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But when Ramzan left his house in early December 2004, two weeks before Dokka was disappeared, he still had forty-five minutes before hearing the Cossack colonel’s voice for the first time. A blue nylon duffel bag the size and slump of a dead cat dangled from his wrist; inside swung the satellite phone. He opened the back door and, stepping into the wind, crossed the field. The sun filled the frozen slant of the outhouse half roof, but the privy hadn’t yet consumed his hope and dread, as it soon would, and he passed without looking back, walking as snow hardened into the deep treads of his leather boots, following the narrow corridor of bedsheets left stiff on the clothesline, over the brittle yellow grass, over his grandparents’ plot, to the uneven edge of the field and into the forest.
Snow had thickened the ground. The quiet of his house followed him into the woods. Two hundred meters in, raising his head in a long scream, he tore a hole in the silence through which he could walk more freely. His father, he hoped, would mistake it for the wounded bawl of his pack. Before the wars, the winter had been warmer. A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted.
For the duration of the three-kilometer hike, he sca
The cell of subsistence hunting eventually metastasized into the gun-ru
In 1999, years since Ramzan had ventured into the mountains for sculptures, he traded cured meat for shotgun shells in a neighboring village. A welder there made homemade ammunition. New buckshot was prohibitively priced on the black market, so the ingenious man packed the casings with ball bearings ca
And one day the welder vanished to join the independence fighters. For the next year, Ramzan struggled to survive. The task, already a great challenge, was compounded by his diabetic father. In a country where clean water was scarce, insulin should have proved impossible. But Ramzan found a way.
In a small, unassuming collective farm, known locally as the Miracle Fields, Ramzan worked as a petrol farmer for the insurgents, or the Feds, or more likely both. The pipeline ru
In 2001, when a band of wounded rebels briefly occupied the village, Ramzan recognized the welder among their ranks. They embraced as brothers, as though bonded in a crucible more dramatic than an industrial park. The welder introduced him to the field commander, a man with very bad teeth and dental-floss stitches in his chest. Impressed by Ramzan’s familiarity with the mountains and eager to set up supply routes for the coming winter, the field commander referred Ramzan to a Saudi sheikh who had come to Chechnya to support the holy warriors in their ghazawat against the infidel oppressor.
The sheikh wasn’t the first foreign Wahhabi Ramzan had seen break sharia law, but he was the first to break it in the name of Internet poker. “The Qur’an specifically says, ‘He who plays with dice is like the one who handles the flesh and blood of swine,’ but makes no mention of playing cards,” the sheikh explained at their initial meeting, conducted between bets in the midst of the quarter-final round of one of his tournaments. The sheikh had perhaps the only working computer in Volchansk, and co