"Is there any way we could use the uniform you're wearing? Could we maybe fool them..." Bjornstrom began.
"Uh-uh." Bolan cut him short. "Don't forget we stripped the dead guard, so they'll be looking for someone wearing his uniform..." Bolan paused. He was gazing pensively at the slipway.
"Still... is an idea... maybe we can make use of it in a different way." Hastily he pulled off the boots and coverall and stuffed them into the neoprene sack that now contained nothing but his AutoMag and a spare clip of ammunition. He lowered himself into the water. The numbing shock of the sudden immersion was like a blow in the solar plexus, but he mastered the cramp and swam fast across to the slipway.
Clinging to the rowboat moored beside it, he unzippered the sack one-handed and laid boots and coverall along the Buckboards. Finally he removed the miner's helmet he was still wearing and placed it above the gray fatigues. In poor light, for a few seconds, it was just possible that a distant watcher might mistakenly believe a man was lying prone below the gunwales.
Very carefully, Bolan unhitched the painter, submerged himself and swam slowly out toward the center of the cavern, pushing the boat before him.
When it was framed in the rock arch between the two chambers, he gave it a final shove and then backed off. The tide was ebbing, and a slight current receding toward the fjord carried the craft in the direction of the smallest cave entrance. As he had hoped, the movement of the rowboat, as it floated through the shaft of light streaming in from the main cavern, was seen by someone.
There was an excited shout, followed by two more. The ringing of alarm bells stopped, and an amplified voice rapped orders through the speaker system.
Gunfire ripped out, reverberating around the linked caves like thunder in the mountains. Pale marks peppered the dark planking of the rowboat as heavy slugs splintered the wood. The vessel lurched slightly under the impacts and spun slowly around.
Boots clattered on the iron stairway.
A muttered conference distorted a dozen times by the sea-wet rock faces echoed sibilantly overhead. Then at last there was silence an eerie quiet broken only by the lap and suck of the water; a stillness continually contradicted by the ceaseless interplay of light reflected onto the crystalline roof by the movement of the tide.
The Russians were clearly planning some surprise move based on the belief that they had eliminated an intruder in the boat.
It was the diversion Bolan had hoped for. He motioned to the Icelander, and together they dived underwater and swam through the arch into the submarine pens beneath the gallery.
Bolan surfaced by the dockside.
Abruptly, from behind him, he heard a rush of footsteps along the quay they had just left in the smaller basin. The pursuers had raced through the network of passages in the hope of catching unawares whoever was connected with the boat. By now they would be wise to the fact that the craft itself was no more than a decoy.
More commands rapped out in Russian over the speakers. Followed by Bjornstrom, the Executioner hoisted himself onto the concrete dockside and together they sped silently up the spiral ladder to the stack of drums.
There were men on the far side of the gallery, but they were all concentrating their attention on the far cave. By the drums, Bolan made a brusque movement to catch their eyes.
Four out of the half dozen swung around at once.
Four SMG's roared a hymn of hate through the caves. Rock chips showered Bolan's side of the gallery; oil gushed from punctured drums.
The two saboteurs had ripped open their neoprene sacks in readiness.
Facedown below the gallery railing, they returned fire. Bjornstrom's compact sixteen-inch Ingram chattered out a stream of lethal skull busters, and the Executioner's AutoMag punctuated the death stream with individual shots that bellowed beneath the cavern roof.
Two of the Russians fell forward over the rail and dropped into the dock basin, where they floated lifelessly, trailing clouds of crimson in the dark water. A third was hurled back against the wall, his arm shattering on impact.
"Okay," Bolan yelled. "Now! We've been surprised and beaten back on the way in. Let's go!"
Vaulting over the rail, they dived into the basin and swam frantically underwater for the cave entrance. With luck the guards outside on the spur wouldn't know what the hell was going on; with luck they wouldn't be in direct contact with the speaker system; with luck Bolan and his companion could stay submerged long enough, once they were through the arch, to escape their attention.
With luck.
It was when he surfaced to catch his breath beneath the arch that Bolan heard, over the sporadic shots still being fired after them, the shouts from the inner cave that were followed by a woman's scream.
With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, he realized that, in decoying the main body of the Russians into the second chamber, he had unwittingly delivered Erika Axelsson into the hands of the enemy.
16
"She is safe for another three hours," Bjornstrom said. "She does after all have the pill with her."
"The pill?" Bolan sounded incredulous. "You don't mean... Not the cyanide pills?"
"No, no. Nothing so... final. A kind of a sleeping pill, except that it acts instantly. It's a variety of chloral hydrate, your old-fashioned Mickey Finn, without the hangover. They can do nothing to her, she will hear nothing and feel nothing, until the effect wears off."
"You said three hours?"
"Four from the time she bit down on it. They give them to us in our service it leaves time to attempt a rescue before they start to torture a prisoner. There is no point administering electric shocks to someone who is how do you say? out for the count."
"But three hours from now?"
It was not quite midday. Bolan and the Icelander were holding a conference of war over glasses of Brennevin and weak local beer in a tavern on the outskirts of Pvera, on the far side of the fjord from the Russian concession.
"That means we have to bust into the place and get her out by three o'clock this afternoon, right?"
"I think so," Bjornstrom said soberly.
The mission is more important than individual members of the team this was the hard lesson Bolan had to learn in Nam, in the Mafia wars and during his subsequent anti terrorist campaign. It was a truism for military men the world over. But that didn't mean you wouldn't do your damnedest to get back a fellow fighter in enemy hands... before that operation could compromise the mission.
In any case this one was a self-imposed mission. Even if the time element had not been in favor of a quick rescue attempt, no alternative entered the Executioner's mind; no other line of action would have occurred to him. Erika was a comrade in arms. She had been captured; she must be released. As quickly as possible. It was that simple.
"How are we going to do it?" Bjornstrom said.
Before Bolan could reply, a tall, elderly man with white hair and thick-lensed glasses detached himself from a group of young people and advanced on Bolan. He held out his hand.
"Good to see you again," he said affably. "I guess you made your run down to Jokulsa after all?"
Astonished, Bolan automatically took the hand, thinking: who the hell is this? The face was vaguely familiar but he could not place it; neither the voice nor the presence stirred any connection in his memory.
"The plane," the old-timer reminded him. "The flight from Copenhagen."
Of course. Bolan remembered. So much had happened since then that he had completely forgotten the conversation with the passenger sitting next to him on the Icelandair 727.