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.
14
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.