Free Fall

FIRE ON US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just two hours away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nosov yelled to the civilians:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’

And, smiling, he said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sure, son, toss a few over, you never know…’

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

‘Lots of snipers on the roofs, too many… watch out for the snipers on the roofs!’

Nosov grabbed the first aid kits and replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the young lieutenant asked:

‘What do you have in mind?’

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

‘I’ve already come up with a plan, which will work one hundred per cent… You and your boys keep responding to the fire from the left side of the building, but don’t shoot at the house next door. Actually, act like you’ve completely given up on that position. My guys and I will cross the street, shadowing the fence at the back of the building. We’ll come through the rear, where there’s the curve that goes right to the side of the house… If they’re there like I think they are, we’ll get rid of them and go back to the main road – no doubt some of them will come after us, so your boys’ll have to cover us, otherwise we’ll lose our hides…’

The lieutenant looked at us for a second, trying to figure out if our captain was joking or not. We were already getting ready, removing all the inessentials so we could run faster, and when he saw that we were serious, the lieutenant, a spark of daring in his eyes, said:

‘Then let’s do it, boys! God bless us!’

We headed out behind our captain.

Usually in city operations we were only armed with Kalashnikovs, each of us always having a couple on him. I had two rifles: a VSS, which I kept slung at my back along with five clips for a total of fifty rounds, and my trusty AKSM, which I carried by hand. This was the paratrooper assault rifle, a model with a short barrel, reinforced compensator, folding stock and dioptric sight, the one with the red dot that we jokingly called ‘Lenin’s lamp’. This time, however, the operation was particularly dangerous, and Nosov had also brought along a loaded grenade launcher, plus a backpack with another three rounds. Two of our men had 7.62-calibre submachine guns.

We were all wearing light jackets, with jumpsuits underneath, trainers on our feet and no helmets on our heads, just regular beanies. Mine was grey with a pom-pom on top. The other units made fun of us, calling us ‘bums’ since we wore whatever we came across. Obviously it bothered them to have to wear uniforms; they would rather have been able to do as we did – when it was hot we could wear shorts. None of us shaved, we all had goatees or at least a few days’ stubble, and we often kept our hair long. By our looks we were more likely to be taken for a group of terrorists than a unit of the Russian Army. We did it on purpose, obviously, because we often ended up going behind the line and having to blend in with the enemy, even though every so often one of our own shot at us, thinking we were Arabs.

We slowly walked across the courtyard, which the infantry was watching over. The dead bodies of enemies were left on the side of the road. We sprang over to the fence. We could hear the infantry shooting as well as the Arabs, who were attacking the left side of the building. The road made a curve that would lead us to the house, our objective.

From there, however, we could see that two hundred metres ahead, right in part of the yard where our troops were, another group of enemies was hiding behind a half-charred armoured car, shooting now and then at our soldiers.

‘Let’s cross the road without firing,’ Nosov said. ‘One of you cover, everyone else run.’

I positioned myself to cover the others. My comrades hunched down and sprinted almost on all fours, and when they had all reached the opposite side of the road I followed. Together we went behind the trees, and then emerged in front of a small building, some kind of old bar, from inside which we had a clear view of the house.

We stopped in the bar to figure out whether there was movement around the house. Nothing happened for fifteen minutes; nobody came, every so often in the distance we saw enemies running over to the building occupied by the infantry. The lieutenant’s men shot a few rounds at them, a few Arabs fell to the ground lifeless. A group of enemies continued moving about in a seemingly chaotic manner: they came out into the open clearly with the intention of attracting the infantry’s attention, shooting blasts of fire at them almost randomly, without aiming, then going back to shelter.

The captain commented:

‘They think they’ve really got us – look how they’re jumping around, they look like mountain goats…’

We kept quiet, waiting. At a certain point, however, the situation around the house changed. Two blacks, Africans, came up to the building shouting. One went inside and started kicking in all the doors. More men popped out from a road carrying a heavy machine gun and a cylinder grenade launcher, an American-made weapon. Another little group followed them, carrying the cases with the cartridges, protected by men armed only with Kalashnikovs.

The two black men almost started arguing at the entrance, without being afraid of being hit; sure they were safe behind the house. One of them motioned towards the street and was saying something, the other guy was yelling.

Nosov said:

‘Boys, at my signal…’

We readied our rifles, aiming at the targets. The captain settled the grenade launcher on his shoulder and went to the window. My comrades stepped away from him so they wouldn’t get burned when the grenade exploded.

‘Fire!’

In an instant, the spot where the two black men had been arguing had become a hole in the pavement. Meanwhile we had taken down, one by one, almost the entire group. Not expecting an attack from our direction, those poor devils hadn’t even been able to make a move. Only one volley of bullets reached us, but it went too high and immediately drowned in our fire, as violent as a hurricane.

The cases with the clips began to explode one after the other, making a racket.

‘Let’s go back, before they all get here!’ shouted Nosov.

We went out from the bar and ran across the main road to the building. From the third-floor windows came the volley from our machine gunners to cover the area behind us, as we had arranged earlier.

Suddenly Nosov stopped in the middle of the street, and amidst the shouts and shots of the enemy – who had seen us and was fast approaching – launched a grenade at the armoured car where the Arabs were hiding. The car blew up, then I opened fire on the enemy, and Moscow and Shoe joined in. In the meantime, Deer and Spoon had already reached the building, and together they fired from the second-floor window. Zenith had taken cover by the building’s entrance, and from there opened fire with a grenade launcher hooked to his Kalashnikov, hitting one man full on – we saw bits of his body go flying. Nosov started running again and in a moment we were all back in the building. The infantrymen were looking at us like we were crazy.

As always, our captain asked:

‘Everyone in one piece? No holes?’

We were all down on the floor, trying to catch our breath. To be able to answer Nosov, first we had to figure out what our status was, check to see if there was anyone injured or anything. A bullet had split the sole of my shoe, right at the heel. I slipped it off with my knife and showed it to the others.

‘For the love of God, Kolima, stop playing these jokes…’ Spoon said to me, smiling, and everyone started laughing.

Just a few centimetres further up, and that bullet would have hit my ankle.

From that moment on, the battle was like a volcanic eruption. The Arabs, after having lost the machine gun and grenade launcher, were furious and started throwing themselves on our position almost hysterically, attacking repeatedly without stopping even for a second. Fortunately the infantrymen were ‘well dressed’, as we would say when someone was armed to the teeth; they had three machine guns and every single hole in the wall under surveillance.

We took positions on the second floor. With two other machine guns, my comrades had emptied four cases, ten thousand rounds, in half an hour. I took out three snipers who were trying to climb onto the roof of the nearby apartment building; one of them, before I was able to pinpoint him, had seriously wounded one of the infantry sergeants, hitting him right in the chest. Unfortunately, he died two hours later in his comrades’ arms, down in the cellar where there were another seven wounded.

In the subsequent four hours, after nightfall, there was nothing to indicate the presence of live Arabs. The whole street in front of the building was filled with bodies; everywhere you looked you saw nothing but corpses. None of our men shot anymore, and you couldn’t hear anything in the vicinity either.

We arranged rest shifts, while some ate and others stood guard. I was able to close my eyes for an hour or so. Hearing only the voices of the guys rehashing the details of the various battles or talking about their families, the houses they were born and grew up in, all the conversations blended together in my head…

When I got up I took over from Moscow, and he instantly plopped down on the empty crates of machine gun clips; he was asleep in seconds. I drank a broth made with bouillon with some dry black bread and pieces of stew from the American cans of preserved meat that our men had found on the Arabs.

Nosov was telling a story. I had missed the beginning because I had gone out into the yard to relieve myself, but it was something about a personal experience of his in Afghanistan. Everyone was listening raptly, and he spoke gently, remembering the men who had been in that war with him, every so often adding a fond phrase like ‘May his be the kingdom of heaven’ after someone’s name…

At some point, on the road in front of the building – making a terrible noise as the bodies of the dead were swept aside – about ten armoured cars and light tanks arrived. It was our paratroopers, and they were about to make another advance into enemy-controlled territory.

They asked us to come along. We gathered our things promptly, waking Moscow and the others who were sleeping. We said a quick goodbye to the infantrymen, with whom we had fought very well. We jumped onto our BTRs and were on our way to the line of fire yet again.

The young infantry lieutenant and some other guys from his unit appeared at the third-floor window. As he had done earlier that afternoon, the lieutenant shouted:

‘Good luck, boys! May God bless you and forgive you!’

We waved goodbye, although we couldn’t see them in the dark, and Spoon replied:

‘God willing, we’ll see each other again, brothers!’

Our car went after the column of paras.

In the dark, the city looked like a cemetery. No lights, no movement – the only things visible were the yellow headlights of our armoured cars illuminating the road. The sound of our engines made us sleepy, but we had to stay awake.

I looked up and the sky seemed empty, everything seemed empty. I felt abandoned, alone, trapped in a god-forsaken place from which there was no possibility of return.

As we approached the line we could hear the sounds of the battle. The skirmish seemed really serious: heavy machine gun blasts, grenade launcher shots, tank cannon blasts… Our order was to be as careful as possible; we were in full battle mode. But I felt like I was going to pass out from exhaustion. After all the shooting, my head kept feeling heavier and heavier.

We had fought for two days without pause. Sometimes by ourselves, other times with the paras or infantry explorers, who didn’t even have time to retreat before they had to keep up the defence in other areas. We had pushed ourselves so hard without ever really resting. Sometimes during transport we were able to get a few minutes of shuteye, just to fool our bodies into thinking they had slept a little.

Our infantry had sustained many losses; the enemy was fighting with desperation, because they knew there was no way out. The streets our cars went through were filled with bodies, the houses were crumbling under cannon fire – in the midst of that chaos it was impossible to coordinate ourselves. The paras accidentally opened fire on the infantry units twice, killing a few of our own.

By that point the end was near; the battle for the liberation of the city was becoming increasingly fierce. You could feel the hate, fear and death in the air. Everyone was exhausted; many were overtaken by fits of rage, even the simplest of conversations became a form of violence. Everyone’s nerves were at breaking point, and I was seriously on the verge of losing it.

As we were going down a road where the paratrooper assault units had just finished a battle, I saw an American-made armoured car in flames. Black smoke rose from the tyres, and the internal mechanisms made soft popping noises, like when coffee boils on the stove.

On the front of the car, on the windscreen, wire-bound to the chassis like Christ on the cross, there was a bare-chested Arab covered in blood. His face had been completely skinned: you could see the muscles and bones; the eyes, big and round, seemed made of glass. On his head he wore a blue beret with the paratroopers’ insignia, and a battle knife had been stuck between his teeth, affixed to his jaw with the wire. Someone had taken a big strip of cardboard from the boxes of food rations and hung it around his neck, then used his blood to write: ‘Allah isn’t great, ’cause he has no blue beret.’ Beneath there were the names and nicknames of some of the paras who had fallen in the battle.

Passing that tremendous sight, the paras who were with us in the column stood on top of the cars, removed their berets and saluted their fallen friends, shouting their beloved slogan in unison:

‘Angels in the sky, demons on the ground!’

Torturing prisoners was prohibited by military regulations, and according to the law any perpetrators of such an act were to be tried in court and at a minimum sentenced to serve in military prison. Of course, I’ve never heard of any of our men who had tortured or disfigured prisoners’ bodies being reported or turned over to the authorities.

Once, our paras, in a town that had just been liberated, captured an Arab; after cutting off his nose and ears, they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with gunpowder. Not content with that, they kicked his arms until they were broken and then shot him in both heels. In that piteous state, in agony but still alive, he was left right in the middle of the main street.

Only afterwards did it come out that the Arab was a big shot – a terrorist wanted by the secret service, who had experience in the Yugoslav wars and a close network of important connections; some people even said that he had studied law at a university in the United States… This story quickly reached the ears of a general in central command, who went personally to the front line to track down the culprits. When the general asked the entire paratrooper division (composed of almost six hundred men, all assembled before him) who was responsible, everyone – including officers and lieutenant colonels – stepped forward. To prevent a nationwide scandal, the general went back to command and swore never to stick his nose into the affairs that took place on the front lines…

Battle command is very different from the commanders who plan the war on paper from the safety of an office, calculating operations based on the moral principles of Russian Army regulations. The officers on the front lines had many bloody wars under their belts, and had a completely different way of understanding military code. The men in command, when they learned of enemies being tortured and killed, said we were a ‘bunch of maniacs’, ‘sadists with inhuman conduct’. The truth is that it was impossible to remain a human being after even just a month on the front lines. And many of us were there for the entire duration of our military duty, over two years, and then some re-enlisted and stayed even longer as contract soldiers.

In the face of the horrors we went through every day on the front, some lost their soundness of mind, others risked losing it, and many just died. The soldiers often had to be cruel – it was a matter of survival.

At the sight of that poor wretch tied to the car, I must admit that there were a few sniggers among us. A column of infantrymen and some explorer units was behind us; one of their cars stopped, an officer came out with a pair of pliers and tried to free the body.

There he was, about to cut the cord that bound the dead Arab’s hands, when our Nosov noticed what was going on. He immediately kicked our car’s turret and shouted:

‘Halt, skulls![5] Halt!’

The car hadn’t come to a full stop before Nosov jumped down. Running up to the officer, he started yelling:

‘Soldier! What the hell do you think you’re doing with those pliers?’

The officer gave Nosov a sideways look, then said contemptuously:

‘Who are you, and why aren’t you acting according to regulations? Identify yourself! Name, rank, and unit!’

‘Captain Nosov, saboteurs…’

The officer, who was a little younger than Nosov but a rank higher, eyed him from beneath the brim of his hat:

‘Captain, I order you to return to your vehicle – you’re blocking the column!’

Nobody had ever dared talk to our captain like that before.

Nosov ripped the pliers out of his hands and threw them into the rubble, screaming at him like a madman; in fact, even we were startled.

‘Boy, you get back in your vehicle and never dare give orders to a saboteur again! When you were still jerking off or taking it in the arse from your schoolmates I was already burying my brothers in Qandahar! Who gave you permission to untie him?’ He pointed to the Arab’s flayed body. ‘Did you put him there? Well, when you’ve got the balls to do something like that then you can take him down…’

The officer tried to reply, serious and impassive:

‘Captain, I must inform you that when we reach our post I will be forced to report your conduct to command!’

‘Your piece of shit post only exists thanks to the sacrifice of those boys!’ Nosov snarled, pointing at the names of the dead paratroopers written on the piece of cardboard. ‘Go ahead and inform whoever you please, do whatever you want; I wipe my arse with your regulations… If I see you laying a hand on any other monuments around here, I swear on the souls of my dead brothers that I will shoot you!’

After these words Nosov gave the officer an impertinent military salute, turned around, and headed back to the car.

The officer stood there for a second, without moving, thinking about what he had just heard, returned the salute, albeit belatedly, almost instinctively, then returned to his car.

Throughout this whole incident, what struck me the most was what our captain had called that disfigured cadaver. He called it a monument.

Many veterans of the war in Afghanistan, especially the older paratroopers, would leave these ‘monuments’ in the streets after a particularly difficult battle. They were terrifying sights, always the body of a dead enemy that the soldiers would savage in a frightening way. But the real horror in this ritual lay in the fact that in order to make these ‘monuments’, soldiers used people who were still alive.

One time, after a skirmish in which a para group attacked and liberated a fortified area, we found a prisoner in this sort of condition who was still breathing. They had cut the skin on his torso and back into strips, in imitation of the stripes on the shirt the paratroopers wear, which back home they call a telnyashka. They had nailed the poor devil to a door, heavy tent stakes sharpened into points struck through his hands. Nearby someone had written the motto, also in blood: ‘We may be few, but we wear the telnyashka!’

However terrible this was, it had become a kind of custom for them, a matter of dignity and prestige, which the paras always tried to honour without anyone ever daring to go against it.

Our column kept scouting the liberated areas, headed for the line of fire. The line kept moving forward, and after every operation we would always lag behind, so every time we would have to catch up to it again. We forged ahead like waves of water, so as not to give the enemy a chance to rest, make a move, organise an attack against us. We were always fighting, always.

Every now and then we would run into various support units; the carriers restocked our supplies, took care of the injured and accompanied the soldiers who were going to rest.

A kilometre away from the front we had to stop; the car couldn’t go any closer, otherwise, in the midst of battle, it would have been torched in seconds. Running with heads down, taking cover behind a light tank, we began moving towards the site along with the paras.

The road was narrow, and the enemy was shooting at us crossways. I could feel the bullets ricocheting off the armour of the tank and then dispersing in every direction. We couldn’t stick even our noses beyond the tank, the gunfire was so heavy.

After a while the tank stopped, and the turret turned towards the shots. A cannon blast went off, and at the same time, a volley of bullets from the heavy machine gun, which was next to the cannon inside turret. The explosion was so violent and sudden it made me fall down; my head spun.

When we reached the position, we realised it was an inferno. The paras were agitated and running all over the place, by that point not even covering themselves. Our task was to liberate a house; they had tried to attack it twice, unsuccessfully, and were now waiting for support from us and the tank. We all advanced together, breaking through the enemy defence.

We had been able to push back the enemy’s defence almost twenty kilometres. Command was happy because usually only five kilometres at most would get liberated in a day, whereas we had been really fast. But every time we concluded one operation, our assistance was needed elsewhere. They ordered us to take out snipers positioned in various buildings, to launch assaults on buildings, help surround enemy-controlled areas, sabotage their equipment… We were exhausted. The paratroopers took turns, whereas we saboteurs hadn’t slept for three days. I felt so tired that I didn’t have any strength left to eat.

After a short skirmish on a narrow road – where we had destroyed a nursery school, our tanks razing the playground completely – we found ourselves who knows how running through the rooms of a destroyed building, shooting the enemy from such a close range that we could almost reach out and touch them.

I ended up on the top floor with Shoe, to try to eliminate the last big gun. We launched two hand grenades.

In the dust coming down from the ceiling we couldn’t see anything, and we ran right into four enemies who, like us, were circling around like blind kittens in the grey, dirty cloud which smelled like rubble and burnt explosives.

There in Chechnya I had never shot anyone from such a close range.

Meanwhile on the second floor our captain had taken a prisoner and downed eight enemies, all by himself.

When I came out with Shoe I was completely dazed. Captain Nosov was asking Moscow to keep an eye on the Arab prisoner while he, Spoon and Zenith went to check on the basement.

I sat down on the stairs next to Moscow, across from the terrified prisoner, who kept on trying to communicate something to us. Moscow wasn’t listening to him; he was sleepy and worn out, as we all were. As soon as the captain turned his back, Moscow pulled out his gun, an Austrian Glock, one of his ‘trophies’, and with a derisive scowl shot the prisoner in the head and the chest.

The captain turned around and without saying a word looked at him with pity.

Moscow went and sat down next to the dead man and closed his eyes, succumbing to a wave of exhaustion.

Looking at all of us as if he were actually meeting us for the first time, the captain said:

‘This is too much, boys. Everyone to the carrier, to rest behind the line.’

In single file, like zombies, we headed for our cars. My head felt so heavy that I was convinced if I stopped at all it would explode.

We went behind the line, into the area guarded and defended by our infantry. We fell asleep instantly – I didn’t even have the chance to finish taking off my coat and side bags before I fell into oblivion, like a dead man.

It wouldn’t seem so, but the scariest time of all in war is when you’re resting. In those moments you become aware of all the horrors of the situation you’ve found yourself in. While you don’t even have the time to think during operations and just worry about the essential actions needed to carry out an order, everything that would have an impact on your spirit – impressions, doubts, feelings of guilt – comes to the surface when you stop to rest. Then you can’t help but despair, because you’d like to rest and forget the war for a few hours, but you know it’s not possible. You spend a lot of time half-awake and half-asleep, reliving what you’ve just gone through and thus fuelling your tiredness even more.

The only time when you can really rest is when you simply pass out, as if someone had pulled your plug all of a sudden. That’s how I felt then.

… A little later, Moscow woke me up by tapping my chest with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

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

Moscow’s face looked tired. He was chewing on a piece of bread. It was dark outside, impossible to tell the time. I checked my watch, but I couldn’t even see the numbers; it was like everything was shrouded in fog.

‘What’s going on, how long did we sleep?’ I asked Moscow.

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

I put my face in my hands, trying to muster the strength to get up and start thinking. I needed to sleep, I felt utterly exhausted. My clothes were dirty and damp, my jacket smelled like sweat and dirt. I was a wreck.

Moscow went to wake the others:

‘Come on, guys, we’re leaving now… They need us.’

They were all in despair – they didn’t want to get up. But griping and cursing, they got to their feet.

Captain Nosov was going around with the handset to his ear and an infantryman with the field radio in a backpack was running after him like a little dog. The captain was getting angry, he kept repeating to who knows who, on the radio, that we had got rest for the first time in three days, that we were beat. All to no avail, because after a while Nosov said, in a tone that recalled the sound of tap shoes:

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel! I confirm, order received!’

So they were sending us to the front lines again.

I didn’t even want to think about it.

I went to the metal vat filled with water. I plunged my hands in; the water was nice and cool; it gave me a light shiver. So I dunked my whole head underwater, and lingered for a moment, holding my breath.

I opened my eyes inside the vat and saw complete darkness. Startled, I pulled my head out immediately and gasped for breath.

The darkness I saw in the vat gave me a bad feeling, it seemed as if death might be like that – dark and airless.

I stood over the vat, and watched the reflection of my face and of my life up to that point dancing on the water. But I stepped back immediately – I didn’t want the water to become still, too much like a mirror. According to an old Siberian tradition, looking in the mirror before facing a risk brings bad luck.

And from what I understood from the bits of the radio conversation between Nosov and some unknown colonel, we would be facing many a risk indeed…

We all sat in a circle, next to the car, as we always did before leaving for a mission. Moscow explained the situation: during the night a group of enemies had broken through the ring we had around the city, and some of our infantry were trapped in a building surrounded by Arabs… We had to free them; the attack was set for six in the morning. Only two hours away.

I chewed on a piece of buttered bread, trying to reestablish contact with reality. Moscow was talking; I was taking little sips of boiling hot soup from a cup made out of an old tin. I was slowly waking up.

Fifteen minutes later we were in the car, once again headed for the line of fire.

During the trip Nosov gave us his take:

‘First our command makes a mistake by leaving a weak spot in the ring around the city. Then the Arabs come in and make trouble, and even if they don’t manage to advance or to do anything serious they take our soldiers hostage… Our nearby troops can’t make it in time, and now it’s up to us to break through their defence for the second time. And if we don’t attack now, our men will die for sure… It’s a farce, the colonels in command know very well that prisoners get killed, but it’s in their interest to look like they tried to save them…’

To tell the truth, at that moment I understood absolutely nothing about the situation, I was just trying to rest as much as possible so that I wouldn’t collapse later during battle. None of my comrades said anything; the captain went on talking by himself, pondering military tactics, making comparisons to similar cases he had encountered in the past.

At some point Moscow turned to me and whispered with irritation:

‘I really hope this is the last time. If they ask us to do anything else, I’m going to tell them all to shove it.’

I was in total agreement.

We soon reached our destination. The car stopped in the courtyard of a small building defended by our men. The yard was full of equipment randomly strewn across the ground. On the opposite side there was a road that separated our territory from the territory held by the enemies. We jumped out of the car and began gathering Kalashnikov clips, tying them together with the wide bandages from our medi-kits, attaching them to our vests.

The captain ordered:

‘Prepare ten clips for me too, boys!’

Then he went off to the tent in the middle of the yard, which was surrounded by sandbags stacked up to a man’s height around the perimeter. It was the mobile command base, where there was usually some low-ranking officer, a major or at most a lieutenant colonel.

Our captain was very critical towards the men in command – he called any contact with them ‘listening to babies cry’, referring to the story in the Gospel about the massacre of the innocents. There was something about their behaviour, he told us, that he had never really been able to understand, and when he had to deal with them face to face they always ended up arguing and he would insult them. As he admitted himself, that’s precisely the reason why he never went up in military rank – sometimes he would jokingly add the word ‘eternal’ to his title of captain; he was aware that nobody in command was very fond of him, either.

That day, I could tell just from the way he stormed over to the tent that Nosov was going to get into trouble the moment he walked in there.

Not even ten minutes had passed before we started to hear shouting coming from the tent, along with a string of accusations and insults, with which our captain was always very generous.

Right after that Nosov came by the sandbags, and called me over, his voice breaking:

‘Kolima! Come here, I have a job for you!’

I could imagine what it would be, so I walked towards the tent with some reluctance. Inside there was an infantry major sitting at a table, improvised from empty cases for heavy machine gun rounds. He had a battle knife in his hand, which he was using to show Nosov various points on a map that was spread out in front of them.

On the map, our area was surrounded by empty shells and various calibres of cartridge, which were supposed to represent the different military units. Next to that was a package of black bread, open, and a piece of paper with a pat of butter on top, a Kalashnikov survival knife stuck inside. There was also a big pot full of black tea, which was so hot it was steaming, and in fact its smell filled the entire tent. In one corner, on top of a zinc case, an infantry explorer, a private, ate silently. Next to him, leaning against the case, was his precision rifle: a VSS with an integrated silencer, exactly the same as mine. He was a sniper too.

The major was angry with Nosov, but he paid no attention and made himself at home. He spread some butter on a thick hunk of bread and passed it to me.

‘Here. Eat while you can…’

I didn’t need him to tell me twice, and in a single bite I’d chomped off half the piece. Then the major took an empty tin from a pile of rubbish on the ground and poured a drop of hot tea in it. He rinsed out the tin with a vigorous swish and dumped the dirty tea on the rubbish. Finally he filled the tin up with tea and said to me:

‘Drink up, soldier, don’t just eat stale bread!’

I liked him right off the bat, this major; he had a very friendly demeanour and he treated me like a son. It was clear that he found himself in an awkward situation, that’s why he was trying to get some support.

While I drank the tea, with the residue of the oil from the tin still floating on top, Nosov bent over the map. He said to me, without ever looking up:

‘Look, Kolima, your colleague here has managed to find the spots where the Arabs are. You have to memorise them, study them carefully…’ I turned towards the explorers’ sniper, who still hadn’t said a word.

‘You left the area by yourself? How did you do it?’

The guy gave me a serious look, and while he was still chewing, he said:

‘I went into the sewer system. In the yard, behind the house where our post is, there’s an entrance to the sewers. Our lieutenant ordered me to search it and, if possible, follow it all the way to you guys.’

It seemed incredible, looking at the guy. Alone, with a precision rifle and a few clips, that boy had gone through over a kilometre of sewer. Even if they were completely dry, since in the city the water pipes weren’t working and there was no drinking water, the biggest danger in the sewers was the mines. During the First Chechen Campaign, all the sewers were mined – first by the enemies, then by us – to keep anyone from using them as underground passageways from one part of the city to another. Nobody dared go in there, the risk was too high.

‘That’s some luck, brother! You weren’t just born with a bulletproof vest, you had a full-on jacket!’ I said, looking on the map at the path he had taken.

I had only been in the sewers once. We were clearing out a neighbourhood in the Chechen capital, the city of Grozny. To get closer to the position of an Arab sniper I had to take down, I went through nearly two hundred metres of sewer, but it was nice and wide, and there was no danger of being discovered. The city was under the control of our troops, and two soldiers from the strategic unit had already passed through that same tract of sewer and deactivated the mines they found on the path.

The Arabs had several models of explosive devices at their disposal, many of which were Italian-made, coming from San Marino. They had different mechanisms, but were all deadly weapons. Some of them had been scattered throughout the city we were supposed to attack, thrown in the street in order to attract our soldiers’ attention. They were made to look like mobile phones, watches, videocameras, and unfortunately sometimes toys or boxes of crayons. We all knew about these dangerous surprises, and if during the First Chechen Campaign a Russian or two had lost his hide, I don’t remember a single case of that happening in the Second. But many civilians died, including – disgracefully – children. When we saw those mines in the street we wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them to make them explode, thus rendering them harmless. The idea of picking them up and trying to deactivate them, on the other hand, never occurred to any one of us.

The explorers’ sniper had done everything alone. Besides making it all the way to our position, he had emerged from the sewers at several points to observe the enemy camp and had used a piece of hard lime to mark the areas of greatest danger on the walls. He had risked his life so he could tell us where and how the Arabs were positioned. To me he was a hero.

Now that I had a full stomach I went and carefully studied the map the sniper had drawn, trying to memorise all the points marked on the route, but there were so many I couldn’t even count them. So I took out the map they’d given us at the beginning of the operation, and with a pencil I traced every single enemy post.

In the meantime, Nosov was talking with the major, discussing the possibility of launching an attack to free the trapped soldiers.

‘Before we attack,’ the major said, ‘we have to wait for the planes to arrive, to bomb the perimeter, and…’

‘But that means sentencing our men to death!’ Nosov broke in. ‘We have to try a passive attack. We push the Arabs back to their positions, and take back control of the perimeter. Then from there, we create a path for us to get to the area where the soldiers are stuck…’ Nosov wasn’t used to having to explain things to other people.

The major barked:

‘Captain! You are an officer in charge of one unit. Do all of us a favour; devise strategies with your men however and whenever you see fit, but don’t try to resolve something that goes beyond your capacities!’

Nosov, however, didn’t want to listen. He went on with accusations, using the same old stories about Afghanistan, talking about how he had been abandoned by a bunch of ‘officers with no balls’ worried more about their medals than about the soldiers who were dying in the ‘traps laid out for them by the generals in the Kremlin’, people who had sold out to those ‘faggots at the Pentagon’…

At a certain point the major lost his patience and he went outside the tent, asking to be brought a field radio.

Three soldiers came running up. One carried the radio; the other two – Cossacks armed to the teeth, with vests, guns, Kalashnikovs and extra clips all over – went into a corner and started talking with the explorers’ sniper.

The soldier with the radio fiddled with the equipment a little, then passed the handset to the major. They were calling the unit of trapped infantrymen, who had been holding out heroically for hours.

‘Twelve thirty-two! Twelve thirty-two! Birch calling! Birch calling!’

They answered right away.

‘Birch! Birch! This is twelve thirty-two!’ You could hear the agitation in his voice, gunfire in the background.

The major took a deep breath, and said in a shaky voice:

‘Soldier, what is your situation? Request confirmation of your situation!’

For a moment everything on the other side stopped, you could only hear some shooting and a couple of loud explosions. We all stared at the radio, holding our breath.

After a moment the voice returned, even more agitated than before:

‘Birch, Birch! Confirming our situation! The unit is under siege. Lots of two-hundreds![6] The three-hundreds are almost gone,[7] we have no more medi-kits! The unit has run out of supplies, I don’t know how much longer we can last! We request air strike on our coordinates! Fire on us!’

The soldier’s voice seemed not to come from the radio, but to come from somewhere beyond. It was more than desperate – it was defeated. After a brief pause, he concluded the conversation:

‘Goodbye, brothers, remember us, and may God bless you! The whole unit and I salute you…’

Afterwards, we heard a long whistle; that sound meant the other side had ended communication. The major ordered the radio to be turned off and sat down on one of the crates, his face tired. He took an unfiltered cigarette and started smoking it with fury. He looked Nosov in the face, and then said quietly:

‘Captain, unfortunately you heard for yourself how badly off they are. Sending our units would be a futile sacrifice, pure insanity… Independent of whatever action we decide to take, command has already given the order, and soon we’ll have confirmation – they’re going to bomb the perimeter. All we can do is be ready for the attacks from the surviving enemy groups, who will most certainly try to flee the area.’

Nosov turned back to the map. The major got up and ordered the soldier with the radio to return to his unit. Only then did the two Cossacks approach the major. One of them, the older one, gave him a military salute. The major stood up, and before responding, checked to make sure his hat was on[8] – you could see that he was tired and worn out too.

The Cossack said:

‘I’m Osaul[9] Ustinov, Sixth Division of Free Kuban Cossacks… My son, Private Ustinov, is in the enemy-surrounded area. I ask your permission to join the attack group going to support our boys!’

The major looked at our captain for a second and then, lowering his eyes, began explaining the situation to the Cossack:

‘I understand your request, but the boys have no hope. They requested fire on their position, I’m certain they won’t make it to daybreak alive… I officially apologise for our total powerlessness in the face of a situation like this…’ From his tone of voice, it was almost as if he were apologising for having personally killed the Cossack’s son.

The Cossack’s face went dark, like a cloud heavy with rain. I was standing beside him, and I had the impression he was going to burst at any moment.

‘How much time do we have before the first air strike?’ Nosov suddenly asked.

He was focused on the map and didn’t notice the expression that came over the major’s face. Naturally, the major didn’t want to take on responsibility for any potential plans that came from Nosov’s mind. Despite all that, he replied:

‘About an hour and a half, Captain… But I don’t understand – what does the time of the strike matter now? The situation is cut-and-dried, unfortunately…’

Nosov looked up from the map, took a piece of bread from the table and chewing it almost cruelly, said:

‘Major, with all due respect… In an hour my strays and I can break through the enemy defence, check out their position, free the boys and come back home. We’ll have time left over for breakfast…’

At these words my heart sank into my boots: Nosov was going to take us straight to hell.

The major took off his cap and sat down on the crate. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack; he was probably already picturing some superior stripping the stars from his uniform. He tried to object, without conviction, and raising his voice just a touch, he repeated:

‘That’s not within your competencies, Captain…’

But Nosov shot back arrogantly:

‘Major! Let the beasts in the forest cry, we’re soldiers and we must do our duty! My men and I will go into operation immediately. We’ll go through the sewers, you prepare a group to cover us, because within an hour we’ll come out at this exact point.’ His finger pointed to the spot on the map.

Nosov traced a line marking a little street that went behind the trapped infantrymen’s position and ended just opposite our units. Between those two points there was a kilometre and a half with enemy positions. Looking at it on the map, the route seemed short and simple, but to physically travel it, on the actual perimeter, definitely wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.

The explorers’ sniper came up, shook my hand and said:

‘Good luck and may God protect you, do everything you can for our boys…’

I, at that moment, was thinking that if anything went wrong, there wouldn’t be anybody to do everything they could for us. If we tarried even a little we would get bombed by our own planes. Nothing to be cheery about.

The major looked Nosov in the eyes and said:

‘Captain, there’s nothing I can do to stop this insane endeavour of yours, but remember that if anything happens behind the line, no one will be able to help you… As an officer of the Russian Army, all I can do is restrict myself to calling your actions dangerous for the lives of the soldiers under you. Personally, I’m against anarchy…’ After these words, the major made a sly face, and whispered in a low voice, ‘But, Captain, if you need anything in particular, all of our magazines are at your disposal…’

Nosov spoke seriously, as he would do whenever he could already taste victory:

‘Prepare the support troops at the places I showed you on the map. In an hour we’ll be there.’ Without another word he exited the tent.

Before leaving, I paused to salute the major according to regulation. Looking at me squinty-eyed, he just waved his hand as if he were shooing away a fly.

Our captain was roaming around the yard looking for my comrades. The first one he found was Moscow. They spoke briefly, and right afterwards Moscow yelled:

‘Saboteurs! Battle alarm!’

As our men came from various places, running, throwing on their jackets, putting their clips and everything in place, Nosov slung two grenade launchers and a couple of bags of extra ammo over his shoulders.

Once we were all there he spoke in a low voice, as he did whenever he wanted to explain something important:

‘We’ll go on foot, without using the car. We’ll go through the sewers and then, following the map, we’ll come out directly on the perimeter where our guys are trapped. When we get there, hopefully we’ll find some of them still alive…’

We listened carefully. We too needed to know what sort of death awaited us.

Suddenly the Cossack came over with his young sidekick. The old man interrupted Nosov, his words full of desperation:

‘Captain, I beg you, take us with you, my son is there, you understand? How could I go on living knowing that I could have done something to save him and I didn’t?’

Nosov replied calmly, as if he had been expecting this question his whole life.

‘I understand you, Osaul, and for me personally it’s not a problem. But we saboteurs are a family, and we make decisions together. If even one of my boys doesn’t agree to it… I’m very sorry, Osaul, but you’ll be staying here…’

The Cossack turned towards us. He wore a moustache, and he looked dead tired. He seemed about fifty years old.

‘My boys, help me at this difficult moment! One day, God bless you, you will be fathers too, and I hope you never experience what I’m going through now…’ He gazed at us with sad eyes and stiff lips, as if a cramp had frozen the muscles in his face. You could tell he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t manage to get it out.

Moscow was the first to speak:

‘It’s fine with me…’

We all gave our assent.

The expression in the old man’s eyes changed instantly.

At that point Nosov said:

‘We have about an hour, so let’s try to hurry as much as possible, on the double, and no messing around…’

We quickly introduced ourselves. The old man was called Vasily, the young one – who was much less worried about the gravity of the situation – Yury. They were uncle and nephew, and they seemed like good people to me. I was glad that someone else was joining our group on such a dangerous operation – it was an unusual occurrence, and maybe it would bring a little more hope to all of us.

We checked our equipment one last time, while Moscow and Zenith explained to the Cossacks what they needed to remove and what they should keep on. The two immediately lightened their jackets, tossing their guns that would have made noise and restricted their movement. The Cossacks were expert soldiers – no one had any doubt as to their training – but we didn’t have time to explain saboteur rules and conduct.

We had to cross the street, go through a yard and from there go down into the sewers. In the darkness of the early morning there was a cool wind that caressed our faces; you could still see the stars up in the sky.

As we moved in silence, I noticed a cat, an old male tabby, perched on a half-destroyed car. He observed us attentively, while we prepared ourselves covertly for the mission. The presence of cats, according to Siberian tradition, brings good luck. I hadn’t forgotten that terrible darkness I’d seen inside the vat of water, and the cat seemed like a positive sign.

The yard shown on the map was full of empty cases that had held the explosive charges for the cannons. There in the middle was the entrance to the sewers, sealed with a heavy slab of iron. So as not to get lost, we had to follow the indications the explorer had drawn on the sewer walls. Along the entire route, as the captain had explained, we would find his unit number, 168, serving as our guide.

One by one, we jumped underground. Nosov and Moscow – the first and the last in line – had flashlights with red bulbs so as not to arouse the enemy’s suspicion. The sewers were paved; they formed a very narrow tunnel that forced us to walk with our heads down and bent almost halfway over.

I had only one thought in my head: the fact that the explorers’ sniper hadn’t blown up didn’t mean there weren’t any mines down there.

We ran behind Nosov, and it felt like we were mice. It was dark, it was dead hot, there was dust everywhere, and I felt like I was breathing sand. At multiple points we heard the Arabs’ voices coming from above.

Suddenly Nosov froze, stiff as a rod. We stopped behind him, breathing hard. Moscow spat on the ground and cursed softly. Nosov studied the map with the flashlight, then pointed the light at the wall, looking for the sign. When he found the number with a little star drawn next to it, he didn’t waste any time. He turned to us and said:

‘Ready for action – let’s go!’

We loaded the barrel, Zenith and Shoe put two charges in the grenade launcher.

‘Kolima, you and Moscow go up on recon. If it’s all clear, one of you come back down here to lead the way.’

I climbed up a narrow stepladder that went from the sewer tunnel to the exit. You couldn’t see a thing, Moscow was climbing up after me with a flashlight, but that weak red light didn’t help. I groped my way up.

After a while my head touched the ceiling. There was an iron cover, it must have been five metres wide. I tried to lift it but that thing didn’t even budge a centimetre. I thought something heavy was blocking the exit; maybe a car was parked on top, or maybe there was a light cannon. I kept pushing, even using my shoulders, but I really couldn’t lift it. My sweat was cold.

‘What the fuck are you doing? Take off the bloody cover!’ Moscow yelled at me.

‘Holy Christ, they’ve put something on top, it won’t open!’

‘Bullshit!’ Moscow came up and I moved aside, balancing myself on the ladder with one foot off the rung. ‘Fucking hell, Kolima! You’re not even capable of moving a bloody manhole cover?’ He was raging now.

‘They’ve put something on top, I’m telling you, it won’t move!’ Any more and I was going to cry.

‘Stop saying that. Let’s try together.’ Moscow started pushing on one side and I on the other. The cover lifted a little.

Slowly inching it aside, we managed to clear an opening. The cool morning air came rushing in, and my lungs greedily took it in.

‘They’ve put something on top…’ Moscow made fun of me, in a simpering little voice. ‘Eat more, otherwise you won’t even have the strength to take a shit!’

I went out into the yard first. Outside it was brighter than when we had left. The sun wasn’t out yet, but there was already that strange morning light that at times seems like a reflection in the distance.

There were open crates of equipment everywhere, all empty. There was absolute silence, no sound of gunfire. On one corner there was an armoured car like ours, a BTR with one side burned out and the rear doors open. Someone had dismantled the machine gun from the turret – it was clear that, once they had realised the danger they were in, the infantrymen had tried to gather every weapon they could.

For a second I thought we had got there too late. Then I noticed movement in one of the windows of the third floor of the building. Someone was pulling a rope, lifting something. Moscow pointed towards the entrance; lying on the ground, there was a soldier. I couldn’t see the details; I could only make out a dark spot. He moved slowly, crawling towards the door as if he were afraid to get up. He went a couple of metres, then stopped; I thought maybe he was wounded.

Moscow touched my arm and said:

‘That’s our guys, let’s go!’

We hurried across the yard. Partly because we were used to the dark and partly because day was starting to break, we realised that the bodies of our soldiers were scattered here and there; none of them had his vest or gear. We could see that the living had pillaged the dead.

Sneaking along the walls, we peered in the windows. The building was square, with identical rooms and a wide, long hallway with high ceilings – it seemed to be a school or hospital. It was completely destroyed, and our soldiers’ bodies were in piles on the floor.

Once we reached the corner, I saw one of our positions. Next to a ground-floor window a soldier sat on the inner side of the boundary wall smoking a cigarette butt concealed under his hand. We crawled over to him and he didn’t notice a thing – he kept on sitting there, without moving, smoking calmly. Moscow approached from behind and immobilised him, like a spider clutches its victims. He put his hand over his mouth and whispered in his ear:

‘Relax, little brother, don’t worry. We’re the saboteurs, we’ve come to get you out of here…’

The soldier hadn’t had time to react; the cigarette fell to the ground and I covered it immediately. When Moscow let go he looked at us as if we were aliens.

‘How did you do it, guys?’ he said, incredulous.

‘Your sniper, the explorer, went through the sewers and showed us the way,’ Moscow summarised. ‘We have to move now, while it’s still not too light…’

The soldier grabbed an empty shell from the floor and threw it somewhere inside the building, into the darkness of one of the rooms. We heard a tired voice say:

‘What is it, Mitya?’

Our new acquaintance replied:

‘We have visitors – the saboteurs are here!’

From the other room the voice perked up instantly:

‘Fucking whore of a war, finally!’

There were sixteen infantrymen left. They had occupied a wing of the building and resigned themselves to waiting for the last attack from the enemy, who would come back at dawn to exterminate them.

While Moscow went to alert our guys, who were waiting for an update down in the sewer, I started talking to the sergeant. He was a really competent guy; he’d taken over after their lieutenant fell, planning their defence in an attempt to stretch what little time they had as much as possible. His name was Lavrov.

‘I’d been hoping that, when dawn came, some of our men would start to push onto the line of fire,’ he confessed to me. ‘That way maybe the Arabs’ attention would have been taken from us to defending themselves…’

‘Sergeant,’ I preferred to tell him the truth right away, ‘unfortunately, Command already approved an air strike…’

He looked at me in astonishment – he couldn’t believe our command had been ready to sacrifice them without trying one last time.

I told him to gather the men from his unit right away, and within a few minutes all sixteen of the surviving soldiers were there in front of me. They were tired and worn out, but alive. Poor guys, they had only two boxes of rounds for the machine gun; if things went well that would have lasted them about five minutes of combat…

So as not to carry unnecessary weight, I decided we should leave the heavy machine gun behind, but first I plugged the barrel with a misshapen Kalashnikov shell and removed the lock to make the weapon completely unusable. I slipped it into my pocket; I’d throw it into the sewer later.

I picked up a few bulletproof vests, which could turn out to be useful during retreat, and passed them out to the guys. It was good to have a few extra – we could use them to cover the holes in the windows, to cover the radio and keep it from getting broken during transport, or to protect some other thing of value.

Moscow came back in a rush, all out of breath:

‘Let’s hurry, the Arabs are coming. I heard noises in the distance…’

We headed out. I led the group, Moscow closed the line. The infantry made noise; their uniforms had tons of latches and they had some useless stuff on their vests that we hadn’t had time to tell them to take off. But we got through the yard without any problems, and at the entrance to the sewers, one by one they went down.

Moscow and I covered them from a possible enemy attack, but everything was calm – there wasn’t the slightest sign of the Arabs. Finally, when everyone had got to safety, we jumped down too. We carefully replaced the cover and off we went.

Nosov was down below, preparing some booby traps to mine the sewer entrance. He climbed up, and with some bandages from the medi-kits he affixed three grenades to the second rung of the iron ladder. Then he threaded some wire through the pins, tied two bullet-proof vests to one end of the wire to act as a counter-weight, and slipped the other end of the wire under the cover, which kept it in place and kept the vests hanging in the air. If someone moved the cover, the wire would come loose and the vests would fall and trigger the bombs.

Besides obstructing the sewer entrance, the explosion would surely kill a few enemies as well. An F1 model hand grenade had a lot of explosive power, and could shoot metal fragments up to a distance of four hundred metres. It was a real bitch, that bomb.

Nosov came down and looked at the soldiers:

‘So, you’re the only ones left?’

Sergeant Lavrov replied:

‘Yes, Comrade Captain, the others have fallen.’

It was dark and you couldn’t see anything, but from our line the Cossack’s voice emerged:

‘Does anyone have word of Private Ustinov?’

A cry came from among the infantry:

‘Papa!’ A young soldier jumped out from the group and practically threw himself on the old man. The two men embraced, and then the cousin too. They were grinning, happy as children.

‘Let’s save the family reunions for later, Cossacks!’ Our Nosov motioned for everyone to follow him.

We went fast. It really seemed like everything had gone smoothly, and I was almost happy that we had managed to conclude the operation without having to shoot a single bullet. As we passed under the grates, you could see the first rays of sunlight filtering down to the sewer floor. At those points we crept along against the wall so we couldn’t be seen from above.

The infantrymen followed the saboteurs, and Nosov ordered me and Moscow to bring up the rear. Although the group had grown, although our heads were down and we were hunched over, we moved even faster than we did on the way there.

‘I knew I was going to be okay,’ Moscow said at one point, though almost under his breath.

‘What?’ I asked, without stopping. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

‘My neighbour, the gypsy, she read my future on the cards…’ He was smiling now. ‘She said I would die an old man, in my sleep…’

He told this story every time he got through some serious trouble – that is, all the time. I was about to say something, when suddenly we heard such a strong explosion that for a few seconds our ears were plugged. It was our booby trap.

Nosov halted. We looked at one another, scared, half-deaf, feeling trapped. Our captain said:

‘We have to get out fast, now, wherever we are… I’m sure they’ve already given the signal… Now those beasts’ll be throwing bombs into every sewer in the area!’

Within a minute we found an exit, also closed by a cover. Without a word Nosov climbed up, moved the cover and went out. Then he peeked in and gestured for us to follow him.

We moved so fast that we looked like a group of navy soldiers used to going up and down the passageways of a submarine.

Coming out in broad daylight in some random place, however, would expose us to any possible attack.

We found ourselves at the end of an empty street facing a cement wall full of holes and rusty shards. Nearby there was a low building, a small power plant. There was one in every neighbourhood – they were good places for escaping heavy artillery attacks, because they had very thick walls, and sometimes even a tank had trouble knocking them down; they were kind of like little bunkers. The problem is that they were blind, without windows – they had a door and that was it. Many soldiers had lost their lives in those places, because in trying to take shelter they ended up getting trapped.

Behind us there was a half-destroyed, abandoned apartment building. Nosov headed there and we followed. Once inside, we all began trying to figure out an escape route.

Nosov pulled out the map and showed us our location. We had gone in the right direction, but we were about three hundred metres from where we were originally supposed to come out. According to the directions I had copied, we were right in the middle of the enemy’s second line of fortifications.

While the others hid in the building, Nosov asked Moscow and me to come with him to explore the area. The silence was unsettling – it felt as if we were crossing a dead city. But as we went through the streets, we spotted several places where machine guns poked out from building windows. Evidently the Arabs felt safe, and that was why they had no ground cover. Still, it was a big stroke of luck that we hadn’t come out in a place defended by the snipers, otherwise we’d have stepped into our own grave.

There was an armoured car, a BTR, inside one of the courtyards, where someone had written something in Arabic with white paint. We looked around, and not seeing anyone, we went in. The back doors of the car were open; inside there was an enemy, sleeping.

Nosov didn’t stop to think. He drew his knife and jumped on him like a flash. Without the slightest whimper, the Arab died from a jab right in the heart.

Moscow entered the cabin and started the engine. I hung on the side with Nosov. Obviously when we came onto the street, everyone would notice the car. We had to make it look like we were them, but also had to be ready to get off in case they recognised us.

Moscow drove the car perfectly, nice and smooth. Nosov had put on the dead Arab’s hat and was making a weird face – it almost made me laugh to look at him. I had torn the pom-pom off my hat and turned it inside out, so that from far away it would look at least a little like the ones the Arabs wore. We went through the streets and everything around was still – it really seemed like our trick had worked.

We entered the courtyard of the abandoned house where our men were waiting for us, backing up as close as possible to the door.

Nosov suggested to the soldiers a plan to get out of there: they would all squeeze inside the BTR; two would go to the driver’s side, another inside the gun turret, while we saboteurs would stay on top, in plain view. His idea was to dress the dead Arab’s body in one of our soldier’s uniforms, and then attach him to the car (they really liked exhibiting our corpses – I had seen videos with the half-butchered bodies of Russians being taken around the city streets like trophies), pretending to be their comrades. It was a crazy plan, but it was the only plan possible.

One infantryman took his uniform off without hesitation and took the Arab’s clothes. We put the jacket on the corpse, wrapped his head in a rag to cover the black beard and long hair, and tied him up. In the car we found one of their flags, which was entrusted to Zenith; his task would be to shout the only Arabic phrase he knew, ‘Allah Akbar’, and wave the flag around like a nut. The rest of us would confuse things a little by shooting into the air and letting out some whoops.

It was already daylight. We had just a few blocks to go. We would dump the car just before reaching the territory under our control; otherwise there was the risk of our soldiers killing us.

Without much ado, we set off. The car barrelled onto the street at full speed; in front, under the gun turret, we had placed the corpse. The head dangled from side to side – it really looked like one of our men. We hollered and shot in the air every now and then, we had all turned our hats inside out. Luckily the road was deserted.

We were almost at the end of the road when we heard some shouting from a nearby house, then fire from a machine gun and some Kalashnikovs and pistols. Some Arabs came out of the door, jumping for joy, shooting into the air and waving at us, raising their hands high in the air. We kept up the show. I was next to the turret; Zenith was yelling so loud it almost hurt my ears.

We came to a big crossroads where there were lots of Arabs bustling about with heavy cannons and tanks. Some of them fired in response to us, but one group gestured for us to stop the vehicle. Nosov took a hand grenade and threw it right at a cannon, which exploded. Moscow and I opened fire on the Arabs, to their surprise. We wiped them out in no time, and our BTR kept going down the street into the distance.

There were still two small streets of enemy fortifications to cross; then we would come onto a wide street, and after that we would reach our men. We were so close; I could almost see our post.

From the roof of a three-storey house, the enemy started shooting at us with two machine guns. One of the infantrymen who were driving the car made an abrupt manoeuvre, zigzagging around; we couldn’t shoot, all our effort was concentrated on not falling off.

At a certain point I felt a tremor going from the armour to the handle I was holding on to, like a little earthquake. It was the machine gun hitting the front of the car. The BTR swerved to the left and, slowing down, went up onto the pavement.

Nosov jumped off the vehicle and we followed him. I fell, did a somersault and jumped back up. I kept on running although my ankle hurt like hell. The car had broken down a gate, gone through a yard, and crashed into a building. We rushed over, trying to enter the building so we wouldn’t be exposed to gunfire.

The rear doors of the car opened and the soldiers burst out. The one who had been sitting in the turret had blood all over his face – part of a shell had hit him, leaving a wide, deep gash from the middle of his forehead to the top of his head. The boys who had been driving the car, however, were both dead, having taken the blast straight on.

We could hear the machine guns approaching, and amidst all the chaos I could distinguish the sounds of a precision rifle. From the deep echo it left in the air, it had to be a Dragunov. Suddenly, one of our soldiers standing in the middle of the yard fell over. His vest exploded as if it were made of glass, leaving him a hole in the chest that went clear from one side to the other.

Only anti-tank shells had that kind of power. They were heavy, had a strong steel interior and were plated with a thin layer of very soft metal that allowed the bullet to slide nicely down the barrel and follow a precise trajectory. Some snipers, to make them even deadlier, sprayed them with Teflon, which made them slip through armour like melted butter. The sniper couldn’t be too far away, two or three hundred metres at most.

Backing up against the wall, I yelled:

‘Stay out of the yard, sniper in the area! Keep inside, walk by the walls…’

I didn’t have time to finish my sentence before another infantryman was grazed in the back.

Meanwhile, our captain was helping a soldier who was limping; his leg had probably been hurt during the accident. He carried him to safety inside the building, going through a window, gripping the ledge with one hand and helping the boy to enter with the other.

Before disappearing inside he yelled:

‘Kolima, get rid of that bloody sniper for me. Now!’

I ran along the wall and at the end I saw an entrance to the basements. I ran in, and with my rifle aimed I went through some of the rooms. They were completely empty, but on the bottom level there were some small windows that looked onto the courtyard. I chose one in the shadows.

Before shooting with a sniper rifle I would cover my left eye with a small piece of cardboard I always carried with me, kept in the fold of my hat. It was an old trick my grandpa Nikolay had taught me; when he shot, he would always cover his left eye with a piece of cardboard – it was simpler to concentrate on the target without straining to keep your eye closed, and above all it didn’t damage your sight, because keeping one eye closed and the other open for a long time would throw off your eyes.

I pulled out my VSS precision rifle, took the cover off the scope and unfolded the stock. I took a round table and placed it under the window, knelt on top, and started observing the area outside.

Suddenly I heard somebody coming up behind me and I flipped around, ready to shoot. Then Moscow’s voice assuaged me:

‘Come on, brother, take him out and we can get out of here – we still have to get across that bloody yard!’

I was trying to remember how the soldiers’ vests had blown up to reconstruct the trajectory of the shot. There’s a way to figure out the so-called ‘approximation level’, the information that helps pinpoint a sniper’s location; you calculate the distance of the shot, which can be determined by the type of wound it leaves on the victim’s body, and then its path. This is why the most expert snipers often use modified bullets that become misshapen inside a body – to keep the enemy from making a precise calculation. They use various compensators that reduce the bullet’s potency or they lighten the gunpowder charge, so that a shot going off nearby could seem to have come from further away.

About two hundred metres across from me, there were two five-storey buildings. Behind those there was another one, taller, with at least nine or ten floors – only the top two rows of windows were visible. I made a quick calculation; the fifth floor of the two closer buildings could be an ideal spot for a sniper.

I began inspecting the upper level of the two buildings with the scope. Almost immediately, right in the middle of one, inside a small shed that connected the roof with the stairs inside, I found my sniper.

He wasn’t set up like a professional. He hadn’t created any sort of dummy position – many would intentionally leave small objects sticking out that resembled the barrel of a rifle, or they would plant mirrors to attract attention. I even happened to catch him smoking, relaxed as if he were watching television. He was young and had short blond hair, probably a ‘tourist’ from the Baltic countries. He had to be a mercenary, or an athlete. Even choosing the roof showed that he was no expert; the roof is the absolutely least protected place in a house, and putting yourself there usually meant suicide.

In short, my sniper was what we would call a ‘water boiler’, a novice marksman who thinks he’s a pro just because he has good aim. He was too sure of himself – it must have been his first experience with war. But he didn’t know that it would also be his last.

I calculated the distance; he was really close. I was about to shoot when I realised he was talking to someone. So I hesitated, and in my sight a young woman appeared, with long blonde hair tucked into a military cap. She seemed like one of those American porn stars photographed half-naked stroking a pile of guns. I felt total disgust at seeing two young people who had come here to kill our boys for money. I waited for them to come closer. She said something to him, smiling; he stood up for a moment and touched her face before kissing her. That’s when I took the first shot.

I aimed at the lower part of his head, right at the chin. When you do that, usually the bullet ends up hitting the temple.

The rifle did its job; the empty shell landed on the floor. Moscow, standing behind me, held his breath as I did. The sniper had disappeared. There was just a red stain on the wall behind where he had been.

The girl was still for a moment, then she stupidly went to close the window, but I already had her face in my sight. It was a second, half a breath, and I hit her too. After the shot I saw her lifeless body still standing for a few seconds; her hat had flown off, her head seemed puffy and huge, but half of her face was no longer there. She hung on to the window with one hand, and then she fell down.

I ran straight to the next room to observe the scene from another position. I always did that so I wouldn’t be found. Moscow came behind me and asked:

‘So, d’you get him?’

‘Yep, there were two of them, they were even making out…’

Moscow whistled:

‘What do you know, those nasty homos…’

I laughed:

‘They were no homos, Moscow…’

He looked at me, shocked, leaning his head on his rifle, which he was holding behind his back.

‘No? What, then?’

I thought for a moment, looking out of the window and through the scope, framing the point where just minutes earlier the two snipers had been talking.

I was completely beat, and a strange feeling of homesickness had come over me. At that moment I wanted to be somewhere else, away from the war, in some other reality, with other people. I don’t know why, but I had a strange desire to joke. And to laugh.

I slowly looked away from the scope, and pulling myself to my feet I carefully folded my rifle stock. Then I answered Moscow, almost singing:

‘My noble lord, behold he who hath killed Romeo and Juliet…’

Moscow burst out laughing at my little scene.

‘Romeo and Juliet? You’re crazy, my friend! And what does that make me? The Prince of Denmark?’

Laughing together, we exited the basement.

Our men were waiting for us to cross the yard. From the other side of the street they had begun firing shots from the Kalashnikov at ground level; the Arabs were trying to figure out our situation, trying to provoke us so that they could then attack us.

The bodies of the dead soldiers were in the middle of the yard. Their comrades had removed their ammo and then fired their rifles to render them unusable.

Nosov had placed a hand grenade in the car. He activated it so that if anyone opened the door, the explosive would blow up in his face.

The infantrymen struggled to carry their dead; Zenith had sewn up the head of the guy who’d been in the turret as best he could, but it was a messy wound, it bled too much, and you could see that the guy needed a doctor, some antibiotics, and some rest too.

Half our group followed them, the rest of us – led by Nosov along with Deer and Spoon – headed for camp.

The Arabs were behind us. There wasn’t that many of them, probably twenty or so, only armed with Kalashnikovs – but we weren’t able to move very fast.

Moscow, Zenith, Shoe and I covered the rear, sometimes stopping to keep the enemy away with direct gunfire so the infantry could break away and retreat.

At a certain point, however, we noticed that the enemies had entered a small building, a sort of cottage surrounded by a half-destroyed fence. From there, they fired two long blasts at us – I could hear the bullets hit the house next to me. So Moscow responded to the fire with the grenade launcher. Their shelter exploded and four or five were buried in the rubble. The rest of the group started to run off, but I was still able to land a bullet in one’s back. I saw him fall to the ground lifeless.

We resumed running and joined our men quickly. We were passing a road when a sudden blast of heavy machine gun fire came from the top of a building. Two of the infantrymen fell, almost split in half by the powerful bullets. The others were covered in their blood, and the gun was still shooting.

Private Ustinov, the young Cossack, and one of our comrades were carrying the soldier with the head wound. A volley of bullets hit them straight on. The wounded one literally split open – his body exploded, making a loud pop like when a tyre blows. The other soldier had taken a bullet to the chest and kept on running for a bit, but then his head turned almost all the way round, and after a few metres he fell down, dead.

Ustinov was wounded in the leg, and bleeding. His father and cousin managed to take cover in a nearby building, going through the window; some of our men and other infantrymen went with them. The rest of the group and I ducked into the house across the way.

Ustinov was on the ground, right between our two positions; the bullet must have fractured the bone because he couldn’t get to his feet. The Arab with the machine gun tried to hit him, but he was able to hide behind a row of cement poles. Then the gun went for the poles and they crumbled one by one, exposing our wounded man’s position more and more.

His father, Vasily, was on the other side, watching the whole scene from the window in desperation. Private Ustinov tried to hide as best he could, but the poles around him were popping off like matches.

At some point Shoe said:

‘I can’t stand here and watch this anymore!’

He took off his vest, belt and side pouches, and was left with just his jumpsuit. His vest was in pretty bad shape – it was full of dents and had two big holes in the chest.

Shoe put it over his head, and backing down the hall, he said:

‘Cover me, boys! And forgive me if something goes wrong!’

He leapt out the front door, sprinting like a tiger hunting its prey. The machine gun began shooting at him too late, by the time he had already reached the poles, and didn’t hit him.

From the windows, meanwhile, we fired non-stop towards the building where the Arab with the machine gun was. Kalashnikov shots came at us from a different direction, so I signalled to my men, pulled out my precision rifle, and moved to the back room of the building. Moscow came with me, to cover me in case anyone ambushed us.

From the house across the way, Nosov launched a grenade. It blew up just above the machine gun, and while the machine gunner’s position was enveloped in dust and flame, Shoe stood up, threw Ustinov over his shoulder, and threw the open vest on top of him. Then he rushed towards us.

They were shooting at him from the bottom floors. I hit one guy in the head – he had made the mistake of looking up and staying at the window a few seconds too long. I got another one in the chest; he fell backwards and didn’t get up again. One, however, wouldn’t let me catch him. He was very agile; he went from one room to another, appearing at a window and disappearing immediately afterward. I began to shoot at all the windows on that floor and hit him by chance.

Shoe hurtled into the house and fell face down on the floor, along with the wounded man. We all thought they’d killed him. Often someone would get hit by a bullet, even in a vital organ, but still keep running for a few metres.

Zenith jumped on him and turned him over. He was fine, without a scratch, he was just breathing heavily and couldn’t talk yet.

Ustinov was completely white – he’d really had a close call. Zenith and Moscow treated his wound, using two individual medi-kits. They wrapped it in an entire roll of bandages, and with another they applied some medication right below the knee so he wouldn’t lose too much blood. But it was clear that if he didn’t see a doctor soon, the dressing wouldn’t be enough.

Nosov loaded another grenade but this time he aimed perfectly. He hit their position straight on, and the machine gun fell to the ground along with some of the Arabs, right in front of the windows of our building.

We joined the rest of the group, and quickly consulted the map with Captain Nosov. We had to get to the closest building, on the other side of the street; we would enter it and then exit through the back. There, according to the directions, there was a group of private houses with gardens, and behind them we would finally find our positions. A few Arabs continued shooting a Kalashnikov from the windows, trying to catch us.

We made a shield that would allow our men to cross the street. The Cossacks carried their wounded relative, the others tried to run as fast as possible. Inside the house there was a small enemy group, but the infantrymen confronted and eliminated them in no time; when we got there all the work had been taken care of.

There was a large block of cement in the middle of the yard – it looked like the foundations of a building that had never been finished. It was about twenty metres long and empty inside, a good place to hide in. One by one we jumped in.

We were exhausted, all breathing as if we were on the verge of one big heart attack.

Nosov said that he and Moscow were going to try to reach the line to ask for assistance from our troops to create a free corridor for us to pass through. The Arabs had stopped shooting, and Nosov wanted to make the most of that invaluable moment. He removed all his ammo, threw it at my feet, leaving just two clips attached to his rifle. Following my lead, Moscow did the same, then he took his Glock from under his vest and gave it to the wounded Cossack. Though he was in such a bad way that he couldn’t even keep hold of his rifle, he took Moscow’s pistol and held it to his chest.

‘We’ll be back with our men in fifteen minutes,’ said Nosov. ‘Wait here, stay out of sight, and do not provoke combat in any way.’ Then he jumped to the other side and started running across the yard.

Moscow went after him, saying in his usual lighthearted tone:

‘See ya later! Be good!’

We stayed inside that makeshift cement shelter, waiting for our boys.

Waiting is the hardest thing. When you’re waiting for something that isn’t within your control, every second that goes by is torture. I checked my watch every ten seconds, then I realised that it was just making me more nervous and I stopped looking. So I took a better look at my new comrades – we had been through quite an ordeal, and I still hadn’t seen their faces.

Sergeant Lavrov had slightly pointy ears and wavy blond hair – he looked like an elf. Private Ustinov, on the other hand, was an exact replica of his father. All that was missing was the moustache; in every other way they were identical. One soldier had a scar on his face, perhaps he’d got it even before entering the army. Another pulled a little kitten out from his jacket; it was black and white, with a dark spot around the eyes that looked like a bandit’s mask. It was scrawny and scared, trembling all over and looking around, meowing weakly.

The soldier started petting him and he purred right away.

‘How old is he?’ Zenith asked.

The soldier smiled. ‘A month old. I took him from the mother cat in the artillery unit last week…’

Shoe broke out laughing:

‘So young and already initiated into battle… He’ll become cat general!’

I was looking at the kitten and I felt like him. At that moment it was clear that we were all exactly like that kitten; alive because of fate. And it wasn’t over yet, neither for him nor for us, unfortunately…

Vasily, the old Cossack, was breathing heavily. His face was bright red, and he was bathed in sweat. He had removed his jacket and was just in his undershirt, over which he had put a bulletproof vest. I noticed a few dents in the vest, a sign that he had caught a bullet or two. His son was sitting in front of him, his head down, as if he were ashamed of something. He was still hugging Moscow’s pistol to his chest.

My ankle hurt like hell from the sprain I’d got jumping off the car. My foot was all swollen. I noticed just then that I was still and was breathing more calmly. Examining my vest I saw that a bullet was lodged in one of the Kalashnikov clips I kept in my inside pocket – amidst all the gunfire I hadn’t even felt the impact. Shoe was also tracing the cut a bullet had made on one side of the vest he had thrown on Private Ustinov earlier; the projectile had taken a miraculous path, skimming the surface without going inside the vest. In military slang an occurrence like that is called ‘blessed’, as if God had intervened at the last minute to save a soldier’s life.

We were all incredulous that we’d made it through such a close call. I’m sure that each of us, more than once that day, had silently bid farewell to life…

At some point Vasily took an orthodox cross from his pocket, stood up and went over to Shoe. Then he leaned over him and put the cross around his neck. Shoe looked at him in astonishment, standing up too. The Cossack embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks:

‘Today is a happy day… Our Lord sent me another son…’ The old man almost had tears in his eyes; he was as proud as a father at his son’s wedding. Shoe looked at the cross for a moment and then responded, scratching his head:

‘Thanks, uh… The fact is that we tend not to leave our men in the lurch.’

The Cossack smiled without saying a word.

We had been waiting for over half an hour, but there was still no sign of Nosov and Moscow. Every so often we could hear a few shots in the distance, and all of us were secretly thinking the worst.

I had just decided to poke my head out to get a look at the situation outside, when suddenly I had to duck back down. There were two huge explosions, most certainly the cannons on the heavy tanks. Right after that, we heard a brief burst of gunfire – the shots seemed right behind us.

I inserted my last cartridge in my Kalashnikov and sent the round to the chamber. I placed the selector on the single shot and along with the others got ready to fight. Just then we heard our men’s voices; a group of paras was rushing across the yard behind the enemy positions. The gunfight was right in the back of the yard. Suddenly a paratrooper lieutenant jumped into our shelter, landing right in between us. Astonished, he looked at us for all of a second and then said:

‘What the hell are you guys doing here? Don’t you know that this area is under enemy control?’

Shoe grabbed his vest from the ground and threw it at the paratrooper’s feet. Looking at the bullet holes, he whistled in surprise.

Shoe shot back sarcastically:

‘Under enemy control? We had no idea…’

We emerged from our refuge. The paras and infantrymen went ahead, breaking through the enemy defence. I could feel my head spinning, like I was drunk. At some point, we saw a BTR pop out from a narrow road, headed towards us; on top sat Nosov and Moscow, who signalled to us not to come out into the street. We stopped by a house and hid behind a wall. The car came right to us and Nosov shouted:

‘Jump on, boys! Quick, there are still Arabs everywhere…’

We got on the BTR and headed off to our territory.

We powered through the streets of the city, heading for camp, passing by the ruins of half-destroyed houses that looked like the giant skeletons of prehistoric animals. One of the things that made an impression on me from the very beginning was all the rubble from the buildings. Everything around you, in war, becomes a sort of magnified image of what’s going on inside you. It was like we were drowned in an inhuman violence that changed people, annihilated them, even our souls were reduced to rubble… I looked at the gutted houses, the collapsed walls and the burnt furniture, the photographs of people I didn’t know torched and torn up, thrown aside without remorse, without any respect for memory. Anyone who experiences a war, whether fighting it or fleeing from it – either way, trying to survive – no longer has anything of his own, not even his own history.

None of us thought of the past or the future – every day was today. We were immersed in a long, single day. That’s how I was, too, and by that time I’d become used to occasionally seeing toys among the ruins of houses; I didn’t give them any weight, I tried to maintain the same indifference with which I observed everything I encountered along the road: burned-out cars, big cracks in the ground, broken pipes, disfigured bodies…

The car went on ahead, and I was lost in my thoughts. I was beginning to see the reality around me like a series of short film sequences which appeared in my mind and paused there for a moment before vanishing. We had already left the city behind; the worst was over. I felt sleep coming over me, it felt like I was falling through space, but I did everything I could not to crash. Nosov was sitting in front of us, his back against the turret of the heavy machine gun. He looked at us with a half smile on his face, he was pleased. A few armoured cars and three heavy tanks came up the road behind us: the paratroopers and explorers.

I was facing backwards, looking at the column of cars in the procession, when I heard an explosion. The ground started shaking so hard that we were all about to fall off the car – the BTR began oscillating like a sheet of paper in a gust of wind. It seemed as if everything were about to cave in.

After the first explosion, another one went off, and then another. An enormous dust cloud rose from the city, and tall flames stretched up to the sky. Soon we were hit by an unbearable wave of heat. These were the effects of the air strike. Our attack had begun.

For a second I tried to imagine what was happening back there where the cloud was: total destruction. The temperature would be so high that the armour plating on the cars would drip off, leaving only the bare chassis, as if it had been covered in liquid material. Human bodies would burn completely – afterwards, not even the bones would be left.

You couldn’t even hear the airplanes, nor anything to indicate that the bombs were dropping from the sky, just a series of explosions of such force and power that all the ground around us wouldn’t stop shaking. The paras counted each explosion, gleefully shouting in unison, like when people count a birthday boy’s age by pulling on his ears. I felt very lucky, and it gave me goose bumps to think that we too had risked ending up beneath those bombs…

The car finally came to the yard of our camp, the same place we had left that morning. The sandbag-surrounded tent was still there, and the major of general command was outside, with a bulletproof vest on and a Kalashnikov in his hands. He had a lit cigarette in his teeth, and when he saw us, he rushed over to our car:

‘So you did it! My God, you’re lunatics!’

He walked around the BTR looking at us one by one, as if we were objects on display in a museum. The car came to a stop and we all got out.

The infantryman sergeant approached the major and saluted:

‘Comrade Major, permission to report!’

The major stared as if he had a ghost standing in front of him:

‘Permission granted, Comrade Sergeant!’

The soldier took a deep breath and began, with a tired but firm voice:

‘I, Sergeant Lavrov, from the explorer unit of the 168th armoured infantry division, report that the unit was surrounded by enemy forces and pushed into the occupied zone. We took defence of the perimeter, but sixty-seven soldiers, thirteen lieutenant colonels and four officers fell in battle.’ He spoke these words with his lips taut, almost like he was shooting them out with a machine gun. ‘Thanks to the assistance of the saboteurs, the unit returned to the safe zone, but during the course of the operation seven soldiers fell and one was wounded. Numbering nine soldiers, the unit is now at your command.’

The major paid great attention to Lavrov’s report. He looked as if he’d been listening to news about his own family. At the end he shook his hand:

‘We honour your courage, Sergeant. The whole unit displayed real…’

He wasn’t able to finish his sentence because, on the other side of the yard, three of our infantrymen jumped out from the entrance to the building, yelling. One of them had been hit in the neck, but from the way he was moving you could tell that it wasn’t serious; even if blood was gushing out the bullet must only have grazed him. Their shouting had interrupted the major, who’d been about to venture into one of those touching military speeches usually given by those who never go anywhere near the front line and are impressed by everything, placing grotesque importance on every little banality of war.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ the wounded man yelled. ‘What the fuck are you doing there, they’re pushing us hard! Everyone over here, now, or else we’re screwed!’ And with some more insults as well as a nice string of expletives the soldier went back into the building. A battle was underway. Some enemies had managed to escape the air strike and attack our line of defence. Although some had died immediately, others had pushed themselves all the way to our camp. Now, a group of Arabs – probably about fifty men – was trying desperately to get into the building under our infantry’s control. They were armed with light weapons, shouting, while our explorers, with ten support tanks, exterminated everyone they encountered on their path.

The other two infantrymen went to a crate of ammo in the centre of the yard and began filling their pockets and side pouches with Kalashnikov clips. Without waiting for an official invite, we went to help them out. There was no time to tie all the clips together, so I took a few individual ones, throwing them in my trouser pockets, and I slid a couple under my jacket.

The hammer of heavy machine guns on our tanks could be heard everywhere. I saw a spray of bullets hit a small group of about fifteen men; in an instant, body parts, arms, legs flew off. Everything was soaked in blood. Our tanks continued to advance, pushing them against the building. Although the building was defended by three machine guns shooting from under the roof, a few Arabs had managed to break through the defence nonetheless, penetrating the left wing on the ground floor and landing in a large room. We all ran towards the building to give the infantry our support.

Smoke was coming out of the left wing, and long blasts of gunfire could be heard; one of our men was calling for help, others were shouting to be careful of the hallway, because some enemies had hidden in the rooms, waiting to shoot anyone who passed by.

It was total chaos. It was impossible to tell where our men were or where theirs were. These situations are absolutely the most dangerous, because you can catch a bullet even from your own, or get trapped in gunfire from both sides, not to mention the shrapnel from hand grenades flying everywhere… In military slang, a situation like this is called a ‘hurricane in a box’, and the likelihood of getting wounded amidst all the chaos is very high.

We went down the corridor; we had to cross it all the way to reach the room at the end. Moscow was running in front of us, with a hand grenade poised to throw. Nosov was behind him, then Zenith, with his vest unfastened, hanging off him like the armour of a medieval knight. I was running behind him. Suddenly I slipped on a piece of broken glass and fell, hitting the wall. I got up almost immediately, running again as if it were nothing, but my ankle kept getting worse.

Moscow was going past a doorway when gunfire came from the room. He fell to the ground, letting out a yell, and then the hand grenade exploded in the room. I threw myself down, hitting a wall again, while the shrapnel from the bomb flew over our heads. Usually an explosion from a hand grenade makes holes in the upper part of the walls, which are made out of brick or another light material; whereas the supporting parts, made out of cement, can better withstand the force of the explosion and repel the shards.

Moscow had a hole in his left leg. He was furious, and from a sitting position kept shooting into the room, out of which billowed dust and smoke – you could hear cries coming from inside, a man desperately shouting something in Arabic. It was hard to listen to, it was like an animal bellowing at slaughter. Nosov went into the room; the man said something else and our captain shot him, point blank. We scrambled to get a closer look; the Arab was stretched out on the floor, still moving. His body went through one last tremor of pain, and then went still. His legs were in tatters from the shrapnel; his right arm had been blown off at the elbow. Nearby were the bodies of three more; one of them must have tried to save his friends by jumping into the bomb, and had been literally disintegrated by the explosion. Bits of his body were stuck to the walls and there was a lot of blood.

I went to the window and saw three more Arabs coming to jump inside. They were about five metres away; one of them was surprised to see me there but didn’t have time to lift his rifle before I’d framed him in the sight of my Kalashnikov. Trying to bend down, he let out a howl, and right after that my bullets hit him head on; I could see bits of his flesh flying through the air. I kept shooting, I couldn’t stop, and I knocked down the other two as well. I used up an entire magazine on them.

Nosov looked at me and said:

‘It’s going to be a long day, boys…’

We went out into the hall. Moscow had got up from the ground and had resumed leading the group. He was really agitated; his leg must have hurt like hell.

Nosov yelled at him:

‘Keep up, otherwise today will be your last!’

Moscow just made a gesture of irritation, and when he got to the end of the hall he went into the room first. The situation was really bad – our infantry already had six losses. There were so many Arabs: they were shooting from the windows and then hiding, probably waiting for the right moment to burst out.

One of the infantrymen said that the enemies had reached the stairs, so we divided tasks: Zenith and I would go on reconnaissance on the upper floors while the others would fight in the room along with the infantry.

We rushed up the stairs. On the second floor, we found three soldiers dead and one seriously wounded; he was lying down and couldn’t speak, blood gushed from his ears, his legs were filled with shards – a hand grenade must have exploded right next to him. As soon as we looked into the hallway to go up to the third floor, we were met by a short burst of gunfire at the top of the stairs. A round hit me in the vest and I fell to the floor. Zenith responded by firing the grenade launcher attached to his Kalashnikov. I got to my feet and moved towards the stairs, this time more carefully.

I had almost reached the stairs, when one of our soldiers opened fire with an RPG heavy grenade launcher from the opposite side of the hall. I was hit by a powerful blast of air, which lifted me up like a leaf and propelled me all the way down the hallway.

I was stunned, I couldn’t see a thing, and everything had suddenly become mixed up in my head. Scenes that I had gone through that day and other events in the previous days were getting confused with one another. I couldn’t tell which way was up – I had a whistling in my ears that kept getting louder and I could hear voices but they were very far away, as if they were behind a closed door.

When my sight returned I realised that I was lying against the wall. Five infantrymen were running towards me, while Zenith was above me, trying to lift me off the ground.

‘Cease fire, cease fire! Saboteurs, 76th division!’ he yelled.

Little by little it seemed like the vertigo was fading, and the ringing in my ears had become a little more bearable.

I managed to stand up.

The infantrymen were explaining to Zenith that more enemies had reached the building and were preparing to enter. Then they turned to me, checked that I was okay and asked me if I could set up a sniper position over the left wing. I said yes, but my head was still spinning. I started walking towards the exit. Zenith went with the infantrymen to the fourth floor, where they had placed another machine gun, to check the area outside.

That whole day I went around in the midst of the battle like a ghost. I don’t remember exactly what I did, I just remember that at some point someone gave me a grenade launcher and told me to shoot outside. I couldn’t swear whether it actually happened or I imagined it, but in my head I have a very clear image of lifting the grenade launcher to my shoulder, trying to find a good room to shoot from, as perhaps someone from command had ordered me to do.

I had just taken position at one of the windows and was aiming at an armoured car when Shoe arrived.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Kolima!’ he yelled, startled. ‘That’s one of ours!’ and he pulled the grenade launcher out of my hands.

Only then did I notice that it was already dark outside – it must have been late. I’d wandered around the building all day under the effect of the concussion.

‘Go down to the courtyard and sleep with the others!’ Shoe said.

Obediently, I went to the exit.

I walked down the hallway of this building where people had once lived and now there was only destruction, while the shards of that ruined peace crunched under my feet: glass, pieces of paper, broken furniture, pipes, burned books, bricks… in some places the ceiling had caved in; a block of reinforced cement leaned against a wall, it was straight and whole as if it had been cut out precisely, with a chisel.

I was so exhausted I felt like a magnet was holding me to the ground. My body didn’t hurt anymore, the blows I’d taken on that never-ending day had been completely absorbed by the emptiness that my tiredness had plunged me into. I was limping, dragging my swollen foot; I could see it bent in an unnatural way but I didn’t feel any pain. My headache, too, had become almost pleasant. Reality had gone and hidden somewhere else; a cloud of fog had fallen before my eyes, and like a giant strip of gauze, had dressed all my wounds…

Around me ran our infantrymen, paratroopers, the spetsnaz – they were all agitated, shouting, repeating the commands they’d been given. Right as I was passing by a room with windows overlooking the street, a violent burst of fire came. The bullets crossed the room and lodged into the wall in front of me. A cloud of dust rose up, and small bits of cement and plaster hit me in the face. Instinctively, I closed my eyes, but without making too much of it, and I continued down the hall. About ten infantrymen came in and started shooting wildly from the windows.

The rhythmic sound of the bullets calmed me down. It was hypnotic, it made me feel the calm and comfort you feel when you climb into a bed with clean, warm sheets after a day of tiredness and cold… Everything around me was moving at maximum speed, the battle was going ahead even if we had already condemned the enemy to defeat…

These are the moments in war in which human strength goes beyond its absolute limit; a sort of second collective breath comes on and everyone becomes fast and synchronised, like machines. But I saw everything as if in slow-motion; I felt like I was outside that reality.

I went out to the courtyard, where there were four armoured cars and a tank. There weren’t many lights around, but the clearing was full of our soldiers, bustling around like ants. Ten artillerymen were placing two heavy mortars right in the middle of the yard, and within seconds they were ready to fire. Everywhere there were open crates with cartridges for AKs, hand grenades, ammunition for grenade launchers, and coils for submachine guns.

To one side, our dead were laid out in a row. There were ten or so. One of them had the infantry insignia on his sleeve; someone had put a lit candle in his hands, which were folded on his chest. Another had lost an arm, which they had tied to his neck with a piece of fabric from his uniform. Some of the bodies were completely charred, but seemed tall as normal. They were covered with military tent fabric, but the cloth had shifted a little to the side, perhaps it had been the wind. One had the skin on his face burned off; he didn’t have a nose or ears and his teeth stuck out, as if he were growling. Last, there was a body with just the left arm – he had lost both legs, and around him there was a pile of other arms, legs, pieces of ankles and hands. A piece of cardboard was attached on top with the date written in ballpoint – it was the day before our arrival, when the infantry had suffered a night attack from the enemy – and someone had added, in handwriting like a three-year-old child’s: ‘Boys, here are all the pieces of the 201st unit, there was nothing else left in the area.’

An infantry lieutenant was standing beside the armoured car. I went over to him, and saw that he had a hole in place of an eye – the wound had been plugged up with a rag. He grimaced with pain, but he still continued giving orders to three sergeants, one of whom had a bloody bandage around his left arm.

Moscow was sitting on our car, treating his wounded leg. When he saw me he called me over right away, asking for help. I climbed up onto the BTR like a zombie; I didn’t want to do anything.

Everything around us was black; the only light came from the machine gun turret, which Moscow had turned towards his leg. He was holding surgical pliers and a scalpel – the hole was about ten centimetres above his knee, towards the outside of his leg. The good kind of blood, the kind that’s not too thick, was coming out of the wound, but there was a lot of it.

‘You were so lucky,’ I said, looking at his leg. ‘A few centimetres and it would have hit your artery…’

‘What the fuck are you talking about!’ He was irritated, but his voice didn’t betray any trace of suffering. ‘There’s no way they’re going to get me in this war. The gypsy told me…’

Without replying I took the scalpel from his hand and made two cuts around the wound a few centimetres wide. That way it would be easier to extract the bullet; pulling the skin down on both sides, I would try to pull the bullet as far out of the flesh as possible.

Moscow intently observed the way I cut the wound, disinfecting it as best I could with a dirty rag that smelled like gasoline.

As always, he found something to complain about:

‘Is that what you call a cut? Come on, go deeper!’

‘What, have you got a missile in there?’ I responded. ‘That’s enough, don’t be annoying… Just hand me the pliers.’

Moscow made a disgusted face and passed me the pliers. I noticed that my hand was trembling from tiredness. Trying to gather my last strength, I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Behind my closed eyelids, instead of darkness, I saw flying stars, white circles and flashing lights – a clear sign of exhaustion.

‘What are you waiting for, I’m tired too!’ Moscow shouted at me, bringing me back to reality.

Then he took his leg with his hands and violently pulled the skin down. The wound widened immediately and blood started pouring out – the skin was almost turned inside out. The light was directly on his leg, but even with that I couldn’t see much. I strained to put things into focus.

I stuck the pliers into the wound, and they went down, sliding around smoothly. I pushed slowly, until the point hit the end of the bullet. I opened the pliers slightly, closed the bullet in the grip and tried turning it a little to make sure I had a good hold. The bullet seemed pretty firm and stable, so I tightened the pliers until they went clack.

Moscow was still. After all the action he was still full of adrenaline; the shock caused by the trauma hadn’t yet subsided. At that moment I could have taken his appendix out without anaesthesia and he wouldn’t have felt a thing.

With my hand trembling, I very slowly extracted the bullet from my friend’s leg. It was a 5.45-calibre, it had definitely come from a model of Kalashnikov that has a short barrel, which had not put much force on the bullet. If it had been shot from a long-barrelled rifle, that same bullet would have entered the body but wouldn’t have stopped, it would have travelled, slicing through the flesh, leaving little hope… A bullet like that could go into your leg and come out of your neck, making a pâté of your internal organs. Moscow had been very lucky.

I cleaned the wound a little more, since it kept bleeding, then I took out one of my medi-kits. Moscow didn’t have any more: he’d just given his last one to one of the infantry soldiers.

‘Hang in there, boy, you’re all grown up now,’ I said, passing him a needle and thread. ‘You should sew it up, my hands are shaky…’ He took the kit without a word, but he gave me a friendly slap on the back, his way of saying thanks.

I jumped down from the car, and walking unsteadily as if drunk, I went over to the back where Shoe was already sleeping.

I set down my rifle and couldn’t even get my vest off before a superhuman force pinned me to the ground.

The soil was hot, boiling almost – I could feel it vibrate with every explosion. Thus sleep came over me, and looking up at the starry sky I felt a piercing sense of fear and weakness. I could no longer tell whether the stars I saw up there were real, or if they were just fiery bullets that were going to rain down over me. I wondered what those lights could be, and in this state of uncertainty I fell asleep. I was too tired, so tired I would have let myself be killed by the stars which I confused with the flaming lead mercilessly falling all around me…

We slept for an entire day. One of the infantrymen had thrown a tent cloth over us, just like the one we used to cover the bodies of the fallen. Even the clean-up crew took us for dead. One of them gave me a kick in the chest, as they would do – and as I had done too – to drive the rats out of the bodies.

I moved, and he was startled. I pulled down the cloth and sat up, looking around me, confused. There was no trace of the infantrymen; they had gone ahead with the rest of the troops.

Our car was the only one left in the yard. Next to it there was just one tank, and behind that a small mobile kitchen, where there was something good boiling on the fire. Two tankers were sitting on the tank, eating hot food out of little individual pots.

Behind me, I could hear that Shoe had woken up too. He gave me such a hard slap on the shoulder that I almost fell over.

‘Ahhh, damn, what a great nap…’ he said. ‘And now it’s time to eat! Let’s move, Kolima, before everything gets cold!’

I scratched my head without really understanding, and I responded:

‘Let’s go, yeah, I’m dying to eat…’

And along with him I went limping towards the kitchen.

We ate in silence. When we finished, Shoe came out with a statement that seemed to me like an absolute truth:

‘I understood for the first time today how nice it is to be in the world.’

That’s what he said, simply, and it felt like he was showing me his soul as a material thing, like an object there in his hands.