KirBAAMMM!!!
It is Hussein’s gun, firing one shot for every three hundred sixty-five of theirs.
Woosh, woosh!
Return fire into the thorn-bushes where I once innocently dwelled. Woosh, woosh, woosh!
I am sure I am going to die in this six-foot pit, this grave. And all because I have bought into the idea of war as entertainment. Bang Bang, yeah.
I sneak my head above ground just far enough to stick the camera lens out and click off a few seconds of whatever is shooting at us from the other side of the tracks. I mean, if you are insane enough to be out on this little ambush romp, you may as well complete the picture by doing your job and getting the bang bang that folks back home find so very entertaining. I have screwed my courage and stupidity to the sticking place and my head is above the rim of the pit and I am shooting film just as Hussein is shooting his 70-caliber small cannon broken tank machine gun at the armored beasts across the field. I want this camera of mine or the microphone that looks so much like an over-under gun mount to be just that right now, and I want the camera not to record but to recoil like my trusty 30-30 or maybe my left-eject, pawnshop special twelve-gauge shotgun letting loose against the metal beasts that are trying to kill me, kill us.
KirBAAMMM!!! KirBAAMMM!!! would be the sound of my film. KirBAAMMM!!!
“You are out of your mind!!” screams Hussein, pulling me back down into the pit.
Seylah’s face is white; his pants are stained wet from the inside. So are mine.
I look to my left; Hussein is crouching, studying something through his stupid glasses. Seylah, at the far end of the pit, is sneaking a peek through the Seemores, as some folks call binoculars in Montana. See more, get it? Leaverite? Haha!
Think of anything else. Anything.
Now Seylah is shouting at Hussein, but in Chechen, so I do not understand anything but the word kamaz, the Russian word for truck.
Truck.
One of the three trucks seems to be struggling up the muddy dirt path. Like that one mule deer that always lingers behind the rest when they know you are downwind in that coulee underneath the ridge. A calm settles over the gun pit. Hussein marginally adjusts the oversized glasses he is wearing. They look utterly ridiculous on his face. Seylah coughs something. Coordinates, I guess. I hit “run” on the back of the camera; I have about three minutes of battery life left and I left the spares in my backpack, hidden in the thorn bushes that incredibly distant fifty yards behind me. kirbam…
The blast is almost musical as the world slows, stops. Then, distantly, after two or three or five seconds, a soft, almost gentle thud. No, not a thud. Thud carries the sense of something hitting the earth, dirt. This is different. This is deadly. It is the unmistakable sound of metal meeting metal. Whack, maybe.
The distant truck is stopped on the slope. Then a sputter of red, a flame. Then a short, quick burp as the motor explodes and whatever or whoever was in the truck is very dead.
Seylah hugs Hussein in that attenuated way of snaking one hand around the back that serves as the Chechen handshake.
Congratulations on your kill.
I am about to vomit for joy.
9
SIEGE AND SURVIVAL
“It’s time for you to leave,” said Hussein that night after a supper of beef broth and pickles. “It is going to get nasty around here soon.”
I tried to explain that I still had more work to do, images to capture, interviews to conduct. Hussein dismissed my arguments with the sweep of a hand.
“I am a farmer, and not a specialist in photojournalism,” he said.
“But it seems to me that you have an abundance of rich material for your stated project. Our stated project. This is not your war; it is mine. And given present realities, my fear is now that you will lose all the material you have accumulated because you will get killed foolishly and needlessly. It is time for you to go. No, I order you to go. It is our film, too.”
The problem was, how to get out.
“I think it almost impossible that the local traitors have not informed on you to the KGB,” Hussein pointed out. “It is most likely that you will be arrested and searched on sight, and your tapes—our tapes—seized and destroyed, or used against us in some way.”
He was right. I was not a reporter with a notebook that could be memorized and destroyed before it fell into the wrong hands. I was a high-profile courier, bearing an often-incriminating collection of cassettes. In a word, I had the physical evidence that Hussein and all his men were participants in what the world regarded as a rebellion. Hussein, said my pictures, was a rebel. And one man’s rebel may be another man’s freedom fighter, but he is also another man’s terrorist.
The issue of disposing of the tapes gnawed at both of us. One way to get them out would be to hide them on the person of either a respected elder—such as Hussein’s father—or a woman, such as Ussam’s wife, Rana. The security checkpoints generally did not check women or the elderly, and a bribe here or there could generally help get things done. The problem was what to do with the tapes, once past the checkpoints. Who was to be trusted in Sernovodsk, Slepsovski, or distant Nazran, the headquarters of most of the floating journalists in the theater of war? I did not know anyone there—and neither, for that matter, did Hussein.
Finally, we hit upon a solution that made everyone equally nervous. By sheerest chance—or was it, the paranoid in me wondered—an old school friend of Hussein’s had shown up in town to take a look at the ancestral homeland and the general situation. His name was Musa, a thoroughly Russified Chechen living in Moscow. I had the ABC bureau’s telephone number, so they could theoretically pick up the stash. As for trusting Musa to perform his part of the bargain—well, Hussein had blessed the venture and made the introduction.
We met for breakfast at Musa’s family home at midmorning. A silent woman walked in with tea; noisy kids reached for Hussein’s gun and wanted to play. I said something about the nature of the tapes and Hussein interrupted, launching into a long lecture about history, Chechen nationalism, and love of country that culminated in the recollection of the use of tombstones in the local cemetery, where both he and Musa had once played.
It was a touching, intimate moment between two old friends, and I was reaching for my camera to capture it on tape when the regular morning drone of distant helicopters came closer—and closer and closer—until the whole house was buzzing from the whirling blades and windows were shuddering and threatening to implode.
“Vertilot!” shouted Hussein, grabbing his weapon and spinning out the door. “Helicopters!”
Ridiculously, Musa urged me to stay and finish the breakfast that had just arrived on the table. I did not so much decline as bolt, dropping the camera and breaking the on/off switch in so doing. I had forgotten that my left prehensile thumb no longer worked.
A bread knife was on the table, so I grabbed it and carved off the plastic around the broken switch until I hit the main metal toggle, and then I carved still further until I could get a finger in deep enough to turn the camera on and off in a way it was not designed for, but it still worked. Then I was out the door and down the street and sprinting into the cough and sputter and brrrt! brrrt! brrrt! of heavy-caliber machine guns and small cannon sounds ripping the air like crumpled paper.