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.

A laboratory, yeah. White-smocked, bespectacled egghead types were working around a five-foot-high aluminum tub — Bolan estimated the diameter at fifteen feet-filled to six inches from the brim with a stinking greenish-black liquid that could only be what Bolan had traveled all this way to destroy. The Devil's Rain.

He counted five cannibals working a console of gauges and lights that controlled the flow of the junk through pipes and a processing system to a dock where a half dozen Afghan army regulars trundled oblong canisters that looked like bombs onto wheeled flatcars, which would be used to get the stuff to the choppers.

Bolan took out the soldiers first, deciding not to spare any of these punks. They would be the ones to fire on the blitzer if they could reach their rifles, which were stacked while they worked under the watchful eye of two more raydoviki.

The two Russians caught the blitzer's death-hail first, then the Ingram tracked on to eat away at the other soldiers who withered under the .45-caliber bullets in various stages of reaction before any of them could fire a shot.

Bolan slammed a fresh 30-round magazine into the Ingram and a new fury gripped him. He tracked on the killers of women, children and the elderly that the slave state could not enslave and wanted dead; animals who thought they were far enough away from the death, suffering and other abominations they cursed mankind with; horrors like the Devil's Rain and Yellow Rain.

But Bolan dirtied these scum plenty, .45-caliber steel bursting white smocks apart in exploding red fountains, cannibals toppling in all directions like bowling pins after a strike.