Andy McNab - Exit wound

I picked up a piece of pitta bread and got stuck into the last kebab. ‘How do you know him? I mean, M3C are the enemy, aren’t they?’

She didn’t answer. Neither did she fire up another cigarette as I ate. She just stared at me, her mind buzzing. ‘OK, Jim, we’ll talk…’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not married.’ She lifted her right hand. ‘I wear it to keep men out of my way. This is Russia, after all. But it is also there to remind me that I was going to marry once, years ago. Semyon was going to be my father-in-law. I love him deeply. He is the only family I have now.’

Her hand came down and played with the cigarette packet.

‘My boyfriend was older than me. My father didn’t approve.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Grisha. We used to go to that place you were aiming for, to escape the eyes of my family. It’s a young person’s hang-out – always has been. He always said it served the best shashlik in Moscow.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was 1987. We were young. We were in love. And then he went to Afghanistan. I waved goodbye to him at the station… and the next time I saw him he was in a coffin. Now Semyon and I have only pictures of Grisha to remind us of what he was like.’

I watched a tear form and trickle down her cheek. She fumbled to get another cigarette out of the pack. I took it from her and helped.

She sniffed. ‘I still go there sometimes when I want to remember him.’

The firebrand who’d gobbed off at the press conference didn’t square with the person I was with now. In Tehran she’d seemed utterly driven. The girl in front of me was vulnerable. But if you’d lost the love of your life in a war? The picture was steadying a little. ‘Grisha’s death still drives you.’

She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. But not, I suspect, for the reasons you think.’

I passed her the cigarette and she took it and lit up. ‘Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. Then, one day, February ’eighty-nine, the letters stopped. They told us he was missing, presumed dead. We wrote requesting further information, but the army never replied. It was like he’d never existed.’

In the wake of the Chechen war, I’d helped a number of families who’d tried to find out what had happened to their dead or missing sons. But during the Soviet era it would have been dangerous even asking the question.

‘It must have been – must still be – difficult.’

‘What?’

‘Not knowing what happened.’

‘But we do.’

Anna toyed awkwardly with her Baltika. ‘Almost a year after we lost the war, Semyon got a call from a man who claimed to be the colonel of the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on Grisha’s body.’

She saw something in my face. ‘You’re thinking the army didn’t carry out autopsies on ordinary soldiers? Sometimes they did. In certain circumstances.’

I didn’t need to ask her what they were. I knew she was going to tell me soon enough.

She took a swig. ‘The colonel told Semyon that he wanted to meet, that there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was scared to meet him.’

‘Why?’

‘This was Soviet Russia.’

‘So you said you’d go.’

‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man – this colonel – at a cafe. He told me about himself – told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. It was then that he showed me the pictures.

‘The autopsy had been carried out at a military medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: he was face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.’

The tears were really flowing now. She didn’t even bother wiping them away.

‘I asked the colonel what had happened and he told me Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier had been hit by an antitank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled, removing the back of his skull. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head – just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’

She steadied herself.

‘The fragment that had killed Grisha had come from an antitank missile that had only just entered service with the Soviet Army. It was effectively brand new. Someone had sold it to the mujahideen . Never mind that it would kill Russians. To the people who’d done the deal, the only thing that was important was the money.’

‘So why did this pathologist approach Semyon?’

‘Oh, that bit was easy. In exchange for the information, he wanted a job.’

Caught in the pool of light cast by the street-lamp outside, a couple of peaked caps and heavy trench coats walked past the window. They stopped to look through the glass. She watched and waited until they moved on.

The stub of her cigarette joined the others in the ashtray. ‘Jim, we should go.’

We were on a main drag – a long prospect heading westwards, the direction we needed to go. Traffic streamed in both directions. I turned to Anna as she took my arm. ‘Tell me about Grisha.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘As much as you want to tell.’

She wrapped her coat more tightly around her against the wind that was blowing along the prospekt . With it came a few spots of rain.

‘Grisha was an idealist. He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening, when I came back from school, I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I loved Pushkin. We got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him – in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. That’s why he joined the army.

‘He would have been conscripted anyway to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well as fight for them? It meant signing up for five years, but then he’d be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher. But to do that he first had to become a soldier.’

‘What was he? An engineer, an officer?’

‘No, he was nothing special. Just a normal infantry soldier. One of the thousands our government sent to be slaughtered out there.’

‘I had a friend, a British soldier. He’s just been killed in Afghanistan.’

‘Did you love him?’

I had to think about that one. ‘There were four of us who were close – we’d done a lot together. I’m the only one left now. You know what? I think I cared for all three of them. I miss them very much.’

She looked away. Her tear-stained cheeks glistened in the glow of a street-lamp.

I’d surprised myself talking about Tenny, Dex and Red Ken like that. I decided to cut away before it happened again. I didn’t like not being in control. ‘So, how much older than you was Grisha when you met? Was he old-enough-to-be-your-dad sort of old?’

‘No, no.’ She gave a giggle, which surprised her even more than it surprised me. ‘We’d started dating when I was just sixteen – a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen. Like I said, my father did not approve of the relationship. But by then my father did not approve of anything much.’

She paused.

‘He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. My mother was scared of him. I was his only child. He wanted me to make something of my life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. Grisha and I had to see each other in secret. Thank God he had a motorbike, a Ural, so we could escape every so often for a few hours on our own.’