Don Pendleton - Blood Heat Zero

He watched her walking away along a narrow street after she had pointed out a cafe where workingmen cradled cups of steaming coffee behind the misted windows. Seeing the rounded swell of breasts beneath the tight sweater, the supple curves of hip and thigh as she moved, he experienced a sudden pang of desire, a fleeting wish that he really was still on vacation, free to use his leisure time any way he wanted. He looked at the woman's retreating figure again. Later, there might be time... For him, romance would have to wait until he found some answers to the present mystery.

Every fiber of his being was dedicated to that end.

Bolan strode out beyond the town with the caseless assault rifle concealed in his plastic carryall.

After the intersection, the road arrowed across a stony stretch of moorland to the bridge at the lakehead.

Here, for the first time since he left Egilsstadir, Bolan saw automobiles and trucks. There were not many; most of the cars were old, local three-cylinder Saabs, battered Volvos dating back to the 1950's, Volkswagen Beetles. The trucks were mainly small, loaded down with crates of produce, and he remembered that, despite the near-polar latitude, long daylight hours permitted the cultivation of tomatoes, peaches and sometimes even bananas grown in greenhouses.

He noticed the Renault panel truck not because it lacked lettering along its sides, not even because it was new and carried Reykjavik license plates, but because of a slight hesitation in its approach, a momentary pause in the even note of the engine as it drew abreast. As if the driver was satisfying himself that he had arrived in the right street, at the correct address.

Or that the person he was passing was the one he sought.

Bolan had the impression of heavyset men he couldn't tell their numbers crowded into the truck. Men dressed in anonymous gray. Then it accelerated, sped up a slight rise and vanished into the dip beyond.

The Executioner continued his unhurried pace. But the zipper of the plastic holdall was open now and his right hand was already inside, wrapped around the pistol grip of the G-11.

He saw the panel truck stewed across the road at the bottom of the depression as he breasted the rise.

There was no other traffic in sight.

Two men were crouched behind the hood.

Two more were running for clumps of stone at each side of the road. A fifth appeared between the open rear doors of the truck. All of them were armed with submachine guns.

Bolan didn't wait for them to fire first. Maybe they had orders simply to get the drop on him and bring him in alive for questioning. At any rate the SMG's did not open up the moment his head and shoulders appeared in view.

The Executioner flung himself to the side of the roadway, finger tight around the Heckler and Koch's trigger.

Fired from inside the plastic suitcase, the gun spewed out a blaze of dead that ripped through the fifty yards separating Bolan from the truck so quickly that the killers behind the hood died before they had a chance to shoot. The diminutive 4.7 mm rounds drilled through metal, mangled pipes and hoses and wiring, and cored through human flesh. A cloud of blood sprayed through the air as the hardmen fell.

By the time the three others opened fire, Bolan was prone on the hill, his body shielded by the stone heaps.

Flame spurted from between the truck's open rear doors. Hollowpoint death bringers scuffed the tarmac at the roadside and whistled through the coarse grass above the ditch.

Bolan jerked the G-11 from the carryall, snuffed out the smoldering edges where the gun's muzzle-flashes had melted the plastic, and fired again.

He stitched a double line of destruction hip-high across the doors.

The gunner crumpled to the ground, with northern daylight showing through his skull.

Two hitmen remained in the ditches.

Bolan dropped the case, leaped to his feet and sprinted across to the far side of the road with the HandK.

A stream of slugs struck sparks from the granite chips in the pavement as he ran. But the gunman on the far side had revealed his position. Flattening himself behind the opposite stone pile, Bolan hammered another burst low down through the moorland sedge. Small clods of earth fountained into the air and spattered the roadside. He heard a strangled scream.

In the far ditch something flopped briefly among the grasses and then lay still. There were no more shots from that side of the highway.

Four down and one to go. Bolan crawled stealthily along the depression, inching his way downhill in the hope of seeing the last killer before he had a chance to fire. Figuring he could finish it with a single blast, the guy stood upright with a grenade in his hand.

He hadn't reckoned with Bolan's split-second reactions or the G-11's rate of fire. Bolan caught him with the full force of a half-second burst when his arm was still drawn back to throw.

The bomber collapsed into a huddle of blood-stained rags. The grenade flew from his hand and exploded harmlessly on the upland turf near the truck.

Shattered glass tinkled to the roadway.

Bolan rose to his feet, replaced the assault rifle in the damaged plastic holdall and walked to the truck. The engine refused to start carburetor, feed pipes and inlet manifold had been mangled by the G-11's first murderous eruption. He pushed it into the ditch, hauled the bodies into the rear section, closed the doors and continued on his way. He was in sight of the lake before the next vehicle passed him on the way to Grimsstadir.

Bjornstrom arrived punctually at midday at the tiller of a Hypalon raft exactly like the one he had lost at the Fjallagfoss.

But this one carried large white numerals painted on the inflated gunwales.

It was clearly some kind of official craft.

Another section of the puzzle clicked into place.

"I get it," Bolan said.

"This guy from the Icelandic Water Board, the inspector you say checks out the pump houses and the pipelines 'once in a while,' that's you, am I right?" Bjornstrom nodded.

"And you found out that the Russians were tapping your supply and decided to carry out a more detailed inspection... on your own?"

"That is correct."

"But why? Why not just tip off your bosses? Why not call in the army or the police or whatever? Tell these bastards where they get off."

"There is no army," Bjornstrom said. "As for the police, it would require action at diplomatic level. The real reasons could be buried or the plot abandoned and restarted a different way. I prefer first to find out the truth. Then, maybe, when we know what the project is, it can be stopped."

"Okay," Bolan said, "I understand that. But... are Ingrams and G-11's part of your normal inspector's kit?"

"Absolutely," the Icelander joked. "I got dozens of them. I give them to my friends at Christmas!"

"And the girl? Erika?"

"She is a friend."

And the Executioner had to be content with that unsatisfactory answer once more.

Bjornstrom started the outboard, and they nosed out into the lake. It was in fact no more than a sinuous drowned valley gashing the bare landscape, dammed at the far end by a shelf of harder rock. Its narrow, fifteen-mile length was dotted with small islands, but they saw very few boats, most of them were solitary fishermen and nobody fired on them from above the walls of the canyon. Beyond the natural dam, the Jokulsa a Fjollum thundered down beneath a dense cloud of spume into Iceland's largest, deepest, widest cataract, the Dettifoss. Three miles farther on the two men were faced with a shorter but no less arduous portage on account of a smaller waterfall called the Rettarfoss.

After that, the stream wider and slower now, there were bleak lowlands to cross, high ground to the east with the fifteen-hundred-foot smoking cone of Pristikluvatn, one of the island's many active volcanoes, and at last the division of the river into several branches that ran out into the great northern bay named the Axarfjordur.