Flames licked the night sky as everything burned.

The soldiers in the center of the encampment stumbled to their feet, grabbing rifles with the confusion of men torn from deep sleep. Bucheksky felt an odd surreal objectivity grip him. He somehow felt oddly removed from the sounds and terror of battle, and although part of it, still able to observe it all and know exactly what he should do. Survival instinct, he thought, as he flared into action. His training replaced fear now that the battle raged.

More gunfire poured down on the flaming camp from the slopes of the valley. Battle cries in Pashto accompanied the red winking of automatic gunfire as rounds whistled into the camp.

A soldier near Bucheksky pitched sideways when the left side of his skull exploded from the impact of an incoming round into a dark mist against the firelight.

The sentries on the outside perimeter held, falling flat to the ground and firing auto bursts at the attacking waves of mujahedeen.

In the illumination from the fires, Bucheksky saw one of his soldiers lifted off the ground into a backward somersault as a bullet cored his face.

The lieutenant turned to shout something, anything, to his men who were now rushing to openings between the flaming vehicles, toward the attackers who had come within ten yards out there in the dark.

There would be no contacting Kabul by radio, Bucheksky knew; the explosions had effectively destroyed all his unit's communications equipment.

He had heard no incoming missiles but how could the explosives have been planted without detection by his men?

Before Bucheksky could encourage his men he saw something. His eyes had almost missed it until he focused to see it again. A shadow, a human shadow, darting past the glow of a flaming armored car. Not a soldier! Bucheksky realized.

A big apparition in combat black was striding past the fires, pumping a mercy round into the flaming soldier who had somehow stayed alive and kept squealing until the specter freed the man's soul.

Bucheksky moved in that direction, pistol up, searching for the phantom. Could one man have planted all these explosives?

Done all this damage? Who was this executioner of so many good soldiers? Bucheksky would stop him.

He saw the combat shadow again, too late. The specter tossed something that could only be a grenade and the ghost faded back into the night. The young officer angled away from the melee of his men returning fire at the mujahedeen.

The grenade exploded with a ferocity that blasted apart one soldier and hurled three others aside like a child's discarded toys. Two of the men got dazedly to their feet, and the third shuddered in death throes where he fell.

Gunfire and grunts of hand-to-hand combat from outside the circle of flame peppered the night.

"Move out of the circle! Disperse! We're easy targets down here!" Bucheksky shouted to his men.

The crisp authority carried across the melee, the men toting their AK's out of the flickering ring of dying flames to confront their attackers. Bucheksky fanned the night with his pistol. He cut into the direction where he guessed that the nightshadow would turn next if he continued the progression of his last two appearances.

The officer heard curses in Russian and Pashto all around him amid the noise of combat, but all that mattered to him at that instant was staying alive.

He sensed movement coming at him from his right, the opposite side from where he had guessed he would intercept the lone death-bringer in combat black.

Bucheksky crouched and tracked his pistol in the direction of the sound and glimpsed a mujahedeen guerrilla in traditional Afghan garb shouting something in Pashto and triggering off a burst of automatic fire in the lieutenant's direction.

The Russian officer dodged to the side in time and squeezed off one round from his Tokarev, the first time he had ever fired on a man. The guerrilla caught the bullet through his open mouth in midscream; the slug blew away the back of his skull.

Bucheksky felt nothing except the urge to stay alive. He turned in the direction where he had expected to see the nightscorcher and realized as he turned that his luck had run out and so had his life.

The shadow in black dashed past Josef Bucheksky on his way to another point in the battle.

The young officer brought up his pistol as quickly as he could. Without slowing the nightscorcher triggered a burst from an Ingram MAC-10 as he jogged past.

For twenty-three-year-old Josef Bucheksky, everything went black. The Executioner shifted combat-cool eyes from the toppling body of the officer to survey the battle winding down around him. The two mujahedeen forces had descended with a fury from higher ground upon the Russian encampment. The jukiabkr had held back the signal for his men to attack as Bolan had hoped he would until after the plastique had exploded.

After planting the puttylike charges, Bolan had held back as the mujahedeen delivered blistering salvos of autofire into the flaming camp during their charge to the valley floor from west and east. Bolan had stayed well out of the softening-up fire. He had fired on the outside sentry to the north, canceling that man before the guy could find suitable cover.

In no time the mujahedeen had overrun and taken out the other three sentries, two of the troopers falling in brutal hand-to-hand combat with men of Tarik Khan's force.

Hash Breath and his boys chose to hold well back, Bolan had noted, though their spotty fire into the camp toppled another of the Soviet infantrymen inside the ring of fire.

Bolan had next heard the snap of a pistol shot almost lost beneath the mix of close-quarter warfare and glanced as a young Soviet officer drilled and killed Alja Malikyar with a well-placed shot through Alja's open, screaming mouth. Alja had foolishly rushed the officer, shouting zealous Islamic phrases as many other mujahedeen fighters did, except Alja shouted too soon.

Damn fool, Bolan had thought sourly. So Alja is with his beloved Mohammed. What a waste. Bolan had taken out the officer with a burst from the MAC-10 before moving on.

The third sentry had made the mistake of angling away from the flame light right into the thickest of the jukiabkr's force where Hash Breath and some of his men had held the screaming soldier down on the ground and laughingly beat him to death with their rifle butts.

Bolan disciplined an urge to level those mujahedeen, but for once he had no choice in his allies in battle.

He catfooted back to the smoldering hulk of the wreck of the personnel carrier.

Three Russian soldiers remained alive, moving well away from one another in an attempt to secure cover that did not exist. They saw their executioner and tracked three AK-47's as one in his direction, but Bolan had the killing edge.

He delivered a fusillade of scything slugs that hammered two men, hurling them into the smoldering ruin of a BTR-40 where their dead flesh fried. The Executioner drew a bead with his M-16 on the last soldier, just as that one bought it from a hail of bullets from Tarik Khan's assault rifle.

The last Soviet soldier flew backward to the ground in a wide-armed sprawl with a line of holes tracked left to right across his chest.

With the fading battle sounds came the hubbub of the jukiabkr's men descending on the corpses like buzzards, stripping dead soldiers of everything from uniforms to weapons to money, mob-rule anarchy dominating the scene.

Bolan turned away in distaste. He slammed another magazine into his Ingram.

Tarik Khan did the same with his AK.

Bolan approached Tarik Khan's men, who were regrouped in subdued businesslike fashion, a striking contrast to the scavengers from the nearby village whom they regarded with contempt as they counted their own numbers.