But then an ugly doubt surfaced in his mind. Could this man be the contact who had tipped off the Russians that a guy known as the Executioner was on his way?
Uh-uh. Looking beyond the white-haired guy to the group he had left, he recalled the rest of it. They were college kids. Boys and girls. He remembered them leaving Keflavik field while he was checking out his freight, bound for the capital on a bus.
Geology students, and the old man was their professor.
"Yeah," he said in answer to the professor's question. "I finally made it. A fairly... eventful... journey. I hope your own expedition has been successful," he added politely, wondering how he could get rid of the elderly academic.
"Not as interesting as yours, I'm afraid," the professor replied. "We can't all cross the lava fields in kayaks! However, this afternoon should prove stimulating. The Russians leasing the promontory on the far side of the fjord have kindly offered to show us over the trial bores they are sinking among the igneous intrusions."
Bolan caught his breath. "The Russians?" he echoed.
"That's right. It seems there are uncharacteristic pegmatites among the amphiboles and plagioclase zones they encountered in their search for tin lodes. They promise to let us explore the upper galleries."
"What time?" Bolan asked urgently. "What time this afternoon?"
The professor raised his brows, surprised at the Executioner's tone of voice. "Three-thirty, actually," he said. "We are required to make a punctual appearance at the main gate. It seems they are rather hot on security, and we have to be escorted to the pithead."
Bolan excused himself as quickly as he could and rejoined Bjornstrom. This time he was really shaken. Not only was Erika in the hands of the Russians, a party of college kids were being shown over the upper section of the mine workings at the very time the charges they had so carefully timed were due to explode.
Somehow, within the next three hours, they had to spirit the girl away and save the students from almost certain death.
"We must go back in and alter the timing," Bjornstrom said. "Push the hour hands right back again so the charges will not go off until late this evening."
"No way." Bolan shook his head. "There are twelve of them. Each one has to be located, unwrapped, retimed, taped back in position and then concealed again. That takes a lot more time than just shoving a prepared package in among the machinery. We'd never make it; there wouldn't be enough work stoppages for one thing."
"But if we concentrated first on those nearest the shaft, the charges putting the kids in most danger?"
"We might not be able to concentrate on any. For all we know they may not be blasting at all this afternoon. Especially if they have a conducted tour planned."
"Then?.." The Icelander looked crushed.
"We'll play it another way. We'll go back in all right. But we won't touch the charges; we won't go near them. We'll simply use the caves as an entry to the surface workings."
"You're crazy."
Like a fox, Gunnar. We'll have to play it damned dose to the chest, but it can be done. We have three objectives — destroy the base, rescue Erika and save the kids, right?"
"So?"
"So what's wrong with making all three in a single operation?"
"I cannot see how it is possible," Bjornstrom said.
"I'll tell you," Bolan told him. "If we leave the charges the way they are we achieve objective number one, anyway. So all that remains is to get Erika out and stop the students going in."
"This is where I come in, Bolan. How the hell ?"
"Listen. All we have to do is get to that elevator. If they are still blasting, we do it while they're in the shelter; if not, we'll blast our own way in there. With lead. Once we make the cage, we take it to the top and come out shooting. We locate Erika... and then we stage the biggest, boldest, most ear-shattering battle the Russians have seen for a long time."
"After we have Erika? Why don't we just get out? If that is not just a pipe dream anyway?"
"You don't understand. The Sovs are obviously asking these Danish kids and their instructor around as a PR exercise. They won't allow them anyplace near the submarine pens. But it consolidates their position, strengthens their cover if independent witnesses actually see them doing their mining number. If we raise enough hell, on the other hand, the Russians themselves will find some way to stop the kids coming in. The last thing they'll want is an audience if the place is humming with live rounds from Ingrams and Kalashnikovs!"
Bjornstrom passed a hand over his face. "Well," he said, "it might work." He sighed heavily. "I suppose."
"It's got to work," the Executioner said.
17
The security guards got Erika Axelsson to the pithead she was already under the effects of the pill. They took her to a room behind the chief overseer's office, ripped the latex dry-suit down around her ankles, hosed her with icy water and beat her naked body with rubber hoses. But though her breasts, belly and buttocks turned black and blue she showed no reaction.
She remained comatose when a 12-volt electric current from a hand-cranked generator was jolted through her body, and there was no muscular reflex when one of the guards stubbed out a cigarette on her wrist.
"It's no good," the station doctor told them. "It's pointless applying stimuli, useless to ask questions. She is genuinely, deeply unconscious."
The KGB colonel in charge of security was furious. "How long," he raged, "before the bitch will be in a fit state to be questioned?"
The doctor shrugged. "Difficult to say. Depends on the exact composition of the drug it's some kind of chloral hydrate compound. And of course on the amount in the pill. Clearly it will be fairly efficient, or she would not have been provided with it. I say several hours at least."
Colonel Dmitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin became increasingly frustrated as he pondered his present circumstances.
He had once been liaison between the KGB and GRU military intelligence. In that function he had been assistant to the infamous Major General Greb Strakhov of the KGB hierarchy. The Iceland posting was a demotion. It had come as a result of Antonin's failure to organize a worldwide Mafia confederation that was to have been backed with KGB money.
The man responsible for that failure, for provoking such internecine strife among the various Mob families that the idea had to be abandoned as impracticable, was Mack Bolan.
Not Colonel Antonin's favorite character, now or at any time.
It was bad enough that they had crossed swords not just that once but many times... and the American had always come out on top. The worst thing of all was that Bolan should have turned up right here, in Iceland, at the exact time Antonin hoped for a spectacular success that would reestablish him in the eyes of Moscow.
How had the bastard known?
The commercial attache from the Soviet embassy who happened to recognize him on the plane from Denmark had done well to signal Antonin at once. Yet the capitalist lackey had four times outwitted KGB assassins before he even arrived at the sinkhole in the glacier.
Since then there had been nothing but disasters.
The crews of two outposts on the river annihilated, a helicopter and its occupants destroyed at the pumping station near Grimsstadir by Bolan and some as yet unidentified accomplice, five men and a raft vanished without trace at the Fjallagfoss, a vehicle and another five operatives lost on the road near the lakehead. And Bolan, unscathed, was still advancing as remorselessly, as the tides that Antonin had made part of his own blueprint for success.