Generally, I'm glad that life brought me together with the SOBR guys. Probably because life constantly put them in dangerous situations, and life itself constantly showed them its dark and dirty side, they exuded a strength—not ostentatious, loud, and arrogant, but calm, genuine—that binds our fragile existence and instills a sense of reliability.

No, they, of course, were not happy to be in Chechnya. Moreover, together we cursed Moscow politicians and felt sorry for the untrained boys thrown into this bloody mess. But since they found themselves in this war (although I can repeat what I wrote in the newspaper then: it is not the business of SOBR units to participate in combat operations; they—special rapid response detachments—were created to fight bandit groups), they tried to do their work honestly and thoroughly. That's probably why I never heard bad words addressed to them: no one accused them of cowardice, no one contemptuously threw "Marauders" after them, as, for example, OMON officers were called, and they were not noticed in abuses at filtration points.

About a year later, at the height of the State Duma election campaign, I flew to Novosibirsk with Vladimir Lukin to support Yabloko. I called Yuri Zaitsev: "Gather the guys. I'll tell them about our program." When I arrived, the guys I had met in that wartime Grozny January were waiting for me in his cramped commander's room. Vodka on the table, sausage sliced... "Just don't try to campaign to us. We met there..."

There was one more meeting with a familiar SOBR officer, a Muscovite. Quite unexpected and accidentally disrupting what I thought then was an important meeting.

When Vlad Listyev was killed, I started an independent newspaper investigation, openly announcing it on television and providing my editorial phone number.

That, of course, is a separate story, with many thrilling adventures.

But one day I received a call from the MVD, and they said that we were doing a good job, but it could end badly for me ("You'll have trouble, and we'll have another corpse," said the deputy minister), especially since they had spotted either an observer or a sniper in the attic of the building on the opposite side of the street from my office window.

So I started walking with SOBR protection.

Our first meeting with these guys probably deprived us of important information, but on the other hand, it might have protected us from some danger.

Another phone call:

"I want to tell you something important... Very important..."

"Come to the editorial office..."

"That's impossible."

"Come to the editorial office. I'll come out to the street."

"That's impossible."

"Where, when? I'll come."

"At your place. In Peredelkino. At the crossroads near the children's sanatorium," I heard, surprised by my interlocutor's knowledge of where I lived.

We agreed to meet the next day at eleven in the morning.

"You won't go alone," the colonel from GUOP, who was part of the investigative team, warned me. "The guys will cover you..."

I remember the road from the dacha to the crossroads. Who is waiting? What is waiting? Will I get closer to the riddle or get even more confused? Who are these guys who will be covering me? How will I find them? And they me? And anyway, why all this? It's all nonsense...

Something like that, perhaps, flashed through my mind then, as I turned left off my small street and walked along the forest into some unknown. Or maybe nothing like that flashed. I was just going to one of the secret meetings, of which—given the specifics of my journalistic specialization—there had been many in my life. By the way, I was also covered, and I myself covered (it's like normal safety precautions), though usually these were fellow journalists or simply—close friends. Representatives of the state were covering me for the first time in my life, and that in itself was interesting...

Garages, now right, then left again... Here it is, the crossroads... A Volga... Is it the one? Is it him?

The Volga's door swung open... And a guy jumped out, familiar to me from Grozny, back then, in January...

The one I saw in Mozdok when he came for beds for the SOBR officers based at the dairy factory.

"What a meeting!" I exclaimed happily.

We hugged, and I started asking how the guys were? Was everyone alive? Was anyone wounded?