Blood Heat Zero te-90

by Don Pendleton

  He was, he judged, two bends above the oxbow when a sight line past a two-hundred-yard reach and between two opposing bluffs gave him a glimpse of the killers hideout.

  It was a momentary view, before the emplacement disappeared behind one of the bluffs. But it was not reassuring.

  One guy was left beneath the tarp, toting what looked like a submachine gun. Two others had left the shelter, one on either side, to scramble away between the boulders. Each had a hunting rifle slung across his back.

  But they weren't after caribou, Bolan felt certain. The Russians were planning to bracket him with a double enfilade.

  He took up the paddle and pin-wheeled the canoe out into the center of the current. With swift strokes he belted the craft toward the nearer of the two bluffs. A couple of handguns, however efficient and however skilled the shooter, were no match for the weapons arrayed against him. Especially if he was going to be under fire from three separate points.

  There was no way he could shoot his way out of this one in open confrontation stealth and wits were the operative words. And the number-one priority there was to find a hiding place.

  He stroked the kayak into a pool hollowed from the basalt and overhung by a shelf of harder rock. Here he would be visible only to someone standing immediately opposite on the other side of the river.

  Right now there was no watcher. But Bolan's own view was similarly restricted. He climbed out of the kayak and waded to the inner margin of the pool. He carried the Beretta, its 20-round magazine in place, in his right hand. The .44 AutoMag, fully loaded, was stashed inside the zippered front of his wet suit.

  He trod across a narrow strip of shingle and hauled himself up onto the projecting shelf. The sound of the water cascading from his wet suit would be lost in the burble of the river.

  From the shelf there was a wider view of the far bank, of the boulders bordering the entrance to the oxbow, of the bare plateau above.

  But there was no sign of the Russians. The emplacement was out of sight around the bend. Nothing moved among the rocks at the edge of the ancient lava flow. No bird flew, no vegetation stirred in the wind, even the lowering clouds appeared stationary.

  For Bolan there was only one course of action he must take out his adversaries one by one. But first he had to know where they were. Before they could become targets for the Executioner's hellfire attacks they had to show themselves.

  He decided to draw their fire.

  Above the rock shelf, weathered by frost, eroded by millennia of freezing storms, the strata were soft. He broke off a chunk and lobbed it out beyond the ledge to tumble down a shaley slope and splash into the river.

  It was the oldest trick in the book.

  And it didn't work.

  There were no more revealing shots.

  Nobody plunged down among the boulders to check whether Bolan had missed his footing on the slope. Bolan waited.

  There was silence, except for the chuckle of the stream.

  The sky darkened, then scattered drops of rain began to fall. Soon the light would thicken into the Icelandic dusk.

  Prone on his shelf, the warrior breathed shallowly, every nerve alert for the slither of a foot brushing rock, the click of a cocking hammer, the telltale rattle of a stone.

  He heard nothing.

  Then suddenly there came a bellow, a harsh voice distorted by a bullhorn.

  "Bolan! We know you are there! Come out and surrender and no harm will come to you. Our superiors only wish to ask you some questions. Give yourself up and you will be fairly treated as a prisoner."

  Bolan smiled grimly. Fair treatment?

  Oh, sure with every imaginable kind of torture they could think of.

  "Be sensible, Bolan," the amplified voice continued when he made no reply. "If you do not show yourself we shall come in with grenades."

  Bolan replied in Russian. "I am waiting come and get me!"

  There was no further communication from the bullhorn.

  Soon afterward, he heard the distant drone of the airplane. He had been expecting it. It didn't bother him. The kayak was beneath the overhang, invisible from the air; Bolan's neoprene wet suit was almost the same color as the basalt. Lying facedown he would be indistinguishable from the rocky background.

  It was the same light plane that had checked him out above the sinkhole, he saw from the corner of his eye. The pilot made perhaps a dozen passes over the oxbow and the surrounding wilderness. He flew up and down the course of the river.

  Evidently he saw nothing and his radio reports to the emplacement were negative, because there was no reaction from the hidden gunmen. Soon the plane vanished in the darkening sky to the north.

  The rain fell more heavily, dimpling the surface of the river. Wind moaned through crevices in the lava massifs.

  Bolan was shivering, the insulating layer of moisture inside his wet suit chilled by inactivity.

  When it was dark, he clambered down to the pool, ate and drank, and then made some changes to the loading of the kayak.

  He stowed a spare paddle, a two-piece model assembled with an aluminum sleeve and a set screw, in the stern compartment. He snapped the spray skirt in place around the coaming, wedged each of the paddle halves under the belt that normally fit around his waist and then propped them up so that the skirt rose above the level of the deck. He bulked out the tentlike silhouette with PVC sacks from the two storage compartments and laid the one-piece paddle across the foredeck.

  Bolan hoped the mock-up could fool watchers unbelieving here was a boater in the cockpit, hunched up to avoid detection.

  Because he had to end this stalemate pretty damned quick as soon as full daylight returned, he was certain there would be a chopper loaded with reinforcements over head.

  Pushing the kayak in front of him, he waded out into the center of the river.

  The water reached almost to his armpits; the pull of the current was strong enough to make it hard keeping on his feet.

  He shoved the boat away and moved toward the opposite bank, his silenced Beretta held above the surface.

  The kayak was carried downstream, gathering speed as the oxbow approached.

  Bolan was taking two chances that the current would dump the canoe in still water at the far end of the oxbow, where he could recover it; secondly that the snipers would fire at what they figured for a man and not the boat, so that damage would be minimal.

  The bow of the kayak angled in to the curve.

  Bolan heard a shout over the patter of rain on the water. He raised the Beretta, finger curled around the trigger, left hand grasping the foregrip.

  Pinpoints of flame flickered high among the boulders. Three single shots came in quick succession. The rifleman was hiding above, behind the shelf on the same side of the river as the overhang.

  Had been hiding.

  Bolan triggered two bursts before the echoes of the first shot died away, aiming below and fractionally to the left of the rifle's muzzle-flash. The 9 mm skull busters smashed through the killer's rib cage and fisted his life away while two of his own slugs were puncturing the kayak's spray skirt.

  His third shot went into the sky as he was flung back lifeless among the rocks.

  Bolan lifted his feet and allowed the buoyancy of his life jacket to carry him after the kayak.

  He approached the curve fifty yards behind the canoe.

  Fire spit down on the craft from the bluff on the outer edge of the oxbow.

  And this time the hardman had allowed the long hours of waiting to sap his concentration. He was silhouetted against the almost dark sky.

  Bolan drifted against a rock that showed above the surface of the water.

  His feet touched ground. He hauled himself out of the river and sighted the 93-R.

  The guy was reloading. He had only a 3-shot rifle. Probably a Husqvarna .358 Express. Very long range. Dead accurate. Hyperhigh muzzle velocity that gave the 150-grain slugs an almost flat trajectory and huge knockdown power.

  Pr
oviding you hit something.

  Bolan mowed him down. But not before the gumnan had made his play. The executioner must have stirred foam from the surface as he landed. Two shots splatted into the water in front of him; a third caromed off the rock into the night.

  By this time the rifleman was on his way. A stream of death had hosed across his chest. The gun splashed into the river; the shooter landed on his back across a narrow crescent of shingle that the current had deposited on the inside of the bend.

  Bolan submerged again and swam over there. The guy was dead, open eyes dulled in the northern twilight, his torso black with blood. Two plastic grenades were slipped to his web belt.

  Bolan unfastened one and went back into the water.

  He swam now, openly, a fast crawl that churned the water, and accelerated by the current, brought him rapidly to the apex of the oxbow.

  The Beretta, together with Big Thunder and the grenade, was belted to his waist in a waterproof sack.

  His kayak had been carried around the bend and was now within range of the last Russian beneath the tarp. The guy opened up with his SMG short, sharp bursts that ripped out with shattering force and stitched the gloom with points of flame.

  The kayak appeared to shudder from the force of the shells. It spun, heeled over, righted itself and headed stern first for the opposite bank.

  Bolan was below the emplacement, waist high in the stream, the PVC sack unzippered. His right hand dipped in, came out holding the grenade. He pulled the pin. His arm swung back.

  As the gunner got wise to the fact that the kayak was pilotless either that or he had two enemies to deal with! Bolan uncoiled and pitched.

  The grenade streaked through the air, hit the stony rampart and bounced in under the tarp.

  The Russian had time to unleash one brief burst in the Executioner's direction before the explosion. The slugs perforated the PVC sack.

  Then came the cracking detonation and a livid sheet of yellow flame. Brown smoke laced with scarlet ballooned out and drifted away. The collapsed tarp flared momentarily and then subsided onto the debris of charred flesh and splintered the wooden flooring of the emplacement.

  Bolan sighed and headed for the canoe. He would have wished it some other way. But so long as animal man chose to play by the devil's rules.

  Hell, there just was no other way.

  7

  Grimsstadir, the only village anywhere near the river on the first half of its journey to the sea, was fifty miles downstream. There was an airstrip there and a road junction at the head of a lake. For most of the distance the Jokulsa a Fjollum channeled its course through the bare lava uplands. There was only one other sector where a mountain track veered within half a mile of the river valley.

  The Executioner wondered how many more humans he would be forced to kill, how many lookout posts he would have to overcome, before he unearthed the secret of this wild countryside and its clandestine invaders.

  The kayak was beached, as Mack Bolan had guessed, on the far side of the oxbow.

  It was tipped onto its side, with water washing over the coaming and into the cockpit. The spray skirt was riddled with bullet holes, one of the spare paddle halves was snapped in two and several waterproof sacks had been damaged. The fiberglass hull was perforated in twelve places three individual holes in the foredeck and seven stitched in a near row that slanted from gunwale to keel line.

  Bolan removed the contents, inverted the vessel to tip out the water and carried it to a slope of dry rock above the river.

  There was a can of resin filler among his supplies, originally included in case the craft was punctured while running the rapids.

  Working with the help of the flashlight beam, he plugged the holes and smoothed over the filler with a palette knife. The repairs might not withstand a battering by submerged rocks in a really rugged stretch of white water, but at least they would keep him afloat.

  If he did lose the kayak, he would still follow the river by other means a rented all-terrain vehicle, on horseback or even on foot. But he was determined to carry out his initial vacation plan. But the overriding priority now was to learn what these Russians were up to. He hoped for their sake that it was not something sinister.

  Navymen, commercial personnel or KGB, it was all the same to him he was personally involved now.

  That challenge was enough for the warrior.

  He would unravel the mystery, uncover the intruders plan and wreck the project, whatever it was. Nothing less would satisfy him now.

  He would follow the damned thing through to its conclusion, whatever the odds.

  And if he drew the short straw, if in the final reckoning those odds ran against him, well, at least he would have tried. The Executioner knew no other way.

  As soon as the resin had hardened, Bolan unloaded a spare spray skirt from the storage compartment, relaunched the kayak and sped downriver.

  There was obviously a limit to the amount of harassment the Russians could get away with. It was unlikely they would dare operate a full-scale manhunt in a foreign country; even in a remote area such as this there would be the risk of an international incident, repercussions at the United Nations, a threatened breakdown of diplomatic relations.

  Helicopter recon flights could be similarly restricted. In a country with an unusual number of small airstrips and many private aircraft flying the domestic airlanes because of the rudimentary surface communications, they would soon be spotted. Such sorties would be counterproductive, drawing attention to a situation the Russians wished to keep secret.

  Still, Bolan decided to rest during the hours of full daylight and ride the river only during the short northern half night. He had perhaps two hours left before sunrise. Each precious moment must be used to distance him as far as possible from the destroyed emplacement.

  For several miles below the oxbow, the current ran smooth between fifty-foot cliffs channeled from the ancient lava. Then the canyon widened, the margins of the stream drew apart, the landscape flattened even farther into a region of tundra floored with multicolored mosses and patches of lichen covering the rocky outcrops.

  Bolan paddled as fast as he could.

  Beyond the plain, his maps showed another track of volcanic country crisscrossed by steep-sided ravines.

  And until he reached that, there wasn't a hope in hell of concealment scarcely a boulder impeded the shallow course of the river as it flowed easily over the flat land, and there was certainly no place a kayak could be hidden.

  Bolan's arms moved back and forth with the regularity of a metronome, water droplets trailing from the long paddle, blades biting deep into the current as he forced the craft downstream.

  Conical peaks flanked by a line of low hills materialized out of the gloom ahead, but they were still several miles away when the sky lightened in the east and clouds took shape out of the darkness overhead.

  The rain had stopped but an icy wind still whined across the plain, riffling the surface of the water and scourging the lone boater's face.

  Bolan plowed doggedly on. There was nothing else he could do; he had no place else to go.

  There were no signs of pursuit by the time, almost an hour later, he stroked the kayak in among the first of the hills. But before he could think of resting there was another major obstacle the Jokulsa a Fjollum itself.

  The river was turning sour on him, and there was fast water ahead!

  Huge granite boulders, dumped by some forgotten glacier aeons ago, lay strewed across the watercourse, some with their craggy summits above the flow, others submerged dangerously close to the surface.

  Foaming white water seized the kayak and accelerated it into a cleft between two of these towering sentinels. On the far side Bolan was faced by a ferocious row of high waves, tall whitecaps facing upstream that came pounding down on the bow of his lightweight craft as he sliced a path through the rapid.

  The swiftest flow ran along the base of a cliff that rose sheer on his right. He slipped cross-
channel, braced momentarily upstream to allow the kayak to be swept into it, then hurtled onward, washed over from bow to stern, his eyes blinded by spray.

  A saw-tooth rock ridge cut the surface. He braced again to shoot around that, slalomed past a shark fin of basalt and then snapped his hips sideways and paddled fiercely to steer into calmer water as he felt the canoe begin to dump.

  It was then that he saw the concrete pumping station built out on a ledge overlooking a river.

  And a guy with the machine pistol covering him while the raging current threw them closer together.

  Bolan had no choice to lift the spray skirt and reach for one of his own guns he was too busy using the paddle to keep himself afloat. The guard was on a catwalk surrounding the concrete cabin. When the kayak was within twenty yards, he jerked the muzzle of the machine pistol in an unmistakable order stroke the kayak into dead water beneath the ledge.

  Bolan accepted the invitation.

  "You better had come up here," the gunman called in heavily accented English. "It is drier, and you can hide your boat beneath."

  The pumping station stood on a platform that projected beyond the ledge, two and a half feet above the surface of the river. Its outer edge was supported on two pillars rising from the water. Bolan unfastened his spray skirt, climbed out of the kayak and slid it in below this makeshift boathouse. He scrambled up a rocky bank and approached the guy with the gun.

  It was an Ingram MAC-11, a deadly machine pistol.

  The finger on the trigger belonged to a husky dude, almost Bolan's height, with straight blond hair above blue eyes deep set in a tanned weather-beaten face. He was wearing a fisherman's sweater, denim pants and rubber wading boots. He didn't look much like the other hardmen who had tried, unsuccessfully, to get the drop on the Executioner.

  But he looked as dangerous.

  Bolan halted two feet away at the far end of the catwalk, keeping his hands in sight and well clear of his body. He eyed the flesh-shredder held unwaveringly in the guy's big hands.