Black Tulip

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."