Black Tulip

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?