“There’s no working radio tower in the country. It’s all static,” she said, without looking to him.

“I know. But 102.3 plays the best. Not too tinny. Full and robust. If a cello were to perform static, it would sound like this.”

She shook her head and turned the dial. “I prefer 93.9,” she said. She still hadn’t looked at him.

“It’s too thin and monotone. There’s no variation. It just sounds like static.”

“And that’s why I like it,” she said. “It sounds like static is supposed to sound.”

He reeled the dial to the far end. “106.7,” he said. “Just listen.” Snatches of foreign transmissions laced the white noise. Syllables surfaced like glowing bubbles from the harsh swirl. Voices in a storm. She turned the dial back to 93.9 and they listened to static-sounding static. Fog fell over the fields. A bus was parked in a meadow. Paint chips pointed down a gravel road to the rusted remains of a tractor factory. Dormant smokestacks. Nowhere was a fire less likely to be found than inside a factory furnace.

“Do you worry about land mines?” he asked.

“Not really. There’s a steel plate mounted beneath the driver’s seat.”

“Does it happen to cover the passenger’s seat, too?”

She had to smile, but before she shook her head and said he could amputate his own legs now, her gaze hardened around a figure a hundred meters down the road. An elderly woman with the posture of a parenthesis. A twine-strapped bundle of blue tarpaulin hung from her shoulders. A lavender dress hem fluttered at her ankles.

“Don’t you know this road isn’t safe on foot?” Sonja asked through the open window. “Do you need a ride?”

The woman shrugged the blue tarpaulin, and watching her Akhmed wanted to reach out, to wipe the damp grooves of her forehead and tell her that he too had suffered Sonja’s questions.

“Only a fool would sit in a truck,” she said, pace unchanged.

“But we are doctors,” Akhmed said, emphasizing we.

She glanced at him and back to the road. “And you’re sitting in a truck.”

Thirty minutes of empty fields passed without remark before Akhmed and Sonja reached the first checkpoint. An OMON lieutenant approached, followed by two scrawny privates who mimed his movements down to the way he chewed his bottom lip between his sentences; and contemplating these slight, unconscious facsimiles, Akhmed wondered if fear so consumed the young men that they would fuck, fart, and die on their superior’s schedule. Sonja passed the lieutenant their documents: two ID cards, one expired medical license, and three letters penned by Federal colonels, which persuaded the lieutenant more compellingly than their legitimate documents. A hundred meters past the checkpoint she reached across his lap and slid the letters into the glove box. She still hadn’t looked at him. He grabbed her wrist before she could shut it and pulled out more than two dozen envelopes. The letters varied in formality, from official endorsements typewritten on Defense Ministry stationery to a few approving words scrawled on the back of a rebel field map. The signatories formed an index of the top brass on both sides of the war: General of the Federal Army Valentin Vladimirovich Korabelnikov, Special Battalion Vostok Commander Sulim Yamadayev, Commander of the Northern Caucasus Military District Alexander Ivanovich Baranov, the deceased mujahideen leader Ibn Al-Khattab, separatist field commanders Ruslan Gelayev and Shamil Basayev, even a deputy from Putin’s office, both rebels and Feds cohabiting peacefully by the thin partition of letter envelopes.

“Be careful with those,” she said, pulling her hand away.

“Why do you have these?” he asked, as the first of long-overdue misgivings unsettled him.

“For unhindered travel. They take care of bureaucratic formalities.”

“I wish you’d told me before I’d sewn shut my pockets.”

She smiled.

“Have you actually met these people?”

“Of course not. Most are from the man we’re going to see. He says he can steal the spots off a snow leopard.”

“A criminal?”

She shook her head and glared at him with complete disdain.

“Is common decency too much to ask?”

“Excuse me?” she said, but he knew she couldn’t claim affront. Common decency was the one thing he had that she didn’t, and he held on to it as a rare, improbable triumph.

“You said every doctor and nurse to ever work for you has left but Deshi. Do you think that might have something to do with the way you treat people?”

“I think you’d better have brought your boots, because you’re walking home.”

He spoke in a measured tone as her knuckles whitened on the wheel. “You think I’m an idiot. An embarrassment to your profession. You are probably right. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“I think you need to be quiet, Akhmed.”

“Why?” He didn’t dare turn to her.

“Because two days ago, I thought I was adding a competent doctor to my staff. Instead I’m babysitting a child who speaks in riddles and a man who couldn’t identify his own foot if he tripped over it.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to treat me dismissively. I’m trying to help you.”

“Actually that gives me every right to treat you dismissively. It gives me every right to dismiss you and the girl and fuck off back to London where even eighteen-year-old biology students know better than to give an unresponsive patient a questionnaire.”

“The Feds are looking for Havaa,” he said. “You’re this prodigy surgeon, right? Leaving London to come back and save lives? You are saving hers, Sonja. Each day. And you don’t even have to cut off her legs.”

“How do you even know they want her? Why would they care about some child?”

“An informer was waiting at my house yesterday.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll be quiet.”

“What could you possibly be sorry for?”

“I’m sorry for you. Something in you is broken.”

“Another razor-sharp diagnosis, Dr. Akhmed.”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“I’ve amputated one thousand six hundred and forty-three legs. You’ve done three, and you think you have the right to diagnose me?”

“I’m not diagnosing you.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” She turned fully from the road and he saw her pupils, as wide as kopek coins, for the first time that morning. He shook his head at the windshield. Brown fields were everywhere.

And Grozny appeared, gray on the horizon as the road devolved to a basin of broken masonry and trampled apartment blocks. Cigarette kiosks slouched on the sidewalk. Akhmed wished he had taken paper and a pencil with him to capture his first trip to the city. Sonja brought the jeep to a crawl as they tipped into a crater. The street rose and disappeared somewhere above them, the whole world of dark wet earth, the tires spinning and reaching the lip. No scent drifted through the open window but the engine burn. No sewage or raw waste. Nothing. A flattened bureau basked in the sun, knobs pried out. The flicker of an oil-drum fire three blocks out came as a small, welcome signal of human habitation. Behind the flame a man turned a rotisserie fashioned from clothes hangers and a gardening stake on which was impaled a pink fist of flesh. Two pigeon claws revolved over the fire. Behind the fire, wooden gangplanks connected pyramids of rubble. Some lay over craters, others were suspended two or three stories high, bridging alleyways. This is Grozny? He should have visited sooner.

“It’s like scaffolding,” he said, the first words in many kilometers.

“Built by the street kids that live in the ruins,” she said, and in a tone of apology added, “You were smart to bring her in.”

No faces peered from the yawning walls. The thought of his dreary, soul-crushingly backward village sent an unfamiliar flare of pride up his chest.

“How do they survive?” he asked, glancing at a building with more plank bridges than floors. An ingenious strategy; these young engineers were clearly ethnic Chechen. Collapsed floors would take construction crews years to lift and rebuild, but plank bridges could be reassembled in minutes.