When the Nines Roll Over by David Benioff Read Free Book Online Page B

him quizzically for a moment and then laughed. It took Leksi a second to realize they were laughing with him, not at him.
    â€œNo,” said Nikolai, clapping him on the back. “Neither do I.”
    After nightfall they unrolled their sleeping bags and slept in turns, one man always keeping watch. Leksi pulled the first shift but could not sleep after Nikolai relieved him. Every few minutes a dog would howl and then his brothers would answer, until the hills echoed with lonely dogs calling for each other. An owl screeched from a perch nearby. Leksi lay in his bag and stared up through the pine branches. A half-moon lit the sky and he watched the silhouetted clouds drift in and out of sight. He lay with his knees pressed against his chest for warmth and flinched every time the wind blew a stray pine needle against his cheek. He listened to Nikolai puffing on another hand-rolled cigarette and to Surkhov grinding his teeth in his sleep.
    In a few hours he might be fighting for a house he had never seen before tonight, against men he had never met. He hadn’t insulted anyone or fucked anyone’s girlfriend, he hadn’t stolen any money or crashed into anyone’s car, and yet these men, if they were here, would try to kill him. It seemed very bizarre to Leksi. Strangers wanted to kill him. They didn’t even know him, but they wanted to kill him. As if everything he had done was completely immaterial, everything he held in his mind: the girls he had kissed; the hunting trips with his father; the cow he had drawn for his mother when he was seven, still hanging in a frame on her bedroom wall; or the time he got caught sneaking glances over Katya Zubritskaya’s shoulder during a geometry test, and old Lukonin had made him stand up right there and repeat, louder and louder while the students laughed and pounded their desks: I am Aleksandr Strelchenko and I am a cheat, and not even a good cheat. These memories were Aleksandr Strelchenko’s, and so what? None of it mattered. None of it was real except here, now, the snow, the soldiers beside him, the house on the hilltop. Why did they need the house? To observe the valley. What was there to observe? Trees and snow and wild dogs, the Caucasus mountains looming in the distance. Leksi curled up inside his sleeping bag and pictured his severed head resting on a Grozny doorstep, his eyes the eyes of a dead fish on its bed of ice.
    The midnight shift would have just started at the bottling plant back home where his older brother worked. If Leksi hadn’t joined the army he would be there now, inside a warm building with dusty lead-glass windows, the overhead lights soft and yellow and steady. Maybe a conveyor belt had broken and Leksi was asked to fix it; he saw himself replacing a cracked roller and then regrooving the rubber belt. A radio played softly and Leksi chatted with the foreman about politics. Everyone knew everyone else; they had all grown up together. There were friends and there were enemies but everyone had their reasons. He would like Bobo, say, because Bobo was the goalie for their hockey club; he would hate Timur because Timur’s wife was very beautiful and Timur wore tight Levi jeans that his brother sent him from America. That would be logical. That would be a life that made sense. And maybe at night he would dream of adventure, of sleeping in the snow with his rifle by his side, of storming hilltop houses and battling the Chechen terrorists, but it would just be a dream, and in the morning he would drink his coffee and read the newspaper and cluck sadly to learn that three more boys were killed in Chechnya.

    At three A.M. they climbed the hill. They left their packs behind, wrapped tightly in waterproof tarps and buried below the snow, marked with broken twigs and pinecones. The moon was bright enough to make flashlights unnecessary. Surkhov and Nikolai seemed like different people now; since waking they had barely spoken. They had