SOKOLOV WATCHED THE slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration. He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this situation at essentially zero. And yet this Muslim Negro, the victim of a surprise raid, handcuffed to an unwilling hostage, and squarely in Sokolov’s rifle sights, had apparently managed to make good his escape simply by taking advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself at random. Of course, the distraction posed by the explosion and collapse of the building had helped him enormously, but it was admirable nonetheless. From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.