Explosions shattered reality from three of the vehicles across the encampment, balls of flame igniting the night.

11

Bolan had made a careful study of the Soviet encampment alongside the road and assessed its security as tight, formidable, set up by someone of seasoned field experience.

The outer perimeter consisted of four sentries, positioned a distance of fifty yards from one another outside the small camp, each holding an AK-47 as he patrolled a larger circumference, ten yards out from where the tanker, personnel carrier and two armored cars had been drawn into a circle.

The nightstalker made a third outer circle as he moved unnoticed to thoroughly reconnoiter and plan his one-man penetration of those defenses.

At the open spaces between each vehicle, inside the camp, stood another sentry.

Bolan discerned a Soviet officer who stood smoking a cigarette, staring out into the darkness. The man was unaware that close to sixty pairs of eyes from two separate groups were at that moment trained on him like a specimen under a microscope, from either side of this valley in which the Russians had been forced to spend the night.

Bolan counted sixteen soldiers down there, seven wrapped in sleeping bags on the ground in the center of the circle, no doubt resting up for their turn at standing guard. But Bolan knew the 50-to-16 odds were not overkill because those troopers were Soviet soldiers, among the very toughest in the world.

The thirty or so mujahedeen of Tarik Khan's force waited along the ridges and crests of the western wall of the small valley while twenty ragtag ruffians of the jukiabkr held the high ground to the east. After both sides had been deployed, Bolan had left Tarik Khan's group on a southeasterly approach to the camp on the valley floor. The penetration specialist had suppressed his misgivings about this hit and concentrated on a by the numbers infiltration between two of the outer sentries.

The only thing that mattered now was the success of the mission, which meant doing as much damage as he could and getting away without casualties to his own side.

When Bolan got past the patrolling sentries, he moved first to one of the BTR-40 armored cars.

He held some of the plastic explosive in his hands. He knelt silently before the hulking shadow of the war machine and wedged some death putty against the axle at the front tire.

The sentry posted between the BTR-40 and the armored personnel carrier did not even blink when shadows shifted before his eyes a couple of paces away.

The night-hit expert in black proceeded to plant more timed explosives in the three other vehicles.

He went undetected during the two-and-a-half-minute operation. When Bolan passed the juncture between the next BTR and the elongated shadows of the tanker, he noted through his NVD goggles that the officer had been joined by a tough-looking noncom.

Bolan caught enough of their exchange as he passed to remind the Man from Blood that these were human beings he had to kill tonight, not some targets in a game, the officer voicing a damn accurate assessment of the real reasons for the USSR'S globe grabbing.

Bolan heard the noncom urge his officer to cool it. There seemed an almost father-son regard between the two. Then the nightkiller blocked such thoughts and continued with his work.

He paused until a sentry strolled past, and when the Executioner saw an opening he broke from the tanker, as stealthy as a wraith. For a heartbeat Bolan thought his presence had been discovered when the Russian flicked a cigarette butt that arced to within a foot of him. The officer had watched it and Bolan thought he saw the man pause in his conversation with the noncom. The Executioner had remained still, fearing that the officer had sensed Bolan, but he guessed the officer decided it could only be the breeze or something and the Executioner got clear, past the sentries to several hundred yards away from where Tarik Khan's men waited.

Bolan flung himself in a forward dive to the valley floor one heartbeat before the plastique started ripping the night apart with hellfire behind him.

After the last of the clustered explosions finished, gas tanks of the vehicles mushrooming golden balls of flame in the night sky, the nighthitter stood, gripped his MAC-10 in firing position and moved in. The valley echoed with the unearthly shrieks of Allah's holy warriors as mujahedeen stormed down from either side of the valley to join the fray, each force reserving at least half of its men while the others rushed in firing weapons.

Chaos and confusion reigned within the circle of vehicles that had erupted into a circle of death and destruction.

When the first rapid series of explosions rumbled from the near distance like approaching thunder, Katrina Mozzhechkov experienced stomach spasms that matched those rumbles of doom note for note.

She sat on a chair near the door of a vacant farmhouse. The occupants had left, the man to fight with the mujahedeen, his wife to wait somewhere with the other village women, shunning Katrina as they had all day. Katrina felt afraid but she tried to fight her fear, to ride out the emotion, telling herself that because her moods had fluctuated so since last night, after what had happened to her lover, this fear would pass, too.

She feared also for the man known as the Executioner, and as she heard the faint secondary explosions, almost inaudible, she considered again what her fate among these people would be if Mack Bolan were killed in the raging battle or otherwise could not protect her. He had strongly requested she remain in the village. She understood he did not want her exposed to unnecessary danger, knowing she carried a new life within her. But she had insisted on taking her chances anyway, until he explained that there would be no way possible she could survive. He trusted Tarik Khan's men implicitly, but he feared the local men had probably already planned to kill her as an enemy of Allah and to claim it an enemy hit during the heat of the battle. Katrina knew the big American had to be right when she considered again the hatred with which she had been regarded all day in this strange, terrible place. And so she agreed to stay behind, but as she heard those rumbles of war, Katrina Mozzhechkov felt many things: fear, anger, loss... and a frustration that would not go away; a need to do something, not sit here on the sidelines.

She had to prove herself.

To the unborn child within her.

To the memory of her lost lover.

And most of all to herself.

She stood, gripping the M-16 that Bolan had left her, and started toward the door.

The force of the exploding about of the tanker pitched Sergeant Lamskoy into Lieutenant Bucheksky.

Bucheksky somehow registered the lucid thought, Thank God the tanker is empty! as he and the noncom toppled backward onto the ground toward the center of the circle of vehicles.

Dazed, the lieutenant started to his feet the instant they landed. He reached for his bolstered side arm and realized Sergeant Lamskoy made no such similar effort.

Bucheksky looked, knowing what he would find, and fought to hold back the cry of panic and the bile that threatened to spew from his throat when he saw what remained of the man who had been like a father to him.

Sergeant Lamskoy's corpse lay draped across the officer's lower legs, the sergeant's back a charred, shredded ruin, the tunic ripped away, all visible flesh seared into puckered, smoldering horror around a dark hole where a chunk of flaming shrapnel had skewered him.

Bucheksky scrambled to his feet, the Tokarev pistol in his fist. He crouched as he looked around frantically at the holocaust that had befallen his command: the screams of one man in flames razored the air, the soldier squealing as he rolled about on the ground. The stench of burned human flesh made Bucheksky nauseous. He saw the body of another soldier lying in an impossible position, the man's legs torn off at midthigh and nowhere to be seen; the man mercifully was dead or soon would be.