Free Fall (11 page)

Our job was to attack the most resistant positions, neutralise the snipers, and as official orders from general command said, ‘secure the quality of the movement of the main troops and support the liberation and transfer of the civilian population into the federal territories'. We had a support team behind us – the special paratrooper assault unit called ‘Thunder'.

Their unit, just like ours, was completely independent. They travelled in armoured cars and had about ten tanks. They were perfect cut-throats, true assassins – wherever they went, they always wreaked havoc.

We saboteurs, on the other hand, travelled in a BTR armoured personnel carrier, also known among the soldiers as a ‘coffin', because its thin armour often got pierced in battle, even under fire from a mere Kalashnikov. To survive a surprise attack it was important to travel on top and not inside; at the first sign of gunfire you could jump off the car and take a defensive position. In the city, however, the BTR had its advantages; having wheels and not tracks, it moved faster and handled better than a regular tank.

We had two of our own drivers; they were hotheads, pros who would have taken us to hell and back without batting an eye. The older one had been in Afghanistan, and he told us that even though he had nearly burned to death in the BTR many times, he had never left it in the road – he'd always managed to get back to base, even with the wheels in flames.

*

According to commanding orders, we were supposed to use a strategy called ‘passive advance'. The units enter the city one at a time, occupy a position other than their own and then defend it until another group comes to take over. Then they advance, gradually approaching their actual combat position. Our objective was to reach the ‘line of fire', but we had to cross half the city to get there; we would stay in constant radio contact with command. This strategy is particularly effective in urban combat, because even at the most difficult and dangerous points it ensures the creation of a safe zone, which is invaluable for the assault units who always need to be restocked with weapons, to stay connected to the support troops and have a path for transporting the wounded.

When we entered the city the first skirmishes were already over. We went through streets full of dead Arabs and Afghans, with the bodies of some of our infantrymen and a few civilians. Many civilians came out from cellars or other hiding places and ran in the direction we were coming from. These were simple people who had lost everything. Their life was an endless nightmare; the way these people lived – or rather,
subsisted
– in war was terrible.

From the start of the First Chechen Campaign, the civilians hadn't seen a single day of peace. Those who weren't able to flee to Russia or the nearby republics, like Dagestan, Ossetia or some other place, had been forced to witness the sad spectacle of two armies destroying their homes, killing their families, and making their existence a hell on earth. Each of their faces was
marked by signs of fatigue and a fatal indifference towards everything.

In war, the living made more of an impression on me than the dead. To me, the dead looked like a bunch of receptacles that someone had used and then thrown away – I looked at them as I would broken bottles. Whereas the living – the living had this horrible emptiness in their eyes: they were human beings who had seen beyond madness, and now lived in the embrace of death.

It was terrible to see old people with children in their arms running in the opposite direction as we marched by, without stopping for a second or turning around. Our paras showed those people the way out, gave them some food even if they had very little, since they were assault troops and only carried their weapons and the minimum needed for survival. Some civilians would take the food and recount what they had gone through during the terrorist siege; others would reveal where the snipers were and wish the soldiers luck. There were many people in tears, hysterical, desperate.

At one point a woman appeared, filthy and with a tangle of hair on top of her head as if it had exploded; in her arms she was holding a little baby covered in blood. The woman walked towards our car with crazed eyes, shouting, asking for help. When she was a few metres away, I could see that the baby had been dead for some time. Her belly was split open, a big black hole that the mother had tried to plug up with torn pieces of rags and sheets. I felt horrible.

Nosov yelled to the civilians:

‘Someone help her for the love of God! Take her out of here, or she could get run over!'

A pretty girl emerged from the crowd. From the look of her she seemed Chechen. She put her arm around the woman and said gently:

‘Let me hold your baby, let me have her for a while, so you can rest. We still have a long way to go . . .'

The mother gave the baby's body to the girl, who took that blood-encrusted corpse and hugged it in her arms as if it were still alive. Only then did the woman move away from our cars and return to the line, and as she walked she repeated mechanically:

‘We have to find a doctor, when we get out of here, we have to find a doctor for my baby . . .'

Our captain looked at each one of us. We tried to appear calm, but the tension was evident. We couldn't wait to throw ourselves onto the line of fire.

‘Relax, boys, relax. We'll get to them very soon . . .' His words were full of contempt – it sounded as if he'd spat them out. It spurred us on. Maybe because he was able to transmit his rage in a dignified way, putting into words the emotions we all felt.

Once a medical officer said something about Nosov that, when I thought about it later, really seemed true, right on the mark. I was at the hospital where I had gone for treatment after my first wound. The friendly surgeon and
I were discussing the likelihood of making it out alive from this bloodbath we'd ended up in. I was complaining, saying that it took a lot of luck not to get hurt in war, and then he said to me:

‘If you want to save yourself, friend, you have to do what your captain did.'

‘What do you mean?'

And, smiling, he said:

‘All you have to do is marry the war, love her, and she'll love you forever . . .'

Personally, I wasn't so worried about facing the enemy. What really tormented me was the reality of the situation. No matter how many Arabs I killed, I knew I couldn't change the fate of the war, or of any one of us.

Our column advanced quickly. The battle was getting closer and closer – there was the constant sound of machine gun fire, hand grenades blowing up, grenade launchers being shot . . . A disorientated group of enemies would pop up here and there – we killed them without even getting off the cars. The heavy guns on the turrets took care of them. Like rats gone berserk they ran in every direction; they hid in the houses, but none of us went after them – we left them to the infantry, we couldn't lose time on them. A real battle awaited us further on.

Meanwhile command kept sending directives over the radio, keeping us apprised of the situation. Just when we
were almost at the line of fire, three more orders came, one after the other. First they told us to join up with a paratrooper unit poised to penetrate the defence in one area, but we had no support. The order was immediately cancelled because in the meantime the paras had come across a group of explorers and infantrymen and had already taken positions to break through the line, so we were no longer needed. A second later we heard that the affected area had been attacked and breached by the 102nd paratrooper division, who were on the road. The third order – to advance and wait for exact coordinates – came when we were at the line of fire. The battle was right there in front of us, we would find our men along on the road, busy defending the positions they'd occupied in civilian buildings and homes.

We had to drive through a small public housing district. All the buildings were destroyed, and our support units had set up an emergency hospital right there in the ruins, plus a few distribution centres for food and weapons.

I passed through that district, filled with our infantry and medics going to and fro, each with a specific task, and I felt like I had gone behind the set of a theatre. On stage the show went on, while in the wings there were many people working, putting something big into motion, something very important that many people placed even above their own lives.

A guy in a medical unit uniform asked us if we had enough medication. He was holding a box full of individual medical kits. We only had one kit for each of us, so Nosov told him:

‘Sure, son, toss a few over, you never know . . .'

The skinny kid threw ten medi-kits, held together with a rubber band, over to our car. Then he yelled:

‘Lots of snipers on the roofs, too many . . . watch out for the snipers on the roofs!'

Nosov grabbed the first aid kits and replied:

‘Thanks, kid, and if there are snipers that's too bad for them . . . We've got a Siberian sniper with us!'

Then Moscow, giving me a hard tap with his shoulder, yelled to the medic:

‘Hey, man, you know how they shoot in Siberia? They can hit a squirrel in the eye from three hundred metres away!' Everyone burst out laughing, making faces at me, since I was the centre of attention.

The only thing I was thinking at that moment was not coming to the same end as that Siberian squirrel . . .

It was true, the most dangerous people in urban combat were the snipers. If an expert marksman learned how to act, move, hide – and was fast and patient enough – he became the perfect assassin and could even change the course of a battle. One of my tasks during combat was to locate and neutralise these sorts of dangers. It wasn't easy – even locating a sniper's position required weeks of preparation, lots of work, camouflage, exhausting waits. All this just to fire a single bullet. But the shot had to be precise and definitive.

Mercenaries from various countries were recruited as
snipers, lured by the good pay. I often encountered Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian snipers, very competent marksmen from the former Soviet Union sports scene. They could shoot with precision, but many lacked the basics of military strategy. My hunting education in the forests of Siberia, which I received as a boy from my grandfather Nikolay, turned out to be extremely useful, and I learned everything else at training camp thanks to Yakut, the Siberian instructor I mentioned earlier.

The snipers were the lords of the battle. In my experience, anything was preferable to going up against another sniper, because I could never be sure what I was dealing with.

We stayed there for a few minutes, just standing on the line of fire. Nosov made two requests for orders via radio, but command didn't know where to send us – it seemed that our men were making progress on every front, and help from the saboteurs was no longer needed. After a while, they finally gave us some coordinates – we had to go to a building where our infantry were outnumbered and undergoing a series of violent attacks from the enemy.

We rushed over to the location: a large, five-storey building, half-burned out and full of broken furniture. Through the shattered windows – and through the holes in the walls from mortar rounds and cannon balls – you could see bits of paper flying through the air like ghosts stirred by the wind.

Our infantrymen greeted us with camaraderie, the only thing that truly unites all soldiers, especially at the toughest
times. Their lieutenant had a shoulder wound, and even though his soldiers kept telling him to take cover in the cellar, where the other wounded soldiers were, he went on fighting in the battle anyway. In fact, he was shooting as if he weren't injured at all, and gave orders to set up the defence, addressing his men with professionalism. He was young, he couldn't be over twenty-five, but you could tell he had already ‘smelled the gunpowder', as we would say. The infantrymen listened to him and obeyed him like a father; there was a very familial atmosphere in their unit.

First off, Nosov gave him some advice on how to plan the resistance:

‘We need to concentrate forces on the sides of the building and leave the middle free.'

The lieutenant agreed, and we all took strategic positions, keeping watch over not only the building itself and the space in front, but also the three roads that led directly to the area occupied by the terrorists.

At four in the afternoon the enemy troops began moving towards us. Gunfire had become very intense in the left wing of the building, where our captain was; a young infantryman, their gunner, was dead – a bullet had gone through his skull.

Nosov recognised the enemy's tactic. They were trying to provoke fighting in one spot in order to gain free access from the opposite side. Next door there was an abandoned house, and if we didn't stop them they would make it a fortified position. Nosov called me to organise a sortie. In a room on the second floor with windows overlooking
the courtyard – a big open space with a few trees and bushes, behind which were two of the infantry's light tanks – we had a quick huddle. Nosov said:

‘They're definitely going to put something in that house, maybe a heavy machine gun. And once that thing starts working on us, they'll hit us with the grenade launchers too . . .'

‘We could beef up our defence with another machine gun on the third floor, and then concentrate the fire on them,' the lieutenant proposed.

‘That won't work, we'd only drag it out . . .' Nosov retorted, serious. ‘If they have a machine gun, and I'm sure they do, after a few hours of direct fighting they'll realise that we don't want to attack their positions, and they'll call reinforcements to break our defence . . . These people are desperate, our paras are hunting them down.'

So the young lieutenant asked:

‘What do you have in mind?'

Nosov had a half smile on his face, which we all knew very well. It meant that he'd already come up with a plan, which (as he would always say with conviction) would work one hundred per cent. In fact, he replied: