He was staring at the VDT screen, a replica of the one that would shortly become operative in the control room of the cavern more than two hundred feet below them.

"Much NATO activity?" he asked the navy man at the console.

"Very little, Comrade Colonel," the man replied. "Just the flotilla engaged on this so-called goodwill mission."

He pointed to a small cluster of blips at the left of the screen.

"There will be British submarines skulking around on the seabed someplace on the fringe of the exercise area," the admiral growled, "spying on our fleet and feeding the information into their damned computers in the hope of a printout that will allow them to extrapolate what we would do in any given situation." He turned to Antonin. "I shall call up the Ilyushins to make sure that we have eyes and ears underwater; we shall beat them at their own game." The Ilyushins converted long-range transport planes — sowed undersea sensors copied from captured American SOSUS detectors that could chart the course of a submarine wherever it went. The latest models were so sophisticated that they could identify individual submarines from the noise of their engine print."

"It will not be long, Comrade Admiral," Antonin said, "before such intricacies will become redundant. The short-range recon hunter-killers deployed from this base will provide quicker, better, more accurate information than any computed."

"If the base is ever finished," the admiral interrupted tartly. "We are already weeks behind schedule. It should have been in operation well before the long-night season. And provided its existence has not been splashed over every newspaper in Northern Europe." He looked coldly at Antonin. Neither the KGB nor the GRU were popular with the Soviet armed forces. "Your much-vaunted 'security' has not proved very secure, Comrade Colonel, has it? Our pipelines uncovered, our site penetrated, our outposts destroyed. Your professional en— forcers outwitted at every turn by a single amateur guerrilla. A man still at liberty moreover. And even the guards charged with the security of our fjord entries prove incapable of resisting this terrorist. It would seem that they themselves require guarding," the admiral said sarcastically. "You have in fact already lost three of them if I am not mistaken?"

Antonin's face was suffused with rage. A vein in his temple twitched uncontrollably. He had forgotten to include the men missing from the spur in his catalog of Bolan attacks.

"By nightfall the man will be in our hands and the affair terminated," he said in a choked voice.

He strode to his desk, snatched up the interphone and savagely punched buttons on the handset.

"Rodsky?" he snapped. "Prepare the woman for sharpened interrogation at once. I know she is not conscious, you dolt. Prepare her nevertheless. The interrogation is to commence as soon as she shows signs of consciousness."

For Mack Bolan and his Icelandic ally the most difficult part of the operation was getting back into the caves.

The sun, low in the sky but fiercely bright, flashed reflections from the binoculars wielded by four guards deployed around the spur. Two hundred feet higher, security men silhouetted against the skyline constantly scanned the fjord. And within the connecting caverns it was certain that special orders would have been given in case the impudent intruders of the morning were rash enough to try a second time.

The impudent intruders left Pvera in a beat-up Citroen that Bjornstrom had somehow acquired and raced across the bridge at the head of the fjord to take the highway leading to Akureyri.

Two miles farther on, Bjornstrom swung right onto a dirt road that looped up toward the Russian concession.

While the mine workings and the wall barring the entrance were still hidden on the far side of a swell in the landscape, he turned off the road and steered between scattered boulders across a depression that ended in a steepsided valley slanting down to the water.

Once out of sight of the road, he cut the engine and coasted. The noisy clatter of the air-cooled twin-cylinder engine died away, and they bumped across a slope of coarse moorland grass to halt in the shelter of a granite outcrop.

Below them the valley plunged toward a cascade that foamed into a creek leading off the fjord. And there, shielded by a wilderness of tumbled rocks, their Hypalon raft was concealed.

They clambered down and retrieved their wet suits from beneath the seats of the raft.

The one thing in their favor, the only factor that gave them a chance to make the caves unseen, was the fact that the concession was on the western side of the fjord.

Because of this, a combination of low afternoon sun and high cliffs threw a shadow across the water.

"Even so," Bolan said, "we shall have to make the whole distance underwater, with snorkels for both of us all the way."

"The bottom of the fjord is black basalt and marine vegetation grows below the cliffs," Bjornstrom pointed out. "There's no pale seabed sand for us to show up against. You don't think?"

"No way," Bolan insisted. "It's okay for minisubs they will be at some depth; no danger of them leaving a telltale wash. But even if we are invisible below, the moment we broke surface to gulp in a breath of air we'd risk making enough of a commotion to draw the attention of the goons on that spur. Or one of the guards above. They might take it for a fish after a fly the first time, but not the next. Anyway, they'd probably loose off a burst just in case."

"Whatever you say," Bjornstrom agreed.

He sloshed water around inside the eyepiece of his mask, pulled it down over his face and took the hard rubber breathing bit between his teeth.

Followed by the Executioner, he submerged and swam slowly out of the creek into the fjord.

Even with the snorkels they had to take it slowly. In the circumstances it was difficult to remain underwater for much more than a minute. And each time the head of a breathing tube with its caged ball valve periscoped above the surface there was a chance it might leave enough wake to alert a watcher.

Fortunately the tide was now rising.

The inward flow of seawater meeting the current of the Jokulsa a Fjollum created ripples on the shadowed side of the fjord and a constant, shifting glimmer of sunlight beyond.

Each of them was hampered in his movements, Bolan with the waterproof Heckler and Koch G-11 strapped across his chest, the Icelander by the neoprene sack protecting his Ingram and two handguns. In addition, each stroke had to be made cautiously, the breath drawn evenly and slowly when the U-shaped tube broke surface and the ball float dropped to let in air.

It was almost two o'clock before they arrived at the mouth of the smallest cave.

They surfaced still in the shelter of the low rock arch and trod water, staring into the lit interior of the small cavern.

The rowboat had been pulled out of the water and up to the top of the slipway. The only other difference from their previous visit was that now the entry to the generator cave and each of the passageways branching off the quay framed a guard with a Skorpion machine pistol.

Over the hum of turbines the two men could hear the familiar sounds of drills, compressors and concrete mixers. Work was evidently continuing on the rock faces around and behind the caisson.

From time to time an overseer shouted an order, but the noise was mainly mechanical. The guards did not patrol. They remained motionless at their posts.

Clinging to the rough walls just outside the pool of light, the roof of the arch low above their heads with the rising tide, the two freedom fighters waited for the whistle to blow. Would the KGB hardmen barring their way go to the shelter with the others?