Sheets was shocked—and furious. If the stories about the assassination murder were true, he had been sitting no more than twenty miles away from a major development in the Chechnya-at-war story, but without any means of verification.
I was stunned. If true, it meant that the so-called Abkhazian Battalion, under the command of Shamil Basayev, had pounced on Samashki and eradicated the local leadership—or that Hussein and his men were the perpetrators of the killings of the negotiators, a group that would include the imam as well as diarist Akhmad Amaev.
And the invitation for the MVD to demilitarize the town by force?
There was nothing to do but drink another long shot of vodka and stare at the ceiling of the Sundja guest house and wait for morning, listening to the constant, distant thunder of heavy artillery. The windows thumped and threatened to shatter, as evil, synthetic sheet lighting lit up the sky until dawn.
It was a rotten night’s sleep of no sleep at all.
Dawn, or at least close enough to first light to pass for it, and we were drinking instant coffee, smoking cigarettes, and packing the car. The rival AP and WTN crews had already left, and Lawrence was angry. There was no question where they were off to, and he had extracted a pledge that they would check out this Samashki story together with him. But the competitive edge of the others led them to violate their promise; there would not be much assistance from Lawrence in the future. War is news but news is business.
The big car moved out through the muddy, rutted streets of Slepsovski, passed the market area, and turned left down the side road to Sernovodsk, the ambiguous town on the new border of Chechnya and Ingushetia that was sort of claimed by both and thus served as a sieve for traffic. We ran into the first Russian checkpoint after about a kilometer or two. The fact that Nodar’s car had Georgian plates helped: The sergeant in control of the checkpoint was an ethnic Georgian who somehow ended up not only in Russia, but serving in the Russian military. Nodar glad-handed him and slipped him some cigarettes and chocolates and we were let through, not sure if anything illegal had transpired, but not really caring. We had just entered the “zone of conflict,” even if we were only on the apron.
Sernovodsk. Another forlorn Friday market town of walled compounds and one-story buildings built along a byway, which is half the size of a highway, or something close to that. We stopped for bottled mineral water and biscuits and tried to gather some basic information about events of the night before in general, and about events in Samashki in particular. Everyone was incredibly tight-lipped. Maybe they thought that Sheets and I were Russian spies. It was the first time I had felt the real difference of being an outside reporter, as opposed to an insider, and I did not like it.
We proceeded down the main road past the hospital and Friday Mosque, and toward Samashki, some five kilometers away. The road was empty of traffic. A haze of smoke rose in the distance, but it was too far away to determine anything concrete. There was also the sound of distant small arms fire. Rat-a-tat-tat and all that.
Over a small rise, and then our path was blocked by a Russian MVD armored vehicle that was completely blocking the road. To its right radio antennas were sticking through camouflage mesh. Closer inspection revealed a network of trenches containing more armor and men, all partially concealed beneath more camouflage mesh. Post 13.
A very blonde Russian youth dressed in a black flak jacket only worn by special forces—the regular Russian grunts wear the more cumbersome green jobbies that carry multiple steel “alligator skin” plates—jumped down from the APC and swung his gun barrel at us. He was wearing Reebok running shoes, or maybe Nikes.
“Davai!” he ordered us, “Clear out, now!”
He was instantly joined by a knot of similarly ill-disposed Russian servicemen.
Lawrence got out of the car and extended his hand, trying to break the ice and reason with the man. But this was one checkpoint he was not going to talk his way across. Further discussion—or a monologue, really—in Lawrence’s perfectly fluent Russian (he even knows the word for “phlegm,” as opposed to just “spit” or “snot”) only served to get the guards to call in their sergeant, who emerged from a nearby command trench with a smile on his face and a piece of paper and pencil in his hand, noting first our license plate number, and then our names and press affiliations.
“Sorry,” he smiled. “You are not on the master list from Mozdok and cannot enter this particular area of the zone of conflict.”
“Master list from Mozdok?” Lawrence asked. “But we have our permissions from the Ministry of Defense.”
“Sorry,” smiled the captain or sergeant. “There is a special operation underway right now, and new permissions are required. You have to go to Mozdok to get it.”
Mozdok. The headquarters of the Russian command in the Chechen campaign, and one of the great “filtration” centers. It was at least three hours away by bad road. Lawrence lingered to argue the inanity of our having to go there, but got nowhere. A distant explosion over the blocking APC, and a new plume of smoke from the general direction of Samashki. More distant rat-tat-tat. We were at a dead end.
“Did you get it?” Sheets hissed to his cameraman once we were back in the car.
“What?” asked the maybe-junkee sitting in the front of the SUV.
“The post, the sergeant, the explosion and smoke over Samashki!”
“What?”
“Durak!” snarled Sheets. “Fool! Why do you think I kept talking?”
Uncle Larry could get mean when he felt deprived of news footage.
The only good news, as it were, was seeing the two cars bearing the AP and WTN television teams heading toward the checkpoint we just left. It seemed they took the wrong road in the morning, and that meant we were ahead of them. We did not bother to stop to tell them what they could expect. Letting them get tied up for an hour or more gave us the time to bag something exclusive, newswise.
Competition, and all that.
Back through Sernovodsk. Back through Slepsovski. Back down the main highway to Nazran, with a cut right at Karabuk, and up and over the Sundja Hills via very bad and muddy roads to Mozdok via the back door. The hills were starting to take on a veneer of green, with splashes of wildflower erupting in yellows, reds, and blues here and there. Spring in the Caucasus. Shepherds drove their sheep; vicious dogs attempted to attack the car; an outdoor market in the middle of nowhere was specializing in automotive parts; a hippodrome of sorts was tucked between two hills, with a horse race game called jirit underway. All of this would have made lovely B-roll footage for a documentary feature on the region, or even one on the weirdness of life-goes-on-as-normal-in-the-midst-of-war. But we did not have the time nor inclination to stop. The Novosti news program on Channel One was carrying a report, sourced to the military, of MVD forces conducting a “mop up” operation in the area of Samashki. Russian losses were reported as sixteen killed and forty wounded. The fighting must have begun just after we had left the Post 13 checkpoint on the distant western fringe of the town. I thought of all the point positions I knew of on the Samashki periphery, the gun pits and slit trenches—and their occupants. I was sick at heart of it all, but mainly sick at heart for not being there.