Free Blood Heat Zero by Don Pendleton

by the current, brought him rapidly to the apex of the oxbow.
    The Beretta, together with Big Thunder and the grenade, was belted to his waist in a waterproof sack.
    His kayak had been carried around the bend and was now within range of the last Russian beneath the tarp. The guy opened up with his SMG short, sharp bursts that ripped out with shattering force and stitched the gloom with points of flame.
    The kayak appeared to shudder from the force of the shells. It spun, heeled over, righted itself and headed stern first for the opposite bank.
    Bolan was below the emplacement, waist high in the stream, the PVC sack unzippered. His right hand dipped in, came out holding the grenade. He pulled the pin. His arm swung back.
    As the gunner got wise to the fact that the kayak was pilotless either that or he had two enemies to deal with! Bolan uncoiled and pitched.
    The grenade streaked through the air, hit the stony rampart and bounced in under the tarp.
    The Russian had time to unleash one brief burst in the Executioner's direction before the explosion. The slugs perforated the PVC sack.
    Then came the cracking detonation and a livid sheet of yellow flame. Brown smoke laced with scarlet ballooned out and drifted away. The collapsed tarp flared momentarily and then subsided onto the debris of charred flesh and splintered the wooden flooring of the emplacement.
    Bolan sighed and headed for the canoe. He would have wished it some other way. But so long as animal man chose to play by the devil's rules.
    Hell, there just was no other way.

7
    Grimsstadir, the only village anywhere near the river on the first half of its journey to the sea, was fifty miles downstream. There was an airstrip there and a road junction at the head of a lake. For most of the distance the Jokulsa a Fjollum channeled its course through the bare lava uplands. There was only one other sector where a mountain track veered within half a mile of the river valley.
    The Executioner wondered how many more humans he would be forced to kill, how many lookout posts he would have to overcome, before he unearthed the secret of this wild countryside and its clandestine invaders.
    The kayak was beached, as Mack Bolan had guessed, on the far side of the oxbow.
    It was tipped onto its side, with water washing over the coaming and into the cockpit. The spray skirt was riddled with bullet holes, one of the spare paddle halves was snapped in two and several waterproof sacks had been damaged. The fiberglass hull was perforated in twelve places three individual holes in the foredeck and seven stitched in a near row that slanted from gunwale to keel line.
    Bolan removed the contents, inverted the vessel to tip out the water and carried it to a slope of dry rock above the river.
    There was a can of resin filler among his supplies, originally included in case the craft was punctured while running the rapids.
    Working with the help of the flashlight beam, he plugged the holes and smoothed over the filler with a palette knife. The repairs might not withstand a battering by submerged rocks in a really rugged stretch of white water, but at least they would keep him afloat.
    If he did lose the kayak, he would still follow the river by other means a rented all-terrain vehicle, on horseback or even on foot. But he was determined to carry out his initial vacation plan. But the overriding priority now was to learn what these Russians were up to. He hoped for their sake that it was not something sinister.
    Navymen, commercial personnel or KGB, it was all the same to him he was personally involved now.
    That challenge was enough for the warrior.
    He would unravel the mystery, uncover the intruders plan and wreck the project, whatever it was. Nothing less would satisfy him now.
    He would follow the damned thing through to its conclusion, whatever the odds.
    And if he drew the short straw, if in the final reckoning those odds ran against him, well, at least he would have tried. The Executioner knew