Blood Heat Zero by Don Pendleton Page A

retaining spring had snapped or the river had tired of playing cat and mouse and decided to get it over with and the raft surged toward the deadly lip.
    Tilting up as it went over, it hurled out at least two of the occupants before it fell. For an instant Bjornstrom heard their death screams. After that there was nothing but the roar of thousands of tons of water pounding down on the rocks below.
    Bjornstrom ran to a narrow pathway cut from the rock on the western margin of the cataract. Spume from the thundering falls had blown across to slick the black rock, and he had difficulty keeping his feet on the slippery, treacherous surface. But at last he arrived on a ledge lower down, from which he could overlook the giant basin hollowed by the water.
    There was nothing to see through the spray but the foaming white wilderness into which the great curving curtain of the cascade was plunging.
    It was not until twenty minutes later that the hellhole relinquished the first of its prizes fragments from Bolan's kayak. The spray skirt, a broken paddle, burst-open provision sacks and a portion of the foredeck were spewed out to swirl away on the surface of the river as it raced toward the ocean. Soon afterward the yellow helmet bobbed to the surface, floated into an eddy and was beached on a gravel strip fifty yards downstream. There was no sign of the Russians or their raft.
    With a heavy heart, Bjornstrom hurried on. Grimsstadir was five miles away, but he was well-known in the area. And well liked, which is all-important in thinly populated regions. He completed the last three and a half miles on a borrowed pony.
    The little town was at the foot of two sheer bluffs facing each other across the Jokulsa a Fjollum valley.
    Most of the houses set in neat garden plots between each row of streets were of the same style orderly white rectangles with dormer windows on the upper floors that projected from roofs colored red, green, terra-cotta or midnight blue.
    Bjornstrom passed them all and went into an older building at one side of a square, a gray stone pile that housed the local commissariat of police.
    * * *
    The moment he had dumped the crippled kayak into the first part of an Eskimo roll, Bolan made what expert paddlemen called a "wet exit." He ripped off the spray skirt, released his helmet and dived out of the cockpit. He was at once seized by the current and rolled away from the capsized canoe.
    Ten yards downstream there was a suckhole five feet across and probably half as deep again. Bolan was swept underwater toward this swirling funnel and held down beneath the surface by the hydraulic pressure of the stream.
    It was surprisingly clear down there.
    He could make out every detail of the freckled granite boulder submerged just below the surface, which created the miniwhirlpool; he could see the smooth, dark bedrock at the bottom of the river; he could see farther on the stone-layered face of a shelf that formed a rampart between him and the lip of the falls.
    If he could make that rampart and stay submerged below it, there was a chance that he could work his way to the east bank of the river and get out.
    And if not.
    He had two alternatives, both lethal he would remain spinning in the suckhole and drown, or he would float above the level of the rampart and be swept instantly over the edge of the cataract.
    Bolan knew that the only way to escape the deadly clutch of a suckhole was down. He knew there would be a wave above the rampart that would marginally reduce the strength of the current on that part of the river.
    He jerked the quick-release toggle of his buoyancy vest and swam powerfully down under the vortex to the undercurrent. At once he was whirled away from the suckhole, his face inches from the rocky bed, and then shot to the surface like a cork.
    He gasped a single lungful of air and dived again, thrusting deep with all his strength. He was perilously near that tall wave, and beyond it there was nothing but the lip,