Free Fall (32 page)

Nosov got up.

‘Follow me, there's a house nearby: their first reinforced position. We have to take it fast . . .'

Jumping over an old, half-destroyed wooden fence, we entered one of the yards. In the pitch dark, completely enveloped in fog, the house seemed very small, but that was just an impression.

Part of the explorers' unit was to stay in the yard and cover the access routes to the house. Nosov pointed out a long wire running to our left: a tripwire to a mine.

Zenith broke down the door – that was his speciality. In fact, Nosov called him the ‘poet of the busted door' – with minimal effort, he was able to break down almost any door without making much noise. He would push on them with his foot, swift and steady, and they would obediently open.

‘Moscow, Zenith and I are going first,' Nosov said. ‘You guys break up into groups.'

Once we were inside we noticed that the hallway was long and wide – there had to be lots of rooms, so we split them up. With me there was Shoe, the explorers' sergeant, and two of their soldiers.

The enemies had arranged a row of speakers against the walls. So as not to attract attention, the windows had
been obscured with tarpaulins, the kind usually used to cover tanks. Placed on the ground, in the blind corners away from the windows, were lamps that gave off a dim light. All this gave the place a macabre aspect . . . The electric plant in town hadn't been functioning for ages; the light came from a combustion generator. Lots of houses had generators – usually they were kept in the cellar or on the patio, with a pipe system built to carry away the exhaust.

We entered one of the rooms. There were just a few mattresses and some sleeping bags; the floor was covered with clothes, Turkish toiletries, boxes of vacuum-packed food (some still half-full with spoons inside) and a pot with some tea. Next to one of the mattresses there was an unopened pack of single-use syringes; in a corner there was a pile of used syringes with brown spots on them, most likely heroin. On the mattress there was a brick-sized block: a nice fat chunk of hashish. One side of it was burnt and crumbled, and beside it was a box of filters and a bag with some tobacco. This was where our enemies prepared their ‘vitamins' so that they could get through the attacks without fear and exhaustion.

Suddenly we heard gunshots. We looked into the hall and saw Nosov, Zenith and Moscow rushing past chasing someone.

We broke down a door that opened onto a large room. A few enemies were waiting for us inside. They fired a spray of bullets at us, but we were able to dodge it. After throwing three hand grenades, we entered the cloud of dust, which smelled of burnt flesh. We kicked the bodies
a few times – everyone was dead. One was literally disintegrated – only his shoes were left, and his ankle bones protruded from them; his clothes were smeared on the walls, mixed with blood and flesh. The F1 is a very powerful fragmentation grenade, and it could chop you up mercilessly. If you're lucky you're just left an invalid, but three F1s in one room definitely won't spare anyone. The others must have thrown that poor wretch at the grenades trying to save themselves. They were blood-sucking junkies, with no honour or soul.

In the room there were lots of weapons and some crates of RPG-7 grenade launcher ammo, which had remained undamaged. A pair of grenade launchers was leaning against the wall. One was fine, whereas the other had been damaged by the explosion. I took the intact one and loaded a round in it, then passed it to an explorer. The RPG was a very useful weapon; if you knew how to use it well it could change the course of a battle. We only had one single-shot RPG at our disposal, which we called the ‘fly' or ‘hornet'. But whenever we came across a trophy as valuable as the RPG-7, we took it without a second thought, and after using it we would get rid of it.

We were coming out of the room when the sergeant said:

‘Hear that?'

He turned back, and reaching out his gigantic hand he went over to a sofa where there was a blanket that, in fact, was shaking. With an indifferent face and pointed weapon, he tore off the sheet as if he were doing a magic
trick. On the sofa lay a woman dressed in a military uniform, with the insignia of a group of Islamic fundamentalists sewn on the sleeve. The sergeant lowered his weapon and we moved closer.

She stared at us wide-eyed and mumbled something in an accent similar to that of the Chechens, Georgians and everyone who we disdainfully called
chernozhopiy
– ‘black arses', or members of the Asian races of the Caucasus. She was speaking Russian, but what she was saying was completely incomprehensible. She was afraid to die, that much was clear.

The explorer sergeant extracted a huge knife from his right boot. It looked like something a butcher would use, very thick and with a wide blade. The woman went even paler, if that was possible, and without trying to get up from the sofa kept spitting out bursts of words that didn't make any sense.

‘She must be their medic,' the sergeant said, for no particular reason.

None of us was able to say a word. We were all curious to find out how this romantic little encounter was going to end.

Shoe was behind me, and with a voice weakened by the cold he said:

‘Come on, brother, shove the blade between this Muslim bitch's legs. Now we'll show you how real operations are done, we'll teach you what surgery is . . .'

Shoe was scaring me, but I was frightened of myself too. All of us were worked up, yet at the same time disgusted at what was happening.

The explorer sergeant grabbed the woman's neck with one of his huge hands, and held her still. She tried to scratch his face, she struggled, but he was smiling, as if she were his daughter and they were play-wrestling on their couch at home. Without any sudden movements he stuck the knife into her chest, at the left breast. The blade went in easily, and he pushed it in slowly. It seemed like he was enjoying every moment.

With his other hand he kept hold of her neck. She tried to free herself while foam started to trickle out of her mouth, and it quickly turned red. The woman's face was purple, swollen; she made a sort of deep, guttural moan, kicking and shaking as if she were having an epileptic fit.

When the handle of the knife hit the woman's uniform, I tried to picture the blade sunk all the way through her flesh; the knife was so long that it must have impaled her, its tip touching the fabric of the sofa. The sergeant lifted her and sat her down. She looked like a broken doll. Her eyes were empty, her arms hung limp, blood oozed from her slightly open mouth, but it was light – perhaps she had bitten her tongue as she was dying. She had the typical face of women from the Caucasus: small, barely pronounced eyes, a long and disproportionate nose. She was young, she couldn't have been over thirty.

The sergeant, in a calm and almost affectionate tone, as if he were addressing a lover, said to her:

‘There, good girl . . . See, it was all fast, no suffering . . .'

Shoe laughed behind me.

The sergeant pulled the knife out of the woman's body and wiped the blade on her uniform. Then he tore the insignia off her sleeve and put it in his pocket.

We all left the room without saying a word.

Nosov and the others were in the hall. They had captured an Arab. Zenith was holding him down on his knees, on the floor. Moscow kept hitting him on the head with the handle of his combat knife. His entire face was covered in blood. Nosov asked him something in Arabic, repeated the same thing a few times, then turned to Moscow:

‘Sergeant, this warrior of Islam is clearly suffering from a concussion, give him first aid!'

Moscow responded by slitting the Arab's throat, blood spraying on the opposite wall, then he pressed the prisoner's head against the floor with his boot, bent down and drove his knife into his left side several times. He was dead; all you could hear was the air, pushed by the blood, coming out of the holes in his lungs.

We went out of the house. Nosov was pleased.

‘We took an important position in their defence, they almost ran out of ammo,' he said, looking at us seriously. ‘Whoever was here before must have gone to help the others against our assault units . . .'

‘And what now, Ivanisch?' I asked. The fog around us had not dispersed.

‘We have to cross the main street, get rid of the other
reinforced positions and signal to our tanks where to meet us . . .'

‘Let's take this fucking town apart,' Shoe said, striking his chest with his fist.

We left. The houses were empty. We found a mine here and there, but from the way they had been planted it was clear that they hadn't had time to lay the traps carefully. We moved slowly through the fog; the real battle was on the other side of the city – no one would notice us.

We ran into a group of five Arabs in the yard of a house. Two of them were wounded; one had lost an arm. We took them out with a few blasts of gunfire; they hadn't been expecting it, they didn't even have time to lay a finger on their weapons. We inspected the bodies – they had some nice pistols on them. There was an American clone of the Colt 1911 with a few clips.

‘I'll take this one,' the explorers' lieutenant major said, his eyes sparkling in that scar-ravaged face.

Nosov agreed. We divided up the Kalashnikov clips, and hid the weapons in an old kennel. The bodies, on the other hand, we laid along the walls of the house, so as not to leave them in the middle of the street.

The fog had become translucent and we could see much better now; we could make out human figures from a distance of about twenty metres. We went through the yards, one after another, until we reached the main street. The road was wide, with a long row of trees, many of which were broken or uprooted. There was almost no asphalt left; everywhere there were holes caused by bomb explosions. In the middle of several crossroads they had
put the wrecked civilian cars, a few carcasses of burned-out armoured vehicles and some old tractors – tall piles of big truck tyres, like mountains, poked out from every angle. Everything had been arranged to keep our units from travelling quickly through the streets, even if a couple of tanks could have cleared the way in a couple of minutes.

We started to move along the walls of the houses, hunched over and not making a sound. By one crossroads there was a house with another enemy position. We were heading there from the opposite side, because as Nosov always said, before throwing yourself onto the enemy, you have to get a head start in order to make a good jump. This metaphor meant that he knew the way the Arabs prepared their defences and positioned their guards, thus he always tried to plan our strategy based on the enemy's habits. Even though in that conflict everything was so chaotic that the enemy often didn't follow a pattern, he just acted however seemed best at the time.

Having come within twenty metres of the crossroads, we went across the way and hid behind a wrecked armoured vehicle riddled with bullet holes. In the air was the strong scent of burnt, rusted metal, which came from inside the cars. It made an impression on me whenever I smelled it, because it reminded me that inside that car there had been soldiers my age who had died like mice in a trap.

It's a smell that anyone who has never smelled it can't understand, a smell that hits you like a bullet in the heart.

*

The only things those soldiers must have known were mud, filth, cold, a few scraps of disgusting food, military disorder and injustice, battles, blood, disfigured human bodies, souls devoured and emptied, and then death. Maybe after that, death might even be a blessing, but of course that wasn't enough to justify it . . . When I had a moment to stop and really look at what was left of our fallen boys, the sadness of their lifeless bodies, I thought about how no one would worry about them anymore – they were dead, full stop. The military operations would go on, and soon someone else would come and take their place, their bodies would be put into coffins, then in zinc cases and finally sent home, where their parents could bury them with the money generously offered to them by the government. At the funeral a handful of soldiers, on loan from the nearest recruitment office, would fire three blank rounds next to the fresh grave and the story would end there.

Every time I smelled that odour I would think of all that, and I told myself that I would rather have ended up with the ‘missing'. At least that way they could spare themselves those empty shots, flags and the whole song and dance at my grave.

We were hiding behind that vehicle, while Nosov and Moscow inspected the area. The house was big, two-storey, and before becoming the private residence of some local big shot it must have been a nursery school, built during
the Soviet era. The roof had been turned into a big terrace, upon which we spotted an anti-aircraft gun; we called it a ‘Shilka'. It has four powerful cannons that fire so fast they can disintegrate an armoured car in seconds. It had to be destroyed; it posed too big a danger for our units.

In order to avoid killing one another, Nosov proposed the so-called ‘closed' assault system: one team (the assault team) comes into the residence from one entrance, a second blocks the other exit (but doesn't shoot, just keeps anyone from going out), and finally a third covers the first two.

I was on the assault team with Nosov. Jumping over the nursery school fence, we entered the yard. We immediately noticed a group of Arabs. They hadn't seen us; they were sitting on some chairs by the stone staircase that led up to the front door of the house. They had their guns in their hands and were talking. Nosov signalled for me to strike.

While he and I shot at the Arabs sitting outside, three of our men jumped onto the stair, flung the door open and launched three hand grenades inside. They waited for them to explode, then to be on the safe side opened up again and threw in another two. The explosions were strong – the glass in the windows went halfway into the garden. The captain and I went inside while the other group went to block the exits. I opened a door, then Nosov and I shot two volleys crossways, making a big X in bullets, and then we jumped inside, into the dust. They responded with a long blast, we threw a grenade, then we moved to the next room. Three Arabs lay on the floor. One was trying to get up, but his legs were full of shrapnel.
I finished him off with a bullet to the head. Without waiting, we rushed off to the second floor . . .