“Come on, Ami,” they said with nonblinking eyes. “Its time to show you our town.”
We started at the municipal post office and worked our way upward through extreme rubble to the city-center rooftops that served as snipers’ dens, ending up at a place the rebonik, or “guys” referred simply to as “the beach.” And indeed, lying in their skivvies on the tarpaper roof paper were a couple of Ruski beach bums, catching a few rays. The pair threw me a couple of shit-eating, we-just-got-caught-with-our-pants-down grins while literally hoisting up their underwear. Kiril and another sniper pal just laughed and laughed and laughed while I got it all on film.
Who were these guys?
What did they do back home?
Where was home?
Where was mine?
With VE-Day done, and Clinton, Major, and Mitterand safely out of Moscow and on their way back home, Boris Yeltsin’s unilateral cease-fire that had never really been enforced gave way to a new paroxysm of fire and steel across the murky front.
The war went on and I went with it.
I caught a mean team of Russian Military police tossing an Inguish translator into the deep-deep of the so-called filtration camps and saved his sorry ass by bargaining away a Yankee flak jacket for his life. Then I rode with the same nasty MPs on a tour of the front lines and got to experience the unique dynamic of a road collision between their eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier and a T-82 battle tank.
Whack!!!
I was sitting atop the former when the latter came lurching out of a field and smashed into us, and there was not another vehicle for miles around. Seems the tank driver was drunk on vodka and looking for more, or at least he was later when I caught the same tank prowling after hours in the town of Shali, swiveling its big gun around until the villagers produced the drink, and then crunching into a local house and killing the inhabitants beneath its treads an hour later.
I had lots of stuff on tape that never made the network news.
I was there for the siege, negotiated surrender, and then the double-cross aftermath of a lopsided battle for a cement factory that served as a sort of Soviet-style Alamo for the Chechen defenders outside a Soviet-style dump town called Chiri Yurt. The chemzavod, or cement factory, that had once supplied most of the cement and related construction materials for Soviet-style building projects from Armenia to the Crimea appeared to be almost a small city when seen from the distance. The smokestacks, burners, storage, loading, and administration buildings covered acres. Below the ground, the complex was said to be honeycombed with tunnels; some said that it doubled as a nuclear war bunker. Who knew; who knows. The main point was that the entire complex had become a death trap for the Chechen fighters dug in there, and subjected to such an intense fire from artillery, attack helicopters, and jet bombers that the thick, black column of smoke billowing from its wounds darkened the sky for miles.
Watching the brick-by-brick destruction of the complex had become a form of entertainment for the people of Chiri Yurt, many of whom had once been employed in the chemzavod. Gathering in the town square—which gave an unimpeded view of the factory across a potato field—residents would squat on their haunches like they were at a crude outdoor movie without proper benches, waiting for a real-life Arnold Schwarzennegger flick to start. The first signal that the daily show was about to commence was the monotonous droning of a high-flying helicopter, spotting targets through the smoky haze for distant gunners. These were the “trailers,” as it were: the short outtakes that preview coming attractions. Next would come the credits—the random whacking from a line of mobile howitzers positioned some two or three miles to the north.
The first indication that the show had actually started would be small puffs of smoke rising from the factory grounds. The report of exploding shells would reach the audience after a delay of several seconds. Sometimes the audience would be caught by surprise by the shock-blast of a big hit, with a thick curtain of smoke later rising from the center of the factory, because the shells landing behind it exploded offstage and the concussions coming seemingly from nowhere.
“Look—here comes an SU-27,” said Ibrahim Kazbekov, a functionary in the local town administration. He was pointing at a spec in the sky that grew larger by the second. It was a jet bomber, flying at around five hundred meters above the ground. Silently, it zipped over the administration building and then was gone. The woosh and roar of its engines followed after about three seconds. Then there was a plume of smoke moving upward from the area around the main smokestack in the chemzavod , which turned crimson and then blew upward into a tremendous fireball that rose higher than the jet had been flying. Silence, then Boom. The retort of the explosion, delayed by several seconds, knocked down a ten-year-old kid standing next to me.
“Vacuum bomb,” said Ibrahim clinically, helping the kid back to his feet. “Looks like they managed to hit an underground diesel fuel tank.”
For once I did not feel guilty about being a voyeur of death and destruction, because all the locals were doing the same.
I was there, too, in the nearby neutral town of Novi Atagi for cease-fire negotiations between Chechen commander General Asian Maskhadov and General Genadi Trochev, the supreme commander of Russian forces in the sector. The meeting was held at the house of Rizvan Laylorsanov, the director of the chemzavod at Chiri Yurt during its salad days as the largest cement factory in the Soviet Caucasus. It must have been a position with perks, because Rizvan’s residence did not reflect any sort of penury. Set on a prime acre of real estate at the edge of town, his was a mansion made of red brick and pine. The main quarters, liberally strewn with televisions and deep freezers, must have been three hundred square meters, not including the patio area. The avlu, or traditional reception area for visitors on holidays, seated at least fifty. The toilet was an outhouse tucked away in the garden.
Now it was the venue for Generals Maskhadov and Trochev to work out the modalities of surrendering the chemzavod, and negotiate an exchange of corpses. While fascinating in itself, this was less interesting for me than meeting General Maskhadov and making my own measure of the man. By all accounts, Maskhadov had mounted an extraordinary defensive campaign with the limited means at hand. In Grozny, his adroit use of three-man hit-and-run teams to attack, pin down, and then destroy Russian armor had been so effective that Moscow began making up excuses for its humiliation. My favorite was that the Chechen mafia had hired an army of Amazon mercenaries from Latvia to do its dirty work for it. Reality was a lot more prosaic: Maskhadov had his men travel through the city’s sewer system to pop up behind the lines for lightning strikes, before disappearing down the drains once again.
I had no chance to ask Maskhadov about any of this. After quickly paying his respects to a line of Chechen elders sitting in a row along the avlu wall, he disappeared into Rizvan’s guesthouse, leaving his boots on the steps, lest he sully the interior of the house with the filth of the street. Nor was I given the opportunity to have a word with General Trochev. As soon as he entered the avlu with his bodyguards, he saluted the elders, untied his boots, and walked up the steps to the guesthouse in his stocking feet. Aside from the two aides-de-camp, the only people allowed into the room were the women of the house, as they scurried from the kitchen to the guest house with steaming pots of pilav, soup, spring lamb, and fried potatoes, fresh bread and homemade butter, cottage cheese, local honey, and gallons of tea.