For as far as he could see in the curved mirror, the narrow track unrolled emptily behind him across the bleak, treeless land.
The pursuers if pursuers they had been had given up.
Ten miles farther on he discovered why.
The trail petered out, while the ice cap was still no more than a shimmering line in the distance, in a rocky wilderness that had once been a lava flow a deserted plateau that was bare of vegetation and littered with shallow lakes. There was no turnout, no intersection, no alternative route; there was nothing to do but turn around and go back.
If either of those cars was following him, all they would have had to do would be to park near the original turnout and wait for him to come back.
And that was what they did.
After that they made no pretense that they just happened to be following the same route; they fell in behind the Colt, first the Audi, then the Mere G-Wagen, with a precision that was almost military, maintaining their exact distance at whatever speed the Executioner chose.
Bolan had a sudden disturbing thought. Could they in fact be military? Or at any rate the equivalent?
Iceland had no army, no navy, no air force, and only a small coast-guard service. Even the police numbered less than six hundred country-wide. But there could be some kind of security organization. Had his outlaw status somehow been flashed ahead of his arrival? Were they keeping tabs on him to see what the hell he was up to in their country? Had they connected him with the bodies at the hotel?
Unlikely. In that case surely they would simply have taken him in.
But there was also the possibility that one of the attempts on his life had been reported; maybe the authorities were checking him out, curious to know why he had not complained.
More likely still was the simplest explanation the goons on his tail were from the same outfit that had fouled up the earlier attempts on his life.
If that was the case, it suited the Executioner fine; that was just the way he wanted it.
Once they had been maneuvered into a position where he could gain the upper hand, he figured he would at least have a chance to find out what the hell went on.
Bolan made few mistakes in his tactical appreciations. This was one of them.
He led the procession toward Porosstadir and the long, narrow sea arm known as Hruta Fjord. Then near the village of Stathur, when the steely headwaters of the craggy twenty-five-mile inlet were already visible below the left-hand margin of the road, he veered away to the east, bumping over a stony track that spiraled up into the Vistur Hunavatus highlands.
The G-Wagen and the Audi followed, closing now.
Bolan accelerated, wheels spinning clouds of dust into the mountain air as he hurled the Colt around each curve.
Breasting the final rise, he jammed momentarily on the brake pedal. Ahead, the trail looped crazily down the face of an escarpment and then lost itself in a confusion of giant boulders far below. Beyond these scattered segments of rock a bare landscape stretched away in gentle undulations toward a line of ancient volcanic cones.
Bolan maneuvered the utility down the grade, zigzagging the rock face, showering stones and loose stone chips into the void at each twist in the track. He wrenched the offroader between the boulders at the foot of the cliff and steered out across a plain floored with coarse upland grass.
Two hundred yards behind, the G-Wagen bumped out from the dark and ragged outcrops in pursuit. But the rough ground proved too much for the Audi.
With a lower ground clearance, the powerful sedan tore the casing from its rear differential on a rocky projection and ground to a halt with a scream of ruptured metal.
Bolan grinned.
There was no doubt now that the followers two stalled in the Audi and three in the Mere, as far as he could see were out to get him.
Three hundred yards out from the escarpment, granules of toughened glass stung the back of the Executioner's neck as the rear window of the Colt exploded inward. Someone in the Mercedes had opened fire with an SMG or a machine pistol. Heavy slugs ripped through the fiberglass top and punched holes in the steel bodywork of the vehicle.
But the range was too great for accurate shooting, and in any case the grass, smooth enough from a distance, was in fact so pitted with small hollows, so studded with hummocks that no marksman could hope to score from a bouncing utility traveling at more than forty mph.
Bolan gunned the 4x4. Some way beyond a slight swell in the treeless surface of the plain he had seen a slash of brighter, more vivid green coloring the dun landscape. His plan, a sudden decision, depended on his ability to dip out of sight of the Mercedes for an instant before he approached that stretch of green.
A prehistoric stone monument stood on the crest of the rise. Three vast rock columns, topped by two equally heavy horizontal slabs, hid the Colt momentarily from view as Bolan swerved sideways and threw out his luggage.
Then he was rocketing down the far slope toward that bright green space.
And briefly, but for long enough, the pursuers dropped out of sight on the far side of the low ridge.
Bolan braked fiercely, opened the driver's door and dived out of the decelerating Shogun. He hit the ground, shoulder-rolled and came up crouching, sprinting for the shelter of a solitary rock that pierced the grassy slope.
The off-roader, picking up speed again, plowed on with its engine bellowing. A twenty-pound stone, harvested by Bolan in case of emergencies during his fruitless attempt to make the Langjokull glacier, weighted its acceleration pedal flat to the floorboards.
As the G-Wagen appeared over the crest, Bolan's mount was hitting the half century. Swaying giddily from side to side, it made the foot of the slope, shot up a small ramp and took to the air for more than twenty feet before it hit the jade-green surface of the brighter area.
The Colt didn't bounce. The green surface erupted. The utility, obscured by a curtain of color, appeared to be half engulfed. Slowly it began sinking from sight.
The flat green swath was no grassy upland meadow but a treacherous quagmire, one of the deadly bogs for which the interior of Iceland was notorious.
The Mercedes squealed to a halt on the fringe of the morass. Three men, unaware of Bolan's escape, got out. A driver and two gunners, as he had surmised. He was ready behind the rocky outcrop with Big Thunder, the stainless steel .44 AutoMag in his right hand.
He felt no compunction. These guys or soldiers from the same outfit had three times tried to take him out.
The driver stayed by the door of the G-Wagen. The two hardmen armed, Bolan saw, with Uzi submachine guns walked warily to the shelving demarcation line between the grass and the moss-green slime of the swamp. With trigger fingers at the ready, they eyed the slowly submerging Colt, waiting for its occupant to make some desperate attempt to escape.
Nobody emerged. The abandoned utility was already more than halfway under. As they watched, the obscene mass flowed in through the open door and began to fill the cab.
"Over here!" Bolan called from his hiding place.
The killers whirled, flame blossoming from the stubby muzzles of their Uzis.
A hail of lead flailed against the rock, shrieking into the sky as the multiple detonations lost themselves in space.
Bolan had hurled himself sideways. He fired two-handed, stitching a classic left-right-left figure eight across the bodies of the two hoods.
One died on his feet, with white splinters of bone pricking through the crimson ruin of his chest. The other, caught in the left shoulder, spun away, hurled backward over the morass by the demon impact of a heavy Magnum flesh-shredder. He splashed into the wicked slime... and fatally, instead of lying flat or trying to roll himself to the side, he panicked and struck out, some crazed instinct prompting him to head away from the gunfire, toward the sinking Colt.
Bolan could do nothing but watch him die. But before that he had wasted the driver of the Mere with a 3-shot burst that shattered the near window and let daylight into the killer
's skull before he could free his Police Special from its shoulder holster.
The wounded assassin was quickly sucked under. His screaming face gurgled beneath the heaving slime; the last corner of the Shogun's roof squelched out of sight.
Bolan stood and went to examine the bodies.
Zero.
Negative as the corpses in the hotel room in Reykjavik gray coveralls with no labels, no identifying marks; no papers, no documents, not even a wallet. The one undamaged face was neither Oriental, middle eastern nor Mediterranean in type. Like the others it could have come from any country in Northern Europe.
The Executioner sighed. He reloaded the AutoMag, climbed into the G-Wagen and fired the engine. He drove back toward the wrecked Audi, stopping on the way to recover his luggage from behind the stone monument. A hell of a way civilization had come since they were erected, he thought bitterly.
Bolan hoped the other stranded gunmen seeing the red utility return would assume their prey had been eliminated in the firelight and their comrades were on the way back to report success.
But it was too much to hope for.
Maybe they could see that there was only one rider instead of three; maybe there was some signal he should have given. In any event they opened fire while the G-Wagen was still more than one hundred yards away.
That was their first mistake.
The range, again, was too great for the handguns they were using. They must have concentrated all the heavier stuff they had on the spearhead detail in the Merc. That was the second.
Their third mistake, fatal in any warlike encounter, was to underestimate the strength and determination of their opponent.
Bolan made no attempt to slacken speed, take evasive action or duck out of the fight. He drove the heavy Mercedes utility straight at the sedan, keeping an iron grip on the bucking wheel with one hand, pumping lethal .44 boat tails from the AutoMag with the other hand.
The two-man crew from the Audi Quattro was out of the car and behind the hood before the Mercedes made half the distance, spitting death from revolvers he guessed to be Police Specials, like the dead driver's. But the relatively lightweight .38's were no match for the steel-drilling, 240-grain messengers of death thundering from the Executioner's cannon. After a few snap shots the goons dropped from sight, obviously waiting for him to exhaust his magazine.
The Merc's windshield was holed in two places; the laminated glass starred but held. Apart from the last of a rear window there was, so far as Bolan could see, no other damage. He braced himself for the shock, steering the G-Wagen hard at the Audi's rear quarter.
The massive iron grille protecting the utility's front smashed into the sedan's rear wheel and trunk, mangling the bodywork and rupturing the fuel tank. Gasoline splashed out as the Audi tipped over onto its side with a screech of crumpled steel.
Bolan rocked the G-Wagen to a halt and leaped down behind one of the boulders. Big Thunder's magazine was empty but now he held the Beretta 93-R in his hand. Folding down the forward hand grip, he sighted carefully and loosed off a single shot.
The slug was well aimed, striking the rock on which the Audi had foundered at a shallow angle and ricocheting away in a shower of sparks. The inflammable vapor rising from the savaged fuel tank ignited with a dull thump. An instant later the gasoline remaining in the tank exploded, transforming the capsized Audi into a blazing fireball.
From beneath the boiling, black-tinged maelstrom a scarecrow figure erupted, beating ineffectually at its flaming clothes with charred hands.
Bolan fired a mercy round to terminate the hood's agony.
The last man the one the Executioner was determined to keep alive dashed out from behind the holocaust and headed for a rock shelf, firing from the hip as he ran.
Bolan dropped him in midstride with an auto 3-shot aimed low. The hardman's gun skittered from his hands as he dropped, writhing, with shattered knees.
Bolan ran across and hauled the guy to his feet, one big hand bunched in the anonymous gray coveralls.
"Okay, hotshot," he snarled, "time to start talking, now!" He shook the injured gunman fiercely in his grasp.
The man's eyes, almost colorless, showed neither fear nor hate nor even shock. His face was expressionless; only the teeth sunk into his lower lip revealed the effort he was making not to scream aloud at the pain scything his splintered kneecaps.
Bolan jammed the Beretta's muzzle against the man's forehead, let him see the trigger finger whitening in the squeeze.
"Who the hell are you?" the Executioner grated. "Who sent you? And why are you trying to kill me?"
The wounded killer choked. His hand flew to his mouth.
Suddenly he smiled up into the big guy's face.
And shuddered.
Bolan realized too late that this was no involuntary hand gesture provoked by a spasm of agony, no expression of humor, however grim.
The lips were drawn back from discolored teeth by a fearful rictus.
The body stiffened and then went limp.
The head flopped forward and an acrid almond odor caused Bolan to release his grip in a reflex of horror.
The guy had bitten on a cyanide pill rather than talk.
Bolan released his breath in a long sigh of frustration.
"Damn!" he said forcefully.
His ruse to decoy the assassins out into the open had worked exactly the way he had planned it.
And he had ended up as he started... knowing precisely nothing.
What now?
He shrugged. The car-rental agency would be surprised when he turned in a 300-GD off-roader that was worth five thousand bucks more than the Colt he had hired even if the Mercedes needed a certain amount of attention to the rear window and windshield. But once he had handled that little problem, he decided, he would continue with his vacation as planned.
And if the mysterious organization that seemed so anxious to waste him followed him down below the ice cap... well, he'd tackle that one when it happened.
He returned to the G-Wagen and headed for the trail that wound back up the escarpment.
4
A Russian factory ship loomed above the trawlers and tugs berthed along the waterfront at Akureyri.
"Loaded to the gunwales with surveillance equipment," the man wearing the watch cap said to Bolan. "We know it, and they know we know it, but nobody does nothing about it."
"That so?" the Executioner said casually.
"No trawlermen aboard that ship." The sailor spit into the sawdust at his feet. "Soviet navy specialists, most of 'em. They take our fish and louse up the goddam breeding grounds, but mainly they use those boats to keep tabs on shipping movements, NATO maneuvers and suchlike."
They were in a tavern on the wharf.
It was the first time in many missions, but since he was supposed to be enjoying a well-earned R and R. the soldier had decided to sink a few beers. The man in the watch cap, perched on the next bar stool, had started talking as soon as he sat down.
"How come they dock in your town?" Bolan asked.
"There's a NATO goodwill flotilla heading this way frigates from Britain, the U.S., West Germany and Norway and like I say, they aim to keep tabs. Times they refuel, too, or take shelter from the big storms. It can get kind of rugged out there." The sailor nodded toward the shower of arctic spray exploding over the seawall outside the windowpanes. "They got a right to put in anyway," he added, "We buy our oil from the Soviets. And they started in on a mining concession over by Husavik, in the northeast, a few months past."
"Oh, yeah? Mining what?" Bolan wasn't really interested but it cost nothing to be polite. "Search me."
The Icelander shrugged.
"Minerals. Whatever. They got some crazy rock formations out there. It seems the Russians are flying in plenty of heavy equipment through the airstrip at Husavik."
Bolan signaled the bartender and bought his companion a beer.
"Skoal!" The guy raised his glass and drank. He shook his head. "Crazy w
orld, too, ain't it? Your Navy people use the Keflavik base to monitor the movement of Soviet warships and subs toward the North Atlantic; the Reds use their boats to monitor the movements of your fleet... meantime the seabed is a garbage dump of nuclear waste and listening devices."
"Listening devices?"
"Sure." The seaman laughed. "You know what? Last week one of our coast-guard patrol vessels fished up what looked like a rusted mine that had been floating in the water since World War I." He paused for effect. "It was packed with electronic gadgetry so delicate you could have heard the skipper of a nuclear killer sub shaving!"
Bolan laughed dutifully. The conversation was beginning to tire him.
He was on vacation, dammit. In any case he had heard it all before.
He finished his beer, told the sailor in the watch cap goodbye and left. It was a long, tortuous drive to Egilsstadir a hundred miles in a straight line, almost twice that following Iceland's primitive, twisting roads and he wanted to make it before the light started to fade.
Egilsstadir was located in a long valley brimming with one of the very few forests in the country. The birch and aspen plantations were no more than twelve feet high, but they grew thickly and they were easy on the eye after grueling hours spent circumnavigating the interminable indented fjords gashing the bleak and treeless coastline.
At one point the road crossed the Jokulsa a Fjollum, the river he was to follow in his kayak, on a high, arched bridge of prestressed concrete.
Surmounting a bluff some way downstream, he could see hoists and gantries in the center of a camp that housed, he supposed, the engineers exploiting the Russian mining concession.
The airport at Egilsstadir was a single asphalt runway and a small terminal shack. It was also something like a theater restricted to two shows daily one for the morning Icelandair flight from Reykjavik and one for the afternoon. In between, the apron was deserted, the terminal as silent as the surrounding forest. Two guards, changing shift every four hours, patrolled the perimeter and guarded a freight shed where Bolan's gear should by now be stored.
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