The car-rental office was closed when he hit town. He left the Mercedes in the yard with money for the repair of the windshield in an envelope tucked beneath a wiper blade. By the time they made a connection between the engineer who had hired a Colt Shogun in Reykjavik and the crazy explorer who had checked in a G-Wagen that didn't belong to him, he would be long gone.
Hefting his two suitcases, Bolan strode along the empty street in the half light. There had been no further signs of pursuit since the firelight by the swamp. There had been no survivors, either. So by now, he hoped, his anonymous enemies would definitely have lost track of their quarry, allowing him to progress, his own innocent plans unimpeded.
Dismissing the problem from his mind, he found a modest hotel overlooking the central square and checked in for the night.
* * *
Relatively, the field was a hive of activity when he arrived to claim his gear the following morning... the Icelandair flight was expected; a private, six-passenger Beechcraft Bonanza was being refueled at the avgas pump; the pilot of a small overhead-wing Cessna 150 was tying down his aircraft at the far end of the ramp. And above the terminal, an executive jet with Russian markings, which had just taken off, circled the field before it flew away toward the east. By the open doors of the freight shed, a forklift truck maneuvered crates of machinery onto a flatbed semi.
Bolan supervised the unloading of his own crates. The ultralight, powered by a 250 cc two-stroke engine positioned between the spars supporting the delta wing, was equipped with skis as well as landing wheels.
Bolan's kayak a Norwegian polymer version of the American Precision Mirage model, with a low deck and rounded gunwales was slung between the struts of the undercarriage.
High-energy iron rations, a goose-down sleeping bag, a ground pad, a wet suit, helmet and underwater boots were stowed in PVC sacks inside the kayak's fore and aft compartments along with the two paddles the warrior had chosen. The entire rig took less than half an hour to assemble.
After he had arranged for the ULM to be collected by helicopter from the sinkhole where he intended to drop beneath the ice to the source of the underground river, the Executioner took his place in the open bucket seat of the ultralight and requested permission for takeoff.
The flight had to be approved by the Icelandic coastguard service, and the official okay had come on condition that Bolan was equipped with two-way radio on which he could call for help in case of any accidents. Judging by the expression on the faces of the mechanics and laborers and customs officers gathered on the apron, local opinion seemed convinced that he would need to use it.
The tiny engine sputtered to life.
Polished spruce airscrew behind Bolan's seat spun, and the aircraft trundled out to the runway to await takeoff. A green light glowed from the control room above the terminal, and Bolan was on his way.
He had a flight of approximately seventy miles in front of him. For fifty of these he flew southwest, following the upstream course of the Jokulsa Fljotsdal river until it emerged from a terminal glacier on the fringe of the ice cap. Then he turned through twenty-two and a half degrees and vectored due west for the glacial region known as the Dyug Jujokull, where the sinkhole was located.
For the first few miles the ULM skimmed the surface of a lake, where the river had drowned a long, twisting valley. Then the land rose abruptly to a highland plateau bare of vegetation, an ancient volcanic wilderness that reminded Bolan in its empty desolation of a black Sahara.
So long as he was overflying the river valley, the Executioner kept the ultralight as low as he dared; even at one thousand feet the cold struck like a knife through the kapok-lined alpine survival suit and life belt that he wore. But when the barren rock bulk of the six-thousand-foot peak called Snafell materialized beneath a blanket of low cloud to his right, he hauled back the stick and sent the frail machine climbing high. There was no telling what hazardous combination of cold drafts and air pockets he could encounter above this icy terrain.
Lacking an oxygen mask, Bolan was becoming lightheaded when at last he saw, in the distance, the pale immensity of the frozen continent that was his target.
The Vatnajokull, eighty-three miles across and fifty from north to south, is an ice cap rather than a single Lacier. The surface, unexpectedly, is not blinding white but varies from gray through browns to a slate mauve.
Black lakes circle the southern margin and here, fissured away from the ice cliffs at the glacier's edge, float enormous bergs colored kingfisher blue and jade green in the cold northern light.
It took Bolan some time to locate the sinkhole. It was only when he flew to the terminal moraine from which the river he was to follow emerged and then banked through 180 degrees to track back toward the center of the ice mass, that he identified the dark opening in the frozen surface five hundred feet below.
The landing was rough. Jagged furrows crisscrossed the packed ice in all directions. The ultralight bounced once, twice and then, as the starboard ski snapped under a third impact, stewed sideways and slid for fifty yards, jolting the breath from the Executioner's body and bending one of the aluminum spars that acted as an engine support. Luckily the kayak was undamaged.
Bolan climbed down and began to dismantle the ULM. The sky was darkening ominously and he feared one of Iceland's sudden storms was brewing.
He was not mistaken. Within minutes angry clouds boiled overhead; the wind, penetratingly cold to start with, had howled up to gale force; and squalls of freezing snow lashed horizontally across the surface of the ice.
Bolan was forced to wait out the blinding blizzard. With wind and cold combining to produce a chill factor of minus-thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, he rigged a hasty shelter from two paddles, the ultralight's unbroken ski and the red and yellow nylon of the machine's delta wing.
After an hour of frozen hell the wind dropped and the sky cleared. Shivering, Bolan emerged from his makeshift tent, unzippered one of his supply sacks and changed into his caver's rig. Beneath the life jacket he wore cellular inners, a Transat neoprene wet suit and a proofed coverall with builtin knee pads to minimize bruising against the inside of the canoe when shooting rapids.
Apart from the helmet, the total effect was much as though he had donned his familiar black-quit.
Eleven inches of snow had fallen during the storm. Bolan slid the kayak over to the edge of the sinkhole and busied himself with ice clamps, pitons and the arrangement of rope and pulleys that would allow him single-handed to lower himself and his craft into the depths.
The rig was in place before he heard the airplane.
Subconsciously he had for some time been aware of the approaching drone, but it was not until the pilot made his first pass over the cleft that Bolan registered the fact that he was under surveillance from above. It was a small aircraft of a type unfamiliar to him a V-tail, low-wing monoplane with a single motor in the nose. As it banked and turned for a second run, he could see through the spinning disk of the airscrew that there were two helmeted figures behind the Plexiglas canopy.
A coast-guard patrol, confirming that he had survived the long flight in the ULM? A meteorology crew checking out the results of the storm, astonished to see a human being in this wilderness? Or a private flyer from one of the many small fields that dotted the barren countryside?
It was only when the plane made its third pass skimming no more than twenty feet above the snow-covered ice that Bolan realized it carried no markings at all.
Half-deafened by the roar of the engine as it zoomed directly overhead, he watched the machine climb steeply and fly away toward the northeast.
What the hell?
The machine was as anonymous as the hardmen he had wasted in Reykjavik and elsewhere. Bolan tried to make a connection. Had the mystery pursuers latched on to him one more time? If they had, what would their next move be? Bolan shrugged away the questions.
The answers could wait. Right now he had more important things to do.
The
sinkhole was like a huge inverted tunnel, 70 feet across at the top and more than 150 deep.
A freshening wind and freezing temperatures made the manipulation of ropes and tackle difficult for chilled hands topside. But within the shaft, which had been formed by steam from geothermal vents, the air was warm.
Testing his anchorages one final time, Bolan lowered away the loaded kayak and then swung himself over the edge of the yawning chasm.
At once he was in a different world.
Weathered as an ancient rock face, the walls of the shaft were circled in different layers, each, like the rings in a tree, witness to a different era in the ice cap's twenty-thousand year history.
The Executioner had to reposition ice screws and take extra turns on the rope as the up current of warm air loosened and then started to melt the surface.
It was easier going down than up, but without the crampons clamped to his boots and the pitons he hammered in afresh every ten feet or so, it would have been a rugged maybe damaging descent.
He was halfway down, and the light from the opening far above was fast fading, before the whine of wind passing the sinkhole was drowned by the suck and gurgle of water from below. At the same time he became aware that it was uncomfortably hot beneath the protective clothing he wore.
Bolan had made perhaps 120 feet when the ice walls slanted away into the darkness on all sides and he was left dangling in space, suspended above a giant cavern beneath the glacier.
Now the roar of underground waters was loud in his ears. Cautiously, hand over hand, he lowered himself to the last knotted length of rope until his feet submerged and then grounded on solid rock.
Warm water gushed around his knees.
A strong current knocked pebbles against his ankles.
Bolan waded across to a shelf, where the hollowed ice wall rested on glistening bedrock. He unbolted the shackles and released the kayak from its rope, stowing the craft safely on the ledge out of reach of the frothing torrent.
Unpacking a powerful flashlight, he flicked it on, then swung right and left to examine the base from which his perilous journey would start.
The cavern was huge. The beam was not strong enough to illuminate its inner recesses. Channeled between smooth islands of rock, the underground river ran fast and deep toward the mouth of a tunnel. At the far end it would, Bolan knew, burst through the Vatnajokull's terminal moraine and emerge into the open air.
He intended to be with it.
Playing the beam from water to rock to ice, he marveled at the paradox of nature that permitted this age-old frozen massif to remain unmelted above active subterranean volcanoes spewing out molten lava and creating enough hot springs to provide half the country with domestic warmth.
Too bad the humans up top whose convictions ran to equally opposite extremes had not yet learned to compromise in the same way and exist together in peace.
Yeah, there was a lesson to be learned here if only animal man would check his downward rush long enough to pause and think.
Mack Bolan laid out the ground pad and sleeping bag on the driest part of the shelf he could find, ate a portion of his iron rations and turned in for the night. The pale disk of sky overhead had already darkened to what passed for night in this sub-Arctic summer, and he had to rely on an early start if he was to cross the underground section of his route and make good time through the headwaters of the Jokulsa a Fjollum tomorrow.
* * *
Four hours later he was lowering the kayak into the stream. Settled in the cockpit, he adjusted the black neoprene spray skirt around his waist and tightened the elastic draw-cord that fixed it in a watertight seal around the cockpit coaming.
The light filtering down from the sinkhole that was now his sole link with the outside world had already brightened. Bolan clipped the flashlight into its special harness, switched on, fisted his two-blade laminated hardwood paddle and headed with swift, precise strokes for the tunnel mouth.
The first ten minutes of the journey, before he had become accustomed to the speed of the river and the darkness outside of the flashlight beam, were hair-raising.
At first the channel remained smooth and deep, the water speeding almost soundlessly, the boater required only to dip an occasional blade in a brace that would push the kayak away from either of the rock walls rushing past.
Then the stream divided around a massive rock, divided again, and there was white water on every side.
The flashlight beam careened wildly out of line as the lightweight craft scythed through tows of two-foot high waves. Water washed over the deck and pummeled the spray skirt. Black fingers of rock reached threateningly through the foaming tide.
Bolan leaned expertly into the swirls of current, his paddle flashing left and right, forcing the kayak into the main channel that had been gouged by the racing river.
Beyond the rapid, the stream was wider and shallower. And now the spray-loaded darkness was loud once more with the sound of rushing water.
The vessel swept around a wide curve in the subterranean torrent, and Bolan was drenched in an icy cascade when the kayak shot through a shaft of freezing water thundering down from an opening in the glacier overhead.
Here near the river's source, the boiling flow from geothermal springs mixed with such icy spills to produce an average temperature of ninety-five degrees a little below blood heat. The layer of moisture inside Bolan's wet suit, acting as an insulator against eventual cold, had been raised the few degrees necessary to make up the difference. But the unexpected freezing spray penetrating the neoprene seals of the suit made the warrior temporarily catch his breath.
It was the subsequent warm flow of blood on supercooled skin plus a stinging sensation in the lobe of his left ear and the realization that the chin strap of his helmet had snapped that alerted him to the danger even before the sound of the shot echoed thunderously around the ice cavern.
5
Bolan's reactions were precise and immediate. He killed the light and stowed the paddle. Then he leaned inward, letting the kayak drift with the swift current, coaxing it toward a rock overhang bordering the outer margin of the river bend.
He felt the lightweight hull nudge the rock. The stern swung around, leaving the bow facing upstream in the dark.
Bolan reached above his head, feeling for a projection that might break the smooth curve of rock. The kayak's gunwale was scraping the water-sculptured rock surface. It could be heard over the ripple and bubble of the stream.
His fingers lodged in a crevice, held on, steadying the craft against the pull of the current.
There had been no second shot. No muzzle-flash had showed against the myriad reflections glinting from wet rock and water and the ice roofing the cavern. But Bolan figured the sniper must be on the far side of the bend in the river since that position would give a marksman the best view and the longest time to take aim at a target being swept downstream. Now he would be holding his fire, awaiting some give-away move on the part of the target.
In total darkness the Executioner held his breath, straining every sense to locate the invisible killer's fire point. With his free hand, Bolan released one side of the spray skirt from the coaming and groped stealthily inside for the waterproof satchel holding his two guns.
Right now the number-one priority was survival.
The AutoMag possessed greater stopping power, but in these conditions, with distances and deflections as yet unknown, the Beretta's longer range and marginally greater accuracy outweighed Big Thunder's skull-busting impact.
Thumbing open the clasps of the satchel, Bolan withdrew the Italian death bringer and eased off the safety.
He couldn't believe that the tiny click was audible over the roaring rush of water, but a blinding light blazed instantly to life, swung across the turbulent current and homed in on the kayak. The beam, more powerful than his own, had lanced out as he had guessed from the far side of the bend, exposing him against the rock in the light's pitiless glare.
; The warrior could deal with one or more snipers, but not spotlit as vulnerably as an insect pinned to a board. He triggered off a 3-shot burst that smashed the light. At the same time he relaxed his grip on the rock and shoved the kayak violently out into midstream.
The assassin fired again, a hail of lead that chiseled splinters from the rock and stung Bolan's face as the craft spun once, twice, and then whirled away into the blackness.
Bolan knew now he was facing an assault rifle, fashioned for single shot or full-auto use.
He allowed the kayak to ground on the inside of the bend, downstream from the gunner now but still on the opposite bank. Snapping off the spray skirt, he wedged the boat between two boulders and heaved himself out of the cockpit.
He was waist deep in warm water, the 93-R held high.
His most vital objective was to keep the kayak and his own lamp undamaged.
Entombed beneath three thousand feet of solid ice, with God knew how many divergent channels and cataracts in the darkness ahead and no hope of finding the sinkhole and climbing out, he would be lost if the boat was punctured or there was no light to guide him.
He waded out toward the center of the flow.
Froth forming around his hips was visible. Or maybe some small unexpected noise, some subtle change in the myriad level of sound tipped the ambusher off.
Hellfire ripped out from the rocky bank.
A deadly hail splatted into the water as Bolan lifted his feet and thrust himself farther downstream.
But his gun hand was well above the surface... and this time there were muzzle-flashes to aim at.
Before the long burst of automatic fire was exhausted he touched down on the riverbed, steadied himself against the tug of the water and loosed off three triple bursts.
Livid flame flickered in turn from the Beretta, momentarily printing the image of the cavern against the dark as the rock walls hurled back the reports in shattering confusion, explosion drowning echo until the reverberations faded into the distance.
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