"Do you know the high command headquarters?"

Bolan's intel of the area was complete.

"I know where it is."

"And do you know that more than a thousand Soviet soldiers guard the high command?"

"I know that, too. What I would like to know, Katrina, is why you remain here endangering yourself. The KGB will send agents back to search this place."

A tear pearled in one eye, ready to cascade down the woman's cheek. Katrina Mozzhechkov sat steady and held eye contact with the soldier in the doorway.

"I know when I leave this room, this place of so many good memories, I will never see him again." Her quavering voice matched with the tortured look in her eyes. "They have him. They will not let him go, ever. And so I am with him here one last time even if I am alone, and I linger to savor the bitter sweetness of it."

"I can help, Katrina. Come with me and I'll get you to safety away from here. There's hope for Lansdale, too."

"Not if the KGB have him. And I cannot leave Kabul. I cannot run. I have a mother and father and two sisters in the Soviet Union. What would become of them if I defected and went with you? Perhaps my superiors will not learn of my disloyalty, even if what I see in this country every day, the atrocities committed in the name of my homeland, sickens my soul."

"At least leave here," he urged. "Quickly. If they don't know about you, you're still safe. Do you live near here?"

"Nearby." She stood but did not take her eyes from him. "You are right, of course. I overheard him only this evening on his short-wave radio to his superiors in New Delhi. They ordered him not to cooperate with you. He told them he would disobey those orders. You are the man called the Executioner? You will need to kill many tonight, Executioner, if you want to reach him. And you will be killed."

Bolan switched off the light, plunging the duplex into blackness again but he could still see her, thanks to the goggles.

"It's been tried before, Katrina." They stepped into the front room. "You'll see your man again."

She paused when they were at the side door leading out of the house. "I have lived in Afghanistan too long to believe in miracles, American. And..." her hands rested lightly on her stomach "...I have something of his that must be kept safe. I learned of it only yesterday. I carry his child, you see."

She moved forward slightly and placed a hand on his arm. Then Katrina Mozzhechkov slipped by him out of the house without a sound. He stepped onto the landing to watch her gain the lean-to by the alley. She rounded a corner into the side street that intersected the alley, and other structures blocked her from his infrared vision.

He closed and locked the door behind him as he had found it and faded into the night in the other direction.

He could have stayed to search Lansdale's place but he felt certain the Company man would have kept nothing on paper concerning the Devil's Rain. The top priority now had to be getting Lansdale out and that would take some doing, bet on that. But Bolan had turned incredible odds around in his favor before. In fact, it was his specialty.

During his Mafia campaigns the authorities had dubbed it the Bolan Effect. Tonight the Soviet military high command in Kabul would get a taste of that Effect firsthand.

And yeah, you could bet on that, too.

5

The sprawling Soviet headquarters, a quarter of a mile square near the center of Kabul, the command post of the 40th Army, the operations base for all troops in Afghanistan, appeared impenetrable.

Surrounding the complex were twenty-foot-high concrete walls topped with curled strands of concertina wire, the top ledge of the walls embedded with razor-sharp shards of glass.

Bolan took a rooftop position on a three-story building higher than the nearby structures, providing him with an unobstructed view of the Soviet fortifications and layout.

The main HQ building was easy enough to spot even from a distance.

It could only be the two-story structure with the half-circle drive and the flagpole in front of it, the only building inside those walls with any lights on at this hour.

Bolan also discerned single-level secondary office buildings, prefab, all without lights or signs of activity.

They could have Lansdale inside one of those annex buildings with the windows blacked out, thought Bolan, but if the KGB had brought Lansdale here, the GRU, intelligence arm of the Soviet military, must be involved. And that meant the HQ building if Bolan was any judge of the Soviet military mind. His missions thus far against the Soviet terrorist machine had indicated that he had a damn good read on his enemy.

Besides the HQ building he could make out barracks and a motor-pool garage. He did observe some coming and going, though.

A motorcycle dispatch rider approached the front gate built midway into the eastern wall.

The messenger stopped outside the iron-grille gate while a sentry came out to glance at orders authorizing the motorcyclist access onto the high-security base.

Satisfied, the sentry handed the orders back to the courier and made a hand signal to two men inside a guardhouse who had kept the motorcycle rider covered with automatic rifles.

The weapons' barrels were poking through special slots in the guardhouse window-bulletproof, thought Bolan — that was built into the wall. One of the soldiers inside the sentry hut activated a mechanism that made the gate slide into the wall.

The rider passed on in, the gate closed and the sentry returned to join his comrades inside the hut.

The motorcyclist stopped at the building Bolan had already targeted as HQ, confirming for the nightwatcher where he would find Lansdale.

A few moments later a ZIL limousine, an officer's car, approached the gate and went through the same ritual; the local KGB commander was called in on the arrest of Lansdale. At each corner of the walled perimeter stood watchtowers, heavy-caliber machine guns snouted from each of the towers, and the men who defended this high-command compound would be raydoviki — tough, well-trained Soviet infantrymen.

Bolan saw checkpoints at all roads into the street leading past the main gate. Additional two-man patrols walked beats along the stretches of dark street between the checkpoints and the front entrance. A penetration by force was out of the question.

Even in blacksuit with the night goggles and all his firepower, Bolan could not take on this whole security setup from the outside. He might be able to bust out that way because they would not be expecting that and could therefore be outflanked no matter what the odds, but as for getting inside those walls, the best, the only way would have to be a soft probe.

Bolan heard the heavy rumble of a large vehicle approaching through city streets toward one of the checkpoints. He crouched on an opposite ledge of the flat roof and spotted a two-and-a-half-ton supply carrier coming in from the west. The vehicle was still a block away, rumbling closer by the moment to a spotlit checkpoint two streets from the command compound.

Bolan could discern six raydoviki armed with rifles, standing around a GAZ patrol car and a BTR armored vehicle, the 7.62mm SGMB submachine in the BTR aimed at the narrow spot in the concertina wire that stretched from one side of the street to the other, the gap in the wire only wide enough for one vehicle at a time to pass through.

The approaching military carrier shifted into lower gear, its engine sounds distinct on the night air.

The truck was a supply carrier of the flatbed variety, the bed empty, perhaps returning late from a delivery to a detachment in the field or to one of the outposts. Bolan hurried into action, retracing his route via a doorway from the roof to a stairway inside, past closed doors of apartments down to a deserted dirt street.