kill the colonel in December 2003 corresponds sequentially with the serial numbers of the Makarov pistols found in the back of your truck when our brave lads ambushed you and took you to the Landfill in January 2002.”
Silence.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Sir.”
“This puts us in a rather difficult situation. In seeking information on the supplier of a gun used to assassinate an FSB colonel, we are immediately led to a person whom we pay to provide us with just that information.”
“I swear I had nothing to do with it, sir. Who was the assassin, sir?”
“A Black Widow. A shahidka. A separatist trained and sent by those animals in the mountains.”
“Was she taken alive … sir?”
“The shahidka was detained at a filtration point. Cleverly, she seduced the colonel, a man, I am told, so very well endowed that only the cavernous cunt of a Chechen has the latitude to accommodate him. No doubt hearing of the colonel’s great girth, the shahidka used her powers of seduction. When they were alone, she shot him.”
“But, sir, why wasn’t she checked for weapons?”
“If you still had a pair of stones between your legs, you would know that the average cunt of your womenfolk is capacious enough to conceal a rocket launcher. The colonel was a fool, no doubt, but nonetheless, he was still a colonel.”
“Yes, sir, but wouldn’t it be more prudent to trace the shahidka, rather than the gun?”
“A gun can be identified more easily than a person. There is a lesson in that.”
“But the shahidka …”
“Irrelevant.”
“I’ll do what I can, sir.”
“No, you will not do what you can do. You will do what you are told.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Numbers are the amoral language of absolute truth. These serial numbers do not lie. At some point you were in possession of that Makarov, and I will know the name and location of the next hands who held it. I was promoted to replace the departed colonel. I now hold his rank and command, and so, understandably, it is my chief priority to kill the architects of his assassination. Should I fall victim to a similar fate, and should the cuckolded captain be given my rank, I truly fear the fate of the Russian nation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see from your file that you have a father.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And he lives with you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He turned seventy-nine this year?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He survived the Great Patriotic War?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the deportations to Kazakhstan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And eleven years there on the steppe?”
“Twelve, sir.”
“And you would like him to see his eightieth birthday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give me names, Ramzan.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Or I’ll sew your stones back on just to chop them off twice.”
The Landfill filtration camp was so named for having been built, or rather sunken, into the site of a partially constructed garbage dump. Once, when Ramzan passed the site as a younger man, he watched a brontosaurial backhoe bite into the soil and scoop out a bathtub’s worth of loose earth. But after the collapse, and the subsequent wars, plans to finish the landfill were postponed then abandoned completely. Only two of the eight proposed pits, each twenty meters deep, with the surface area of a soccer field, had been excavated. The concrete and plastic foundation, which would have trapped runoff effluvia, was never installed, and so rain and snow dissolved into a knee-deep sludge at the bottom of the two earthen pits. When Ramzan was taken there in the first war, he spent three days in Pit A before two guards lowered a sixty-rung ladder, doused his feet and legs in frigid water, and led him to the two-story white building whose entranceway still bore the sign REFUSE DISPOSAL ADMINISTRATION. Petitions calling to fill in the pits circulated after the first war. An unfortunate group of sixteen women widowed by the Landfill shoveled for a month, but failed to visibly alter the swampscape. Ultimately, the symbolic benefit of filling the two pits didn’t hold up to the actual benefit of rebuilding roads, houses, schools, power plants, refineries, and hospitals. No one imagined the pits might again be used. No one imagined there would be a second war.
But there was a second war, and now, in January 2003, having encountered the lost Federal patrol, Ramzan was imprisoned for the second time. He spent eleven days belowground, this time in Pit B, while Dokka was taken to Pit A. At the very least his ears would receive a welcome rest. He descended the now-rusty sixty-rung ladder and the guard shook him from it before he reached the final