"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.