Blood Heat Zero (9 page)

Steadily, inexorably, the kayak was drawn stern-first toward the lip of the falls.

The Beretta's magazine was empty.

Bolan thought he might have winged the remaining submachine gunner, who had flopped down into one of the raft's seats. But he might have been paddling on the far side to help the guy at the tiller. There was no time to check: the wounded killer was firing the Stetchkin with his good arm; the remaining man with the Skorpion firing from the shoulder with the machine pistol's wire stock extended was pumping 7.65 mm slugs on full-auto at the kayak.

Seeing the line of holes creep-along the prow toward the cockpit, Bolan took advantage of the only maneuver open to him he swept the paddle blade to one side, snapped his hips violently sideways and dumped the canoe into an Eskimo roll.

The waterlogged canoe turned slowly onto its back; Bolan disappeared beneath the surface.

In the distance, Bjornstrom watched aghast as the keel line of the American's capsized craft was riddled from stem to stern by the Russian gunners. Half awash in the speeding flood, the kayak did not right itself.

With increasing speed, it shot toward the lip of the falls.

For a dizzy moment it seemed to hang at the edge, the pointed bow rising almost vertically from the water. Then it vanished into the maelstrom below.

For an instant the Icelander thought he saw Bolan's yellow helmet reappear among the turbulent eddies racing toward the lip, then it, too, was swept away and dropped out of sight.

Gunnar Bjornstrom scrambled down from the rock outcrop and leaped into the river. He was a strong swimmer. And he was wearing a life jacket. Even so the turbulent current carried him two hundred yards downstream before he could make the west bank of the Jokulsa a Fjollum.

He was no longer in danger from the Russians. They were too busy trying to avoid death by drowning.

In their eagerness to eliminate the Executioner, they had allowed their raft to drift too near the cataract.

Now, even with the outboard engine bellowing at full power, they were losing ground. Frantically they pushed the first gunner Bjornstrom had killed out of the inflatable.

The body was quickly carried away by the current. It vanished into a seething suckhole, reappeared nearer the falls. On the very lip, a leg appeared above the surface, then a limp arm, as if waving in mock farewell. Seconds later it had gone.

The killers were tossing overheard yet another corpse the second Uziman, who must after all have been wasted by Bolan's final burst. Back at the tiller again, the guy with the shattered arm was screaming hysterically. His two companions took up paddles and began, grim faced, to stroke as hard as they could. But the current's grasp on the raft was relentless with a terrible inevitability it backed up toward the edge.

Bjornstrom watched the Russians die.

The end was unexpectedly sudden. A brusque acceleration, as if a retaining spring had snapped or the river had tired of playing cat and mouse and decided to get it over with and the raft surged toward the deadly lip.

Tilting up as it went over, it hurled out at least two of the occupants before it fell. For an instant Bjornstrom heard their death screams. After that there was nothing but the roar of thousands of tons of water pounding down on the rocks below.

Bjornstrom ran to a narrow pathway cut from the rock on the western margin of the cataract. Spume from the thundering falls had blown across to slick the black rock, and he had difficulty keeping his feet on the slippery, treacherous surface. But at last he arrived on a ledge lower down, from which he could overlook the giant basin hollowed by the water.

There was nothing to see through the spray but the foaming white wilderness into which the great curving curtain of the cascade was plunging.

It was not until twenty minutes later that the hellhole relinquished the first of its prizes fragments from Bolan's kayak. The spray skirt, a broken paddle, burst-open provision sacks and a portion of the foredeck were spewed out to swirl away on the surface of the river as it raced toward the ocean. Soon afterward the yellow helmet bobbed to the surface, floated into an eddy and was beached on a gravel strip fifty yards downstream. There was no sign of the Russians or their raft.

With a heavy heart, Bjornstrom hurried on. Grimsstadir was five miles away, but he was well-known in the area. And well liked, which is all-important in thinly populated regions. He completed the last three and a half miles on a borrowed pony.

The little town was at the foot of two sheer bluffs facing each other across the Jokulsa a Fjollum valley.

Most of the houses set in neat garden plots between each row of streets were of the same style orderly white rectangles with dormer windows on the upper floors that projected from roofs colored red, green, terra-cotta or midnight blue.

Bjornstrom passed them all and went into an older building at one side of a square, a gray stone pile that housed the local commissariat of police.

The moment he had dumped the crippled kayak into the first part of an Eskimo roll, Bolan made what expert paddlemen called a "wet exit." He ripped off the spray skirt, released his helmet and dived out of the cockpit. He was at once seized by the current and rolled away from the capsized canoe.

Ten yards downstream there was a suckhole five feet across and probably half as deep again. Bolan was swept underwater toward this swirling funnel and held down beneath the surface by the hydraulic pressure of the stream.

It was surprisingly clear down there.

He could make out every detail of the freckled granite boulder submerged just below the surface, which created the miniwhirlpool; he could see the smooth, dark bedrock at the bottom of the river; he could see farther on the stone-layered face of a shelf that formed a rampart between him and the lip of the falls.

If he could make that rampart and stay submerged below it, there was a chance that he could work his way to the east bank of the river and get out.

And if not.

He had two alternatives, both lethal he would remain spinning in the suckhole and drown, or he would float above the level of the rampart and be swept instantly over the edge of the cataract.

Bolan knew that the only way to escape the deadly clutch of a suckhole was down. He knew there would be a wave above the rampart that would marginally reduce the strength of the current on that part of the river.

He jerked the quick-release toggle of his buoyancy vest and swam powerfully down under the vortex to the undercurrent. At once he was whirled away from the suckhole, his face inches from the rocky bed, and then shot to the surface like a cork.

He gasped a single lungful of air and dived again, thrusting deep with all his strength. He was perilously near that tall wave, and beyond it there was nothing but the lip, nothing to stop him being shot over into the seething maelstrom below.

He was above the rock rampart now, still shooting downstream.

An extra push of his legs... a desperate grab for a rough projection as he wedged the fingers of his other hand into a crevice splitting the chiseled face... and then slowly, against the manic force of the current, he hauled himself down until he was crouched on the riverbed in the shelter of the rampart.

He lay flat, pressing himself into the angle between rock and riverbed, and started to crawl toward the bank.

It was a difficult maneuver. He had to concentrate on forward movement, yet combine this with resistance to the lateral pull of the current that threatened every second to pluck him away from his underwater refuge and hurl him into oblivion.

The sounds of the river were drowned by the roaring of blood in his ears, the rattle of stones by the thump of his heart. He had no idea how far he had crawled or how far he had still to go.

He was running out of air; his lungs were bursting with the effort of moving in an oxygen-deprived situation.

Bolan forced himself onward. He had forgotten the purpose of his vacation trip, forgotten the mystery of the river, the Russians and Bjornstrom, forgotten even the risk of hurtling over the falls to his death. Every fiber of his being was centered on a single aim to reach the riverbank before his lungs gave out on him and he lost consciousness.

Or died.

For although Bolan was an athlete, a man with a husky body never less than one hundred percent in shape, he had always preferred to pit his agility, speed and muscular coordination, his strength and determination against the forces of nature rather than those of a human competitor.

"The only meaningful competition," he wrote once in his journal, "is against oneself. But perhaps competition is not the right word it is more that one pushes oneself to the ultimate limits of endurance, capacity and capability and, in coming back from these limits, learns a lesson more valuable than any to be gained besting another person." It was this ethos that had brought him to Iceland in the first place, this which urged him to continue his challenge even after the Russians had organized a manhunt placing his life in jeopardy.

And in the end it was Bolan's particular brand of steely determination that triumphed over adversity. But it was a near thing, a very near thing.

Into his dimming consciousness floated the idea that the face of the rock rampart was losing height, that the pull of the current had diminished, that the water was shallower.

With the last of his fading strength he dragged himself a final few yards... and let go.

He sat up on the bed of the river.

And his head was above water.

Bolan gulped in great drafts of air, breathing in ragged gasps until the hammering of his heart slowed down. He sat without moving, staring out across the swirling surface of the river, the crashing roar of the waterfall once more in his ears.

There was no sign of the Russians or their raft. The water flowed remorselessly onward, hurling itself over the lip of the cataract. He saw Bjornstrom running along the far bank, but for the moment he was too weak to call out. In any case his voice would have been lost in the thunder of the falls.

By the time he staggered to his feet and waded ashore, the Icelander was no longer in sight.

Bolan knew roughly how far he was from Grimsstadir. For direction, all he had to do was follow at a discreet distance, because the Russians would be back the course of the river. But right now the idea of a five-mile march across that bleak, inhospitable lava plain held little attraction for him.

He had been paddling all night and most of the previous day, when lack of suitable cover, plus the fight with the hoods in the chopper, had cheated him of his rest. He realized, and the heaviness of his overtaxed limbs confirmed it, that he had slept for only one four-hour stretch since he lowered himself into the sinkhole on the Vatnajokull glacier.

If he was to retain the cutting edge of his reactions, the split-second timing that his dangerous trade demanded, he must rest up. Soon.

Before he rolled the kayak, Bolan had stuffed the Beretta back in the waterproof pouch along with his AutoMag. This, with another neoprene sack, was still clipped to his belt.

Tightly wrapped in that second container were thermal inners and the skintight black-quit that had become the Executioner's trademark. There was also a folded, ultralightweight plastic sack that could be opened out to the size of a small suitcase.

Bolan stripped off his wet rubbers and exercised his lithe, muscular body in the chill northern air until his skin was dry. He dressed quickly in the cellular inners, pulled on the black-quit and packed the pouch containing his weapons, his holstered combat belt and the wet suit into the plastic case. It closed with a nylon zipper and sported reinforced handles.

Three hundred yards below the falls, a bluff rose on the eastern side of the river with boulders scattered along the foot of the rock face. Bolan found a sheltered crevice between two of these, lay down with his head resting on the plastic sack and slept.

He woke as the right faded and continued on his way to Grimsstadir.

So far, no clear plan had formed in his mind. He would keep following the Russians, for sure. But now that the kayak was gone, organization of any precise details relating to the chase would have to be played by ear. There was money zippered into his belt.

Perhaps he could rent another boat at Grimsstadir.

He knew, too, that Bjornstrom had survived the dangers of the waterfalls.

But whether or not the big Icelander would rejoin him was no more than a question mark.

Whatever, he would play the cards the way he always did, the way they were dealt.

What astonished him this time was the joker he found in his hand.

The last half mile of his journey to the silent, shuttered town was along a paved highway. Before the first houses there was a gas station with a single pump. He was striding silently past when a voice whispered from the shadows behind the pump.

"Mr. Mack Bolan?" The warrior stopped in midstride, hairs prickling on the nape of his neck. His guns were still inside the plastic carrier.

"Who wants to know?" he said huskily.

"A friend. I have a gift for you from Gunnar."

Bolan's taut muscles relaxed. It couldn't be a trap there was no way the Russians could have known the identity of the second fighter who had downed their chopper.

"Advance, friend," he said dryly, shades of army guard duty flooding his memory, "and be recognized." He caught his breath.

The figure stepping out from behind the pump was that of a woman. As far as he could see in the half light she was tall, slim and blond. Her features were in shadow, but he could see that her hair was cut very short, that she wore jeans and a sweater... and, yeah, that she was stacked.

Most surprising of all was the "gift" that she held out to him without another word.

It was a Heckler and Koch G-11 caseless assault rifle.

The Heckler and Koch G-11 looks more like a carrying case for some esoteric musical instrument than a death machine. The twenty-nine-inch grooved plastic housing has no protuberances and only two holes the muzzle and an opening for ejecting misfired rounds.

The pistol grip beneath islet the exact center of gravity and the carrying handle above it also acts as an optical sight.

The rate of fire is very high two thousand rounds per minute maximum, but this is reduced to six hundred on normal autofire.

Although the one hundred rounds contained by the weapon are only 4.7 mm caliber they can be fired in 3-round bursts each lasting only ninety milliseconds and each capable of piercing a steel helmet at a range of five hundred yards.

Mack Bolan was familiar with the gun and its capability. In the present circumstances it was a welcome gift, particularly if there was going to be any action underwater. But its arrival, and the manner of that, was as mysterious as the rest of the events of the past few days.

"I don't understand," he said. "Who are you? How come Gunnar knew I would be here on this road at this time?"

Her name, she told him, was Erika Axelsson. She was a friend of Bjornstrom's. He was aware of her smile in the dawn light.

"It was not so difficult. Gunnar thought at first you had been drowned at the Fjallagfoss. He was very sad. But later one of the Fokker coast-guard planes reported a man sleeping between rocks on the banks of the Jokulsa a Fjollum, and he guessed that it could be you."

Bolan shook his head in bewilderment. He must have been beat, all right he hadn't even heard the plane.

"After that," Erika continued, "well, he said he knew you must come to town. He knew you would probably make it at night. This is the only road you could come by."

"Yeah, but he didn't know he couldn't have known what time I'd arrive. I didn't know myself."

"That was not so much a problem. All I had to do was wait. I have been here since midnight," the woman said simply.

"You waited for me all night?" Bolan was astonished. "Well, I am grateful. But I don't get it. What's your angle? For that matter, what's his?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean... well, why are you doing this?"

"I told you. I am his friend."

"Okay. But people don't hang in around deserted gas stations all night toting this kind of thing." He hefted the assault rifle in both hands. "I mean, you have to agree it's a little... unusual."

"Gunner is an unusual man."

"Yeah, I found that out. Luckily for me, too. He says he's mad at the Russians for screwing around in his country and he wants to find out why. But that can't be the whole story. What is he really? Some kind of cop?"

"You will have to ask Gunnar," Erika said.

Bolan grinned. "I already did. I didn't get very far. But I'll keep at it. I don't give up that easy."

"Gunner, also. He is a very determined man. But sometimes even for such men it is necessary to trust people, trust them without knowing everything."

"Sure it is," Bolan said. "I think your friend Gunnar and me proved that. Still, even with someone you trust, there are times when it would help to know just who you are trusting!" But he could pry nothing more from the woman about herself, about Bjornstrom or about the special, secret interest he showed in the Russian intrigue.

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.

The bomber collapsed into a huddle of blood-stained rags. The grenade flew from his hand and exploded harmlessly on the upland turf near the truck.

Shattered glass tinkled to the roadway.

Bolan rose to his feet, replaced the assault rifle in the damaged plastic holdall and walked to the truck. The engine refused to start carburetor, feed pipes and inlet manifold had been mangled by the G-11's first murderous eruption. He pushed it into the ditch, hauled the bodies into the rear section, closed the doors and continued on his way. He was in sight of the lake before the next vehicle passed him on the way to Grimsstadir.