Blood Heat Zero by Don Pendleton

specific, but the ambush proved otherwise.
    He was sitting in what was obviously a permanent lookout post; materials to fashion a concrete platform and install a two-way radio could hardly have been conveyed to a location deep inside the biggest glacier in Europe in a matter of hours or even days. The place had to have been in existence before he even knew himself that he would be boating past it.
    The gunmen had been stationed there to block any caver or canoeist who figured he might like to make it along the underground headwaters of the Jokulsa a Fjollum.
    Another thought occurred to Bolan the river must somehow during its course hold the secret these guys were so anxious to keep under wraps.
    So what the hell could be so special about a river that rose in an inaccessible subterranean cave and then ran more than one hundred miles through some of the world's coldest, bleakest country?
    He had to find out. Because one thing was now crystal clear.
    Whatever he may have thought after the earlier attacks, the Executioner's own standpoint was now radically changed.
    He decided to carry on with his planned itinerary; there was nothing else he could do. But the aim of the operation would be different. As of now.
    To hell with the R and R. This was no longer a vacation trip. No way. The kayak voyage was now a fact-finding mission. Yeah, the unknowns had tried Mack Bolan's patience too far.
    He would find out what was brewing along the course of the damned river and put a stop to it.
    Or die in the attempt.
    Bolan smiled grimly. It seemed he was back on a search-and-destroy kick after all. Despite all those innocent holiday plans. Just the way his unknown enemies had figured he was since the takeoff. They had talked him into it!
    He rose and stretched. Suddenly aware that blood still dripped from his ear, he realized that he had completely forgotten that first shot, the very near-miss that had almost ended the Bolan legend.
    Adrenaline was the answer. The stuff had been raging through his veins faster than the river ran, fast enough to momentarily make him forget that murderous initial attack until the threat had been mastered by the violence it unleashed.
    Yet it was no more than an abrupt swirl in the stream, or maybe an unexpected roll of the kayak's hull, that had saved the warrior's life a deflection of one single inch in the wrong direction and the killer slug would have severed the carotid artery, wasting his lifeblood in less than two minutes. It would have been Bolan's body then that was washed anonymously away to rot in some backwash creek below the ice-cap mountain. A chilling thought.
    He eased off the helmet with its dangling strap.
    The wound was no more than a scratch, a raw furrow at the tip of the lobe.
    He found a thin spray of icy water cascading from a cleft in the rock and bathed the wound alternately with this and the warm water from the river until the bleeding stopped.
    Some you win... to Bolan said to himself. He smiled again. And froze.
    Gutturally, from someplace behind, a deep voice had boomed in reply. And amid a stream of words incomprehensible among the hollow echoes of the cavern, he had caught the three syllables of his own name.
    Mack Bolan.
    It was a moment before he caught on; the voice came from the speaker of the radio stashed in the rock alcove.
    Base called the lookouts to check whether or not the Executioner had showed. Not so strange.
    What did jolt Bolan was the fact that the voice was speaking in Russian.

6
    Bolan whistled softly. Pieces of the puzzle locked snugly into place. He remembered the Soviet factory ship at Akureyri, the seaman in the watch cap, snatches of conversation.
    Stuff that bored him then had now, suddenly, become loaded with significance.
    We buy our oil from the Soviets.
    They got a right to put in here.
    They started a mining concession.
    The Russians are flying in heavy equipment through Husavik.
    Right.
    Husavik was not far from Jokulsa a Fjollum. From a bluff