Black Tulip

"To God goes the credit, not to me," Satar said. His face heated with pleasure even so. But the night was dark, so none of his companions saw him flush.

Some time around midnight—or so Satar judged by the wheeling stars—the mujahideen reached the mountain slopes above Bulola. Satar's home village was dark and quiet, down there on the floor of the valley. It seemed peaceful. His own folk there would be asleep. The muezzin would not call them to prayer in the morning, not in a village the godless Shuravi held. Here and there, though, inside houses that hadn't been wrecked, men would gather in courtyards and turn toward Mecca at the appointed hours.

Satar cursed the Soviets. If not for them, his father would still have his foot. If not for them, he himself would never have left Bulola. But I am coming home now, he thought. Soon the Russians will be gone, and freedom and God will return to the village.

Soon the Russians will be gone, God willing, he amended. He could not see their trenches and forts and strongpoints, but he knew where they were, as he knew not all the deniers of God would be sleeping. Some of the mujahideen would not enter into Bulola. Some, instead, would go Straight to Paradise, as did all martyrs who fell in the jihad. If that is what God's plan holds for me, be it so. But I would like to see my father again.

He took his place behind a boulder. For all he knew, it was the same boulder he'd used the last time Sayid Jaglan's men struck at the Shuravi in Bulola. His shiver had nothing to do with the chill of the night. His testicles tried to crawl up into his belly. A man who said he was not afraid when a helicopter gunship spat death from the sky was surely a liar. He'd never felt so helpless as under that assault.

Now, though, now he would have his revenge. He clicked his Kalashnikov's change lever from safe to full automatic. He was ready.

The night-vision scope turned the landscape to a ghostly jumble of green and black. Shapes flitted from one rock to another. Sergei looked away from the scope, and the normal blackness of night clamped down on him again. "They're out there, all right," he said. "Through this thing, they really look like ghosts."

"Yeah," Vladimir agreed. Sergei could just make out his nod, though he stood only a couple of meters away. But he'd had no trouble spotting the dukhi sneaking toward Bulola. Vladimir went on, "Sure as the Devil's grandmother, they're going to stick their cocks in the sausage machine."

Just hearing that made Sergei want to clutch himself. Fyodor said, "Oh, dear!" in a shrill falsetto. Everybody laughed—probably more than the joke deserved, but Sergei and the rest of the men knew combat was coming soon.

He said, "Looks like Lieutenant Uspenski got the straight dope."

"If he got the straight dope, why didn't he share it with us?" Vladimir said. "I wouldn't mind smoking some myself."

More laughter. Sergei nodded. He smoked hashish every now and then, or sometimes more than every now and then. It made chunks of time go away, and he sometimes thought time a worse enemy in Afghanistan than the dukhi.

"When do we drop the hammer on them?" Fyodor said.

"Patience." That was Sergeant Krikor's throatily accented Russian. "They have to come in close enough so they can't get away easy when we start mauling them."

Time . . . Yes, it was an enemy, but it killed you slowly, second by second. The ghosts out there, the ghosts sneaking up on, swooping down on, Bulola could kill you in a hurry. More often than not, they were a worry in the back of Sergei's mind. Now they came to the forefront.

How much longer? He wanted to ask the question. Ask it? He wanted to scream it. But he couldn't, not when Krikor'd just put Fyodor down. He had to wait. Seconds seemed to stretch out into hours. Once the shooting started, time would squeeze tight again. Everything would happen at once. He knew that. He'd seen it before.

For the dozenth time, he checked to make sure he'd set the change lever on his Kalashnikov to single shot. For the dozenth time, he found out he had. He was ready.

Sergeant Krikor bent to peer into his night-vision scope. "Won't be�," he began.

Maybe he said long now. If he did, Sergei never heard him. Sure enough, everything started happening at once. Parachute flares arced up into the night, turning the mountain slopes into brightest noon. Krikor pulled his head away from the night-vision scope with a horrible Armenian oath. Since the scope intensified all the light there was, he might have stared into the heart of the sun for a moment.