Black Tulip

Sergei's father was a druggist in Tambov, maybe four hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. Filling prescriptions looked pretty good to Sergei. You didn't have to work too hard. You didn't have to think too hard. You could get your hands on medicines from the West, medicines that really worked, not just the Soviet crap. And you could rake in plenty on the left from your customers, because they wanted the stuff that really worked, too. So—pharmacy school, then a soft job till pension time. Sergei had it all figured out.

First, though, his hitch in the Red Army. He was a sunny kid when he got drafted, always looking on the bright side of things. He didn't think they could possibly ship his ass to Afghanistan. Even after they did, he didn't think they could possibly ship him to Bamian Province. Life is full of surprises, even—maybe especially—for a sunny kid from a provincial town where nothing much ever happens.

Abdul Satar Ahmedi's father was a druggist, too, in Bulola, a village of no particular name or fame not far east of the town of Bamian. Satar had also planned to follow in his father's footsteps, mostly because that was what a good son did. Sometimes the drugs his father dispensed helped the patient. Sometimes they didn't. Either way, it was the will of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Satar was twenty—he thought he was twenty, though he might have been nineteen or twenty-one—when the godless Russians poured into his country. They seized the bigger towns and pushed out along the roads from one to another. Bamian was one of the places where their tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters came to roost. One of the roads they wanted ran through Bulola.

On the day the first truck convoy full of infidel soldiers rumbled through the village, Satar's father dug up an ancient but carefully greased Enfield rifle. He thrust it at the younger man, saying, "My grandfather fought the British infidels with this piece. Take it and do to the atheists what they did to the soldiers of the Queen."

"Yes, Father," Satar said, as a good son should. Before long, he carried a Kalashnikov in place of the ancient Enfield. Before long, he marched with the men of Sayid Jaglan, who had been a major in the Kabul puppet regime before choosing to fight for God and freedom instead. Being a druggist's son, he served as a medic. He was too ignorant to make a good medic, but he knew more than most, so he had to try. He wished he knew more still; he'd had to watch men die because he didn't know enough. The will of God, yes, of course, but accepting it came hard.

The dragon? The dragon had lived in the valley for time out of mind before Islam came to Afghanistan. Most of those centuries, it had slept, as dragons do. But when it woke—oh, when it woke . . .

Sergei looked out over the Afghan countryside and shook his head in slow wonder. He'd been raised in country as flat as if it were ironed. The Bulola perimeter wasn't anything like that. The valley in which this miserable village sat was high enough to make his heart pound when he moved quickly. And the mountains went up from there, dun and gray and red and jagged and here and there streaked with snow.

When he remarked on how different the landscape looked, his squadmates in the trench laughed at him. "Screw the scenery," Vladimir said. "Fucking Intourist didn't bring you here. Keep your eye peeled for dukhi. You may not see them, but sure as shit they see you."

"Ghosts," Sergei repeated, and shook his head again. "We shouldn't have started calling them that."

"Why not?" Vladimir was a few months older than he, and endlessly cynical. "You usually don't see 'em till it's too damn late."

"But they're real. They're alive," Sergei protested. "They're trying to make us into ghosts."

A noise. None of them knew what had made it. The instant they heard it, their AK's all lifted a few centimeters. Then they identified the distant, growing rumble in the air for what it was. "Bumblebee," Fyodor said. He had the best ears of any of them, and he liked to hear himself talk. But he was right. Sergei spotted the speck in the sky.

"I like having helicopter gunships around," he said. "They make me think my life-insurance policy's paid up." Not even Vladimir argued with that.

The Mi-24 roared past overhead, red stars bright against camouflage paint. Then, like a dog coming to point, it stopped and hovered. It didn't look like a bumblebee to Sergei. It put him in mind of a polliwog, like the ones he'd see in the creeks outside of Tambov in the springtime. Come to think of it, they were camouflage-colored, too, to keep fish and birds from eating them.

But the gunship had a sting any bee would have envied. It let loose .with the rocket pods it carried under its stubby wings, and with the four-barrel Gatling in its nose. Even from a couple of kilometers away, the noise was terrific. So was the fireworks display. The Soviet soldiers whooped and cheered. Explosions pocked the mountainside. Fire and smoke leaped upward. Deadly as a shark, ponderous as a whale, the Mi-24 heeled in the air and went on its way.

"Some bandits there, with a little luck," Sergei said. "Pilot must've spotted something juicy."

"Or thought he did," Vladimir answered. "Liable just to be mountain-goat tartare now."

"Watch the villagers," Fyodor said. "They'll let us know if that bumblebee really stung anything."

"You're smart," Sergei said admiringly.

"If I was fucking smart, would I fucking be here?" Fyodor returned, and his squadmates laughed. He added, "I've been here too fucking long, that's all. I know all kinds of things I never wanted to find out."

Sergei turned and looked back over his shoulder. The men in the village were staring at the shattered mountainside and muttering among themselves in their incomprehensible language. In their turbans and robes—some white, some mud brown—they looked oddly alike to him. They all had long hawk faces and wore beards. Some of the beards were black, some gray, a very few white. That was his chief clue they'd been stamped from the mold at different times.

Women? Sergei shook his head. He'd never seen a woman's face here. Bulola wasn't the sort of village where women shed their veils in conformance to the revolutionary sentiments of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was the sort of place when women thought letting you see a nose was as bad as letting you see a pussy. Places like this, girls who went to coed schools got murdered when they came home. It hadn't happened right here—he didn't think Bulola had ever had coed schools—but it had happened in the countryside.

He gauged the mutters. He couldn't understand them, but he could make guesses from the tone. "I think we hit 'em a pretty good lick," he said.

Vladimir nodded. "I think you're right. Another ten billion more, and we've won the fucking war. Or maybe twenty billion. Who the fuck knows?"

Satar huddled in a little hole he'd scraped in the dirt behind a big reddish boulder. He made himself as small as he could, to give the flying bullets and chunks of shrapnel the least chance of tearing his tender flesh. If it is God's will, it is God's will, he thought. But if it wasn't God's will, he didn't want to make things any easier for the infidels than he had to.

Under him, the ground quivered as if in pain as another salvo of Soviet rockets slammed home. Satar hated helicopter gunships with a fierce and bitter passion. He had nothing but contempt for the Afghan soldiers who fought on the side of the atheists. Some Russian ground soldiers were stupid as sheep, and as helpless outside their tanks and personnel carriers as a turtle outside its shell. Others were very good, as good as any mujahideen. You never could tell. Sometimes you got a nasty surprise instead of giving one.

But helicopters . . . What he hated most about helicopters was that he couldn't hit back. They hung in the air and dealt out death, and all you could do if they spotted you was take it. Oh, every once in a while the mujahideen got lucky with a heavy machine gun or an RPG-7 and knocked down one of Shaitan's machines, but only once in a while.

Satar had heard the Americans were going to start sending Stinger antiaircraft missiles up to the mujahideen from Pakistan. The Americans were infidels, too, of course, but they hated the Russians. The enemy of my enemy... In world politics as in tribal feuds, the enemy of one's enemy was a handy fellow to know. And the Stinger was supposed to be very good.

At the moment, though, Satar and his band were getting stung, not stinging. The gunship seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. Hadn't it been hovering above them for hours, hurling hellfire down on their heads?

Another explosion, and somebody not far away started screaming. Satar cursed the Soviets and his comrade, for that meant he couldn't huddle in the shelter of the boulder anymore. Grabbing his sad little medicine kit, he scrambled toward the wounded mujahid. The man clutched his leg and moaned. Blood darkened the wool of his robe.

"Easy, Abdul Rahim, easy," Satar said. "I have morphine, to take away the pain."

"Quickly, then, in the name of God," Abdul Rahim got out between moans. "It is broken; I am sure of it."

Cursing softly, Satar fumbled in the kit for a syringe. What did a druggist's son know of setting broken bones? Satar knew far more than he had; experience made a harsh teacher, but a good one. He looked around for sticks to use as splints and cursed again. Where on a bare stone mountainside would he find such sticks?

He was just taking the cover from the needle when a wet slapping sound came from Abdul Rahim. The mujahid's cries suddenly stopped. When Satar turned back toward him, he knew what he would find, and he did. One of the bullets from the gunship's Gatling had struck home. Abdul Rahim's eyes still stared up at the sky, but they were forever blind now.

A martyr who falls in the holy war against the infidel is sure of Paradise, Satar thought. He grabbed the dead man's Kalashnikov and his banana clips before scuttling back into shelter.

At last, after what seemed like forever, the helicopter gunship roared away. Satar waited for the order that would send the mujahideen roaring down on the Shuravi—the Soviets—in his home village. But Sayid Jaglan's captain called, "We have taken too much hurt. We will fall back now and strike them another time."

Satar cursed again, but in his belly, in his stones, he knew the captain was wise. The Russians down there would surely be alert and waiting. My father, I will return, Satar thought as he turned away from Bulola. And when I do, the village will be freed.

The dragon dreamt. Even that was out of the ordinary; in its agelong sleep, it was rarely aware or alert enough to dream. It saw, or thought it saw, men with swords, men with spears. One of them, from out of the west, was a little blond fellow in a gilded corselet and crested helm. The dragon made as if to call out to him, for in him it recognized its match: like knows like.

But the little man did not answer the call as one coming in friendship should. Instead, he drew his sword and plunged it into the dragon's flank. It hurt much more than anything in a dream had any business doing. The dragon shifted restlessly. After a while, the pain eased, but the dragon's sleep wasn't so deep as it had been. It dreamt no more, not then, but dreams lay not so far above the surface of that slumber.

Under Sergei's feet, the ground quivered. A pebble leaped out of the side of the entrenchment and bounced off his boot. "What was that?" he said. "The stinking dukhi set off a charge somewhere?"

His sergeant laughed, showing steel teeth. Krikor was an Armenian. With his long face and big nose and black hair and eyes, he looked more like the dukhi himself than like a Russian. "That wasn't the ghosts," he said. "That was an earthquake. Just a little one, thank God."

"An earthquake?" That hadn't even crossed Sergei's mind. He, too laughed—nervously. "Don't have those in Tambov—you'd better believe it."

"They do down in the Caucasus," Sergeant Krikor said. "Big ones are real bastards, too. Yerevan'll get hit one of these days. Half of it'll fall down, too—mark my words. All the builders cheat like maniacs, the fuckers. Too much sand in the concrete, not enough steel rebar. Easier to pocket the difference, you know?" He made as if to count bills and put them in his wallet.

"It's like that everywhere," Sergei said. " 'I serve the Soviet Union!' " He put a sardonic spin on the phrase that had probably meant something in the days when his grandfather was young.

Sergeant Krikor's heavy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. "Yeah, but who gives a shit in Tambov? So buildings fall apart faster than they ought to. So what? But if an earthquake hits—a big one, I mean—they don't just fall apart. They fall down."

"I guess." Sergei wasn't about to argue with the sergeant. Krikor was a conscript like him, but a conscript near the end of his term, not near the beginning. That, even more than his rank, made the Armenian one of the top dogs. Changing the subject, Sergei said, "We hit the bandits pretty hard earlier today." He tried to forget Vladimir's comment. Ten billion times more? Twenty billion? Bozhemoi!

Krikor frowned again, in a subtly different way. "Listen, kid, do you still believe all the internationalist crap they fed you before they shipped your worthless ass here to Afghan?" He gave the country its universal name among the soldiers of the Red Army.

"Well . . . no," Sergei said. "They went on and on about the revolutionary unity of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the friendship to the Soviet Union of the Afghan people—and everybody who's been here more than twenty minutes knows the PDPA's got more factions than it has members, and they all hate each other's guts, and all the Afghans hate Russians."

"Good. You're not an idiot—not quite an idiot, I mean." Sergeant Krikor murmured something in a language that wasn't Russian: "Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg!"

For a moment, Sergei thought that was Armenian. Then he realized he'd heard it here in Afghanistan a couple-three times. "What's it mean?" he asked.

" 'Soviets! Soviets! Death, death, death!' " Krikor translated with somber relish. He waited for Sergei to take that in, then went on, "So I really don't give a shit about how hard we hit the ghosts, you know what I mean? All I want to do is get my time in and get back to the world in one piece, all right? Long as I don't fly home in a black tulip, that's all I care about."

"Makes sense to me," Sergei agreed quickly. He didn't want to fly out of Kabul in one of the planes that carried corpses back to the USSR, either.

"Okay, kid." Krikor thumped him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. "Keep your head down, keep your eyes open, and help your buddies. Odds are, we'll both get through."

The ground shook again, but not so hard this time.

"Allahu akbar!" The long, drawn-out chant of the muezzin pulled Satar awake. He yawned and stretched on the ground in the courtyard of a mud house a Russian bomb had shattered. Ten or twelve other mujahideen lay there with him. One by one, they got to their feet and am-bled over to a basin of water, where they washed their hands and faces, their feet and their privates.

Satar gasped as he splashed his cheeks with the water. It was bitterly cold. A pink glow in the east said sunrise was coming soon.

"God is great!" the muezzin repeated. He stood on the roof of another ruined house and called out to the faithful:

The fighters spread blankets on the dirt of the courtyard. This was no mosque with a proper qibla, but they knew in which direction Mecca lay- They bent, shoulder to shoulder, and went through morning prayers together.

After praying, Satar ate unleavened bread and drank tea thick with sugar and fragrant with mint. He had never been a fat man; he'd grown thinner since joining the mujahideen. The godless infidels and their puppets held the richest parts of the countryside. But villagers were generous in sharing what they had—and some of what was grown and made in occupied parts of the country reached the fighters in the holy war through one irregular channel or another.

A couple of boys of about six strutted by, both of them carrying crude wooden toy Kalashnikovs. One dived behind some rubble. The other stalked him as carefully as if their assault rifles were real. When the time came for them to take up such weapons, they would be ready. Another boy, perhaps thirteen, had a real Kalashnikov on his back. He'd been playing with toy firearms when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Now he was old enough to fight for God on his own. Boys like that were useful, especially as scouts—the Shuravi weren't always so wary of them as they were with grown men.

Something glinted in the early-morning sun: a boy of perhaps eight carried what looked like a plastic pen even more proudly than the other children bore their Kalashnikovs, pretend and real. Assault rifles were commonplace, pens something out of the ordinary, something special.

"Hey, sonny," Satar called through lips all at once numb with fear. The boy looked at him. He nodded encouragingly. "Yes, you—that's right. Put your pen on the ground and walk away from it."

"What?" Plainly, the youngster thought he was crazy. "Why should I?" If he'd had a rifle, Satar would have had to look to his life.

"I'll tell you why: because I think it's a Russian mine. If you fiddle with it, it will blow off your hand."

The boy very visibly thought that over. Satar could read his mind. Is this mujahid trying to steal my wonderful toy? Maybe the worry on Satar's face got through to him, because he did set the pen in the dirt. But when he walked away, he kept looking back over his shoulder at it.

With a sigh of relief, Satar murmured, "Truly there is no God but God."

"Truly," someone behind him agreed. He turned. There stood Sayid Jaglan. The commander went on, "That is a mine—I am sure of it. Pens are bad. I was afraid he would take off the cap and detonate it. Pens are bad, but the ones that look like butterflies are worse. Any child, no matter how small, will play with those."

"And then be blown to pieces," Satar said bitterly.

"Oh, no, not to pieces." Sayid Jaglan shook his head. He was about forty, not very tall, his pointed beard just beginning to show frost. He had a scar on his forehead that stopped a centimeter or so above his right eye. "They're made to maim, not to kill. The Russians calculate we have to work harder to care for the wounded than to bury the dead."

Satar pondered that. "A calculation straight from the heart of Shai-tan," he said at last.

"Yes, but sound doctrine even so." Sometimes the officer Sayid Jaglan had been showed through under the chieftain of mujahideen he was. "You did well to persuade the boy to get rid of that one." "Taking off the cap activates it?" Satar asked. Sayid Jaglan nodded. Satar went over and picked up the pen and set it on top of a battered wall, out of reach of children. If he was afraid of doing it, he didn't show his fear, or even acknowledge it to himself. All he said was, "We should be able to salvage the explosive from it."

"Yes." Sayid Jaglan nodded again. "You were a little soft when you joined us, Satar—who would have expected anything different from a druggist's son? You never followed the herds or tried to scratch a living from the fields. But you've done well. You have more wit than God gave most men, and your heart was always strong. Now your body matches your spirit's strength."

Satar didn't show how much the compliment pleased him, either. That was not the Afghan way. Gruffly, he replied, "If it is God's will, it will be accomplished."

"Yes." Sayid Jaglan looked down the valley, in the direction of Bulola. "And I think it is God's will that we soon reclaim your home village from the atheist Shuravi."

"May it be so," Satar said. "I have not sat beside my father for far too long."

Sergei strode up the main street, such as it was, of Bulola. Dirt and dust flew up from under his boots at every stride. In Kabul, even in Bamian, he probably would have felt safe enough to wear his Kalashnikov slung on his back. Here, he carried it, his right forefinger ready to leap to the trigger in an instant. The change lever was on single shots. He could still empty the magazine in seconds, and he could aim better that way.

Beside him, Vladimir carried his weapon ready to use, too. Staying alive in Afghan meant staying alert every second of every minute of every day. Vladimir glanced over at a handful of gray-bearded men sitting around drinking tea and passing the mouthpiece of a water pipe back and forth. Laughing, he said, "Ah, they love us."

"Don't they just!" Sergei laughed, too, nervously. The Afghans' eyes followed Vladimir and him. They were hard and black and glittering as obsidian. "If the looks they gave us came out of Kalashnikovs, we'd be Weeding in the dust."

'Fuck "em," Vladimir said cheerfully. "No, fuck their wives—these assholes aren't worth it."

He could make it sound funny. He could make it sound obscene. But he couldn't take away one brute fact. "They all hate us," Sergei said. "They don't even bother hiding it. Every single one of them hates us."

"There's a hot headline!" Vladimir exclaimed. "What did you expect? That they'd welcome us with open arms—the women with open legs? That they'd all give us fraternal socialist greetings? Not fucking likely!" He spat.

"I did think that when I first got here. Didn't you?" Sergei said. "Before they put me on the plane for Kabul, they told me I was coming here to save the popular revolution. They told me we were internationalists, and the peace-loving Afghan government had asked us for help."

"They haven't changed their song a bit. They told my gang the same thing," Vladimir said. "I already knew it was a crock, though."

"How?"

"How? I'll tell you how. Because my older brother's best friend came back from here in a black tulip, inside one of those zinc coffins they make in Kabul. It didn't have a window in it, and this officer stuck to it like a leech to make sure Sasha's mother and dad wouldn't open it up and see what happened to him before they planted him in the ground. That's how."

"Oh." Sergei didn't know how to answer that. After a few more steps, he said, "They told me the Americans started the war."

Vladimir pointed out to the mountains, to the gray and brown and red rock. "You see Rambo out there? I sure don't."

"We've got our own Ramboviki here," Sergei said slyly. "Bastards. Fucking bastards." Vladimir started to spit once more, but seemed too disgusted to go through with it this time. "I hate our fucking gung-ho paratroopers, you know that? They want to go out and kick ass, and they get everybody else in trouble when they do."

"Yeah." Sergei couldn't argue with that. "Half the time, if you leave the ghosts alone, they'll leave you alone, too."

"I know." Vladimir nodded. "Of course, the other half of the time, they won't."

"Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. I haven't been here real long, but I've seen that." Now Sergei pointed out to the mountainside. A few men— Afghans, hard to see at a distance in their robes of brown and cream— were moving around, not far from where the bumblebee had flayed the ghosts a few days before. "What are they up to out there?"

"No good," Vladimir said at once. "Maybe they're scavenging weapons the dukhi left behind. I hope one of the stinking ragheads steps on a mine, that's what I hope. Serve him right."

Never had Sergei seen a curse more quickly fulfilled. No sooner had the words left Vladimir's mouth than a harsh, flat craack! came echoing back from the mountains. He brought his Kalashnikov up to his shoulder. Vladimir did the same. They both relaxed, a little, when they realized the explosion wasn't close by.

Lowering his assault rifle, Vladimir started laughing like a loon. "Miserable son of a bitch walked into one we left out for the ghosts. Too bad. Oh, too bad!" He laughed again, louder than ever. On the mountainside, the Afghans who weren't hurt bent over their wounded friend and did what they could for him. Sergei said, "This won't make the villagers like us any better."

"Too bad. Oh, too bad!" Vladimir not only repeated himself, he pressed his free hand over his heart like a hammy opera singer pulling out all the stops to emote on stage. "And they love us so much already."

Sergei couldn't very well argue with that, not when he'd been the one who'd pointed out that the villagers didn't love the Red Army men in their midst. He did say, "Here come the Afghans."

The wounded man's pals brought him back with one of his arms slung over each of their shoulders. He groaned every now and then, but tried to bear his pain in silence. His robes were torn and splashed— soaked—with red. Sergei had seen what mines did. The Afghan's foot—maybe his whole leg up to the knee—would look as if it belonged in a butcher's shop, not attached to a human being.

One of the Afghans knew a little Russian. "Your mine hurt," he said. "Your man help?" He pointed to the Soviet medic's tent. "Yes, go on," Sergei said. "Take him there." "Softly," Vladimir told him.

A fleabite might not bother a sleeping man. If he'd been bitten before, though, he might notice a second bite, or a third, more readily than he would have otherwise. The dragon stirred restlessly.

Satar squatted on his heels, staring down at the ground in front of him. He'd been staring at it long enough to know every pebble, every [dot] of dirt, every little ridge of dust. A spider scuttled past. Satar watched it without caring.

Sayid Jaglan crouched beside him. "I am sorry, Abdul Satar Ahmedi."

"It is the will of God," Satar answered, not moving, not looking up.

"Truly, it is the will of God," agreed the commander of the mujahideen. "They do say your father is likely to live."

"If God wills it, he will live," Satar said. "But is it a life to live as a cripple, to live without a foot?"

"Like you, he has wisdom," Sayid Jaglan said. "He has a place in Bulola he may be able to keep. Because he has wisdom, he will not have to beg his bread in the streets, as a herder or peasant without a foot would."

"He will be a cripple!" Satar burst out. "He is my father!" Tears stung his eyes. He did not let them fall. He had not shed a tear since the news came to the mujahideen from his home village.

"I wonder if the earthquake made him misstep," Sayid Jaglan said.

"Ibrahim said the earthquake was later," Satar answered.

"Yes, he said that, but he might have been wrong," Sayid Jaglan said. "God is perfect. Men? Men make mistakes."

Now at last Satar looked up at him. "The Russians made a mistake when they came into our country," he said. "I will show them what sort of mistake they made."

"We all aim to do that," Sayid Jaglan told him. "And we will take back your village, and we will do it soon. Our strength gathers, here and elsewhere. When Bulola falls, the whole valley falls, and the valley is like a sword pointed straight at Bamian. As sure as God is one, your father will be avenged. Then he will no longer lie under the hands of the god-less ones . . . though Ibrahim did also say they treated his wound with some skill."

"Jinni of the waste take Ibrahim by the hair!" Satar said. "If the Shuravi had not laid the mines, my father would not have been wounded in the first place."

"True. Every word of it true," the chieftain of the mujahideen agreed. Satar was arguing with him, not sitting there lost in his own private wasteland of pain. Sayid Jaglan set a hand on Satar's shoulder. "When the time comes, you will fight as those who knew the Prophet fought to bring his truth to Arabia and to the world."

"I don't know about that. I don't know anything about that at all," Satar said. "All I know is, I will fight my best."

Sayid Jaglan nodded in satisfaction. "Good. We have both said the same thing." He went off to rouse the spirit of some other mujahid.

"Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg!" The mocking cry rose from behind a mud-brick wall in Bulola. Giggles followed it. The boy—or maybe it was a girl—who'd called out for death to the Soviets couldn't have been more than seven years old.

"Little bastard," Vladimir said, hands tightening on his Kalashnikov. "His mother was a whore and his father was a camel."

"They all feel that way, though," Sergei said. As always, he felt the weight of the villagers' eyes on him. They reminded him of wolves

Tracking an elk. No, the beast is too strong and dangerous for us to try to pull it down right now, that gaze seemed to say. All right, then. We won't rush in. We'll just keep trotting along, keep watching it, and wait for it to weaken.

Sergeant Krikor said, "How can we hope to win a war where the people in whose name we're fighting wish they could kill us a millimeter at a time?"

"I don't know. I don't care, either," Vladimir said. "All I want to do is get back home in one piece. Then I can go on with my life and spend the rest of it forgetting what I've been through here in Afghan."

"I want to get home in one piece, too," Sergei said. "But what about the poor bastards they ship in here after we get out? They'll have it as bad as we do, maybe worse. That isn't fair."

"Let them worry about it. Long as I'm gone, I don't give a shit."

Vladimir pulled a fresh pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Like anyone who'd been in Afghanistan for a while, he opened it from the bottom. That way, his hands, full of the local filth, never touched the filter that would go in his mouth. He scraped a match alight and cupped his free hand to shield the flame from the breeze till he got the smoke going.

"Give me one of those," Sergei said. He knew cigarettes weren't good for you. He couldn't count how many times his father and mother had tried to quit. Back in Tambov, he never would have started. But coming to Afghanistan wasn't good for you, either. He leaned close to Vladimir to get a light off the other cigarette, then sucked harsh smoke deep into his lungs and blew it out. That made him cough like a coal miner with black-lung disease, but he took another drag anyhow.

Vladimir offered Krikor a smoke without being asked. Of course, Krikor was a sergeant, not just a lowly trooper. Vladimir was no dummy. He knew whom to keep buttered up, and how. Krikor didn't cough as he smoked. In a few savage puffs, he got the cigarette down to the filter. Hardly a shred of tobacco was left when he crushed the butt under his heel. "To hell with me if I'll give the Afghans anything at all to scrounge," he declared.

"Yeah." Vladimir treated his cigarette the same way. Sergei took a little longer to work his way down to the filter, but he made sure he did. It wasn't so much that he begrudged the Afghans a tiny bit of his tobacco. But he didn't want his buddies jeering at him.

The ground shook under his feet, harder than it had the first couple of times he'd felt an earthquake. Krikor's black, furry eyebrows flew up. Some of the villagers exclaimed. Sergei didn't know what they were saying, but he caught the alarm in their voices. He spoke himself: "That was a pretty good one, wasn't it? " If the locals and the sergeant noticed it, he could, too.

"Not all that big," Krikor said, "but I think it must've been right under our feet."

"How do you tell?" Vladimir asked.

"When they're close, you get that sharp jolt, like the one we felt now. The ones further off don't hit the same way. They roll more, if you know what I mean." The Armenian sergeant illustrated with a loose, floppy up-and-down motion of his hand and wrist.

"You sound like you know what you're talking about," Sergei said. "Don't I wish I didn't," Sergeant Krikor told him. "Sergeant! Hey, Sergeant!" Fyodor came clumping up the dirt street. He pointed back in the direction from which he'd come. "Lieutenant Uspenski wants to see you right away."

Krikor grunted. By his expression, he didn't much want to go see the lieutenant. "Miserable whistle-ass shavetail," he muttered. Sergei didn't think he was supposed to hear. He worked hard to keep his face straight. Krikor asked Fyodor, "He tell you what it was about?"

"No, Sergeant. Sorry. I'm just an ordinary soldier, after all. If I didn't already know my name, he wouldn't tell me that."

"All right. I'll go." Krikor made it sound as if he were doing Lieutenant Uspenski a favor. But when he came back, he looked grim in a different way. "The ghosts are gathering," he reported.

Sergei looked up to the mountains on either side of Bulola, as if he would be able to see the dukhi as they gathered. If I could see them, we could kill them, he thought. "When are they going to hit us?" he asked.

Before Sergeant Krikor could answer, Vladimir asked, "Are they going to hit us at all? Or is some informant just playing games to make us jump?"

"Good question," Sergei agreed.

"I know it's a good question," Krikor said. "Afghans lie all the time, especially to us. The ones who look like they're on our side, half the time they're working for the ghosts. One man in three, maybe one in two, in the Afghan army would sooner be with the bandits in the hills. Everybody knows it."

"Shit, one man in three in the Afghan army is with the dukhi" Vladimir said. "Everybody knows that, too. So what makes this news such hot stuff? Like as not, the ghosts are yanking our dicks to see how we move, so they'll have a better shot when they do decide to hit us."

Krikor's broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. "I don't know anything about that. All I know is, Lieutenant Uspenski thinks the information's good. And we'll have a couple of surprises waiting for the "Bastards." He looked around to make sure no Afghans were in earshot. You could never could tell who understood more Russian than he let on.

Sergei and Vladimir both leaned toward him. "Well?" Vladimir demanded.

"For one thing, we've got some bumblebees ready to buzz by," the sergeant said. Sergei nodded. So did Vladimir. Helicopter gunships were always nice to have around.

"You said a couple of things," Vladimir said. "What else?"

Krikor spoke in an excited whisper: "Trucks on the way up from Bamian. They ought to get here right around sunset—plenty of time to set up, but not enough for the ragheads here to sneak off and warn the ragheads there."

"Reinforcements?" Sergei knew he sounded excited, too. If they actually had enough men to do the fighting for a change . . .

But Krikor shook his head. "Better than reinforcements."

"What could be better than reinforcements?" Sergei asked. The Armenian's black eyes glowed. He gave back one word: "Katyushas."

"Ahhh." Sergei and Vladimir said it together. Krikor was right, and they both knew it. Ever since the Nazis found out about them during the Great Patriotic War, no foe had ever wanted to stand up under a rain of Katyushas. The rockets weren't much as far as sophistication went, but they could lay a broad area waste faster than anything this side of nukes. And they screamed as they came in, so they scared you to death before they set about ripping you to pieces.

But then Vladimir said, "That'll be great, if they show up on time. Some of the bastards who think they're so important don't give a shit whether things get here at six o'clock tonight or Tuesday a week."

"We have to hope, that's all," Krikor answered. "Lieutenant Uspenski did say the trucks were already on the way from Bamian, so they can't be that late." He checked himself. "I don't think they can, anyhow."

After what Sergei had seen of the Red Army's promises and how it kept them, he wouldn't have bet anything much above a kopek that the Katyushas would get to Bulola on time. But, for a wonder, they did. Better still, the big, snorting six-wheeled Ural trucks—machines that could stand up to Afghan roads, which was saying a great deal—arrived in the village with canvas covers over the rocket launchers, so they looked like ordinary trucks carrying soldiers.

"Outstanding," Sergei said as the crews emplaced the vehicles. "The ghosts won't have spotted them from the road. They won't know what they're walking into."

"Outfuckingstanding is right." Vladimir's smile was altogether predatory. "They'll fucking find out."

Above the mountains, stars glittered in the black, black sky like coals and jewels carelessly tossed on velvet. The moon wouldn't rise till just before sunup. That made the going slower for the mujahideen, but it would also make them harder to see when they swooped down on Bulola.

A rock came loose under Satar's foot. He had to flail his arms to keep from falling. "Careful," the mujahid behind him said.

He didn't answer. His ears burned as he trudged on. To most of Sayid Jaglan's fighters, the mountains were as much home as the villages down in the valley. He couldn't match their endurance or their skill. If he roamed these rocky wastes for the next ten years, he wouldn't be able to. He knew it. The knowledge humiliated him.

A few minutes later, another man up ahead did the same thing Satar had done. If anything, the other fellow made more noise than he had. The man drew several hissed warnings. All he did was laugh. What had been shame for Satar was no more than one of those things for him. He wasn't conscious of his own ineptitude, as Satar was.

The man in front of Satar listened to the mujahid in front of him, then turned and said, "The godless Russians brought a couple of truck-loads of new men into Bulola this afternoon. Sayid Jaglan says our plan will not change."

"I understand. God willing, we'll beat them anyhow," Satar said before passing the news to the man at his heels.

"Surely there is no God but God. With His help, all things may be accomplished," the mujahid in front of Satar said. "And surely God will not allow the struggle of a million brave Afghan forebears to be reduced to nothing."

"No. He will not. He cannot," Satar agreed. "The lives of our ancestors must not be made meaningless. God made man, unlike a sheep, to fight back, not to submit."

"That is well said," the man in front of him declared.

"That is very well said," the man behind him agreed.

"To God goes the credit, not to me," Satar said. His face heated with pleasure even so. But the night was dark, so none of his companions saw him flush.

Some time around midnight—or so Satar judged by the wheeling stars—the mujahideen reached the mountain slopes above Bulola. Satar's home village was dark and quiet, down there on the floor of the valley. It seemed peaceful. His own folk there would be asleep. The muezzin would not call them to prayer in the morning, not in a village the godless Shuravi held. Here and there, though, inside houses that hadn't been wrecked, men would gather in courtyards and turn toward Mecca at the appointed hours.

Satar cursed the Soviets. If not for them, his father would still have his foot. If not for them, he himself would never have left Bulola. But I am coming home now, he thought. Soon the Russians will be gone, and freedom and God will return to the village.

Soon the Russians will be gone, God willing, he amended. He could not see their trenches and forts and strongpoints, but he knew where they were, as he knew not all the deniers of God would be sleeping. Some of the mujahideen would not enter into Bulola. Some, instead, would go Straight to Paradise, as did all martyrs who fell in the jihad. If that is what God's plan holds for me, be it so. But I would like to see my father again.

He took his place behind a boulder. For all he knew, it was the same boulder he'd used the last time Sayid Jaglan's men struck at the Shuravi in Bulola. His shiver had nothing to do with the chill of the night. His testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. A man who said he was not afraid when a helicopter gunship spat death from the sky was surely a liar. He'd never felt so helpless as under that assault.

Now, though, now he would have his revenge. He clicked his Kalashnikov's change lever from safe to full automatic. He was ready.

The night-vision scope turned the landscape to a ghostly jumble of green and black. Shapes flitted from one rock to another. Sergei looked away from the scope, and the normal blackness of night clamped down on him again. "They're out there, all right," he said. "Through this thing, they really look like ghosts."

"Yeah," Vladimir agreed. Sergei could just make out his nod, though he stood only a couple of meters away. But he'd had no trouble spotting the dukhi sneaking toward Bulola. Vladimir went on, "Sure as the Devil's grandmother, they're going to stick their cocks in the sausage machine."

Just hearing that made Sergei want to clutch himself. Fyodor said, "Oh, dear!" in a shrill falsetto. Everybody laughed—probably more than the joke deserved, but Sergei and the rest of the men knew combat was coming soon.

He said, "Looks like Lieutenant Uspenski got the straight dope."

"If he got the straight dope, why didn't he share it with us?" Vladimir said. "I wouldn't mind smoking some myself."

More laughter. Sergei nodded. He smoked hashish every now and then, or sometimes more than every now and then. It made chunks of time go away, and he sometimes thought time a worse enemy in Afghanistan than the dukhi.

"When do we drop the hammer on them?" Fyodor said.

"Patience." That was Sergeant Krikor's throatily accented Russian. "They have to come in close enough so they can't get away easy when we start mauling them."

Time . . . Yes, it was an enemy, but it killed you slowly, second by second. The ghosts out there, the ghosts sneaking up on, swooping down on, Bulola could kill you in a hurry. More often than not, they were a worry in the back of Sergei's mind. Now they came to the forefront.

How much longer? He wanted to ask the question. Ask it? He wanted to scream it. But he couldn't, not when Krikor'd just put Fyodor down. He had to wait. Seconds seemed to stretch out into hours. Once the shooting started, time would squeeze tight again. Everything would happen at once. He knew that. He'd seen it before.

For the dozenth time, he checked to make sure he'd set the change lever on his Kalashnikov to single shot. For the dozenth time, he found out he had. He was ready.

Sergeant Krikor bent to peer into his night-vision scope. "Won't be�," he began.

Maybe he said long now. If he did, Sergei never heard him. Sure enough, everything started happening at once. Parachute flares arced up into the night, turning the mountain slopes into brightest noon. Krikor pulled his head away from the night-vision scope with a horrible Armenian oath. Since the scope intensified all the light there was, he might have stared into the heart of the sun for a moment.

Behind Sergei, mortars started flinging bombs at the dukhi, pop! pop! pop! The noise wasn't very loud—about like slamming a door. The finned bombs whistled as they fell.

"Incoming!" somebody shouted. The ghosts had mortars, too, either captured, stolen from the Afghan army, or bought from the Chinese. Crump! The first bomb burst about fifty meters behind Sergei's trench. Fragments of sharp-edged metal hissed through the air. Through the rattle of Kalashnikov and machine-gun fire, Sergei heard the ghosts' war cry, endlessly repeated: "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu!. . ."

Some of the dukhi, by now, were down off the hillsides and onto the flatter ground near Bulola. Sergei squeezed off a few rounds. The Afghans went down as if scythed. But they were wily warriors; he didn't know whether he'd hit them or they were diving for cover.

Bullets cracked past overhead, a distinctive, distinctively horrible sound. The dukhi had no fire discipline. They shot off long bursts, emptying a clip with a pull of the trigger or two. A Kalashnikov treated so cavalierly pulled high and to the right. Accuracy, never splendid with an assault rifle, become nothing but a bad joke.

But the dukhi put a lot of lead in the air. Even worse than the sound of bullets flying by overhead was the unmistakable slap one made when struck flesh. Sergei flinched when he heard that sound only a few meters away.

Fyodor shrieked and then started cursing. "Where are you hit?" Sergei asked. "Shoulder," the wounded man answered.

"That's not so bad," Vladimir said.

"Fuck you," Fyodor said through clenched teeth. "It's not your shoulder."

'"Get him back to the medics," Sergeant Krikor said. "Come on, somebody, give him a hand."

As Fyodor slapped a thick square of gauze on the wound to slow the bleeding, Sergei asked, "Where are the bumblebees? You said we were supposed to have bumblebees, Sergeant." He knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he couldn't help it. Fear did strange, dreadful things to a man. "And why haven't the Katyushas opened up? "

Before Krikor could answer, a burst of Kalashnikov fire chewed up the ground in front of the trench and spat dirt into Sergei's eyes. He rubbed frantically, fearing ghosts would be upon him before he cleared his vision. And, also before Krikor could answer, he heard the rapidly swelling thutter that said the helicopter gunships were indeed swooping to the attack.

Lines of fire stitched the night sky as the Mi-24s—three of them— raked the mountainside: thin lines of fire from their nose-mounted Gatlings, thicker ones from their rocket pods. Fresh bursts of hot orange light rose as the rockets slammed into the stones above Bulola. Along with cries of "Allahu akbar!" Sergei also heard screams of pain and screams of terror from the dukhi—music sweeter to his ears than any hit by Alia Pugacheva or Josif Kobzon.

And then, as if they'd been waiting for the bumblebees to arrive— and they probably had—the men at the Katyusha launchers let fly. Forty rockets salvoed from each launcher, with a noise like the end of the world. The fiery lines they drew across the night seemed thick as a man's leg. Each salvo sent four and a half tons of high explosive up and then down onto the heads of the dukhi on the mountainside.

"Betrayed!" The cry rose from more than one throat, out there in the chilly night above Bulola. "Sold to the Shuravi! "They knew we were coming!"

"With God's help, we can still beat the atheists," Sayid Jaglan shouted. "Forward, mujahideen! He who falls is a martyr, and will know Paradise forever."

Forward Satar went, down toward his home village. The closer he came to the Russians, the less likely those accursed helicopters were to spray him with death. He paused to inject a wounded mujahid with morphine, then ran on.

But as he ran, sheaves of flame rose into the air from down in the valley, from the very outskirts of Bulola: one, two, three. They were as yellow, as tightly bound, as sheaves of wheat. "Katyushas!" That cry rose from more than one throat, too—from Satar's, among others—and it was nothing less than a cry of despair.

Satar threw himself flat. He clapped his hands over his ears and opened his mouth very wide. That offered some protection against blast. Against salvos of Katyushas . . . "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God!" Satar gasped out. Against Katyushas, prayer offered more protection than anything else.

The Russian rockets shrieked as they descended. They might have been so many damned souls, already feeling Shaitan's grip on them. When they slammed into the side of the mountain—most of them well behind Satar—the ground shook under him, as if in torment.

Roaring whooshes from down below announced that the Russians were launching another salvo. But then the ground shook under Satar, and shook, and shook, and would not stop shaking.

Evil dreams, pain-filled dreams, had come too often to the dragon's endless sleep lately. It had twitched and jerked again and again, trying to get away from them, but they persisted. Its doze grew ever lighter, ever more fitful, ever more restless.

A hundred twenty Katyushas—no, the truth: a hundred eighteen, for one blew up in midair, and another, a dud, didn't explode when it landed—burst against the mountain's flank that was also the dragon's flank. Thirteen tons of high explosive . . . Not even a dragon asleep for centuries could ignore that.

Asleep no more, the dragon turned and stretched and looked around to see what was tormenting it.

The screams on the mountainside took on a different note, one so frantic that Satar lifted his face from the trembling earth and looked back over his shoulder to see what had happened. "There is no God but God!" he gasped, his tone altogether different from the one he'd used a moment before. That had been terror. This? This was awe.

Wings and body the red of hot iron in a blacksmith's forge, the dragon ascended into the air. Had it sprung from nowhere? Or had it somehow burst from the side of the mountain? Satar didn't see it till it was already airborne, so he never could have said for certain, which was a grief in him till the end of his days. But the earthquakes stopped after that, which at least let him have an opinion.

Eyes? If the dragon might have been red-hot iron, its eyes were white-hot iron. Just for the tiniest fraction of an instant, the dragon's gaze touched Satar. That touch, however brief, made the mujahid grovel facedown among the rocks again. No man, save perhaps the Prophet himself, was meant to meet a dragon eye to eye.

As if it were the shadow of death, Satar felt the dragon's regard slide away from him. He looked up once more, but remained on his knees as if at prayer. Many of the mujahideen were praying; he heard their voices rising up to Heaven, and hoped God cared to listen.

But, to the godless Shuravi in the helicopter gunships, the dragon was not something that proved His glory to a sinful mankind. It was something risen from the Afghan countryside—and, like everything else risen from the Afghan countryside, something to be beaten down and destroyed. They swung their machines against it, machine guns spitting fire. One of them still carried a pod of rockets under its stubby wing. Those, too, raced toward the dragon.

They are brave, Satar thought. He'd thought that about Russians before. They are brave, but oh, by God the Compassionate, the Merciful, they are stupid.

Had the helicopters not fired on it, the dragon might have ignored them, as a man intent on his business might ignore mosquitoes or bees. But if he were bitten, if he were stung . . .

The dragon's roar of fury made the earth tremble yet again. It swung toward the gunships that had annoyed it. Helicopters were maneuver-able. But the dragon? The awakened dragon, like the jinni of whom the Prophet spoke, could have been a creature of fire, not a creature of matter at all. It moved like thought, now here, now there. One enormous forepaw lashed out. A helicopter gunship, smashed and broken, slammed into the side of the mountain and burst into flame.

Satar couldn't blame the Soviets in the other two gunships for fleeing then, fleeing as fast as their machines would carry them. He couldn't blame them, but it did them no good. The dragon swatted down the second helicopter as easily as it had the first. Then it went after the last one, the one that had launched rockets against it. Again, Satar could not have denied the gunship crew's courage. When they saw the dragon gaining on them, they spun their machine in the air and fired their Gatling at the great, impossible beast.

Again, that courage did them no good at all. Dragons were supposed to breathe fire. This one did, and the helicopter, burning, burning, crashed to the ground. The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next.

Down in Bulola, the Russians serving the Katyusha, launchers had had time to reload again. Roaring like lions, roaring like the damned, their rockets raced toward the dragon.

They are brave, too, Satar thought. But I thought no one could be stupider than the men in those gunships, and now I see I was wrong.

Sergei said, "I haven't smoked any hashish lately, and even if I had, it couldn't make me see that."

"Bozhemoi!" Vladimir sounded like—was—a man shaken to the core. "Not even chars would make me see that."

Sergei wasn't so sure he was right. The local narcotic, a lethal blend of opium and, some said, horse manure, might make a man see almost anything. But Sergei had never had the nerve to try the stuff, and he saw the scarlet dragon anyhow. He was horribly afraid it would see him, too.

Sergeant Krikor rattled off something in Armenian. He made the sign of the cross, something Sergei had never seen him do before. Then he seemed to remember his Russian: "The people in this land have been fighting against us all along. Now the land itself is rising up."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Vladimir demanded. Just then, the dragon flamed the last bumblebee out of the sky, which made a better answer than any Krikor could have given.

The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. That was when the Katyusha crews launched their next salvos—straight at the beast. Sergei had never known them to reload their launchers so fast.

That didn't fill him with delight. "Noooo!" he screamed, a long wail of despair.

"You fools!" Krikor cried.

Vladimir remained foulmouthed to the end: "Fucking shitheaded idiots! How the fuck you going to shoot down something the size of a mountain?"

Katyushas weren't made for antiaircraft fire. But, against a target that size, most of them struck home. And they must have hurt, too, for the dragon roared in pain and fury, where it had all but ignored the helicopter gunships' weapons. But hurting it and killing it were very different things.

With a scream that rounded inside Sergei's mind as much as in his ears; the dragon flew down toward the Ural trucks. It breathed flame again, once, twice, three times, and the trucks were twisted, molten metal. A couple of the men who'd launched the Katyushas had time to scream.

Somebody from the trench near Sergei squeezed off a banana clip at the dragon. If that wasn't idiocy, he didn't know what was. "Noooo!" he cried again. If Katyushas couldn't kill it, what would Kalashnikov rounds do? Nothing. Less than nothing.

No. More than nothing. Much more than nothing. The Kalashnikov rounds made the beast notice the Red Army men in the trench. Its head swung their way. Its great, blazing eyes met Sergei's, just for a moment. Its mouth, greater still, opened wide.

Sergei jerked his assault rifle up to his shoulder and fired off all the ammunition he had left in the clip. It wasn't that he thought it would do any good. But how, at that point, could it possibly hurt?

Fire, redder and hotter than the sun.

Blackness.

"Truly," Satar said to his father, "there is no God but God."

"Truly," the older man agreed. His left foot, his left leg halfway up to the knee, were gone, but the wound was healing. The Russian medic— now among the dead—had done an honest job with it. Maybe Satar's father could get an artificial foot one day. Till then, he would be able to get around, after a fashion, on crutches.

Satar said, "After the dragon destroyed the Shuravi at the edge of the village, I thought it would wreck Bulola, too."

"So did I," his father said. "But it knew who the pious and Godfearing were, or at least—" He chuckled wryly. "—who had the sense not to shoot at it."

"Well . . . yes." Satar wished his father hadn't said anything so secular. He would have to pray to bring him closer to God. He looked around, thinking on what they had won. "Bulola is ours again. This whole valley is ours again. The Russians will never dare come back here."

"I should hope not!" his father said. "After all, the dragon might wake up again."

He and Satar both looked to the mountainside. That streak of reddish rock . . . That was where the dragon had come from, and where it had returned. If Satar let his eyes drift ever so slightly out of focus, he could, or thought he could, discern the great beast's outline. Would it rouse once more? If it is the will of God, he thought, and turned his mind to other things.

The dragon slept. For a while, till its slumber deepened, it had new dreams.

The black tulip roared out of Kabul airport, firing flares as it went to confuse any antiaircraft missiles the dukhi might launch. Major Chorny—whose very name meant black—took a flask of vodka from his hip and swigged. He hated Code 200 missions, and hated them worst when they were like this.

In the black tulip's cargo bay lay a zinc coffin. It was bound for Tambov, maybe three hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. It had no windows. It was welded shut. Major Chorny would have to stay with it every moment till it went into the ground, to make sure Sergei's grieving kin didn't try to open it. For it held not the young man's mortal remains but seventy-five kilos of sand, packed tight in plastic bags to keep it from rustling.

As far as the major knew, no mortal remains of this soldier had ever been found. He was just . . . gone. By the time the black tulip crossed from Afghan to Soviet airspace, Chorny was very drunk indeed.

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From "Redshift" edited by Al Sarrantonio

2003.07.12