Appointment in Kabul Read Online Free PDF

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."
    "Do you know the high command headquarters?"
    Bolan's intel of the area was complete.
    "I know where it is."
    "And do you know that more than a thousand Soviet soldiers guard the high command?"
    "I know that, too. What I would like to know, Katrina, is why you remain here endangering yourself. The KGB will send agents back to search this place."
    A tear pearled in one eye, ready to cascade down the woman's cheek. Katrina Mozzhechkov sat steady and held eye contact