Maskhadov’s and Trochev’s bodyguards waited in the avlu, chatting like old pals about school, favorite football teams, and all the other sort of common memories youth raised in the former Soviet Union-Russian Federation Republic might reasonably share. Often, it seemed that the only thing that really distinguished the two groups were the beards worn by the Chechens and the high-top basketball shoes favored by the Russian grunts. And I had it all on tape.
Finally, after two hours, Generals Maskhadov and Trochev emerged from their room and all fraternization came to an abrupt end. The bodyguards leapt to their feet and reverted to their discrete groups. The Russians followed Trochev out the door, while the Chechen guard escorted their leader over to a knot of twenty elders who had gathered to learn about the fates of their respective towns. All wore astrakhan hats, despite the fact that it was over eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
“Agreement has been reached to clear the cement factory of fighters by giving them free passage out and into the woods,” Maskhadov told the elders. “A delegation of townspeople will be allowed in to help the wounded and to collect bodies for burial. The modalities will be dealt with by the local Russian military authorities and the civil administration of Chiri Yurt.”
Then he turned on his heel, marched with his guard to his transport, and was gone, having shared nothing about the larger peace he was trying to work out with Trochev.
Outside Rizvan’s, I found a baby-faced Russian named Colonel Sergei huddled with Maskhadov’s chief of staff, a captain named Isa, and the local representative of Chiri Yurt, Ibrahim Kazbekov, scratching in the dirt to delineate lines.
“I guarantee your security,” Colonel Sergei was stressing. “At five o’clock, you can come and collect the bodies at this point.”
Captain Isa was not impressed.
“How can you talk of security guarantees when your tanks are still firing?”
“I guarantee your security,” Colonel Sergei repeated. “You have my guarantee.”
A crowd of young men had gathered at the end of the street and were starting to shout ugly epithets at the Russians. Ibrahim and Rizvan stepped in to calm them down.
“They are guests in my house!” roared Rizvan. “They have my personal guarantee!”
At five o’clock, we were back at Chiri Yurt and on our way to the chemzavod. Although it was still belching smoke, it was quiet now. There was Russian armor in the surrounding fields, but the tank crews had stripped to their waists and were washing in the irrigation canals. The front line had shifted again, and Chiri Yurt and the chemzavod were now behind it. I did not even put on my flak jacket as we drove down the shell-splattered road and tried to forget about mines.
The factory grounds were a sorry sight. Huge gaping holes yawned from the asphalt, the gravel, and the grass. All trees within one hundred yards of any building had been reduced to stumps. Used, puke-green ammunition boxes were strewn everywhere.
In the parking lot near the administrative building—or what I assumed to be such—twisted lumps of metal represented what had once been cars. A military truck—Chechen? Russian?—blocked access to what I decided was the company canteen. Sightless eyes had been shot through its windshield exactly where driver and passenger would have been sitting; its front wheels had been amputated by a mine.
Then there were the buildings of the chemzavod. Seemingly every square foot of masonry had been shot at and hit. Smoke still billowed from the windows of those buildings that had not collapsed. It did not require a degree in structural engineering to understand that Rizvan’s beloved chemzavod would have to be rebuilt from scratch in order to ever produce one bag of mortar again. I pointed my camera at the smoldering ruins and scarcely had the frame in focus before I had a rifle barrel pointed at my gut.
“Hey, you—out!!” my friend, or acquaintance, the baby-faced Colonel Sergei screamed at me. “Get the fuck out of here, now!”
I thought it prudent to take his advice, and moseyed down the road. After a brittle hundred yards or so, I ran into frustrated rescue workers.
“What’s up?” I asked an elderly man with a long white beard and orange skull cap.
“A double cross,” he grunted.
Then he looked at his watch and glanced at the sky, found an internal compass, and removed himself to the edge of the road to set about performing his ablutions. Others joined him, leaving me alone on the road as they began performing afternoon prayers.
Your town is being destroyed and your world is bombed and all you can do is praise God? Who were these people?
As the line of faithful bowed their heads toward Mecca, the Russians guns now stationed inside the twisted ruins of what had once been the primary source of building material in the Caucasus began dumping high trajectory shells on the wooded hills five hundred yards away.
KirVOOM! came the initial report from the factory.
A four-second pause, followed by a puff of white smoke in the forest.
The Russians were interdicting the escape routes that they had guaranteed to leave open, and not just with regular munitions. Beautiful, thick white smoke, cumulus clouds in miniature, now lingered over the trees like a blanket.
Phosphorus. While not expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, the wicked weapons should be banned: They suck up all oxygen and suffocate anything in their vicinity; collateral effects include third-degree burns when the ash falls on naked skin. Fun.
The praying men prayed, and the shells continued to fall. Then, Ibrahim and the other rubble and relief workers emerged from the factory, walking in our direction with empty stretchers and ashen faces.
“There are no bodies in there,” said Ibrahim.
No bodies?
“Either the fighters have removed all the dead with them, or something else has happened,” said Ibrahim, trying to take control of the situation.
“Like what!?” some elderly man demanded.
“We cannot say for sure, but we think the Russian forces have collected the bodies themselves to use as bargaining chips for POW exchanges,” he said evenly. “We will look into the matter further tomorrow.”
It took awhile to sink in.
Colonel Sergei had kept the bodies for use as exchange currency in the future.
Who was that guy?
Distant shepherds twirling their staffs over a timeless mountain landscape. Kids playing King of the Haystack. A series of ancient stone towers, guarding access to the upper valleys of the Argun River, which turned from a sluggish stream into a white-water roar. Perhaps I thought of Montana, romantically and impossibly, if so. Because it was not the upper Yellowstone, Smith, or Gallatin, where a solitary white-water kayaker, or brace of trout fishermen in a drift boat might be expected around the next thundering gorge. This was the spinal column of Chechnya at war, the river route and highway leading into the mountains, that was (or should have been) the primary target for every piece of artillery and all the air power the Russians had to blast the rebels off the map, forever. They were trying, judging by the snarled, if no longer smoldering hunks of shattered metal pitched over the sides of the road, and sometimes still on it.