Bulat’s memory traveled across the Atlantic and across time to a troubled region of the Northern Caucasuses where he and Zama had grown up, like many of his men under his command.
There, as boys in the mountains, they’d played football together, chased the same girls, went to the same schools and dreamed the same dreams.
Bulat was born in Mykrekistan, a small Russian republic slivered between the tinderbox republics of Dagestan and Chechnya near the Caspian Sea. Bulat’s father, a chemist, and Bulat’s mother, a teacher, had joined Mykrekistan’s long-standing rebellion against Russian rule.
But the struggle to create a free and independent nation was always crushed.
After a failed uprising, Bulat’s father and mother had taken him to gather with others to line the streets of their town to protest a passing Russian military convoy.
Bulat’s father stood in the path of a tank and held up the sign he’d made on their kitchen table opposing the Russian occupation. The tank’s gunner shot him. When Bulat’s mother rushed to his aid, the gunner shot her, too. Before anyone could move, the tanks rolled over their bodies as if they were animals.
Bulat was fourteen.
He ran to them but others held him back to save his life. He fought, screamed, then fell to his knees in the snow-soaked dirt, his body quaking, tears running down his face. The foul-smelling diesels growled and steel clanked as he mourned the rag dolls that were his mother and father.
In the days and weeks that followed, Bulat remembered nothing.
But the seeds of vengeance had been planted in the blood-drenched mud where his parents had died.
Bulat had been taken in by relatives and passed to various homes. He was always the outsider, the loner.
“You are an orphan of the revolution,” one uncle told him, “perhaps you are destined to lead it one day.”
As Bulat became a young man he joined the struggle with a vow to honor his parents by winning freedom.
The Republic of Mykrekistan was divided between the loyalist minority, which ruled as a Kremlin puppet, and the resistant majority determined to break free of its Russian yoke. Mykrekistan was a region of unrest. For years across the land there were enclaves of separatist fighting and talk of unifying insurgent movements for a revolutionary war.
After graduating from school with high grades and the ability to speak English and some French, Bulat became a junior engineer in a chemical factory. He also secretly trained with the underground militia and helped lead attacks against Russian military targets.
By the time he was nineteen he had killed fifty men.
Impressed by Bulat’s zeal, a wealthy warlord with international links arranged for him to study in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States.
“You are a true son of Mykrekistan, you carry our plea and hope for our emerging nation,” the warlord said.
For the next six years Bulat was away. He lived in London, Paris, Hamburg, Sydney, Toronto and New York City. He studied engineering and improved his English, his French and learned to speak some German. But the goal of his education abroad was to gather intelligence, establish cells and strengthen “freedom” networks in Mykrekistani communities around the world.
In New York City, he fell in love with Leyla, a pretty NYU student from Mykrekistan. They returned to Mykrekistan where they married and started a family, first with Lecha, their little boy, then Polla, their little girl.
Back in his homeland Bulat was embraced by rebels as if he were a returning prophet. During the years that followed he’d become a professional soldier and resumed his role leading missions against the Russian occupiers that were devastatingly effective as the potential of a revolutionary war increased.
Beyond the bloodshed, Bulat saw the future in the faces of his children, the promise that a free Mykrekistan was within their grasp. He felt it when he took them to the cemetery to kneel at the graves of his parents-to remind Lecha and Polla that his life, like those of their grandparents, was devoted to the struggle.
One year, after a brutal winter, the spring brought hope when Moscow announced free elections and the start of peace talks aimed at the transition of power and independence.
It was a lie.
The move was a ploy meant to end the toll exacted by the insurgent attacks. The election was rigged, resulting in another government that kowtowed to the Kremlin. Anger ignited unrest on every street of every village, town and city. Within weeks Mykrekistan was engulfed in war.
For weeks Moscow hammered Mykrekistan’s rebel forces with its overwhelming military might. Rockets, bombs, tanks and ground troops razed entire towns.
Bulat took his family to a safe house in one of the rebel-controlled mountain villages, but the Russian military tortured prisoners for information on rebels, then unleashed relentless attacks on their strongholds.
One night Bulat woke to the sound of distant thunder. It was approaching. Dishes and cutlery began clinking because the earth started shaking.
Bulat knew what was coming.
He moved quickly to get his family to safety just as the sky shrieked with such ferocity Bulat feared it was being ripped apart. In an instant the air spasmed with a deafening roar and great wind, then everything flashed white as though the sun had hit the earth.
Bulat was hurled into blackness.
He awoke to the smells of earth and charred meat. He called out to his family in vain, then heard strange voices. Flashlights pierced the night as rescuers extracted him from the rubble.
Then in the dust-filled blackness they found Leyla.
Eyes and mouth open, only her head was exposed. Bulat called her name and prayed as he frantically removed the debris around her.
It was futile. She was dead.
Leyla’s hand had a death-grasp on a foot.
They found the rest of his son’s remains across the room.
Bulat and the rescuers searched for Polla.
He called out to her, his shattered heart clinging to the hope that she had survived. Then they found her.
Above them.
Entangled in the roof’s wreckage.
Dead.
Bulat got her down.
Her body was intact and warm as he carried her from the horror to the tiny meadow near the house where the rescuers had arranged Leyla and Lecha. Their bodies had been wrapped in sheets.
As Bulat held Polla in his arms something inside him cleaved, separating him from this world and his connection with humanity.
From the mountainside, among the dead, he saw the distant bomb flashes and the tracer fire of the Russian onslaught across the region. Bulat had no time to mourn. He fought the enemy as the war raged for months. Thousands of Mykrekistanis died before Russian forces had regained control of the republic.
“They invade our country, murder our children, our families, and the United Nations does nothing,” Bulat told his men. “We must plunge our sword deep into Russia.”
In the months after the war, Bulat led a number of strategic strikes against Russian institutions in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. However, the FSB, Russia’s security service, paid informants to lead them to most of the rebels. They were captured and their families were located, arrested, then tortured before their eyes.
Then they were all executed.
Bulat and his surviving loyalists had escaped.
