1990
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
Early in 1990, you lay sprawled on the ground at an execution site. You lay in a sea of blood. You had been part of the unit before, part of “S,” but now, with one exception, you had been eradicated. The one survivor was looking up, devotion in his eyes. Peering up at the man who stood at the top of the chain of command. At the man known as the Director, the General, and by various other names.
The man had aged.
Our own homeland, he said. To the dog. The Soviet issued the command, he said. That we be eliminated. They ordered it. We are the evidence, they say, that must never be discovered. And so we must be destroyed.
The old man raised his gun, aimed it at the dog.
The dog did not flinch. He listened.
All around the man and the dog a terrible stench hung in the air. The smell of countless deaths, of so much spilled blood.
The old man gazed at the dog.
The dog’s name, this dog’s name, was Belka.
The unit has disbanded, the old man said. Do you understand that?
Belka listened. He heard. And he answered: Woof!
Tears spilled from the old man’s eyes. His right hand, gripping the pistol, trembled. I just, he said, I just…I just, I just…
Woof! the old man cried.
“I am going to lose my mind,” he told Belka. “And you, you are going to live.”