"This is a proud but foolish tribe," Tarik Khan explained to Bolan. "They would never allow us to do their fighting for them."
The village leader snarled an impatient demand that needed no translation.
Bolan resigned himself to the only possible course open to him if he wanted to salvage any hope at all for the Devil's Rain hit.
"Tell him I'm in," Bolan told Tarik Khan. "Advise him of my specialties; I have explosives. Tell the jukiabkr that I can infiltrate the Russians' encampment, then you and his mujahedeen can swoop in for the mop-up. With the damage I can do, that could cut our losses to nothing. If we come in blazing, those soldiers could defend their position and call in air support, which would take only minutes to arrive. We've got to level them with one decisive strike."
"You are right, of course," Tarik Khan said, nodding. He proceeded to translate Bolan's words to the jukiabkr. The village leader listened, scoffed in contempt, then turned and stalked away.
Alja Malikyar shook his head, watching the jukiabkr return to a cluster of his own men.
"It is indeed unfortunate we must ally ourselves with such unwashed creatures. I beseech your forgiveness, malik Tarik Khan, for so disrespectfully voicing my thoughts moments ago."
"What did Hash Breath just say?" Bolan asked.
Tarik Khan paused.
"He said he would not take orders from an infidel such as yourself. He will allow you to do as you suggest, but he is the one who will direct his men when to attack the Soviet convoy whether you have finished your placing of explosives or not. He said you will not live out this night."
* * *
Lieutenant Josef Bucheksky wondered if he had not made a grave error in judgment in ordering the fifteen-man unit under his command to encircle their vehicles — two BTR-40's, the GAZ tanker that had thrown a rod and the armored personnel carrier that had carried troops to guard the precious fuel delivered to the outpost in distant Baghlan to the north. A hundred kilometers from Kabul and they break down! Bucheksky had ordered his men to camp here for the night. Sergeant Lamskoy, the group's ranking noncom, immediately set up security measures within the circle of vehicles, which reminded the lieutenant of a scene he had once seen in a German-made, government-approved film about the American west; the twenty-three-year-old officer nursed a fascination with American history that he tactfully refrained from mentioning to those with whom he served.
Bucheksky fired a cigarette and tried to let the peacefulness of the night relax him. A man felt enveloped by the elements here in the wilderness, he thought, which is as a man should feel.
Then he reprimanded himself for entertaining such useless notions and returned his attention to the problem at hand.
Bucheksky had been in Afghanistan only a month and had yet to see combat. He recognized the queasiness in his stomach as fear. We should have pushed on, he thought for the hundredth time since the gloom of night had descended across this desolate valley less than an hour ago.
Camping here had seemed the right thing to do at the time, in the bright light of day. The only village nearby had never shown signs of antigovernment activity, had seemed friendly as some of the mountain tribes appeared to be; the sensible ones, thought Bucheksky.
The "highway" cutting through the valley toward Kabul, so badly in need of repair, was quite another matter and on further reflection the young officer decided he had made the right decision, especially taking into account the trouble in the capital last night that officers in the field had been notified of: a strike at the very heart of the high command. There were no actual details and it was too soon to tell if the assault had been an isolated incident. The mujahedeen had never struck at the nation's capital before; a suicide fringe could be responsible. Or was this the beginning of an orchestrated counteroffensive by a united Muslim front?
The lieutenant considered himself a man of letters marred by a personality flaw he had yet to overcome; he had the sensibilities of an artist but had not developed a strength of conviction necessary to achieve independence of thought and action — and he knew it. Bucheksky's father was a retired general and upon Josef's completing the state-required formal education there had been no question that he would follow in his father's and grandfather's footsteps to officers' training school and a career in the military service of Russia. At least Bucheksky had never questioned it and here he was, a man who knew he would one day pen the twentieth-century epic of his people, or so he hoped, and who had for the time being rationalized appeasing his father with the hope that a military career would at some not-too-distant point afford him the financial stability to subsidize such aspirations. Though a loyal soldier of the Soviet Union, Bucheksky remained a man who loved American jazz and detective stories when he could find them. But where was he now? In some desolate, primitive country, learning nothing but fear; facing his own cowardice before a real world that he tied to himself he understood and could write about.
Here stood Lieutenant Josef Bucheksky on his first true mission, though in reality it was nothing but a minor exercise and his superiors knew it, this routine accompanying of the fuel truck through a pacified countryside. But Bucheksky had read all too vividly the hostility in the eyes of every Afghan civilian they passed and the flutter in his stomach would not go away. Nor would the foreboding that he had made a mistake. Sergeant Lamskoy strode over. The noncom had twenty-two years' experience on the lieutenant, yet no conflict had developed between them. The elder soldier had responded to something in Bucheksky and had sort of taken the younger man under his wing, though their exchanges recognized their respective ranks.
Bucheksky felt a sense of security and safety just knowing Lamskoy was here tonight.
"The sentries will be rotating every two hours, sir," the sergeant reported. "That will keep them fresh. Kabul will send out mechanics and parts first thing in the morning."
"But not tonight, eh?
"This area..."
"Yes, I know, Sergeant. Friendly. Then I wonder why Kabul won't send us help tonight?"
"Probably don't want to spare any men after what happened last night," the noncom opined.
"I've got a feeling we're not being told the full story on that. I wonder why..." Bucheksky finished smoking his cigarette and flicked it into the darkness beyond the circle of vehicles. He watched the tiny red dot of the butt arc and for a minute sensed the presence of a breeze but there was no breeze. But the sensation was so momentary he dismissed it as nerves.
"When have we ever been told the whole truth, Sergeant?"
Lamskoy frowned.
"Excuse me for saying so, sir, but talk like that does not become an officer."
"Our civilians wait in endless lines for the barest necessities," Bucheksky went on, "and the only way a man can find security in a steady job is in military service. I sometimes think our country's expansionism has nothing to do with political ideology, Sergeant, but serves to save an economy that, if it fell, would mean many changes in our government at home. Then maybe we would have peace.
"But I suppose it is the soldier who always wants peace the most, is it not, for it is the soldier who is sent to fight and die when war comes.
"Why are we so far from home, Sergeant? Man to man. Why don't we all just march home? What would happen then? Would it be the end of the world?"
Lamskoy rested a hand on the younger man's arm.
"I do not hear your words. Speak no further. You are Russian. We are soldiers. We serve our motherland. It is our duty." At the instant Lamskoy spoke that last word, the world erupted with the fury of hell and Josef Bucheksky instinctively knew that his foreboding had been prophecy.
Explosions shattered reality from three of the vehicles across the encampment, balls of flame igniting the night.
11
Bolan had made a careful study of the Soviet encampment alongside the road and assessed its security as tight, formidable, set up by someone of seasoned field experience.
The outer perimeter consisted of four sentr
ies, positioned a distance of fifty yards from one another outside the small camp, each holding an AK-47 as he patrolled a larger circumference, ten yards out from where the tanker, personnel carrier and two armored cars had been drawn into a circle.
The nightstalker made a third outer circle as he moved unnoticed to thoroughly reconnoiter and plan his one-man penetration of those defenses.
At the open spaces between each vehicle, inside the camp, stood another sentry.
Bolan discerned a Soviet officer who stood smoking a cigarette, staring out into the darkness. The man was unaware that close to sixty pairs of eyes from two separate groups were at that moment trained on him like a specimen under a microscope, from either side of this valley in which the Russians had been forced to spend the night.
Bolan counted sixteen soldiers down there, seven wrapped in sleeping bags on the ground in the center of the circle, no doubt resting up for their turn at standing guard. But Bolan knew the 50-to-16 odds were not overkill because those troopers were Soviet soldiers, among the very toughest in the world.
The thirty or so mujahedeen of Tarik Khan's force waited along the ridges and crests of the western wall of the small valley while twenty ragtag ruffians of the jukiabkr held the high ground to the east. After both sides had been deployed, Bolan had left Tarik Khan's group on a southeasterly approach to the camp on the valley floor. The penetration specialist had suppressed his misgivings about this hit and concentrated on a by the numbers infiltration between two of the outer sentries.
The only thing that mattered now was the success of the mission, which meant doing as much damage as he could and getting away without casualties to his own side.
When Bolan got past the patrolling sentries, he moved first to one of the BTR-40 armored cars.
He held some of the plastic explosive in his hands. He knelt silently before the hulking shadow of the war machine and wedged some death putty against the axle at the front tire.
The sentry posted between the BTR-40 and the armored personnel carrier did not even blink when shadows shifted before his eyes a couple of paces away.
The night-hit expert in black proceeded to plant more timed explosives in the three other vehicles.
He went undetected during the two-and-a-half-minute operation. When Bolan passed the juncture between the next BTR and the elongated shadows of the tanker, he noted through his NVD goggles that the officer had been joined by a tough-looking noncom.
Bolan caught enough of their exchange as he passed to remind the Man from Blood that these were human beings he had to kill tonight, not some targets in a game, the officer voicing a damn accurate assessment of the real reasons for the USSR'S globe grabbing.
Bolan heard the noncom urge his officer to cool it. There seemed an almost father-son regard between the two. Then the nightkiller blocked such thoughts and continued with his work.
He paused until a sentry strolled past, and when the Executioner saw an opening he broke from the tanker, as stealthy as a wraith. For a heartbeat Bolan thought his presence had been discovered when the Russian flicked a cigarette butt that arced to within a foot of him. The officer had watched it and Bolan thought he saw the man pause in his conversation with the noncom. The Executioner had remained still, fearing that the officer had sensed Bolan, but he guessed the officer decided it could only be the breeze or something and the Executioner got clear, past the sentries to several hundred yards away from where Tarik Khan's men waited.
Bolan flung himself in a forward dive to the valley floor one heartbeat before the plastique started ripping the night apart with hellfire behind him.
After the last of the clustered explosions finished, gas tanks of the vehicles mushrooming golden balls of flame in the night sky, the nighthitter stood, gripped his MAC-10 in firing position and moved in. The valley echoed with the unearthly shrieks of Allah's holy warriors as mujahedeen stormed down from either side of the valley to join the fray, each force reserving at least half of its men while the others rushed in firing weapons.
Chaos and confusion reigned within the circle of vehicles that had erupted into a circle of death and destruction.
* * *
When the first rapid series of explosions rumbled from the near distance like approaching thunder, Katrina Mozzhechkov experienced stomach spasms that matched those rumbles of doom note for note.
She sat on a chair near the door of a vacant farmhouse. The occupants had left, the man to fight with the mujahedeen, his wife to wait somewhere with the other village women, shunning Katrina as they had all day. Katrina felt afraid but she tried to fight her fear, to ride out the emotion, telling herself that because her moods had fluctuated so since last night, after what had happened to her lover, this fear would pass, too.
She feared also for the man known as the Executioner, and as she heard the faint secondary explosions, almost inaudible, she considered again what her fate among these people would be if Mack Bolan were killed in the raging battle or otherwise could not protect her. He had strongly requested she remain in the village. She understood he did not want her exposed to unnecessary danger, knowing she carried a new life within her. But she had insisted on taking her chances anyway, until he explained that there would be no way possible she could survive. He trusted Tarik Khan's men implicitly, but he feared the local men had probably already planned to kill her as an enemy of Allah and to claim it an enemy hit during the heat of the battle. Katrina knew the big American had to be right when she considered again the hatred with which she had been regarded all day in this strange, terrible place. And so she agreed to stay behind, but as she heard those rumbles of war, Katrina Mozzhechkov felt many things: fear, anger, loss... and a frustration that would not go away; a need to do something, not sit here on the sidelines.
She had to prove herself.
To the unborn child within her.
To the memory of her lost lover.
And most of all to herself.
She stood, gripping the M-16 that Bolan had left her, and started toward the door.
* * *
The force of the exploding about of the tanker pitched Sergeant Lamskoy into Lieutenant Bucheksky.
Bucheksky somehow registered the lucid thought, Thank God the tanker is empty! as he and the noncom toppled backward onto the ground toward the center of the circle of vehicles.
Dazed, the lieutenant started to his feet the instant they landed. He reached for his bolstered side arm and realized Sergeant Lamskoy made no such similar effort.
Bucheksky looked, knowing what he would find, and fought to hold back the cry of panic and the bile that threatened to spew from his throat when he saw what remained of the man who had been like a father to him.
Sergeant Lamskoy's corpse lay draped across the officer's lower legs, the sergeant's back a charred, shredded ruin, the tunic ripped away, all visible flesh seared into puckered, smoldering horror around a dark hole where a chunk of flaming shrapnel had skewered him.
Bucheksky scrambled to his feet, the Tokarev pistol in his fist. He crouched as he looked around frantically at the holocaust that had befallen his command: the screams of one man in flames razored the air, the soldier squealing as he rolled about on the ground. The stench of burned human flesh made Bucheksky nauseous. He saw the body of another soldier lying in an impossible position, the man's legs torn off at midthigh and nowhere to be seen; the man mercifully was dead or soon would be.
Flames licked the night sky as everything burned.
The soldiers in the center of the encampment stumbled to their feet, grabbing rifles with the confusion of men torn from deep sleep. Bucheksky felt an odd surreal objectivity grip him. He somehow felt oddly removed from the sounds and terror of battle, and although part of it, still able to observe it all and know exactly what he should do. Survival instinct, he thought, as he flared into action. His training replaced fear now that the battle raged.
More gunfire poured down on the flaming camp from the slopes of the valley. Battle cries
in Pashto accompanied the red winking of automatic gunfire as rounds whistled into the camp.
A soldier near Bucheksky pitched sideways when the left side of his skull exploded from the impact of an incoming round into a dark mist against the firelight.
The sentries on the outside perimeter held, falling flat to the ground and firing auto bursts at the attacking waves of mujahedeen.
In the illumination from the fires, Bucheksky saw one of his soldiers lifted off the ground into a backward somersault as a bullet cored his face.
The lieutenant turned to shout something, anything, to his men who were now rushing to openings between the flaming vehicles, toward the attackers who had come within ten yards out there in the dark.
There would be no contacting Kabul by radio, Bucheksky knew; the explosions had effectively destroyed all his unit's communications equipment.
He had heard no incoming missiles but how could the explosives have been planted without detection by his men?
Before Bucheksky could encourage his men he saw something. His eyes had almost missed it until he focused to see it again. A shadow, a human shadow, darting past the glow of a flaming armored car. Not a soldier! Bucheksky realized.
A big apparition in combat black was striding past the fires, pumping a mercy round into the flaming soldier who had somehow stayed alive and kept squealing until the specter freed the man's soul.
Bucheksky moved in that direction, pistol up, searching for the phantom. Could one man have planted all these explosives?
Done all this damage? Who was this executioner of so many good soldiers? Bucheksky would stop him.
He saw the combat shadow again, too late. The specter tossed something that could only be a grenade and the ghost faded back into the night. The young officer angled away from the melee of his men returning fire at the mujahedeen.
The grenade exploded with a ferocity that blasted apart one soldier and hurled three others aside like a child's discarded toys. Two of the men got dazedly to their feet, and the third shuddered in death throes where he fell.
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