Danilo gives him a don’t-doubt-me glare. “I manned up and I finished, Kolya. It was easy with that photo of your mom in the leopard-print bikini.”
Kolya elbows him in the kidney.
“Don’t worry,” Danilo says. “I folded it so you and your little bro were out of view. And I didn’t get a drop of blood on it.”
“It’s not blood I’m worried about.”
“Point is, I finished my mission. Unlike this goddamn engine.” Danilo slams his fist into the steering column and Kolya waits it out before suggesting they reevaluate their options. They climb out from the truck and unfold their map on the ground. Kolya had made it by taping sheets of notepaper over command’s computer monitor, tracing pictures of antique maps of Chechnya, and then pasting the sheets together in what he hoped was the right order.
“Which way’s north?” Danilo asks.
Kolya pulls out a compass that points north no matter which direction he holds it. “Which way do you want it to be?”
“We should check the map,” Danilo surmises.
They check the map. Having forgotten to include a legend within the map itself, they examine the map, squint at the horizon, quarter-turn the map, frown at the horizon, and repeat a half-dozen more times without discovering any of the map on the land or any of the land on the map.
“We can’t find north on the map and we can’t find north where we are. We are more than fucked,” Kolya says.
“The map’s fucked. We’re fine.” Danilo scans the ridge. “That fat old bastard’s got to be here somewhere. It’s supposed to be a day’s drive, right? We’ve been driving, what, five hours? That’s a day, right?”
Kolya’s from the wrong side of the Arctic Circle, from Kirovsk, where a winter day is a fifteen-minute glow on the horizon. “Sure,” he says.
It’s clear they’ll have to set out on foot. They have a radio, but it hasn’t worked in several years and they carry it as a good luck charm more than anything; even in that capacity, it isn’t working. They pack up as many of the body bags as they’re able, to prove they aren’t deserters in case a patrol picks them up. With two body-bag-stuffed parachute duffels, and whatever provisions and extra ammo they can pocket, they set off.
They only make it fifty meters when Danilo drops his parachute bag. “Hold up,” he says and jogs back to the Shishiga to empty the rest of his clip into the engine block. The eight staccato blasts multiply off the valley walls in a brief but thunderous applause for Danilo’s coup de grâce. When Danilo returns, he looks much more chipper.
“Was that necessary?” Kolya asks. He should be irate with Danilo for wasting the ammo, but more seriously, for announcing themselves to any rebel in a ten-kilometer radius. It’s April 2000 and the army has sealed the bulk of the Chechen insurgents within the topographical confines of the southern mountains, an area into which generals issue demands with the ineffectual bluster of zookeepers shouting into a cage. But Kolya can’t summon the appropriate anger. Whatever life-preserving instincts evolution endowed him with have been war-blunted to an amused disregard for all mortality, particularly his own.
“Don’t you worry yourself,” Danilo says. “We know two things about our revered colonel. First, that he loves his banyas. Second, that he’s a cur-hearted coward less likely to see action than my left hand. If he’s around here, then here is as safe as my grandmother’s lap.”
Kolya wouldn’t put much trust in anyone involved with raising Danilo. But he shoulders his parachute duffel and his Kalashnikov and follows Danilo into the valley.
THEY spend the night zipped inside the body bags. In the morning Kolya drinks from a stream that runs clearer than any faucet he’s ever known. Upon closer inspection, it’s not a stream but an ancient irrigation canal that continues to water the terraces a century after the soil was last tilled. They decide to march downhill and Kolya points the busted compass toward the valley to officially make it the right direction. Trees prosper on the valley floor and dwindle to waist-high grasses as they climb another ridge. Vertical seams of white stone split the green slopes at haphazard intervals. The soreness in Kolya’s heels is less a physical pain than a physical fact he’s as familiar with as the color of his eyes.
Beyond the next ridge an emerald field gradually unrolls, dead-ending into trees. With binos, Danilo scans the straightedge of woodland cutting across the meadow. They go quickly and somewhat ridiculously, bent at the waist in a crouched shuffle as if the open field has been rolled into a tight tunnel. Discrete packets of panic burst in Kolya each time the wind shifts the grass, or the shadow of a bird cuts over the ground. He focuses on his breathing to delay an oncoming anxiety attack. Over the past year he’s developed a deep mistrust of open spaces and now can’t cross anything wider than a doorframe without wondering if he’s walking into a sniper’s scope.
When they reach the tree line, Danilo snaps up his arm with tight-lipped alarm.
Kolya freezes.
Danilo farts.
“Devil,” Kolya mutters, cuffing Danilo on the shoulder. “You’ll give me a heart attack before the rebels ever get me.”
“Oh no,” Danilo says. His face, often formed of diagonals — slanted eyebrows, sneered lips, sloped cheeks that together resemble a crudely drawn demon — completely wilts.
“Fuck off,” Kolya says.
“It won’t be a heart attack.” Danilo nods into the forest, where Kolya catches sight of a dozen rebels gathered around the remains of a campfire. They hold their rifles in their right hands, bowls of kasha in their left, apparently alerted by Danilo’s flatulence. Twelve barrels stare up at Kolya, and the fear that had loosened its grip in his chest since he crossed the field now crushes his heart with both hands.
They drop their parachute bags and raise their arms as they are relieved of their weapons, ammo, and boots. The man patting Kolya down misses the cassette tape buttoned into his shirt pocket. The rebels sport full beards, slender waists, and mud-spattered plastic and leather sandals. One wears a green headband squirming with Arabic script. The one patting Kolya’s calves for concealed sidearms has the straightest, whitest teeth he’s ever seen. The scrawny kid with almond eyes doesn’t have the beard of an insurgent yet, but Kolya knows that’s what he is, deep down, just as he’d feared himself capable of murder long before he ever picked up a gun.
“Kontraktniki,” the rebels whisper. From their tattoos and black sleeveless shirts, Danilo and Kolya are obviously mercenaries rather than conscripts. The rebels deal with captured conscripts — all poorly trained and terrified teenagers — more leniently than contract soldiers, who collectively conduct themselves like Russian Rambos with less discriminate aim.
A tall, silent man in a Tesco T-shirt kicks Kolya’s legs from under him and binds his wrists from behind with wire. He lies on the ground beside Danilo. Behind them, younger insurgents sift through their belongings. The tall one doesn’t leave their sides. We’ll die today, Kolya realizes, but rather than horror or surprise, the realization hits him like the first breath after a long, dark dive under water.
The tall man spreads open two body bags in front of Kolya and Danilo. “Get in,” he orders.
Danilo begins to protest, but a swift rifle butt to his temple interrupts the plea. Kolya watches two younger rebels fold Danilo into the black plastic body bag like a poorly tailored suit into a garment bag. The second bag lies open on the ground, and with a sigh, he climbs in legs first and is zipped up.
They lie there for an indeterminate interval while the rebels talk in Chechen. The body bag traps all of Kolya’s heat. The whole goddamn thing smells like the inside of his boot. There’s a two-centimeter gap in the zipper and he puts his mouth to it as if to a nipple and sucks. He keeps waiting for the sifting of dirt, the ring of spade on rock, and when several strong hands lift the corners of the body bag, his throat clenches and he thinks: this is it, this is it, this is it. But rather than falling, he is raised. Rather than dirt, he feels the ribbed plastic of a truck bed slide under him.