the kayak.
The Russian voice on the radio was still querulously demanding news. Bolan switched on the light, pushed himself out into midstream and continued his journey.
The two snipers he had killed had used an inflatable raft to reach their lookout post. Even with rapids and an occasional waterfall, this had to mean that the river, from here on down to its exit from beneath the glacier, was largely navigable.
No class-six stretches of white water, no cascades dropping over unclimbable shelves, no tunnels with roofs too low to allow a canoeist to pass.
Bolan wondered if there would be other, more dangerous obstacles. A second lookout post, for instance, with more alert patrols?
He guessed not. There was no other entry to the subterranean watercourse; one post between the sinkhole and the exit would surely be enough.
That didn't rule out the possibility of an emplacement somewhere along the Vatnajokull's terminal moraine. That was where he would install a backup team himself, if he was determined to block all boating on the upper part of the river.
He guessed right on both counts.
But before he saw the sky again, there were natural hazards to overcome.
The river twisted through caverns no more than ten feet high, ran out across vast chambers whose roofs were lost in darkness far above the flashlight's range. At times it flowed fast and deep, then bubbled over rock steps, where there was scarcely enough draft to float the kayak.
Other times the waterway lost itself in underground lakes so wide it was hard to locate the main channel among the network of passages.
Bolan steered past chutes of freezing water, hot geysers that spewed mud through the surface of the stream, tributary falls that thundered in his ears and veiled the flashlight beam with mist.
He encountered only three major difficulties.
The first was a cataract where the river divided into tiny streams that ran for what seemed hundreds of yards over a slope of smooth pebbles and forced him to carry the kayak on his back while he maneuvered the light to show up treacherous bed beneath the shallow water.
The second could have buried him beneath the Vatnajokull for keeps.
He chose the wrong outlet on the far side of a deep, still lake and found himself being carried faster and faster by a strong current that flowed between narrowing walls and a roof so low that he could barely wield his paddle. Then, as he realized his mistake, the stream careered away at right angles and poured through an arch into a basin hollowed from the rock at a much lower level.
Desperately Bolan flexed his feet against the pegs, straining knees against the control bracings as he dug a blade hard in and leaned against the remorseless pull of the water to bring the kayak broadside onto the flow.
The vessel swung slowly, too slowly, around. The current jammed it fast across the opening. The fiberglass hull creaked as water roared past and down.