Appointment in Kabul (3 page)

Tarik Khan had been wise enough to recognize that under the circumstances his forces needed the assistance of the very best available military penetration specialist to aid them in stopping Voukelitch. No way could Bolan turn away from this one. No way. The Executioner felt honored Tarik Khan had summoned him here via channels Bolan had set up with these people during his previous mission among them.

At this moment in this soldier's life, there was no other place Bolan would rather be.

A cool mountain wind ruffled Bolan's hair and the Executioner turned to the mujahedeen leader.

"Lansdale must have some pretty good contacts."

"Very good." Tarik Khan nodded. "Very high in the Soviet command-office help and officers."

"And tonight he's to have the exact location of where the Soviets are making the stuff?"

"If Allah wills it. We cannot afford any more time if Lansdale's other reports are true. We cannot travel into the city. The Soviets have imposed a strict curfew and those picked up are not heard from again. One of the reasons, kuvii Bolan, we require a man of your specialties. When you have learned the location of the laboratory from Lansdale, we march and attack."

"I must begin now."

"You will be on your own from here into the city and back. You will need all of your cunning and stealth. The KGB is responsible for security in Afghanistan. They have three hundred agents in the city. There are twelve thousand Soviet troops stationed in and around Kabul."

"If I'm not back by dawn," Bolan told his ally, "don't wait around for me."

"If you arrive and we are gone," the mujahedeen leader said, "look for us in the village of Charikar, to the north." Tarik Khan's expression creased with concern. "Do you think, kuvii Bolan, that the attack on Alja's team by badmash and the Soviet helicopters means that they know of our plans? Or your presence here? Or was it what you call a coincidence? If they know about us and you and our plans, you step into a trap the moment you enter Kabul."

"If it is a trap it hasn't sprung yet," Bolan countered. He lowered the night vision goggles over his eyes again and seemed to dematerialize into the gloom before Tarik Khan.

"Either way, I've got to get to Lansdale and find out what he knows."

"Allah will protect you," the mujahedeen leader assured the already fading voice.

No answer. The Executioner was gone. Into Kabul. On foot. It was time to penetrate the belly of the monster. Bolan intended this to be a quick intel gathering probe. But he was ready for anything.

The nighthitter in combat black entered the capital of Afghanistan from the north through the suburb of Lashkar to avoid the bridge that crossed the Kabul River. The waterway would have a Soviet or Afghan military checkpoint or both.

The dark streets had the aura of a ghost town except for the motorized Soviet patrols, usually jeep-like vehicles with machine guns mounted on the back, crisscrossing the city like hungry animals of prey. Bolan penetrated undetected deeper into a once colorful town that had become one huge concentration camp.

At Huzkisar Way, a wide street that runs from one end of Kabul to the other, the nightfighter paused longer than he cared to while a truck, the rear enclosed with barbed wire caging the shadows of four young men, motored by slowly with a spotlight probing shadows. The men did not see Bolan.

The truck moved on in its forcible "recruiting" of Afghans, many of them fourteen— and fifteen-year-olds, into the militia to be herded off to rudimentary training camps and then to the front.

The vehicle disappeared around a far corner.

Bolan continued deeper into the city via dark alleys and the shadows of the sprawling squalor of neighborhoods.

He did not encounter one civilian, yet he dodged half a dozen cruising Soviet or militia patrols.

The Shar-l-Nau quarter was one of wide, unpaved sidewalks and mud houses.

Somewhere a dog barked in the night and others took up baying. There came the occasional sound of not-too-distant vehicular traffic, the patrols.

Everything else seemed quiet, most of the civilian populace asleep, the rest hiding behind locked doors and drawn shades praying to Allah, Bolan was sure, that they would not be next to be taken in for "questioning" as enemies of the state.

Life under the Soviet regime, reflected Bolan grimly. And a prophecy for the rest of the world if the cannibals had their way. He held to the shadows, since this was Lansdale's turf and he did not want to risk blowing any cover the guy might have worked up. The Executioner took a full ten minutes to circle Lansdale's building twice at a distance, reconnoitering from a series of vantage points before he decided the CIA man's address was not under surveillance. The one-story brick building, set back and separated from the road by pine trees, lindens and poplars, would be called a duplex in the States, each residence taking up one half of the house. The lights of both residences were off.

Lights should have been on in Lansdale's windows if he expected company. Maybe not, but Bolan felt a sensory tremor that made him swing the silenced Ingram MAC-10 to firing position.

He cut over past two houses to the alleyway that ran behind the house where Tarik Khan had told Bolan he would find Lansdale.

Bolan did not care for the idea of taking a Company man on trust, not with that outfit's agents all given orders to Terminate Bolan On Sight; but no, Bolan could not and would not turn back from this mission, and Lansdale was the only card he could play.

He jogged along the alley toward Lansdale's address. He heard motorized sounds from the road in front of the house and paused against a lean-to structure where a cow stood tied. The vehicle, which sounded like one of the jeep patrols, drove by.

Bolan waited until the sound died, then continued on. He reached the back of Lansdale's half of the duplex and knelt against the deepest shadows at the base of the wall. He eased along to two windows and paused at each but both had been latched from the inside, shades drawn.

Damn.

He catfooted around the corner of the house to the door at the end. The next house stood several meters away and appeared to sleep as soundly as the rest of Kabul.

Bolan crouched, eased open a screen door and tried the door handle. Locked, of course.

A thin narrow strip of metal from one of the pockets of his blacksuit gained him soundless entry after seven seconds' work. He inched the door closed behind him and paused to slip the wire back where it belonged. He brought the MAC-10 around again as head weapon and remained unmoving, every sense alert, casing the place before he made another move.

He heard someone crying softly, a jagged weeping from somewhere in Lansdale's half of the duplex.

Bolan's night vision goggles told him he stood in the kitchen. He edged around the form of a table and slid through a doorway into the front room, pinpointing the soft crying sounds, woman sounds he made it now, as coming from a doorway midway along the wall to his left. He approached the doorway warily, the Ingram up not so much because he expected a sobbing woman to open fire on him but because she could well be the bait of a trap.

He moved into the room without the woman's knowing it, and because of the NVD goggles he could see her but she could not see him.

She was in her early to mid-twenties, he guessed; pretty enough in an angular East European sort of way.

She sat almost primly on the edge of a bed, feet together on the floor, sobbing softly into a handkerchief.

He could see no one else in there with her; no place for anyone to hide. He could not spy on her privacy any longer. He reached over and flicked on the light switch.

The room filled with soft light from a bedside lamp and an exclamation came from the young woman, startled by the sudden flare of brightness and even more by the awesome, heavily weaponed apparition in black who stood in the bedroom doorway.

"Do you speak English?" he asked her.

She regained her composure fast enough. Her tears gave way to resolute anger.

"Yes, I speak English," she replied in a heavy Russian accent. "What is this? A trick? You have caught me here, is that not enough? Take me away."

"What is your name?"

"I am Katrina Mozzhechkov. I am a Russian national employed as a typist at Soviet headquarters on Fazwah Square. What will you do to me?"

Bolan lowered the Ingram but his finger remained around the trigger.

"I'm a friend, Katrina. Lansdale's friend. What's happened to him?"

"They have him. They. took him from here only minutes ago."

He could see she was fighting to hold back tears, to keep emotions together.

"They? The KGB?"

"Who else?" She looked at him from where she sat on the bed. "Who... are you, if not one of them?"

"Where did they take him? Fazwah Square?"

"No. I heard everything. He had a special cellar hiding place for me with a hidden entrance under this floor in case this should ever happen... when we were together.. if they should come for him as they did tonight. I heard them. They have taken him to the military high command headquarters."

"Was it about the Devil's Rain?"

She stared at him.

"The what?" He read her confusion as genuine.

Lansdale had more than one contact in the Soviet's Kabul regime, Tarik Khan had told Bolan. It stood to reason that Lansdale would have more than one area in which he gathered intelligence and the areas did not necessarily have to overlap. One of his contacts, one of the office staff Tarik Khan had mentioned, happened to be Katrina Mozzhechkov. She and Lansdale had become lovers.

"I've got to leave now," Bolan told her. "Thanks for your help. I'm going to try and rescue him."

"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.

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.

The building reeked of too many people living too close together. Or maybe I smell their fear, thought Bolan. Kabul had the same beleaguered air he remembered from Saigon. And Beirut. He angled away from the building, a crouched shadow and nothing else as he speed-jogged along a course to a point one block short of the checkpoint, then he crossed over.

He stopped.

One of the two-man foot patrols strolled by within ten feet of him without knowing he loomed there, ready to strike.

He chose not to take this pair. He had to make it over to the next street. He let them talk and walk past, two raydoviki chatting in Russian.

Bolan knew enough of the Russian language, having studied every spare moment he had between missions.

He had already used it with acceptable results.

The conversation between these two, as with most soldiers thrown together during a long night's sentry duty, touched on the subject of women as they receded into the night, away from Bolan's position. After the sentries had passed far enough away from him on their rounds, Bolan continued on his track toward the street along which the approaching supply truck would come, after it passed the checkpoint. He heard the vehicle brake for the checkpoint and the voices of the sentries interrogating the driver.

The night is so quiet, even silenced reports from the Ingram would carry, Bolan thought. Until he had Lansdale, the warrior would have to play this one quiet. But hard!

He encountered another two-man patrol walking its beat near the intersection midway between the blocks separating the high command from the checkpoint.

This couple did not know of their encounter with the Executioner until the heartbeat of their death.

He came at them fast, the edge of each stiffened hand slashing downward hard enough to break both necks.

The soldiers crumpled to the pavement at Bolan's feet with soft sighs.

One block over, the sentry at the checkpoint waved the supply carrier through. The driver upshifted and Bolan knew he had less than half a minute now or he would miss the chance.

He dragged each dead soldier by one foot until the bodies rested hidden behind stacked hay, well out of sight of anyone passing on the darkened street.

He selected the jacket and headgear of the dead man closest to his size. The uniform was too small, but Bolan thought it would do in the dark for sentries well into their shifts, who would not be as sharp as they should be.

He hurried back to the intersection and stood in the middle of the street as the truck approached, the way a sentry would during a routine double check.

Bolan raised a hand in an authoritative signal to halt, reasoning that since there were guard patrols stationed along these approaches to the compound, it would not be unusual for these patrols to do spot checks along the last stretch to the main gate.

Bolan intended to use their tight security measures against them, bending adversity into an ally.

The intersection positioned him exactly midway along the two-block stretch between the checkpoint and front gate. If he worked this right, those at either end of the stretch would interpret the truck's stopping as nothing more than a spot check.

The truck braked, its front end stopping less than a foot from Bolan, Bolan approached the driver's side of the truck. He saw a second man in the truck cab.

At first the sleepy-eyed driver saw only the Soviet army jacket and headgear where he expected to see a sentry, but when Bolan stepped up, the driver got a better look at the soldier who had stopped them, saw the blackface, the night goggles and started to open his mouth. The Executioner tugged open the driver's door, reached in and rapidly pulled the driver out, down into a raised knee that smacked the man's face with such force, Bolan heard the neck snap. He caught the failing body in the crook of his left arm. With his right he threw the combat knife across the few feet of space in the cab before the shotgun rider could angle his weapon around. The soldier had no time at all because the blade buried itself to the hilt into his heart, killing him as dead as the driver.

Bolan continued at high speed, staying away from the headlights at all times, everything happening so fast that, yeah, the seemingly distant checkpoint in one direction and the base at the other end of the dark street appeared to be buying this as just another security check by an enthusiastic sentry.

The Executioner dragged both bodies from the truck to an entranceway between two shops that looked deserted. He retrieved his knife, cleaned off the blood on the corpse's uniform and hustled back to the supply carrier. Bolan climbed into the cab and started the truck moving, closing the cab door as quietly as possible. He pulled out a treated cloth to remove much of the facial blackout goo with hurried swipes.

He drove at a moderate speed and reached into the cab's glove box where he found military orders for the driver's last run, as is customary with motor-pool drivers in armies around the world.

Satisfied, he left the orders where he found them, closed the box and slowed the truck when he reached the closed main gate and guardhouse of the compound.

He stopped the truck and feigned grogginess from lack of sleep. He saw a sentry approaching.

"Your orders," the guard snapped in Russian to the dim outline behind the steering wheel in the cab at a height that made the shadows only murkier. Bolan reached over routinely, snapped open the glove box and handed the orders down.

The sentry studied the papers in the light from the guardhouse where the other two soldiers had their machine guns trained on the cab. The guard looked up from the papers for a closer view into the shadowy cab.

Bolan felt hackles rise on the back of his neck, his finger tight around the trigger of the Ingram MAC-10 that rested across his lap. He was ready to blow this sentry to bits and drive the truck through that iron gate into the jaws of hell itself if it meant pulling Lansdale out of here and finding out what the guy knew about the Devil's Rain.

The sentry's right hand moved to the trigger of his shoulder-strapped AK-47.

"The orders say there are supposed to be two of you," he snarled at Bolan in Russian.

"Where is the other man? Tell me. Immediately!"