Free Fall (10 page)

The captain said to the infantrymen:

‘Go ahead and take it if you want, keep it as a souvenir. That way you can tell everyone that at least one time in your pointless lives you knew some real men . . . Remember that being cruel doesn't mean cutting the noses or ears
off the dead to make a necklace or a keychain . . . You don't rape women or beat children. Try to look your enemy right in the eye when he's still alive and breathing, that's enough . . . And if you have the balls to do something else, well go ahead . . .'

We said nothing, mulling over what had just come out of our captain's mouth. The infantrymen seemed frightened, some had stepped back, pretending they hadn't seen anything.

The silence that had fallen around that inhuman torture was broken by Shoe. With an almost indifferent and calm expression – as if he were on vacation – he proclaimed:

‘Well, not too bad, Ivanisch, that bat almost looks real!'

A young officer from the infantry pulled his gun out of his holster and went over to the Arab, aiming at his head. Nosov gave him a dirty look.

‘What are you doing, son?' he asked, calm.

‘Enough, I can't take it – I'm going to kill him . . .' The officer was shaken up. His hand trembled as it gripped the weapon.

‘This guy stays as he is,' Nosov yelled, ‘and in fact I hope he lives till his friends get here . . . They think they're cruel? They don't know shit about cruelty! I'll teach them personally what it means to be cruel!'

Then he went towards the prisoner on whom we'd found the videocamera and the passports. He was all tied up, ready to come with us. Nosov grabbed him by the beard and dragged him over to his freshly skinned companion:

‘Look, and look hard, Arab . . . You don't know who
you're playing with! Pray to your god that command is interested in you, otherwise I'll skin you alive and make my guys belts out of your hide!'

After about ten minutes, the helicopters came. We jumped on while the infantrymen stayed behind, waiting for two special infantry units to close off the valley.

We headed back to base, tired and loaded with useless stuff as usual, this time with an Arab prisoner to boot, who, while we were up in the air, suddenly started to cry.

Moscow, feeling sorry for him, gave him some water to drink, and the captain smiled.

‘Give him a drink; I'm sure his throat is all dry . . . What a shitty day, boys, surrounded by a bunch of homos . . .'

When we got to base, there was already a delegation waiting to pick up the prisoner.

Captain Nosov spoke to the colonel while his men loaded the Arab onto another helicopter. The colonel called Nosov ‘son', and the captain called him ‘old man'; you could tell that they were buddies.

The colonel said:

‘The infantrymen complained, saying that you made a bloodbath, you tortured a prisoner . . .' He wasn't at all angry; he spoke with a mixture of complicity and irritation.

Nosov, as always, was playful and in good spirits:

‘You know how they are, old man, those guys shit
themselves as soon as they get wind of an Arab . . . They need to be shown that we're the dangerous ones – they should be afraid of themselves, not those ignorant, incompetent, drugged-out religious fanatics . . .' Whenever he spoke, Nosov had a mysterious power; his words carried a strange certainty. The colonel thought for a moment, and then, smiling, clapped a hand on his shoulder:

‘Son, you'd certainly know better than anyone else. But remember, if anything ever happens, I'm always here . . .'

As the helicopter ascended, the colonel smiled from the window and waved. Then he made a sign on his chest, as if he were drawing our bat with his finger. Still smiling, he clenched his fist, as if to say ‘Keep it up!' We all broke out in big grins and waved back at him, as if he were our own grandfather who had come to visit us.

I thought a lot about what happened that day. Sometimes I regretted not having killed that poor man I'd shot in the knee. But later, after some time had passed, I came to understand the insane logic that guided our captain's actions, and I realised that, yes, it was true that he made some extreme decisions, but he did it so that we could keep fighting the war the way we did.

We owed our reputation to Nosov's great skill in handling complex situations well in the face of the realities of war.

And if his choices didn't always conform to human morality, it was only because they reflected the horror and the difficulty we endured every day in the war, trying to stay alive, strong and sound.

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*
This was what we called military supplies – ammunition, weapons, clothing – that came from a foreign country.

 

. . . for this offensive special commitment is required of the soldiers and officers in the assault units and of all the active units on the front lines. Given the high priority of this operation, the nature of the task does not call for the capture, arrest or transport of terrorists or any other member of an illegal armed group. All human units who pose a threat or cause difficulty in carrying out orders during direct combat must be physically eliminated; whatever weapons or ammunition they may have must be destroyed on the spot or used by the active units to carry out the received order. Any form of communication with representatives of illegal armed groups is prohibited, as with civilians or any individual who does not belong to the units working in the area. Respond to any requests from terrorists for medical aid, negotiation, conversation, or unexpected offers to surrender to the law of the Russian Federation with gunfire.

Part of the order transmitted via radio to all the units involved in the offensive in the city ‘N' in the Chechen Republic,
1999

Pummel, throttle, crush . . .

A favourite saying of General Aleksei Yermolov
*

If you only knew what a friend I lost in battle . . .

It happened not forty-two years ago, but just the other day . . .

In the middle of the mountains, in the sand, where the heat burns all,
sparking my memory, now far away from youth . . .

Can you hear me, my friend?

My dear friend, in the end we were able to climb,

climb to that height that cannot be measured in words,

under which you fell . . .

What a friend I lost in battle . . .

As kids we would read war stories,

he certainly couldn't have imagined

I would have to drag his body behind the rocks . . .

Thirty metres away, only thirty metres,

but how far that road was, between night and day . . .

Sand and stone,

sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

Honour to the flag!

Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

If you only knew what a friend I lost in battle . . .

The damned dust filled our eyes,

and our BTR was in flames,

in the sky, like a dragonfly, the helicopter circled

and like voices from the past, everywhere you could hear shouts of ‘Go!' . . .

Like a nerve, he broke like a painfully stretched nerve,

and from the slope straight towards him a bullet took flight . . .

Sand and stone,

sad light of the unknown moon over our heads.

Honour to the flag!

Farewell my friend, you will be with us forever more.

Forgive me, you were killed and I was only wounded,

in the Afghan mountains, in Afghanistan.

Song by singer-songwriter Alexander Rozenbaum, dedicated to the veterans of the war in Afghanistan

And even if we don't yet know the sweet touch or allure of a woman,

even if we've never experienced the pleasant torments of love,

at the age of eighteen we're already used

to gun fights,

to bloody battles that never end,

and we know exactly what it means

to cross the line of fire.

Those days blazed, those nights went up in smoke,

and death flew through the air, laughing and touching us all.

We don't want any honours or promotions,

we've already got what we need to feel worthy.

From the song of the Russian army veterans who were involved in the Chechen conflict

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*
Charismatic nineteenth-century Russian nationalist and representative of imperial tsarism in the Caucasus. He applied a policy of terror and repression towards the Caucasian peoples, especially those of the Muslim faith, forcing them with violence to adopt Christianity.

One morning – really early, it must have been four a.m. – Moscow woke me up. My comrades and I had slept in the courtyard of a half-wrecked building in a public housing district on the outskirts of the city. We'd been embroiled in a series of bloody skirmishes with the enemy for days. My group and I had been fighting on the front lines but luckily we were all still in one piece. We hadn't taken any losses, but we were dead tired.

It seemed like the battle was never going to end. Every second was crucial, every action was important and required great concentration, and at the end of the day we felt like juiced oranges. During battle, we had a clear objective: to push the enemy to the other end of the city, where the armoured infantry units were waiting to eliminate all of them . . . It was an exhausting task, and Captain Nosov had given us permission to take a break, to go behind the line to rest amidst the rubble, in the area guarded by our infantry.

Before falling asleep, some of us said that maybe the mission was over; we were all hoping we wouldn't have to set foot in that godforsaken city again. Then, sleep came.

A little while later – at four, as I said – Moscow woke
me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

Slowly and reluctantly I opened my eyes and looked around. I struggled to remember where I was. I couldn't put anything into focus.

‘What's going on, how long did we sleep?' I asked Moscow, my voice worn-out.

‘We didn't sleep for shit, brother . . . And it doesn't look like we'll be going back to sleep any time soon.'

The order from command called us back to the front line in the northeast area of the city, where a cluster of enemies had got through a breach in our ring of troops. They had American-made armoured cars, off-road vehicles, and they were equipped with heavy weapons: grenade launchers, 120mm cannons and a pair of multiple launch rocket systems called ‘Grad', which is Russian for ‘hail'. That night those bastards had attacked the weakest point in the ring – the Arabs, besides being numerous and well armed, had surprise-effects of their own. Nobody had expected a move like that; usually the cities where operations took place were surrounded so that the enemy couldn't get out. We had never seen anyone trying to come in to take part in the battle.

This event caused an immediate scandal. Command was furious. The infantry had been given orders to contain the attack, but manpower was limited and they had no heavy artillery to back them up. They managed to retreat
without too many losses, and this in itself constituted a good outcome. The helicopters came late, after the greater part of the enemies had already infiltrated the city. Firing from the sky, our men had only managed to take out the tail end of the group.

The security service was supposed to answer to superior command about how the enemy had been able to approach without being seen . . . For the moment, however, the only ones paying the price for that extremely grave military error were our boys on the front line, who were losing their hides out there.

As they entered the city, the enemy tried to split up our troops, but our men held strong, so the Arabs targeted a district in the northeast under infantry surveillance. The infantry was forced to change positions quickly because they were suffering numerous losses and had taken cover in a building, effectively trapping themselves. As a matter of fact, the enemy had managed to surround the building and then ceased fire, waiting for our men to wear themselves out and use up all their ammo.

The troops that had fought the Arabs as they entered the city attempted another attack, yet due to the darkness and the enemy's powerful defences, they retreated too, and had many losses. At that point they were waiting for the paratroopers and special forces, which included us saboteurs. With the infantrymen surrounded by the enemy, we kept in constant radio contact. Their situation was tough, ammo was running out – to them, every minute seemed to last an eternity . . .

As Moscow explained, we were going to help out with
the counterstrike, which was planned for six in the morning.

Just two hours away.

This whole mess had begun four days earlier. We got to the city after the operation had already started, and as we got closer to the fighting I realised that the site we were headed for was a real bloodbath. A ‘triple ring' of our troops had closed off some areas of the city. No one could come out; everything was all ready for the artillery unit to do their job. But they couldn't go ahead with the offensive, because according to the information from the explorers who'd gone ahead, the concentration of civilians was too high. Dropping bombs and missiles would cause a massacre.

The situation was deadly serious – city battles are among the bloodiest and most unpredictable, but when there are civilians in the mix it turns into a big meat grinder, and everyone loses all sense of what they're doing.

The infantrymen had come in with two explorer groups. They were just past the first district when direct combat broke out. The infantry, detached from the main forces, handled the first skirmishes, neutralising the nerve centres where troops were concentrated. We came in after the motorised infantry platoon (even if there was nothing platoon-like about them but the name – in reality it was only three groups, a hundred and twenty soldiers on twelve light tanks), followed by two special units armed with light 120mm cannons.