Free Fall

by Nicolai Lilin

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

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

  The explorers’ lieutenant responded with a nod.

  ‘Good. Outside there are two transport cars waiting for us. They’ll take us somewhere and drop us off. We have about five kilometres to do on foot, after which, here’ – Nosov pointed to a small plain at the mouth of the valley on the map – ‘the Czechs[11] will start shooting at us. They’ll probably open fire once we’re past the plain, so we won’t have a chance to escape and they can slaughter us without any trouble.’

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

  Nosov went on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Don’t you have a radio?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  After another hour of marching we reached the valley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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