Black Tulip

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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