Nicolai Lilin - Free Fall

The soldier lifted the door and then jumped back immediately – a blast of machine gun fire had come from inside. The head of an armed man with long hair peered out. We didn’t give him time to emerge – we shot him on the spot, and he fell back down. We threw two hand grenades into the container; the explosions spread scraps of human flesh, supplies and cloth everywhere. After an operation like that, the officers back at base would write in their reports: ‘A secret refuge harbouring terrorists was discovered and liquidated. Due to the nature of the injuries sustained, the bodies are not fit for identification.’

The OMON guys found many items of interest in the three hideouts: arms, ammo, money, drugs (almost a hundred kilos of heroin in brick-sized blocks, which we all called ‘Afghan bricks’; I had never seen so many drugs in one place before, and I definitely hadn’t imagined I’d be seeing them at a religious site), books on Islamic extremism, flags and other materials intended as propaganda for the holy war against the infidels, plus instructions for making explosives.

There were some videocassettes and DVDs showing torture being inflicted on our soldiers who had been taken prisoner, along with clips of attacks on Russian military convoys. They also had lots of identification papers belonging to dead or missing terrorists, and they had an entire archive (from the Chechen capital, as we later discovered) with the names of the heads of the various terrorist movements in the country.

We piled it all into our cars and then began loading the prisoners on one by one, among them the old imam and his companion, and a woman in her fifties who wouldn’t speak to any of us. To get her into the car an explorer had to hit her on the back with the barrel of a rifle. To begin with, the prisoners resisted, but after the first blows they gave in. There were three young Arabs in particular who kept on shouting, threatening us and refusing to get in the car. One of them grazed an infantryman on the neck with a kitchen knife. The cut wasn’t serious, but the act was: we had to shoot him and his two friends.

We had taken seven prisoners. We tied everyone’s hands and legs together for security, and to keep them from moving we cut the men’s trousers at the waistband. Then we left for our base.

Alerted by the shooting, the local inhabitants gathered around the three corpses. To them, the men on the ground were martyrs.

As our vehicles passed through the village, the streets filled with people, and many inhabitants peered out from behind their front doors – the eyes of the women and the old men, full of hate and a desire for vengeance, were more piercing than plated bullets. No one dared to shoot us, because they knew that if there were even one attack on representatives of the Russian Federation Army, the next day the residents would be awakened by cannon blasts from the artillery or, even worse, by the sound of helicopters, ready to generously drop their surface-to-air missiles. In just a few hours, the entire place would be swept away like the wind scatters leaves in the autumn, without even a memory left behind.

Once we left the village we took the road that led down from the mountains. Our convoy was slowly snaking through the woods along a steep, narrow path, when the terrorists showed up. Usually they would attack the head and the tail of a column, trying to trap the cars in the middle. A few bullets hit the first carrier, where the infantry explorers were; that was the car on ‘detachment’, or further ahead compared to the rest of the line.

The enemy was hiding among the trees of the forest, and by taking that path we had offered ourselves up on a silver platter to their bullets. When we heard the first shots we jumped to the ground, to the opposite side from where the shots were coming. The drivers came out of the carriers too, rolling along with us to the edge of the road, the only place where the Arabs couldn’t see us. According to military regulations, at times like these leaving the car is prohibited – the unit is supposed to defend the vehicle, using their personal weapons as well as the ones the car is equipped with. But in reality, none of us ever followed this rule. An RPG shell travels very fast and can destroy an armoured car in three seconds. In just a few minutes a marksman can torch up to five standing vehicles, and if there are three or more marksmen, the crew doesn’t stand a chance. That’s why active units led by good officers who knew what they were doing would leave the vehicle immediately, to try to organise a counterattack.

The Arabs were shooting with three light machine guns and about ten Kalashnikovs; once in a while, like cracks of a whip, the sound of two precision rifles could also be heard. The car that had been hit was in flames, but the enemy continued to fire an impressive number of projectiles into it, trying to blow it up. Usually the Arabs would shoot a grenade launcher shell under a car, between the tracks. The explosion would break the transmission and the vehicle wouldn’t be able to move; that way, after the battle, the car could quickly be repaired and used as if it were new. But it was a different story with the armoured cars that had wheels, like our BTRs – they couldn’t easily be disabled, so the enemies were forced to burn them or blow them up.

Every so often a few long blasts of machine gun fire came near us; when the car finally exploded, the terrorists moved, probably to take care of the last one in the line.

The fact that they were changing positions was positive; it meant that there were only a few of them, so few that they couldn’t handle more than one point of attack at a time. While the majority of their group was going through the woods above us – covered by a few single shots that tried to keep us under the effect of fear – Nosov gave the order to move out of the road towards the hill.

‘Let’s go past the burned car, cross the road and get into the woods,’ our captain said, amid the pandemonium. ‘We’ll take those bastards by surprise, while they’re on the move…’

Nosov hadn’t quite finished his plan when one of our prisoners jumped out of a carrier. The plastic bands we used to bind prisoners were occasionally defective; the man had evidently managed to free at least his feet. He ran for the woods as best he could, holding up his trousers, which kept falling down, with his bound hands. Suddenly the terrorists stopped shooting. In fact, we could hear their shouts of encouragement – it almost felt like we were watching a sack race. But one of the OMON officers shot a powerful blast into his back, putting an end to the show. The prisoner fell face down on the ground, his trousers around his ankles, and one of his arms – riddled with bullets in the shoulder – came away from his body yet remained hooked to the other arm with the plastic band.

‘Shit, just when I was starting to have fun…’ Shoe commented.

We set off down the hill. It was very steep and at some points we were in danger of slipping. To keep our balance we went almost on all fours, hanging on to every stone, every patch of grass, every little root poking out of the ground. Some of the OMON team came with us, while the others stayed behind; their task was to respond to the fire, to make the enemy think that all of us were still there, following the classic army tactic of protecting the vehicles.

When we got to the first car, we heard not only the sound of ammo exploding inside it but also the voices of our explorers, cursing. So they were alive! Somehow they had managed to get out of the car before it caught fire.

‘Come on, strays, let’s get to this fucking forest…’ Nosov had his own way of encouraging us.

An infantryman rushed up to us, and stopped in front of our captain. I glanced at his uniform; he was a lieutenant major.