Read Online Blood Heat Zero by Don Pendleton - Free Book Online

sure strokes.
    Ten minutes later, the darkness thinned, dissolved, and the lightweight craft glided out between dirty gray ice crags into the open air.
    * * *
    The snipers were posted behind a group of boulders a mile downstream from where the river emerged.
    There were, in fact, Bolan discovered, several streams flowing out from beneath the glacier. Some meandered through the conglomerate calf rocks, stones, mud and sand scoured from the earth's surface by the glacier and deposited around its outer fringe.
    Some formed pools in which ice masses, broken off from the main flow, floated like miniature bergs. Some channeled straight through the moraine to join the main stream.
    A dozen hit teams would have been needed to cover all these exits. It was logical therefore, the Executioner reasoned, that the Russians would wait until all these watercourses joined to form one waterway and place a single patrol there.
    But the theory had to be checked. He beached the kayak on a gravel spit where the last tributary flowed in and climbed a fifteen-foot bank of shale to make his initial recon.
    It was late afternoon. Low cloud cover transformed the sky into a uniform gray. A chill wind blew over a bare rock plateau that stretched as far as he could see in every direction.
    Crouched low so that he would not be silhouetted against the skyline, Bolan scanned the bleak terrain. The dun-colored plateau eroded remains of an age-old lava flow was marked with a darker, winding trail that charted the course of the river.
    A quarter mile away, the channel gouged from the basalt looped into a wide oxbow. It was on the outside of this curve, Bolan guessed, that a backup team would most likely be posted.
    He was right.
    It was hard to see at first, because a camouflage tarp had been rigged above the emplacement to minimize detection from the air. But there was movement above a rockfall rampart, a dull glint of metal, maybe a reflection from a pair of binoculars, that attracted Bolan's attention.
    He guessed there were two gunners beneath the tarp. Perhaps three. And he had to take them out before continuing his voyage, although, with every voice that failed to respond to radio queries from base, the vigilance of the Soviet HQ personnel would be sharpened and increased.
    The snipers were alert, too.
    Discreet as Bolan's movements had been, they were spotted by the lookouts. He saw rock chips fly and heard the screech of a ricochet before the crisp, sharp explosion of the rifle shot reached him.
    The marksman fired twice more before Bolan dropped from sight, momentarily shaken. The gunner was a fair shot, considering the distance.
    Bolan felt the hot wind of one slug above his hair; the other sliced a fragment of rock away moments before he was to grab it as a handhold. The soldier decided it was healthier down by the riverside!
    Reinstalled in the kayak, the warrior allowed himself to drift downstream between the rocky banks, using the paddle only if the craft threatened to backtrack into an eddy or snag on an obstruction. He left the spray skirt stowed in the bow compartment the river ran smooth and fairly deep here, and he might have to spring out in a hurry.
    He was, he judged, two bends above the oxbow when a sight line past a two-hundred-yard reach and between two opposing bluffs gave him a glimpse of the killers hideout.
    It was a momentary view, before the emplacement disappeared behind one of the bluffs. But it was not reassuring.
    One guy was left beneath the tarp, toting what looked like a submachine gun. Two others had left the shelter, one on either side, to scramble away between the boulders. Each had a hunting rifle slung across his back.
    But they weren't after caribou, Bolan felt certain. The Russians were planning to bracket him with a double enfilade.
    He took up the paddle and pin-wheeled the canoe out into the center of the current. With swift strokes he belted the craft toward the nearer of the two bluffs. A couple of handguns,