“Sukhumi,” he spat. “That was playing at war. Stick with me, and I’ll show you the real thing!”
My new friends at the Solidarity Committee cautioned me against this.
“Don’t you understand?” hissed Fazil. “Those kids are going to their deaths!”
Other visitors were suspect, and Fazil warned me against talking openly about my plans. Keeping a low profile was almost impossible, though, due to the surprisingly bad local language ability of my new friends. Twice I was seconded to be a Russian-Turkish translator at an interrogation of a couple of suspected agents because Fazil’s Chechen was insufficient to conduct the interview and the individuals in question spoke nothing but Chechen and Russian. I hasten to add that I in no way considered myself competent for such a task, although I performed as best I could.
“Where were you in September 1993?”
“Well, I was tending the sheep on the Sovieteski Kolkoz, when suddenly I heard the ehtKHizor and the bvf ofhe hnasdfo resounding in garble garble.”
“Did he say Soviet?”
“Well, yes—but…”
“He is an agent provocateur!” snarled Fazil, who equated anything “Soviet” with “Russian,” including place names such as collective farms.
One thing though, was certain: the Caucasus Culture Group/Chechen Solidarity Center must have been staked out and penetrated by at least three intelligence services—the Turkish MIT, the Russian Federal Security Agency (the renamed KGB), and of course the CIA. Perhaps Fazil let me hang around precisely because he assumed I worked for the last agency and that my real mission was to help.
Contacts established, arrangements made and escape routes planned, I packed my bags in anticipation of the early morning flight from Istanbul to Baku and beyond. In anticipation of rough stuff, I was traveling as light as I could, but still had an inventory of things that would match that cited by the Ismaelia war-bound correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s classic, Scoop. In addition to my customized camera, body armor, and Kevlar helmet, I was toting an emergency medical kit that would have landed me in jail on drug-smuggling charges almost anywhere in the world. The two basic dopes were Dolantine, a sort of lazy man’s morphine, used to break the pain of shrapnel lacerations and gunshot wounds, and Atropine, a jump-starter for heart-attack victims, in case I found myself going into shock and decided to do something about it. Hopefully, self-administration of either would happen with the right ampule. I was also carrying diverse pep pills and instant-action vitamins designed for athletes, in case I had to climb a mountain one fine night.
Clotheswise, I was packing a customized cross-country skier’s wardrobe: tights and turtleneck that absorbed sweat away from the body but retained heat, a fleece pullover with a kangaroo pouch for frozen fingers or diverse equipment, quick-dry windbreaker pants with reinforced knees and butt, instant heat packs for fingers and toes, a ski cap that could be pulled down so far as to cover the throat as well as nose and mouth, anti-glare ski goggles, a high-tech flashlight designed to be worn like a miner’s lamp on your head, two pairs of anti-ice traction claws for my lifelong-guaranteed water-and-cold-resistant boots, and even a pair of high-flotation, superlightweight snowshoes. Lest I appear out of place in my survival attire, I also brought along a well-worn dark blue overcoat that was missing two buttons. It served not only as a windbreaker and blanket, but also as a sort of generic Eastern European war refugee disguise, and was especially effective in this capacity when topped by my gray Chechen papakh, or Astrakhan sheepskin hat. For food, I packed two pounds of whole espresso-roasted coffee beans to chew as an energy aid, and two hundred and fifty grams of whole cloves to kill hunger. It might sound like a lot, but actually, the single biggest item was the camera kit: a Sony 3-chip Hi-8 job with boom mike, LAV interview attachment, and Bogan tripod, as well as a clam-oyster miniature remote viewing/dubbing unit and about 50 pounds of tapes and extra batteries. Or so it seemed.
In retrospect, the sheer volume and weight of this kit sounds ridiculous. The idea was to achieve autonomy; what it did was create the need for assistants and bearers. I subsequently ditched half of it.
I tried to sleep, but in vain. It was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and the muezzins calling the faithful to midnight and dawn prayers in the grand mosques around Sultan Ahmet Square vied with one another to see who could extend their plaintive, amplified cries the longest. The ezan, which usually lasts around five minutes at most, seemed to last for a half an hour, one disembodied voice picked up where the last had left off. One particularly clear and beautiful voice seemed to have converted the Muslim creed into a scat song. Allahul Akhbar, Allahul Akhbar!
I lay on the bed, channel-surfing between Turkish TV and international channels and thought about the project at hand. Of all those I had dealt with, the most memorable were the two youths I had met at the Solidarity Center who had fought in Sukhumi, and were now returning for more war. Sukhumi a game? A rehearsal? I had nearly gone down with the ship there, along with my friend and colleague Lawrence Sheets from Reuters. Just how bad could Chechnya be? And now I, too, was going back to war—and the images that passed on the television screen had little to do with my memory of that subject: men without limbs, half-shrouded women’s bodies lying in muddy streets, brains dribbling on the pavement, and rows of dead children lined up in blood-stained snow. I got up and started retching. I continued for hours, finally drawing blood from my stomach. I wanted to think it was something I had eaten, but knew better.
I was scared, really scared.
For someone trying to make a discreet entrance into frontline Azerbaijan, mine was not an auspicious start. The arrivals section of the new international air terminal outside Baku was packed with old friends and acquaintances from all walks of life. There were oilmen and diplomats and spies returning to post from R&R vacation leave and dozens of Azeri citizens who smiled and shouted greetings when they saw me to their prodigal son returned. Many of the security guards and official shakedown artists who passed for customs officials were old friends from the war in Karabkah. One reached out and kissed me on both cheeks and had a long chuckle when I sent his metal detector screaming: the body armor I was wearing had considerably more resonance than the usual watches, rings, cufflinks, and cigarette lighters his metal detector machine was geared to deal with.
Indeed, seemingly everyone I knew—or at least appropriate representatives of different segments of society—was at the airport waiting for my plane. Everyone, that is, except the people I expected to meet: the Chechens assigned to spirit me from the airport with minimal fuss, and smuggle me across the mountains and into war.
I waited for an hour, glad-handing old friends whom I really did not want to see and then just fending off persistent taxi drivers. At first I hoped that one would whisper to me that he was the one, but none of those who approached me uttered anything like a password. When the last of the men holding signs designating MISTER SMITH and MASTER JONES disappeared I knew that something had gone very wrong. I was in Baku and none of the contacts I had so assiduously cultivated in Istanbul (and London and New York and Washington and even New Jersey) had come through.