Black Tulip

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."