Arkady leaned, opened the passenger door and pushed Minin. But as the door swung wide, Minin swung with it and hung on to the outside of the door, pressed against the glass. He broke the window with the Stechkin, got his elbows in and aimed. Arkady tapped the brake. As Minin fired, the side window behind Arkady exploded. The door swung out and Minin’s hat flew off. The motorcycle burned far behind, the lights of the Ring Road overpass appeared ahead. Arkady kicked the door open again with his right foot and with his left pushed the gas pedal all the way down. Minin’s weight and the force of air resistance forced the door back in. Minin began firing as soon as the door swung inward, spraying the rear and side windows as Arkady steered across the shoulder of the road and hit the corner of the overpass.

The dark under the ramp was enormously quiet. When the Zhiguli came out the other side, the passenger door hung like a broken wing and Minin was gone.

Arkady had no guide left, but he was fairly certain by now that he was returning to a place he knew. He brushed glass off the bag. Air tunneled sideways through the hanging door and out the shattered windows.

Arkady remembered that Soviet cars always evolved, doing with fewer and fewer luxuries.

This was the new model.

The first time Arkady came through the village, women were selling flowers on the side of the road. Not tonight. The place seemed abandoned, its windows dark, as if the houses themselves were trying to hide. Sunflowers bobbed in the rain. A cow, startled by his headlights, bolted from a garden.

On the road, water was pooling in tread tracks. Tanks had kneaded mud to a soft consistency, and where they had moved two abreast, they had rolled over fences and fruit trees. The Zhiguli had front-wheel drive, and Arkady plowed ahead in low gear as if he were steering a boat.

The fields on the other side of the village were flatter and the way was straighter, though more chewed up. Half a kilometer on, the right shoulder of the road was crushed by tracks emerging from a field. Mud stood stacked like bricks, showing how the tanks had maneuvered onto the road, advancing one tread to pivot on the other. It would have looked like a military parade, Arkady thought, except that it had started from a potato field, with as few witnesses as possible.

The rest of the way was smooth enough for him to use only running lights. Fields stretched in rows from gray to black, and with the rain the road looked like a causeway between bodies of water.