Bolan saw them in the distance, veering from side to side of the canyon, checking out each hollow among the tumbled rocks with their weapons at the ready.
"Damn!" Bolan said. "We're finished if we stay here. We'll have to run for it now!"
Bjornstrom carried two spare clips for the Ingram's 3 round magazine. He slammed one in and pushed the inflatable raft back into the water. Bolan's two guns were already loaded. He eased himself into the kayak's cockpit and fastened the spray skirt.
"You want me to tow?" the Icelander asked. "While the river is smooth here I can maybe go faster."
Bolan shook his head. "If there are two of us and they go for both, it cuts their effective firepower by half; if they fix on one, the other will be free to the covering fire and enfilade them."
The Russians were between three and four hundred yards upstream.
Bjornstrom jerked the cord, and the Excelsior roared to life while the enemy craft was beached and a pair of hardmen were exploring a long, narrow cave between two slabs of lava that had broken away from the cliff and fallen into the river.
Bolan nosed the kayak into the stream and started paddling furiously; the Icelander also shoved out his raft and scrambled over the inflated side.
He lowered the outboard into the water and sat with the tiller in one hand.
The Ingram lay ready on the thwart beside him.
There was a shout from the Russians.
Bolan glanced over his shoulder and saw the two recon scouts running back to their craft. He paddled as fast as he could, his arms flailing the paddle in and out of the swirling water.
Bjornstrom chugged past, furrowing the surface with white. "There is fast water after the next bend," he shouted. "But I think we make it more quickly than them."
Bolan nodded. No point wasting energy with words.
The fast water was in fact a boiling rapid, where the river hurled itself down a slope interspersed with ragged tips of rock that threatened every second to slit the gray Hypalon of the raft and rip open the kayak's hull.
Bjornstrom cut the engine and tipped fuel tank, shaft and screw out of the racing water as he allowed himself to be carried on by the stream, parrying left and right with forceful strokes of a single concave paddle.
Bolan was wielding his two-blade like a crazy man, bracing every few yards with feet and knees straining against the supports, wrists aching from the leverage necessary to thrust the kayak against the force of the current.
Raft and kayak were more often than not three-quarters submerged among the whitecaps of the wild water as the two men gave everything they had to keep their craft away from the perilous crags.
In the last few yards before the Russians' raft was swept into the rapid, they opened fire.
But small craft half swamped in foam and bobbing like corks made tough targets at two hundred feet. At three hundred yards it was just a waste of ammunition. The rasp of the Uzis was lost in the river's roar; wherever the slugs went, it was nowhere near Bolan or the Icelander.
Beyond the rapid the river widened again and the canyon's rocky walls fell away to reveal a barren moonscape of black gravel and volcanic shale studded with vast blocks of primeval stone. And it was here, where the river ran wide and fairly shallow, that the death squad began gaining on the Executioner and his friend.
Spent slugs splashed just astern of the kayak. Bolan plowed grimly on, sweat streaking his face as he urged the lightweight canoe ever faster ahead of the streaming current. There was no point attempting to return the fire if the Uzis were out of range it would be senseless to lose ground while he wasted ammunition from his two shorter-range handguns.
Bjornstrom was using the outboard again. The rubber raft, stern squatting in the water, was forging ahead. Twin waves curled outward from the prop to wash up the banks of dark shingle on either side of the river.
Twice the Icelander turned around to loose off a short burst from the Ingram neither caused any damage to the pursuing raft or its occupants but most of his effort was concentrated on an island of rumbled stones surrounding a basalt outlier that divided the river into two sections a quarter of a mile ahead.
If he could beach his own boat and get among those rocks while the Russians were still afloat... if he could start shooting in earnest from the cover of those boulders while they were still vulnerable on their raft... if he could make the goddamn island before the bastards were near enough to get Bolan in their sights.
But the Executioner was tiring. He had been using every ounce of his formidable strength for more than two miles, and even he could not keep that up indefinitely.
The hunters were seventy yards away.
The stabbing roar of the Uzis and the harsher rasp of Skorpion machine pistols were audible over the sounds of the river. But from the moment their firepower was directed at Bjornstrom.
His raft was fifty yards short of the island... forty... thirty.
And then suddenly the engine sputtered and died. The craft listed heavily to starboard as the rubber gunwale on that side began to deflate.
The assassins' bullets, aimed first at the boat rather than the man, had struck home.
The raft spun slowly, deep in the water, moving sluggishly toward the channel, racing past the western side of the island.
Bolan's kayak, losing ground rapidly to the Russians, was on the far side of the river.
The killer craft was less than fifty yards away.
Bjornstrom leaped into the water.
Waist deep, he forced his way to shore and flung himself down behind the first group of boulders.
From between two humps of granite he triggered a long burst from the MAC-11, the shots cracking out so fast one after the other that they resembled a continuous deadly drumroll.
One of the Russians dropped his Uzi into the river and folded forward over the inflated gunwale with a flood of crimson spurting from his savaged chest. Blood oozed out between his clenched fingers. But the other SMG was still shooting at the island.
Bjornstrom was forced to duck to avoid a hail of lead splatting off the rocks on either side.
The men with the Skorpions were both firing at Bolan now. A squad of steel jacketed skull busters struck one of the paddle blades and sheared it off as easily as a wire passing through cheese; a second group drilled through the kayak's hull on the waterline.
Bolan felt one slice off the heel of his boot as water jetted into the cockpit.
But now suddenly, entering a narrowing channel on the east side of the island, where the current was far stronger, the kayak was seized by the speeding river and whirled away, faster than Bolan could have paddled, toward another wide bend in the river.
In the grip of the same accelerating flow, the pursuers' craft began to spin. The wounded helmsman was unable to hold it straight with his undamaged hand. Following the kayak, it was whisked past the island.
Bjornstrom stood up, scrambled to the top of the central rock pile and discharged the Ingram's magazine. He crouched there, a powerful figure amidst a thin blue haze of gun smoke and the glint of ejected brass shell cases, coolly aiming at the receding Russians.
Bolan was also firing now. Allowing the kayak to chart its own course, he slipped one hand beneath the spray skirt and came up with the Beretta.
One after the other, he mailed a succession of triple death wishes the enemy's way, special delivery.
There was confusion on the Russian raft. The remaining Uzi was shooting rearward at Bjornstrom. One of the Skorpions was attempting to change places with the injured helmsman; the other, spraying death Bolan's way, looked over his shoulder and started to shout, pointing now frenziedly downstream. The raft rocked dangerously.
Swinging around the bend in the river, Bolan looked up from the Beretta... and saw why the guy was frantic, why the current was speeding up so much. They were fast approaching the Dettifoss.
Centered on a vast plain of naked lava, the waterfall was shaped like a miniature Niagara.
The
wide river slid smoothly ova a U-shaped shelf in a roaring curtain of white to plummet into a boiling caldron of foam from which the spray rose above the cascade in a misty cloud that veiled the sky.
No man, with or without life jacket or flotation vest, could survive in that hellhole of stormy water, even if by some miracle he survived the dizzying drop.
Bolan dug the half paddle that remained to him feverishly into the current, striving to turn the kayak and face back upstream. But the little craft was becoming waterlogged. Low in the water, it was difficult to maneuver.
And now that the Russians had outdistanced Bjornstrom, all their firepower was concentrated on the canoe.
The chatter of the outboard rose to a crescendo as the new helmsman pulled out maximum power to combat the manic force of the river sucking him toward the murderous cataract. The most he could do was steady the raft while the two gunners, one Uzi and one Skorpion, spat hate in Bolan's direction. Even so, slowly but relentlessly, they were being drawn back toward the fall.
Bjornstrom's swamped and half-deflated raft swept past and disappeared over the edge of the cataract.
Bolan was in the worst position. With half a paddle, he was no match for the mighty force of the rushing water.
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.
10
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 s
top 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.
Blood Heat Zero te-90 Page 8