"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."