Appointment in Kabul

16

Bolan glanced at the ridge of metallic gray inching higher behind the eastern peaks.

Fifteen minutes until the first half-light of dawn started to nibble at the dark, he gauged.

He gestured with the AutoMag to the KGB man.

"In the car, General. In the back like a nice passenger, and no sudden moves."

Voukelitch walked to the car. He stood aside while Bolan covered him and made a fast, thorough search of the tonneau for any hidden weapon or signaling device.

Bolan stood back and motioned Voukelitch inside.

The Russian general got in without a word.

Bolan hurried to get in behind the steering wheel.

He twisted the rearview mirror so he had a full-length view of the shadowy form of his passenger.

Bolan started the limo, backed it around and drove toward the highway. He holstered the AutoMag, reached to his shoulder holster, now concealed beneath the Soviet uniform, and drew the silenced Beretta 93-R. He hefted the Beretta for emphasis where Voukelitch could see it — "Here's how it is, General. We roll onto the base and you take me to the Devil's Rain. Keep your mouth shut and do as you're told, do you read me?"

He lowered the Beretta to the seat beside him, his finger on the trigger while he drove with his other hand.

Voukelitch reached with extreme nonchalance for a pocket of his uniform jacket "May I smoke?"

"You may not." Ice voice stopped him.

Bolan steered onto the highway in the direction of the fort a mile and a half away. "The Devil's Rain. Where is it on the base?"

"And why should I tell you?"

"You may not have to. You'll have it in or adjacent to the HQ where you keep an eye on things and still play the bigshot with your own office, if you run to type, General."

"It seems I do," bristled Voukelitch, his voice getting more confident the closer they got to the lights of the fort. "Not that the information will do you much good. Even the fabled Executioner will not penetrate the security with which I have surrounded the lab. You are already a dead man, Mack Bolan."

"And so are you," Bolan grunted.

He took his eyes from the road ahead to glance over his shoulder. The Beretta 93-R tracked around on the cannibal in the back seat.

Voukelitch started to cry out, suddenly realizing the mortal mistake he had made in admitting that Bolan had been right about the location of the lab. The silenced Beretta coughed discreetly.

The savage ceased all motion except to relax back into the upholstered corner of the tonneau, remaining in an upright position, the head dropped forward, chin touching the chest as if the general were catching a short nap and not the big sleep.

Bolan returned his attention to his driving.

He holstered the Beretta and drove on toward the floodlit fort.

Bolan steered General Voukelitch's ZIL limo through the front gates, onto the Afghan militia base. The sleepy-eyed militia regulars extended the same courtesy to the officer's car going in as they had when Bolan had watched the car leave the fort earlier.

Apparently the general's zipping out and into town at odd hours was not unusual.

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.

Bolan punched another magazine in and tracked up at the last man in white who stood at a gauge panel on the walkway ten feet above the black-green shit in the tub.

This one had hidden himself from Bolan's line of view and punched a button up there that started an ululating siren piercing outside somewhere. Then the savage got brave when he thought he had the drop on Bolan and pegged off a round from a pistol, the bullet cracked too close to Bolan.

At the last second before Bolan demolished that face, the Executioner pedigreed the guy.

Dr. Gregor Golodkin.

The Soviet's leading specialist in chemical weapons and their use, most lately in Afghanistan.

There is only one way for this cannibal to go.

Bolan lowered his aim and triggered a sideways burst before the baby killer could fire again. Golodkin's legs flailed out from under him. A scream that started from the bad doctor's panicky mouth erupted with new intensity in the eye blink he had to realize he was falling over the railing into the tub of Devil's Rain. The bloodcurdling yell was interrupted by the splash as he went under, and all that came up was a bubbling, dissolving thing that sizzled like frying bacon. The human mess melted into nothing and a foul cloud rose to mark the passing.

Bolan placed a wad of plastic explosive at the base of the tank and timed it.

The wailing of the siren from outside needled him to the dock where the canisters stood. The containers would be pressurized; they would go with the blow from the explosives.

He raced past the canisters and dived from the dock. He had set the explosives by the tank for ten seconds.

His last impression before the explosion was confused shouting as soldiers poured in from the entrance in response to the siren. The blast hurled Bolan into the air and he felt carried along on a hot wind. The earth shook and everything related to the Devil's Rain blew into a maelstrom of sense-reeling destruction that engulfed the soldiers and the lab.

The Executioner landed in a well-practiced somersault, riding the momentum of his leap and the force of the blast, coming out of it into a beeline run around the far corner of the lab building. He had drawn on what he knew about the shit they were brewing back there to set his explosives in such a way that the building would not be destroyed. Contamination from the Devil's Rain seemed to require bodily contact, not inhalation; none of the hellspawners in the lab had been wearing gas masks.

The initial response to the explosion would be for them to work like hell to contain the liquid horror to the lab building, a diversion Bolan hoped would help him.

He continued away from the lab across the rear length of the headquarters building. He came around the front of the far end of the HQ from where army soldiers poured toward the lab exactly as Bolan had hoped. He wasted no time. He cut off on another direct course full speed toward the nearer of the two helicopters.

The eerie visibility of the new dawn etched a surreal sharpness to the shriek of an incoming missile as one of the gun houses exploded into flying mortar, gun parts and airborne bodies everywhere. The echoes of the explosion yielded to heavy machine-gun fire, and more incoming rockets from Tarik Khan's mujahedeen punched at the walls and other watchtowers but not at the landing pad and the gunships, as Bolan had requested.

Confusion reigned across the fort.

On his dash toward the choppers Bolan saw that the bodies of Voukelitch and the camp commandant had been discovered in the ZIL cannibal car. That left a big hole in response coordination, some troopers charging to the parapets to defend the fort, others fanning out around the lab, everyone disorganized and confused.

The only resistance Bolan met was from four Soviet crewmen who had been waiting near the choppers, ready to spread death and then fly safely away. They looked as confused as everyone else at the sudden attack, but their reaction time flared fast when they spotted the Executioner jogging toward them.

But the approaching figure wore a Soviet uniform and so these death merchants held their fire and Bolan exterminated the lice safely into hell.

He tossed a grenade from the cluster of munitions webbing into the hatchway of the chopper several hundred feet away. He scored a bull's-eye, the grenade demolishing the interior of that craft, lifting it off its landing rails, the machine settling back down where it would stay disabled. Bolan leaped through the side hatch door of the other chopper.

He rushed to the cockpit. He had a working knowledge of helicopters dating back to the war in Nam. He got the attention of most every soldier inside the fort when he gunned the big bird to life, filling the cacophony of battle with a rotor throb that grew louder when he skipped the warm-up phase. He felt the chopper wobble about him more than it should, but the bird lifted and Bolan hoped Tarik Khan's force had sense enough to see Bolan pirating the helicopter. They did. The incoming missile fire wrought havoc all around but did not strike the chopper as it gained an altitude of several hundred feet. Bullets punctured the chopper as Bolan banked it around, but most of the firepower down there was still directed at the hills, the parapets filled with soldiers despite the steady toppling of men from incoming fire. Most of the Afghan soldiers Bolan saw beyond the chopper's Plexiglas probably thought the chopper was piloted by one of their own to give them air cover. No such luck. Bolan banked the death bird around in a low sweep, triggering missiles and rockets that streaked from the gunship at anything in his sights.

The intensified holocaust gnawed at man and brick down there like a mountain lion chomping a field mouse, decimating the garrison and the fort into slaughter and pandemonium in less than two minutes of unleashed wrath. The incoming mortar, rocket and heavy machinegun fire continued without letup. Bolan worked the controls to bank the copter away from the fort haloed in black smoke from fires that pillared into the sky. Bolan piloted the bird on a wide swing around Tarik Khan's force along the ridge overlooking the besieged fort. He set the chopper down at a safe distance behind the staggered line of well-hidden mujahedeen who kept hammering nonstop at the fort.

Katrina Mozzhechkov and Tarik Khan hurried to the chopper from where they had watched it land. An occasional explosion geysered earth as return fire from the fort impacted the ground around the mujahedeen's position. But firepower from the garrison had slacked off considerably since there were not that many men and artillery remaining down there. The woman and the leader of the hill fighters crouched under the idling rotors and joined Bolan in the chopper.

"Your men have good aim," Bolan shouted to Tarik Khan over the engine noise. "This machine will get us the short hop to the border."

"The Devil's Rain?"

"Destroyed. Voukelitch had his security tight on this. He had to be sitting on everything connected to the operation. The Devil's Rain and those who spawned it are no more."

"It is good," the hillman intoned. "But there is no time. Soviet fighter jets are scrambling for here as we speak. My force can disperse to nearby caves, but you must be gone." The resistance fighter placed a hand on Bolan's shoulder; one fraternal squeeze that spoke everything. "Until we meet again, Executioner." Then he looked at Katrina. "And my thanks to you, woman. I have learned from you. Goodbye." Tarik Khan left the chopper and stalked away without looking back.

Bolan revved up the engines again. He glanced at Katrina. "Hang on, lady. Get set for a rough ride."

She grabbed a seat and a wall strap next to him. Bolan saw her direct a steady gaze across the scene of battle and it told him this special woman had confronted and defeated her demons. All that was left for her now was the future. "I'm ready," she assured him. "For anything."

The engine rumbled and the copter lifted off. Bolan gave Tarik Khan a last salute from on high that the resistance fighter returned, then the hillman turned to join his men and Bolan control-stacked them up and away from there.

He piloted the chopper at full throttle across the blue sky of a new day, skimming the jagged, treacherous terrain low enough to avoid Soviet radar.

Toward the border frontier. Toward Pakistan.

Mission completed, yeah. And toward the mourning of too many lost in the name of freedom that fired a strange, savage, noble people to resist impossible odds. Lansdale. Alja Malikyar. So many more. They had not died in vain. Their sacrifice kept the flame alive and it would burn longer and more brightly now without Devil's Rain to douse it. Yeah, Tarik Khan, thought Executioner Bolan. Until next time.