by Geoff Wolak
He mouthed a few words towards me, a pitiful sound made, a hand half-raised with what energy he had left. He was a mirror image of my own suffering.
Staring down at him, his face muddied and bloodied, I felt nothing, and I stopped to consider that. I was an excellent medic, and I could help him, but I knew that I could not even kneel and get back up. My death would soon follow his, each of us in great pain, each facing a slow yet sure end.
I lifted the end of my silencer and lined up with his begging mouth, and pulled the trigger. The back of his head splattered across the damp grass, the quiet crack hardly disturbing the birds, and his death meant nothing to me, not in this state. I did not hate him; if anything I pitied him and related to his condition. Maybe, when I pulled the trigger, I was hoping that it was me on the floor, and that my pain would end.
I walked on. Slowly.
Reaching a path, I gave up any pretence at professionalism and simply followed it, hardly checking the ground around me. If there had been other Serbs nearby I would be killed, but when all of your energy is just about keeping you upright you don’t care. You don’t have the energy to care.
As I walked my legs got better, and I felt a little better. I still hurt more than at any other time in my life, but a one percent improvement in pain was very welcome. My pace picked up and I even glanced around, checking for Serbs.
Reaching an opening I halted, sounds coming from ahead. I slowly moved behind a tree and found a convenient branch at about five feet off the ground, placing my rifle over it. Taking the rifle butt into my shoulder, and wincing at the pain that simple movement caused, I once again peered through those same sights, the extra magazines stuffed into my jacket now clanking a little.
Eight men, single file, sixty yards down the track. They had not seen me, and the way I was camouflaged they would have been lucky to see me anyhow. A measured breath brought me back into soldier mode, back into sniper mode, and my body could have hit the men without my brain’s input. How many rounds had I fired these past four days, how many magazine changes? It had to be countless thousands of expended rounds.
Half a breath out, no emotion whatsoever, and I hit four men before they knew what was happening. Crack, crack, crack, echoed around the forest, and I managed to wound a further three more, I was reasonably sure – but fogged. Taking careful aim, I could see a face peering around a tree, and I hit him in his nose, killing the man instantly.
A waving arm, shouting, and I hit the shoulder waving that arm. A leg near a bush, moving, so I hit it, high in the thigh, usually a lethal wound. An arse, crawling, hit at an angle. That would hurt, and the owner of that arse lifted his face, a grimace evident, his grimace frozen in time as my shot took a chunk out of his exposed forehead.
Nothing.
Silence reclaimed the forest, and part of me hoped that the men had been better prepared, had been better shots, and that my pain would end. I scanned the bodies that I could see, the visible areas around them all checked, and I eased back away from the tree. A path led off at an angle, and I followed it, feeling sick, but not sick about the men I had just killed and wounded. Slowly, I trudged onwards, knowing all the while that death was now close at hand.
So why bother, I found myself asking. Why not just lie down, or just put the end of the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger; no more pain, an easy way out. Was it the training, or just the natural urge to live, to keep going, the survival instinct, or the fear of the unknown, of the big sleep we all face sooner or later. I kept going, but I had no idea why.
Was it for Queen and country, the Army, the Regiment. No, I was reasonably sure that it wasn’t, but my mind was so fogged I could hardly think. I could react at a primitive level and that was all, and that was what was driving me – the primitive instinct to survive.
At the next clearing I halted, the day clearing up, the sun threatening to expose itself once more. It was a pretty picture-postcard image, I found myself considering, but then wondering if I was hallucinating. Why the hell had I stopped to admire the forest? Truth was, I had always been at home in the forest, and most of the time I loved being in the forest somewhere, especially by myself. Here I felt comfortable, not afraid of the unknown.
A crack, the air bursting from my lungs, and I was on my back and staring up at the tops of the trees, the grey clouds rushing past. This was it, this was the end, and I welcomed it.
Major Bradley stepped into the communications centre at 7am, looking tired and a little haggard. Yawning, he made himself a coffee, silent glances exchanged with Capt Harris and the Intel Team, nothing said. After all, if there had been news they would have piped up with something.
He sat. ‘No news?’
An Intel Sergeant reported, ‘Nothing for twelve hours or more, actually ... sixteen hours. They’re still combing the area, but no engagements, sir.’
Bradley exchanged a look with Harris. Harris said, with little energy in his voice, ‘Four days continuous fighting, not even Wilco can do that.’
Bradley sipped his coffee without responding.
An Intel Sergeant stretched his back. ‘Maybe he’s just sleeping. There are no reports of a body.’
The landline phone trilled, causing people to jump, the sergeant answering it. He wrote down the message and read back a set of co-ordinates. Turning towards the expectant faces, he smiled. ‘Some nasty bastard of an unseen sniper just shot up an eight-man patrol.’
Everyone rushed to check the co-ordinates on the map table.
‘That’s about a mile north of the first contact,’ Capt Harris stated. ‘He’s heading north.’
Bradley straightened. ‘He’s had enough of pissing about in those woods and is breaking out at last,’ he quipped. ‘He’s run out of Serbs to shoot, so he’ll be in Berlin by the weekend, heading for the nightclubs.’
He stepped out onto the balcony, the metal walkway rattling as usual, causing the guys to look up as they had breakfast. He announced, he words echoing a little, ‘An unseen sniper has just shot up a Serb patrol a few miles north of those woods. Wilco is heading for bars in Berlin!’
They cheered, tired smiles adopted.
I lifted a hand and patted down the front of my webbing. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ I let out with a sigh; the bullet had – yet again – hit a magazine and not found flesh. I was hurting - and again the round had bruised my already battered sternum, I was a little out of breath, but I would live on – something of a disappointment.
I lifted my head a little, and could hear rather than see movement. My rifle was lying right next to me, the silencer over my boot. Turning my boot inwards like a cam, the silencer was pushed upwards, and towards the sounds of movement. As a parallel to the movement of my boot, I lifted the weapon using my wrist, and rested it on the magazine, the axis of the weapon now pointing towards where the shot had come from.
A good sixty seconds passed, and then I heard whispered voices, finally a shape moving from left to right behind the nearest bushes. And the shape was moving right into my sights, only I had to apply a little guesswork as to where my shot might fall. I waited, my neck soon hurting like hell from such an awkward adopted firing position.
The shape moved off to the right, and then back to the left as it got closer.
Now a face. An AK47 held ready, a typical Bosnian-Serb webbing style, the sounds of twigs breaking underfoot.
A smirk, from a sneering soldier some twelve feet away.
He stopped smirking and frowned, and I pulled the trigger twice, hitting him in the throat and chin, a spurt of blood covering the leaves of the bushes nearby. He fell back, looking stunned as he fired off four rounds, all hitting the ground between us. I heard him land, a burst of air from his lungs, a gurgling sound, and then nothing. I waited, resting my head on the damp ground, my finger on the trigger.
Another voice, calling, a bit further away, maybe ten yards or more beyond the bushes and trees that now filled my view as I lifted my head. Suppressing a cry of pain, I moaned as I turn
ed onto my right elbow, lifting my left knee. I pushed down with my left hand and eased up, soon bent over my rifle and wondering if I would pass out.
Upright, but sill on my knees, I lifted the rifle, brought a knee up – my left foot still not issuing any sense of feeling, and took a half-decent firing stance. I got my finger back onto the trigger as the sounds grew louder, the voice now becoming a strained whisper.
‘Maki?’
It was probably his name, the man I had killed, and I took a moment to wonder if he had a wife and six kids waiting for him back on some farm in a nice green valley. Then I remembered the sneer, and I hoped he did not have a family; I figured the kids would not be raised very well.
Lifting the rifle, and lowering my head, I closed my left eye and peered through the sight, the lower left quadrant blurred. From the right, my 2 o’clock position, I slowly swung left.
A face appeared, covered in camouflage paint, ten yards away, peering out from behind a tree. I took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, sure that I had hit him. Then immediately not so sure. So I waited, a good minute, nothing but birds for company, my right leg going to sleep since I was sat on it and cutting off the circulation. Still, that lessened the pain.
With both my legs now registering their complaint via the shooting pains, I eased forwards, balanced, and eased upright, my back clicking as I did so, leaving me sure that the human back was not supposed to click like that. Blood returned to my right leg, and the pain started up again.
Now I could see the man that would have killed me, the man that believed he had killed me, the man who I almost hoped had finished me off. Unlike me, he was now quite dead, a large pool of blood around his head, his chin gone – just a bloody mess of flesh and white teeth. I turned away and started walking.
I was not quite sure of where I was going, but I seemed to be going in the opposite direction of the two men, and the patrol before them, and for some reason – I believed that it was due north.
After ten minutes of slowly plodding along, and ten minutes of not encountering anyone, I happened across a stream by chance, a splash as my right boot hit it. Kneeling, I pulled out my water bottle and swigged the remaining contents, which tasted unlike water, then filled the bottle. I forced down a few big gulps of the ice-cold liquid, knowing that I needed the fluids, and topped up the water bottle, my mind on automatic.
Plodding on, I started to feel better, and I wondered if the mere movement of the muscles and body, coupled with a higher heart rate than that of the long night, was having an effect. Maybe the antibiotics were circulating and doing their job, I forlornly hoped. Still, the antibiotics could not plug holes, or get the feeling back in my left foot.
Climbing a gentle rise, I found that a large square of forest had been neatly cut down, an almost impossible area to cross because of the assault course of giant logs. But that was to the left of me. In front of me was a path, and I followed it, the open area to the left offering me an excellent field of fire, and many logs to duck behind should I need them.
Sounds.
I stopped, and edged closer to a tree, turning my head like an owl searching for its prey in the dark of night. It was coming from my 10 o’clock position, across the felled trees, so I found a good fire position behind a large tree resting in its side, and peered through the sight. Thirty seconds of looking revealed nothing, so I opened my left eye. There was a gap in the trees, and what looked like a logging track. I re-focused my sight on that track, and there, some four hundred yards away, came an eight man patrol. They were jabbering away, not alert to any danger around them.
Could I just run, walk quickly, or duck and hide? No, I considered, I did not have the strength left. So I took aim, then lowered the aim, and hit the first two men in the legs, secure in the knowledge that they could not see me, and that they could not have heard where the incoming fire had originated.
Echoes of gunfire filled the trees, crack, crack, crack, but none of the rounds were coming my way. I lifted up and plodded on, slowly plodded on along the track, hearing sporadic bursts.
Two hundred yards on, and I was certain that they were not following, that they were doing now what they should be doing – and looking after the wounded. Kill a man, Major Bradley had said, and his team gets annoyed, but wound him and it ties up his whole patrol. So I had been paying attention in class, I considered, a small wry smile taking hold for a moment as I limped onwards.
I had made a hundred yards when a pain in my groin bent me double. Finding a tree stump, wide and smooth, I sat, taking out my cock and balls, and studying the blackened testicle – my thighs covered in a mix of shit and blood.
The testicle was full of poison, and that poison was slowly killing me. Opening my first aid kit, I sat there with my tackle out, and anyone coming across me might have considered that I was taking a break from this soldiering lark and playing with myself.
Winding a white chord around the black testicle, I pulled it tight without registering any pain, and tied a knot. Then I waited for any sensation to end, for the blood to be cut off. Prodding the testicle, I could not feel it, so reached for a scalpel and unsheathed it.
With my stomach turning at the thought of what I was about to do, but having little choice, I cut into the stretched and swollen flesh. Black puss squirted out and the ball sack deflated like a balloon. I wiped away the puss with a finger, the smell almost knocking me out.
Widening the hole, I peered inside, and never having seen an exposed testicle I had no idea what it should look like, but I figured it should not look like a prune – and black. It would have to come out.
Poking it with the blade, I felt nothing, so I cut the flesh back further. Seeing several tubes, veins and arteries, I tied them off with a double knot, and cut them without so much as feeling it, yet I imagined feeling it. A few small threads needed to be cut for the testicle to come away, and I held it for a moment before tossing it over my shoulder.
Checking that no one was near, I cleaned out the inside of the exposed scrotum with a small white pad, and drowned the ball sack in antibiotic cream. Wiping the excess cream clear, I sliced off the black skin, got my needle and thread, and stitched the good skin up tightly. It looked OK, and was not hurting, so I released the first knot.
Putting my tackle away, I zipped up and stood, lifting my rifle ready. I took a few steps gingerly, but then realised that it did not hurt. I plodded on.
‘Sir!’ an Intel Sergeant called.
Major Bradley stood and opened the sliding glass window, poking his head through.
‘Contact report, sir; Serb patrol shot up by an unseen sniper, and they were engaged at six hundred yards, sir, they’re reporting.’
‘Where?’
‘About two miles further north, sir, on the same track.’
Bradley turned to see Colonel Richards approaching, clanking along the walkway with two other officers, one also a colonel, one a lady captain. He opened his squeaky door and welcomed his guests. ‘Sorry about the mess, and the dust, we adopted a factory,’ he told the guests. ‘Maid comes in next week.’
The guests sat after shaking hands, Bradley sticking his face through the cardboard covering the broken window of the SSM’s office and asking for four teas. He finally sat at his desk.
‘Any more news?’ Colonel Richards asked.
‘Yes, sir. Our boy is moving north at a slow but steady pace, engaging Serb patrols every mile. Last lot were shot up from six hundred yards or more.’
‘Are we ... sure that it is him?’ Colonel Richards asked.
‘Can’t be a hundred percent certain, sir, not without direct Comms, but it fits the profile. Still no bodies, no recovered kit. Serb radio lads refer to him as – that fucking ghost again. And you know Wilco, if he doesn’t want to be seen he won’t be.’
Colonel Richards seemed hesitant.
Bradley asked, ‘Are there still ... questions about what happened, sir?’
Richards nodded, seeming guarded with his guests
around, but the guest colonel began, ‘No one is trying to lay blame here,’ making sound as if he was trying to lay blame. ‘But ... we have always denied an SAS presence behind the lines, and the deaths of Serbs have raised many questions abroad, from Russia and Serbia and others, including our NATO allies in Europe, and the more we deny it the more we appear to be lying – in their eyes.’
Bradley held his hands wide. ‘They found no bodies, nor kit, sir.’
‘Yes, that is working in our favour, but they have also found no Muslim bodies, so the deaths are ... unexplained, and regardless of your belief that Wilco can walk on water, no one in HQ is buying the idea that he shot more than three hundred militiamen.’
Bradley controlled his anger. ‘Well, he’ll be at the border by tonight, then you can ask him what happened, sir.’
‘There will be a formal enquiry -’
‘And what?’ Bradley cut in. ‘You’ll accuse one of our men of acting heroically and shooting lots of people who were trying to shoot him. You’ll enter court martial papers that claim he shot three hundred Serbs, sir?’
The guest Colonel now controlled his own anger. ‘We’ll wait till the facts are in, all of the facts. And personally, I think your six men lived longer than described.’
Bradley stared back at the man. ‘Then Wilco’s court martial papers will label him as having lied to me, something I will never go along with.’
Teas were brought in on a tray, breaking the icy stand-off for a minute.
Colonel Richard’s stirred his tea, and without looking up, began, ‘The enlisted men here in Bosnia and Croatia have the story, it leaked in a heartbeat. If Wilco lives, then how he is treated will be very ... carefully observed by the wider military.’
The guests got the message loud and clear. ‘Indeed, and, as I said, we’ll wait for all the facts to emerge before jumping to any conclusions.’
‘I’ve spoken to Colonel Bennet,’ Bradley said with a badly hidden smirk. ‘He’s fully appraised of the situation, and ready to assist Wilco. In fact, he has a whole team stood ready, pencils sharpened.’