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.
Gunfire and grunts of hand-to-hand combat from outside the circle of flame peppered the night.
"Move out of the circle! Disperse! We're easy targets down here!" Bucheksky shouted to his men.
The crisp authority carried across the melee, the men toting their AK's out of the flickering ring of dying flames to confront their attackers. Bucheksky fanned the night with his pistol. He cut into the direction where he guessed that the nightshadow would turn next if he continued the progression of his last two appearances.
The officer heard curses in Russian and Pashto all around him amid the noise of combat, but all that mattered to him at that instant was staying alive.
He sensed movement coming at him from his right, the opposite side from where he had guessed he would intercept the lone death-bringer in combat black.