Don Pendleton - Blood Heat Zero

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.

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.