Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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      “I think that people like you like to tell yourselves that you don’t understand what people think about in the darkness of their minds, what they do with each other. That way you’re protected from the consequences.”

      “People like me?”

      “Powerful ones. You can screw up people’s lives and hide behind your ‘properly,’ your discretion.”

      “You have me all wrong,” Burling told her. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

      Her laugh was thrilling, and warm. “No shit, Chief.”

      after dinner, he and april rode the lift to the lobby, agreeing without a word that they would not go to bed, not just yet, if that’s what they were going to do. The old elevator jerked downward, and the drop in Burling’s stomach disoriented him: along with the possibility that he would sleep with April tonight came the thought that his rush to fulfill one desire might be a willed distraction from the enormity of what he was about to set in motion with the Chinese. Working with them to arm the mujahedin against the Russians was a line of attack that had only glancing support at the Agency, if it had any support at all. If Amelia found out about April, or if the deputy director hung him out to dry when the operation backfired, he would be in the wilderness for a very long time.

      He and April sat close, her hip touching his thigh, on a hard wooden bench in the square, framed by short, dusty trees. A public security car trolled the streets around for black marketeers. Up the crumbling steps from the bare little park they could see the brown, implacable face of the hotel, its roof bleeding color and music into the sky.

      “I wasn’t making it up, when we were dancing,” Burling said. “I don’t think you understand.”

      Between her thumbs April broke a pink grapefruit she had taken from the table. The fruit smelled ripe, a bit funky, and her face was sly but reluctant in the shadows. Explain yourself, she seemed to be saying. If you can.

      “The first time I saw a Viet Cong dead,” Burling told her, “it was early in the war, before the marines even landed at Da Nang.”

      “Where Jack got his ‘million dollar wound,’” April said with fond sarcasm, tearing the peel.

      “That was Tet. This was long before that, in the fall of ’62. We were there in an advisory capacity, helicopter support. The ARVN had killed this VC in a village outside Soc Trang, and we went up to look at him, because we’d never seen one before.”

      “Like killing a cougar,” April said. She handed him a section of grapefruit, the strands of pink flesh sticking to her fingernails. “When I was a little girl all the cougars, the mountain lions, were supposed to be gone from the hills behind my father’s house, but he and my brothers swore they were there. They wanted to kill one to prove they existed.”

      “Did they ever get one?”

      “They never did, but that didn’t stop them from believing it. If they ever had killed one, I don’t know what they’d have done.”

      The security car moved soundlessly behind the trees, a cigarette glowing inside, showing dark figures slumped against the seats. The Chinese colonel, with whom Burling was to meet next morning, came down the steps and looked this way and that.

      “When Wes was murdered,” Burling ventured, “the first thing I remembered was that Viet Cong. Two of the men dressed up as police, or maybe they were police, we don’t know; anyway, they were dead, too, one of them lying there on the ground beside the car. No one had closed his eyes yet. I looked at him, and he had that same sort of meditative look, almost thoughtful, and he was terribly slender, just like the VC, and I thought again that we were in trouble, now—how’d you put it?—now that we know it exists.”

      April got up an inch and sat down, the way women do to shake off a subject from themselves. Above the trees to the west the sky was the color of amber, liquid and dirty from the marketplace stalls.

      “What exists, Lucius? I ask you why you brought me up here, and you tell me a story about dead Viet Cong, about the soldiers of God. You tell me it’s real. What is real?”

      “Sacrifice.”

      “For you? For me?”

      “Love.”

      “Who were the Chinese on the roof?” April asked him.

      the next afternoon they took off again, the pilot flying low above the ruinous desert country to the east, shaped by wind, through the jagged peaks and chilly, verdant valleys to the landscape of rocks that was home to the mujahedin. The flat, rocky ground came up to meet them, the pink horizon rocked back and forth, and April grabbed Burling’s hand with a disarming strength that reminded him sharply of the night before. At first she had led him, for which he was grateful, but as soon as he felt her with nothing between them, all the impediments around them ringed like forces held at bay, he’d begun to believe he was truly in love. What a fool I am, he thought.

      “What is it?” she asked, drawing back.

      The wheels banged across the slabs of the landing strip, jolting him out of his dream. The airfield had been built by the British after the war, part of their own misadventure in this remote, empty place. The plane shimmied as the engines and brakes dragged it down, then choked to a stop before a rusting Quonset hut. A hundred yards along the tarmac sat a Chinese military plane, with a Land Rover parked beside the tail. When the pilot opened the hatch there was no sound but the wind.

      A rumpled guard roused himself from his seat against the corrugated steel of the hut, scratched his new coils of beard, and dragged his rifle out to see Burling’s papers of introduction, his bona fides from Jack. Somewhere a piece of metal banged against itself.

      “How did the Chinese get here?” April asked.

      “Overland,” Burling said. “The borders are pretty porous up here, but they can’t fly that plane into Samarkand.”

      “I don’t see them, though.”

      “I know. Neither do I.”

      April tried to ask the guard in her limited Dari, a language of which she was proud for the very obscurity of it, but the guard was like a man waiting for a storm: as Burling’s papers flapped before him unremarked, he kept looking at the featureless sky. Abdul Hadi climbed from the plane and watched her with dark-eyed contempt.

      Where had he been last night? she wondered.

      “What on earth possessed you to learn a language like Dari in the first place?” Burling asked as they waited. “Apparently even the natives don’t trust it.”

      She could see that Burling was trying to place the guard.

      “They didn’t tell me that at Georgetown,” April said. The guard uttered a few rusty, atonal syllables she didn’t understand. “They were more about Pashto, the language of the rulers.”

      “Did he say that they were coming?”

      Abdul nodded before she could open her mouth, and suddenly her irrelevance coursed through her like a shock. The guard seemed to be suppressing an emotion, although it was unclear if the twitch around his mouth СКАЧАТЬ