Black Tulip

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.