Free Blood Heat Zero by Don Pendleton Page A

no other way.
    As soon as the resin had hardened, Bolan unloaded a spare spray skirt from the storage compartment, relaunched the kayak and sped downriver.
    There was obviously a limit to the amount of harassment the Russians could get away with. It was unlikely they would dare operate a full-scale manhunt in a foreign country; even in a remote area such as this there would be the risk of an international incident, repercussions at the United Nations, a threatened breakdown of diplomatic relations.
    Helicopter recon flights could be similarly restricted. In a country with an unusual number of small airstrips and many private aircraft flying the domestic airlanes because of the rudimentary surface communications, they would soon be spotted. Such sorties would be counterproductive, drawing attention to a situation the Russians wished to keep secret.
    Still, Bolan decided to rest during the hours of full daylight and ride the river only during the short northern half night. He had perhaps two hours left before sunrise. Each precious moment must be used to distance him as far as possible from the destroyed emplacement.
    For several miles below the oxbow, the current ran smooth between fifty-foot cliffs channeled from the ancient lava. Then the canyon widened, the margins of the stream drew apart, the landscape flattened even farther into a region of tundra floored with multicolored mosses and patches of lichen covering the rocky outcrops.
    Bolan paddled as fast as he could.
    Beyond the plain, his maps showed another track of volcanic country crisscrossed by steep-sided ravines.
    And until he reached that, there wasn't a hope in hell of concealment scarcely a boulder impeded the shallow course of the river as it flowed easily over the flat land, and there was certainly no place a kayak could be hidden.
    Bolan's arms moved back and forth with the regularity of a metronome, water droplets trailing from the long paddle, blades biting deep into the current as he forced the craft downstream.
    Conical peaks flanked by a line of low hills materialized out of the gloom ahead, but they were still several miles away when the sky lightened in the east and clouds took shape out of the darkness overhead.
    The rain had stopped but an icy wind still whined across the plain, riffling the surface of the water and scourging the lone boater's face.
    Bolan plowed doggedly on. There was nothing else he could do; he had no place else to go.
    There were no signs of pursuit by the time, almost an hour later, he stroked the kayak in among the first of the hills. But before he could think of resting there was another major obstacle the Jokulsa a Fjollum itself.
    The river was turning sour on him, and there was fast water ahead!
    Huge granite boulders, dumped by some forgotten glacier aeons ago, lay strewed across the watercourse, some with their craggy summits above the flow, others submerged dangerously close to the surface.
    Foaming white water seized the kayak and accelerated it into a cleft between two of these towering sentinels. On the far side Bolan was faced by a ferocious row of high waves, tall whitecaps facing upstream that came pounding down on the bow of his lightweight craft as he sliced a path through the rapid.
    The swiftest flow ran along the base of a cliff that rose sheer on his right. He slipped cross-channel, braced momentarily upstream to allow the kayak to be swept into it, then hurtled onward, washed over from bow to stern, his eyes blinded by spray.
    A saw-tooth rock ridge cut the surface. He braced again to shoot around that, slalomed past a shark fin of basalt and then snapped his hips sideways and paddled fiercely to steer into calmer water as he felt the canoe begin to dump.
    It was then that he saw the concrete pumping station built out on a ledge overlooking a river.
    And a guy with the machine pistol covering him while the raging current threw them closer together.
    Bolan had no choice to lift the spray skirt and reach for