Voukelitch and Fet exited the building via a side door. A sleek ZIL limousine stood waiting beside the building. Corporal Fet held open the door for the general, then moved around to the driver's seat. Neither man spoke as the officer's car cleared through the well-guarded main gate of the fort without being stopped, into the pitch-dark night.

Voukelitch considered again the advisability of liquidating Fet when this mission ended, since only Fet knew the true extent of the general's dealings in and around Parachinar.

The Devil's Rain operation was far more than strategical genocide in much the same way as the KGB itself was far more than merely the security and terrorist arm of the USSR.

In fact, Pytyour Voukelitch and the inner core of the KGB had been exploiting the very capitalistic potentials of their far-flung organization's activities for years.

The military strategy of blanketing the Panjir Valley, the Khyber Pass and other vital areas with Devil's Rain was but a cover for its real value to General Voukelitch.

Other countries, Third World mainly, would pay dearly for the secret ingredients of the Rain and there was the "other business," one of the reasons he ventured out at night in the bulletproofed ZIL, though Ghazi had assured Voukelitch countless times that the vicinity was safe even at night.

Voukelitch had earlier that evening dispatched a Hind helicopter to a village in the relatively distant Charikar region to bring back the village jukiabkr.

During the past four months the man had served as an excellent source of hashish, which Voukelitch channeled on to the next link in the chain via KGB channels for his share of the considerable profits the drug brought from both Western countries and, more increasingly of late, from the Soviet Union herself. This pleased Voukelitch; it would be easier to make money closer to home and his cut would be larger.

He fitted another cigarette into his holder and lit it, reaching his decision.

No, he would not kill Fet. Not yet, he decided.

With the Devil's Rain ready to fall, Voukelitch reasoned that the first order of business would be to cancel out the jukiabkr. Voukelitch expected to be moving on within days; dealings with the Afghan peasant would no longer be feasible and the man could hardly be allowed to live to tell others that he had wholesaled hashish in quantity to a Russian officer.

The whole of the KGB was impossible to control and there were elements, the naive, the idealists, who would have Voukelitch sent to the gulag if the activities of him and his cohorts ever came to light. No, he decided, the jukiabkr had expended his usefulness.

Tonight he would die, and for that Voukelitch would need Fet.

The ZIL traveled at a snappy speed along the well-maintained road toward Parachinar, the limousine's headlights piercing the night like fingers pointing the way.

Voukelitch's mind jumped ahead in anticipation of what would happen after his rendezvous with the jukiabkr.

Until not too many years ago, prostitution in Muslim Afghanistan had been punishable by death — and probably still was among the mountain tribes, Voukelitch reflected — and things had not got much better. The world's oldest profession was conspicuous by its absence in this nation of religious fundamentalism... except for the "safe houses" established by the Soviet command for the chosen among its ranks. Parachinar had not rated such a place until Voukelitch insisted on and supervised the start of one on the outskirts of town.

Voukelitch had long ago resigned himself to the fact that human relations only complicated and detracted from the quest for power that was his true lust.

Yet he had the hungers of any man, more than most, he sometimes thought, when the money had been paid, the flesh owned, the control of another absolute.

He had been visiting the "house" every other night for the past four months, though he did not consider it an obsession. The general restricted his indulgences to those times when he was not needed in the laboratory at the base, when everything was running smoothly, as now; not like the deceased Colonel Uttkin, whom Voukelitch had considered a sadist well disposed of.

First, though, he must deal with the jukiabkr. The general knew he must learn what important information the unwashed savage claimed to have.

Voukelitch despised the man as he did all of these Koran-thumping nitwits, but it could be significant that this jukiabkr hailed from a village in the vicinity of last night's massacre.

Everything was in place, everything moving smoothly ahead, all of Voukelitch's plans about to be realized. There was even bought flesh to lose himself in and still be back at the base in time for the first takeoff of a flight bearing the Devil's Rain.

Yet, and he did not know why it irritated him, a premonition needled his subconscious that something was about to go wrong and there was nothing he could do about it.

General Pytyour Voukelitch had never experienced such a premonition in years of KGB work.

He tried to occupy his mind with thoughts of the whore waiting for him in the "house," of the things he would pay her to do to him. But the premonition would not go away.

14

Katrina Mozzhechkov stood at the side of the road and watched the headlights draw near from the direction of the army fort two kilometers away.

She wore the khaki field outfit she had worn since the night before in Kabul when she had dealt herself into this thing. In some ways it seemed so long ago, and yet the death, before her eyes, of the man she loved would be seared into her soul forever. But never with the pain of now when it burned into her mind like a branding iron.

Katrina knew something of General Pytyour Voukelitch, the man she hoped would be a passenger in the approaching vehicle.

She gambled it would be he, though the hopeless odds that it would not be struck her anew. But this would be her first step in realizing the only thing that mattered since the instant her lover had died. She drew strength only from a consuming need to somehow make all this mean something especially the death of a good man named Lansdale whose seed she carried. The only way it could mean anything to Katrina Mozzhechkov was if it spurredeaher into righting at least some of the wrongs her country had wrought here in Afghanistan. She hoped that in the process she could redeem herself even if she died, because that, too, would have been worth it. The approaching car was not near enough for the headlights to make her visible to its occupants but it would be in a matter of seconds. She tried to strike a pose that she thought was provocative to male eyes, but realized she only looked foolish. Such posing had always seemed so superfluous to her; she had never been a flirt, though she knew she was not unattractive. She decided to stand naturally, without affectation. The headlight beams embraced her. An officer's car.

The vehicle reduced its speed but kept coming.

Katrina had known nothing of the Devil's Rain until the American, Bolan, brought her the realization that, whatever it was, it had caused her lover's death. Now that she knew where the Devil's Rain was, at that fort outside Parachinar, even if that was all she knew about it, at least she possessed knowledge that gave her an edge, an inside edge. It was a chance even the mujahedeen, even the American, did not possess to destroy whatever her government's army had here that had caused her man's death. She would use the edge.

It would be Lansdale's legacy, too, and it would mean something because even if she sacrificed her life, Katrina Mozzhechkov would have redeemed her soul. As Captain Zhegolov's typist at Soviet headquarters in Kabul, Katrina routinely processed the monitoring of Soviet and Afghan army communique's. She had processed the transfer of General Voukelitch to this obscure outpost four months earlier.