“Well?” he asked us. “What do you want?”
“You know what we want. The same thing we have wanted for almost a week.”
“So? Who’s stopping you? Not me.”
We got back in the car. Maybe we put up a white flag or tidied up the tape on the windscreen that spelled out PRESS in reverse. And then we were driving into Samashki, and even Uncle Larry was incapable of coming up with a gallows joke.
The first body was that of a man lying in the mud outside a house at 102 Stepnaya Street. He was dressed in a red vest with a plaid lining on the inside of his coat, partially covered by a green blanket with a white floral pattern. I might have known him, but could not tell due to his shattered face. Lawrence and I sucked up our guts and moved on.
“I don’t know what to say, I just do not know what to say,” said a familiar-looking grandfather, keening in the shattered remnant of his home. “They came and they killed us like we were animals, and then did not even allow us to bury our dead. What can I say?”
His son had been killed right in front of him
A young mother almost deranged with grief, described how a tank had barged through the gate of her parents’ home and then started blasting away at point-blank range. Her father tried to hide in the oil pit of the family garage, but had been found, dragged out and doused with gasoline and then set afire before her eyes. She did not know how her mother and brother were killed; she just buried them in the garden along with her father, a week after having planted the spring onions. She worked the mud between her fingers like religious beads. I forgot to write down her name; it was not that important—she was just one of hundreds of walking wounded, so stunned by grief they could not even wail.
The destruction down some streets was nearly total, with houses gutted from the inside. Weirdly, other streets suffered virtually no damage at all, save for shattered windows and often not even that.
We stopped by the house where I had witnessed my first zikr; it had been converted into a morgue where the dirge leader was washing the body of a young man just brought in from the forest. We spotted the man I called Santa Claus due to his rosy complexion and long white beard—not Commander Ali, but a town elder. He was rolling the charred remains of three girls in white burial linen. We followed him to the cemetery to find something like a hundred fresh graves. A cleric was chanting the Muslim prayer for the dead over each fresh hole. Survivors shoveled in dirt.
I kept my camera running. It was difficult to stay sane.
We drove down the main street to the southeastern part of town, by the water tower, market, and school. The first stop was Alkhazur’s. His welding shop and home were empty.
Dead, or fled?
I instructed Nodar to turn the corner and drive down a short, muddy street I walked down so many times before. The gate was shut, but the house looked sound. I knocked until my knuckles bled.
“Let’s go,” said Laurence. “This is not good for you.”
And then a shuffle behind the gate, and the creak of a bolt being removed.
The door opened a crack. It was Hussein’s mother.
“Toms!” she cried, grabbing me. “Djivut! He’s alive!”
She had never spoken a word to me before.
I wanted to crow for joy; I wanted to wait for his return from wherever he was hiding
“It is really time to go.”
It was Lawrence Sheets, telling me that if I should chose to shirk professional responsibility, that was my business, but that he had to get back to Nazran to file.
Yes, time to file, to broadcast the body-based story of Samashki to the world.
“Let’s go, now.”
I tried to say something comforting or encouraging to Hussein’s mother, but she was already sitting down in a heap and was only capable of weeping.
Who else from my household survived?
“Let’s go,” said Sheets, and that time I followed him out the courtyard door to the muddy street and back into our transport and back down the high road toward the mosque and then the bridge and then the station. The armored train was there, pulling a dozen flatcars piled high with ammunition and the wheeled vehicles of war.
I tried to explain to Sheets that this was the entire reason for all subsequent events and that we needed to stop and shoot some footage of the fucking train, but Lawrence was very insistent. It was time to go before the window snapped shut with us inside the house of death.
As an insurance policy to protect our tapes, we picked up an elderly Chechen woman on our way out of town who obligingly stuffed our cassettes down her blouse.
There was no need.
“Bet you got some good material,” said the baby-faced sergeant at Post 13, poking his head in the car, smiling.
“You’re on the air!” crowed Steve Coppen from ABC Moscow, breaking the good news to me on Sheet’s telephone. It was soon ringing off the hook with more calls for me than Uncle Larry.
“Brilliant,” cried Gillian Findley, the throaty reporter who cut and voiced my Samashki piece for that night’s prime-time ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
“We want fifteen hundred full-color words on that massacre you talked about on the BBC,” commanded Marie Colvin at the London Sunday Times. “I am going for the front page.”
“I don’t care how you file. You can dictate the whole thing on sat phone at any cost, but we want thirty inches by tomorrow morning. We need that story!” pleaded Newsweek’s Steve LeVine. That meant two full pages, a whole spread.
And Sonia Mikich.
“You will get on the next plane out of there now and get up to Moscow and get over to the ABC offices, and I do not care if you have to steal your tapes back, you will convert them to European system and you will deliver them here yesterday, and I will pay you a great deal of money in cash, so move! I need those tapes!!”
Remarkable how ninety seconds worth of prime-time attention can change your life for a day, maybe a week, or maybe a lifetime.
A Japanese channel copied the lot and paid me another thousand bucks, cash. Paula Robatelle of the Canadian CBS needed a couple of minutes to round out her own award-winning French language report. A Turkish channel—Star or Show?—was next in line.
I paid my bills, bought new clothes, took loyal friends out to dinner at outrageously overpriced restaurants. If not the talk of Moscow town, I was at least a temporary player.
The most satisfying moment in the whirlwind of my new life as Witness to Massacre came at the end of that frenetic week, when the Minister of the Interior and Commander in Chief of Field Operations in Chechnya, Colonel-General Anatoly Kulikov gave his first “meet the press”-style opportunity at the Raddison-Slaviskaya Hotel International Press Center on April 19. Blithely describing how federal forces had restored “constitutional order” in Samashki in accordance with the wishes of the majority of the town’s inhabitants, including the mayor and imam, General Kulikov was happy to provide the press with several letters he had received from the town, begging for intervention before the events of early April, and thanking him for the successful outcome of the operation. Still, the general had to admit that the “bandits” in town had put up a hard fight from exactly thirty-one strongholds, and that he, as a military man at war, had been obliged to order his boys to reduce those strongholds to rubble—even if it meant that his men had to throw grenades into basements to flush out militants hiding among terrified civilians in the most cowardly manner.