I don’t have a lot of time to shop, so I stock up. That way I only have to go to the store every couple of weeks. These freezers are a great invention.
On the way home, I stopped at the liquor store and bought a couple of cartons of Fortuna cigarettes and a pad of paper, for when inspiration hits me. As I was waiting to pay, I saw a couple of guys in the gun shop across the street buying shotgun shells. It’s hunting season, and there’s a festival to kick it off. It’ll be a long weekend for them.
When I got home, I put away my purchases and mowed the lawn as I listened to the radio. My backyard is only about five hundred square feet. I have a lot of privacy, with the wall around it. The house is brick and is in a development of forty identical brick villas, in rows of ten, on two parallel streets. Mine is in the middle of Street 1. It doesn’t have a real name, since the development is less than three years old. These things take time. There’s a house on each side of me and one in the back, facing Street 2. A small backyard and a wall, about ten feet high, separate me from the villa behind me.
I don’t know my neighbors very well, since I’m hardly ever at home. A very nice retired couple with a Pathfinder lives across the street. Next door is a doctor and his wife and two young daughters. A cool guy named Alfredo lives on the other side. He works construction and lives with his girlfriend. I live with my cat Lucullus, the horniest devil on the street. One of these days a hysterical neighbor will show up at my door with a box of kittens the spitting image of Lucullus, demanding an explanation. I have to do something with that cat.
On the radio they are still reporting news of Dagestan. It looks like the situation is spinning out of control. The Putin government continues the news blackout and sends in more and more troops and medical personnel. What the hell’s going on?
ENTRY 5: SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT
January 5, 1:54 p.m.
This morning a crew of guys installed my new solar panels. They’re rated at 220W in optimal conditions of luminosity. The two rows of 24-volt batteries in the basement will give me about eight hours of electricity a day, more than enough to weather any power outage.
I called my sister in Barcelona to talk for a while. This weekend she’s going to visit a friend in Girona. She said she’s fine, and after some small talk, we hung up.
On TV they keep showing images from Dagestan. According to the latest news (what little there is, given the media blackout), Russian authorities have begun to evacuate the population. In the assault on the Russian base, Chechen rebels must have accidentally released some kind of chemical weapon stored there. On Channel 1, Lorenzo Mila, the highly respected newscaster from Barcelona, speculated it might have been sarin gas, what terrorists used in the attack in Tokyo. Channel 5 reported it might’ve been the hydrogen peroxide the Soviets used in their intercontinental missiles.
I don’t think anyone knows for sure what’s going on.
ENTRY 6
January 9, 10:23 a.m.
Something’s really wrong in Russia. This weekend there has been a steady stream of news updates, statements, denials of those statements, blackouts, and violence. For the last forty-eight hours, nonstop on every channel, all they’ve talked about is the events in Dagestan.
On Friday morning they closed Russia’s borders. That afternoon, Reuters reported that the raided base was really a biological research laboratory and that the substance accidentally released was some kind of pathogenic agent. Hours later, the Putin government categorically refuted that and talked only about a cloud of toxic chemical fertilizers. By breakfast time on Saturday, we learned that Russia had requested a team from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to come to Dagestan.
Now they’re saying they released the highly contagious West Nile virus that was endemic in Egypt. A few years ago a mosquito transmitting the disease found its way on to a plane. Since 1995 there’ve been isolated cases in Europe and South America. That sounds logical, if it weren’t for one small detail—there aren’t many mosquitoes in the Caucasus Mountains in the middle of January.
On Sunday, things seemed to spin out of control. Just five hours after the CDC team arrived, just as they started to care for the poisoned—or should I say infected—people, two of its members had to be evacuated to the United States after some kind of incident with the patients.
Late that night, something similar happened to a team from the World Health Organization (WHO). They were rushed to the base at Ramstein, Germany. Some Internet sites are saying that members of the team were killed.
We don’t have much information on the Russian medical teams, if they even have any, or the civilian population in the area. Home videos smuggled out of the country, mostly online, showed long convoys of people fleeing or being evacuated, some with pretty bad wounds, and lots and lots of ambulances. Army troops and Russian Border Guards in combat gear are headed in the opposite direction, toward what is now called the hot zone.
And this morning, the nail in the coffin. The Russian government declared martial law. All foreign journalists had to leave the country. No more freedom of assembly or the press. What’s even weirder, they declared an Internet blackout across the country. Nothing can get in or out—in theory, anyway.
This morning our minister of health came on Channel 1 and said that the Spanish government will ensure that there are no outbreaks of West Nile in Spain. There’s no cause for alarm. On Channel SER, the minister of defense said that a team of army medical personnel and construction engineers are headed to Dagestan to help control the situation. He emphasized that they won’t be in danger. Blah, blah, blah.
Half of Europe, Japan, the United States, and Australia are sending similar teams. Something is happening in Russia. Something huge.
ENTRY 7: NEW IDEAS
January 9, 7:58 p.m.
I spent all afternoon trying out the solar panels. The power they generate is amazing. However, if I connected a lot of appliances at one time, energy consumption would soar and drain the batteries in a couple of hours. Using them with only a couple of freezers and the computer, for example, increases battery life to around fifteen hours. After that there’s a lapse of about eight hours when the batteries can’t be used because the voltage is very low and appliances could be damaged due to the difference in voltage. According to the manufacturer, in sunny climates you could use them for twenty-four hours, but it’s winter in Galicia, so I can’t complain. I won’t have to put up with an outage of more than a couple of hours, not even during the worst winter storms. Overall it’s a very smart investment.
Lucullus is kind of surprised by the strange hat his house is wearing. (I’m sure he thinks this is his home and I’m his pet.)
I listened to the radio all day—in the morning, on the way home from the office, and as I fixed dinner. The Spanish contingent took off from the Torrejón Air Base near Madrid, headed for a Dagestani town named Buynaksk, where they’ll set up a field hospital. The Russians are dividing the international health groups among several locations. The region is very backward, and Russian health care seems to be on the verge of collapse.