Don Pendleton - Blood Heat Zero

The doctor shrugged. "Difficult to say. Depends on the exact composition of the drug it's some kind of chloral hydrate compound. And of course on the amount in the pill. Clearly it will be fairly efficient, or she would not have been provided with it. I say several hours at least."

Colonel Dmitri Aleksandrevitch Antonin became increasingly frustrated as he pondered his present circumstances.

He had once been liaison between the KGB and GRU military intelligence. In that function he had been assistant to the infamous Major General Greb Strakhov of the KGB hierarchy. The Iceland posting was a demotion. It had come as a result of Antonin's failure to organize a worldwide Mafia confederation that was to have been backed with KGB money.

The man responsible for that failure, for provoking such internecine strife among the various Mob families that the idea had to be abandoned as impracticable, was Mack Bolan.

Not Colonel Antonin's favorite character, now or at any time.

It was bad enough that they had crossed swords not just that once but many times... and the American had always come out on top. The worst thing of all was that Bolan should have turned up right here, in Iceland, at the exact time Antonin hoped for a spectacular success that would reestablish him in the eyes of Moscow.

How had the bastard known?

The commercial attache from the Soviet embassy who happened to recognize him on the plane from Denmark had done well to signal Antonin at once. Yet the capitalist lackey had four times outwitted KGB assassins before he even arrived at the sinkhole in the glacier.

Since then there had been nothing but disasters.

The crews of two outposts on the river annihilated, a helicopter and its occupants destroyed at the pumping station near Grimsstadir by Bolan and some as yet unidentified accomplice, five men and a raft vanished without trace at the Fjallagfoss, a vehicle and another five operatives lost on the road near the lakehead. And Bolan, unscathed, was still advancing as remorselessly, as the tides that Antonin had made part of his own blueprint for success.

The man was not human.

Worst of all, he had somehow wormed out the secret of the caves and attempted for once, thank God, unsuccessfully to penetrate the base.

Now this unknown woman associated with the foreign terrorist and his companion had materialized. And even here Antonin was temporarily blocked from wringing the information he craved out of her.

No matter. She was in his hands. He had learned how to play the waiting game. The moment she regained consciousness she would be made to talk.

It would be a pleasure to assist at the ceremony. And then he would know precisely how much the mercenary, Bolan, had discovered... and how best to rid himself of the implacable Westerner who had so often too often proved a stumbling block in Antonin's own carefully prepared plans.

It never occurred to the wily Russian that the whole series of setbacks might derive from a simple coincidence. That if the attache had not been so overzealous Bolan might simply have continued his vacation and not noticed anything amiss. If the Executioner had not been pursued so doggedly by KGB killers, which made him so determined to find out what was going on, he might have shrugged the whole thing off as none of his business. But those who make a profession out of deceit are incapable of comprehending the truth themselves.

Antonin stalked across to the video display terminal. A naval enlisted man, cleared for top-secret work, sat at the VDT console. On the dark green fluorescent screen, multiple blips located units of the NATO and Soviet fleets operating in the area.

Russia's northern fleet, largest and strongest of four, was based well over one thousand miles away at Murmansk and other ports on the Kola Peninsula.

Yet the Soviet blips outnumbered the NATO units by more than ten to one.

There were eighty surface-combat vessels in the fleet, which included nine guided-missile cruisers, seven missile destroyers, two carriers and more than one hundred submarines. Most of them were steaming to a rendezvous sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle for an exercise designed to test their maneuverability in time of emergency and, incidentally, to probe NATO reaction to large-scale fleet maneuvers.

Most of them... except the submarines.

The naval authorities had considered it wasteful to employ more than half a dozen nuclear craft when soon enough the new SSK's to be clandestinely based on Iceland would so radically change the pattern of naval operations in the region.

Antonin turned to a wall hanger and pulled down a large-scale polar map of the North Atlantic, a projection that emphasized the too-often-ignored proximity of the Soviet Union and the United States across the ice cap.

And the vital strategic importance of Iceland in that context.

Anchored like a monumental aircraft carrier between Greenland and Norway, the country effectively controlled all three of the sea passages through which the Russians could move their fleet into offensive positions that would be menacing to the NATO forces the gaps between Iceland and Greenland, Iceland and the Farce Islands and between the Faroes and Scotland.

How much easier it would be to plan such movements when the SSK hunter-killer minisubs, themselves secretly operating from the bowels of an Icelandic glacier, could monitor and, if necessary, influence the concentrations of enemy shipping that blocked any Soviet advance!

How agreeable to reflect that responsibility for the existence of a base actually within the NATO bastion would largely be his!

Antonin saw himself at a Kremlin ceremony, the Order of Lenin being pinned to his chest. He saw himself in a vie office with a carpeted floor at Dzerzhinsky Square, the KGB headquarters in Moscow; in his own imported automobile; at a country dacha with servants.

He saw himself in total charge of all the KGB directorates, planning secret operations worldwide.

The Soviet admiral in overall charge of the real-life submarine pen project on which Antonin's hopes were founded had come into the room.

He was staring at the VDT screen, a replica of the one that would shortly become operative in the control room of the cavern more than two hundred feet below them.

"Much NATO activity?" he asked the navy man at the console.

"Very little, Comrade Colonel," the man replied. "Just the flotilla engaged on this so-called goodwill mission."

He pointed to a small cluster of blips at the left of the screen.

"There will be British submarines skulking around on the seabed someplace on the fringe of the exercise area," the admiral growled, "spying on our fleet and feeding the information into their damned computers in the hope of a printout that will allow them to extrapolate what we would do in any given situation." He turned to Antonin. "I shall call up the Ilyushins to make sure that we have eyes and ears underwater; we shall beat them at their own game." The Ilyushins converted long-range transport planes — sowed undersea sensors copied from captured American SOSUS detectors that could chart the course of a submarine wherever it went. The latest models were so sophisticated that they could identify individual submarines from the noise of their engine print."

"It will not be long, Comrade Admiral," Antonin said, "before such intricacies will become redundant. The short-range recon hunter-killers deployed from this base will provide quicker, better, more accurate information than any computed."

"If the base is ever finished," the admiral interrupted tartly. "We are already weeks behind schedule. It should have been in operation well before the long-night season. And provided its existence has not been splashed over every newspaper in Northern Europe." He looked coldly at Antonin. Neither the KGB nor the GRU were popular with the Soviet armed forces. "Your much-vaunted 'security' has not proved very secure, Comrade Colonel, has it? Our pipelines uncovered, our site penetrated, our outposts destroyed. Your professional en— forcers outwitted at every turn by a single amateur guerrilla. A man still at liberty moreover. And even the guards charged with the security of our fjord entries prove incapable of resisting this terrorist. It would seem that they themselves require guarding," the admiral said sarcastically. "You have in fact already lost three of them if I am not mistaken?"