Short Stories (3 page)

Above the mountains, stars glittered in the black, black sky like coals and  jewels carelessly tossed on velvet. The moon wouldn't rise till just before  sunup. That made the going slower for the mujahideen, but it would also make  them harder to see when they swooped down on Bulola. A rock came loose under Satar's foot. He had to flail his arms to keep from  falling. Careful, the mujahid behind him said. He didn't answer. His ears burned as he trudged on. To most of Sayid Jaglan's  fighters, the mountains were as much home as the villages down in the valley. He  couldn't match their endurance or their skill. If he roamed these rocky wastes  for the next ten years, he wouldn't be able to. He knew it. The knowledge  humiliated him. A few minutes later, another man up ahead did the same thing Satar had done. If  anything, the other fellow made more noise than he had. The man drew several  hissed warnings. All he did was laugh. What had been shame for Satar was no more  than one of those things for him. He wasn't conscious of his own ineptitude, as  Satar was. The man in front of Satar listened to the mujahid in front of him, then turned  and said, The godless Russians brought a couple of truck-loads of new men into  Bulola this afternoon. Sayid Jaglan says our plan will not change. I understand. God willing, we'll beat them anyhow, Satar said before passing  the news to the man at his heels. Surely there is no God but God. With His help, all things may be accomplished,   the mujahid in front of Satar said. And surely God will not allow the struggle  of a million brave Afghan forebears to be reduced to nothing. No. He will not. He cannot, Satar agreed. The lives of our ancestors must not  be made meaningless. God made man, unlike a sheep, to fight back, not to  submit. That is well said, the man in front of him declared. That is very well said, the man behind him agreed. 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. Behind Sergei, mortars started flinging bombs at the dukhi, pop! pop! pop! The  noise wasn't very loud about like slamming a door. The finned bombs whistled as  they fell. Incoming! somebody shouted. The ghosts had mortars, too, either captured,  stolen from the Afghan army, or bought from the Chinese. Crump! The first bomb  burst about fifty meters behind Sergei's trench. Fragments of sharp-edged metal  hissed through the air. Through the rattle of Kalashnikov and machine-gun fire,  Sergei heard the ghosts' war cry, endlessly repeated: Allahu akbar! Allahu  akbar! Allahu!. . . Some of the dukhi, by now, were down off the hillsides and onto the flatter  ground near Bulola. Sergei squeezed off a few rounds. The Afghans went down as  if scythed. But they were wily warriors; he didn't know whether he'd hit them or  they were diving for cover. Bullets cracked past overhead, a distinctive, distinctively horrible sound. The  dukhi had no fire discipline. They shot off long bursts, emptying a clip with a  pull of the trigger or two. A Kalashnikov treated so cavalierly pulled high and  to the right. Accuracy, never splendid with an assault rifle, become nothing but  a bad joke. But the dukhi put a lot of lead in the air. Even worse than the sound of bullets  flying by overhead was the unmistakable slap one made when struck flesh. Sergei  flinched when he heard that sound only a few meters away. Fyodor shrieked and then started cursing. Where are you hit? Sergei asked.  Shoulder, the wounded man answered. That's not so bad, Vladimir said. Fuck you, Fyodor said through clenched teeth. It's not your shoulder. ' Get him back to the medics, Sergeant Krikor said. Come on, somebody, give  him a hand. As Fyodor slapped a thick square of gauze on the wound to slow the bleeding,  Sergei asked, Where are the bumblebees? You said we were supposed to have  bumblebees, Sergeant. He knew he sounded like a petulant child, but he couldn't  help it. Fear did strange, dreadful things to a man. And why haven't the  Katyushas opened up? Before Krikor could answer, a burst of Kalashnikov fire chewed up the ground in  front of the trench and spat dirt into Sergei's eyes. He rubbed frantically,  fearing ghosts would be upon him before he cleared his vision. And, also before  Krikor could answer, he heard the rapidly swelling thutter that said the  helicopter gunships were indeed swooping to the attack. Lines of fire stitched the night sky as the Mi-24s three of them  raked the  mountainside: thin lines of fire from their nose-mounted Gatlings, thicker ones  from their rocket pods. Fresh bursts of hot orange light rose as the rockets  slammed into the stones above Bulola. Along with cries of Allahu akbar! Sergei  also heard screams of pain and screams of terror from the dukhi music sweeter to  his ears than any hit by Alia Pugacheva or Josif Kobzon. And then, as if they'd been waiting for the bumblebees to arrive  and they  probably had the men at the Katyusha launchers let fly. Forty rockets salvoed  from each launcher, with a noise like the end of the world. The fiery lines they  drew across the night seemed thick as a man's leg. Each salvo sent four and a  half tons of high explosive up and then down onto the heads of the dukhi on the  mountainside.

Betrayed! The cry rose from more than one throat, out there in the chilly  night above Bulola. Sold to the Shuravi! They knew we were coming! With God's help, we can still beat the atheists, Sayid Jaglan shouted.  Forward, mujahideen! He who falls is a martyr, and will know Paradise forever. Forward Satar went, down toward his home village. The closer he came to the  Russians, the less likely those accursed helicopters were to spray him with  death. He paused to inject a wounded mujahid with morphine, then ran on. But as he ran, sheaves of flame rose into the air from down in the valley, from  the very outskirts of Bulola: one, two, three. They were as yellow, as tightly  bound, as sheaves of wheat. Katyushas! That cry rose from more than one  throat, too from Satar's, among others and it was nothing less than a cry of  despair. Satar threw himself flat. He clapped his hands over his ears and opened his  mouth very wide. That offered some protection against blast. Against salvos of  Katyushas . . . There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God!   Satar gasped out. Against Katyushas, prayer offered more protection than  anything else. The Russian rockets shrieked as they descended. They might have been so many  damned souls, already feeling Shaitan's grip on them. When they slammed into the  side of the mountain most of them well behind Satar the ground shook under him,  as if in torment. Roaring whooshes from down below announced that the Russians were launching  another salvo. But then the ground shook under Satar, and shook, and shook, and  would not stop shaking.

Evil dreams, pain-filled dreams, had come too often to the dragon's endless  sleep lately. It had twitched and jerked again and again, trying to get away  from them, but they persisted. Its doze grew ever lighter, ever more fitful,  ever more restless. A hundred twenty Katyushas no, the truth: a hundred eighteen, for one blew up in  midair, and another, a dud, didn't explode when it landed burst against the  mountain's flank that was also the dragon's flank. Thirteen tons of high  explosive . . . Not even a dragon asleep for centuries could ignore that. Asleep no more, the dragon turned and stretched and looked around to see what  was tormenting it.

The screams on the mountainside took on a different note, one so frantic that  Satar lifted his face from the trembling earth and looked back over his shoulder  to see what had happened. There is no God but God! he gasped, his tone  altogether different from the one he'd used a moment before. That had been  terror. This? This was awe. Wings and body the red of hot iron in a blacksmith's forge, the dragon ascended  into the air. Had it sprung from nowhere? Or had it somehow burst from the side  of the mountain? Satar didn't see it till it was already airborne, so he never  could have said for certain, which was a grief in him till the end of his days.  But the earthquakes stopped after that, which at least let him have an opinion. Eyes? If the dragon might have been red-hot iron, its eyes were white-hot iron.  Just for the tiniest fraction of an instant, the dragon's gaze touched Satar.  That touch, however brief, made the mujahid grovel facedown among the rocks  again. No man, save perhaps the Prophet himself, was meant to meet a dragon eye  to eye. As if it were the shadow of death, Satar felt the dragon's regard slide away  from him. He looked up once more, but remained on his knees as if at prayer.  Many of the mujahideen were praying; he heard their voices rising up to Heaven,  and hoped God cared to listen. But, to the godless Shuravi in the helicopter gunships, the dragon was not  something that proved His glory to a sinful mankind. It was something risen from  the Afghan countryside and, like everything else risen from the Afghan  countryside, something to be beaten down and destroyed. They swung their  machines against it, machine guns spitting fire. One of them still carried a pod  of rockets under its stubby wing. Those, too, raced toward the dragon. They are brave, Satar thought. He'd thought that about Russians before. They are  brave, but oh, by God the Compassionate, the Merciful, they are stupid. Had the helicopters not fired on it, the dragon might have ignored them, as a  man intent on his business might ignore mosquitoes or bees. But if he were  bitten, if he were stung . . . The dragon's roar of fury made the earth tremble yet again. It swung toward the  gunships that had annoyed it. Helicopters were maneuver-able. But the dragon?  The awakened dragon, like the jinni of whom the Prophet spoke, could have been a  creature of fire, not a creature of matter at all. It moved like thought, now  here, now there. One enormous forepaw lashed out. A helicopter gunship, smashed  and broken, slammed into the side of the mountain and burst into flame. Satar couldn't blame the Soviets in the other two gunships for fleeing then,  fleeing as fast as their machines would carry them. He couldn't blame them, but  it did them no good. The dragon swatted down the second helicopter as easily as  it had the first. Then it went after the last one, the one that had launched  rockets against it. Again, Satar could not have denied the gunship crew's  courage. When they saw the dragon gaining on them, they spun their machine in  the air and fired their Gatling at the great, impossible beast. Again, that courage did them no good at all. Dragons were supposed to breathe  fire. This one did, and the helicopter, burning, burning, crashed to the ground.  The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. Down in Bulola, the Russians serving the Katyusha, launchers had had time to  reload again. Roaring like lions, roaring like the damned, their rockets raced  toward the dragon. They are brave, too, Satar thought. But I thought no one could be stupider than  the men in those gunships, and now I see I was wrong.