The Russian had time to unleash one brief burst in the Executioner's direction before the explosion. The slugs perforated the PVC sack.
Then came the cracking detonation and a livid sheet of yellow flame. Brown smoke laced with scarlet ballooned out and drifted away. The collapsed tarp flared momentarily and then subsided onto the debris of charred flesh and splintered the wooden flooring of the emplacement.
Bolan sighed and headed for the canoe. He would have wished it some other way. But so long as animal man chose to play by the devil's rules.
Hell, there just was no other way.
7
Grimsstadir, the only village anywhere near the river on the first half of its journey to the sea, was fifty miles downstream. There was an airstrip there and a road junction at the head of a lake. For most of the distance the Jokulsa a Fjollum channeled its course through the bare lava uplands. There was only one other sector where a mountain track veered within half a mile of the river valley.
The Executioner wondered how many more humans he would be forced to kill, how many lookout posts he would have to overcome, before he unearthed the secret of this wild countryside and its clandestine invaders.
The kayak was beached, as Mack Bolan had guessed, on the far side of the oxbow.
It was tipped onto its side, with water washing over the coaming and into the cockpit. The spray skirt was riddled with bullet holes, one of the spare paddle halves was snapped in two and several waterproof sacks had been damaged. The fiberglass hull was perforated in twelve places three individual holes in the foredeck and seven stitched in a near row that slanted from gunwale to keel line.
Bolan removed the contents, inverted the vessel to tip out the water and carried it to a slope of dry rock above the river.
There was a can of resin filler among his supplies, originally included in case the craft was punctured while running the rapids.
Working with the help of the flashlight beam, he plugged the holes and smoothed over the filler with a palette knife. The repairs might not withstand a battering by submerged rocks in a really rugged stretch of white water, but at least they would keep him afloat.
If he did lose the kayak, he would still follow the river by other means a rented all-terrain vehicle, on horseback or even on foot. But he was determined to carry out his initial vacation plan. But the overriding priority now was to learn what these Russians were up to. He hoped for their sake that it was not something sinister.
Navymen, commercial personnel or KGB, it was all the same to him he was personally involved now.
That challenge was enough for the warrior.
He would unravel the mystery, uncover the intruders plan and wreck the project, whatever it was. Nothing less would satisfy him now.
He would follow the damned thing through to its conclusion, whatever the odds.
And if he drew the short straw, if in the final reckoning those odds ran against him, well, at least he would have tried. The Executioner knew no other way.
As soon as the resin had hardened, Bolan unloaded a spare spray skirt from the storage compartment, relaunched the kayak and sped downriver.
There was obviously a limit to the amount of harassment the Russians could get away with. It was unlikely they would dare operate a full-scale manhunt in a foreign country; even in a remote area such as this there would be the risk of an international incident, repercussions at the United Nations, a threatened breakdown of diplomatic relations.
Helicopter recon flights could be similarly restricted. In a country with an unusual number of small airstrips and many private aircraft flying the domestic airlanes because of the rudimentary surface communications, they would soon be spotted. Such sorties would be counterproductive, drawing attention to a situation the Russians wished to keep secret.
Still, Bolan decided to rest during the hours of full daylight and ride the river only during the short northern half night. He had perhaps two hours left before sunrise. Each precious moment must be used to distance him as far as possible from the destroyed emplacement.
For several miles below the oxbow, the current ran smooth between fifty-foot cliffs channeled from the ancient lava. Then the canyon widened, the margins of the stream drew apart, the landscape flattened even farther into a region of tundra floored with multicolored mosses and patches of lichen covering the rocky outcrops.
Bolan paddled as fast as he could.
Beyond the plain, his maps showed another track of volcanic country crisscrossed by steep-sided ravines.
And until he reached that, there wasn't a hope in hell of concealment scarcely a boulder impeded the shallow course of the river as it flowed easily over the flat land, and there was certainly no place a kayak could be hidden.
Bolan's arms moved back and forth with the regularity of a metronome, water droplets trailing from the long paddle, blades biting deep into the current as he forced the craft downstream.
Conical peaks flanked by a line of low hills materialized out of the gloom ahead, but they were still several miles away when the sky lightened in the east and clouds took shape out of the darkness overhead.
The rain had stopped but an icy wind still whined across the plain, riffling the surface of the water and scourging the lone boater's face.
Bolan plowed doggedly on. There was nothing else he could do; he had no place else to go.
There were no signs of pursuit by the time, almost an hour later, he stroked the kayak in among the first of the hills. But before he could think of resting there was another major obstacle the Jokulsa a Fjollum itself.
The river was turning sour on him, and there was fast water ahead!
Huge granite boulders, dumped by some forgotten glacier aeons ago, lay strewed across the watercourse, some with their craggy summits above the flow, others submerged dangerously close to the surface.
Foaming white water seized the kayak and accelerated it into a cleft between two of these towering sentinels. On the far side Bolan was faced by a ferocious row of high waves, tall whitecaps facing upstream that came pounding down on the bow of his lightweight craft as he sliced a path through the rapid.
The swiftest flow ran along the base of a cliff that rose sheer on his right. He slipped cross-channel, braced momentarily upstream to allow the kayak to be swept into it, then hurtled onward, washed over from bow to stern, his eyes blinded by spray.
A saw-tooth rock ridge cut the surface. He braced again to shoot around that, slalomed past a shark fin of basalt and then snapped his hips sideways and paddled fiercely to steer into calmer water as he felt the canoe begin to dump.
It was then that he saw the concrete pumping station built out on a ledge overlooking a river.
And a guy with the machine pistol covering him while the raging current threw them closer together.
Bolan had no choice to lift the spray skirt and reach for one of his own guns he was too busy using the paddle to keep himself afloat. The guard was on a catwalk surrounding the concrete cabin. When the kayak was within twenty yards, he jerked the muzzle of the machine pistol in an unmistakable order stroke the kayak into dead water beneath the ledge.
Bolan accepted the invitation.
"You better had come up here," the gunman called in heavily accented English. "It is drier, and you can hide your boat beneath."
The pumping station stood on a platform that projected beyond the ledge, two and a half feet above the surface of the river. Its outer edge was supported on two pillars rising from the water. Bolan unfastened his spray skirt, climbed out of the kayak and slid it in below this makeshift boathouse. He scrambled up a rocky bank and approached the guy with the gun.