Blood Heat Zero (4 page)

The two-man crew from the Audi Quattro was out of the car and behind the hood before the Mercedes made half the distance, spitting death from revolvers he guessed to be Police Specials, like the dead driver's. But the relatively lightweight .38's were no match for the steel-drilling, 240-grain messengers of death thundering from the Executioner's cannon. After a few snap shots the goons dropped from sight, obviously waiting for him to exhaust his magazine.

The Merc's windshield was holed in two places; the laminated glass starred but held. Apart from the last of a rear window there was, so far as Bolan could see, no other damage. He braced himself for the shock, steering the G-Wagen hard at the Audi's rear quarter.

The massive iron grille protecting the utility's front smashed into the sedan's rear wheel and trunk, mangling the bodywork and rupturing the fuel tank. Gasoline splashed out as the Audi tipped over onto its side with a screech of crumpled steel.

Bolan rocked the G-Wagen to a halt and leaped down behind one of the boulders. Big Thunder's magazine was empty but now he held the Beretta 93-R in his hand. Folding down the forward hand grip, he sighted carefully and loosed off a single shot.

The slug was well aimed, striking the rock on which the Audi had foundered at a shallow angle and ricocheting away in a shower of sparks. The inflammable vapor rising from the savaged fuel tank ignited with a dull thump. An instant later the gasoline remaining in the tank exploded, transforming the capsized Audi into a blazing fireball.

From beneath the boiling, black-tinged maelstrom a scarecrow figure erupted, beating ineffectually at its flaming clothes with charred hands.

Bolan fired a mercy round to terminate the hood's agony.

The last man the one the Executioner was determined to keep alive dashed out from behind the holocaust and headed for a rock shelf, firing from the hip as he ran.

Bolan dropped him in midstride with an auto 3-shot aimed low. The hardman's gun skittered from his hands as he dropped, writhing, with shattered knees.

Bolan ran across and hauled the guy to his feet, one big hand bunched in the anonymous gray coveralls.

"Okay, hotshot," he snarled, "time to start talking, now!" He shook the injured gunman fiercely in his grasp.

The man's eyes, almost colorless, showed neither fear nor hate nor even shock. His face was expressionless; only the teeth sunk into his lower lip revealed the effort he was making not to scream aloud at the pain scything his splintered kneecaps.

Bolan jammed the Beretta's muzzle against the man's forehead, let him see the trigger finger whitening in the squeeze.

"Who the hell are you?" the Executioner grated. "Who sent you? And why are you trying to kill me?"

The wounded killer choked. His hand flew to his mouth.

Suddenly he smiled up into the big guy's face.

And shuddered.

Bolan realized too late that this was no involuntary hand gesture provoked by a spasm of agony, no expression of humor, however grim.

The lips were drawn back from discolored teeth by a fearful rictus.

The body stiffened and then went limp.

The head flopped forward and an acrid almond odor caused Bolan to release his grip in a reflex of horror.

The guy had bitten on a cyanide pill rather than talk.

Bolan released his breath in a long sigh of frustration.

"Damn!" he said forcefully.

His ruse to decoy the assassins out into the open had worked exactly the way he had planned it.

And he had ended up as he started... knowing precisely nothing.

What now?

He shrugged. The car-rental agency would be surprised when he turned in a 300-GD off-roader that was worth five thousand bucks more than the Colt he had hired even if the Mercedes needed a certain amount of attention to the rear window and windshield. But once he had handled that little problem, he decided, he would continue with his vacation as planned.

And if the mysterious organization that seemed so anxious to waste him followed him down below the ice cap... well, he'd tackle that one when it happened.

He returned to the G-Wagen and headed for the trail that wound back up the escarpment.

A Russian factory ship loomed above the trawlers and tugs berthed along the waterfront at Akureyri.

"Loaded to the gunwales with surveillance equipment," the man wearing the watch cap said to Bolan. "We know it, and they know we know it, but nobody does nothing about it."

"That so?" the Executioner said casually.

"No trawlermen aboard that ship." The sailor spit into the sawdust at his feet. "Soviet navy specialists, most of 'em. They take our fish and louse up the goddam breeding grounds, but mainly they use those boats to keep tabs on shipping movements, NATO maneuvers and suchlike."

They were in a tavern on the wharf.

It was the first time in many missions, but since he was supposed to be enjoying a well-earned R and R. the soldier had decided to sink a few beers. The man in the watch cap, perched on the next bar stool, had started talking as soon as he sat down.

"How come they dock in your town?" Bolan asked.

"There's a NATO goodwill flotilla heading this way frigates from Britain, the U.S., West Germany and Norway and like I say, they aim to keep tabs. Times they refuel, too, or take shelter from the big storms. It can get kind of rugged out there." The sailor nodded toward the shower of arctic spray exploding over the seawall outside the windowpanes. "They got a right to put in anyway," he added, "We buy our oil from the Soviets. And they started in on a mining concession over by Husavik, in the northeast, a few months past."

"Oh, yeah? Mining what?" Bolan wasn't really interested but it cost nothing to be polite. "Search me."

The Icelander shrugged.

"Minerals. Whatever. They got some crazy rock formations out there. It seems the Russians are flying in plenty of heavy equipment through the airstrip at Husavik."

Bolan signaled the bartender and bought his companion a beer.

"Skoal!" The guy raised his glass and drank. He shook his head. "Crazy world, too, ain't it? Your Navy people use the Keflavik base to monitor the movement of Soviet warships and subs toward the North Atlantic; the Reds use their boats to monitor the movements of your fleet... meantime the seabed is a garbage dump of nuclear waste and listening devices."

"Listening devices?"

"Sure." The seaman laughed. "You know what? Last week one of our coast-guard patrol vessels fished up what looked like a rusted mine that had been floating in the water since World War I." He paused for effect. "It was packed with electronic gadgetry so delicate you could have heard the skipper of a nuclear killer sub shaving!"

Bolan laughed dutifully. The conversation was beginning to tire him.

He was on vacation, dammit. In any case he had heard it all before.

He finished his beer, told the sailor in the watch cap goodbye and left. It was a long, tortuous drive to Egilsstadir a hundred miles in a straight line, almost twice that following Iceland's primitive, twisting roads and he wanted to make it before the light started to fade.

Egilsstadir was located in a long valley brimming with one of the very few forests in the country. The birch and aspen plantations were no more than twelve feet high, but they grew thickly and they were easy on the eye after grueling hours spent circumnavigating the interminable indented fjords gashing the bleak and treeless coastline.

At one point the road crossed the Jokulsa a Fjollum, the river he was to follow in his kayak, on a high, arched bridge of prestressed concrete.

Surmounting a bluff some way downstream, he could see hoists and gantries in the center of a camp that housed, he supposed, the engineers exploiting the Russian mining concession.

The airport at Egilsstadir was a single asphalt runway and a small terminal shack. It was also something like a theater restricted to two shows daily one for the morning Icelandair flight from Reykjavik and one for the afternoon. In between, the apron was deserted, the terminal as silent as the surrounding forest. Two guards, changing shift every four hours, patrolled the perimeter and guarded a freight shed where Bolan's gear should by now be stored.

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.