Black Tulip

Sergei's father was a druggist in Tambov, maybe four hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. Filling prescriptions looked pretty good to Sergei. You didn't have to work too hard. You didn't have to think too hard. You could get your hands on medicines from the West, medicines that really worked, not just the Soviet crap. And you could rake in plenty on the left from your customers, because they wanted the stuff that really worked, too. So—pharmacy school, then a soft job till pension time. Sergei had it all figured out.

First, though, his hitch in the Red Army. He was a sunny kid when he got drafted, always looking on the bright side of things. He didn't think they could possibly ship his ass to Afghanistan. Even after they did, he didn't think they could possibly ship him to Bamian Province. Life is full of surprises, even—maybe especially—for a sunny kid from a provincial town where nothing much ever happens.

Abdul Satar Ahmedi's father was a druggist, too, in Bulola, a village of no particular name or fame not far east of the town of Bamian. Satar had also planned to follow in his father's footsteps, mostly because that was what a good son did. Sometimes the drugs his father dispensed helped the patient. Sometimes they didn't. Either way, it was the will of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Satar was twenty—he thought he was twenty, though he might have been nineteen or twenty-one—when the godless Russians poured into his country. They seized the bigger towns and pushed out along the roads from one to another. Bamian was one of the places where their tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters came to roost. One of the roads they wanted ran through Bulola.

On the day the first truck convoy full of infidel soldiers rumbled through the village, Satar's father dug up an ancient but carefully greased Enfield rifle. He thrust it at the younger man, saying, "My grandfather fought the British infidels with this piece. Take it and do to the atheists what they did to the soldiers of the Queen."

"Yes, Father," Satar said, as a good son should. Before long, he carried a Kalashnikov in place of the ancient Enfield. Before long, he marched with the men of Sayid Jaglan, who had been a major in the Kabul puppet regime before choosing to fight for God and freedom instead. Being a druggist's son, he served as a medic. He was too ignorant to make a good medic, but he knew more than most, so he had to try. He wished he knew more still; he'd had to watch men die because he didn't know enough. The will of God, yes, of course, but accepting it came hard.

The dragon? The dragon had lived in the valley for time out of mind before Islam came to Afghanistan. Most of those centuries, it had slept, as dragons do. But when it woke—oh, when it woke . . .

Sergei looked out over the Afghan countryside and shook his head in slow wonder. He'd been raised in country as flat as if it were ironed. The Bulola perimeter wasn't anything like that. The valley in which this miserable village sat was high enough to make his heart pound when he moved quickly. And the mountains went up from there, dun and gray and red and jagged and here and there streaked with snow.

When he remarked on how different the landscape looked, his squadmates in the trench laughed at him. "Screw the scenery," Vladimir said. "Fucking Intourist didn't bring you here. Keep your eye peeled for dukhi. You may not see them, but sure as shit they see you."

"Ghosts," Sergei repeated, and shook his head again. "We shouldn't have started calling them that."

"Why not?" Vladimir was a few months older than he, and endlessly cynical. "You usually don't see 'em till it's too damn late."

"But they're real. They're alive," Sergei protested. "They're trying to make us into ghosts."

A noise. None of them knew what had made it. The instant they heard it, their AK's all lifted a few centimeters. Then they identified the distant, growing rumble in the air for what it was. "Bumblebee," Fyodor said. He had the best ears of any of them, and he liked to hear himself talk. But he was right. Sergei spotted the speck in the sky.

"I like having helicopter gunships around," he said. "They make me think my life-insurance policy's paid up." Not even Vladimir argued with that.

The Mi-24 roared past overhead, red stars bright against camouflage paint. Then, like a dog coming to point, it stopped and hovered. It didn't look like a bumblebee to Sergei. It put him in mind of a polliwog, like the ones he'd see in the creeks outside of Tambov in the springtime. Come to think of it, they were camouflage-colored, too, to keep fish and birds from eating them.