Appointment in Kabul (8 page)

General Pytyour Voukelitch, KGB, studied the Afghan in hospital whites who sat handcuffed to a bed.

"A high fever was the only symptom he showed and it passed of its own accord within days," Dr. Golodkin, head of the technical staff, reported in Russian to his superior. "This man is now perfectly healthy."

The figure in the bed looked fearfully from one Russian towering over him to the other, unable to understand their language but somehow sensing his own existence was at stake.

"Were the others exposed at the same time as this one?" Voukelitch demanded.

"Dead, comrade General, but if the implementation of the, er, program hinges only on determining the intervals at which the solution should be spread, I would conservatively estimate the period of effectiveness at six weeks, based on these experiments. Is that what you need to know?"

The KGB commander stalked toward the door of the sterile room.

"It is. You have done well, comrade Doctor. Your services will be amply rewarded."

"Discreetly, I trust. Uh, what about this one?"

Voukelitch did not pause. He stepped from the room. "Kill him, of course." Voukelitch closed the door behind him and returned to his office at this outpost fifteen kilometers from Parachinar, accompanied as always by a uniformed bodyguard.

Major Ghazi, commandant of this Afghan garrison, waited for Voukelitch as the general had instructed him to in the office that had belonged to Ghazi before the KGB man arrived with orders placing Ghazi and his command at Voukelitch's disposal.

At his superior's entrance, Ghazi rose abruptly from the chair that faced the office desk.

Voukelitch strode to the liquor cabinet camouflaged behind a fake bookcase and spoke as he poured them each a shot of vodka.

"It is done, Major." Voukelitch handed the Afghan a shot glass and hoisted his own. "Operation Devil's Rain will commence with the first light of dawn."

They clinked glasses and downed the shots.

The Afghan chuckled without humor. A sound from the grave. "You have outdone yourself, General Voukelitch. I had heard of your ingenious strategies in the Panjir Valley during last winter's offensive. If I may say so, sir, this surpasses even that. It has been my privilege to be associated with a man of your vision."

Fawning pig, thought Voukelitch, though his pride basked in the compliment. He poured himself another shot without offering one to the Afghan officer, then replaced the bottle and glasses in their hiding place and returned to the desk.

The counterinsurgent operation that Ghazi spoke of concerned — for it was still being used — the air drop from helicopters of camouflaged antipersonnel mines and booby-trapped toys, usually small red trucks, designed not to kill but to injure, blowing off hands.

In this way guerrilla fighters would be demobilized while they transported and attended the victims — in the case of the "toy" bombs, almost always children — who would most likely die anyway from gangrene after days or weeks of atrocious suffering. The objective was to further depress and demoralize those who must watch the victims die.

Voukelitch, who at forty-seven had the physical condition of a man twenty years younger, held the opinion that all is indeed fair in war; to attain the goal, to win, was all that mattered.

To General Voukelitch, morality was but an invention of the weak to defend themselves.

He placed a Turkish cigarette into his onyx holder. "What word from Kabul?" he asked Ghazi.

"Things are coming in piece by piece," the army major reported. "I have beefed up security. Early last night a convoy was massacred near Charikar."

"That area is secured."

"Uh, so Kabul thought. As you know, comrade General..."

"Yes, yes, of course, the situation is still far too fluid. Kabul believes this to be an orchestrated offensive then, is that it?"

"So it would appear."

"And yet it troubles me in particular, coming so close as it does to the implementation of Operation Devil's Rain." Voukelitch thought aloud through a blue-gray cloud of exhaled smoke. "The man Lansdale, the CIA agent, could well have been on to us and what we have been up to here these past four months."

"The man is dead, sir."

"True, but you had better triple your security measures, Major, and not only in preparation for possible attack from those savages. Whoever helped Lansdale to escape from the base at Kabul. If Lansdale knew about us, it is most likely his allies now possess the information as well. All too likely..."

"And you suspect someone other than the mujahedeen?"

"It could very well be."

"But who?"

"That is my concern, Major. Yours is to see that this installation is impenetrable to attack. Operation Devil's Rain will not be delayed or sabotaged."

"Perhaps we should request reinforcements."

"That is a very bad idea, Major. Have I not repeatedly stressed the sensitivity of this project? There are members of the Central Committee and the General Staff who are not aware of the work that has gone on in the laboratory facility constructed here."

"Of course, comrade General, of course. A very bad idea."

"A far better one, Major, would be for you to personally see to increasing security measures immediately."

Ghazi again got abruptly to his feet to deliver a crisp salute. "But of course, comrade General. I will see to it."

Voukelitch did not bother returning the salute.

"See that you do, Major. That will be all." Ghazi turned and exited the office.

Voukelitch waited five minutes in silence, doing nothing but thinking, to insure that Ghazi would not return with some follow-up question. The KGB man smoked another cigarette in the interim. When he felt certain he would not be disturbed, most of the base asleep at this hour in any event, he leaned forward and depressed a hidden buzzer he had installed on the underside of the desk since taking over this office.

A side door opened and Voukelitch's bodyguard entered, armed with a holstered pistol and a shoulder-strapped submachine gun. "Yes, my General?"

"What have you learned, Corporal Fet?"

"I, uh, socialized with the CQ staff in the orderly room while you spoke alone with Major Ghazi," the Soviet soldier reported promptly. "Major Ghazi has done an admirable job in increasing security measures."

"Corporal" Fet was in fact a KGB agent, transferred to Ghazi's command as one of the regular Soviet liaison months before Voukelitch's arrival and the Devil's Rain project. Fet had seemed a random choice by Voukelitch as his bodyguard from the ranks, the perfect spy, a means by which Voukelitch could double-check on the camp CO's activities.

"Very good. Please lock the hallway door, Corporal."

The two men played out their roles in Fet's deception even in private.

"Yes, sir." Fet locked the door and returned to stand before Voukelitch's desk.

"And our... other business?" Voukelitch inquired in a lower voice. He had the office searched daily by Fet for hidden microphones, but one could never be too sure.

"Your pilot returned with a passenger less than thirty minutes ago," Fet replied in the same lowered voice. "The man awaits you now at the appointed spot."

Voukelitch pocketed his cigarette holder, stood from his desk chair and started toward the door by which Fet had entered. "Excellent. We will leave as discreetly as possible, though no one will attempt to stop us."

Fet moved to the door.

"It is good that we hurry, sir. The pilot told me that in addition to the goods... the jukiabkr has something vital to tell you."

Voukelitch paused before the door. He unholstered his own pistol, checked it, reholstered it and nodded for Fet to open the door. "Very well, Corporal. We are on our way. It is a busy night and far from over."

Voukelitch and Fet exited the building via a side door. A sleek ZIL limousine stood waiting beside the building. Corporal Fet held open the door for the general, then moved around to the driver's seat. Neither man spoke as the officer's car cleared through the well-guarded main gate of the fort without being stopped, into the pitch-dark night.

Voukelitch considered again the advisability of liquidating Fet when this mission ended, since only Fet knew the true extent of the general's dealings in and around Parachinar.

The Devil's Rain operation was far more than strategical genocide in much the same way as the KGB itself was far more than merely the security and terrorist arm of the USSR.

In fact, Pytyour Voukelitch and the inner core of the KGB had been exploiting the very capitalistic potentials of their far-flung organization's activities for years.

The military strategy of blanketing the Panjir Valley, the Khyber Pass and other vital areas with Devil's Rain was but a cover for its real value to General Voukelitch.

Other countries, Third World mainly, would pay dearly for the secret ingredients of the Rain and there was the "other business," one of the reasons he ventured out at night in the bulletproofed ZIL, though Ghazi had assured Voukelitch countless times that the vicinity was safe even at night.

Voukelitch had earlier that evening dispatched a Hind helicopter to a village in the relatively distant Charikar region to bring back the village jukiabkr.

During the past four months the man had served as an excellent source of hashish, which Voukelitch channeled on to the next link in the chain via KGB channels for his share of the considerable profits the drug brought from both Western countries and, more increasingly of late, from the Soviet Union herself. This pleased Voukelitch; it would be easier to make money closer to home and his cut would be larger.

He fitted another cigarette into his holder and lit it, reaching his decision.

No, he would not kill Fet. Not yet, he decided.

With the Devil's Rain ready to fall, Voukelitch reasoned that the first order of business would be to cancel out the jukiabkr. Voukelitch expected to be moving on within days; dealings with the Afghan peasant would no longer be feasible and the man could hardly be allowed to live to tell others that he had wholesaled hashish in quantity to a Russian officer.

The whole of the KGB was impossible to control and there were elements, the naive, the idealists, who would have Voukelitch sent to the gulag if the activities of him and his cohorts ever came to light. No, he decided, the jukiabkr had expended his usefulness.

Tonight he would die, and for that Voukelitch would need Fet.

The ZIL traveled at a snappy speed along the well-maintained road toward Parachinar, the limousine's headlights piercing the night like fingers pointing the way.

Voukelitch's mind jumped ahead in anticipation of what would happen after his rendezvous with the jukiabkr.

Until not too many years ago, prostitution in Muslim Afghanistan had been punishable by death — and probably still was among the mountain tribes, Voukelitch reflected — and things had not got much better. The world's oldest profession was conspicuous by its absence in this nation of religious fundamentalism... except for the "safe houses" established by the Soviet command for the chosen among its ranks. Parachinar had not rated such a place until Voukelitch insisted on and supervised the start of one on the outskirts of town.

Voukelitch had long ago resigned himself to the fact that human relations only complicated and detracted from the quest for power that was his true lust.

Yet he had the hungers of any man, more than most, he sometimes thought, when the money had been paid, the flesh owned, the control of another absolute.

He had been visiting the "house" every other night for the past four months, though he did not consider it an obsession. The general restricted his indulgences to those times when he was not needed in the laboratory at the base, when everything was running smoothly, as now; not like the deceased Colonel Uttkin, whom Voukelitch had considered a sadist well disposed of.

First, though, he must deal with the jukiabkr. The general knew he must learn what important information the unwashed savage claimed to have.

Voukelitch despised the man as he did all of these Koran-thumping nitwits, but it could be significant that this jukiabkr hailed from a village in the vicinity of last night's massacre.

Everything was in place, everything moving smoothly ahead, all of Voukelitch's plans about to be realized. There was even bought flesh to lose himself in and still be back at the base in time for the first takeoff of a flight bearing the Devil's Rain.

Yet, and he did not know why it irritated him, a premonition needled his subconscious that something was about to go wrong and there was nothing he could do about it.

General Pytyour Voukelitch had never experienced such a premonition in years of KGB work.

He tried to occupy his mind with thoughts of the whore waiting for him in the "house," of the things he would pay her to do to him. But the premonition would not go away.

Katrina Mozzhechkov stood at the side of the road and watched the headlights draw near from the direction of the army fort two kilometers away.

She wore the khaki field outfit she had worn since the night before in Kabul when she had dealt herself into this thing. In some ways it seemed so long ago, and yet the death, before her eyes, of the man she loved would be seared into her soul forever. But never with the pain of now when it burned into her mind like a branding iron.

Katrina knew something of General Pytyour Voukelitch, the man she hoped would be a passenger in the approaching vehicle.

She gambled it would be he, though the hopeless odds that it would not be struck her anew. But this would be her first step in realizing the only thing that mattered since the instant her lover had died. She drew strength only from a consuming need to somehow make all this mean something especially the death of a good man named Lansdale whose seed she carried. The only way it could mean anything to Katrina Mozzhechkov was if it spurredeaher into righting at least some of the wrongs her country had wrought here in Afghanistan. She hoped that in the process she could redeem herself even if she died, because that, too, would have been worth it. The approaching car was not near enough for the headlights to make her visible to its occupants but it would be in a matter of seconds. She tried to strike a pose that she thought was provocative to male eyes, but realized she only looked foolish. Such posing had always seemed so superfluous to her; she had never been a flirt, though she knew she was not unattractive. She decided to stand naturally, without affectation. The headlight beams embraced her. An officer's car.

The vehicle reduced its speed but kept coming.

Katrina had known nothing of the Devil's Rain until the American, Bolan, brought her the realization that, whatever it was, it had caused her lover's death. Now that she knew where the Devil's Rain was, at that fort outside Parachinar, even if that was all she knew about it, at least she possessed knowledge that gave her an edge, an inside edge. It was a chance even the mujahedeen, even the American, did not possess to destroy whatever her government's army had here that had caused her man's death. She would use the edge.

It would be Lansdale's legacy, too, and it would mean something because even if she sacrificed her life, Katrina Mozzhechkov would have redeemed her soul. As Captain Zhegolov's typist at Soviet headquarters in Kabul, Katrina routinely processed the monitoring of Soviet and Afghan army communique's. She had processed the transfer of General Voukelitch to this obscure outpost four months earlier.

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.

"Follow the plan," Voukelitch instructed his driver. "You know the signal?"

"Yes, sir."

"It begins, then." Voukelitch turned to Katrina and lifted her hand to kiss it gallantly. "Only a moment, my dear, I promise."

"Of course, Pytyour."

Voukelitch and Corporal Fet left the car.

Katrina remained in the tonneau. She casually lifted a hand to brush an errant strand of hair away from her forehead in the brief moment the interior light of the car went on.

Corporal Fet positioned himself close to the limo.

Voukelitch left the opposite side of the vehicle. He approached the waiting hillmen, who had not moved. His boots crunched the ground with his even strides, the only sound in the gloom.

The jukiabkr smelled as bad as ever to the Russian, a fetid combination of hashish and body odor.

The jukiabkr stepped forward.

His bodyguards remained behind, gripping their rifles in both hands, their eyes riveted unblinking on the general and the driver, who did not move from beside the car.

The jukiabkr kept a hand to his shoulderstrapped Kalashnikov rifle to facilitate swinging it around rapidly.

This hardly concerned Voukelitch. He read more greed than wariness in the faces of these men.

"You kept us waiting," the leader growled in his own tongue.

"We were delayed," the general replied in precise Pashto. I can use the bitch to advantage right now, he decided, and continued in the jukiabkr's language. "A woman deserted on the highway. A very, lovely woman."

The jukiabkr licked his lips.

"A... Russian woman?" Voukelitch nodded.

"Very provocatively clothed. Would you like a glimpse, my friend? Or... more? She is my prisoner of sorts, though she does not know it yet, an enemy of the Soviet state. Perhaps I could share her with you." The jukiabkr started toward the car.

"An excellent idea, my General."

Voukelitch lifted a hand to the man's arm, then quickly wiped his fingers on his uniform trousers.

"Ah, I would suggest business first though, my friend. And I understand you have arrived with information for me."

The Afghan turned reluctantly from the limousine to reach beneath the folds of his robe and produce a wrapped package. He extended the brick of hash to Voukelitch.

The Russian extended a wad of currency that quickly disappeared into the hillman's grasping hand, then into the voluminous robe. The Afghan purred.

"A satisfactory transaction as always."

"And this information you have brought for me?" Voukelitch prodded.

The jukiabkr oiled a crafty smile.

"You will understand, surely, my General, that all things have a value."

Insolent swine, thought Voukelitch.

"And you will appreciate, friend jukiabkr, the value of trust. I shall determine the price of what you have to sell as in our other dealings. And above that, you can have the woman. I am done with her." The hillman liked that.

Voukelitch had the desert snake right where he wanted him. "I shall tell you then." The Afghan nodded, unable to keep his eyes from the dark windows of the limo.

The gray of false dawn etched the eastern hills in sharp silhouette tinged with pink, not enough light for the jukiabkr to see the bait, and that made the lure all the more effective, Voukelitch knew. "Be quick," he snapped. "I have a most busy day ahead of me. It is about the ambushed convoy last night, is it not? That happened near your village."

The jukiabkr forced his attention away from the car.

"You anticipate me. A force of mujahedeen led by Tarik Khan was responsible."