A welcome quiet suffused the cabin, and Ramzan basked in it before fear retook him. There were two armored personnel carriers, two UAZ jeeps, and a tank crowned with a machine-gun turret.

“Turn around!” Dokka shouted and shook Ramzan’s arm by the sleeve of his jacket. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”

But he kept the ball of his foot pressed to the brake pedal. “They have already seen us.”

It was true. The machine-gun turret had swiveled to face them and snow shot up behind the jeeps as they accelerated toward the crest.

“If we run, we’re fucked. If we wait and are reasonable, we might survive. We’re just sitting here. It’s not yet a crime to be alive. You might even get a chance to finish telling me about your wife.”

The jeeps stopped twenty meters ahead and idled, while behind them, the tank gradually ground up the incline. The soldiers who emerged were not the tattooed kontraktniki, like those Ramzan remembered from the zachistka; no, compared to those hulking Russian bears these were half-starved jackals. We may live to see the sunset, he thought.

Four soldiers bearing machine guns approached. He raised his open palms to the Feds. Dokka followed suit.

“You went to a filtration camp before. You survived. They didn’t hurt you,” Dokka stammered, unable to convince even himself. Ramzan wanted to grab Dokka by his ears and shake that stupid self-deluded skull until its one grain of logic rang out. Leaning forward, he felt the empty space between his legs.

“Stop speaking, Dokka. Just be quiet.”

One of the soldiers approached the driver’s door. He had gone at least a week without shaving, but the growth couldn’t conceal the concavity of his cheeks. All around the snow stretched indifferently.

“Water,” the soldier croaked. Misunderstanding the request, Ramzan held out his identification card.

“Water,” the soldier again said. “We’ve been eating muddy snow for days. We need clean water. Can’t you speak Russian?”

“I think we should give him water,” Dokka whispered, his opened hands still facing the windshield. It was the first sensible thing Dokka had said that day.

“I have water at my feet,” he told the soldier. “Don’t shoot me.”

The soldier accepted the grease-smeared canteen, sighing as he brought the brim to his lips, and his relief became Ramzan’s. The soldier didn’t suspect that the water had spent the previous day circulating through the engine radiator.

Dokka’s hands remained skyward when they were ordered out of the truck. Ramzan protested briefly and halfheartedly; he had, after all, given that first soldier a canteen of water, and was this how his hospitality was to be repaid? But he dropped the remonstration when that first soldier, his thirst now quenched, pressed the gun barrel to Ramzan’s forehead. They lay facedown in the snow with their wrists bound behind their backs in plastic zip-strips. To keep his head above the snow, Ramzan had to arch his back and puff out his chest and flail like a beached whale. From that uncomfortable vantage, he watched the soldiers unpack the sacks of rice and grain from the truck bed. A few more seconds and they would find the Makarov handguns, fragmentation grenades, Semtex bricks, and lead wires, and he would die here, flopping like a goddamn sea mammal, many kilometers from home. How he wished he had stitched his address into his trouser inseam. He hadn’t taken the precaution for fear that the security forces would implicate his father, but now, with snow melting through his jacket, he could think of no inhumanity grimmer than an unmarked grave. Perhaps he would be forced to lie upon Dokka to save ammunition. Such a death would insult the gunrunner. He would demand his own bullet. For the water canteen, they could at least do him that small honor. Beside him, Dokka had given up. The heat from his face had thawed a soup bowl in the snow. He wept into it.

“Don’t worry,” Ramzan said. His tone surprised him. He could see the end and he was calm. “Today, we’ll find out whether the imams or commissars were right.”

“You’re brave,” Dokka said. “Here I am, crying. I dishonor you.”

How often is immense unhappiness mistaken for courage? He opened his mouth and filled it with snow. It melted as he listened to Dokka’s sobs. The soldiers at least would remember which of the two had faced his bullet with clear eyes.

But the soldiers, in an act of unexpected compassion and restraint, decided not to summarily execute them. After finding the weapons, they pulled Ramzan to his feet, then Dokka. Shaking their heads at the mucus frozen to Dokka’s lip, they turned to Ramzan, and spoke only to him. They were lost. Three nights earlier, the cold had killed their radio, and they had driven through blanketed fields in vain search for human habitation. They hadn’t been tracking the red truck. It was an accident. As the gun barrels pointed them toward the UAZ jeep, the commanding officer asked, “Are you familiar with the Landfill?”

Ramzan nodded.

“Can you give us directions?”

“Directions?”

“I told you. We’re lost.”

He could not believe it.

“If you take us there, you’ll live. At least until we get there. That much, I guarantee. And likely after. I know a lieutenant there.”

“Okay.” He didn’t know what else to say. The commanding officer beamed gratefully. Afraid the man would kiss him, Ramzan made the first move to the jeep. His captors followed.

The soldiers led them down the hillside, tenderly, so they didn’t lose their balance. The commanding officer opened the jeep door for Ramzan and cut the zip-strip with the serrated edge of a hunting knife.

“Watch your head,” cautioned the commanding officer, who would never tell another soul of his military service. The woman he was to wed in three and a half years would know him as a hundred people — a husband, a father, a churchgoer, an elementary school teacher, a charity worker — and would never find a commanding officer in that population she so dearly loved.

Ramzan slid to the far side of the seat. Dokka sat beside him. A few uncomfortable minutes passed before the commanding officer reappeared in the passenger seat with a Marlboro Red, the rebel field commander’s favorite brand, dangling from his lips. The officer and other soldiers watched him expectantly.

“What?” Ramzan asked.

“You haven’t fastened your seat belt,” the commanding officer observed.

“My seat belt?” He glanced around. All the soldiers were wearing seat belts.

“We’re not going anywhere until you buckle up,” the commanding officer said.

Ramzan nodded, yes, of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe. He buckled up, and took a compass from his jacket pocket. “Turn around,” he said. “The Landfill is behind us.”

Within an hour Ramzan directed the jeep to the road that would take them to the Landfill. Ovals of melted snow appeared in the fields. Strangely curvaceous patches of damp dirt. The sun shone. At one point he yawned and felt the nudge of Dokka’s elbow. The hollow-cheeked, grease-lipped soldier dozed beside him.

“I think Akhmed is sleeping with my wife,” Dokka said. Ramzan turned back to the window. Silvery branches darted past. The following summer would be beautiful. He had heard all he cared to hear about Dokka’s wife.

Early December 2004. Two weeks before Dokka disappeared. In the cabin of the abandoned logging truck. The first conversation with the Cossack colonel.

“Ramzan Geshilov?”

“Reporting, sir.”

“Do you recognize my voice?”

“I don’t, sir. Are you filling in for Captain Ivan Fyodorovich?”

“Is he the officer you report to?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, who?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have fucked the wife of your superior officer eighty-seven times, and only the first three were before they married. Do you understand me?”