“I want that report to be lying on my desk the moment you’ve finished it. Anything else you can tell me?”
“Asiyah Kasymova.”
“What about her?”
“She is not who we always thought she was.”
PART IV
1
The Caucasus mountain range rises like a dragon’s back between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its peaks and gorges form the most daunting fortress on earth, conquered only by boisterous flora — dense and jungle-like. Several kilometers higher, the scenery travels to a different world: a kingdom of eternal cold, of snow so thick that a man could be buried and never found, where the sun casts blinding glitter but brings no warmth, and the wind murders silently.
No peak in Europe can match these impregnable mountains. Crowned by ice caps, they stand together like ancient giants — immovable, unavoidable, and unforgiving.
The Caucasus is impossible to discount — it invades your vision, and overwhelms your senses. Only here can a man draw inspiration from proximity to absolute greatness and feel unease realizing the insignificance of humankind against so powerful a backdrop.
Over centuries, the North Caucasus has seen as much death and violence as the Middle East, and then some.
Up above, in the peaks that overlook the Black Sea, a single glacier secretes water, drop by drop. The drops become a trickle as they slither down the rocks, and the trickle is joined by rivulets, to form a stream. Crashing against the craggy terrain, the stream charges down. The Caucasus shapes it, guiding it along the gorges, giving it force until — loud and wild — it becomes a river. A mountain river just like any other, one that rushes downhill, sweeping away pebbles, shifting rocks, adding strength to its thunderous current. But more trickles and streams join it along the way. By the time this water mass reaches the base of the Caucasus, it becomes known as the Terek, the most important river in the region. From its origin around the area of Vladikavkaz, the Terek flows east, along the base of the Caucasus range, some 600 kilometers until its delta unites it with the Caspian Sea.
For centuries, the Terek was the divide between the mountains and the valleys of the Caucasus. The land north of the Terek belonged to Cossack settlements. South of it, the mountains were populated by the indigenous tribes of highlanders, too numerous and varied in ethnicity to count.
Across the Terek, opposite the Cossack town of Grozny, the mountains were home to the Chechen and Ingush villages. The Chechen highland was made up of rock, mist and desolation. They prolonged their meager existence only through shepherding sheep, or raiding the valleys north of the Terek to pillage Cossack homes and kidnap women and children for sale in the Turkish slave markets. Decade after decade, the Cossacks fought back, and a volatile balance had been kept.
All it would take for the Caucasus to explode was a spark. The kind of spark brought by the Bolsheviks.
The Reds saw Cossacks as the greatest threat to their rule. Genocide had been predetermined.
To wipe out the Cossack population in the Caucasus, the Bolsheviks turned to the Chechens and the Ingush, arming their bands, reinforcing them with three Red Army divisions. The Bolshevik who had arrived to take charge of the slaughter was none other than Joseph Stalin.
Attacking, the Bolsheviks and the Chechens contested each other in savagery. It took three days to kill 12,000 people. It took three years to kill the rest.
Another three years were gone, but the land of the Cossacks was still void, as dead as the people, filled with too much blood.
In time, people returned to the valleys north of the Terek — other people, new people, those reformed by the holy light of the Revolution.
For their endeavor, the Chechens had been granted the land of the people they had massacred. But the Bolsheviks were never good on their word. They pushed the Chechens back into their mountains, to shepherd their herds as they had done for centuries. They wanted the land of the Cossacks for themselves.
It was a land rich with oil.
2
When Stalin's empire faced its darkest hour, and the country’s entire military capability strained to fight Hitler, the eastern ridges of the Caucasus facing the Caspian Sea became exposed. As Stalin saw it, the Chechen bandits returned to their old ways. At first, they sabotaged the war effort by deserting from the Red Army. Later, they began to raid the now-Russian valleys north of the Terek, behind the front line. Fearing that the Chechens would side with Hitler, Stalin decided to solve the problem once and for all. He could not afford to fight two enemies on either side of the Caucasus.
Joseph Stalin had his own methods in dealing with problems. In 1944, he ordered that the NKVD deport the Chechens to another territory.
Every Chechen.
Stalin picked the most isolated location he could think of: Kazakhstan.
The Chechen population was packed into trains at gunpoint and sent off in a matter of weeks. When they arrived, the people discovered that their new home was a barren steppe that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was Stalin’s cruel irony: From the cold mountains to the deserted, flat Asian ground. Not to the lush valleys of the Terek, but to a similar fate suffered by the people in those valleys.
Of the 400,000 exiled Chechens, at least 150,000 either perished during the deportation itself, or died from starvation in the next five years.
Like any social organism, the Chechen community in Kazakhstan adapted and survived. They accepted the environment, but not the treatment. The infertile Kazakh land was only capable of nurturing the seed of hatred planted by Stalin. A half-century later, it exploded — following another insane act concocted by a Soviet leader. Mikhail Gorbachev decided to bring the Chechens back to Russia. To a place they had never inhabited — to the land north of Terek, the former Cossack stronghold which was now given a new name.
Chechnya.
In 1992, a twenty-year-old Ahmed Sadaev left his Kazakh hometown of Karaganda, and headed to Chechnya. The young Chechen republic was being run by gangs that specialized in trafficking drugs, smuggling arms and trading slaves. Shortly, Sadaev formed his own gang that terrorized Chechnya’s dominantly Russian population. An all-out war against Russia broke out in 1995, turning Sadaev’s bandits into freedom fighters. The black-market business boomed, making Sadaev one of Chechnya’s toughest commanders. Soon after he met Oleg Radchuk, who had already made a reputation for himself, and their partnership thrived. Sadaev’s gang was feared by the federal soldiers, Chechen rivals, and local populace alike.
Such credentials paved their way to Shamil Basaev’s guerrilla cell of Islamic terrorists. “The Gynecologist”, as Basaev would soon become known, was looking for experienced fighters as he prepared to stage a big “action” against the Russians. Their target was a hospital in Budennovsk, — a small town near Stavropol founded by Cossacks in 1667, known as Holy Cross, later renamed by the Bolsheviks to glorify one of their cutthroats.
On June 14, 1995, the Chechen terrorists took 1,600 hostages, and occupied the hospital’s maternity ward. Federal forces surrounded the building, and Moscow began negotiations with Basaev that resulted in humiliation and shock.
Twenty corpses of women and children spewed blood at the feet of Shamil Basaev. For the rest of his life Sadaev would remember the way it felt, clenching the knife as he gutted pregnant women, ramming the blade to the hilt and slicing down.