The Executioner spared lives when he could, like now, men from the opposing side. If Bolan read this kid's history right, this recruit was as much a victim of the Soviets as the civilians Bolan's blitz was meant to help, and if Bolan was wrong that was the kid's problem. The Man from Blood pushed the sagging, unconscious guard around the side of the building, out of sight of anyone passing by. The sentry would not go unnoticed for long, but Bolan had no intention of staying around for long, either.
He hit the locked door of the lab with a kick that sent the panel ripping inward off its hinges, grabbing the immediate attention of three Soviet infantrymen who stood guard in the short hallway. Beyond a glass-partitioned door Bolan saw activity; men in white moving about. He concentrated on the real security of General Voukelitch's hellspawn: three raydoviki who had not been lounging but still were caught off guard by the sudden Bolan assault.
Two of them tracked rifles toward the blitzer with blinding speed. The third reached frantically for a red button near a wall phone that had to be connected to an alarm.
Bolan shot off the soldier's arm with a burst from the silenced Ingram, severing it at the shoulder when the index finger was an inch away from the button.
The uniform-sleeved meat plopped to the floor, extended index finger pointing spasmodically, a fountain of murky gore spurting from the ragged stump at the shoulder.
The man's expression expanded with shock when he saw the arm, then the expression exploded under a hail of .45-caliber shredders that continued to cut down the other two before either could trigger a shot. The three dead men tangoed in death throes before they collapsed, spreading slimy pools of blood that Bolan sidestepped.
He powerhoused another kick with enough rage to splinter the inside door to the lab. He stormed in with flame snarling from the MAC suppressor, the Ingram chugging flesh-eaters at a rate of 1145 rounds per minute as Bolan scoped the scene and picked targets.
A laboratory, yeah. White-smocked, bespectacled egghead types were working around a five-foot-high aluminum tub Bolan estimated the diameter at fifteen feet-filled to six inches from the brim with a stinking greenish-black liquid that could only be what Bolan had traveled all this way to destroy. The Devil's Rain.
He counted five cannibals working a console of gauges and lights that controlled the flow of the junk through pipes and a processing system to a dock where a half dozen Afghan army regulars trundled oblong canisters that looked like bombs onto wheeled flatcars, which would be used to get the stuff to the choppers.
Bolan took out the soldiers first, deciding not to spare any of these punks. They would be the ones to fire on the blitzer if they could reach their rifles, which were stacked while they worked under the watchful eye of two more raydoviki.
The two Russians caught the blitzer's death-hail first, then the Ingram tracked on to eat away at the other soldiers who withered under the .45-caliber bullets in various stages of reaction before any of them could fire a shot.
Bolan slammed a fresh 30-round magazine into the Ingram and a new fury gripped him. He tracked on the killers of women, children and the elderly that the slave state could not enslave and wanted dead; animals who thought they were far enough away from the death, suffering and other abominations they cursed mankind with; horrors like the Devil's Rain and Yellow Rain.
But Bolan dirtied these scum plenty, .45-caliber steel bursting white smocks apart in exploding red fountains, cannibals toppling in all directions like bowling pins after a strike.
Bolan punched another magazine in and tracked up at the last man in white who stood at a gauge panel on the walkway ten feet above the black-green shit in the tub.
This one had hidden himself from Bolan's line of view and punched a button up there that started an ululating siren piercing outside somewhere. Then the savage got brave when he thought he had the drop on Bolan and pegged off a round from a pistol, the bullet cracked too close to Bolan.
At the last second before Bolan demolished that face, the Executioner pedigreed the guy.
Dr. Gregor Golodkin.
The Soviet's leading specialist in chemical weapons and their use, most lately in Afghanistan.
There is only one way for this cannibal to go.
Bolan lowered his aim and triggered a sideways burst before the baby killer could fire again. Golodkin's legs flailed out from under him. A scream that started from the bad doctor's panicky mouth erupted with new intensity in the eye blink he had to realize he was falling over the railing into the tub of Devil's Rain. The bloodcurdling yell was interrupted by the splash as he went under, and all that came up was a bubbling, dissolving thing that sizzled like frying bacon. The human mess melted into nothing and a foul cloud rose to mark the passing.
Bolan placed a wad of plastic explosive at the base of the tank and timed it.
The wailing of the siren from outside needled him to the dock where the canisters stood. The containers would be pressurized; they would go with the blow from the explosives.
He raced past the canisters and dived from the dock. He had set the explosives by the tank for ten seconds.
His last impression before the explosion was confused shouting as soldiers poured in from the entrance in response to the siren. The blast hurled Bolan into the air and he felt carried along on a hot wind. The earth shook and everything related to the Devil's Rain blew into a maelstrom of sense-reeling destruction that engulfed the soldiers and the lab.
The Executioner landed in a well-practiced somersault, riding the momentum of his leap and the force of the blast, coming out of it into a beeline run around the far corner of the lab building. He had drawn on what he knew about the shit they were brewing back there to set his explosives in such a way that the building would not be destroyed. Contamination from the Devil's Rain seemed to require bodily contact, not inhalation; none of the hellspawners in the lab had been wearing gas masks.
The initial response to the explosion would be for them to work like hell to contain the liquid horror to the lab building, a diversion Bolan hoped would help him.
He continued away from the lab across the rear length of the headquarters building. He came around the front of the far end of the HQ from where army soldiers poured toward the lab exactly as Bolan had hoped. He wasted no time. He cut off on another direct course full speed toward the nearer of the two helicopters.
The eerie visibility of the new dawn etched a surreal sharpness to the shriek of an incoming missile as one of the gun houses exploded into flying mortar, gun parts and airborne bodies everywhere. The echoes of the explosion yielded to heavy machine-gun fire, and more incoming rockets from Tarik Khan's mujahedeen punched at the walls and other watchtowers but not at the landing pad and the gunships, as Bolan had requested.
Confusion reigned across the fort.
On his dash toward the choppers Bolan saw that the bodies of Voukelitch and the camp commandant had been discovered in the ZIL cannibal car. That left a big hole in response coordination, some troopers charging to the parapets to defend the fort, others fanning out around the lab, everyone disorganized and confused.
The only resistance Bolan met was from four Soviet crewmen who had been waiting near the choppers, ready to spread death and then fly safely away. They looked as confused as everyone else at the sudden attack, but their reaction time flared fast when they spotted the Executioner jogging toward them.
But the approaching figure wore a Soviet uniform and so these death merchants held their fire and Bolan exterminated the lice safely into hell.
He tossed a grenade from the cluster of munitions webbing into the hatchway of the chopper several hundred feet away. He scored a bull's-eye, the grenade demolishing the interior of that craft, lifting it off its landing rails, the machine settling back down where it would stay disabled. Bolan leaped through the side hatch door of the other chopper.