The main house was a scene of utter terror. Screams, shouts. Those who were inside wanted to come out, and those who were outside wanted to take refuge inside—both reactions being equally futile. I was among those struggling to get inside, not to seek shelter from the bombardment but to be near Mama. I found her with Tamila. They were clutching each other, huddled in a corner of the bedroom, which was roofed with a concrete slab. Their arms were so thoroughly entwined, I couldn’t have said who was protecting whom.
“Go back to the shed, quick!” cried Auntie Tamila. “Get down between the sacks of cement. Don’t worry about us—we’ll be safe here under the concrete roof.”
“I came to see how Mama did last night.”
“I’m fine—the pain is gone. Tamila’s ointment and the pills you gave me helped a lot. Now go! Get back to the shed!”
“Okay. I’ll return soon—will bring you two more tablets when things have calmed down.”
“All right, but get out of here now!”
I raced back to my little shelter and lay down on the foam pad, well shielded between the sacks of cement.
The shelling didn’t let up. One, two, three, four . . . I counted a dozen rockets in one minute. It was always the same sequence, repeated over and over. A loud whistling noise, made even more terrifying by the Doppler effect, would rend the air, moving as swiftly as thunder; violent shock waves would emanate from the point of impact; there would be an enormous explosion; and everything would be reduced to dust, smoke, debris, and rubble. Every time I heard that whistling noise, I’d hunch my shoulders up around my ears, as if that could give me a bit more protection, and with muscles tensed I’d wait for the impact and the sound of the explosion. One, two, three, four, five . . . I gave up counting. Occasionally the shelling would stop, for minutes at a time, but it always started up again. I think those pauses were just a ruse, to get us to come out of hiding.
The brain is an extraordinary organ. After half an hour of fear and dread under the bombardment, mine adapted to the situation. It transformed the whistlings, shock waves, and explosions into routine sounds that were nothing more than familiar background noise. My terror faded and my body relaxed. I was able to think about other things, just as I’d done at home when I kept music playing in the background on the radio while I was doing my homework.
First I reviewed in my head all the images I’d seen on TV, particularly the sequence in which I was looking at myself but didn’t realize it. If it hadn’t been for the woman who’d grabbed me and pulled me back, out of the path of the tank, I’d already be dead. Saved by a total stranger, for no reason at all. She had no idea who I was. If our paths ever crossed someday, somewhere, she wouldn’t recognize me and I certainly wouldn’t recognize her. I couldn’t figure out why—in this evil, disaster-ridden world I’d been living in for the past few days—people still persisted in doing good.
My wandering thoughts returned to the little shed where I’d taken refuge. I was being hunted by soldiers from my own country—militia fighters or regular troops, I didn’t know which. I wondered why I had to die like this, senselessly, perhaps blown to bits amid sacks of cement. I didn’t understand.
I didn’t understand how a nation’s army could attack a district of its own capital city and bombard its own citizens with heavy weapons. I didn’t understand how anyone could launch rockets and deploy tanks against terrified unarmed civilians just because members of a rival militia had been spotted in the area. When we’d arrived in the neighborhood late the previous afternoon, I’d seen a few of them. Four men with shaved heads and one with short hair, faces whitened with chalk or blackened with charcoal, barefoot or wearing plastic sandals—swaggering show-offs with old Kalashnikovs. Were those the notorious Chechens? Or had the real fighters sensed a trap and retreated? Rather than protecting the population, they held it hostage; instead of reassuring people, they terrified them. And it was to eliminate those fearsome warriors that the entire district had to be brought down around our heads in this deluge of fire and steel? I didn’t understand at all.
After Papa’s death—after his murder—Mama always said to me it was politics that was killing the country and killing us. I think she was wrong. In Australia they have politics, in France they have politics, in Sweden and America, too, they have politics. Why doesn’t politics kill those countries? Don’t their children keep going to school? And eventually get their diplomas? Maybe politics was like a car moving along a road: everything depended on the ability of the driver. I’d never in my life met a politician, man or woman. But I swore that if I ever got out of this mess—if I wasn’t blown to bits by a rocket, along with my sacks of cement—I was going to walk right up to the first one I saw and ask: Ladies and gentlemen of the political world, do you know what you’re doing?
After you’ve spent a good long time asking questions that are never answered, you get the feeling you’re going around in circles and racking your brain for no reason. I began to feel like this. So I decided I’d rather have silence in my head, because I’ve always thought that if you’ve got nothing worth saying, it’s better not to say anything at all. So I told my brain to be quiet. To do something else. Read, for example. Read a book under the whizzing and whistling of the rockets the way you’d read a novel with music playing in the background. A book can make you forget about death. That thought made me smile.
I pulled the leather bag from its hiding place and took out the magazine Tanisha had given me. Scarcely had I hidden the bag again when my brain, like a radar system, detected something abnormal. On high alert, my muscles tense, I listened.
A whistling noise, far away at first, was growing louder and louder at horrifying speed. No doubt about it: a rocket was coming straight toward me. In the moment before the impact, I had just enough time to throw down the magazine, wedge my body between two piles of sacks, hunch my shoulders up around my ears, and brace myself for the explosion.
The rocket went over the roof of the shed, practically scraping the top, and slammed to earth about ten meters away. It struck with such force that the ground shook, and the sacks of cement, apparently so firmly stacked, came tumbling down around me. One of them landed on my right foot, pinning me down by the ankle. At the moment of impact, an enormous mass of dust and smoke, a flaming billow, a mushroom cloud, burst from the ground. Solar eclipse. Blackout. I couldn’t see a thing. I was coughing. Then, through the cloak of darkness that blinded me, I heard shouts, wailing, screams of terror. They penetrated my dazed mind, which was jolted by the cries as if by electric shocks and finally made the connection: the rocket had struck the main house, where Mama was.
When I realized this, I panicked. I was desperate to get out, to run, to find Mama and Auntie Tamila, to help them . . . but my ankle was pinned under a sack of cement, and I couldn’t even stand up. I shrieked, I yelled for help, for someone to come get me out—but the whole world was shrieking and yelling. I tried to move the sack with my other foot, but couldn’t budge it. I began to feel a throbbing pain, and was afraid my ankle was broken.
The smoke and dust began to settle, and I kept calling out, to let people know I was there. At last someone heard me. Two men came into the shed. They were white with dust. They moved the sacks that were hemming me in, as well as the one that had fallen on my leg. I got to my feet. I flexed my ankle—it wasn’t broken, but it was very painful.
Then I looked toward the house. It was gone. The rocket had smashed right into it. It was nothing but a heap of rubble, bricks, roof tiles, splinters. Part of it was in flames. Wild-eyed men and women were wandering aimlessly through this shattered landscape.
I rushed out into the courtyard, which was strewn with debris and wreckage. Limping because of my sore ankle, I ran as fast as I could to the ruined house. It would have been a miracle if anyone had survived. Mama was somewhere under all the destruction. I began to dig feverishly with my hands, clawing with my nails, heaving away bricks and boards, weeping. Other people came to help me. Using impro
vised levers, we managed to move the concrete slab that had formed the ceiling of her room and under which she and Tamila had taken shelter.
The horror was complete. Mama and Tamila, crushed, lying in each other’s arms.
I shrieked. I wanted to hurl myself on the two bodies, but strong arms restrained me and pulled me back.
“No! Let me go! I want to stay—that’s my mother!”
“Later, later,” said a man’s firm voice, while I was being led away. “You’ll see them later. We have to get them out first.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Johnny, Known as Mad Dog
So the bombardment of Kandahar had begun at daybreak. The artillery continued to batter the district all morning. The shells burst into the air at a rapid rate, full of thunder and force—a stupendous advance over our Kalashnikovs. I was elated. The shelling would neutralize as many Chechens as possible before our assault. Too had for the other people in the district—they should have known better than to be born Mayi-Dogos.
Around midmorning, the racket from the barrage became so intense that I got a headache. I moved away from the guns, plugging my ears with my fingers. Lovelita followed me. Seeing that I wasn’t feeling well, she dug around in the makeup bag she kept in the hip pocket of her pants, and from her assortment of beauty aids—eye pencils, lip gloss, a small mirror—she triumphantly produced a ball of cotton, which she offered me. I thanked her, divided it into two smaller balls, and stuffed them into my ears. My head immediately felt better—the din from the cannons and rocket launchers was muffled, as if it were coming from far away.
The artillerymen, in contrast, were firing without protecting their ears and had to be replaced every so often. They would become completely deaf and as a result would have trouble regulating the pace of the shelling. They staggered as they walked away from their posts, dazed and dizzy. Seeing how their legs trembled, I wondered what the noise was doing to their brains.
Oddly, after a while those explosions became our normal environment, and the silence that fell during the pauses in the shelling had something so harrowing about it that I couldn’t wait to return to the natural order of things—that is, to the thunderous roar that accompanied the firing—even if the noise reached my ears only faintly through the cotton.
No one had given the order to attack. But we understood instinctively that the bombardment had ended and that the time to go for the spoils had arrived. What was surprising was that we, the Roaring Tigers, were no longer alone.
From the various districts loyal to our new president came a stream of armed men—militia fighters, soldiers from the “regular” army, and looters. But why bother saying “militia fighters, soldiers, and looters”? The phrase is redundant—I should have said simply “looters,” because that’s what they all were: jackals and hyenas coming out of their lairs, drawn by the smell of blood and plunder. Except for us, the Roaring Tigers.
This time we would put an end to the Chechens and to the arrogance of the Mayi-Dogos. We had entered their stronghold and were going to teach them a lesson they’d never forget. They’d realize once and for all that they should have let our president, an army general, take control of the government.
Little Pepper, Piston, and I went into the yard of the first house we came to. It was just a tiny wooden structure, probably built very quickly by someone who was too poor to afford anything better. We were wasting our time there. But Piston pointed out that Chechens could use the place as a hideout, so it would be a good idea to destroy it. I agreed, and with one good kick I broke down the plywood door. I nearly had a heart attack—an old man dressed all in white was sitting calmly in an armchair, reading a book! He didn’t even jump when the door was smashed open.
“On your feet! Now!” I shouted.
He raised his head and looked at me. Our eyes met, and then, without a word, he turned his gaze back to the thick volume in his hands, as if nothing had happened. I’ve often killed people at point-blank range, often threatened people with a gun, so I’m good at spotting the fear in their eyes—the terror that makes their pupils dilate—just before I pull the trigger. But I couldn’t see an ounce of fear or a glimmer of panic in the eyes of this man. On the contrary, I saw complete serenity, as if he were living in some other world. It wasn’t normal.
“D-d-drop the book, or I’ll shoot!” I heard myself stammer, though usually I fired without warning. His gaze had numbed me—my finger was paralyzed, unable to squeeze the trigger. What the hell was happening to me?
I heard a shot—Little Pepper, standing next to me, had fired. All of a sudden, I felt released. My finger tightened on the trigger and I let loose volley after volley, as if I were taking revenge for that brief display of humiliating weakness. I think I must have emptied my entire cartridge into that demon—his body was reduced to a pulp. Out of curiosity, I picked up the book he’d been reading. It was a Bible.
The book was spattered with blood. I wiped it off. I’d never owned a Bible, and an idea came to me: I ought to acquire a personal library, like a real intellectual. This book would be the first volume in my collection.
Bible in one hand and machine gun in the other, I led my men out of that first house. The second was right next to it, and, stuffing the book into a canvas bag that I’d found and hung from my waist, I headed for the front door. I had to make my subordinates forget the momentary spell of weakness they’d just seen—a leader must never display cowardice. I broke down the door of the house with the butt of my gun, while my men covered me.
“Everybody out!” I yelled. They came out, one by one—thirteen terrified people with their hands in the air. Four men, five women, and four kids.
I went inside and searched the place. There are always idiots who think that hiding under a bed is a good idea. Understandable when you’re ten years old. But if you’re over thirty and you don’t know that under the bed is the first place anyone checks when looking for a thief or a rival lover, then you’ve really got to have shit for brains. Well, this time was no exception. A guy had snuck under one of the beds—he was all curled up, trying to occupy as little space as possible, thinking he could become invisible that way. I drove him out with kicks and blows, while he squealed like a pig. I glanced in all the closets, to make sure no enemy soldiers were lurking there. There was no one else in the house.
Back outside, I pointed to the spots where I wanted them to go and shouted: “Men over here! Women over there!” And then: “On your knees!” They knelt down immediately.
We began searching the men, making them stand up one by one. We patted them down carefully to make sure they had no hidden weapons, even a kitchen knife, and in the process we stripped them of whatever we felt like taking—watches, belts, shoes, you name it. They had very little money, though. Then we searched the women, squeezing their tits, stroking their bellies, feeling their asses. And we didn’t forget to check between their legs—the wily creatures sometimes thought of the most unusual places to hide things. I ripped an earlobe snatching some pretty earrings off a woman so that I could give them to my Lovelita, who was waiting for me back in our district, as I’d told her to.
Little Pepper was furious at having turned up so little money. “Somba liwa!” he shouted, the locks of his red wig trembling. “Buy your death!” That was his way of saying, “Your money or your life!” I remembered back to a time in my military career when I’d been known as Lufua Liwa, or “Kill Death” (just hear my tread, and you were dead!). But now my name was Mad Dog.
Since no one responded to his commands, he doled out a kick to the oldest man in the group—a guy who must have been a grandfather.
“Somba liwa, or I’ll shoot!”
“My son—”
Little Pepper shot him full in the chest before he’d even finished his sentence. He fell dead, and the women began to scream and cry. Little Pepper shut them up by threatening to kill anyone who wept. The sobs were instantly transformed into faint snifflings. At that moment, Piston—who had gone in
to the house to search for electronic stuff—came out the door, pushing ahead of him a boy of twelve or thirteen. The kid was crying. It was all an act, of course.
“I found him hiding above the ceiling!” yelled Piston, giving the brat a boot in the rear.
Shit! How could I have forgotten that people can hide in the crawl space above the ceiling? In retrospect I was scared, because if he’d been armed he would have killed us all, one by one, from his superior strategic position. From now on, I’d even check the trees to make sure there weren’t any monkeys lying in wait.
“Why didn’t you come out with the others?” I shouted at the kid, furious not because he’d posed a danger but because he’d shown he was cleverer than me, the leader of an elite commando unit.
He said nothing and continued to cry.
“You’re a Chechen—that’s why you were hiding! Get down on your knees!”
“He’s my son! I swear he isn’t a Chechen! He’s only a child—he was just scared to come out! I swear he isn’t a Chechen!” cried one of the women.
These people didn’t know me. They thought I was a weakling whose heart would melt under the influence of tears and entreaties. But a Chechen is a Chechen—and a Mayi-Dogo kid, whatever his age, was a Chechen in the making.
“Shut up!” I yelled at the mother. And blam! I fired into the throat of the kneeling boy.
The horrified mother threw herself at the body of her child, but Little Pepper pumped a volley into her before she reached it. She fell to the ground, head first. Well, we’d wasted enough time and had to get going. We decided to kill all of the men. They were Mayi-Dogos anyway. Magnanimously, I spared the lives of the women, telling them to leave the district immediately and head for the areas we had already pacified. I know, I know—someday my kind heart is going to get me into serious trouble.
When we came out into the street, we saw some people wandering around the yard of a house about twenty meters away. It was pretty bold of them to have stayed there without taking cover, seeing as everyone knew we weren’t going to deal lightly with those we found in the district. Were they trying to lure us into a trap? Advancing cautiously with our weapons cocked, we drew closer and saw the ruins of a large house that had been completely destroyed by the shelling. Dazed, hollow-eyed people were digging feverishly through the debris. For the most part they were silent, except for a girl with a bag slung bandolier-style across her front. She was crying hysterically and calling, “Mama! Mama!” while the others tried to restrain her. Still, there was no guarantee that Chechens weren’t hiding among them—we had to secure the entire area.
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