Half an hour, they told him. He returned to the lounge. The high, flat, vibratoless cadences of the taped alto explored a scale somewhere up among the stars. Out on the apron the stressed metal skin of the Cessnas was shivering in the wind.

Bolan was waiting outside the terminal ten minutes before his cab was due. He blew into his cupped hands, hunched against the icy breeze. To his surprise he saw the cab turning into the airport entrance almost at once.

The vehicle a Mercedes sedan with the light behind the for-hire sign extinguished swung around and headed for the taxi stand.

Bolan picked up his luggage, stepped out into the roadway and waited for the car to stop.

Instead the big sedan picked up speed as the driver slammed the lever into second and floored the pedal. The engine screamed as the wide Mercedes leaped for Bolan.

Only the Executioner's seasoned nerves, razor sharp through half a lifetime of combat in the world's hot spots, saved him from the hurtling vehicle. In the hundredth of a second's advantage given to him as the danger signal flashed from eyes to brain to muscles, he threw himself violently backward into the shelter.

The driver wrenched the wheel as Bolan fell. The Mercedes stewed sideways on the pavement, and the front fender missed him by a fraction of an inch as it plowed into a steel support halfway along the shelter. The support buckled and split; the shelter erupted in a fountain of glass and splintered wood.

Tires squealed. The sedan broadsided half across the roadway, snaked and then righted itself. Bolan was shouldering his way up and out of the wreckage, the Beretta in his right hand. He fired, shook glass fragments from his hair and fired again a three-shot group that starred the rear window of the Mercedes.

Once more the big car swerved. Then the exhausts bellowed and it powered toward the highway. Evidently the killers were not armed... or they didn't expect their intended victim to be toting iron and preferred not to trade shots with a professional.

Soon after, the taxi that Bolan had ordered arrived.

On the way into town he scarcely noticed the bleak, treeless coastline, the vivid green mosses that covered the black lava soil of the lowlands.

Too many questions were jockeying for position in his mind. Who were the would-be assassins? Why here, of all places, would anyone want to take him out?

He wasn't on any kind of mission; it wasn't even a recon trip. He'd never been to Iceland before. It was less than forty-eight hours since he had made up his mind, reserved his ticket and hired the kayak and the ULM.

Yet someone knew he was coming and they didn't like it.

If they hadn't known, he must have been recognized at the airport and hasty plans made to dispose of him.

In either case, one thing was clear whoever it was must believe that he was on a mission, some kind of search-and-destroy operation.

It followed that there were facts to find out, incriminating facts important enough to risk murder to keep quiet.

Some person or persons unknown had something going that the Executioner if he had really been working on it could have loused up. What could it be?

Drugs?

Prostitution? Some kind of Mafia racket?

Unlikely. A terrorist plot then?

In Iceland? He dismissed the thought.

Someone had done their best to eliminate him nevertheless. Of the two possibilities, he favored the second that he had by chance been recognized at the airport and the wrong conclusion drawn. The attempt to run him down showed all the signs of a hasty, spur-of-the-moment plan. Otherwise, if they knew anything about him, they would have been armed.

Bolan shrugged as he stared at the white houses with their multicolored roofs on the outskirts of Reykjavik. Okay, someone carrying a load of guilt was prepared to kill to protect his investment. But what the hell it had nothing to do with him; he was on vacation, dammit. The heat would presumably be off once they realized he was not on their trail.

That was before the second attempt.

Bolan planned to play the tourist for two days in Reykjavik. He would see enough of the Icelandic countryside on his self-imposed river trip. The kayak and the ULM were to be freighted to Egilsstadir, on the east coast of the island, and he would follow on a domestic flight two days later.

Right now he was tired and he was hungry. He checked into the Hotel Wotan, in the city center. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned place with creaking elevators and its central heating and hot water drawn as it was for every dwelling in Reykjavik from the thermal springs whose source Bolan himself would soon be exploring.

His third-floor room overlooked Austurvollur Square and the red-brick, steep-roofed Althing building where the parliament met. After a shave and a shower he went out to eat and take in the nightlife of the city though in this season nightlife was something of a misnomer it was weeks before the winter "darkening time," when the earth's Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun and the hours of darkness grew unbearably long, the incidence of alcoholism increased and the murder rate shot up.

Bolan almost smiled as he thought of his narrow escape earlier. These people were getting ahead of themselves.

He arrived at Nielsen's, which was recommended by the hotel's head porter.

It was a candlelit basement and the meal smorrebrod preceded by slices of smoked sturgeon followed by raw herring in a variety of sauces was excellent.

Thule, the Icelandic beer, was practically nonalcoholic, but the aquavit aperitif was strong and the afterdinner Brennivin more fiery still.

It was with a feeling of well-being but with combat instincts on alert that Bolan climbed the stone steps beneath the striped awning to regain the street.

His veteran's sixth sense saved him again. The gun was equipped with a sound suppressor, and there was a flash hider over the muzzle. But something indefinable in the gloom a darker patch of shadow that moved, a tiny scrape of metal, a rolled-down auto window that snared a gleam of light from a distant street lamp warned him of danger. He shoved the doorman violently down the steps and dropped to the sidewalk in a single fluid motion.

The shut of the gun was barely audible. The metal-jacketed death bringer spanged off the restaurant-area railings behind Bolan's head and screeched into the sky. The second shot flattened itself against the brickwork at the top of the steps, at the height Bolan's chest would have been an instant before.

Then a bus rumbled down the street with a string of cars behind it. A truck laden with barrels passed in the other direction. By the time the street was clear again, Bolan was facedown along the slant of the stairway, elbows resting on the sidewalk, the Beretta cradled in his two hands.

He held his breath, scanning the line of parked cars on the far side of the roadway. He figured the shots came from one of them. Or maybe from a marksman standing between two of the vehicles.

Or even someone hidden in a doorway on the opposite sidewalk.

Bolan's ice-chip eyes raked the target area.

"What the hell's going on?" the doorman's angry voice protested from below. "You can't..."

"Crazy fool with a gun," the Executioner whispered. "Keep quiet and stay where you are."

"You're the one's that's crazy! Let me call the pal..."

"No! Let me handle it." Bolan's voice was not much louder than a whisper, but it was enough to pinpoint his position for the hidden gunman. The silenced weapon coughed three more times. Bolan ducked below the top step as the slugs gouged chips from the flagstones paving the sidewalk.

But this time he had a line on the enemy position.

Among the parked vehicles, four were immediately opposite Nielsen's frontage a Volvo station wagon, a Citroen, a panel truck and a Swedish Saab sedan. Bolan had at first suspected the truck maybe an opening concealed in the lettering along its side but as soon as he scanned the row he saw that he was mistaken. In the half light, reflected illumination from the far street lamp gleamed dully on paintwork and veneered the windows of the parked vehicles.