She recalled thinking it odd at the time, and odder still when Voukelitch requested additional security measures pertaining to something coded only by a number.

Katrina had processed it with everything else and had long since forgotten it, never realizing an insignificant numeral lost in a long day's work months ago would lead her to this uninhabited stretch of road. The officer's car stopped.

She approached it.

She had left the M-16 behind at the mujahedeen camp when she crept away half an hour before.

She walked now with her shoulder-strap bag riding close to her side by her elbow. The purse contained, among other things, a 9mm. Heckler and Koch VP70More automatic pistol.

She reached the car.

The driver's automatic window powered down.

"Yes, miss?" a Soviet soldier, a corporal, asked in Russian, snappy, a bit distracted but not impolite.

"I have had some misfortune." Katrina leaned to speak toward a passenger she sensed in the tonneau. "The gentleman I was with... was no gentleman. We had an argument. He... left me stranded."

A voice from behind the driver said sympathetically, "The difficult road of truelove?" Katrina recognized the voice though she had only heard General Voukelitch speak on one occasion when he made a routine visit to Captain Zhegolov's office. Voukelitch had a voice she would never forget because it made her skin crawl. And that is what she remembered.

She remembered something else about the general from office gossip and subsequent communique's monitored by Zhegolov's unit. And this is what had brought her here, leaving the force of mujahedeen and the Executioner behind; the cutting edge they did not have: a knowledge of the general's compulsion.

It could be called nothing else, the officer's penchant for out-of-the-ordinary sex that had come to light when Voukelitch moved bureaucratic heaven and earth to have an "officers' house" opened and maintained in Parachinar.

Katrina knew what these "houses" really were and it was something else about Voukelitch that made her skin crawl, as had the routine intel reports that the general visited his "house" every other night. She had not hoped for it to be this easy but she knew that simply by virtue of being a woman she could gain access to this man. She knew the address of his private whorehouse, if it came to that.

The plan had sprung full-blown to her; she would gain access to the garrison post and kill Voukelitch. Even if they captured her, as they most surely would, it would make the task of Bolan and the mujahedeen that much easier. But if she did somehow survive and managed to start a new life, then Katrina knew it would again be a life worth living.

"Hardly true love," she replied to the general. "May I trouble you gentlemen for a lift into town? I see you are headed in that direction."

"Of course," the voice purred from the tonneau. "Please join us. Miss Mozzhechkov, is it not?" The one meeting and he remembered her too, which she had not counted on; or had Kabul issued a bulletin to apprehend her? Of course they had, Katrina realized with a chilly tremor down her spine. But she saw no options at this point but to follow through. She had her gun. She would not die without a fight.

Katrina entered the limousine.

The corporal shifted the ZIL into almost undetectable motion and continued on. The plush interior of the officer's car muffled the outside world.

"You are Captain Zhegolov's secretary, or at least you were when I visited the good captain several months ago," the general said, smiling emptily; his eyes said nothing. "I remember you, my dear, you see; a most charming daughter of the motherland."

"I am flattered, General. I likewise remember you. I..." She noticed a brief tight smile of his thin lips, there and gone.

"I did not know you had been transferred to the Parachinar area, my dear. I would have sought out your delightful company had I known." He extended a pack of Turkish cigarettes. "Smoke?"

"No, thank you."

He fitted one into his onyx holder and lit up. "Forgive me, it is my one unshakable vice."

"But of course, General." Do it now! her mind screamed. Is it possible his work and vices have kept him so busy that he does not know I am wanted by Kabul? Then she thought of where this could lead: onto the base, to the Devil's Rain, the further damage she could do, and she resisted the impulse to pull the gun from her purse and kill this pig right here and now. She felt knotted up tight inside but hoped that Voukelitch, if he noticed it at all, would interpret it as her natural embarrassment at the situation she had invented to explain her presence here.

In what she hoped was a steady voice with just the right amount of throaty flirtatiousness, she said, "Actually, I have not been transferred. I am on a one-week furlough."

He regarded her through twin streams of smoke exhaled from his nostrils. "A peculiar spot for a holiday, Parachinar."

Not an accusation, she thought, or is it? Is he playing me like a cat with a mouse?

"I had met this officer in Kabul. He seemed a nice sort, a friend of the family. I realize now what anerror injudgment I made."

"He is not under my command, I trust? I would have the knave drawn and quartered."

She detected sarcasm.

Killhimnow!

"He... is not, and I should not wish to embarrass him."

"Admirable. Better and better, Miss Mozzhechkov. Or may I call you Katrina? And I am Pytyour."

And there it is, she realized. I can take this further. I can do so much if I play him along.

"Of course... Pytyour."

"Good," he said briskly, but his voice did not change. Katrina's skin would not stop crawling.

"Where are you staying, in town, my dear? We would be glad to drop you off."

"I was staying with the man who left me stranded here, sir... Pytyour."

"I see. Then the only answer is for you to accompany my driver and me back to the garrison post until I can arrange accommodations for you in Parachinar, first thing in the morning. Would that be satisfactory to a lady in distress?"

She forced herself to smile at the pig.

"Most satisfactory. I am no longer in distress, it would seem, thanks to you, Pytyour. I truly appreciate this."

"I'm sure you do. The corporal and I have but one, ah, bit of business to attend to, some people to meet. It won't take long. I beg your indulgence, and then we shall return to the fort and... but here we are. Corporal, do you recognize the turnoff beyond this tree?"

"Yes, sir," was the driver replied.

The ZIL slowed and turned smoothly from the blacktop onto a rutted path. The limo continued off the highway.

The undulating terrain soon obscured the highway behind them, the headlights razoring a gash across stygian gloom, at last picking out a cluster of three men. They stood waiting for the ZIL in a loose halfcircle across the path, holding rifles, not stepping aside when the limo approached.

The driver braked to a stop.

Katrina looked beyond him through the windshield, and thought her heart would hammer out of her chest when she recognized the jukiabkr from the village near Charikar where Tarik Khan's mujahedeen force had bivouacked the night before! The jukiabkr would recognize her and tell Voukelitch everything if he saw her.

At the moment he and the two Afghan hillmen with him could not see Katrina.

Then the driver snapped off the headlights.

It would take time for their eyes to readjust, Katrina realized. She held her shoulder bag close to her, her palm itching to feel the reassuring butt of the pistol within, but she had gambled this far and knew she would have to gamble some more or give up.

And she would never do that.

The driver killed the car engine.

A predawn breeze whistled softly through nearby pines. "Do you wish me to get out with you, sir?" the corporal asked, not taking his eyes from the mujahedeen silhouetted in the starlight before him.