Bolan sighed. As soon as he located one piece of the puzzle and locked it into place, another sector blanked out on him.
"Gunner asked that you should wear these," Erika said. She ducked back into the shadows and produced baggy sailcloth pants, a fisherman's sweater and a battered watch cap with a shiny peak. "He will meet you at the lakehead at midday. You will find him by the small jetty, in a rubber dinghy with the motor outside, you know?"
"Whatever you say." Bolan drew the clothes on over his black-quit. He was past asking questions. He had told himself he would play the cards the way they were dealt. So okay, here was a fresh hand, straight out of the shoe. "What do I do between now and midday?"
"There is a place near the lake. Sometimes tourists can be there, foreigners who fish or men interested in the... in the rocks, yes?"
"Geologists?"
"Yes. Geologists. You can look at the rocks, too. Or walk by the water. At this season, nobody will ask questions. But first you can come into the town and drink coffee for the lake you must go to the intersection on the far side of Grimsstadir and then turn left for the main road to the bridge. It is perhaps three miles in all."
Bolan had finished dressing. The sky was lightening. It would soon be full daylight.
"We go now," the girl said. "I will show you the coffee place, then I must leave you." Suddenly she reached up and touched his face. "You are a strong man," she said. "Like Gunnar. I like a man that he should be strong and brave." Seeing Bolan's expression, she gave a little laugh. "You are not shocked? In my country we have a tradition a girl is not afraid to say if she likes a man."
"In your country?" The phrase had slipped out, Bolan thought, as though she, too, was a foreigner in Iceland.
"Don't you come from this part of the world then?" Erika evaded a direct answer. "It was a manner of speaking," she said.
"Come. We must be quick now."
She began walking toward the center of town.
Bolan was intrigued nevertheless.
"What about Gunnar?" he queried, hurrying to keep up with her. "Doesn't he mind when you... say that you like another man?"
"Why should he? Gunnar is a friend. We work together sometimes. Sometimes we may play."
Yeah, Bolan thought. But what's the name of the game? What business are these characters in?
Clearly there was nothing more to be gained from the blonde. He glanced at her face as they approached a small square where shopkeepers were already setting out sidewalk stalls of fruit and vegetables. Small nose, wide mouth, square, determined chin. Eyes that were very blue beneath the pale, cropped cap of hair. The kind of girl who knew exactly what she wanted. And would make damned sure that she got it.
He watched her walking away along a narrow street after she had pointed out a cafe where workingmen cradled cups of steaming coffee behind the misted windows. Seeing the rounded swell of breasts beneath the tight sweater, the supple curves of hip and thigh as she moved, he experienced a sudden pang of desire, a fleeting wish that he really was still on vacation, free to use his leisure time any way he wanted. He looked at the woman's retreating figure again. Later, there might be time... For him, romance would have to wait until he found some answers to the present mystery.
Every fiber of his being was dedicated to that end.
Bolan strode out beyond the town with the caseless assault rifle concealed in his plastic carryall.
After the intersection, the road arrowed across a stony stretch of moorland to the bridge at the lakehead.
Here, for the first time since he left Egilsstadir, Bolan saw automobiles and trucks. There were not many; most of the cars were old, local three-cylinder Saabs, battered Volvos dating back to the 1950's, Volkswagen Beetles. The trucks were mainly small, loaded down with crates of produce, and he remembered that, despite the near-polar latitude, long daylight hours permitted the cultivation of tomatoes, peaches and sometimes even bananas grown in greenhouses.
He noticed the Renault panel truck not because it lacked lettering along its sides, not even because it was new and carried Reykjavik license plates, but because of a slight hesitation in its approach, a momentary pause in the even note of the engine as it drew abreast. As if the driver was satisfying himself that he had arrived in the right street, at the correct address.
Or that the person he was passing was the one he sought.
Bolan had the impression of heavyset men he couldn't tell their numbers crowded into the truck. Men dressed in anonymous gray. Then it accelerated, sped up a slight rise and vanished into the dip beyond.
The Executioner continued his unhurried pace. But the zipper of the plastic holdall was open now and his right hand was already inside, wrapped around the pistol grip of the G-11.
He saw the panel truck stewed across the road at the bottom of the depression as he breasted the rise.
There was no other traffic in sight.
Two men were crouched behind the hood.
Two more were running for clumps of stone at each side of the road. A fifth appeared between the open rear doors of the truck. All of them were armed with submachine guns.
Bolan didn't wait for them to fire first. Maybe they had orders simply to get the drop on him and bring him in alive for questioning. At any rate the SMG's did not open up the moment his head and shoulders appeared in view.
The Executioner flung himself to the side of the roadway, finger tight around the Heckler and Koch's trigger.
Fired from inside the plastic suitcase, the gun spewed out a blaze of dead that ripped through the fifty yards separating Bolan from the truck so quickly that the killers behind the hood died before they had a chance to shoot. The diminutive 4.7 mm rounds drilled through metal, mangled pipes and hoses and wiring, and cored through human flesh. A cloud of blood sprayed through the air as the hardmen fell.
By the time the three others opened fire, Bolan was prone on the hill, his body shielded by the stone heaps.
Flame spurted from between the truck's open rear doors. Hollowpoint death bringers scuffed the tarmac at the roadside and whistled through the coarse grass above the ditch.
Bolan jerked the G-11 from the carryall, snuffed out the smoldering edges where the gun's muzzle-flashes had melted the plastic, and fired again.
He stitched a double line of destruction hip-high across the doors.
The gunner crumpled to the ground, with northern daylight showing through his skull.
Two hitmen remained in the ditches.
Bolan dropped the case, leaped to his feet and sprinted across to the far side of the road with the HandK.
A stream of slugs struck sparks from the granite chips in the pavement as he ran. But the gunman on the far side had revealed his position. Flattening himself behind the opposite stone pile, Bolan hammered another burst low down through the moorland sedge. Small clods of earth fountained into the air and spattered the roadside. He heard a strangled scream.
In the far ditch something flopped briefly among the grasses and then lay still. There were no more shots from that side of the highway.
Four down and one to go. Bolan crawled stealthily along the depression, inching his way downhill in the hope of seeing the last killer before he had a chance to fire. Figuring he could finish it with a single blast, the guy stood upright with a grenade in his hand.
He hadn't reckoned with Bolan's split-second reactions or the G-11's rate of fire. Bolan caught him with the full force of a half-second burst when his arm was still drawn back to throw.