Don Pendleton - Blood Heat Zero

The Icelander swam around in circles for a few minutes to keep his circulation active. The remorseless pressure of the icy water numbed his fingers and toes, created an ache in the pit of his stomach. Finally, he, too, submerged and propelled himself underwater as far as the spur.

He pulled himself up onto a granite shelf and investigated the state of the rock. As far as he could see in the waning light, an experienced climber could easily hoist himself up to a height of about twenty feet and from there, along a fissure splitting the age-old face, he could cross to the cliff directly above the caves.

The quartzite there was seamed by a number of horizontal stratifications that formed narrow ledges above the openings, but whether or not there was any way of gaining the interior from these or whether that could be done unobserved he was in no position to see.

The subdued light from the main cave was not reflected in the black water of the fjord, but the channel inside must have curved, or perhaps there was some trick of the light, for he could see nothing but a pale blur beyond the arch.

An instant later he saw nothing at all. Silently from behind, a sinewy steel-hard forearm locked beneath his jaw, clamping his throat in a viselike grip. At the same time hard fingers probed the rubber helmet behind his ear, searching for the pressure point that would paralyze him.

Bjornstrom struggled wildly, clawing at the forearm, striving to shake free of the hand clasped around the base of his skull. He gagged, choking for air.

His feet scrabbled on the granite ledge; fragments of rock tore free and splashed into the water below.

The darkness threatening to engulf him turned red. He felt the strength seep from his limbs... and then suddenly the iron grasp on his throat relaxed. His head was free. He heard a choking cry as the air wheezed back into his own tortured lungs, and he fell to the ground.

Mack Bolan was standing above him, supporting the limp figure of his attacker. Bolan's knife had arrowed in between the man's teeth and penetrated the roof of his mouth, transfixing the lower part of the brain and killing him instantly.

The Executioner withdrew the flat blade and tipped the body over the ledge into the water below before the blood cascading down the guy's gray combat fatigues stained the rock.

"With luck he'll be washed clean before he's found," Bolan said quickly. "The palate wound will not register unless they're looking for it. The marks on the ledge here should indicate that he missed his footing in the fog, fell over and drowned." He pulled the Icelander to his feet and waved aside his thanks. "You weren't to know they'd post a guard out here in this kind of weather," he said. "Do you feel up to making a short recon trip? Underwater?"

"Sure," Bjornstrom croaked, massaging his bruised throat. "What did you find?"

"Well, the caves do connect. We can get to the main cavern through any of them. Also, the place is enormous inside there. Deep water, too. That main archway must go down at least forty feet below the surface. And there's a hell of a lot of work going on."

"What kind of work?"

"That's what we are going to find out," Bolan said. "Come back in with me and we'll check. We better get some idea of the geography of the place before the guard's absence is discovered."

They slid back into the water and headed for the smallest of the arches.

To Bjornstrom, an interminable time seemed to pass before Bolan signaled that it was safe to surface. They had navigated a curving channel perhaps seventy yards long and joined the main entry, where it opened out into an immense cavern.

It was from this that the light reflected in the fjord had come. Now, treading water at the outer margin of this huge chamber hollowed from the rock, they could see under a blaze of arc lights the extent of the work that had already been secretly completed.

What had once been an irregular underground basin had been widened and transformed into a rectangular dock bordered by concrete quays. Beyond this pool two giant lock gates with sluices blanked off a caisson crisscrossed with scaffolding on which an army of laborers worked. A drydock was evidently under construction.

Electric wires and compressor tubes tangled the quay nearest the two intruders, and in the far depths of the cave the shafts of rock drills and boring equipment gleamed. Above these a railed gallery circling three parts of the cavern led to a glassed-in box that was clearly some sort of control room.

Two men carrying submachine guns emerged from a passageway carved from the rock and began patrolling the gallery toward the entrance tunnel.

Bolan touched the Icelander on the arm. They submerged and began swimming back along the main channel leading to the fjord.

There was a lot more to check out but the Executioner had already seen enough to know that at last he held the final section of the puzzle in his mind.

This was no underground base for radio misinformation, no simple KGB disaffection headquarters what he had been looking at were bombproof Russian submarine pens.

The Russians were building a clandestine underwater naval station beneath the territory of a NATO country.

"For the new SSK-class minisubs," Bolan said. "There's space for two in that basin, and a third in the dry-dock."

"Minisubs?" Bjornstrom objected. "You mean those two-man undersea motorboats the Italians developed in the Second World War?"

"Hell, no. Mini in relation to the four— or five-thousand-ton nuclear maxis that are too easy to pinpoint with modern sonar and electronic detectors. The SSK's are 200-ton subs with a crew of only twelve, all-electric engines and a sea-to-sea strike capability of no more than half a dozen short-range nukes."

"Harder to detect, though, than the nuclear-powered ships?"

"Sure. They're silent, the heat emanation is minimal, they are fast and maneuverable as a pursuit plane."

"Better than these so-called factory ships then, for monitoring all the NATO and other Western shipping in the North Atlantic?"

"Uh-huh. Preying on them, too. Acting as a hidden strike force if the Soviets ever decide to unleash a hot war. But they do have one big disadvantage."

Bjornstrom nodded. "The batteries."

"Yeah. Prenuclear subs used electric engines for undersea work, diesels on the surface. The SSK's are too small to carry auxiliary engines and in any case it would louse up to their low profile, write them a bigger signature on the detector screens. But electric motors restrict them to a very short range each accumulator needs to be recharged every X miles or every so-many hours."

"So from Russian bases, Murmansk, Archangel or even the Baltic, an SSK North Atlantic patrol is not a proposition?"

"Right. It was a pretty smart idea, though, to use Iceland." Bolan shook his head in reluctant admiration. "Equidistant from Greenland, the Faroes, Spitsbergen and Norway. Smack in the center of the operations area! They could be in among any NATO concentration, anyplace, within a couple of hours. Even under the ice. And it saves them around a thousand miles each way!"

"But the entry to these caves?" Bjornstrom looked dubious. They were sitting in the rubber raft, hidden behind the rocks, waiting for the pale gloom of the sub-Arctic night to establish itself.

"A piece of cake," Bolan told him. "The fjord is long but it's also dark and deep, with a rock bottom and no sand to show up underwater craft in silhouette. An SSK could slip in from the open sea and make the whole journey submerged, including entry to the main cave through that drowned arch. It wouldn't need to surface until it was safely out of sight inside the basin."

"Then they should be building generators in there as well as maintenance and repair facilities?"