Moscow nodded, and went over to get Zenith. I pointed the rifle towards the enemy and began studying the column. The mules were moving slowly, only a few metres apart. Usually the Arabs would tie them together so that if one animal stopped the other would pull it forward. If those mules were tied together, the best thing would be to unload a blast of gunfire on the first so it would drag the other one down when it fell, and the enemy wouldn’t have time to react.
Moscow and Zenith joined me.
‘Take this, Kolima,’ Zenith said, handing me the machine gun he’d taken from the camp. ‘You use it, you’re much more precise than me.’
The gun was already loaded with its killer bullets. I took my Kalashnikov off my back and gave it to Zenith along with four clips. I looked at my comrades:
‘When I start shooting, you guys look where they respond from and aim directly there… Don’t stop – even if they kill us, their mortars will still be at the bottom of the valley…’
Zenith gave me a wink:
‘Don’t shit yourself, brother, we’ll have lots more drinks together…’
‘And Moscow will take you to another nurse…’ I replied.
This was our way of boosting one another’s spirits.
For months Zenith had been going on and on about this thing he had for his neighbour Larisa, who he would always spy on through the window when he was a little boy. She had, he said, such beautiful soft hair between her legs it was like a priceless rug. He wanted to touch it, he wanted to survive the bloodbath of the war and make love to her, that’s what. It was a nice story, but the fact that Zenith had never been with a woman made us sad, so one day Moscow took him to a nurse who finally freed him from the slavery of virginity.
Talking about alcohol and women fired us up at the time. It’s weird to think back on it now, but the possibility of ending my days on that mountain didn’t have any particular effect on me. At that moment all I wanted was to get rid of those damned mules.
I took a deep breath, then I pushed out the air and held my breath, trying to become completely still and hard like a rock. I put my eye to the scope, and as soon as I pinpointed the first mule I fired. The first blast was very short, but I had to correct my aim immediately, since, as I had already experienced, that machine gun had a strong recoil, and it was hard to keep a good grip on it. I unloaded another blast and then another, whereas the other side hadn’t fired a single round. The mules fell down, along with a few men. We could hear their shouts, the animals’ cries, and then there was a loud explosion. I aimed the gun at the column and emptied the rest of the clip without stopping for a second, almost euphoric. I felt every round on my skin – it was as if with each explosion the air pressed on a different part of my head.
I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice when the Arabs began responding to the fire, but I felt the pieces of rock hitting my back. Zenith and Moscow had already moved away, shooting wildly like I was. The enemy was running in every direction, but luckily there didn’t seem to be any snipers in hiding; maybe they felt safe in their mountains and hadn’t bothered to set up a position.
‘Zenith, another clip!’ I shouted. My ears were ringing – the noise the gun made was incredible – and it felt like I was being pounded on the head with a great big hammer. Zenith pulled two clips off his jacket and threw them to me. The machine gun was smoking, and when I opened it I burned my fingers. The clips were heavy; I inserted one and in a few seconds I was shooting again. A few Arabs tried to climb up, others ran down; amidst all the chaos, I was able to knock down about ten of them. The mountain was steep, and they didn’t have enough space to set up a firing position. I could see their rifle ammo exploding upon contact with the bullets, and then the enemies’ bodies falling off the mountain like stones swept up in an avalanche.
Suddenly we saw a bright light that illuminated the sky like daylight. Moscow barely made it in time to shout:
‘RPG!’
Suddenly everything I could see with my right eye turned blinding white, like when you look at the sun for a long time with dark sunglasses on and then quickly turn away and try to look somewhere else. There was a violent explosion on the wall behind us, and our backs were pummelled with boiling stones. The impact was so strong that for a second I felt like my whole body was made of cotton – I had become light and soft, I couldn’t even manage to keep my hand on the trigger… Moscow had a small flaming rock on his shoulder; seeing such solid material catch fire was impressive. Zenith had his head down, his hands over his ears, his mouth open and his eyes wide. The Arabs started shooting a few tracer bullets, trying to correct their aim in order to send over another grenade.
So I pointed the machine gun at the mountain and without ever taking my eye off the scope I unloaded the rest of the magazine, following every human figure that came into my sight. I couldn’t remember with any precision where the RPG blast had come from, nor did I know what my comrades were doing at that moment. I was in a state of complete confusion… My head hurt like hell, every little noise irritated me, but I kept shooting anyway, changing my clip again, working like a robot. We could hear some people shouting and others sobbing, desperate… The cries of the wounded seemed so close that if you closed your eyes you could imagine them next to you. I looked through the scope, searching for movement, but nobody had been responding to the fire for some time. So I began shooting at the bodies strewn along the path until there was an explosion – I must have hit the RPG rounds or the mortar shells.
I stopped and closed my eyes. I was thirsty. My mouth was so dry that when I opened it to take in some air, my lips cracked; running my tongue over them, I could taste blood. That brought me back to reality. All three of us were lying flat next to one another, breathing hard.
Zenith, who was on my right, was covered in shells from the machine gun. He got up and made the sign of the cross, then he looked at me with a smile and a crazed look in his eyes.
Moscow, as if he had just woken up from a nightmare, leapt to his feet, gave me a kick on the side and yelled:
‘Let’s move! Come on, we have to tell the guys!’
Then he hurried off to reach our group. I pulled myself up too and followed. Zenith came last; he hadn’t hooked the machine gun stand very well, so it had opened and was making a lot of noise, bumping against the barrel.
I wasn’t thinking about anything. I felt good, like I had freed myself from something that had been tormenting me for a long time. Our captain often said that was what winning felt like. Running back to the rest of the unit, though, I felt less and less protected, as if at any moment a bullet could hit me in the back.
At some point, Moscow turned around and yelled to me:
‘Fucking whore of a war, we did it!’
We saw them from afar, running towards us; after hearing the gunfire, they had decided to come and help us. It was Nosov and Shoe, with their rifles levelled.
‘Saboteurs here! Identify yourselves!’
‘Ivanisch, it’s us!’ Moscow yelled.
‘We heard an explosion, what was it?’ Shoe asked, lowering his gun.
Moscow was all excited, like a happy child:
‘Thirty-four Czechs with two mules and two mortars! Fuck, we took them all out!’
‘Move, move, let’s go!’ Nosov ordered the rest of the group. He didn’t want us to stop; we had to get out of those mountains as quickly as possible.
It was good for me to see my comrades’ faces. As always, after getting through danger, it was like seeing family; I wanted to hug them all, greet each one, ask how they were… After an especially stressful action, I got too sentimental.
Nosov continued questioning us:
‘Did you make sure there weren’t any others? Are you sure you killed them all?’
Moscow repeated his version like a broken record:
‘We took them all out, every single one of them…’
And then, short of breath from running, he started recounting every detail of our action. I asked f
or something to drink and an explorer gave me his water bottle. I took big gulps and found the water so good I almost felt inebriated. After a few minutes we came to the spot where we had been shooting earlier. The ground was covered in shells, and that particular point on the road, now that our group was all together, seemed much smaller than when there were only three of us just minutes before. On the side of the mountain above us was the huge hole made by the RPG. Looking at it, I thought how lucky we’d been – if the round had hit just a few metres lower the falling rock would have killed us… I felt strangely relieved, as if all the bad things that still awaited us were contained within that hole in the rock.
We kept on running. The sky was clear, everything was preparing for the coming of the light. The air was cool and damp – if I closed my eyes for a moment it felt like I was back home on my boat, on the river, out in the morning air, on my way back from a night of fishing…
Suddenly I felt a shove and I fell forward onto my left side. Tracer bullets were coming from the mountain in front of us, I don’t know how, but we were in the middle of gunfire. I’d been saved thanks to the soldier who had pushed me down. He and I rolled into a nearby ditch and took cover, and I realised that my comrades were already there. The fire was so heavy that we couldn’t raise our heads at all. The soldier next to me started shooting with his assault rifle, but I stopped him right away:
‘You have to cover the flash supressor; otherwise they’ll keep shooting at us!’
The infantrymen’s Kalashnikovs didn’t have modified compensators or flash suppressors; the rifle’s burst of flame could easily be seen.
None of us responded to the fire. We all hid in the ditch, our heads down, listening to the bullets exploding all around us. In all that pandemonium it was hard to work out the one thing that mattered to me most: whether or not they had a sniper.
At some point something strange happened – the enemy stopped shooting volleys. Only single shots came, and we couldn’t quite make out where they hit; perhaps the enemy couldn’t tell where we were. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a battle in the distance. From the way the echo reverberated off the rocks, these new rounds were coming from the opposite side of the valley – in fact, right from where we were headed ourselves.
There must have been a very violent battle going on. We could hear every sound of the fight perfectly, as if we were at the cinema instead of in a ditch. I recognised the pounding of a heavy machine gun, every now and then the roar of an RPG, and in the background the incessant bursts of the Kalashnikovs – the assault rifles shrieked so loudly it seemed as if they were going to drown out their own voices.
The captain said:
‘Shit, those are our men. They’re pushing them to the other side of the mountain…’
A few Kalashnikov shells came near us, but they seemed to be aimed at a point much higher than where we were. Nosov ordered everyone to identify himself, reporting his status. As soon as he was able to get in touch with our superiors, he would communicate precisely who was wounded and who was not. My comrades identified themselves, stating their role and unit, and then added the most important thing: ‘in rank’. The expression ‘in rank’ meant they had not been hurt and could continue to fulfil their tasks. When it was my turn I said: ‘Sniper, saboteurs, in rank!’ Luckily, nobody had been hurt or killed; all of us had been able to take cover from the unexpected fire.
Cautiously, I raised my head above the ditch and through the scope of my precision rifle I began observing the mountain opposite us. I saw the first enemies about two hundred metres away. There were three of them, slowly moving towards the valley. I reported to the captain:
‘Ivanisch, I see three subjects coming down…’
‘Liquidate them immediately!’ he ordered.
I hit the first two with four rounds but the last one responded to the fire, shooting at us, but without good aim. Then he started running higher. I decided to follow him with the scope; I wanted to see where he would lead me.
He was climbing the mountain very quickly, first running in a zigzag pattern; then when he noticed I wasn’t shooting anymore, he slackened his pace and started following the path. After about fifty metres he came to a flat area by a forest, and there he sat down on a rock to catch his breath for a moment. I fired, but I wasn’t able to hit him – he stood right up, so I shot at his legs, and this time he fell down, letting out a long, pained howl, which faded in the damp mountain air like a gust of wind. Just after that, another man came out from behind the trees. I got him straight in the chest. The guy who was already on the ground suddenly turned and shot another blast in our direction, but it too was imprecise. I aimed carefully and this time I took him out, blasting two rounds into his chest.
‘Those bastards are hiding in the woods…’ Moscow said. I hadn’t even realised he had come up to me.
‘Our men should have defeated them,’ I replied. ‘They’re abandoning their defence and coming towards us…’
The situation was troubling. Our men would follow them, and we – who, without a radio, couldn’t send any kind of communication – risked getting caught in friendly fire. Paradoxically, our men could be more dangerous to us than the enemy, especially if the infantry units were among them, or worse, the Internal Ministry’s Special Rapid Response Unit. The soldiers in the rapid response unit didn’t listen to anyone, they shot at anything that moved. It was best to avoid them, to quickly come up with a plan to make sure we weren’t spotted.
We had been in a similar situation before, when, because of a misunderstanding, we saboteurs had a very close call…
On that occasion, we had been stuck in a building for three long hours, besieged by constant fire from our own infantry.
What had happened was, as we approached their position, we had shot two red signal flares to identify ourselves, as we had determined before the operation. But their officers didn’t see them – one was seriously wounded and in the infirmary, while their lieutenant, recovering from a long battle in another part of the city, was sleeping in an armoured vehicle.
The lieutenant colonels, sergeants and soldiers hadn’t heard a thing about the red flares. After shooting them in the air, we headed for their position, crossing the yard with complete ease. From the third floor of another building about five hundred metres away, two heavy machine guns and a Kalashnikov started going to work on us. Deer took a volley of bullets right in the chest, but luckily his vest saved his life. We hid inside the adjacent building, with nothing to do but wait, hoping they would soon run out of ammo. They even threw a couple of grenades inside our refuge, to burn the house and force us outside where they could kill us. We were able to hide in the cellar, but if the infantrymen decided to enter we would really be trapped.
Their lieutenant only woke up three hours later. When they told him they were shooting at an enemy group who had fired two red signal flares before approaching, he ordered them to cease fire immediately. He sent over a group of explorers – by a sheer miracle we didn’t shoot at one another. The explorers then escorted us to our positions, communicating their status via radio.
Having too many soldiers in a military operation isn’t always such a great thing.
About ten enemies began going down the path; some running hard, trying to escape faster, others stopping and trying to set up a cover. Further up, a group of our men continued shooting unceasingly; we could hear them shouting orders in the distance.
Deer squeezed in between Moscow and me:
‘Christ, the guys are really pushing – in a few minutes they’ll be taking us out too…’
The battle went by fast, almost in a flash, and at some point our men loaded a grenade launcher. After a few seconds the first bomb hit the enemy, then another, and another… The trees and bushes caught fire immediately, and the Arabs started yelling. Through my rifle scope, the whole tremendous spectacle looked like a puppet show: the enemies’ burned bodies, reduced to bits, fell through the air into the valley.
Two rounds had landed very close to the place where I had taken down the last enemies – too close… I checked the path and saw three enemies hiding in a bush; one started going down, trying to flee our soldiers’ attack. I shot and killed him, then I tried to pinpoint the other two. I shot a few rounds, wounding one of them; then our men threw a hand grenade at them, leaving no trace of the enemies’ bodies.
Nosov took control of the situation:
‘Join up for immediate retreat! Saboteurs go first, infantry follows a hundred metres behind. In case of enemy fire, do not shoot without my permission; our men are in the area…’
We jumped to our feet and began running down the road after Nosov. We had to scram before our men noticed us…
We ran like men with nothing to lose, until we came to a point where the road became very narrow.
‘Once we’re past the bend,’ the captain said, ‘we’ll leave this fucking mountain behind us…’
Passing through the bottleneck between the rocks we reached the other side of the mountain. A wide plain appeared before our eyes.
We could finally see the light of day. The sun was rising, but we had to be sure we were in the clear before we could stop running.
After half an hour, Nosov let us take a break.
‘Two minutes!’ he yelled.
We were exhausted, panting. I took the canteen from my side pouch and drank greedily. Just then I heard a blast of gunfire coming from the top of the mountain on our left. I dropped the canteen and threw myself under a rock. Seconds later we were all belly down.
‘Shit, it’s not over yet…’ said Spoon.
The bullets lodged one after the other in the ground in front of us. We couldn’t see anything, just a sea of sand, clay and pebbles that rose and kept moving through the air, like a whirlwind. Keeping your eyes open was impossible and painful, they instantly filled up with sand and dust. I felt trapped. Everything had happened so fast, I didn’t even know exactly where the shooting was coming from; they seemed to be firing from every direction.
Free Fall Page 21