So the Executioner had chosen Keflavik airfield, rather than the big international airport nearer the city.

These unimportant fields shared certain qualities that lent them an appearance of sameness a few incoming and outgoing flights each day, a minimum of formalities and personnel who treated passengers like humans instead of cattle.

The atmosphere at these smaller airfields was casual and relaxed.

You could exchange banter with customs and immigration officials if you had a mind to. And you could get past them with a .44 AutoMag or a Beretta more easily than at Kennedy or Heathrow. Which was a plus if you were a hunted man like Mack Bolan.

And if you happened to be carrying, as he was that day, a 93-R and an AutoMag.

Although the Executioner had no intentions of using his two favorite handguns, he felt that it didn't make sense to take unnecessary chances, especially when one was involved in a trade such as Bolan's.

And that trade was Death.

After all, he was Mack Bolan.

In Iceland, Bolan planned to make a river excursion, from source to mouth.

The river was called the Jokulsa a Fjollum. In Icelandic, the name meant "glacier-fed stream in the mountains." Its source was deep beneath the mighty Vatnajokull ice cap that covered one-twelfth of the country's surface.

At first it was channeled through subterranean tunnels melted through the base of the glacier by geothermal heat generated from volcanoes that erupted beneath the ice. Then the river emerged into a desolate landscape of ancient lava flows and twisted northward into the Arctic Ocean through 130 miles of precipitous gorges punctuated by violent rapids and four major waterfalls.

The trip effectively a coast-to-coast journey across the island had been attempted once before, Bolan had read somewhere, by a twelve-man expedition using kayaks and inflatable rafts backed up by a snowmobile and a ULM, a gas-powered, delta-wing aircraft equipped with floats. It had taken them six weeks.