"Bolan, my friend, my brother. Welcome." The two hellgrounders greeted each other in the Afghan manner, the right arm extended to grasp the other's forearm.

"Malik Tarik Khan, it is good to see you again. You look well."

The leader of the mujahedeen was garbed a bit better than most of his followers. He wore a handsomely embroidered vest, stout riding boots, with two bandoliers crossing his chest and a third wrapped around his waist, exactly as Bolan had last seen him during the Executioner's previous strike into Afghanistan.

The rebel chieftain had dealt the Soviets a number of hard defeats. The area east of Kabul leading to the Khyber Pass to Pakistan had long been one of the rallying points of Afghan resistance.

To the Afghans, Tarik Khan was a symbol of the best they had — conversant in Western ways yet a devout believer in the traditional Afghan values and religion. To the Soviets, the man who now greeted Bolan was the most dangerous foe they faced, his command formed into tactical units rather than loose bands or groups.

"Times here are very hard," Tarik Khan told Bolan matter-of-factly. "The Russian animals from the north show no indication of withdrawing from our land. Yet there is good news, too. My son and wife are safe in Pakistan, my son fully recovered from his burns, thanks to you and Allah's mercy. Join us now, for you are one of us. See, Alja already informs the others of your deeds of bravery."

"With a bit of embroidery, I'm sure." Bolan grunted a chuckle. "I got here fast as I could, malik Khan."

"And there may still be time. Would you care for food?"

The mujahedeen camp was too spread out and it was too dark for an accurate head count, but there were at least twenty men. Alja and his men were already unwinding from the long trek, as the guerrilla leader had pointed out. The mujahedeen squatted about, not lighting fires, maintaining a blackout, conversing in low voices in Pashto, sipping chai or cold tea, wolfing down dried goat and nan, chunks of dry bread.

Bolan had acquired a liking for Afghan food, but at the moment all he could think of was the mission. He felt too keyed for action to have an appetite.

"Thank you but I prefer to discuss the next phase of our operation."

"You feel up to it?" the malik asked. "It has been a long journey for you."

"I'm more than ready."

"This way, then." The mujahedeen leader led Bolan away from the others, up a short incline to a promontory that overlooked the Kabul Valley and the capital of this war-ravaged corner of the world.

Kabul.

Exotic as hell but not much from an overlook at disnight, at a distance of several miles. They might call it a large town back in the States, never a city.

Kabul squatted squarely in a desert basin against one of the most rugged scenic backdrops in the Kush, the contrast of civilization against untenable frontier as harsh as the contrasts of the country itself, a land half desert, half mountain, where the base of the economy, what there was of it, was agricultural with temperatures ranging from 120' in the summer to com200 in the winter.

Still, the Russians wanted Afghanistan.

Another step toward the world domination the cannibals in the Kremlin snickered about, just as Hitler had. And just as in Hitler's time, no one listened.

The Russians wanted Afghanistan, their neighbor to the south. So Russia took Afghanistan.

And no one seemed to give a damn except for a few people in the States and the fighters of the mujahedeen: soldiers of God; holy warriors of Afghanistan. And a man named Bolan.

Bolan cared plenty.

The Russians were closer to the oil fields now, to the Persian Gulf and the warm-water seaports that Russia had sought for centuries. The way things were going now, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq were in the same situation as Poland and Czechoslovakia in the final minutes before Hitler went for total control.

That was the scenario being acted out day by day in Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and, right now, for Mack Bolan in Afghanistan. Arid if the cannibals in the Kremlin played it right they would succeed in attaining their objective before the end of this century. Then everyone would be subjected to a totalitarian society unless something changed and damn fast. The Russians had already expanded the airfields at Khandahar and Shindad to accommodate strategic bombers, putting them within easy striking distance of the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz, through which most of the world's oil must flow.

It had been some journey for Bolan from the States forty-eight hours ago to this promontory overlooking Kabul. But that trip was nothing compared to the hellroad that brought the Executioner to this point in time and space and sudden death from a war in a place called Vietnam where Bolan's odyssey truly began. Mack Bolan earned the title the Executioner for his many successful sniper missions into the north with his top-notch penetration squad, Able Team. Bolan had simultaneously earned the name Sergeant Mercy for his humane treatment of all Vietnamese civilians he encountered; they were what the war was all about as far as Bolan was concerned. This combination of compassionate human being and jungle-warfare expert extraordinaire forged one of the most magnificent human fighting machines ever produced by the United States or any nation.

Bolan's Vietnam soldiering for his government ended abruptly when the young sergeant was granted an emergency leave to bury his family — mother, father and younger sister — victims of Mafia loan-sharking. After much soul-searching, a highly principled soldier declared an unprecedented, wholly illegal, one-man war against the Mob and actually succeeded during a series of dazzling campaigns in bringing that cancerous growth on society to its knees, where a retoughened legal system could begin dealing with the ones who had somehow escaped the Executioner's sights.

That period of Bolan's life concluded with an off-the-record White House pardon for Bolan if he agreed to channel his superior capabilities toward antiterrorist activities. This had seemed a worthy enough enterprise. Bolan accepted the deal.

During the course of his tenure as head man of America's covert antiterrorist operations, Bolan reached the realization that worldwide terrorism was only a tentacle of an evil even more widespread and world-encompassing than the Mafia ever hoped to be. The KGB.

Bolan had spent enough time on a mission inside the Soviet Union to know that Russians as a people — the working stiffs on the street, in the homes — were not such a bad lot, but the wrong ones, the bad ones, had grabbed all the power the way they often do in dictatorships and democracies alike.

The KGB was the terror of the evil that spread from the Kremlin. The impact of the KGB on world terrorism stabbed home to Bolan like a bayonet through the gut when they killed April Rose. He had fingered the mastermind behind that deed and executed him in the Oval Office, in front of the President of the United States.

Once more the Executioner was beyond sanction.

Bolan had come full circle.

The Executioner had commenced his hottest mile yet against an enemy with seven hundred thousand agents worldwide who had Bolan's name and description at the top of their hit lists, and the same went for his own government's espionage agencies.

The Executioner traveled alone again, fighting impossible odds. But for this man, with this life history, there is no other way: no way of dodging a commitment, a duty, and, yeah, think it all the way through, no way to avoid facing the evil product of an evolutionary process that had nurtured the self-destructive strain personified by the likes of Mafia and terrorists and KGB.

It seemed to Bolan that his own life was War Everlasting, and since the death of April he had rarely allowed anything but his devotion to this duty to occupy his every waking hour as a way of dealing with his loss. Bolan knew that when his violent end came — as he had expected it to every minute of his life since Vietnam — then by God this warrior's life would mean something, for he would have died taking his moment in this continuum and would have bought that evolutionary process maybe just a little more time to find its own way of purging the evil.