But there was only one way to finish it quickly.
Attack! He waited until the stoplights released another parcel of traffic, then he used the noise of the passing vehicles to mask his own movements, bellying his way beneath the Citroen until he was looking out at the grille of the panel truck. The shooting from the Saab behind it had stopped. Bolan sprang upright by the truck fender and dashed, not across the sidewalk into the shelter of a doorway, but out into the open, in the center of the roadway.
The second killer, on his feet beside the Swedish sedan, with his gun questing left and right in search of his target, was taken completely by surprise. He whirled, the Executioner's menacing figure registered on his peripheral vision. Too late.
Bolan triggered the 93-R, a 3-shot burst. The 9 mm parabellums drilled through the hardman's forehead. Bolan saw a momentary cloud of crimson in the diffuse light, as the gunner's skull disintegrated. Then he dropped into forever, hidden from sight behind the Saab's hood.
Bolan ran to the car's front window.
His first shot had scored. The man who had opened fire was dead, too, his faceless body sprawled over the blood-spattered seat.
At first glance there was nothing on either of them to show who they were or who had sent them. Bolan could not wait for a second glance. Although the exchange had been virtually noiseless, passersby had already gathered at the traffic lights. Several cars had stopped. Across the road the doorman was shouting and there was a wail of sirens in the distance.
Bolan crossed the sidewalk in two quick strides and melted into the shadows of an alleyway. The last thing he wanted was an interview with the members of Iceland's police. They would ask too many questions, study his ID, maybe check him out with Interpol.
There was not much crime in Iceland foreigners who broke the law were not welcome. The interview could turn into an interrogation.
And however much Bolan had been the injured party on this occasion, the fact remained that his Interpol dossier had him listed as an outlaw.
And he had killed two men on a Reykjavik street.
If he quietly vanished, with luck, he would get away unrecognized.
There were no witnesses to the shooting or to the clumsy attempt on his life at the airport; the doorman was the only person who had actually seen him during the firelight; he had made no reservation and left no name at the restaurant.
He releathered the Beretta and found his way back to the Hotel Wotan by a roundabout route. Thirty minutes later he was in bed.
He had barely fallen asleep when his unknown enemies struck again.
2
The attack was stealthier than the first two. If Bolan had not been a superlight sleeper, his warrior instincts sensitive to the slightest deviation from the norm and if he had not already been alerted by the two previous attempts the intrusion could have passed unnoticed.
For one thing, the clandestine entry was not made the obvious way via the fire escape, the balcony and the floorlength double-casement windows, which would have presented no problem to a professional. A small lobby, with closets on one side and the bathroom on the other, separated the bedroom from the door to the hallway. And it was through this door, the lock oiled with an aerosol spray and a skeleton key expertly maneuvered, that the killer came in.
The entry was completely noiseless.
It was perhaps some infinitesimal alteration in the atmospheric pressure, an exhalation of breath felt rather than heard, that brought the Executioner instantly awake, every nerve tingling with anticipation, his whole body tense as a coiled spring.
He held his breath.
No shape passed across the strip of half light showing between the drapes.
No current of air fanned his face. No board creaked. Bolan's right hand slipped beneath the pillows; his fingers curled around the butt of the Beretta.
A brilliant light blinded him; a high-intensity beam that shafted from a powerful electric torch at the foot of the bed. Clutching the gun, he rolled violently to one side.
That was when the second intruder struck.
A flurry of movement from behind. A heavy body leaped, pinning him to the bed. Hard knees crushed his shoulders, a muscular leg trapped his gun hand before he could withdraw it from beneath the covers.
The flashlight advanced. The knees clamped vice-like on either side of his head, pinning him. Bolan heaved, threshing desperately from side to side. But the man with the light was now kneeling on his hips, immobilizing his body, too.
A hand with an iron grip closed over his jaw, fingers on one side, thumb on the other, forcing open his mouth. The end of a plastic funnel was jammed between his teeth.
Bolan bucked and writhed more violently still, but the combined weight of his assailants held him down. There was a gurgle of liquid.
He gagged as it rushed through the funnel, flooding his mouth and throat.
A second hand squeezed shut his nostrils. For one of the few times in his life he was entirely helpless he had to swallow the fluid or suffocate.
There was no other choice.
He swallowed.
Fierce heat fired the membranes of his gullet. He experienced an instant of panic when he feared they were forcing him to drink some caustic acid. Then came realization... and with it complete bewilderment.
He was drinking cognac.
Relief, temporary though it was, automatically relaxed his taut muscles. His body went limp.
Fractionally, perhaps without acting consciously, the attackers also relinquished a small percentage of their hold.
It was then that Bolan saw the light glinting on the hypodermic syringe.
And the killer straddling his hips made his first and fatal mistake.
Bolan was still swallowing brandy, gasping for breath between each swirl of the fiery liquor. The man with the syringe shuffled himself up from Bolan's hips until his knees were thrusting against the Executioner's armpits. His captor raised the syringe, directing the flashlight downward with his other hand.
But although his arms were still pinioned by the first man, Bolan's legs were now free of the killer's weight.
Galvanized into action, he kicked away the covers, brought up his legs and scissored his ankles around the guy's head. He jerked his legs savagely down onto the bed again, knocking the intruder with the syringe backward. The hood's own legs shot upward, knocking the man who was kneeling on Bolan's shoulders off balance.
The funnel fell from the Executioner's mouth. Cognac splashed over the sheets as the bottle spun from the attacker's grasp. The beam from the flashlight swung crazily across the ceiling.
For the moment there was a frenzied tangle of limbs on the alcohol-soaked bed.
Then Bolan had thrown off the two intruders and was crouched by the night table, ready to spring. He feinted toward the first hood, who was still sprawled on the pillows with the gun beneath him... and then swung violently the other way.
He seized the hypodermic, tore it from the hardman's grasp and plunged the needle with lightning speed into the guy's left eye, ramming the syringe home with the heel of his hand.
The deadly point punctured the eyeball, pierced the cortex and penetrated the cerebellum. The hardman cried out once and fell, clawing at his face. He twitched and then lay still.
Bolan was already on the other guy.
They rolled from the bed to the floor.
Anger and surprise and perhaps some extra stimulation from the liquor he had been forced to swallow lent Bolan a manic strength. His powerful shoulder muscles rippled as he heaved the attacker facedown onto the bed. An instant later he was kneeling on the guy's calves, hauling the top half of his body upright and jamming a forearm across his windpipe and beneath his chin at the same time.
The hood writhed, choking. The point of his elbow rammed backward into the Executioner's solar plexus, but Bolan held on grimly. A hand scrabbled for the soldier's groin. He slammed his hips against the killer's buttocks.
And now the palm of his free han
d was cradling the back of his victim's head. Sweating, he exerted pressure.
On the rumpled bed, their distorted shadows thrown across wall and ceiling by the flashlight, which had rolled to the far corner of the room, the two men remained locked in motionless, almost noiseless, combat. Only their harsh breathing, an occasional creak from the bedsprings as one or the other minimally shifted position, a barely discernible click from tortured sinew or tendon, broke the silence.
Beads of moisture stood out on Bolan's forehead. His opponent's breathing grew more labored and hoarse as the pressure on windpipe and neck inexorably increased; his struggles weakened.
And then abruptly Bolan summoned a supreme effort an upward jerk of the forearm coupled with a sudden titanic thrust with the palm of the other hand. A dull crack echoed in the room.
The hood's body went limp in Bolan's grasp. He allowed it to slide to the floor.
He clambered off the bed, breathing heavily, and examined the two bodies.
Both men had been rough, muscular, evidently hard living. But that was about all he could deduce. They could have come from anywhere in the northern half of Europe. A search of their clothes yielded nothing. They were wearing anonymous gray combat fatigues. No labels, no insignia, no papers in the empty pockets.
Certain things, however, were clearer to Bolan now.
Like the planned scenario for this nighttime visit.
Gingerly he extracted the hypodermic syringe from the first attacker's eye socket. Over the hand basin in the bathroom, he examined the contents, squirted out a second sample. The almond odor was enough to convince him.
A derivative of prussic acid.
Muscular contractions followed by immediate cardiac arrest.
By the time the hotel staff realized that the occupant of room 321 wasn't going to require any breakfast probably not until noon the following day the muscles would be relaxed, the poison itself would have been dissipated. Symptoms, therefore, of a classic heart attack.
Bolan could follow the reasoning imposed on the police. A killer in town, a man wanted by every security agency in the Western world. He drinks too much, in a local restaurant.
Afterward he runs amok in the street, kills two innocent bystanders and then goes back to his hotel and drinks himself to sleep. A massive coronary following such excesses would be a believable sequel. Alerted by the remaining fumes of brandy, stronger and more distinctive than aquavit or Brennivin, the police surgeon and the autopsy doctor would look no further.
Very neat.
There were two other conclusions that Bolan could draw from the night's events.
One, whatever it was that the hoods boss or bosses were trying so hard to keep under wraps must be very important indeed important enough to mount a team operation that had already cost them four soldiers, even if Bolan hadn't winged a fifth in the Mercedes at the airport.
Two, it must be the kind of thing that those bosses, knowing Bolan, would expect him to be interested in destroying.
That narrowed the field some, but it still wasn't exactly specific.
The Executioner was intrigued. What could be going on in Iceland that the bad boys thought he had been sent to stamp out?
Just to satisfy his curiosity and because he was becoming goddamned tired of these continual attempts on his life he determined to do his best to find out.
He wasn't necessarily going to do anything about it when he had found out. Unless, of course, it was the kind of thing... but it would wait until he knew more.
Meanwhile, before he continued his vacation, he would offer himself, knowingly this time, as a decoy. Maybe if he could get close enough to talk, he could convince them that he was not interested at all in their conspiracy, whatever it was.
But first, there were two bodies to dispose of in some way that would leave no finger pointing in his direction. The police, especially after the fray outside Nielsen's, were the last people he wished to complain to, explain to or wise up to the unsuccessful attempts on his life. He would handle that one himself.
The guy with the broken neck was not too difficult. He was a burglar, wasn't he? There were skeleton keys in his pocket to prove it or there would be as soon as Bolan had removed them from the lock of his door. Too bad the guy missed his footing and fell to his death in the area from a third-floor balcony.
Bolan opened the double-glazed windows, heaved the body onto his shoulder and stepped out into the cold predawn light. Bending over the balcony rail, he lowered the corpse to the full extent of his arms, swung it left, right, left again... and then, gasping with the effort, relaxed his grip and let the corpse sail away to one side and down.
The inert body landed below the balcony of the next-door room with a thump and a clatter that seemed to the Executioner as loud as a peal of thunder in a tropical storm. But no window in the hotel facade was thrown open; no questing heads and shoulders appeared; no angry voice shouted. After a minute he went back into his room and drew the drapes. Let the cops work out why a man with skeleton keys that would open doors inside the building should have fallen from a balcony outside it.
The second body posed more of a problem. With a bloody hole where one eye should have been, it would be difficult trying to pass that one off as accidental death.
Soft footed and in his trousers now, Bolan prowled the corridors until he found what he wanted a small room beyond the elevators and the stairwell, where the hotel service personnel stored bed linen and cleaning materials. A sliding panel on one wall opened onto a laundry chute. He dragged the body along the passageway and stuffed it headfirst down the chute.
If it slid freely the whole way to the basement, there would at first be no way of telling which floor it came from; if it became jammed someplace... well, with luck the chambermaids would not change the bed linen in vacated rooms much before ten-thirty.
And Bolan would be long gone before they discovered the chute was blocked.
He returned to his room, wiped the attackers' fingerprints from door handles and anything else the attackers might have touched, and then washed out the syringe and threw it down toward the body in the area.
3
By eight o'clock he had checked out. Ten minutes later he was on the far side of the square, mending an enforced cognac hangover with strong black coffee in the breakfast room of the Hotel Thor. At nine-fifteen he arranged to rent a car with the help of the clerk behind the information desk at the Hotel Loftleider, half a dozen blocks away.
Bolan rented a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Colt Shogun. He chose the tough Japanese off-roader for two reasons: first, because he intended to drive a fair distance and he had heard that only the main Icelandic coastal route was paved most of the inland roads being at best surfaced with packed gravel and secondly because he wanted his planned showdown to be in an area so remote that even the dirt roads might not reach it.
Only then, Bolan felt, would he have the opportunity to bring them clear out into the open, confront them, and... yeah, make the bastards sing!
Maybe then, depending on their answers, he could convince them that he wasn't in the country on their account.
Unless he discovered they were into some nefarious activity that his conscience wouldn't let him leave be.
But that was something he could worry about after they talked. Right now the priority was to move.
He slung his luggage in back of the tall, compact Colt utility, filled up with gasoline and took the road north from Reykjavik.
He intended he told the young woman at the rental agency, just in case anyone was checking on him to take in the huge aluminum plant that was Iceland's only heavy industry and then follow the coast road as far as the port of Bogarnes. After that he would drive inland along the fertile Nodura Valley.
On the pretense of asking her advice, he contrived also to let her know that afterward he wanted to cross the bare central plateau, detour as far as the picturesque fringe of the Langjokull glacier and then head for Akureyri on the north coast. Thi
s was the country's second largest port, a few miles only from the Arctic Circle, and apart from the variety of Norwegian, Danish, Russian and Swedish shipping docked there, he could also visit the great Laxa hydroelectric complex.
This ultramodern super-power-station, thirty-five percent owned by Iceland's National Energy Authority, would be a natural draw for any engineer, as Bolan had told her he was.
The coast road was impressive, following the rugged cliff contours above a steel-gray sea. The sky was a pale cloudless blue, and it was quite warm. At any other time, Bolan would have relaxed, enjoying the unfamiliar scenery. But today it was the Shogun's wide-angle rearview mirror that claimed all the attention he could spare from the winding road ahead.
By American or European mainland standards, traffic was light. But there was a fairly continuous procession of cars, fruit and vegetable delivery trucks, and occasional buses traveling in each direction. Most of the vehicles were sturdy, Northern European makes Volkswagen, Mercedes, Audi, Swedish Volvos and Saabs which made it tough singling out any potential tail everything looked much the same.
It was not until noon, after he had suffered a conducted tour over the aluminum works and strolled the many-masted, herring-scented quays of Bogarnes, that Bolan was able to even suspect a possible tail.
A scarlet, diesel-powered Mercedes 300-GD a highbuilt, 4x4 utility not unlike the machine he was piloting had tucked in behind him some way south of the port. He had lost it in the narrow streets of the Old Town.
But when, after his walk half an hour later, he took the right-hand turn for Desey and the headwaters of the Nodura, the red offroader was there again. So was an Audi Quattro he had first noticed on the outskirts of Bogarnes and a Volkswagen Passat station wagon.
He lost the VW at Hvammur, but the other two kept position behind him, first one and then the other surfacing in the decreasing stream of traffic that lined up behind the Shogun and then passed.
Bolan was practically certain now... and then, when he made another right turn somewhere beyond a small town called Fornilvammer, hoping to find a trail that would take him near the glacier, he discovered that he was on his own.
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