Battle Sight Zero

Prologue

February 1956

Near to the end of a ten-hour shift, his tiredness nagged and his concentration waned, and they kept coming towards him on the conveyer belt. Outside the factory more snow had fallen, another ten centimetres settling on the half-metre already on the ground. He was Josef, from the far south, drafted to the project at Izhevsk. His chance of returning to the warmth of his village overlooking the Black Sea was less than minimal. The heating had failed, although the factory was newly built, and he could not wear thick gloves for the work he did. His fingers were numbed, he needed to piss, and his stomach growled.

His hand was heavy as he reached out to lift it off the slow-moving supply line, and when the belt suddenly stopped, it was jerked up and his fingers had no grip, and it fell. And seemed to shriek.

Martial music had blared from the amplified speakers, a military choir singing the marching songs of the Red Army, to help him and the scores of others on the vast, stinking, echoing factory floor keep their composure and maintain their enthusiasm for their work. Now there was a broadcast from the sergeant who liked to call himself Misha, who told the story again – and again, and again – of how he had led the team that developed the thing that had moved towards Josef on the belt, then had slipped from his grip and fallen. The shriek was the bayonet lug catching the metal rim of Josef’s work area. Then there was a clatter as the assault rifle hit the concrete floor by his boots, then a squeal.

Because he was at the end of the line, where assembly of the weapon was completed, Josef was not overlooked. The supervisor in charge of quality control, able, anywhere, to find fault, was lurking close to the area where they fastened the wooden stock to the body of the weapon. Misha’s voice droned. Josef, and a thousand other men and women inside the huge factory were supposed to be enthused by the sergeant who had achieved such fame and had performed so valuable a service to the Motherland. Because Josef recognised propaganda, the diet of shit served up to them, he showed little enthusiasm for his work. He would never be recommended for advancement, nor for a transfer to the heat of the coast where his family came from. Home for him was a hastily built four-storey block, one of many erected within walking distance of the factory. They were near to a polluted lake, close to dark pine forests that ringed the complex and were now burdened with snow, and they were under the constant pall of dark smoke that simpered from the chimneys of the foundry where the iron was manufactured for the working parts. It was said that the rifles were revolutionary, a triumph of Soviet engineering, because of the practicality of the sergeant’s design: ‘complexity is simple, simplicity is difficult’.

After the shriek came the clatter and after the clatter came the squeal. By Josef’s left boot lay a splinter of wood from the rifle’s stock. It was varnished, barely dry, but it had left a jagged pale strip five centimetres in length, a half-centimetre wide and a little less deep. He bent and reached for the weapon and the torn-off piece of wood.

They had a joke: a woman works in a factory that makes steel-framed beds which are sent to the army, to universities, to hospitals. But she has no bed of her own. The factory operates on three shifts in every 24 hours. She and her fellow workers all sleep on the floor of their homes. Her sister comes to visit from Leningrad. The sister’s advice: each day they should steal a piece from the production line, then, eventually, put all the pieces together, and build a bed. She replies they have tried that many times, brought the parts home and assembled them, then discovered that ‘instead of having a bed we have an automatic Kalashnikov’… Always a grim smile from Josef’s friends.

Josef’s job was to check the basic mechanism of the weapon, carry out the procedure for arming it which was the equivalent of raising a round into the breech, then pulling the trigger. He had to activate the selection lever that dictated whether the weapon was on ‘automatic’ or ‘semi-automatic’, then it would move on down the line to the man who took it from the belt and dropped it, carelessly, into the crate. Forty for each crate. Josef pushed the splinter into the cavity, forced it with his thumb, spat on it to make it stick. He did not think the repair would be seen; it would hold fast as it went with the others into the box for shipment; if it were spotted, the bastard at the end of the line would likely call the supervisor and take pleasure from the reprimand given to Josef.

The sergeant was still talking. He was visiting Factory Number 74 of the Izhevsk Machine Engineering Plant, known to them all as IZMASH – secret, isolated and marked on no maps – because he was credited with designing the rifle. And had been rewarded. Josef and his wife lived humbly. No holidays, no luxuries and a damp apartment although it was only four years old. Mikhail Kalashnikov, or Misha, had been awarded 150,000 roubles four years before, which was precisely thirteen years of salary for Josef. Misha had been allowed to buy the first kitchen refrigerator to reach this outpost of manufacturing, and a vacuum cleaner, so that his wife did not have to risk dirtying her fur coat by sweeping floors. He would have driven to Number 74 that evening in his Pobeda car that would have cost 16,000 roubles to any of the few able to get their name on the waiting list, and he was now a deputy in the Supreme Soviet. Josef flushed with anger, and his heartbeat accelerated with jealousy.

Another one arrived. Armed, checked, trigger depressed. Then the selector moved down, then up, and passed on.

And another.

First it had been fewer than a hundred a day. Then it had been many hundreds. More clouds of choking smoke rose from the nearby chimneys. Now it was near to a thousand for each of the shifts. Over the loudspeakers, Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov spoke of his determination to design a rifle that could better defend the Motherland against the Fascist aggressors to the west. And spoke of the privilege of being in a hall, as large as the factory floor, and seeing the inspirational figure of their leader, Josef Stalin. Said that, soon, there would be more workshops, more lines and more belts. Then quiet, and only the throb of the generators and the soft whine of lathes and files and grinders. They were all supposed to applaud when the sergeant graced them with a visit, but on that occasion it was desultory. Josef could have shouted that it was said, at least was rumoured, that the design owed much to a considerable team of engineers, and in particular to the German prisoner from the war, Hugo Schmeisser,

And another came. The martial music returned. Josef had no car to take him home, no vacuum cleaner and no refrigerator, but his wife could always put butter and watery milk in a plastic box on the window sill. And another rifle was placed in the crate and the worker at the end of the line turned and shouted that it was now filled.

The top was placed on it, and an empty crate replaced it, fourth filled that day from his line. The top was stamped 7.62 Avtomat Kalashnikova obraztsa 1947 goda. Josef worked on the belt that brought him the 7.62 Automatic Kalashnikov Model 1947, but had never handled one with an attached and filled magazine, had never armed one of them and raised it to his shoulder and peered down the length of the barrel with the range of it set at Battle Sight Zero, had never pulled the trigger, and probably never would. The filled box was screwed down, fastened tight, levered on to a trolley, and wheeled away. No ceremony, no trumpets, and no celebration yelled over the speakers. He assumed that the splinter of wood from the stock would now be wedged in place and held there by the weight of the weapons stacked above and beside it. It might stay in place until the crate was jemmied open and the rifles allocated to an armoury, or it might detach during its journey. When Josef and his trusted few did not tell jokes, they grunted sour complaints out of the side of their mouth: the Motherland could not produce decent toilets or safe elevators or quality cameras, could not grow wheat or potatoes that would flourish, could not turn out toothpaste without a foul taste, but could make – it was said – a rifle. A brilliant rifle, it was claimed, the best.

He heard the rumble of a door being pushed open and felt the blast of frozen air tunnel through the gap. The box would be lifted by four men and heaved on to a lorry’s flatbed. He could do the work required of him if he dreamed, bowed with tiredness, cold. He could perform his tasks and could imagine. He was permitted to imagine because the supervisors and the commissars, always close, listening for subversion, could not read words that he imagined or see what he saw… The crate was on the lorry.

Josef imagined… The rifle came out from the crate, was stored, then issued to a shivering conscript. An officer, a veteran of the Leningrad siege or the victory at Kursk or the advance into Berlin, would see the damage to the wooden stock and would beat the kid, thrash him for carelessness. And imagined… The rifle was buried in permafrost ground, or in sand or in the jungles of the east, or was doused in sea water, and was retrieved and would still operate. Would never degrade or be destroyed, would live for ever, and would kill for ever. And imagined… Production increased, the belt going faster until it raced, covered with a squirming oily mess of rifles that were spewed out of a machine that could not be slowed, more and more; great underground bunkers filled to overflowing with them, thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, and millions and tens of millions and all the same and all deadly. It was boasted that the simplicity of its design made it a suitable weapon for conscript troops, many with poor education. That children – like the ones at the schools in Izhvesk – would easily learn to handle it, and fire it and kill with it. And imagined… Rows of graves stretching further than those at the Piskaryovskoye military cemetery in Leningrad or the Rossoschka military cemetery outside Stalingrad, in the steppes. Stones and posts and mounds of earth and swarms of flies and packs of hunting dogs looking for food. It could be that each year, every year, a quarter of a million people – men and women and children – would lose their lives after being hit by the bullet fired from such a rifle. And imagined… the end of the day’s work. Not a special day, not exceptional, different from the one before or the one after, when he stood almost at the end of the production line and checked another of them, the AK-47. And imagined…

The hooter went. A noise like a beast in pain. Work stopped. Men and women did not finish their tasks, tidy what was in front of them, make good what they had started. The line ground to a halt. Pieces were abandoned, left until the next morning when the factory would again come to life and the music start up. The rifle parts would stay there, untouched. The heating went off and all but skeleton lighting was doused. The trigger, the hammer, the magazine catch, the bayonet lug, the muzzle compensator, the operating rod, and the bolt and firing pin. They would stay where they were all night. The place emptied.

The lorry had gone. Josef walked through the low pall of cigarette smoke that the loaders had left behind them, huddled against the drive of the weather, and imagined his supper: a bit of bacon, with cabbage, and perhaps a glass of weak beer – not as good as Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov would enjoy – and the radio, and a magazine that highlighted football. It had seemed important to him that he had dropped a weapon, that it had shrieked – the cry of a whore in pain, he had briefly thought – and a piece of the stock had broken clear. And that particular weapon, with its individual serial number, and the scar on the stock close to where it would nestle on a soldier’s cheek, now moved at slow speed on an ice-covered road, out of Josef’s life.