Don Pendleton - Blood Heat Zero

Suddenly a rowboat appeared out of the fog, nosing in to the spur. There were two big men in it, one blond and the other dark, wearing fishermen's sweaters, seaboots and peaked caps. The dark one stood and reached for a projecting ledge as the boat nudged the rock. He started to hoist himself ashore.

Prokhorov scrambled farther down toward the water level.

"You cannot land here," he said roughly. "This is private property."

"That's all right," the dark man said in Russian. "We won't do any damage. We only want to climb twenty feet or so, to that grassy shelf up there. It's a good place for the birds."

"You will be trespassing. You can't land here."

The stranger swung himself up easily until he stood beside the guard. His eyes were a piercing blue. "The ducks are flying south," he said, as if Prokhorov hadn't spoken. "We'll be all right here you can get a good shot across the water from this spur. They'll be coming in low today because of the fog."

"Get into your boat and go back!" the Russian shouted. "In any case the ducks don't..." He froze, staring down at the boat.

There were no guns in it.

He whirled, reaching for his own shotgun. An iron-hard fist slammed into his solar plexus, choking the breath from his lungs. He folded forward, his mouth open to shout a warning, but no sound forced its way past his savaged diaphragm. At the same time the dark man picked him up as easily as if he had been a child and dropped him over the edge into the fjord.

Bjornstrom was ready. The guard plunged into the water, arms flailing and throat gargling, six feet from the boat. Bjornstrom pushed off the rock face with two hands and slid the boat across the intervening space.

He was leaning over the gunwale as the Russian surfaced, still groaning for air. Bjornstrom placed both hands on the man's head and shoved him under again.

The rowboat rocked as the Russian submerged. Bolan stepped down into it and joined his companion.

Prokhorov came up for the second time. Before he could drag in a lungful of air, Bjornstrom leaned out once more and grabbed the back of his jacket. The Norwegian bunched the cloth in his fists and thrust hard down, holding the drowning man against the rowboat just beneath the surface.

The water swirled and frothed.

Bubbles burst. Bolan braced himself against the heaving boat as Bjornstrom rained the murderous pressure on the Russian's thrashing figure.

Gradually the frenzied struggles slackened. The bubbles ceased. For Yuri Prokhorov the marshes of the Rion Delta suddenly became very real. And the sun unbelievably bright.

On the far side of the spur, Mikhail Sujic heard the heavy splash when Prokhorov hit the water. He hurried around a shoulder of rock, unslinging his shotgun. The colonel had told them to be extra cautious. Andreyev's body had been found floating three miles away, and the colonel was not entirely convinced his death had been an accident. There were saboteurs around, and an American terrorist had been seen in the region.

Sujic jumped down onto a lower ledge.

And stopped dead.

A helmeted figure in a shining black dry-suit was facing him. He saw from the curves of breast and hip molded by the skintight rubber that it was a girl. She held a Beretta 93-R in her right hand. "Drop the gun," she said quietly.

Sujic dropped it.

Then he had second thoughts. He began walking toward her.

"Stop!" she warned. "Or I'll shoot."

He shook his head. "You dare not," he said. And of course he was right. "You'd have a half a dozen men with SMG's running down that cliff path before I hit the deck. Come on you give me your gun. I think we'll take you in for a little questioning." Still walking, he held out his hand.

"Come and get me," Erika Axelsson said.

Sujic had guts. He came. Backing his hunch that she would not shoot, he ran at her a heavy, thickset man with a bull neck and mean eyes.

Erika dropped the Beretta. Sujic didn't know exactly what happened after that. She reached up and grabbed the hand clawing out toward her, dipped one shoulder, jerked and then swiveled from the hips.

Sujic flew through the air. He dropped over the edge of the shelf, landed on his back on a steep slope with a sickening thump and slid off into the fjord.

Dipping an oar over the stern of the rowboat, Bjornstrom was beside him in a few strokes. They grasped his ankles and held his feet up in the air so that the upper half of his body was immersed. He died quickly, probably without regaining consciousness.

Ten minutes later, Erika was swallowed up in the mist, rowing the boat back to their hiding place, and the two men were perched on the shelf linking the spur with the cliff face above the caves.

"Those guys were probably on a four-hour watch," Bolan muttered. "Work in the cavern had already started when we arrived, but we should have plenty of time for our recon before they're missed." He tensed as whistles shrilled through the mist. "Okay, Gunnar, this is it!" he said.

Facing the cliff with arms outstretched and toes flexed, he led the way along the shelf toward the caves.

Despite the overhang formed by the roof of the arch, they found handholds and footholds in the weathered rock, ducked into the main cave and inched their way around the curve that hid the inner basin from any watcher on the fjord. By the time the sounds of voices and retreating footsteps had died away, they were clambering over the rail of the gallery that circled the dock.

Beside the control room on the far side of the gallery, a spiral stairway snaked down to the quay. Next to it, in a gray steel housing, was a main transformer flanked by a panel covered with complicated switch gear.

"That's target number one," Bolan whispered.

"And number two's not far away," the Icelander replied, pointing to a second chamber that opened off the dock. Fed by one of the smaller entrances from the fjord, this was evidently intended for small craft, for there was a shallow slipway leading up out of the dark water with bays on either side. A rowboat was moored in one of the bays.

And at the back of the slipway, pipes emerged from the rock to curl through a second opening beyond which the massive, humped shapes of generators were visible.

Bolan nodded, mentally noting other vulnerable points that he could see drain covers, junction boxes, parts of the sluice mechanism. "Anyone in the control room?" he murmured.

Bjornstrom, who was farther along the gallery, craned over the rail. He shook his head. "All in the shelter, I guess. But where is the place for the men who set the charges?"

Bolan indicated a doorway beyond the top of the spiral stairway. An arrow with the Russian characters for the word Shelter pointed to a warren of passageways, which he guessed must eventually connect with the mine shaft sunk from the pithead on the ridge far above them.

Inside this opening there was a glassed-in hutch with slatted steel shutters covering the windows through which they could make out the silhouettes of two men with their backs to the dock basin, looking down into the construction chamber.

One of the men raised his arm.

Abruptly a jet of brown smoke boiled up behind the scaffolding. A muffled explosion shook the fabric of the gallery and a shock wave assaulted the intruders' eardrums. Seconds later two more detonations filled the air beneath the arcs clustered below the roof with a fog of rock dust.

Bolan and the Icelander were racing around the gallery toward the control room. By the time the whistles blew for the workers to come out of the shelter, the two invaders were concealed behind a stack of forty-gallon oil drums between the stairway and the transformers.

Now, for the first time, they were able to study the opposition at close quarters.