by John Mason
“What if there’s no entrance on the southern side after all?” Zlenko asks.
“There must be one.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s our only chance.”
The Stalkers remain silent. Tarasov quickly orders them to take positions which fits their equipment best: machine guns to the flanks, riflemen to the center, the few Stalkers with Dragunovs and scoped assault rifles to the rear.
“All right… paratroopers, weapon check. Ilchenko, I hope you got acquainted with that M27.”
“Took her virginity last night. Tends to bear a little to the right and above, but should be all right, sir. I have eight magazines, and I’m locked and loaded.”
“Zlenko?”
“Ready for close quarters,” the sergeant replies, pumping the first round into the breech of his Benelli shotgun.
“Check night vision. You’ll need it.”
While the soldiers do as ordered, Tarasov picks two Stalkers. His first choice is Skinner, now armed with a Remington shotgun, who proved himself a capable fighter at the Outpost. Then he picks a Stalker wearing an old exoskeleton and a heavy shotgun with a drum magazine.
“Hey, you with the Striker shotgun! You come with us too. What have you got loaded?”
“Slugs. Still have plenty.”
“What’s your name?”
“Zef.”
“Where do you come from with such a name?”
“South Africa.”
The Stalker’s exoskeleton is patched and has repair marks all over, bearing witness to many gunfights and mutants’ claws. He opens the helmet of his armor and bows his head to Tarasov with respect.
“What the hell?” Ilchenko gasps. “We have a fucking negro here!”
“Shut up,” Tarasov says angrily, almost at the same time as Zlenko and Skinner.
“And you, Skinner?”
“Nagorny Karabagh.”
“You’re Ashot’s countryman, then?”
“No way. He’s from Yerevan,” Skinner replies in a disdainful tone. “People there take a cucumber, paint it yellow and sell it as a banana. But we from Karabagh – we are fighters!”
Tarasov shrugs and turns to the Shrink.
“Borys, are your men set to go or do they also discuss home-made differences?”
The old Stalker responds with a grim smirk. “My patients are cool. They’ve been promoted to research assistants. If the enemy comes, we’ll have a closer look at what’s going on in their heads!”
“We’re set fair then… Keep your position and give them hell when the time comes. Infiltration squad – all ready?”
“Ready,” the soldiers and Stalkers reply one by one.
“Zlenko, take point. Davay, uhodim! ”
12 October 2014, 08:23:58 AFT
Using the low walls along the dirt road to their advantage, they sneak into the forest. Tarasov wishes he could properly scout the area but gambles everything on the one chance they have: surprise. They cautiously walk down the path weaving through the forest. It is still dark under the dense foliage, with the ubiquitous tank wrecks giving them the chance to gather in cover when the distance between their ranks becomes too large.
Zlenko suddenly stops, raising his fist. “I see hostiles at twelve o’ clock.”
Tarasov moves to his pointman and looks in the direction shown. Ahead of them, a half dozen hostiles sit around a campfire, one of them assigned to keep lookout on top of a wreck that once was a civilian all-terrain vehicle.
“The bad guys also seem to have made a brotherhood,” Zlenko whispers. Four enemies wear the tight body armor of the Chinese commandos, the rest are Taliban, their gas masks comfortably hanging from their shoulders with their long black headscarves.
“Shit… still, I suppose we’ve been lucky so far.”
Tarasov pulls the safety off on his M4 and switches to single shot mode. On the narrow road between the mud walls, there’s no way of finding a good firing position or flanking the enemy.
“Sergeant, you and Ilchenko take the guys to the left. Skinner, you and Zef go for the others to the right. I’ll drop a grenade. When it goes up – hit them hard and don’t miss – if one of them gets to use their radio, we’re screwed! Clear?”
His men nod. Tarasov takes a grenade from his webbing and removes the safety pin. He lets the fuse burn for two seconds and tosses the grenade into the group of the unsuspecting enemy. When the grenade explodes, his companions jump from their cover and spray the enemies with a hail of bullets and shotgun shells. In just a few seconds the one-sided firefight is over.
“So far, so good,” Tarasov affirms, pleased at seeing the fallen hostiles. “Let’s hope we didn’t make too much noise. Ilchenko, now you take point. Move on, men.”
They have covered almost half the way when the Shrink’s agitated voice crackles in Tarasov’s intercom. “Major! Can you hear me?”
“What’s up, Shrink?”
“They are mounting their trucks and are driving away to the south!”
“Do you see civilians among them? Any equipment?”
“It’s hard to tell from this distance. All I can see is that since a few minutes ago the whole place is stirred up like an ant’s nest. Wait… what the hell is that? Many are trying to get into the truck, but they’re just driving away. Looks like they are fleeing!”
“You say they are abandoning the ruins?”
“Not exactly… they just want to… I see them climbing on the trucks as they leave, and the others already inside just kick them off the trucks… the freaks are panicking!”
“All the better. Wait for the flare.” Tarasov turns to his comrades. “Something is going on up there. The Chinese are fleeing the place… and I don’t like this.”
“But it makes everything easier for us,” Zlenko says.
“Depends on why they are spooked. Let’s move, quickly!”
If there had been other sentry posts on the road they must have been abandoned in a hurry, because Tarasov’s team does not encounter any other hostiles along their way. The path soon turns to the west. Now Tarasov can see it for himself: a dozen trucks making a hasty departure from the ruins, all loaded until their axles groan. Mercenaries are running after them in the dust whipped up by the heavy vehicles.
No one wants to be left behind… I wonder what’s going on in that damned place.
They wait until the last truck has passed then, on Tarasov’s signal, the small squad moves on and at last reaches the main road.
“Hostiles!” Ilchenko whispers. “One hundred fifty meters, one o’clock!”
Tarasov waves at his men to halt and hold their fire. He sees mercenaries coming in their direction. They don’t seem to be prepared to fight and look as if they are thinking only of getting away from the ruins as quickly as possible.
The major fires the flare gun. The projectile climbs into the sky and in a few seconds bursts out into a fireball over the hill. Immediately, heavy gunfire breaks loose as the Stalkers get into action beyond the hill.
“Open fire! Open fire!”
He realizes that he has given Ilchenko a bad weapon, seeing as the machine gunner empties the first magazine within seconds. “We don’t need a hail of bullets,” he shouts. “Concentrate your fire, Ilchenko! Don’t waste your damned ammo!”
Picking off the unprepared enemies, they move forward, covering the last two hundred meters to the dust road that leads up to the hill. He sees Skinner running forward.
“Don’t scatter! Keep together,” Tarasov shouts, but his warning comes too late. A heavy machine gun opens fire and the Stalker falls. Zef grabs his body and pulls it into the safety of a low stone wall. Dust and stone particles fly around them as the machine gunner keeps firing.
Before crouching down beside the wounded Stalker, Tarasov sees where the bullets are coming from: a massive bunker guards the road intersection, its crew either too slow or too stubborn to escape with the rest.
“Show me the wound, brother,” Zef says
, taking a medikit from his backpack. His voice is surprisingly calm despite the machine gun bullets darting above their heads. “You’ll survive. I’ll patch you up.”
A look at the Stalker’s wound assures Tarasov that Skinner can probably continue provided the wound on his hip is properly bandaged, and Zef’s skillful first-aid looks reassuring enough to him. Then his thoughts return to more immediate dangers. He takes a stone and tosses it over the wall. Immediately, a long burst of machine gun fire rips into the stone wall.
“Shit,” Ilchenko swears angrily. “They don’t seem to be low on ammo…”
“Anyone got a smoke grenade?”
“I do, komandir.”
“Give it to me, Viktor. Stay put. I’ll try to cover our approach. Then we make a dash for it and finish that bunker with frags.”
Tarasov knows it’s a bad and desperate plan. Even if the smoke pops, there will still be about fifty meters between their position and the pillbox where they could be mown down. But with only four men, there’s not much room for textbook-style suppressing and flanking maneuvers.
He crawls to the end of the wall and throws the grenade as fast as he can towards the pillbox. In a few seconds thick smoke covers the path. Dashing forward, he has covered only a few meters when the machine gun opens up again and hits him in the chest. The bullets don’t penetrate his armor, but their impact is strong enough to knock him off his feet. Desperately, he crawls to a huge rock and takes cover behind it.
No way out of here. That bastard doesn’t need to aim to hit me with that damned machine gun.
Suddenly he hears a rifle firing a dozen rounds in a slow sequence. Concrete splinters as heavy bullets blast the pillbox. The machine gun falls silent. Peeking out from his cover, Tarasov doesn’t need to think twice before running up to the pillbox to toss a fragmentation grenade through the loophole.
The concrete shakes from the explosion inside and, his ears still ringing, he can barely hear the familiar voice in his intercom.
“You wasted your grenade, Condor. The bastards needed stronger walls to stop the bullets from my Gepard!”
Tarasov sighs with relief. At last that elusive bastard is here.
“We are not quits yet, Crow! I could have handled this on my own!”
“Like always, eh? But it ain’t time to relax yet! Hostiles at your ten!”
By now his men have run up to the rock. Tarasov rises from behind the cover to aim his weapon, but Crow is quicker and the effects of his rifle leaves Tarasov amazed for a second. Where a mercenary had appeared in his reticule a moment ago, he now sees a human torso that has been torn apart by the impact of a heavy bullet. Ilchenko is already firing, not bothering to wait for orders, while Zlenko and the two Stalkers who wait for the enemy to get into range of their close-quarter shotguns.
Cautiously peering out from his cover, Tarasov looks over to the hill on the other side of the road, the only position where he would hide if he were a sniper, and frowns. For a second, it seems to him as if there are several fighters in black armor at the top of the hill. However, he has no time to think over what Crow would be doing with Bone’s men – if his eyes didn’t fail him, that was – and Bone’s squad was supposed to back them up, not hide. Turning back to the road and sensing that the momentum has shifted, he orders his men to charge.
“Zlenko, Ilchenko, you’re fire team one. Lay down suppressive fire. Skinner, Zef – fire team two. Run like hell up to that gate and take position there. Once you get there, Zlenko’s fire team will move up. Clear? Vperyod!”
His plan seems to have paid off. With the gunfight on the other side of the hill and the still-unexplained retreat, there are not enough defenders to counter Tarasov’s squad with effective fire and they soon reach a larger ruin, which offers high ground from where they could fall into the rear of the hostiles exchanging intense fire with the Stalkers below.
“Borys, can you hear me? Hey, Shrink!” Tarasov shouts into the radio.
“Calm down, Major. Where are you?”
“I am calm,” he screams. “Reached high ground. I can see your position. Time for the Stalkers to move forward!”
“It was about time.”
Rock by rock, Tarasov’s squad purges the slope of the hill of enemies. Now the fight is all about close quarters; the time has come for Zlenko and the two Stalkers with shotguns. Tarasov switches to his Glock and rushes forward to meet their enemies, who may be surprised and desperate but still act agile and sharp.
Zef, his head in the purple haze of pitched battle, leaps at a commando who is firing his pistol at him, throwing the adversary to the ground and finishing him off with his shotgun, only to be the perfect target for a rifle burst from another Chinese fighter leaning around the corner. Tarasov sees red stains broadening on the South African’s sand-colored armor. Reckless fool, flashes through his mind as the Stalker steps back, re-charging his shotgun with disregard to his wound.
“Frag out!” Tarasov shouts, tossing a grenade around the wall where the shooter hides. The explosion covers the ruin with dust and sand. Skinner arrives from nowhere and blindly fires his shotgun into the dust cloud. Ilchenko’s machine gun barks from somewhere above them.
“To the right! Hostiles to your three, Major!” Zlenko’s scream is subdued by the sound of machine gun fire.
Shit, not another pillbox!
But it’s a Stalker with a machine gun, followed by another one, firing his AK from his hip at an enemy that Tarasov is unable to see.
“Into the trenches! Let’s clean them!”
Zlenko and the machine gunner run through a dilapidated arch that may have been a palace gate once but now only hides more enemies. The sergeant tosses a grenade into a cavity among the rocks, the thunderous explosion throwing out dust and body parts as if the earth itself was spitting them out. Tarasov is about to follow them when an enemy appears before him. He pulls the trigger on his weapon but it doesn’t fire. A knife flashes towards him through the dust. He skillfully evades the thrust, grabbing his weapon’s barrel to use it as a club to defend himself, not having had time to change the magazine, but before he can strike the enemy who is about to jump at him again, knife ready to thrust into Tarasov’s neck, Skinner intervenes and fires two shots from his Remington.
“Close shave,” he shouts, jumping over the body of the collapsed enemy fighter and rushing on towards the receding gunfire on the east side of the hill.
By the time Tarasov catches up with him, the noise of full-on battle has ceased, with only an occasional gunshot heard as the Stalkers’ finish off the remaining enemies.
“Cease fire!” Tarasov shouts. His voice is hoarse and he can feel sand between his teeth. “Infil squad, on me! Everyone, cease your fire!”
One by one, dusty and exhausted, his fighters emerge. They all look unscathed except Zef, who has a big bloodstain on his side.
“You’re wounded, brother,” Tarasov says. “Next time don’t try playing Rambo, okay?”
“Sorry, boss. But they got you too,” the Stalker replies, pointing at Tarasov’s arm. Looking down, he sees a cut on his left arm at the point where his exoskeleton’s armor is weakest. Even now that he knows about his wound, he doesn’t feel pain, just dumbness in his muscles.
I need to buy Degtyarev a crate of vodka for this suit.
Yet he feels weak and he has to sit down to relieve his trembling knees. An unknown feeling overwhelms him. The relief of having survived the pitched battle vanishes, making way for the desire that he could be far away from this place, where dozens of men have died fighting over a low hill covered with meaningless ruins.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Viktor… I’m fine.” He takes a deep breath, trying to forget the memory of deep green eyes. “Looks like we made it.”
“Yep… even the negro did. Although he got more than one bullet in his ugly hide.”
The Stalkers look at Ilchenko.
“Actually, there were moments when I was thinking I shou
ld help the dushmans in finishing off this monkey.”
“Shut the fuck up, soldier,” Zlenko says. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Never mind, Sarge. We are all still running on adrenaline,” Zef says, opening his exoskeleton and applying a bandage over his wound. “Once I had a girlfriend…”
Tarasov cannot concentrate on the Stalker’s anecdote. There is something in Ilchenko’s manner that worries him, and it’s not his offensiveness.
“Machine gunner,” he says coldly. “Take Skinner with you and give the Stalkers a hand in mopping up the place. Move. Now!” As the former Dutier rises from the ground where he was resting, Tarasov stops him. “Keep an eye on Ilchenko. Something’s wrong with him.”
“Will do,” Skinner replies, reloading his shotgun and following Ilchenko.
“Anyway, Zef,” he turns back to the Stalker, “what about that girlfriend?”
“Nothing important, boss… she once told me, a woman can’t take anything that men say after having sex seriously. I say, a man can’t take what another man says after a battle like this seriously.”
“I guess so.”
“Are you all right, Major?” Zlenko’s voice sounds anxious. “You look… distracted.”
“Do I?” Tarasov is not sure what to reply. “I told you, I’m fine. It’s just… Suddenly I felt a desire to crush Ilchenko’s head.”
“There you are!” exclaims a cheerful voice. “We routed the bastards, didn’t we, Major?”
Borys the Shrink climbs over a pile of mud bricks and sits down at Tarasov’s side. As the Shrink looks at his face, an impending sense of dread moves over the Stalker’s, so quickly that Tarasov is not sure if what he saw was real or just a reflection of his own, adrenaline-soaked mind.
“Take some medicine,” the Shrink says, offering him a bottle of vodka with more seriousness in his voice than usual. The major gladly accepts. The bottle goes around among them. From around the ruins, they hear the conversations of the Stalkers, some of them crying out excitedly when they find some valuable loot on the fallen enemies’ bodies.
“I could use some food.” Zlenko opens a can of processed meat, but Tarasov shakes his head when the sergeant offers him a chunk of meat on the tip of his bayonet.