"But the mission... The attack on the garrison...""
If I don't catch up with her in fifteen minutes, I'll return and we'll continue with the original plan. Set it back twenty-five minutes, that's all. I know time is short but we can afford this. I've got to afford it and I should be doing it instead of talking about it." The guerrilla nodded.
"If you must, you should." He fell into step alongside the Executioner. They started out of the camp. "I have never known you to be wrong, kuvii Bolan. I know you from the field of battle and so I know you. Your intuition and compassion equal your bravery and skill. I will not let you go alone."
* * *
They had not gone far along the sloping terrain when they saw distant headlights leaving the Afghan army installation to turn in the direction of town.
When they saw the vehicle stop briefly, Bolan used his binoculars and at a distance of a half mile he witnessed the scene of Katrina intercepting the ZIL limo.
Katrina, you brave, irrational fool, thought Bolan. He swallowed the lump of concern that constricted his throat and swung into action before the limo down there started rolling again.
"We've got to head off that car," he told Tarik Khan. Both warriors hoped they would intercept the ZIL, considering the car's stop, some curves in the road that would slow its progress and the direct line taken by Tarik Khan and the Executioner who galloped to make good time across the rocky slope.
Bolan and Tarik Khan pulled up again when the limo, after traveling no more than a quarter mile, slowed for a turn off the highway to a point well in and concealed from the main road.
Bolan and the hillman had almost made it to the clearing where the ZIL had stopped when they heard the faint snap of muffled pistol shots followed by the louder sustained chatter of a submachine gun. The gunfire sounded to Bolan's trained ears like an Uzi or a Czech Model 23, and for a moment he feared he and Tarik Khan were too late. Then they made it over a rise and Bolan's NVD eyesight told him they had not arrived too late but not one damn microsecond too soon, either.
Bolan hand-signaled a maneuver.
Tarik Khan nodded his understanding and split off from the Executioner. The two advanced undetected from different angles on an unfolding scene of action that Bolan took in at a glance: three dead Afghans, the Russian corporal at the front of the limo with the submachine gun and the Soviet officer grappling with Katrina, yanking her to him with his pistol to her temple. The officer, a general no less, was so busy struggling with the wildcat that he did not hear Bolan at all.
The Executioner pressed the muzzle of Big Thunder to the guy's temple and everything changed.
"Drop your weapon," Ice Voice growled. "Release the woman."
The Russian officer did both with alacrity, yet no panic showed in the man's movements. Bolan knew from this as much as from the photograph he had seen of his target that this was the man he had come to Afghanistan to kill.
The corporal, still clutching the SMG, did not fire for fear of hitting his superior.
A shadow materialized behind the corporal.
Tarik Khan.
The corporal was completely oblivious of anyone behind him until the Afghan hill fighter snaked his left forearm around the man's neck.
Tarik Khan tilted the head forward into the crook of his arm, then applied a fast open-handed punch behind the man's ear.
The dry snap of the corporal's neck breaking sounded like a pistol shot across the clearing.
Tarik Khan released the body and let it fall to the ground. Then he turned to watch the others.
Katrina was standing a few feet away while Bolan kept the 11.5inch stainless steel cannon aimed in a straightarmed stance at the Soviet officer's temple. The Executioner was far enough away so the general could not try swinging around into Bolan or diving away from the gun.
With the bodyguard taken care of, Bolan stepped back from the officer, but the barrel of Big Thunder never wavered from the Russian's head. "Turn around, comrade," Bolan ordered. "General Voukelitch, I presume."
The officer turned with deliberate movement to acknowledge Bolan with a nod.
"The infamous Executioner," Voukelitch returned with cool formality. "You have a habit, it would seem, of appearing when and where you are least expected."
Bolan glanced at Tarik Khan, who reached down almost absently to relieve the dead corporal of his SMG and ammo clips before moving to the car, where an Afghan lay sprawled in death.
"We are a good team, you and I," the mujahedeen leader gruffed. He used one foot to flop the corpse over onto its back so he could get a look at the dead face. "We knew this one, kuvii Bolan. Allah has a sense of justice, you see. It is your friend of the Hash Breath."
Bolan glanced at Katrina.
"Are you okay?"
She nodded, found her H&K automatic where it had fallen and retrieved it. "The jukiabkr is an informer and a smuggler of drugs. They were going to..." Her voice faltered at what had almost happened. She looked to Bolan for understanding. "...I wanted to..."
"The thing that matters now is that you have proved yourself to malik Tarik Khan," Bolan interrupted kindly.
He glanced at the hill chief who sauntered over.
Tarik Khan grunted with a last look at the dead jukiabkr. "She has proved herself," he agreed.
General Voukelitch cleared his throat.
"Pardon my impertinence, gentlemen, but may I inquire what is to become of me? Am I to be murdered like my driver?"
"Not if you cooperate," Bolan white-lied to the cannibal. "There's a reason I suggested my friend use his hands to kill the corporal. You're my ticket onto that fort, comrade. Cover him, Tarik Khan. If he so much as twitches an eye wrong, kill him. We can find another way onto the base."
Tarik Khan centered his rifle on the general's heart. "It will be difficult to restrain myself."
"Do your best." Bolan walked over to the sprawled corpse of the driver. "Looks like a close enough fit to pass."
Voukelitch raised his hands to assure Tarik Khan that he meant to cooperate. The officer retained the expression of a stone wall but his apprehension under malik Khan's close-up loathing said he almost preferred the cool-eyed aim behind the AutoMag.
Bolan hurriedly shed his combat webbing and lightweight munitions and equipment and shucked them through the open driver's window onto the floor of the ZIL, along with his silenced MAC-10.
He made quick work of stripping the trousers and tunic from the dead soldier. He slipped them over his blacksuit. He had instructed Tarik Khan with hand signals to slay the soldier without a weapon so as not to get any blood on the uniform.
Voukelitch watched Bolan.
When the Executioner returned to the group the general risked a snicker as Bolan pulled off his NVD goggles and slid them into a pocket of the blacksuit before buttoning up the tunic.
"You hope to bluff your way onto the installation?"
"With your help, General. Maybe not if it was a Soviet base, but I saw this vehicle slide out of there a while ago without even stopping for the guards at the gate. The militia sentries saw you coming and had the gate open to salute you through as nice as you please. That's the way they'll do it on your way back in."
Voukelitch lowered his upraised hands. Steel prodded his spine. "I am a Soviet officer. I will not betray..." Katrina interrupted.
"He deals in hashish," she said, glaring in accusation. "He has a brick of it on his person. He paid the hillman for it. These pigs barter in all manner of death; violent, and the kind that rots a civilization from within."
"We'll let the general keep his hash," Bolan decided. He unholstered Big Thunder again and the .44's muzzle retracked to the cannibal. "If he dies today, it will give them a little more to cover up and reorganize and panic about and I like that."
Tarik Khan glanced at his wristwatch.
"Has anything... changed?" he asked Bolan, careful not to divulge reference to the scheduled assault.
"Nothing, except spare the choppers at the l
anding pad. They're mine."
The hillman's brow furrowed but he nodded.
"As you say, my brother. And the woman?"
"Take her with you." Bolan glanced at Katrina. "You must go with him."
She nodded without hesitation.
"I will. A soul has been redeemed here... and I am wiser for it."
"No more talk. Good luck, both of you. You had best return," he advised Tarik Khan.
"And so we shall." The Afghan fighter stalked off.
Katrina looked as if she wanted to say something to the nightfighter who had saved her life but she knew Bolan was right. She followed Tarik Khan into the gloom.
16
Bolan glanced at the ridge of metallic gray inching higher behind the eastern peaks.
Fifteen minutes until the first half-light of dawn started to nibble at the dark, he gauged.
He gestured with the AutoMag to the KGB man.
"In the car, General. In the back like a nice passenger, and no sudden moves."
Voukelitch walked to the car. He stood aside while Bolan covered him and made a fast, thorough search of the tonneau for any hidden weapon or signaling device.
Bolan stood back and motioned Voukelitch inside.
The Russian general got in without a word.
Bolan hurried to get in behind the steering wheel.
He twisted the rearview mirror so he had a full-length view of the shadowy form of his passenger.
Bolan started the limo, backed it around and drove toward the highway. He holstered the AutoMag, reached to his shoulder holster, now concealed beneath the Soviet uniform, and drew the silenced Beretta 93-R. He hefted the Beretta for emphasis where Voukelitch could see it — "Here's how it is, General. We roll onto the base and you take me to the Devil's Rain. Keep your mouth shut and do as you're told, do you read me?"
He lowered the Beretta to the seat beside him, his finger on the trigger while he drove with his other hand.
Voukelitch reached with extreme nonchalance for a pocket of his uniform jacket "May I smoke?"
"You may not." Ice voice stopped him.
Bolan steered onto the highway in the direction of the fort a mile and a half away. "The Devil's Rain. Where is it on the base?"
"And why should I tell you?"
"You may not have to. You'll have it in or adjacent to the HQ where you keep an eye on things and still play the bigshot with your own office, if you run to type, General."
"It seems I do," bristled Voukelitch, his voice getting more confident the closer they got to the lights of the fort. "Not that the information will do you much good. Even the fabled Executioner will not penetrate the security with which I have surrounded the lab. You are already a dead man, Mack Bolan."
"And so are you," Bolan grunted.
He took his eyes from the road ahead to glance over his shoulder. The Beretta 93-R tracked around on the cannibal in the back seat.
Voukelitch started to cry out, suddenly realizing the mortal mistake he had made in admitting that Bolan had been right about the location of the lab. The silenced Beretta coughed discreetly.
The savage ceased all motion except to relax back into the upholstered corner of the tonneau, remaining in an upright position, the head dropped forward, chin touching the chest as if the general were catching a short nap and not the big sleep.
Bolan returned his attention to his driving.
He holstered the Beretta and drove on toward the floodlit fort.
* * *
Bolan steered General Voukelitch's ZIL limo through the front gates, onto the Afghan militia base. The sleepy-eyed militia regulars extended the same courtesy to the officer's car going in as they had when Bolan had watched the car leave the fort earlier.
Apparently the general's zipping out and into town at odd hours was not unusual.
Bolan slowed to a moderate speed, hoping like hell the corpse of the KGB gangster would not choose this precise moment to tip over and draw suspicion from the guardhouse.
But as Bolan drove through he doubted if even that would have aroused any interest from the dullards at the front gate. Any other vehicle would no doubt have received its share of hassle but not the general's wagon coming home at this morning hour. Bolan spotted three sentries, two of them not even rousting themselves from the guard shack to come out; one of the two looked asleep.
Some army the Kabul regime has raised, thought Bolan. Though with the walls and heavy machine guns in those towers and with parapets along the walls set up for more firepower, he read the fort as secure enough from any full-scale standard assault from the outside.
He steered the limo to a stop in front of a two-story plain brick building that had to be base headquarters, judging from the insignias and flag painted above the door, poor cousin to the Soviet base in Kabul. A new-looking one-level prefab structure stood adjacent to the building.
The lab.
The Devil's Rain.
The landing pad in front of HQ still hosted the two Soviet choppers, dark and deserted, and beyond them Bolan saw the two-story barracks building that stretched the width of the far side of the base. No lights shone in the barracks building yet, but that would change any second.
The other structures on the base were dark except for headquarters and the adjacent laboratory.
Bolan turned off the limo's lights and ignition. He grabbed the combat webbing and MAC-10 and started to open his car door to get out when a man emerged from the front entrance to the HQ.
A militia officer, a major, obviously waiting for General Voukelitch's return, strode briskly to the rear door on the passenger side of the limo. The Afghan major opened the door, leaned in and started to speak to a man he did not know was dead.
"General, I must say I had hoped you would forgo your... proclivities at such an auspicious moment," the Afghan began in a tone of respectful peevishness, then he noted the bullet hole in Voukelitch's uniform over the heart. The Afghan blinked and turned to Bolan. "What..." he began.
Bolan reached back to clamp iron-hard fingers around the major's throat; the man wore a security clearance badge, no doubt the Devil's Rain project, identifying him as Major Ghazi, Base Commandant. The Executioner applied pressure and tugged the man into the limo with practically no noise at all except for Ghazi's wheeze as he tried frantically, futilely to grab at Bolan's choking hands; then this cannibal, Afghan variety, died before he could do even that. Ghazi's corpse sprawled across Voukelitch's lap.
Bolan closed the passenger door after Ghazi and left the two cannibalg as they were.
He debarked from the ZIL, the webbing of munitions packets slung over his left shoulder, the Ingram MAC-10 hugged in close to his right side, but in a manner that would not present a suspicious figure to anyone watching as "the general's driver" left the ZIL to allow Major Ghazi and General Voukelitch to confer.
The veil of darkness had yielded to the first strange half-light of day. The chatter of night insects turned into birdcalls chirping beyond the fortress walls.
"Corporal" Bolan stalked businesslike, all correct military bearing as befitted the driver of a KGB general, toward the prefab structure.
No one appeared to intercept him.
He doubted if anyone paid attention to him except for a militia regular, a kid of no more than fifteen, who was standing sentry duty. Bolan knew there would be plenty heavy security beyond this outside door. This kid had been placed here so as not to draw undue suspicion to where the Devil's Rain was brewed.
The sentry looked like forced draftee material.
He eyeballed the uniform of the approaching driver and did not even bother to unshoulder his AK-47 when he started to ask the "corporal" something.
The kid realized something was wrong too late.
Bolan did not slow his stride past the sentry.
He brought his right fist up in a swift blow that caught the soldier on the chin, snapped his head back with a thunk into a wall, and the kid's eyes rolled back until only the whites showed.
The Executioner spared lives when he could, like now, men from the opposing side. If Bolan read this kid's history right, this recruit was as much a victim of the Soviets as the civilians Bolan's blitz was meant to help, and if Bolan was wrong that was the kid's problem. The Man from Blood pushed the sagging, unconscious guard around the side of the building, out of sight of anyone passing by. The sentry would not go unnoticed for long, but Bolan had no intention of staying around for long, either.
He hit the locked door of the lab with a kick that sent the panel ripping inward off its hinges, grabbing the immediate attention of three Soviet infantrymen who stood guard in the short hallway. Beyond a glass-partitioned door Bolan saw activity; men in white moving about. He concentrated on the real security of General Voukelitch's hellspawn: three raydoviki who had not been lounging but still were caught off guard by the sudden Bolan assault.
Two of them tracked rifles toward the blitzer with blinding speed. The third reached frantically for a red button near a wall phone that had to be connected to an alarm.
Bolan shot off the soldier's arm with a burst from the silenced Ingram, severing it at the shoulder when the index finger was an inch away from the button.
The uniform-sleeved meat plopped to the floor, extended index finger pointing spasmodically, a fountain of murky gore spurting from the ragged stump at the shoulder.
The man's expression expanded with shock when he saw the arm, then the expression exploded under a hail of .45-caliber shredders that continued to cut down the other two before either could trigger a shot. The three dead men tangoed in death throes before they collapsed, spreading slimy pools of blood that Bolan sidestepped.
He powerhoused another kick with enough rage to splinter the inside door to the lab. He stormed in with flame snarling from the MAC suppressor, the Ingram chugging flesh-eaters at a rate of 1145 rounds per minute as Bolan scoped the scene and picked targets.
Appointment in Kabul te-73 Page 11