It was late October in Chechnya when our team was given a temporary post. We were sent to the 46th motorized infantry unit base. The position was in the mountains, at a strategic point with a view of two very narrow valleys.

The word going around was that the explorers had sounded the alarm because the enemy was concentrating military forces in those mountains. There were two large armed groups equipped with Igla single-fire missiles, a surface-to-air missile system they had used to take down one of our transport helicopters.

A few units from the two paratrooper divisions had reached the base first, in tanks and armoured cars; you could sense that a big military operation was getting underway, with several units of the Russian Army involved.

No specific orders came for three days but lots of strange stories circulated among the soldiers about that helicopter explosion. Some said that an officer from command had been on board, so it had to do with the death of someone important; others just kept saying it was scandalous for the enemy to possess one of our most powerful weapons. The infantry officers had in fact explained that some Iglas, about ten, had been stolen during a battle when one of our columns transporting equipment had been attacked by the Arabs.

As usual, Captain Nosov derided all these theories, and would say it was about illegal trafficking, supported and run by the men in command. He cursed those double-crossing traitors, who according to him sold all our most cutting-edge, high-tech weapons to the Chechens and Arabs to help them to resist us as long as possible, because ‘it’s in their interest for this war not to end too quickly’. As the captain often said, ‘The generals and politicians at the Kremlin eat our charred flesh and drink our rotten blood.’ Sometimes his rants almost seemed poetic.

Even back during the First Chechen Campaign, it was very common for the enemy to have the same equipment as us, even the latest models produced in Russia – which, for our army, were still considered experimental prototypes and thus were barely in circulation – sometimes ended up in their hands.

The Russian politicians of the time – led by that ‘stupid drunk Yeltsin’, as Nosov always called him, ‘who sold out to the United States of America’ – needed, according to our Captain, a black hole, a place that swallowed money and spat it out clean, supporting their so-called ‘democratic’ regime, which was run the American way – that is, with wars, lies, illicit trade and total lack of respect for the people of the Russian Federation. That black hole was Chechnya.

‘The Americans gave Yeltsin and his men a huge helping hand – they were able to control the whole orchestration of this disgusting war,’ Nosov vented for the thousandth time while we were on our way to base in the helicopter. ‘Who knows how much fun the strategists at the Pentagon had when they came up with this foul plan of local war right within the borders of their old enemy, the USSR . . . And through misinformation, political and ethnic agitation, they provoked us like a bunch of war dogs, straining at the leash.’

Essentially, their tactics were analogous to raping a dead body. It wasn’t enough for them to kill the ‘Soviet bloc’ – they still wanted to satisfy their sick thirst for dominion somehow, and to our shame there wasn’t anyone in Russia capable of stopping them . . .

Our first day on the 46th infantry base went by without anything in particular happening; we saboteurs stayed in our assigned barracks, waiting for something. Indeed, we knew that sooner or later command would give us our orders; they wouldn’t have moved all those units from one post to another without a specific reason.

The paratroopers, on the other hand – as often happened in times of calm – caused a ruckus, got drunk, hassled the girls in the infirmary and the kitchen, and ribbed the other soldiers.

Based on our captain’s experience and advice, we got some rest. Whenever we could, we slept, and the rest of the time we ate like cows. Nosov personally requested a double ration for each of us and a little something extra when possible, stuff from the food depot that was usually reserved for the officers, like sweet hot tea and a kind of cake that we really loved.

In addition, Moscow had made a deal with the helicopter pilot who’d taken us to the base: in exchange for an American pistol – a Colt, and we had quite a few – he gave us a bag of lemons, ten chocolate bars and five tins of red caviar. It was a great deal; usually for a pistol we could get two cartons of cigarettes and three bottles of whisky at most. All the drivers and pilots asked the guys in the active units to get them American or European guns, and since in war money doesn’t mean the same as in civilian life – ‘the closer you are to the line of fire, the less money is worth’ – we calculated the value of everything in food.

I should say that on that occasion the technical quality of the gun helped us out – it was really nice, and often for Russian soldiers, especially the ones who didn’t fight on the front lines, a Colt was a status symbol, an object to show friends and family when they returned home, and who knows how many stories they told to show off, to look like someone who had fought a tough battle and in the end had won. We also had a saying:

‘All the girls go for the guy who brings back a Colt as a trophy.’

So, after going to the ‘store’, we were able to spend a few peaceful days on base. Our group went by the ‘law of the camel’: whenever you have the chance, eat everything you can and as much as you can.

On the second night, a friendly nurse who would visit the various units to chat a little and look for some ‘male affection’, told us that our comrades in the motorised paratrooper division, unlike us, would usually offer her vodka. And they were happy to do so, seeing her as a symbol of feminine virtue.

‘Don’t you guys drink?’ she asked us out of the blue.

I’ve never been much of a drinker, but the idea of downing a little good vodka didn’t sound too bad at all. And the rest of the guys seemed to agree.

Zenith was the most eager; he had a real weakness for booze.

‘Well, I guess we could go for a sip or two . . .’

‘I know the tankers have quite a reserve,’ the nurse said.

We started to think up a plan. It was pointless hoping that the tankers would give us any; we had no choice but to steal a few bottles from them or somehow force them to share their precious cargo with us.

We knew that the tankmen, like many other units, had a mascot. It was a very common practice in war; soldiers would often bring dogs or cats with them, or even try to tame wild animals like squirrels or hedgehogs – some even had an ermine. Our tankers, however, were notorious because their favourite animals were sewer rats – probably because in military slang the tankers themselves were called ‘rats’, since during combat they had to stay inside the small cabin space inside the tank yet still be able to move with agility. As a matter of fact, each tank had its own rat – everyone would feed it and it would get fat like an old spoiled cat.

Soldiers follow lots of superstitions in war, and losing the mascot is considered very bad luck . . .

Maybe we’d found the way to have ourselves a nice big drink.

Nosov had gone out a few hours earlier to visit an old friend of his, a major who’d fought with him in Afghanistan and now commanded one of the assault units stationed at the same base. When Nosov went to see his friends nobody was to disturb him, go with him or follow him. Everyone who had fought in Afghanistan had a tradition of sorts – they only met amongst themselves and didn’t allow us young people to come.

That same night we left the barracks and headed for the area where the tanks were. It was a wide, unpaved clearing in the middle of the base. Down from the sky fell a light sharp rain that drummed on us insistently.

Autumn is melancholy in those parts, and since we were obliged to wade through the mud, I almost felt like we were in the famous folk poem by Sergei Yesenin, the one where he talks about this season in a rather crude way. It goes like this:

It is cold, it’s come autumn,

the birds have quit pecking at shit,

some cow crapped in the pail of milk,

That’s just the weather, fuck it!

The tanks were side by side, half a metre apart. The cannons were lowered so that water couldn’t get inside them. But if you looked carefully at the ends of the cannons, every now and then you’d see a rat’s nose poking out. Our tankers often kept their mascots there, and the rats liked it. They didn’t run away; sometimes they went out to get a little fresh air but they always went back inside where it was warm.

There were some tankers standing guard, but we avoided them without too much difficulty and quickly reached the nearest tank. We waited a little, quiet, until a rat’s whiskered nose peeked out of the barrel.

Moscow signalled for us to keep an eye out, and we surrounded the tank. Then he put on a pair of thick leather gloves, the kind that machine gunners usually wear, because during a battle the gun gets so hot that if you reload it with your bare hands you risk getting burned. Moscow climbed onto the tank, then grabbed on to the cannon with one hand while with the other he made a quick swipe, clamping the rat by the head and pulling him out with a strong and firm sweep of his arm. As soon as Moscow jumped down, we ran back to our post.

Back in the barracks, we got to know the rat. He was a big, fat animal, with a long tail and very clean fur that shone as if he shampooed it every evening. He had a collar made from a piece of green tent fabric, with the rat’s name and the number of the tank he belonged to sewn on with white thread. It was a boy; his name was Zeus.

Zeus never gave the impression he was scared of us, even if he seemed annoyed by the kidnapping. We put him inside a zinc box where we usually kept bullets for the Kalashnikovs. Moscow was very attentive to him; he put a piece of bread in his box, and made a little water bowl by cutting a piece out of an empty tube of tomato paste. Then he made three holes in the top of the box so air could circulate.

After all that Moscow looked satisfied. He gave the rat’s temporary prison a little tap with his knife and said:

‘In here, my dear fellows, we have not only the key to getting the vodka . . . but also the key to winning the tankers’ respect!’

We started laughing. He seemed as determined as Napoleon must have been before his Russian campaign.

A delegation composed of Moscow, Zenith and Shoe communicated to the tank’s crew the means, time and conditions for payment of the ransom. The tankers accepted our offer on the spot: a case of vodka in exchange for Zeus. We were ecstatic.

Around four in the morning five of them came knocking at our door, carrying twenty-five bottles of vodka in an equipment crate. We gave them back their animal, they quickly verified Zeus’s health, and then we all decided to drink together in celebration of our happy transaction.

We sat down at the table and lit a small portable stove that ran on kerosene. Moscow took a zinc case to use as a pan and poured in four tins of stewed meat and some potatoes we’d nabbed from the kitchen the day before. At that point one of the tankers went to their base and came back with a big piece of salted lard; its smell was so strong, intense and appealing I thought I was going to faint. We opened the first bottle of vodka, and after pouring it into a big iron canteen our party finally began.

The canteen was passed from hand to hand, and one by one the bottles were emptied. Amidst many stories of war, peace and life, we started to get a little drunk. The tankers were really nice guys – often the ones who have to be on the alert are more human than the others; knowing they’re risking their lives every day gives certain people a kind of purity that’s hard to explain. Their leader, a young lieutenant, was great company. He always had a joke at hand, and knew the right thing to say when the conversation went off track.

Around six in the morning – by then we’d emptied almost half the case and could hardly stand – Nosov came back.

Our captain was tired and looked like someone who had just finished a battle. He was sloshed and stank of garlic and fried potatoes. His Kalashnikov was slung over his shoulder and he seemed to be in a terrible mood. He greeted the tankers with a gesture that recalled Stalin saluting his Soviet comrades from the platform at Lenin’s tomb. He took note of our little party, then took a piece of bread from the table and dipped it in the melted fat in the zinc pan, where a few potatoes and bits of stew remained.

As he finished his bite, Nosov started looking at each of our faces with such profound desperation in his eyes that despite the effect of the alcohol I had a premonition of danger, as if something tragic were about to happen . . . Then he got up from the chair, shuffled across the barracks and fell into the first bunk he found. His Kalashnikov was still on him, and it poked out from the bed menacingly, right in our direction.

Shoe said to Zenith:

‘Brother, go and disarm our captain. Better not to tempt the Lord’s patience . . .’

Zenith turned to Spoon and repeated Shoe’s request verbatim.

Spoon went to move, but it was clear that it was a struggle for him to get up, so without anyone saying anything Deer stepped up. He carefully lifted our captain, who was already snoring, and unceremoniously grabbed the rifle out of his hands with a forceful and determined tug. Nosov didn’t resist, and with his eyes closed he mumbled:

‘We’re at altitude 216 southeast of Jalalabad . . . Everyone down, fucking whore of a war! Nobody goes on recon without my permission . . . Bastard helicopter, we’re not leaving anyone . . .’

He went on giving orders for a few minutes, cursing at the helicopter and getting pissed off with who knows whom. Finally, mentioning some general whose surname was followed by a vulgar term (which in Russian indicates the female genital organs after sexual intercourse with an animal), he concluded:

‘Everywhere we’ve been, there’s no life left . . .’

Then he fell into a deep sleep. We remained in silence for a little while, then we drank to our captain’s health as the tankers started retreating to their post.

It was morning, but outside it was very dark. It hadn’t stopped raining yet, and the smell of fried food in our barracks intermingled with the smell of the rain. The air was damp and icy; you could feel the cold coming from outside all the way down into your bones. One by one, we fell into our bunks too.

Deer took off his shoes and lifted his stinky socks up to my face, but I was so tired and drunk that I didn’t even have the strength to turn the other way, and I fell asleep inhaling the smell of his feet. Even that was overpowered by the odour that we were already used to – in war, everything is rank and foul.

We slept all day long. Around four in the afternoon my hangover had subsided, but I was still lying in bed, wearing a heavy winter coat. I stared at the ceiling without thinking about anything in particular, like a sick man just waiting to get better. I felt as if I had found myself in a place where we were condemned to stay forever, everyone in the rain, surrounded by the autumn air, pierced by a sadness that went through our souls like the dampness that soaked through our clothes . . .

Moscow and Zenith were sitting at the table and preparing their jackets, sewing the places where the fabric was torn and fixing the side pouches. They were talking in hushed voices about a previous mission of ours where Moscow had risked catching a blast of heavy machine gun fire but had been saved because Nosov grabbed his leg, pulled him down and dragged him into a trench that had been made during the First Chechen Campaign after the explosion of an air bomb.

‘It was a close call,’ Moscow said.

‘I realised too late that I had stood up right in front of the machine gun, but that bastard had hidden himself well . . . For a second I thought I was going to die . . . If it weren’t for Nosov I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.’

‘You should go on making war, not love . . .’ Zenith joked.

They both broke out in quiet laughter, so as not to wake the others.

I turned onto my side and put my hood over my head. I couldn’t sleep but at the same time I didn’t want to get out of bed. Deer was sitting in a corner, and he was eating a piece of dry bread, his teeth making a noise as if he were chewing on pebbles. I turned again, took a deep breath, then closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, but sleep didn’t want to come.

Eventually I decided to get up and go outside to relieve myself. I opened the barracks door and looked at the desert of dirt and mud in front of me. The rain was coming down so hard and heavy it seemed like I had a wall of water in front of me. Without giving it a second thought, I pissed directly from the doorway. Right at that moment an officer wearing a rain poncho appeared out of nowhere and gave me the dirtiest look. Indifferent, I went on emptying my bladder, pretending not to see him. He yelled at me:

‘Soldier! Call Nosov over, now – they’re expecting him at the colonel’s office! All the camp officers are already there, he’s the only one left!’

I went to wake up our captain, who was still sleeping in the same position we had left him in. I bumped him with my shoulder and told him that the colonel was waiting for him. Nosov asked what time it was, then with his eyes still half closed, groped around for his rifle. Deer had left it on the floor, at a safe distance from the bed, and I passed it to him.

Nosov stood up and pulled a bag out from under his bunk. He opened it, took out a rain poncho and put it on. He went up to the table and took the canteen with the vodka. He took three gulps, resolute, then he looked at me with seriousness and said:

‘Enough with the drinking. Prepare for action. Check the ammo and weapons. There are rain ponchos for everyone in here, get them out. They’ll be sending us into the mountains soon . . .’

After these words, he left with the officer, who had been standing by the front door the entire time.

We just looked at one another in silence for a while, as if it seemed impossible that they really were sending us on an operation after all.

Moscow, biting off the thread he was using to sew his jacket, took a deep breath and then said:

‘Yep, looks like our vacation’s over . . .’

About an hour later, someone knocked on our door. Deer went to open it and found a group of infantry explorers in front of him. Their lieutenant asked:

‘Captain Nosov’s saboteurs? 76th division?’

Moscow replied in a light, almost ironic tone:

‘Yep, that’s us . . . Something bad happen?’

The lieutenant looked confident. He smiled at Moscow, and, entering the barracks like an actor would take to the stage, he said:

‘For the moment nothing particular has happened, Comrade Private . . . but I think that soon all hell’s going to break loose . . .’

Each of us stopped doing whatever he was doing and went over to the lieutenant to hear his explanation. He signalled for his men to come in while Deer went to put the water on to make tea.

The explorers were already prepared for the mission; they were kitted out with vests, weapons, rain ponchos. In the week following our army helicopter’s mysterious accident, they had combed every inch of the surrounding mountains, informing our troops about the enemy’s presence and watching every move that appeared remotely suspect.

At Nosov’s request, they had brought each of us a pair of tall boots, waxed so that water couldn’t get through – in war, having dry feet is very important. Personally, one of the things I hated most was when my trainers became muddy and slipped off. Running often carried the risk of ending up barefoot – not the most comfortable thing.

The explorers were equipped like Afghanistan war soldiers; they didn’t have canteens attached to their belts but had a few bottles of water in their belly bags; their rifle ammo was inside the pockets of their jackets, shortened up to the waist just like ours. They carried their knives sideways, concealed behind their belts. They also had side pouches, handmade specially; they were all armed with double magazine paratrooper rifles, some with optic or dioptric scopes. One had a precision rifle just like mine, a VSS with an integrated silencer, wrapped in a piece of soft cloth so it wouldn’t get damaged.

They didn’t seem anxious. Their faces were the classic faces of people who live in war: tired eyes, deep wrinkles in dry skin, skin corroded by wind, rain, cold and hunger. But behind these men’s eyes there was that mix of humility and wisdom that comes only to those accustomed to dying and coming back to life several times a day. These were people who could witness the death of a friend with the tenderness of a loving mother putting her children to bed at night knowing she’ll be waking them up in the morning . . .

They sat down on the crates, which were scattered around the room. Someone lit a cigarette, enjoying big gulps of hot tea while their lieutenant unfolded a map on the table and started showing us our destination.

We would have to cross the valley, go up into the mountains and reach the point on the map circled in red.

‘Command seems really keen for us to get to the area of the helicopter crash as soon as possible,’ the lieutenant said. ‘There must be something important there, something we have to find at all costs. Provided the Arabs haven’t got there first . . .’

‘What if we don’t find anything?’ Spoon asked, his mouth full with a hunk of tea-soaked bread.

‘I have specific orders,’ the lieutenant said, serious. ‘If the Arabs have arrived before us, we’ll have to return to base immediately. We’ll give the go-ahead for a general operation, involving all the corps of the military, including the artillery and air force . . .’

Obviously, none of us knew why there was so much interest in a simple transport helicopter that was just like so many others shot down during the war. We immediately started thinking up a million reasons, trying to figure out what could have been on board the ill-fated aircraft that was so precious to command.

One of the explorers said jokingly:

‘It was probably a load of rubber dicks for the generals’ wives!’

Everyone howled with laughter.

So Moscow, who was standing in the middle of the room with a boot on one foot and a sneaker on the other, triumphantly announced:

‘Brothers, before all of you, I officially give this operation code name Operation Where’s The Dildo?’

We couldn’t stop laughing.

‘What a great operation! Now I feel really important!’ one explorer shouted.

‘Rubber dicks . . .’ wailed Shoe, who was about to fall off his chair he was laughing so hard. ‘As long as they don’t screw us over with them!’

‘Let’s get going, boys! And if we really can’t find the goods, we’ll just have to satisfy our generals’ dear wives with what nature has given us . . .’ Deer proposed.

The explorers laughed along with us, but their lieutenant seemed the most amused.

‘Are you kidding, brother? I wouldn’t even want to see those washed-up whores . . .’ Zenith tried to look serious. ‘We must fulfil our mission, I accept no alternatives . . .’

When the fits of laughter died down, the lieutenant traced on the map the exact route we had to take to reach the helicopter. At various points his finger would stop and he’d say:

‘We found traces of them here.’

We would have to go almost twenty kilometres into enemy territory. The strangest thing was that during their week of night reconnaissance the explorers hadn’t encountered a single terrorist. There had to be camps or mine fields somewhere, and yet they had moved through the area undisturbed. I had a bad feeling, as I always do when something seems too simple . . .

Before an operation, command usually identified certain reference points that circumscribed the area, then they would leave us in a predetermined location and the rest – especially the particulars of our route – was up to us. Nosov had taught us something he called ‘combat recon’, which meant scouting the area as the operation was underway. This strategy gave us the possibility of acting immediately, in real time, planning our moves without having to follow a particular route, able to change plans at any time based on the unpredictable developments of battle.

I really didn’t understand why we should take the route command had chosen; it didn’t seem very smart to me – what did these officers know about the best path to take? They’d never set foot on those mountains; they just used the general picture the explorers had given them, and any military expert could tell you that one can’t trust the information acquired through reconnaissance alone, because things change very rapidly in war and enemy positions can change from one minute to the next.

The guys kept on talking around me. Everyone put in his two cents but I wasn’t listening to them anymore. It was like I was hypnotised by the map. I was inside it, on those paths, between one point and another, and trying to find an answer to the thousand questions tormenting me – like when you find yourself staring at something without really looking at it, and try to figure out what’s in your head, your thoughts . . .

At that moment the door to the barracks was flung open. The explorers sitting by the entrance jumped to their feet and saluted, making room for Nosov to pass. I came back to reality and looked at our captain. He was soaked from the rain and the expression on his face definitely seemed serious. I was sure that he had a good idea of what was going on.

Nosov stopped at the table; the infantry lieutenant rose and saluted him.

‘Lieutenant Razumovsky, leader of the 34th infantry division explorer detachment! My team is ready for action, Comrade Captain!’

Nosov answered the salute with an apathetic lift of the hand:

‘Nosov, captain of the saboteurs . . .’

Usually before an operation our captain tried to make a show of being resolved and positive, to assure us that he had everything under control, to – how should I put it – lighten our mood. But that time he looked at us one by one, and then taking a deep breath, with his eyes down, he said:

‘Well, boys, I don’t know any other way to explain to you what headquarters has cooked up for us . . . So, I’ll just say it straight and clear, tell you the truth as I always have.’ After a short pause, all in one breath he said: ‘Some piece of shit among our generals wants us dead, and it’s going to happen tonight.’

A dead silence fell in the barracks. The only thing that could be heard was the rain beating on the roof and the irritating sound of Moscow’s joints cracking, as they did every time he got nervous or had to concentrate on something important.

We all expected Nosov to go on, but instead our captain stepped back from the table, sat down on a chair and pulled out from underneath his bunk a zinc case full of AK tracer bullets, the ones that leave a green trail in the air when you fire them.

Before putting normal cartridges into our rifles, we would also put a few tracer bullets in to alert us that the clip was almost empty – in the middle of battle, when we didn’t have the chance to keep track of how many rounds we’d fired, we would immediately change the clip as soon as we saw the green trail, without reloading the carriage, so at least one round stayed in the chamber and we saved precious time.

Those bullets also helped us to identify distant targets with precision and to correct our fire. A group of soldiers, the spotters, would be near the enemy positions where they could best spot the weak points where we should concentrate our fire. They would shoot at the enemy with tracer bullets, and our men at the machine guns in the more protected (and therefore best from which to fire) positions would follow the green trails and fire at the target, creating a constant, solid wall of lead. Being a spotter was very dangerous, because in addition to being in close proximity to the enemy you had to be very quick and skilled in changing positions at the drop of a hat. Usually people who joined the spotter team had lots of war experience and weren’t afraid of close combat.

Lastly, tracer bullets were very useful at night, when we needed to follow a precise line of fire, because during combat in the dark there was a serious danger of falling victim to friendly fire, especially when the unit was scattered across several positions and couldn’t communicate. That’s why each of us carried four magazines with tracer bullets.

While Nosov was taking care of the magazines, Lieutenant Razumovsky made a move as if he were about to speak, but instead he said nothing. He scratched his head and sighed, looking at us almost as if he expected some sort of explanation from us.

We saboteurs, however, just stood there observing our captain. Nosov, after filling two magazines with tracer rounds and binding them together with black electrical tape, turned to Moscow:

‘Take over for me, prepare twenty of these . . .’

Moscow obeyed right away.

Nosov went over to the table, pulled his pistol, an Austrian Glock, out from his inside jacket pocket, and began to disassemble it.

Without anyone asking him, Spoon got the jar of oil we used to lubricate the weapons, which were often full of gunpowder residue, and set it in front of the captain. Nosov dismantled the carriage of the gun, removing the spring, then the barrel. He lifted the barrel to the light and examined it carefully, then blew inside. Only when he started cleaning it did he begin to speak, but he didn’t take his eyes off his weapon, as if he were ashamed of something:

‘One week ago, in the early evening, a cow* left from this camp. On board there was an inspector from the military prosecutor’s office and an investigative team composed of five army officers who were looking into the case of a general accused of collaborating with terrorists . . . The investigators had found a connection between that piece of shit and some of the officers from this camp, and had come here to conduct an interrogation. When the inquiry was over, they left. They had been in the air for a few minutes when their helicopter exploded. Nobody saw a damn thing, but a young lieutenant, who apparently isn’t too fond of his superiors, revealed to me that the helicopter didn’t explode in the mountains like they want us to believe, but in a field nearby . . .’

After thoroughly lubricating the pistol, Nosov wiped it with a rag, reassembled the carriage and loaded the magazine sending a cartridge into the chamber. Then he slid the pistol under his jacket and placed both hands on the table, as if he were at a restaurant waiting for someone to serve him dinner. Only then did he resume his story:

‘Long story short, there are two things that don’t add up in this story: first, it doesn’t make sense that the helicopter would go through the mountains when the better route would have been over the fields; and second, there hasn’t been terrorist activity in that area for at least six months. Everybody knows that the enemy is hiding deep in the mountains, waiting to gather the weapons and manpower they need to launch a real attack . . .’

Lieutenant Razumovsky listened, sitting with his head in his hands – despite his young age he probably knew very well what it meant to deal with corrupt officers. Often they would cover up these incidents by launching a big operation, one that usually cost a slew of human lives – in this case, ours.

I felt completely paralysed. Of all the horrible things in the world the one thing I was sure I didn’t want to end up dealing with was this whole thing about dead investigators, helicopters that explode while flying over a field and mysteriously reappear in the mountains dozens of kilometres away, and especially a high-ranking officer in command who feels trapped and is willing to use all his power just to get rid of a few inconvenient witnesses . . .

‘After the explosion, some parts of the helicopter were removed,’ Nosov continued. ‘The lieutenant I talked to swears that they made sure part of the wreck ended up with the terrorists deployed in the mountains in a place designated by command. The rest of the helicopter was buried to eliminate all the evidence. They want to send us up there to confirm the terrorist presence and make the lie about the helicopter seem more plausible . . . In order to save their skins those bastards didn’t restrict themselves to blowing up the helicopter. They also staged attacks, faked assaults on the patrols in the area and blew up two of our cars on the mountain roads. Some of our boys died . . . Only then were they able to request help from the main troops . . . And nobody noticed a thing, for fuck’s sake, while we’ve been waiting around for three days without firing a shot, getting drunk and waiting for Santa Claus . . . Now the officers need something more substantial – so they arranged with the terrorists to set a real trap for us; that’s also why they’ve shown us what route to take . . .’

I wanted to leave the barracks, run over to command headquarters and take out every single person in there. I could already picture the bullets from my Kalashnikov felling all those old generals, their crisp uniforms riddled with bullets and their bodies tossed on the ground like sponges soaked with blood.

But our captain had his own ideas on how to resolve the matter. He asked Spoon for a cup of tea, which he quickly brought over. Taking small sips, he closed his eyes like a cat lying in front of a warm wood-burning stove.

Spoon took our last lemon and sliced it, neatly arranging the pieces on a sheet of newspaper and sprinkling a little sugar on top. Our captain appreciated Spoon’s care and thanked him, tossing three slices of sugared lemon into his mouth, one by one. Then he swore and started speaking in the same conspiratorial tone as before, this time looking us in the eyes:

‘Long story short, boys, none of us has any desire to die for these sons of bitches. I hope that on this point we’re all in agreement.’

The explorers’ lieutenant responded with a nod.

‘Good. Outside there are two transport cars waiting for us. They’ll take us somewhere and drop us off. We have about five kilometres to do on foot, after which, here’ – Nosov pointed to a small plain at the mouth of the valley on the map – ‘the Czechs* will start shooting at us. They’ll probably open fire once we’re past the plain, so we won’t have a chance to escape and they can slaughter us without any trouble.’

He took a sip of tea and ate another slice of lemon. Lieutenant Razumovsky took one as well, and then Nosov pushed the cup of tea over to him. He took a couple of sips and passed it to his men, as Spoon was already pouring another cup. Meanwhile, we could hear Moscow – who hadn’t stopped preparing the sets of tracer bullets for a second – loudly heaping insults on the officers, the army and the war.

Nosov went on:

‘The young lieutenant told me that he and another group of officers gave the investigators a statement, requesting further clarification about the case. Then they were given protective escorts. But as long as these corrupt colonels are in charge no one can go against them, so we have to carry out our mission, otherwise we all risk prosecution. But we have the right to carry it out as we see fit . . .’ He gave a half-smile. ‘I’ve already come up with a plan, which will work one hundred per cent . . . Or at least, it’ll give us a chance to come out of this shit alive.’

Nosov showed us a place on the map about five kilometres north of where they thought our skirmish with the enemy would take place.

‘We’ll get to the mountain here, go all the way across on one side without ever going down to the plain. We’ll find the enemy positions and once we’ve found them we mine their exit points. Then we’ll position ourselves nearby, and as the proverb goes, “If you’ve got the whip in your hand, you’ve got to whip the horse . . .” Command says we have to travel light – they stressed that we need to have the bare minimum on us, so we’ll present ourselves to them as we are now. But the lieutenant has already offered us his unit’s arsenal. We’ll take more grenade launchers and lots of hand grenades. And don’t forget your tracers – tonight we’re going to play target practice . . .’

The idea of target practice, risking becoming the targets ourselves, didn’t sit well with me – I would rather have stayed in our warm, safe barracks, drinking tea and sleeping. But by now the situation was clear, we had to steel ourselves. We had a none too pleasant excursion ahead of us.

We got dressed, prepared our jackets, and put the rain ponchos on. We each checked our weapons. I took my VSS precision rifle and a good number of rounds. That rifle was an exceptional weapon; I could shoot so fast that no matter how much ammo I had it was never enough. Naturally I took my trusty Kalashnikov, but I preferred not to load it with tracer bullets. I’d always been obsessed with the idea that the enemy would be able to figure out my position by following the green trail, a fear that snipers often have, a sort of occupational phobia.

In just a few minutes both groups were ready. We had quite a few people to kill, and we realised it wasn’t going to be simple. As my grandfather Nikolay used to say, ‘Be careful when you decide to kill someone, because death is close by.’

We came out of the barracks and went over to the yard where two armoured cars were already running. The rain was heavy, like a curtain between me and the world. In accordance with regulation we lined up in front of the officers’ barracks, and shortly one of them came out, even if you couldn’t see his stripes since they were covered by his rain poncho. His face had the typical grimace that all command officers have. All it took was a glance at that bastard and already I felt like throwing up.

As the highest ranking soldier, it was Nosov’s duty to report first. Nonchalantly, he began to yell, managing to be heard over the pounding rain:

‘Comrade Colonel! The sabotage and exploration group of the 76th division is ready for orders! Group commander Captain Nosov at your service!’

The colonel gave a listless salute, then gave us a quick once-over and asked Nosov:

‘Don’t you have a radio?’

‘We’re saboteurs, Comrade Colonel; a radio is not part of our equipment!’ Nosov replied, like a perfect soldier. Only to us was it clear that our captain was mocking him.

That pig looked at us again and without even listening to the explorers’ lieutenant, who was supposed to report second, he said:

‘It’s better that way, you can travel light – this is a walk in the park. Come tomorrow evening and you’ll already be back on base having dinner!’ Then he turned around and went back into the barracks.

What a dick, I thought, reflecting on how many guys like me he must have sent to their slaughter over the course of his military career.

We ran over to the armoured cars, light tracked vehicles. A man in civilian clothes was saying something to one of the two drivers. The guy said hello to Nosov, and I reckoned he was the young lieutenant who was saving our hides. Before going off to talk to him privately, our captain turned to us and said:

‘Get in there nice and tight now; I don’t want to see anyone riding on the armour!’

We obeyed immediately, also because the idea of being outside in that rain was not too appealing. As my comrades were getting into the car, I peeked inside. It was immediately clear why Nosov had told us to ‘get in tight’; it was packed with weapons, grenade launchers, ammo – there were three heavy machine guns, various cases full of bullets and three boxes full of hand grenades. Thinking about how tiring it was going to be carrying all that stuff while we were walking up in the mountains, I got in too. In the two cars, including the infantry explorers, there were fourteen of us in total.

Nosov joined us and sat in his favourite spot, with his back up against the door, which he had just closed with a bang. Smiling at me, he said:

‘Wake up, Kolima, we’ve been sleeping enough lately . . .’

The cars advanced through the mud while we made the final preparations. My job was to assemble the hand grenades. I took the explosive parts from one box – the ones with the characteristic lemon shape, except they’re green, and on the surface they’re cut into little squares like a tortoise shell – and the detonators from another box, where they were kept separately for safety. I screwed a detonator into each grenade. It was a strange device, thin as a pencil, with a handle on one side and a ring in the middle. Once I had assembled the two components, the grenade could be used at any time, you just had to pull the pin and the mechanism would go off – in three to four seconds it would explode.

There were different types of detonators: the most common were the ones for throwing, with a delay mechanism that allowed the bomb to be launched in complete safety. There were some slower detonators, where the explosive is contained in three separate compartments, which allows almost a minute between activation of the mechanism to the actual explosion; these were very useful for retreating from positions, or for when you’re being pursued. A group of soldiers at the end of the column would stay a little behind and throw these bombs, leaving a kind of improvised mine trail. Then there was the model with the direct detonator, which went off as soon as the pin was pulled, but perhaps the most famous and also the easiest to put together were the ones with the trip wire, which in military slang we simply called ‘trips’. The enemy would trip on the wire tied to the ring and immediately be blown to bits.

We saboteurs had every kind, because the nature of our actions was so broad that we had to be ready to use any tactical solution. The important thing was not getting them mixed up in the chaos of battle – that’s why we each carried certain types of bombs in certain places that everybody knew, so if one of us happened to get hurt or killed, the others could take his bombs without wasting time figuring out what colours they were marked with. And of course the marks were very subtle; they couldn’t be seen very well during the day, let alone at night or in the middle of pandemonium – one mistake could prove fatal.

I was afraid of grenades, as I was of explosives in general. They gave me the sense of something unstable, extremely dangerous. In my jacket, in a pocket I’d sewn on the back, I always carried one, but I never wanted to take more than that – expert snipers would often aim right at grenades naively kept in the most visible parts of a jacket. Once during a battle, I saw a stray bullet hit a grenade hanging from the vest of a VMF soldier. That mistake cost the soldier his life, and some of his nearby comrades were seriously wounded by the shrapnel. Fate is terrible: a weapon can be dangerous even for the person carrying it.

After about forty-five minutes, the cars – which used night scopes for illumination, keeping the headlights off – stopped near a bridge that spanned a small river. From there on we would have to go on foot. The rain only seemed to fall harder, and as soon as we got out we sank into the mud.

It was completely dark, and this combined with the rain created an uncomfortable sense of disorientation. We couldn’t see the horizon, neither the sky nor the earth; we couldn’t tell if the sky was up or down, if the water was falling or rising. I felt like I was floating in mid-air; I had the impression of being surrounded by emptiness and of being more than empty myself.

I leaned on the vehicle and as soon as I put my hand on the armour I realised I was standing, that the ground was beneath me and that therefore the sky was up above, because that’s how things in nature worked . . . From behind, Moscow gave me a shove:

‘What’s come over you, brother? You okay?’

‘It’s nothing . . . it’s just that for a second I couldn’t tell up from down with this rain . . .’ I replied, a little out of it.

‘What’s there to tell? It’s as simple as shit: water is falling, that means it’s raining.’ He nudged me with his shoulder and went to help the others pull the gear out of the cars.

It took just a few minutes to distribute the weapons and ammo. The drivers wished us luck and vanished into the dark in their vehicles, splattering more mud on us.

Nosov quickly explained our situation. Despite the torrents and the darkness, we had to trust him and follow his lead. We set off without a word, and the explorers followed behind.

We walked in the rain for almost two hours. Nosov used a compass to keep track of our orientation, stopping every so often to check the route with the infantry lieutenant, illuminating the map with a small red flashlight, just like the one each of us usually carried.

Our captain listened to Lieutenant Razumovsky’s suggestions carefully, because after scouting the vicinity with his group for a whole week, he was the one among us who knew the area best.

The road was unpaved. The ground was a mixture of mud and rocks that weighed down our every step and slowed our progress. We kept close to the trees, whose branches bowed from the weight of the water, closing us in almost like a cage.

After a while we noticed the outline of the mountains appearing majestically in the distance. They were dark, darker than the night, and there was something very menacing about them.

Nosov ordered us to take a short break. My comrades took the opportunity to swap equipment in order to temporarily lighten some of our loads. I took Zenith’s light machine gun, even though Nosov usually didn’t want me to get too tired; he said that as the sniper in the group I always had to be more rested and alert than all the others, because I needed to be able to concentrate to do my job.

We sat down to rest. Nobody smoked or ate – in these instances it was forbidden. I was thirsty, despite all the water that kept falling from the sky. I took a few sips from the canteen and closed my eyes for a minute.

When I opened them again it wasn’t raining so hard. The sky was slowly becoming free of the clouds and you could see a few stars in the distance. Of course, it was still completely dark, but it had become that kind of darkness that we called ‘dear’ – a friend, a partner you could trust – because in the dark we saboteurs felt at home.

Nosov gave the order to head out, in ‘millipede’ formation, and off we went.

When a big group moves through open territory, it often uses this formation, because it’s an effective way to avoid mines and not leave too many tracks. The leader of the company observes the surrounding territory and then chooses the best route, guiding the column. All the others have to follow him about one metre apart, walking in exactly the same spots he did. That might seem difficult, but actually you learn fast and soon it becomes natural. You get used to walking without thinking too much about it. It must look funny from the outside, an entire group perfectly imitating the movements of the first person in the line, as if they were all mocking him. It’s a good system for the soldiers’ safety – the group moves compactly and it becomes difficult to see from far away because it’s as if everyone were hiding behind one another. But it also has some negative aspects; besides forcing the soldiers to move slowly, if there’s a sudden attack it takes a lot of time before you can take up proper defensive positions.

Usually our infantry units and paratroopers moved according to a formation called ‘chess’; with at least three metres’ distance between one soldier and the next, and each soldier moving quickly and independently, it was important to maintain the same direction. If they were attacked, the men had enough room to drop to the ground and set up a position. There were still disadvantages: the group was highly visible, and in unknown territory the risk of blowing up was higher. Often anti-personnel mines would be placed on the sides of the road, precisely to catch those moving in ‘chess’ formation.

Each military unit followed the tactic chosen by its commander, but obviously each commander was different – each had his own war experiences behind him, and therefore used the solutions he considered the safest. Nosov said that the millipede formation was the most used in Afghanistan, especially on the mountain roads where there were many mines. We saboteurs all had complete faith in our captain, because his unit was the only one in which nobody had died since it had been formed. We felt protected, which was crucial in war because, as Nosov often said:

‘The soldier who feels defenceless is already halfway dead.’

After another hour of marching we reached the valley.

A soft wind blew on our faces, and it was very pleasant. It had stopped raining almost entirely, and the horizon could be seen in the distance. We still had a few hours of darkness before the dawn.

We took another break, sitting in a circle under a split rock. Nobody spoke. We passed the canteen around in silence, trying to recover our strength.

The explorer lieutenant and Nosov were bent over the map. They spoke in low voices, discussing our route.

‘It’s dangerous to go down too low,’ Lieutenant Razumovsky said, worried. ‘We risk running right into the enemy . . .’

‘That’s true,’ Nosov replied. ‘But we can’t go up either. We don’t know the area and time is tight . . .’

In the end the two decided to send a small group on recon.

It was a pretty safe method, but often the soldiers who were in the recon group – who never carried heavy weapons in order to move more easily – took an enormous risk. If they ran into an enemy encampment they had to able to retreat quickly, and sometimes (especially during night battles) on the way back to their positions they would run into friendly fire. To avoid these sorts of accidents, usually when it came time to retreat, the soldiers communicated with flashlights from the distance. We didn’t use a radio because it was a direct route to death: every frequency was monitored by the enemy.

The soldiers communicated by flashlight with a very specific code. To indicate that they were returning to base was three short flashes, at ten to twenty-second intervals, to which the rest of the company was supposed to respond with the same intermittent red light. Two short flashes meant that the group was staying in position for the moment; a single long flash meant that the enemy had been spotted; a short flash was used to tell the main group to join the others. Flashlights were used at short distances: fifty metres, two hundred at most. In open spaces, with few obstacles, like fields or areas near rivers, you could also go a little further, whereas in the city, the woods, or in underground tunnels, it was better to stay close by because the risk of losing visual contact was very high.

Communication in war is a strange thing. Lots of important decisions – the ones that can cost the lives of many people, including yours – are made on the basis of things like a series of signals made with a flashlight. You have to blindly trust whoever is sending those signals, because at that moment he’s the eyes and ears of the whole group. Personally, I didn’t really like the idea of depending on someone else, but in situations like that you didn’t have many alternatives. Trust was the only thing that made you and your comrades act as one big organism.

Nosov didn’t really trust the skill levels of men in other units, especially if he didn’t know them very well or they’d never been with him on an operation. And so that time in the mountains, he decided that the group to go on recon would be composed of three of us: Moscow, Deer and Spoon. Zenith, Shoe, Nosov and I would stay with the infantrymen. Some of them helped us, carrying the heavy stuff our guys had been carrying until then – grenade launchers, a few bags of hand grenades and various gear.

Leaving our refuge under the split rock, we headed off, hugging the mountain, and then we entered a young forest. The path was steep; you could feel your legs bending with strain. The group ahead of us signalled for us to stop, so we lay on the ground while the tireless Nosov sat and waited for the next signal, which punctually arrived a few minutes later. We proceeded very slowly, moving with the utmost care. In the mountains it’s as if every sound is magnified; the human voice carries a greater distance than normal, especially if there’s a lot of moisture in the air. For this reason it’s also easier to make mistakes, and a noise that seems far away can actually be close or vice versa, according to how the echo ricochets off the rocks and gets muffled or amplified by the trees or other external factors. Even one’s vision can be fooled by particular optical effects, and subjects can seem closer through a rifle scope. This type of operation requires total concentration, because the mountain is an unforgiving place.

We tried not to make any noise, not to stir the rocks, passing through the bushes in silence and carefully pushing aside tree branches. The dead leaves under our feet were soaked with water, in some places it was like a slide – all it would take was one of us to take a wrong step and we could all fall down like dominoes, going back to where we started from in two seconds. Here and there the path broke off completely, stopping at a wall of rocks and starting again higher up, a couple of metres from the ground. So we helped one another up, passing the load to the person who was already on top, but always without a word and with care as to where we stepped. Despite the cold mountain air, despite the humidity and a faint but constant wind, I felt hot, and my back was covered in sweat.

We went on like that for quite a while, moving through the thick of the forest. Time went by easily – it was always better to be moving than standing around waiting, at least to me.

We climbed for some time and then we suddenly reached a clearing with a narrow road that formed a kind of natural bridge between two mountains. It was a hundred metres long and curved in two places; the path was illuminated brightly by the stars.

We stopped, because the group who had gone ahead on recon was already on the other side of the mountain and had signalled for us to wait. So Nosov called me over. He was leaning on a tree and looking towards my comrades. Without taking his eyes off them, he said to me in a faint and feeble voice:

‘We’re almost there, be ready.’

I got the message. I instinctively reached for my precision rifle.

Our men didn’t signal for a while. We waited in silence, though surrounded by the sounds of nature: the wind whistled between the trees, a bird chirped, some stones fell somewhere, in the distance, up high. I was so focused, I noticed a sound that was perhaps water on rocks – there was probably a small stream nearby. Just beyond the edge of the road there was a very steep slope covered in trees and bushes. I tried to look down, but from where I was I could hardly see anything.

Fighting in a place like that would be very difficult – how nice it would have been to spend that night and the following day exploring the area without ever seeing anyone, and then just go back to base . . . at which point the inspectors from the prosecutor’s office, who were probably already on the scene, would cancel our operation. It would be so amazing to just coast through for once, without having to risk our hides in the middle of the mountains, I said to myself, daydreaming . . .

Suddenly Nosov pulled me away from my thoughts, giving me a little tap on the head, and when I looked towards our group I saw the red light, which stayed on for a long time. That could only mean one thing: they had found the enemy positions. A moment later, on the road between the two mountains, I saw some shadows moving towards us. They were moving very fast, sliding flat against the mountain. Nosov was still, concentrating. The shadows came closer. I recognised Moscow first, followed by the others. You couldn’t even hear their steps, it almost seemed like they were flying instead of walking.

Resolute, Moscow entered the glen and sat down next to Nosov, as if he’d known where our captain was in advance. The others gathered round him.

‘Right past the road there’s a stream,’ Moscow whispered, a slight tremor in his voice. ‘They’ve planted four mines; we pulled out two, and we left the others where they were, but defused . . . The Czechs are about two hundred metres further down. The stream goes over their position; there, they have two guards. They’re very calm, they’re talking at normal volume, joking around . . . As I approached I caught a strong smell of hash. I went past them without any trouble and went down to their camp. There’s about forty men. They lit a fire and covered it with a light tarp; I could see their barracks in the distance. Some of them were sleeping, others smoking, there were lots of Arabs, a few Czechs . . .’ Moscow paused for a second, as if he were trying to remember something.

‘What about the weapons?’ Nosov asked him.

Moscow went off again like a spring:

‘So . . . I saw four heavy machine guns, two with night scopes. One Arab was sleeping next to an RPG. They have bags everywhere with charges for grenade launchers. Some of the Arabs are very well equipped, I saw one soldier with an unusual oar,* definitely designer. That’s all I could see . . .’

Nosov put a hand on his shoulder, as if to thank him. Then he stood up and went over to the infantry lieutenant. My comrades seemed excited; it was clear that the presence of the enemy electrified them. I asked Moscow what he thought of the situation. He looked at me:

‘We could position ourselves above the stream – it’s full of rocks, it seems like a good place. They’re not waiting for us up there. I’m sure they have another group further down towards the valley, but if we can get rid of these ones, the others won’t have any support . . . We can kill the guards without making a sound, plant mines around their camp and then bury them in lead; with the grenade launchers, hand grenades and our machine guns we should be able to take care of them in a flash. There aren’t many of us, and so we’ll be able to move faster than them . . .’

The idea of destroying them in a single strike was a very good one, but – as often happened in that war – anything that seemed easy became hard as soon as it was put into practice. There were only fourteen of us, very few compared to the number that were certainly hiding in those mountains . . . Attacking such a large group, without precise information on the location of their other units, was really very dangerous.

I looked up. The forest was immersed in darkness, breathing loud. The trees seemed alive, like people – ruffled by the wind, the branches did a strange dance, a constant hypnotic motion. It was unquestionably a gorgeous, enchanting place. It’s a shame we had to see it through war, which manages to make even the most beautiful and extraordinary things in this world horrific.

I never stopped being afraid in the war, not even for an instant, and I think this is actually the reason I stayed alive and didn’t lose my mind. Every day I found myself facing situations that seemed to exceed my capacities; I had to make choices that forced me to surpass my physical and mental strength, and so I always tried to be very careful, precise and resolute . . . In war, the idea of death never leaves your thoughts. Everyone tries to exorcise it in his own way – some try to dispel it, others become obsessed with it and end up becoming its victims, still others act tough, trying to bring out the worst in themselves as if generating negative things in their minds deludes them into thinking they’re deferring death’s power . . . But the risk is turning into a stupid puppet, in the service of another.

With time, I learned that the fear of death had to be exploited, used as a resource that human nature offers to those who know what to do with it. All the things that make an individual what he or she is, attitudes related to conscience, morals, respect for others, elements that vary according to culture and upbringing – all this disappears when confronted with the instinct for survival. In extremely dangerous situations, it’s instinct that guides you. That’s how I was, often without really realising it. I made decisions based on the fact that the primary goal was to save my skin. Everything else came second.

I talked to Nosov about this a few times. On the whole he agreed with me, but he always stressed the fundamental difference between fear and terror:

‘Fear will make you grow eyes even on your back, but terror makes you blind.’

That night in the mountains I had my eyes wide open, waiting to see what was going to happen.

Lieutenant Razumovsky came over to us, followed by Nosov. With all my lung power I took in the cool and pure mountain air, savouring every mouthful as if there soon wouldn’t be any left.

As Moscow had predicted, our officers had decided to attack from above, thus making use of the surprise-effect. We broke up into two teams: the infantry explorers had to position the machine guns and grenade launchers at strategic points, and be ready to fire; my comrades and I, plus Nosov, had the task of taking out the guards and mining the territory around their base with explosives.

In truth, if there was one thing I hated it was planting mines, but you can’t argue with orders, as soldiers would say, so I filled my pockets with explosives to put the ‘trips’ together. My comrades were nervous. Moscow started checking every bomb himself – he wanted to be sure that everything went right. Nosov and the infantry lieutenant repeated the plan one last time. Finally, after just a few minutes we were all ready to attack.

We came out of the woods and set off down the small path connecting the two mountains, running hunched over so we couldn’t be seen. Moscow and the others who already knew the area led the ranks; Nosov brought up the rear and I was in front of him. We quickly reached the other side of the mountain, and then Moscow signalled for us to keep completely quiet and showed us the way. We had to go down along the brush, since the slope was steep and there was nothing to hold on to; thus we went, with our bottoms almost touching the rock.

The sound of the stream kept getting louder, and at a certain point past the trees’ lush branches I saw the glittering water gliding between the rocks. We stopped near the stream. It must have been a metre and a half wide, and it wasn’t very deep; you could see some big stones jutting out, polished by the water. We could hop across without any problem. It’s always better to cross streams by jumping whenever possible, because walking on stones, however flat, isn’t very safe; it’s too easy to slip and fall.

Ten metres away from us sat two individuals. One with his back to the mountain was smoking a cigarette, covering it with a cupped hand, and was chatting with the other guy. You could tell they were relaxed. They were sure we were going to come from below, where their other group was probably waiting to ambush us.

Nosov signalled to Moscow, who understood immediately what our captain meant. He gave Deer the rifle and pulled out his knife, holding it with the handle down and the blade concealed under his wrist to keep the steel from reflecting. Nosov handed me his rifle and took out his knife as well. Without a word, the two went out from behind the trees towards the guards. We observed everything in silence.

The one who had just finished smoking was stretched out on a rock. His rifle was resting on his thigh and his arms were straight at his sides; he looked tired. The other one was sitting up, his back straight, holding the rifle between his legs, every now and then lightly gripping the barrel. Nosov and Moscow took over five minutes to reach them. They moved slowly, creeping through the bushes, almost hugging the ground.

There were no trees near the guards. The water gave off so many gold shimmers we were able to see every detail. The smoker was young, while the other one was older.

Now that our men were no longer visible, our eyes were glued to the guards. We were waiting for something to happen, but everything seemed calm. Suddenly there was movement; the older one got up and went towards the stream. He set his rifle down on a rock and bent over, bringing his lips to the water and drinking on all fours, like wild animals do. At that moment his comrade lifted his hands upward a little and made a noise, a sort of whimper. An instant later a shadow popped out from behind him – Moscow. The Arab was no longer moving. Meanwhile, the one who had gone to drink some water already had his head dunked in the stream and a knife plunged into his neck. Nosov was holding him fast under the water, clutching him like a spider its prey. The Arab’s right hand scraped at the stones in a hopeless attempt to grab his rifle, but Moscow was already holding his weapon, and then had a foot blocking his arm. After a moment he ceased struggling. Nosov slowly slackened his grip, then turned him onto his side, lifted his left arm and to be sure sank his knife between his ribs, where the heart is. It was like seeing how one should kill an animal, not a man.

We went closer. Together, we hid the bodies in the bushes nearby. Now we had to move along the edges of the camp, planting mines to avoid leaving any passageway free.

The forest sloped down, but the enemy’s barracks rose in the middle of a nice wide clearing that was visible from a distance. We crept along like snakes; we were so close that we could hear the crackle of the wood burning in the fire in the centre of their camp. Once we got within about fifty metres of the barracks, we split up, with Deer placing the bombs in the trees on one side, Moscow planting the tripwire, and Shoe and Spoon covering, keeping an eye on the area; we were on the opposite side, doing the same task.

Nosov ordered me to plant the bombs in the trees. He pulled the first one out of the bag and I wrapped the wire around the fuse; Nosov carefully tightened the wire, while Zenith kept an eye on our surroundings. The enemy was near – I could hear them talking, some were laughing. Nosov periodically showed me when the wire on the spool ran out, so I would pull another one out of the bag and hand it to him. We did everything fast – it was almost like decorating a Christmas tree. Within a few minutes I had completely emptied my bag. We’d already planted fifteen hand grenades, but that still wasn’t enough. I signalled to Zenith and he immediately passed me another full bag.

We kept going more rapidly and efficiently – after a while my fear of explosives was almost gone. Our movements were precise, automatic and repetitive; while the body worked, the mind detached, as in yoga. I set up the bombs, thinking of my house in Bender, of the river where I used to go fishing, of the smooth, delicate water it was a pleasure to take a dip in . . . Often during the war, a projection came into my mind, like at the movies, a mental screen where the most comforting images from my past would roll by. Sometimes they were so real I could almost feel the warm summer wind on my face that blew on me as a boy when I would go sailing with my friends . . . In those moments I was really fine, I was able to relax, and even if everything around me was like an inferno, inside I was able to maintain great calm, an absolute peace. But immediately afterward, as soon as I realised that the pleasant sensation was fading, I would despair – it was like falling through an empty space.

We had almost finished mining our side of the camp, and backing up little by little we returned to the stream where the guards had been just before. There, we planted the last grenade. Zenith was looking in the direction from which our comrades were supposed to come, but we couldn’t see anyone yet. We went back across the stream and hid behind the trees, waiting for the others to arrive. I had taken off my gloves to secure the bombs as well as possible and now my hands were freezing; I put them back on, trying to warm up.

A few minutes later the others finally arrived, almost in a rush – we were all afraid that some Arab would set off a mine early. As soon as the group rejoined us we went back up to our position where the infantrymen were waiting for us.

The explorers had already arranged everything as best they could. The machine guns were shielded by the biggest rocks, the grenade launchers were arranged on the side and in the centre, and there was a broad space for the rest of us.

Everyone took his place. Moscow and Zenith went to two machine guns, an infantryman was at the other. I prepared my Kalashnikov and placed it next to me, then I unslung my precision rifle, opened the stock, and loaded the cartridge in the barrel, trying to make as little noise as possible. I took the piece of cardboard from the fold in my hat, scrunched up my eyes three times – a little concentration exercise that helped me to aim better – then covered my left eye and started observing my targets.

I was in a comfortable position; the visual on the enemy base in front of me was good. There were a few Arabs sitting, some were lying down. There was a fire in the middle, carefully concealed by the tent. It was clear that they had set up their camp so it couldn’t be seen from below, but from my location – despite the dampness and the dawn that tarried to come – with the scope I was able to make out everything. First I noticed a group of five people – they were sitting on a log all in a row with their backs to me, warming up by the fire. I decided to start with them. They were awake, and when we attacked they would definitely be among the first to react. I aimed at the one on the far left. There was a big tree next to him, behind which he and his comrades could hide, whereas on the right was ten metres of open space; when the enemies realised that one of them had been shot down, they would instinctively jump to the right, and that’s when I would have all the time I needed to kill them.

The Arab sitting on the left had long hair, wore an American jacket and was armed with a folding stock AKS that he had resting against his leg. Even if I was able to see only the back of his neck, he looked like a calm type. His movements were relaxed, and observing him made me feel calmer too – and I love calm, I can’t stand chaos. Breathing slowly, I took aim; his neck was in my sight. Now I was just waiting for the ‘blessing’ of our captain, who in the meantime had come over to me.

‘I’m ready,’ I said, without taking my eye off the scope. Nosov made the sign to everyone to be on alert, then he whispered a very precise order into my ear:

‘Fire!’

I filled my lungs with air and held my breath. When my body got as hard as a rock I pulled the trigger. As I’ve said, my rifle was a very quiet model. Once it had been released, the bullet travelled through the air like an arrow shot from a bow – in fact, among soldiers the VSS was known as the ‘black arrow’. In an instant I had unloaded four more rounds, each time aiming at the neck. None of the enemies had even had the time to get up from the log they were sitting on. They slid to the ground one by one.

The bullets didn’t have much force and therefore they simply killed, going through the men’s heads without their bodies making the kind of violent spasms that would arouse the suspicions of those near them. It was a death poor in movement – seen from the scope, the target still seemed alive. If the bullet struck the head you could see the victim make a quick half gesture, as if he were tossing back a lock of hair that had fallen on his forehead. He would freeze for a second, and then immediately collapse like a marionette whose strings have been cut. If the bullet struck the heart, you couldn’t see anything at all – the target would be still for a few seconds, and I would often shoot again until I saw him fall.

Once during a skirmish in the city, I found myself shooting at a guy who just wouldn’t fall down. Although I had unloaded an entire clip into him he stayed on his feet. At some point I hit his head, but nothing doing . . . When the battle was over and I was able to get a closer look, I saw that the guy was completely propped against a wall, his feet shifted forward a little, which kept him standing although he had already been dead for some time. His arms were folded across his chest, plastered with bullet holes; his head dangled, revealing two deep holes in the back of his neck. That occurrence made a strange impression on me; it erased the border in my head separating images of the living from the dead, and from that moment on I haven’t been able to distinguish between them. When I look at the living I can perceive signs of death, and vice versa . . .

Seeing people die when they don’t expect it, killing them while they’re immersed in total calm, is a privilege reserved exclusively to snipers. Soldiers normally see another death, one that’s more physical, full of facial contortions and bodily struggle. In hand-to-hand combat, when the firing distance ranges from ten to a hundred metres, you often can’t tell exactly where or who you’re shooting at. You shoot while running, amidst enormous confusion, with your senses spinning, and it’s impossible to see things from the right distance. I, on the other hand, had learned to do my job with patience, to watch scenes of death with great calm, to look at them the way one looks at a painting.

The other soldiers, when they found out that I was a sniper, would often ask me what was so great about my position that had me roaming around at night in the middle of enemy territory, going through mine fields, risking my life to find the best position and staying there motionless for hours watching the enemy, when most of the time things were resolved in a few seconds, or with a single explosion . . . I’d smile just slightly, but if I were sure that they wouldn’t take it the wrong way, I would reply that I was motivated by a great love for death, the true pleasure that only hunting human beings can provide. A sick feeling.

I stood there in position waiting for the exact moment to shoot, and it seemed as if I was being cradled in the arms of death, that death appeared just for me; a shiver went through my body, like when someone you love touches you or breathes on your skin . . . I knew I was putting myself on the line for this one second, but in that moment death and I were the only ones left on Earth, and she did her terrible dance for me, the one that’s always the same but different every time, charged with emotion, with grace and a lethal beauty that made me feel good. In those moments I felt like I was part of an eternal mechanism, an entity that surpassed human understanding. It was without a doubt the madness of an assassin – me – but it gave me certain sensations that can’t be compared to anything else.

When the war was over and I was back home, I talked about this experience a lot with my grandfather, telling him how killing human beings had made me feel differently than hunting animals in the forest. In his way, he consoled me:

‘Every man carries both God and the Devil within himself. In some situations it’s right for one to prevail over the other; that’s the only way man can survive.’

The war in Chechnya was a true hell, and my personal devil had to be at the height of his strength: that was his place and his time.

Once I unloaded the round in the last guy’s head I immediately glanced at the others; they were all lying on the ground except for one. He was on his knees, one hand gripping his throat and the other making strange motions in the air as if he were swimming. I’d hit him in the neck, and even though the wound was fatal he still had a few seconds to live before leaving this world. Often, during battles – especially if there was more than one target, as in this case – I had no way to observe that macabre spectacle I found so captivating, and so death did its dance alone, without sharing it with me.

I immediately shot another round and hit him right in the head. His body fell beside his comrades’.

Just then we heard shouting coming from the enemy camp. I didn’t have enough time to look up before our men had already opened fire, using all the firepower we had prepared.

With the grenade launcher my comrades hit the bags where the Arabs kept their ammo. Two powerful explosions lit up the sky. Someone shot a volley of bullets at us from a nearby bush. I tried to take aim and shoot him, but the enemy immediately stepped on one of our mines and blew up. Then there was a series of more shouting, shooting, explosions, tracer bullets whizzing through the air – they were trying to get rid of us, but our fire was so heavy they couldn’t. One by one the enemies began to emerge from the camp, and, running towards us, they set off the mines we had planted all around. Everything was on fire; within moments there were bodies in flames everywhere, on the ground, in the trees – the enemy camp looked like one big bonfire with the Arabs running around disorientated, shooting in every direction.

I hit one in the chest and he fell right away; then he put his palms on the ground and tried to get back up. I got him in my crosshairs and shot again; the second bullet demolished his nose and maybe also his eyes. His head dangled, but he was still alive – he held a hand up to his disfigured face as if afraid to touch it, or as if he wanted to free himself from a sticky substance. I aimed again and this time the bullet lodged right in the back of his neck. Through the scope, I saw his raised arm slowly droop down.

Nosov shouted something to me, but with all that racket I couldn’t make sense of anything. Then he motioned for me to look to my left. One of the infantrymen was placing the machine gun right next to me, in order to strike the enemy from a closer distance. As soon as I realised, I covered my ears with my hat the best I could, but within seconds the infantryman had already used up the first magazine. Hearing a machine gun from close up is like getting pounded in the head, I hated it. I grabbed my Kalashnikov and crawled a few metres over to Nosov. Our captain was firing single shots, using a dioptric scope.

‘That bastard has a grenade launcher, take him out before he can fire!’ he ordered me.

I immediately started looking for the target, but I couldn’t see it.

‘Right behind the tent, between those two trees!’ the captain yelled.

I looked in the direction Nosov indicated. I couldn’t see anyone, just an RPG grenade launcher peeking out from behind a tree. I shot at the RPG but didn’t hit it right away; I only got it after two tries. When it exploded, a man fell dead from behind the tree. Another man popped out from the same place – he was clutching his belly, bent over so far he seemed hunchbacked – clearly he’d been hit by the shrapnel. Anyone who has been in war knows that it’s better to take five bullets than a single fragment from a grenade. I took him out too, firing a round right at his head. He fell, his hands still on his stomach. A part of his skull flew off; once he was on the ground, his head looked like a half moon with a huge crater.

The enemy was no longer responding to our fire. We were only firing single shots, at most a few short blasts from the machine gun. The entire forest in front of us was on fire, and now and then, when the flames reached the bodies, you could hear the rounds exploding directly inside the enemies’ guns, or in the magazines hooked to their bulletproof vests.

The flames were very high; nothing of their camp was left. Perhaps in addition to the ammo for the grenade launchers, the Arabs had had some gas-powered devices. When they explode, they can create a fire that can reach a temperature of ten thousand degrees for a few seconds over a ten-metre circumference. The burst of flame they produce can incinerate armoured cars instantly and leaves little trace of the human body. You only know that there was a person there at the time of the explosion from the oil stains you find on the metal or the cement.

In an instant, it was all over. I had observed that terrible spectacle through the scope of my rifle, while Nosov watched the enemy camp go up in flames through his small pair of binoculars. The fire was strong, blinding; ammo continued to explode, you could see sparks flying everywhere, but around the clearing everything seemed calm. Our captain was satisfied, making a quiet noise that sounded like a purr – he always did that when he was happy with the outcome of an operation.

Suddenly, about five kilometres further down, at the opening of the valley, a green signal flare went up in the sky. It lingered in the air for about ten seconds, and then started to fall. It was another enemy group, maybe the ones who were originally supposed to attack us – they had probably intended to block the exit from the valley, push us into the mountains and make us fight the group we had just eliminated. A plan like that revealed their fear of direct combat. They had surely planted mines on the path that they’d wanted to force us to take. All these elements proved that it had all been planned down to the last detail – undoubtedly with the support of our command.

Unfortunately for them, they weren’t very well trained. Word was that the Arabs had a makeshift field hospital in those mountains, where in addition to caring for the wounded they sent the younger soldiers to learn something from those with more experience. Our blazing victory and the panic that had spread among our adversaries (although the attack had been unexpected) were proof that these weren’t expert soldiers – otherwise the whole thing wouldn’t have been so easy.

Nosov put down the binoculars and smiled at me:

‘Kolima, son, you know what that flare means?’

‘I don’t have a clue, Ivanisch,’ I replied, though in reality I had some idea.

He gave me a light tap on the head, like adults do with children when they’ve made a mistake.

‘That flare, soldier, means that today we’re going to ram it up their arses so far they’ll get sore throats!’

Hearing him talk that way was a good sign. Nosov only said things like that when he was certain of victory. So I smiled too.

The captain rose to his feet and ordered the others to pick up the ammo scattered all over the ground. Everyone got to work. An infantryman snapped a twig off a tree and swept the shells away, hiding them under the bushes. Soon the terrain was clear.

The infantry sniper came up to me:

‘Hey, brother, where’d you learn to shoot?’

‘In Siberia, I used to go hunting with my grandfather . . .’ I showed him the piece of cardboard I used to cover my eye. ‘See this? It helps.’

He was young. He seemed fascinated and intimidated. It was clear that he had found himself with a precision rifle in his hands just because someone in his command needed to assign the role of sniper to a draft soldier.

Often with infantry snipers, nobody explained anything to them. They learned to shoot in combat. When I had the chance, I showed them what were, in my opinion, the essentials for getting through this gig.

There’s a whole science behind using a precision rifle. To ensure that your shots make the maximum impact, you have to calculate every detail. A person who’s a good shot at a non-professional level can learn during war – over the course of six months – all the little tricks and secrets to turn him into a master sniper. The important thing is to get a lot of practice and be careful of everything, obviously first training yourself how to avoid getting shot. Many soldiers, since they’d never had any instruction, developed instinctive personal techniques, some of which were actually interesting, and so sometimes I also learned something from them.

I met quite a few snipers who came from highly specialised schools – people who knew everything about the theory – and used excellent, extremely accurate weapons, with which (thanks to very sophisticated electronics) they could cover great distances. Yet they came to a bad end the moment they came face to face with an enemy armed with even just a regular assault rifle, a weapon that couldn’t shoot more than six hundred metres away.

That happened because they came to war without field training. Nobody had told them that the sniper’s primary talent depends on his capability to kill without thinking. You have to be calm, relaxed, and – as the old Siberians used to say – ‘have a frozen heart and a cold hand’.

Nosov, without losing any time, called three from our group and three infantrymen to scour the enemy encampment:

‘Don’t pick up grenade launcher rounds, explosives or undetonated hand grenades – take only the ammo we can use. If you find usable weapons, collect them, put them together and blow them up. If you find anyone still breathing, use your knives, use fire only if necessary. If you find any documents, maps, electronic devices, means of communication, bring them here immediately . . .’

Moscow, Deer, Zenith and three explorers went right down. I took position to keep an eye on them, and the young explorers’ sniper accompanied me. A little way from us, Nosov surveyed the scene with his binoculars.

For a while there was no sign of our group, and then Moscow came into view. He led the others, keeping his rifle levelled, and Deer and Zenith followed, covering him on both sides. The explorers brought up the rear, the last one walking slowly, backwards, looking around. They stopped in the middle of the camp, illuminated by the light of the fire. Moscow signalled for Deer and Zenith to lower their rifles. They pulled out their knives and went off in opposite directions, each followed by an infantryman with his rifle up, ready to shoot if necessary.

Moscow went over to an Arab who was lying face down. He turned him over and cut his bulletproof vest laterally; he quickly checked the pockets, emptied a bullet case, putting the cartridges into his backpack, and moved right on to the next, while the infantryman followed him like his shadow. At one point, Moscow came across a man who was wounded; he slid his knife into his heart and the man died without batting an eye.

Within ten minutes the entire camp was cleaned out. Deer and Zenith had backpacks full of ammo; Zenith had found a heavy machine gun with a night scope. He dragged it along with a set of magazines looped together with a belt.

After emptying the chambers, they threw all the weapons they had found into a ditch in the middle of the camp, and then set them on fire. Zenith and Deer took two big heavy logs, placed them over the hole to stifle the explosion a little, then they left with the infantrymen, running towards us. They jumped over the stream and clambered up the steep little road, and in a second they were back with us again.

Moscow was alone in the middle of the camp. He looked around for a moment and then tossed a hand grenade in the ditch. Then he threw himself somewhere in the dark, under cover. The explosion was very loud and we instinctively ducked down. Fragments of weapons went flying everywhere, scattering around the camp and surrounding woods; they were almost all from AKs, which were now completely unrecoverable. Moscow’s figure emerged from the dark. He went over to the ditch for a second, toed what was left of a rifle and then ran back over to us.

‘Excellent work, boys,’ Nosov commented.

Zenith went to the captain and showed him the machine gun that, against orders, he had kept:

‘Ivanisch, don’t be angry,’ he implored, ‘but I couldn’t leave it there. It’ll be useful to us – look how many clips it has, and it even has a night scope . . . I’ll carry it myself, I swear . . .’

Zenith was physically very strong – none of us had any doubt that he could carry the weapon without any trouble – but we knew very well how important respecting orders was to Nosov.

The captain seemed lost in thought, and then all of a sudden he turned to me, pointing to the machine gun:

‘Kolima, make sure the scope works and that it’s calibrated right. If everything’s okay, Zenith can keep it. It could prove useful to us in our next battle . . .’

I took the machine gun and examined it. The scope had a cloth cover, very crudely hand-sewn; I took it off and switched on the night scope. I waited a second for it to come on and when I saw the shine of the phosphorescent reticule, I brought my eye to the lens. The view was very good, the scale clear. I set the weapon on its stand and after pointing it at the field I loaded the chamber. The release was smooth, making an even duller sound than a Kalashnikov. I aimed the crosshairs at a dead Arab lying on the ground, arms outstretched, in the middle of the camp. I couldn’t see the surrounding area too well because of the flames – the camp, the body, the trees, everything was bathed in a hazy green light. So I removed the night scope’s battery and the light scale went off; then it had the faint light of a regular scope.

Every scope has an indicator – a ‘fixed point’, ‘single point’ or ‘pattern’ – that signals the distance from the weapon to the objective. Usually on precision rifles this point corresponds to about two hundred metres. At that distance there’s no need for correction; once the target has been pinpointed you can fire.

If the target is at a distance of more than two hundred metres you have to correct the sight a point lower on the scale, while if the target is closer than that you have to go a point higher. You also have to take into consideration certain external factors: wind, rain or the specifics of a given place – if there’s a river nearby, for example, the air will be more humid – will vary the correction. This goes for the precision rifle scope. A machine gun, however, is a little simpler. Its fire capacity is higher than a rifle’s, but it’s much less precise; besides single rounds – which aren’t its forte – it can cover a very broad area with a single volley of bullets.

*

‘Is it any good?’ Zenith asked, impatient. He was pacing more nervously than a father waiting to find out whether his newborn child was okay.

‘Just one second, brother,’ I replied, moving the selector to single shot.

I took my mouth guard out of my pocket – I carried it with me for shooting a Kalashnikov. It prevented my jaw from getting hit too much and the headache that would ensue. I framed the head of the corpse lying in the middle of the camp in the sight. The trigger was hard to pull, unlike the one on my rifle, which was nice and smooth.

I fired a round, and the head of the corpse came apart. Although I had a good hold on the weapon and was in a comfortable position the recoil was so strong that I felt it smack me in the shoulder. There was an annoying whistling in my ears, though I thought I’d compensated the force of the shot better than that . . . It was very strange. I switched the regulator onto blast and, clenching my teeth, I aimed at the Arab’s vest. It literally burst into pieces, as if it had exploded from inside.

My comrades were speechless, and I couldn’t believe my eyes either. Machine gun bullets could make holes in bulletproof vests, but usually they didn’t destroy them in such a violent and devastating manner.

I had a hunch. I took a flashlight and pointed it at the chamber, opened it up and examined the cartridges. The shell was grey instead of brass.

‘Fuck,’ I said out loud.

‘What? What?’ Zenith asked, all excited.

I stood up and reported my discovery to Nosov:

‘Ivanisch, there are amazing bullets in this little toy,’ I said, my voice serious.

The captain took the gun and examined it carefully.

The bullets were polished to a mirror shine, the tips painted black. These were very expensive special cartridges, definitely not stuff meant for the army. The body was steel, covered with a light coat of varnish, and the tip was metal so it could go through kevlar or iron the same as air. The matrix was liquid mercury, which made its trajectory extra precise; most importantly, the gunpowder charge was stronger than normal, because it had to create enough force to propel the bullets, which were much heavier than normal ones.

We didn’t have ammunition like that in our possession, only the Arabs did. It came from the black market, through ties with America. People said that a special company in Texas manufactured them, and that they cost five dollars each. This type of projectile was famous and feared among the soldiers, because there was no bulletproof vest that could withstand their force. In military slang they were called ‘bye-bye mommas’ – if a round like that hit you were done for.

Nosov passed Zenith the gun.

‘Nice surprise. Use it wisely, son . . .’

My comrade’s eyes shone like two polished buttons on a general’s uniform.

*

In the meantime, Moscow and Deer opened their backpacks and began passing out the ammo they found in the camp – many were clips for AKs.

Moscow came over and held out two clips:

‘See if they work on yours, they won’t fit in mine . . .’

I took them, but even though they were the right calibre they didn’t work in my pistol either. But so as not to throw away useful stuff I put them in my side pouch anyway, under the medi-kit. We weren’t short on ammo, but it was always better to have a little extra.

We put all our weapons in place, making sure everything was in order. I pissed in the bushes and had a big drink of water.

Nosov and Lieutenant Razumovsky had spread out the map on a rock and were trying to decide the best way to circumvent the other enemy group. We had to keep hugging the mountain, then at some point the road would open out onto the valley. There, we had to go down and cross the valley, and then we would be on the way home.

Nosov set off down the path with a fast and determined stride, and the rest of the group followed behind. The explorers joked amongst themselves, a sign that after our victory morale was high. One of them passed me a piece of bread; I thanked him and started chewing on it slowly. Only then did I realise that I was hungry. Despite my days of rest and the spreads on base, I devoured it in seconds. As my elders often said:

‘It doesn’t take long to get used to the good things . . .’

We walked quickly in the cold morning air. The moon in the sky was a thin crescent and soon would disappear with the dawn. Nosov was watching the road and we were trying to keep up. The road was flat; once in a while there would be some bushes and then our captain would send one of us on recon. I took advantage of those moments to close my eyes and try to get at least a few minutes of rest.

Thus we continued for a while, until we reached a spot with a view over another mountain. It seemed close by. The sky was dotted with little clouds, riddled with holes as if someone had shot at it with a machine gun.

Nosov and the infantryman lieutenant stopped, ordered us to go to the side of the road and take a break. We didn’t make them say it twice. We sat right down, leaning against the huge rocks that must have slid down there who knows how many years ago. We were all really tired. Some drank, others ate, and one infantryman took off his backpack, put his rifle down, lay out on a flat rock and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for about a minute, and then got up, stretching and yawning, as if he had just got out of bed.

Nosov gave me a piece of hardtack, and rubbing his neck, sat down beside me. For a while he didn’t say anything, and then he explained:

‘The next leg will be almost all in the open, near the boulders. It’s a three-kilometre route.’ He pointed to the space between the two mountains. ‘At the point where these mountains are at their absolute closest they’re probably about three hundred metres apart. That mountain leads to the north, and it’s completely treeless, whereas this one has some very dense areas of forest . . . If I were in the Arabs’ place I’d hurry across the valley, then I’d go up by the trees to set an ambush, that would be the only safe place. They’re afraid of direct combat – I’m sure they’ll station themselves there. Just as long as they can get there in time . . .’

I chewed on the biscuit as if hypnotised. When I listened to my captain’s voice the rest of the world turned off, there was only room in my mind for whatever he was saying. He put his hand on my head, as if giving me a blessing, and continued:

‘Get ready – in five minutes you’ll go with Moscow and Zenith to survey the hill. You’ll go on “detachment”.* We won’t be there to cover your arses, so be quick and keep your eyes peeled . . . Stop every ten metres and observe the terrain carefully. If you see any strange movement, if there’s something that makes you suspicious, come back immediately . . . We’ll be twenty minutes behind you, don’t forget. And be careful – I don’t want anyone losing his hide.’

In short, it was clear that the whole operation had reached the crucial moment, the turning point that could determine our future (or non-) existence.

When I went on recon I became another person. I was much less confident than when I just had to be a sniper. I worried about making mistakes, not being able to observe the terrain well, not noticing important details . . .

Reconnaissance, in war, is a very difficult task. It doesn’t only mean penetrating the enemy’s territory unseen and watching them, it’s a matter of assessing various factors, in order to reach a conclusion and deliver it as quickly and precisely as possible to your captain. Each operation is different. You have to spot the things that seem invisible to the normal eye, predict the enemy’s moves, think like him. It’s like hunting in the woods, following animal tracks. The difference is that in war both sides have weapons, the hunter and the hunted.

Your senses must always be on alert, especially if you don’t know the area. You have to memorise every detail, even the most insignificant. Each individual stone and ditch, every tree and possible path. If something unexpected happens, it’s crucial to have already figured out a quick escape route different from the one you took there. And to give a precise report, you have to remember all the places where firing positions can be set up, probing every bit of land to find the most appropriate plan.

Even today, I often find myself observing open spaces and thinking how perfect they would be for a military operation. Where a normal person sees a landscape and contemplates the beauty of nature, I realise that, against my will, I am figuring out where the machine gun should go.

I was sitting and chewing on the biscuit the captain had given me and trying to gather whatever strength I had left to carry out my job. Meanwhile, Nosov had gone first to Moscow and then to Zenith to give them the same little speech he had given me.

We had to cover two kilometres through a small forest, after which, according to Nosov, we would come to the clearing. This was the point from which we would go and explore the other mountain.

My comrades and I started filling our pockets with ammo. Zenith pulled an individual medi-kit out of his side pouch and put two clips in its place. When we went on recon we had to travel light but carry as many clips as possible. Getting into fire combat without anyone covering you was usually the fastest way to reach the great beyond.

We did our usual jumping on the spot to make sure nothing we had on us would make too much noise when we moved. I asked a soldier drinking some water from a plastic bottle if he would let me have some. I drank slowly, leisurely, letting the water slide down my throat. My head was light, I felt as if I’d got a second wind. In a certain sense, it was as if our adventure had only just begun.

Moscow came over and smiled at me:

‘It’s up to us once again, little brother . . .’

‘May Jesus help us this time too, as always,’ I replied.

We saluted and headed out.

Zenith walked behind us. With the machine gun he’d found and all the clips on his jacket he looked like some kind of robot.

At a certain stretch, when we were already almost past the first curve, Nosov came running up. For a second I thought he wanted to join us, but that wouldn’t have made any sense.

He gave Moscow two hand grenades and, looking at us almost affectionately, he said:

‘Be careful, boys, this isn’t a walk in the park . . .’

We went through the woods. A few times we dropped to the ground, alarmed at noises that seemed like footsteps very close by, but that were actually stones falling down somewhere else.

Trees became more and more sparse, and after a very tight curve we saw a wide, bare rocky area ahead. Crossing that entire stretch in our two groups without being discovered – if there was anyone hiding out waiting to kill us – would be no easy endeavour.

‘I’ll go first,’ I said, trying to muster my courage. After a long breath, I went onto the path, flattening myself against the wall of the mountain. I realised that there was a small ditch at my feet, almost half a metre deep, perhaps created by the rainwater, so I tried walking inside it. It was easy going, and it gave me a sense of protection from possible bullets, but the path was irregular; in some places the ditch slanted up and almost reached the level of the main trail. I went on like that for about ten metres, then I stopped and signalled to my comrades that I was going to come back onto the path.

I lay down on my belly. I could really smell the wet grass, the air was still completely moist, but there was no fog. I went on my hands and knees across the trail until I got to the other side. The ground was soft, swollen with rain, and the water went right through my clothes, right to my skin. We had taken off our rain ponchos because they limited our range of motion significantly, and besides that they made enough noise to reveal our presence immediately.

I turned on my rifle’s night scope and looked at the mountain. The first area I decided to scout was about thirty metres wide and half a kilometre long; it was covered with small trees, but they weren’t very close together. I looked slowly, moving the scope from high to low, right to left and then back. To scout a place it has to be divided into sections, so first you give the entire area a quick once-over. At this stage, it’s helpful to identify some features of the landscape that you can use later as points of reference, like a stream, a fallen tree, a big or unusually shaped rock . . . Each of these elements serves to create an imaginary network in your head that you can go back over later through the scope for more careful inspection. An expert eye can notice a human presence even with peripheral vision. The important thing is never taking your eye off the scope, not changing position or allowing yourself to be distracted by anything outside your field of vision.

I didn’t notice any Arabs; I crawled back across. I signalled for Zenith and Moscow to join me, and together we walked through the ditch. We stopped several more times – every ten metres, as the captain had said – taking turns observing all the details of the mountain, but there didn’t seem to be anything suspicious.

We were almost finished; it was my turn to explore again. All I could think about was when we would be back on base. Maybe Nosov’s worries were exaggerated; our enemy wouldn’t be able to move through the mountains fast enough to catch up with us and ambush us.

I went to the edge of the trail and began observing. Suddenly something appeared in my scope. It was a man, walking uphill, and he was carrying lots of ammo. I felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice water on me. The man was moving slowly and his phosphorescent figure, as I saw it through the night scope, gave the impression that he wasn’t afraid of being discovered. I lowered my scope straight down a little. Below him, about ten metres away, other armed figures were climbing up the same path. In total there were thirty-four, and they had two transport animals, mules perhaps.

When I saw the mules I grew really scared. It could only mean one thing: those bastards were carrying something heavy. For an instant I looked away, and I inwardly cursed Nosov, him and his eternal knack for always being right. Then I went back to observing.

After a bit Moscow came over. He crawled slowly, and when his face got near mine, he whispered:

‘So did you see something?’

I probably hadn’t moved for a while, and my comrades must have grown suspicious. I’d taken more time than usual to scout the area, wanting to be sure of the enemy’s exact numbers. I set my rifle on the ground, put my hand over my mouth to avoid an echo, and as softly as possible I said:

‘Thirty-four ‘spirits’,* lots of ammo . . .’ And then I couldn’t go on. If I didn’t say it, maybe what I had seen would be less true.

Only after a moment did I find the courage to finish:

‘. . . and two mules.’

Moscow put his hand over his eyes.

‘Fucking Christ . . .’ he said. ‘Mortars . . .’

A mule could transport a light 85-calibre mortar and some ammunition. Usually a grenade launcher was enough to attack a column of soldiers – you only used mortars when you really wanted to create a living hell. If the enemy was able to position them and use them against us, our endeavour would be over within minutes. Those were deadly weapons, with an extremely powerful charge, capable of completely razing a trail such as the one we were on right now . . .

*

Once I saw an entire column of vehicles taken out by mortars.

After the explosion, all that remained was a hodgepodge of various mechanical parts, completely misshapen, mixed with ammo, remnants of human bodies, weapons, food, mud . . . You couldn’t make sense of anything, it was complete chaos. It was as if a giant had taken all those cars filled with people, put them in a huge washing machine and then, after putting them on spin fast enough to send every single bolt and bone flying, had tossed them into the street. The idea of ending up in a situation like that took my breath away.

A tactic often used by the Arabs was occupying each end of a road with a mortar. They would fire and keep moving little by little towards the middle of the road, progressively reducing the distance and thus sowing total destruction. This tactic had been used against our ranks in Afghanistan – it was crude but very effective. Soldiers had nowhere to run, because after an explosion the shrapnel would fly everywhere and was more devastating than bullets, mercilessly tearing the human body to shreds.

In the mountains a mortar was even more dangerous, because there was nowhere to hide. Even if the person firing didn’t have good aim, the shells still hit the rock, and the pieces would come off the mountain and fall down like rain. For a small group like ours, with only fourteen men and no heavy artillery (if you excluded an RPG grenade launcher), it was certain death . . .

Moscow and I were lying on the edge of the road, with our cheeks sinking into the damp soil, both thinking the same thing: if we let the Arabs get through the mountains with those mules now, then nobody would be able to cross that road. There was no time to turn back and report to the captain – before long the enemy would pass the visible part of the hill and would be hidden deep in the forest.

When I spoke to Moscow my mouth was dry; my tongue stuck to my teeth, as if glued on. I was anxious. I never would have thought I’d have to make a decision like this.

‘You’re a corporal. It’s up to you to give the orders, but I want to tell you my opinion anyway: we need to act now . . . If any of their men are waiting for them higher up, if the ones we saw weren’t the main group but were just heading to a position . . . Well, in five minutes we’ll be a trio of corpses . . .’

‘You’re right,’ he replied. ‘We can’t let them get to the woods. I give the orders, that’s true, but there are three of us and more than thirty of them . . . you know what’ll happen if we open fire? We can get rid of the mortars, and we three risk dying. We can go back, and all fourteen die together. What if Nosov has an alternative route?’

I was too tired and nervous to think. The only thing to do was act. I felt like a machine, a tiny piece of a mechanism that does things without making decisions, and does them that way because it was only programmed to do that specific action. My reply came out of my mouth before I’d thought it through:

‘Nosov’s not here now, and we don’t know shit about the roads on this stupid mountain. All I know is that when I look through the telescope I see a group of Arabs transporting two fucking mortars. If they have any snipers positioned anywhere we’re screwed, but we have to take out those mules at all costs . . .’

Moscow nodded, and went over to get Zenith. I pointed the rifle towards the enemy and began studying the column. The mules were moving slowly, only a few metres apart. Usually the Arabs would tie them together so that if one animal stopped the other would pull it forward. If those mules were tied together, the best thing would be to unload a blast of gunfire on the first so it would drag the other one down when it fell, and the enemy wouldn’t have time to react.

Moscow and Zenith joined me.

‘Take this, Kolima,’ Zenith said, handing me the machine gun he’d taken from the camp. ‘You use it, you’re much more precise than me.’

The gun was already loaded with its killer bullets. I took my Kalashnikov off my back and gave it to Zenith along with four clips. I looked at my comrades:

‘When I start shooting, you guys look where they respond from and aim directly there . . . Don’t stop – even if they kill us, their mortars will still be at the bottom of the valley . . .’

Zenith gave me a wink:

‘Don’t shit yourself, brother, we’ll have lots more drinks together . . .’

‘And Moscow will take you to another nurse . . .’ I replied.

This was our way of boosting one another’s spirits.

For months Zenith had been going on and on about this thing he had for his neighbour Larisa, who he would always spy on through the window when he was a little boy. She had, he said, such beautiful soft hair between her legs it was like a priceless rug. He wanted to touch it, he wanted to survive the bloodbath of the war and make love to her, that’s what. It was a nice story, but the fact that Zenith had never been with a woman made us sad, so one day Moscow took him to a nurse who finally freed him from the slavery of virginity.

Talking about alcohol and women fired us up at the time. It’s weird to think back on it now, but the possibility of ending my days on that mountain didn’t have any particular effect on me. At that moment all I wanted was to get rid of those damned mules.

I took a deep breath, then I pushed out the air and held my breath, trying to become completely still and hard like a rock. I put my eye to the scope, and as soon as I pinpointed the first mule I fired. The first blast was very short, but I had to correct my aim immediately, since, as I had already experienced, that machine gun had a strong recoil, and it was hard to keep a good grip on it. I unloaded another blast and then another, whereas the other side hadn’t fired a single round. The mules fell down, along with a few men. We could hear their shouts, the animals’ cries, and then there was a loud explosion. I aimed the gun at the column and emptied the rest of the clip without stopping for a second, almost euphoric. I felt every round on my skin – it was as if with each explosion the air pressed on a different part of my head.

I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice when the Arabs began responding to the fire, but I felt the pieces of rock hitting my back. Zenith and Moscow had already moved away, shooting wildly like I was. The enemy was running in every direction, but luckily there didn’t seem to be any snipers in hiding; maybe they felt safe in their mountains and hadn’t bothered to set up a position.

‘Zenith, another clip!’ I shouted. My ears were ringing – the noise the gun made was incredible – and it felt like I was being pounded on the head with a great big hammer. Zenith pulled two clips off his jacket and threw them to me. The machine gun was smoking, and when I opened it I burned my fingers. The clips were heavy; I inserted one and in a few seconds I was shooting again. A few Arabs tried to climb up, others ran down; amidst all the chaos, I was able to knock down about ten of them. The mountain was steep, and they didn’t have enough space to set up a firing position. I could see their rifle ammo exploding upon contact with the bullets, and then the enemies’ bodies falling off the mountain like stones swept up in an avalanche.

Suddenly we saw a bright light that illuminated the sky like daylight. Moscow barely made it in time to shout:

‘RPG!’

Suddenly everything I could see with my right eye turned blinding white, like when you look at the sun for a long time with dark sunglasses on and then quickly turn away and try to look somewhere else. There was a violent explosion on the wall behind us, and our backs were pummelled with boiling stones. The impact was so strong that for a second I felt like my whole body was made of cotton – I had become light and soft, I couldn’t even manage to keep my hand on the trigger . . . Moscow had a small flaming rock on his shoulder; seeing such solid material catch fire was impressive. Zenith had his head down, his hands over his ears, his mouth open and his eyes wide. The Arabs started shooting a few tracer bullets, trying to correct their aim in order to send over another grenade.

So I pointed the machine gun at the mountain and without ever taking my eye off the scope I unloaded the rest of the magazine, following every human figure that came into my sight. I couldn’t remember with any precision where the RPG blast had come from, nor did I know what my comrades were doing at that moment. I was in a state of complete confusion . . . My head hurt like hell, every little noise irritated me, but I kept shooting anyway, changing my clip again, working like a robot. We could hear some people shouting and others sobbing, desperate . . . The cries of the wounded seemed so close that if you closed your eyes you could imagine them next to you. I looked through the scope, searching for movement, but nobody had been responding to the fire for some time. So I began shooting at the bodies strewn along the path until there was an explosion – I must have hit the RPG rounds or the mortar shells.

I stopped and closed my eyes. I was thirsty. My mouth was so dry that when I opened it to take in some air, my lips cracked; running my tongue over them, I could taste blood. That brought me back to reality. All three of us were lying flat next to one another, breathing hard.

Zenith, who was on my right, was covered in shells from the machine gun. He got up and made the sign of the cross, then he looked at me with a smile and a crazed look in his eyes.

Moscow, as if he had just woken up from a nightmare, leapt to his feet, gave me a kick on the side and yelled:

‘Let’s move! Come on, we have to tell the guys!’

Then he hurried off to reach our group. I pulled myself up too and followed. Zenith came last; he hadn’t hooked the machine gun stand very well, so it had opened and was making a lot of noise, bumping against the barrel.

I wasn’t thinking about anything. I felt good, like I had freed myself from something that had been tormenting me for a long time. Our captain often said that was what winning felt like. Running back to the rest of the unit, though, I felt less and less protected, as if at any moment a bullet could hit me in the back.

At some point, Moscow turned around and yelled to me:

‘Fucking whore of a war, we did it!’

We saw them from afar, running towards us; after hearing the gunfire, they had decided to come and help us. It was Nosov and Shoe, with their rifles levelled.

‘Saboteurs here! Identify yourselves!’

‘Ivanisch, it’s us!’ Moscow yelled.

‘We heard an explosion, what was it?’ Shoe asked, lowering his gun.

Moscow was all excited, like a happy child:

‘Thirty-four Czechs with two mules and two mortars! Fuck, we took them all out!’

‘Move, move, let’s go!’ Nosov ordered the rest of the group. He didn’t want us to stop; we had to get out of those mountains as quickly as possible.

It was good for me to see my comrades’ faces. As always, after getting through danger, it was like seeing family; I wanted to hug them all, greet each one, ask how they were . . . After an especially stressful action, I got too sentimental.

Nosov continued questioning us:

‘Did you make sure there weren’t any others? Are you sure you killed them all?’

Moscow repeated his version like a broken record:

‘We took them all out, every single one of them . . .’

And then, short of breath from running, he started recounting every detail of our action. I asked for something to drink and an explorer gave me his water bottle. I took big gulps and found the water so good I almost felt inebriated. After a few minutes we came to the spot where we had been shooting earlier. The ground was covered in shells, and that particular point on the road, now that our group was all together, seemed much smaller than when there were only three of us just minutes before. On the side of the mountain above us was the huge hole made by the RPG. Looking at it, I thought how lucky we’d been – if the round had hit just a few metres lower the falling rock would have killed us . . . I felt strangely relieved, as if all the bad things that still awaited us were contained within that hole in the rock.

We kept on running. The sky was clear, everything was preparing for the coming of the light. The air was cool and damp – if I closed my eyes for a moment it felt like I was back home on my boat, on the river, out in the morning air, on my way back from a night of fishing . . .

Suddenly I felt a shove and I fell forward onto my left side. Tracer bullets were coming from the mountain in front of us, I don’t know how, but we were in the middle of gunfire. I’d been saved thanks to the soldier who had pushed me down. He and I rolled into a nearby ditch and took cover, and I realised that my comrades were already there. The fire was so heavy that we couldn’t raise our heads at all. The soldier next to me started shooting with his assault rifle, but I stopped him right away:

‘You have to cover the flash supressor; otherwise they’ll keep shooting at us!’

The infantrymen’s Kalashnikovs didn’t have modified compensators or flash suppressors; the rifle’s burst of flame could easily be seen.

None of us responded to the fire. We all hid in the ditch, our heads down, listening to the bullets exploding all around us. In all that pandemonium it was hard to work out the one thing that mattered to me most: whether or not they had a sniper.

At some point something strange happened – the enemy stopped shooting volleys. Only single shots came, and we couldn’t quite make out where they hit; perhaps the enemy couldn’t tell where we were. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a battle in the distance. From the way the echo reverberated off the rocks, these new rounds were coming from the opposite side of the valley – in fact, right from where we were headed ourselves.

There must have been a very violent battle going on. We could hear every sound of the fight perfectly, as if we were at the cinema instead of in a ditch. I recognised the pounding of a heavy machine gun, every now and then the roar of an RPG, and in the background the incessant bursts of the Kalashnikovs – the assault rifles shrieked so loudly it seemed as if they were going to drown out their own voices.

The captain said:

‘Shit, those are our men. They’re pushing them to the other side of the mountain . . .’

A few Kalashnikov shells came near us, but they seemed to be aimed at a point much higher than where we were. Nosov ordered everyone to identify himself, reporting his status. As soon as he was able to get in touch with our superiors, he would communicate precisely who was wounded and who was not. My comrades identified themselves, stating their role and unit, and then added the most important thing: ‘in rank’. The expression ‘in rank’ meant they had not been hurt and could continue to fulfil their tasks. When it was my turn I said: ‘Sniper, saboteurs, in rank!’ Luckily, nobody had been hurt or killed; all of us had been able to take cover from the unexpected fire.

Cautiously, I raised my head above the ditch and through the scope of my precision rifle I began observing the mountain opposite us. I saw the first enemies about two hundred metres away. There were three of them, slowly moving towards the valley. I reported to the captain:

‘Ivanisch, I see three subjects coming down . . .’

‘Liquidate them immediately!’ he ordered.

I hit the first two with four rounds but the last one responded to the fire, shooting at us, but without good aim. Then he started running higher. I decided to follow him with the scope; I wanted to see where he would lead me.

He was climbing the mountain very quickly, first running in a zigzag pattern; then when he noticed I wasn’t shooting anymore, he slackened his pace and started following the path. After about fifty metres he came to a flat area by a forest, and there he sat down on a rock to catch his breath for a moment. I fired, but I wasn’t able to hit him – he stood right up, so I shot at his legs, and this time he fell down, letting out a long, pained howl, which faded in the damp mountain air like a gust of wind. Just after that, another man came out from behind the trees. I got him straight in the chest. The guy who was already on the ground suddenly turned and shot another blast in our direction, but it too was imprecise. I aimed carefully and this time I took him out, blasting two rounds into his chest.

‘Those bastards are hiding in the woods . . .’ Moscow said. I hadn’t even realised he had come up to me.

‘Our men should have defeated them,’ I replied. ‘They’re abandoning their defence and coming towards us . . .’

The situation was troubling. Our men would follow them, and we – who, without a radio, couldn’t send any kind of communication – risked getting caught in friendly fire. Paradoxically, our men could be more dangerous to us than the enemy, especially if the infantry units were among them, or worse, the Internal Ministry’s Special Rapid Response Unit. The soldiers in the rapid response unit didn’t listen to anyone, they shot at anything that moved. It was best to avoid them, to quickly come up with a plan to make sure we weren’t spotted.

We had been in a similar situation before, when, because of a misunderstanding, we saboteurs had a very close call . . .

On that occasion, we had been stuck in a building for three long hours, besieged by constant fire from our own infantry.

What had happened was, as we approached their position, we had shot two red signal flares to identify ourselves, as we had determined before the operation. But their officers didn’t see them – one was seriously wounded and in the infirmary, while their lieutenant, recovering from a long battle in another part of the city, was sleeping in an armoured vehicle.

The lieutenant colonels, sergeants and soldiers hadn’t heard a thing about the red flares. After shooting them in the air, we headed for their position, crossing the yard with complete ease. From the third floor of another building about five hundred metres away, two heavy machine guns and a Kalashnikov started going to work on us. Deer took a volley of bullets right in the chest, but luckily his vest saved his life. We hid inside the adjacent building, with nothing to do but wait, hoping they would soon run out of ammo. They even threw a couple of grenades inside our refuge, to burn the house and force us outside where they could kill us. We were able to hide in the cellar, but if the infantrymen decided to enter we would really be trapped.

Their lieutenant only woke up three hours later. When they told him they were shooting at an enemy group who had fired two red signal flares before approaching, he ordered them to cease fire immediately. He sent over a group of explorers – by a sheer miracle we didn’t shoot at one another. The explorers then escorted us to our positions, communicating their status via radio.

Having too many soldiers in a military operation isn’t always such a great thing.

About ten enemies began going down the path; some running hard, trying to escape faster, others stopping and trying to set up a cover. Further up, a group of our men continued shooting unceasingly; we could hear them shouting orders in the distance.

Deer squeezed in between Moscow and me:

‘Christ, the guys are really pushing – in a few minutes they’ll be taking us out too . . .’

The battle went by fast, almost in a flash, and at some point our men loaded a grenade launcher. After a few seconds the first bomb hit the enemy, then another, and another . . . The trees and bushes caught fire immediately, and the Arabs started yelling. Through my rifle scope, the whole tremendous spectacle looked like a puppet show: the enemies’ burned bodies, reduced to bits, fell through the air into the valley.

Two rounds had landed very close to the place where I had taken down the last enemies – too close . . . I checked the path and saw three enemies hiding in a bush; one started going down, trying to flee our soldiers’ attack. I shot and killed him, then I tried to pinpoint the other two. I shot a few rounds, wounding one of them; then our men threw a hand grenade at them, leaving no trace of the enemies’ bodies.

Nosov took control of the situation:

‘Join up for immediate retreat! Saboteurs go first, infantry follows a hundred metres behind. In case of enemy fire, do not shoot without my permission; our men are in the area . . .’

We jumped to our feet and began running down the road after Nosov. We had to scram before our men noticed us . . .

We ran like men with nothing to lose, until we came to a point where the road became very narrow.

‘Once we’re past the bend,’ the captain said, ‘we’ll leave this fucking mountain behind us . . .’

Passing through the bottleneck between the rocks we reached the other side of the mountain. A wide plain appeared before our eyes.

We could finally see the light of day. The sun was rising, but we had to be sure we were in the clear before we could stop running.

After half an hour, Nosov let us take a break.

‘Two minutes!’ he yelled.

We were exhausted, panting. I took the canteen from my side pouch and drank greedily. Just then I heard a blast of gunfire coming from the top of the mountain on our left. I dropped the canteen and threw myself under a rock. Seconds later we were all belly down.

‘Shit, it’s not over yet . . .’ said Spoon.

The bullets lodged one after the other in the ground in front of us. We couldn’t see anything, just a sea of sand, clay and pebbles that rose and kept moving through the air, like a whirlwind. Keeping your eyes open was impossible and painful, they instantly filled up with sand and dust. I felt trapped. Everything had happened so fast, I didn’t even know exactly where the shooting was coming from; they seemed to be firing from every direction.

We stuck to the mountain as closely as possible. We had about fifty centimetres of room where the bullets couldn’t reach. Our infantrymen, on the other hand, had taken cover behind a row of big boulders. From there, they began shooting over our heads – they must have spotted the enemy. So the Arabs stopped shooting at us and responded to the infantry. The dust in front of us faded little by little.

One of the enemies let out a loud yell – he had probably been hit; another fell in front of us. He had a fatal wound in his neck, but he was still moving. Moscow finished him off with a couple of shots.

While the infantrymen distracted the enemy, we tried to change positions, dragging ourselves to the opposite side of the road. I was last and I couldn’t see where we were going, but any other hiding spot would be better. The Arabs threw a grenade somewhere close to us. The explosion was deafening, and everything filled up with dust again. I had sand in my eyes, my nose, my mouth . . . It was as if I had dived into a pool of sand, and then my ears started to ring . . . Someone grabbed me by the jacket and started dragging me, scraping me against the ground. I couldn’t tell if it was someone in my group who wanted to save me or an enemy who wanted to capture me, all I could do was hold the rifle tight in my hands while I kept repeating:

‘I can’t hear! I can’t hear!’

It was an ugly moment. My eyes hurt like hell. My back came up against something hard, and then gradually I could hear voices. It seemed like my comrades, but I still couldn’t completely make them out. Someone splashed my eyes with water, and I was able to wipe away some of the sand.

‘More . . .’ I said. ‘More . . .’

More water splashed onto my face, and the figure of Nosov slowly came into focus. He was standing over me and staring.

‘Were you hit by shrapnel?’ he asked me, alarmed.

I looked around, a little stunned. We had all moved behind a rock, and my comrades were trying to set up a position, responding to the enemy fire from this new shelter.

‘No . . . I don’t think so . . .’ I replied. ‘I don’t feel any pain, I don’t think . . .’

‘Well, Kolima, you have Deer to thank – that bomb almost blew up on top of you, and if he hadn’t taken you out of there . . .’ Then he went to see how the rest of the group was doing.

The situation was clear. We had to arrange our cover so that the infantrymen could get through – now they were the ones who were trapped. Even if we had the enemy under fire, even if they were busy responding, it appeared that they had no intention of letting up on our infantry.

‘Stand back,’ Nosov said as he loaded the RPG.

He placed the mouth of the grenade launcher into an opening between the stones and shot a round towards the Arabs. As soon as the bomb exploded, the infantrymen took advantage, coming out from their cover and running over to us.

Moscow and I started shooting in order to create a wall of fire and keep the enemy from hitting our soldiers. The Arabs, from above, started throwing more hand grenades.

The skirmish was violent. Neither we nor the enemies had a decent position; we were all behind rocks, fifty metres apart. The bullets whizzed over our heads and there were constant explosions all around us.

Moscow took a round in the chest. The bullet was stopped by the vest but it still managed to send my friend’s body flying as if he were a doll. He fell at my feet.

‘Everything okay, brother?’ I asked, still shooting.

He gestured that he was okay; he just had to recover from the blow.

A bomb hit the bottom of the valley, exploding in the distance. Another ricocheted off a rock without hitting the road; it blew up, bringing lots of stones down on the soldiers’ heads and forcing them to slow their retreat. The last bomb fell right behind them, and after the explosion we saw an infantryman hit the ground. His comrades picked him up right away and rushed over to our shelter.

The guy who had been hit had some nasty cuts on his legs and his jacket was full of shards. Some infantrymen joined us to increase our firepower, while others treated their comrade as best they could. The infantry lieutenant, along with one of his men, made an improvised stretcher out of the wounded man’s vest.

‘We have to get out of this hellhole, now,’ Lieutenant Razumovsky said. His face was very pale – you could see that he was concerned about his man’s fate.

‘Moscow, Deer,’ Nosov said lucidly, ‘you go with the infantry.’

Then he turned to the lieutenant:

‘Relax, we’ll be here to cover you . . .’

We had to continue keeping the enemy occupied, and about twenty minutes after the infantry group had left we would start to make our retreat.

I was still stunned by the bomb explosion. I was shooting along with the others but I was slow, I didn’t really know what was going on. Nosov must have noticed:

‘Kolima,’ he said, ‘take cover. I’ll take your place.’

I moved to the side of the path, in between the boulders.

The infantrymen were able to retreat without any losses. I could hear the gunfire continue, but now our men were limiting themselves to firing single rounds. The enemy fire had become a little less intense – they probably wanted to retreat too; maybe there were few of them left or maybe some of them were wounded.

Often, in firefights between small groups, the following phenomenon would occur: a series of blasts, even violent ones, would be exchanged for a few minutes, and then suddenly, both sides, as if by unspoken accord, would withdraw. It was a kind of pact of mutual trust between the two groups taking part in the conflict, a chance, time-restricted choice of non-violence against the enemy.

There were various reasons for doing this. One unit might be in a hurry to reach another target and didn’t want to lose time or risk their lives on an unplanned battle, so they tried to evade it, to ‘slip out’, as we would say, or leave without provoking the enemy at all. In many cases, however, this tactic would be used when a group had reached the limit of their capacities – if they didn’t have much ammunition, if there were any wounded, or if they couldn’t establish a decent stable defence.

Sometimes, obviously, this tactic could be a good way to trick the enemy. A small group of soldiers would detach from the unit, approach the enemy positions and pretend to have wound up there by accident. They would put on a real show, making the enemy think they were completely confused. They would pass themselves off as soldiers who were lost and trying to find a way out of the area. One of them would yell things like ‘Where are we? Who has the map?’ that sort of nonsense, acting like idiots. At that point, if they’d been loud enough, the enemy would open fire, thereby revealing all their positions. The others would respond, while within a short time the larger group – alerted via radio by their ‘decoys’ – would come to back them up.

It was a strategy that the Russian army was really fond of, and one used often in both Chechen campaigns, especially in the city, where the streets were usually occupied by various units, everything was chaotic and nobody could figure out exactly what was going on. The Chechens quickly learned this tactic, and on occasion used it to lead the Russian troops into traps in the woods or the mountains.

Sheltered behind that rock I sat with my eyes closed for a moment, but my head started spinning straight away. It was like being on a merry-go-round, I felt nauseous . . . So as not to fall into the trap of exhaustion – which in war can cost you your life – I decided to take part in the battle anyway. I took my precision rifle and began inspecting the area where the enemies were. As far as I could tell they didn’t have any snipers; they must have hit Moscow purely by accident – when a sniper shoots at someone from fifty metres away, that person doesn’t stand a chance . . .

A few rounds were exchanged, but we were all pretty weak. It was obvious that the enemy was also trying to find a way to pull out of the skirmish.

I had to do something to get rid of the headache that was eating away at me, keeping me from thinking. I could feel exhaustion creeping over my entire body, my knees and back ached . . . I felt weaker and weaker . . .

Thinking back on it now, I feel horrible and ashamed, yet in those moments, when I thought that if I closed my eyes I was going to go mad, I would repeat to myself, like a prayer, the phrase ‘I have to kill an Arab’, until I was able to regain control of myself . . . I don’t know exactly how the subconscious works, but at those times it was as if my body were running on automatic pilot, as if a part of me had gone to sleep, surrendering to my hunting instincts.

As I was looking through the scope, I heard a loud explosion. I immediately hid behind the rock, and there was a series of powerful explosions just like the first. From the sound, it seemed like they were coming from an AGS, a kind of automatic weapon that shoots grenades instead of bullets. Our men had arrived! We all pressed ourselves to the ground – the rocks falling on us were so scorching hot we could feel the heat through our uniforms.

The AGS was a very efficient weapon; it could clear out an area in a very short time. Soon we would smell burnt flesh – we just all hoped that it would be the enemy’s and not ours . . .

When the AGSs stopped shooting, Nosov shouted:

‘Withdraw immediately!’

We started running in the direction the infantrymen had gone. I had a brutal headache, but I just put one leg in front of the other. I remember asking God to put a stop to all this chaos around me, because I wasn’t at all sure I could make it with the little strength I had left. I ran without feeling anything, only fear and confusion.

Often, especially after a long and arduous mission (when I had a ringing in my ears that wouldn’t stop, and everything around me looked like a surrealist painting seen from a speeding train), I would get overwhelmed by strange emotions . . .

At certain times I would suddenly think I had forgotten something, but I couldn’t work out what. I felt like I didn’t have my rifle, whereas I actually had it in my hands; or I was convinced I was wounded – sometimes all it took was the idea of a wound, and immediately I’d have a phantom pain in some part of my body, which didn’t subside until I was able to make sure that I really was okay.

One time, right in the middle of a battle, for some inexplicable reason I couldn’t find a pair of trainers that I was sure I’d just taken off an enemy’s fresh corpse. I looked for them everywhere. I blamed Deer, insulting him and accusing him of having taken my shoes. ‘You have them on, you dick,’ he said to me. When I looked down and saw them on my feet I was shaken – I really didn’t remember putting them on at all . . .

Following my comrades, I felt the cold on my face. I couldn’t tell whether my mouth was closed or open, I couldn’t control my muscles too well, it was as if I’d been given partial anaesthesia . . . It was one of the effects of concussion: your hands start trembling, your eyes start twitching; you need to rest, avoid making sudden movements . . . but you have to follow through with the rest of the unit all the way to the end of the mission.

Behind us we could hear the sounds of the battle that was still going on as we walked down a very narrow path. The rocks jutted out over our heads; the sunlight hadn’t completely reached us yet. I was last in line, and I felt like I was in one of those dreams where you’re trying to reach a point, but the further you go the more distant it becomes. Soon this will all be over, I kept telling myself in order to keep calm.

We were almost at the end of the path where there was an opening with a thin ray of light coming through. We could feel the cool air coming from the other side. Nosov said that we were to go through the opening and would find a steep slope overlooking a densely wooded area. We just had to go down the slope and we would finally reach the plain.

Zenith and Spoon went first. Then it was Nosov’s turn. After him went Shoe, and last was me. When our captain entered that sort of vortex of light, I thought I saw something strange. For a moment his figure completely blocked the current of damp mountain air, and the rays of sunlight seemed to erase the features of his face, making him look like a kind of luminous ghost . . . I was about to ask Shoe if he saw the same thing, when a spray of bullets came right through the opening.

I saw Nosov fall on his back, his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross. It was so unexpected that for a few seconds I was paralysed.

Shoe, on the other hand, responded to the fire immediately, shooting madly into the light.

Spoon and Zenith could have been anywhere. Wounded, dead, or in the clear.

‘Get him, take him to shelter!’ Shoe yelled at me while still shooting.

I grabbed the captain by the jacket and dragged him over to a small cave in the mountain that we had passed earlier.

I tried to determine whether he was seriously wounded. I looked on the ground to see if there was a trail of blood, but as I was moving him I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

I remember fearing Nosov’s death almost more than my own. The loss of our captain, for me, would be tantamount to the end of our entire unit. Up to that moment he had been the truest, strongest thing we had encountered in that war. We all knew very well that we risked our lives carrying out his orders, but no one had ever thought that he could be the one to die. Of course, we had been given instructions on how to lead the unit in the event of losing our commander, and maybe we could have got by on our own, but Nosov was the very incarnation of our faith as soldiers, our security, a talisman that we always had with us through the chaos. As long as he was there, nothing could really scare us, nothing could defeat us. The idea that he too, like the rest of us, could lose his life during an operation, was so terrible that none of us had ever dared bring it up. To us Nosov was sacred.

And at that moment I was dragging that sacred person, who was giving no signs of life, away from the battle . . . We reached the cave; I sat down and caught my breath. In my head, everything was frozen at the instant when that blast came, like when you pause a movie. I couldn’t think or make decisions. I looked at Nosov’s body, dazed, trying to work out what to do. My hand shaking, I put my finger under his nose and felt a light puff of air; I touched his neck and realised that I could feel his pulse. His heart was pumping hard.

‘Thank heavens,’ I said to myself. He had only passed out; his eyes were closed and the muscles on his face were relaxed, like when a person is resting or having a good dream.

I rapidly inspected his vest – it had a pretty big dent in the middle and the central plate was broken in half.

I propped him up against the wall of the cave and then stepped outside. I could hear the bullets coming from both sides – we were caught between two sources of fire.

I rushed over to Shoe, who was still swearing and cursing the entire Islamic community.

‘Is he alive?’ he asked me.

‘He took a blast in the chest . . . He doesn’t seem hurt. He’s breathing, but he’s still unconscious . . .’

‘We have to get him out of here, this is a bad spot,’ he said, changing his rifle clip.

‘But where?’ I asked, shooting a couple of times into the opening myself, even though nobody was responding to our fire. ‘If we turn back they’ll kill us for sure. It’s better to try to go this way. Maybe there aren’t that many of them . . .’

Shoe looked at me without saying a word. I stopped shooting, and for a second we fell silent, trying to guess what the situation beyond that opening was. Everything seemed still; there was just a faint gust of wind, making the same sound as a conch shell when you put it up to your ear.

‘I wonder where those two ended up,’ Shoe said suddenly.

There was no need for him to name them. I too had tried to imagine what happened to Zenith and Spoon after they went through there . . . Then my thoughts went back to our captain, who was propped up nearby, unconscious, thrown in a corner like a broken toy.

I was desperate. I felt far too close to the ‘end of the line’, as we call the point of no return in war, the moment when a soldier can’t take it anymore and becomes catatonic or goes mad with fear and desperation.

Amongst all the confused thoughts spinning around in my head, there was one that seemed stronger than the others until it became a cement wall that was about to bury me. It was a phrase, simple and definitive, one that could paralyse me completely. It went:

‘This is the end.’

And then I felt a great lightness go through my body, and I thought I had died for real . . . I didn’t notice that my rifle had slipped out of my hand, nor did I realise that I was lying on my back on the ground, like a real corpse. Even if I was seeing things as a living person for the last time, I wasn’t sad at all – the sensation was like being a body carried away by the current. I could feel everything, the air passing over me, the ground beneath me, but it was as if it had lost all value, had suddenly become invisible, unimportant . . .

Shoe was shouting at me, but his voice didn’t really reach me; it seemed distant – it was much better to stay down, motionless, dead. I don’t think this episode lasted very long, but I felt as though I had fallen into eternity. I don’t know what that scene looked like from outside; I remember that I wasn’t anxious or worried – on the contrary, I was very calm, if only because by that point I was sure I no longer existed . . .

Suddenly I felt a strong jolt, like someone was shooting at me, and then a loud, booming voice filled my head – I don’t know how else to put it. The voice went through every molecule of my organism, and now it was bringing me back to life.

‘Soldier! On your feet, you stupid bastard! Take up your weapon!’ Captain Nosov, furious as a beast, was standing over me and shouting right in my ear.

I was on my feet in a heartbeat, my rifle in my hands. I looked at Nosov like Mary must have looked at the sepulchre of the resurrected Christ. On the captain’s face there was a horrible grimace of pain, and he had a nasty black bruise on his neck that he must have got from the broken plate of his vest hitting him.

From the distance we could hear Spoon’s voice, which seemed to come from the sky, like a messenger angel:

‘What the fuck are you doing in there? Come on!’

We went through the opening, one at a time, almost joyfully. In an instant we had that damned mountain behind us, and we were running down the hill. At the bottom, near the edge of the woods, Zenith showed us the place where the enemies had been shooting at us moments before. I was running so hard I was almost out of breath.

When we went into the woods, Spoon came up to me, nudging me with his shoulder:

‘What was that? We thought you were a goner! We saw that blast you took . . .’

Gasping as if drowning, I replied:

‘That wasn’t me, it was the captain . . .’

Spoon whistled, and then looked at Nosov. At that moment he was resting with one hand against a tree and the other on his chest.

‘What, soldier,’ he said to Spoon, ‘you think your captain would abandon you and let you go fuck around? Certainly not . . .’ He spoke with a joking tone, even though the blow he had taken must still have really hurt.

‘Shit, that’s some luck . . .’ Zenith remarked, his machine gun levelled to cover our retreat.

‘Come on, boys,’ Nosov said, ‘our men will already be down there waiting for us.’

We could hear the battle continuing behind us – it was definitely our men who had succeeded in pushing the enemy somewhere and were smashing them to bits.

We walked through the damp morning air that rose from the wet soil and shimmered in the sunlight; the warm sunbeams shone through the tangle of branches, forming a mosaic of long, twisted shadows at our feet. There, in that fantastic theatre of nature that unfolded before our eyes, suddenly replacing the scenes of war, I was absurdly gripped by a thought; just as we were killing each other like maniacs, the world went on. While we were fighting, pushing ourselves to madness and brutality, nature went on existing. There it was.

I knew perfectly well that such philosophical thoughts usually came to me when my psycho-physiological state had reached total exhaustion. I began to worry. So as not to get lost in that mental spider web, I tried to remember the details of the events that had just happened . . . I thought it was important for me to make sure what had happened to me didn’t happen again. Only then did I comprehend the gravity of my actions – I had abandoned my weapon and lain on the ground, putting my comrades in danger. I was a disgrace walking through the woods with a rifle. I could feel my cheeks burn. I thought about the lecture the captain was going to give me, and with good reason . . .

Nosov had picked up the pace – the shots were closer now, maybe an enemy detachment had entered the woods. Soon they would catch up with us . . . The exit onto the plain had already come into view. It was a straight, wide road; there was lots of mud and few trees. In the distance we could make out the hills and some uncultivated fields, abandoned for who knows how long.

I saw an armoured car about a hundred metres from the road, but then a blast of gunfire came towards us. We all dropped to the ground.

‘Don’t shoot! It’s our men!’ the captain told us. Nosov and Shoe began moving to the side, to get to them without being seen and tell them who we were. They quickly crossed the road and disappeared behind the trees. A few moments later we heard the armoured car start up – it was crossing the muddy plain to take us to safety. The bullets whistled over us, lodging into the bark of the trees.

Then we heard Nosov’s voice:

‘Saboteurs, on the armour!’

We got up and rushed over to the car. It wasn’t ours – it had a red symbol on the side, the insignia of some infantry unit I didn’t recognise. Nosov sat on top and next to him, thank God, were Moscow and the explorer lieutenant. I smiled and grabbed Moscow’s hand, and he helped me up.

‘Where’s Deer?’ I asked, a little anxious.

‘He’s inside, safe with the others,’ Moscow said, patting the car’s belly.

The car backed up about twenty metres and then, turning in the mud with its ultra-powerful wheels, went forward, heading for base.

I watched the woods fade into the distance. I could hear the sounds of the battle and it was as if I was still there, amidst all the trees . . . A cold shudder went down my spine. A grenade exploded somewhere – I could see the smoke rising from the forest, spreading over the trees like a cloud and rising towards the outline of the mountains, where it dissolved in the air and faded into nothing.

After a while we were joined by the four other cars that had been waiting for us to form a convoy. They belonged to an elite unit of the ‘internal troops’, as they called the military police, a force that focused on special operations such as investigating corruption cases or assisting the arrest of terrorists, arms dealers or the various bands who tried to cross the Chechen borders.

Once we were back on base, we were met by the young lieutenant who had told our captain the true story about the blown-up helicopter, the same one who had helped us out by supplying us with weapons and ammunition.

As we found out from him, a few hours after we had left for the mountains, soldiers from the internal troops, officers from the military prosecutor, and even some agents from the FSB, the Russian state security organization that had replaced the KGB, had arrived on base.

They arrested six officers, about ten lieutenant colonels and all the authorities in command. One lieutenant colonel had managed to lock himself in a trailer that doubled as a kitchen, and at the legal officers’ pleas to come out and turn himself in to the military police, had shot himself in the head with his own gun.

They wanted to send someone to try and stop us, but our armoured cars were already on their way back, and since we didn’t have a radio it was impossible to get in touch with us. Meanwhile, in the other part of the mountains, a motorised infantry unit and a spetsnaz unit were in the middle of an anti-terrorist operation . . . That night in the mountains by pure chance we had crossed the line dividing the area controlled by our units and the area occupied by the terrorists. The two groups we had eliminated, the young lieutenant explained to us, were wounded and exhausted men who had been wandering around the mountains for days, pursued by our relentless infantry. This was confirmed by the helicopter pilot who took the spetsnaz to the other side of the mountains – they were supposed to go across, block the enemy group in the valley and exterminate them.

That night, in short, we had risked getting killed by our own men much more than by the enemy.

They let us sleep on base for a whole day and night. They gave us a ton of good stuff to eat; there was even hot soup, with potatoes and meat – a very rare thing, especially in the big units, where provisions were often scarce.

Even after resting and with a full belly, the shame over what had happened to me in the mountains hadn’t left me – on the contrary, it had become even more oppressive and wouldn’t leave me in peace.

I went walking to and fro around the base. I was restless. At some point I ran into Deer, and I thanked him for saving me when the hand grenade had almost exploded on me in the mountains.

‘Don’t mention it, brother,’ he replied, a smile behind his kind eyes.

But I still wasn’t calm.

I went to the captain to vent my feelings. He was sitting at the table, taking apart his gun in order to clean it. He listened to me attentively, without interrupting at all. When I finished my sob story, he smiled at me and said:

‘Rest easy, soldier. No one will ever know. I already talked to Shoe about it. I told him to forget the whole thing . . .’

I was happy. I felt as if an enormous weight had been taken off my chest. I gasped with joy.

Nosov went back to cleaning his gun. But suddenly he paused, as if thinking back on my words. He looked up and asked:

‘Are you sure you felt yourself die? Maybe you were just tired, don’t you think?’

Before answering I thought about it for a minute. I wanted to remember that exact sensation one more time. Once I did, I felt a strength awaken inside of me and take hold of my heart. A feeling that had no explanation.

‘Yes, I really thought it was death. I did. But I didn’t feel horrible, it wasn’t so bad . . .’

He spoke without looking me in the face, setting the spring inside the shaft:

‘Well, now you know what it’s like to be dead. It’s a good thing.’

_______________

* This is what transport helicopters are called in military slang.

* The soldiers in the Russian army often called the Chechen soldiers ‘Czechs’ – echy, the same term used to indicate the people of the Czech Republic – to distinguish them from civilians.

* Military slang for precision rifle.

* This was what we called a small group that went on reconnaissance and had no contact with the rest of the unit.

* The Afghani authorities called the Taliban dushman, or ‘enemies’; the Russian military abbreviate the word to duch (‘spirit’ in Russian), probably because they appear and disappear so quickly.