Nicolai Lilin - Free Fall

Our captain, Moscow, and my other comrades were getting closer and closer, the ring was tightening. For an instant I felt like the fight was over – it was a sensation I felt when a moment of calm suddenly occurred during a battle. You don’t hear anyone else shooting around you and you feel as though you’re the only agitated, vengeful person left in the whole universe. Everyone else is calm and peaceful… It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s enough to make you feel a sort of shame, as if the blame for everything that was happening lies on you alone – and that’s the moment when you’re most in danger of losing touch with reality. That’s what happened to me. As I ran I began to overthink the situation, and I passed a live terrorist without even noticing.

He was a young Chechen armed with a Kalashnikov, with a shadow of a beard on his face and a strip of green cloth affixed to his wool cap. He was sitting against a tree, and when I passed beside him he decided to shoot me in the back. Unlike me, my comrade had seen him and stopped to shoot him. But the Chechen moved faster, and emptied his clip into him.

I turned, and without hesitation fired my entire magazine at him, keeping the rifle at my right side. He tried to respond but the rifle fell from his hand. His face was white, his eyes startlingly open, and his mouth kept opening and closing – he looked like a fish that had flopped out of the water. He tried to remove the heavy jacket he had on, as if it were suffocating him. I kept shooting, and as I shot him he tried to shield himself – he put a hand in front of his body, as if to protect himself from the bullets, but his arm immediately lost its strength and his hand flailed, groping in mid-air. At last a bullet crushed his chin and part of his jaw; his head whipped to the side and froze in a surreal position. The broken bones of his face, the shattered teeth, the blood pulsing from his open veins and uprooted tongue: all these details made the wound look like a flower. Seeing that macabre botanical composition above a man’s shoulders had a strange effect; it seemed as though he had not died but had transformed into something new, something that, for those of us still in this world, was impossible to comprehend.

‘Kolima, that’s enough,’ Moscow said, placing a hand on the rifle to make me stop. I hadn’t noticed that he had approached. ‘He’s dead.’

Only then did I look at the OMON officer. He was lying on the ground next to his rifle. His eyes were still open, but he was no longer breathing – he’d taken a bad hit directly to his chest. His mouth was full of dark blood; his stomach and lungs must have been pierced by the bullets. I bent over and checked his vest; the iron plates weren’t there. He had probably removed them so as not to carry any extra weight.

It was terrible to discover that the boy had died in such a stupid way, because of my mistake – one moment of inattention had cost another man his life. A man who was now a piece of motionless flesh at my feet, without wants, fears, loves… everything that had connected him to this world. Who knows what his last thought had been before dying, or what words had died on his lips, caught in that mouth filled with black blood.

Moscow ran off towards the others. I told him I would be right there.

I inspected the corpse. I found four rifle magazines, and I took his gun. I hadn’t even had the time to ask him what his name was.

The fire fight was still raging. I could hear Nosov giving orders while someone from OMON was busy talking on the radio. None of us had been carrying a field radio, so that meant we had finally made it back to the road.

I was heading in the direction of the gunfire when I came upon Shoe. He was lying on the ground behind a tree, looking at the sky, oblivious to everything that was happening around him.

‘Hey, what are you doing over there, taking a nap?’ I positioned myself not far from him, trying to inspect the area below us.

‘There are four spirits. I’m waiting for Nosov’s signal to throw the hand grenades, then they’ll hit them again with the machine guns…’ Shoe was relaxed; he seemed far away from the war, like a tourist who’d dropped in from some Caribbean beach, sunbathing and sipping on a nice cold drink.

‘There’s the body of an OMON guy in the woods, their sniper…’ I said, peering out a little to observe the situation better. ‘An enemy shot an entire clip into him. We have to take him down to his men…’

‘Hey, quit sticking your damn head out,’ he scolded me with a little kick on the leg. ‘In a few days you’ll be discharged, isn’t that enough for you? You want to leave the army in a coffin with the band behind you?’

‘Relax, brother, I see them.’ I took my rifle and got into a comfortable position. ‘I’ll take care of them; there’s no need to pollute the wilderness with your bombs…’

The men were hidden in a deep pit, with their backs to us, about fifty metres away. I shot an entire clip at them. Three fell immediately. One managed to move in time and began to fire in my direction, but I shot him in the forehead.

We heard shots coming from the other side – our men were attacking the same enemy position, which no longer contained any live Arabs.

‘We already handled it, Ivanisch!’ I yelled.

‘Why do you always have to do things your way?’ Shoe asked me, smiling. ‘So, where’s this kid’s body?’

We went back up to get it. Shoe took his rifle; I took the young Chechen’s. I inspected the enemy’s body and found army documents, a plastic card and a piece of paper covered in Arabic handwriting and various stamps. I took everything, because our commanders and secret service agents loved playing with the paperwork – when it came to tracking down our soldiers killed or gone missing in the war they’d beat around the bush, but when it came to terrorists they were always at the ready. They would even send entire investigative teams to find the body of some Islamic extremist.

Shoe and I picked up the sniper’s corpse, and, holding him by the jacket and feet, we went down to the road.

When we arrived the fighting was over. Our men stood beside ten or so enemy corpses piled up at the edge of the road, while the OMON dogs ran in circles, agitated, sniffing the air and growling in the direction of the dead.

One of the OMON men sat on the ground; Spoon was treating a hole just above the knee on his right leg. Another was already on a stretcher; his comrades were trying to make room for him inside their car. The driver stood next to them, and he kept repeating, like a prayer, the phrase:

‘Put him in feet first, remember, feet first…’

This had to do with an old Russian custom, according to which only the dead should be transported with their heads towards the front, so that they come out feet first. Drivers and pilots always made sure the wounded were loaded feet first, so that when they reached their destination they would come out like the living, head first – this was a kind of insurance, a good luck charm that prevented the wounded from dying during the trip.

An OMON soldier was fiddling with the radio while Nosov spoke on the handset. Before going into the woods, Nosov had given the order to call in reinforcements to ensure the transport of the wounded and the prisoners, since two of our vehicles had been attacked. The reinforcements had started on their way, but they had run into enemy fire on the road. It sounded as though they were still in the middle of a battle; you could hear shots and explosions through the radio.

‘Comrade Captain, we’ve been hit… On the rise at the twentieth kilometre from the inhabited area…’ In a weak, shaky voice a young soldier was trying to provide useful information.