MadetoBeBroken by Lyra Byrnes Page B

be south-southeast, he realized automatically,
accustomed to mapping the landscape wherever he went, the direction of London
and airports. If he walked long enough, a village would rise up on the horizon
eventually, and with it, vehicles, a telephone. He could head to Glasgow and
make contact with the one person he trusted in this benighted country, or
return to London and try to right what had gone horribly wrong. Or he could
just fly back, back to rubble and tainted water and no bread and hundreds of
starving people, grown cunning through desperation, who looked to him as a
savior now that they had lost their first faith.
    He had seen the question in the girl’s face, the question he
had asked himself after the grenade ripped him from everything he had ever
loved, everything he had ever been. Why not work with the Russians? Better to be well-fed under the Moscow boot than to die in a frozen field with
nothing to take into the afterlife but your independence. But was it? He had
read her dossier—all she did was travel from one embattled hellhole to another,
talking strongmen like him out of reclaiming their manhood, urging them to give
in to a greater power, to bend their necks to the boot. And when she could not
sway them, a bullet sent the message instead.
    No, Russia would not forgive her breakaway children for what
they had done—for what he had done. His beloved land would be punished
for a hundred hundred years by those brutes, and American would hand them fresh
lashes as the old ones wore out.
    He knew this because he had tried another way. If only she
understood that, she would not still be asking the wrong questions.
    As he had suspected, there was a deep indentation at the
foot of the crag, shaded by rocks and shrubbery. He pushed aside the thistles
and found a ledge on which to sit, gazing through the flowers that blurred the
land outside. Caves, trenches dug into frozen earth—the war had made him a
feral creature more used to savage hidey-holes than warm beds. He dug out a
cigarette—there were only three left—and lit it. Just as well he was running
out. A truly strong man had no addictions. Addictions were another form of
weakness, and vulnerability easy for an enemy to exploit. He had to be stronger
than ever, not just in his body, his conviction, his intelligence, but, as the
American writer had said, strong at broken places. His leg throbbed but he
would not show it. Unlike the girl’s internal wound, his had scarred over,
sealing the three girls he had loved inside forever. Love was weakness and he
would never feel it again.
    So what would she ask next, he mused? “Alexi, did you order
the massacre of a train full of civilians?” “Did you stab a French diplomat
outside a theater in Grozny?” “Did children, innocents, your own people, die
because of what you have become?”
    Yes, yes, yes.
    * * * * *
    By the time he opened his eyes again, the cigarette was a
log of ash against the lichen-spongy rocks and long shafts of orange light
slashed across the landscape. He had not dreamed, only vanished from his
thoughts into a dark and silent place, and reappeared in his cave behind a
screen of thistles.
    I could live here, sleep here, die here, but I have a
duty to perform.
    For the first time since the murder of his family, his
thoughts were in Chechen, not Russian.
    Golden light glowed from the windows of the cabin as he
approached it in the deepening twilight. This place of torture and
interrogation looked as humble and welcoming as any crofter’s cottage in any
sleepy Western village. Is this a place I could live in, sleep and die in, he asked himself? No, he had a mission and nothing would sway him from it, not
the red bird’s beautiful body or the light that splashed warmth against the
grass.
    The white van was still resting crooked on the gravel, but
there was another car next to it, a round-shouldered black vehicle like those
London taxi drivers used. His steps slowed instinctively as he