Bjornstrom had one of the handguns — it was Bolan's AutoMag in his fist. He took a snap sight and fired.
The report of the wildcat .44-caliber shell was deafening. And the force of the recoil took the Icelander off guard. He miscalculated the rise, and the slug caught the edge of a steel slat high up the window and whined off into the darkness of the roof. Glass tinkled to the floor.
The guard dropped the receiver and snatched his machine pistol from a desk beside the window. Before he raised the barrel, Bjornstrom fired again. This time his aim was better.
The 240 grain hollowpoint caught the man full in the throat.
For a heart-stopping moment, as the Russian's mouth opened in astonishment, a scarlet flower bloomed horribly against the whiteness of his skin. Then he toppled to the floor spewing blood, his head almost severed from his body.
Bolan and Bjornstrom arrived at the door of the hut at the same time. The Executioner saw that the telephone handset was still swinging at the end of its lead. He picked it up and hooked it gently back on its cradle.
The machine, one of the few outdated devices in the Russian base, was one of those with a hand-cranked generator, which rang a bell at the other end of the line like an army field telephone.
"Did you get him before he turned the handle?" Bolan asked urgently.
Bjornstrom nodded.
The warrior breathed a sigh of relief. No listening gear would have been alerted on the surface.
"There's no service stairway," he said lightly. "We'll take the elevator to the top floor'"
19
The elevator cage was wide enough to take three jeeps side by side. It was closed by a hand-operated latticework grille that ran noisily on rollers.
As it rose into the darkness from the brightly lit underground chamber, Bolan could imagine the big wheel at the pithead turning. Would there be guards alerted up there on the surface, waiting to move them down the moment they made ground level? Had any of the Russians noticed when they brought the cage creaking down five minutes ago?
The Executioner thought not.
It was no more than a hunch, but it was based on solid reasoning.
The relayed announcement had ordered the work force back to the surface for "briefing on simulated mining activity." The students were due in half an hour. It was likely, therefore, that all available personnel would be required at the briefing, to make sure they knew what they were supposed to do during the conducted tour. Also, it was unlikely during this period that anyone would return to the cavern; because of this, there was a good chance there would be nobody at the top of the shaft to check whether the elevator was up or down. Since the concession was protected on three sides by sheer cliffs, and on the fourth by a wall patrolled by armed men, there was no need to post a guard there.
But it was only a hunch. And there was a chance. In any case there was nothing else he could do. And a fighter should always be prepared to back his own hunches, right?
There were oil drums in back of the elevator cage. Replacements, maybe, for those punctured this morning, which nobody'd had time to shift?
Bolan and the Icelander squatted behind them. Bjornstrom held the silenced Ingram, Bolan the G-ll. Each carried one of the handguns from the neoprene pouch in waterproof shoulder rigs — Bolan this time with Big Thunder, Bjornstrom toting his Beretta.
The elevator jolted to a halt.
Light flooded through the grille. The two men crouched, weapons ready.
Inside the cage, only their quiet breathing broke the silence. Outside, sunlight glinted off a baggage trolley loaded with flat pans of yellowish ore, and from corrugated iron roofing.
But there were no KGB guards waiting on the packed earth surrounding the shaft. A row of huts in front appeared to be deserted, and the cars and trucks ranged behind in a lot excavated from the hillside were all empty. Bolan's hunch had paid off nobody had seen the elevator descend, then return.
He rose, stole quietly to the grille, held up his hand. They could hear a voice, amplified, speaking in Russian.
It seemed to come from the slope of hillside below the huts.
"It is essential," the speaker emphasized, "that what you are doing appears to be a routine, something you are used to doing. Groups A and D therefore will be sinking exploratory holes farther out on the headland; Group C will list analyzed samples of the cores they have brought up; Group E will be working the upper trial gallery and Group B will remain with myself and the Comrade Admiral, supervising and acting as interpreters."
Bolan frowned. The voice was familiar. It stirred an echo in, his memory. But like the face of the professor in the tavern, he could not place it. He eased up the catch of the grille. There was a heavy metallic click. Very slowly he began to drag back the iron gate. The wheels on their runway shrilled protestingly as the latticework shivered.
"Most vital of all is the shaft," the voice was saying. "We cannot hide the fact that we have sunk a shaft the pithead gear spells that out for everybody. We shall therefore make a point of showing them that shaft. But we shall conceal the details of its depth. So far as they are concerned it goes no deeper than the lower trial gallery. The elevator is on no account to drop below that level. There is enough there and above to convince them that we are doing what we claim to do. They must not know the full extent of the workings; the fact that we have established a connection between the shaft and the caves is to remain a total secret."
Bolan hauled the gate open another few inches. The opening was now wide enough to allow them through.
Cautiously he peered out. On the grassy slope below the huts, engineers, laborers, overseers and guards were drawn up in front of a raised wooden platform. On it stood a tall, lean man in the uniform of a Soviet admiral. Beside him, addressing the Russians through a bullhorn, was a heavyset man with a shaven skull.
Bolan caught his breath. "Now I've seen it all," he muttered.
"What is it?" Bjornstrom's voice was a whisper.
"That man. His name is Antonin. A KGB colonel. He was one of the top brass, ruthless and cruel. Comrade Antonin and I are old enemies. The fact that he's here makes it'll the more urgent to spring Erika."
"How do we know ?"
Bolan laid a finger to his lips. He was scanning the line of huts and the terrain immediately beyond. The huts were clearly sleeping quarters. Behind them rose taller structures sheds full of excavation equipment, a rock crusher, a glass-roofed mineralogical laboratory. Higher up the slope a wooden mess hall stood by what looked like a headquarters block.
And behind the gantry, half hidden by the shack housing the pithead machinery, a square brick building with the legend in Russian above the door Chief Overseer. A single guard with a Kalashnikov AKM stood outside at the top of a short flight of steps.
"That's where she is," Bolan murmured.
"Are you certain?"
"Damn right I am. They're putting on a show. Everyone's being told the role they have to play. Only one guy's left to block a doorway. Why would he be there if there wasn't a prisoner inside?"
Bjornstrom nodded. "Guess you're right." He looked at his watch. The minute hand was well past the hour. "She will be waking now."
Swiftly Bolan surveyed the terrain.
Antonin was still talking, turning the bullhorn this way and that across the ranks of men before him. The admiral gazed impassively ahead over his folded arms. They were both turned slightly toward the pithead. Beyond them the land dropped away toward the dark water of the fjord. The sunshine, pale but bright, would be directly in their eyes. If Bolan and his companion could steal out of the elevator without attracting their attention and make the shadow between the two nearest huts.
The Russian colonel droned on. But the briefing could stop at any minute and the workers disperse to their positions.
Bolan tiptoed toward the bar of shadow.
Bjornstrom followed him out into the sunshine.
The Executioner had estimated that the guard outside the oversee
r's of lice would be hidden from Antonin, the sightline blocked by the last hut in the row. From the shadow he saw that he was right.
Bjornstrom joined him between the two huts.
Bolan made his decision. He whispered instructions. Bent low, the two black-suited frogmen figures slipped around behind the huts and sped silently uphill toward the mess hall and the HQ block.
Behind the block they were invisible both to the guard and the assembly below. On a raveled apron in front of the entrance there was a black ZIL limo with diplomatic license plates and a consulate flag above one front fender.
Bolan crawled gingerly over the granite chips until he was level with the front wheels. He raised himself high enough to peer over the top of the hood. Around the corner of the overseer's office, the guard was just visible, perhaps seventy-five or eighty yards away.
At that range the assault rifle would be more accurate.
But Bjornstrom's Ingram was silenced.
Bolan beckoned the Icelander forward. He pointed to the guard and then drew his finger across his own throat. Bjornstrom nodded. He raised the compact SMG.
* * *
Erika Axelsson was spread-eagled naked on a scrubbed wooden table in the back room, her wrists and ankles strapped to the four table legs. She opened her eyes to see two expressionless heavies standing on either side of her. The blue-jowled, balding one held a cheap cigarette lighter in his hand. The blond with pale, red-rimmed eyes poised a surgeon's scalpel as if it was a pen he was about to write with.
There was a sheet of typescript in his other hand.
Blue Jowls slapped Erika's face heavily three times. She gasped and jerked away her head, striving to clear her mind from the effects of the drug. Her body ached all over, and there was a burning sensation in one wrist where the strap bit into a sore spot, but otherwise she was undamaged.
"At last," the blond goon grated. "You kept us waiting long enough. Now there's a list of questions you have to answer..." he held up the paper "...but first we are going to hurt you a little to show that we mean what we say, to give you a sample of what will happen to you if you fail to answer correctly."
The girl bit her lip. So this was it.
The pill had only brought her a respite. She hoped the zen training she had received would permit her to rise above the pain, the humiliation. She hoped she would be strong enough to resist using the second pill, the cyanide one that could be tongued out of a hollow tooth.
Blue Jowls was leaning over the table, his forearm resting between her spread thighs. "They tell me the singeing of hair is very much the fashion among Western beauty specialists," he said conversationally.
"It can be cut out by the roots," said the man with the scalpel.
"Yeah, but singeing is quicker," Blue Jowls said. He thumbed the lighter into flame.
Erika screamed.
The door burst open.
At first the Norwegian woman did not realize who the two helmeted, rubber-clad figures were. She screamed again when Bjornstrom's hand clamped down to extinguish the smoldering hair at her loins, thinking it some psychological twist in the tormentors' game.
Then she recognized the cold blue eyes and inflexible features of the Executioner.
Bolan sprang for the guy with the scalpel as Bjornstrom whirled to attack Blue Jowls.
The scalpel gleamed wickedly, scything through the air in search of flesh. Bolan dropped to one knee and whipped the commando knife from his boot. The scalpel blade, sharper than ten razors, ripped the sleeve of his wet suit from shoulder to wrist, opening a ten-inch gash in his forearm.
He pivoted on the knee, seizing the torturer's killer arm and pulling it over his shoulder before the guy could attempt a second sweep with the scalpel. The Russian fell forward across Bolan's body.
In the same fluid movement Bolan stabbed viciously upward with the knife. The broad, flat blade sliced through clothing and skin, penetrating the gut.
Bolan twisted and then ripped with all his force.
The Russian uttered a strangled scream and dropped facedown on the floor, the stomach and intestines spilling from his ruptured belly.
Bjornstrom had caught Blue Jowls with a roundhouse right to the side of the head as the hardman tried to pull a Stetchkin automatic from his waistband. Then, as the goon staggered off balance, he swung up the Ingram and jammed the grooved suppressor into his face. The snarling jowls opened to yell, and the fat barrel smashed through teeth to home on the Russian's palate.
Bjornstrom favored the trigger with an instant squeeze.
The triple shot, the splat of blood and brain tissue on the partition wall behind Blue Jowls's head and the smack of .45-caliber bullets tearing through the wood made a single sickly sound.
The torturer slid to the floor.
Bolan's knife was slashing the straps that bound Erika to the table.
"You're bleeding!" was all she could gasp as she sat up to rub circulation back into her cramped limbs.
"It's nothing," Bolan said. "A scratch; luckily it didn't go deep." He helped her to stand up, staring at the angry bruises covering her body. "We have to find clothes for you. Sure you're okay?"
"A little sore," she admitted. And then, contriving a grin, she added, "Luckily it didn't go deep."
In a closet in the outer office they found a suit of the nowfamiliar gray coveralls, a white slicker and a spare pair of boots.
"With your short hair you could pass for one of the overseers at a distance," Bolan said when she had dressed herself. He was binding the wound on his arm with strips torn from a shirt that had been hanging in the closet. "Maybe we could use you to fool them some, once we start shooting."
"Shooting? Are we not getting out?"
He explained the position to her.
"It's three-fifteen," he said, glancing again at his watch. "We have to raise hell for at least a quarter hour to make sure they send those kids away."
"But make sure also that we are not still around at four o'clock!" Bjornstrom said.
"Too right," Bolan agreed. "Come on, guys, let's go."
The body of the guard was lying crumpled by the steps outside. Bolan pulled the AKM out from under him.
"You know how to use one of these?" he asked the woman. And when she nodded, he simply handed her the gun and said, "Shoot straight, then."
Bjornstrom unclipped two plastic grenades from the man's belt. "These will come in useful also maybe," he said.
They made it to the shadow between the huts opposite the pithead. "We'll cross over behind the shack with the winding mechanism," Bolan decided. "We open up once we're on the far side of the motor pool. We shall be between them and the gates then.. With enough ground cover to keep them busy thirty minutes."
"And after that?"
"We'll work that out when we get to it," Bolan said.
20
Antonin had stopped speaking. The workers and overseers were preparing to disperse to their positions. The shooting would have to start soon, yeah, if it was to be effective enough to have the Russians refuse entry to the professor and his charges.
It started sooner than Bolan expected... and not the way he planned.
Bjornstrom had made it to the shack, and he was two-thirds of the way across the sunlit strip with Erika when he saw with horror that the elevator gate was still open.
Whatever else happened it was vital that nobody suspected they had been in the caverns, nobody discovered the dead guards below, nobody started any kind of investigation before those charges went off.
The open grille was a direct giveaway.
Bolan decided it was worth the risk.
He would close the grille as far as he could without actually engaging the noisy latch.
He turned to retrace his steps. As the ball of his foot swiveled, a pebble of quartzite crunched loudly.
Turning his ankle, he stumbled and to save himself falling, grabbed instinctively at Erika. His fingers closed around the wrist that had been burned while she was uncon
scious, and despite herself she gave a cry of pain.
Heads turned along the assembled ranks of Russians. Antonin jerked to attention and stared toward the pithead. For one frozen moment the actors in the drama formed a silent tableau the Russians astonished, Antonin with the loud-hailer halfway to his mouth, the woman and the helmeted, black-suited intruders, guns in hand, facing the elevator shaft.
The scene exploded into action.
Antonin shouted orders. The guards leaped for their machine pistols, stacked nearly at one side of the parade. Workers fanned out to give them a clear field of fire.
Bolan, figuring that his attitude could mislead the Russians into thinking he and his companions were making for the elevator instead of away from it, sprang back as though he had just opened the grille. And then whirled to race with the woman for the corner of the shack.
"Keep them away from the shaft!" Antonin roared through his bullhorn. "I want them alive if possible, but they're not to make that elevator."
First objective gained, Bolan thought. He dropped down behind a bank of loose dirt in back of the winding-gear shack and brought the Heckler and Koch assault rifle to his shoulder. Erika was kneeling in the shadow cast by the wooden shack, the Kalashnikov aimed toward the huts; Bjornstrom covered the open ground between the huts and the HQ building.
The guards opened fire. From between the huts, behind the baggage trolley, on either side of the platform, Skorpions spat flame. The 700 rpm death stream ripped wood splinters from the walls of the shack and whined off the massive iron spars of the gantry.
Bolan coaxed telling bursts from his G-11, hearing over the deadly rasp of the assault rifle's backfire the deeper reports of Erika's AKM.
A guard fell out from behind the trolley, rolled over in the dust and lay still. Another, caught in the open space between the platform and the huts, sat down abruptly with a hand clasped to his shoulder and blood bubbling between his fingers. The girl downed a man foolish enough to attempt a run between two of the huts.
Antonin and the admiral had disappeared.
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