Balázs Pataki - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Northern Passage

Pete smiles. “Clear, sir.”

The big man nods to the Lieutenants. Followed by a half dozen fighters, they enter the airplane with a stretcher, carefully place the Top’s body on it and lift it to their shoulders. Without bothering to ask, Tarasov and Pete join them. None of the former Marines has a word against it.

“Our Sergeant Major has returned, here he comes!” the big man shouts as the men carrying Hartman’s body descend the ramp. He salutes. “Attention on deck!”

Tarasov doesn’t know much about Marine rituals, nor has he witnessed anything like that before in the Tribe. Looking at the solemn faces of the saluting fighters, he nonetheless understands that Colonel Leighley has just given Sergeant Major Hartman the greatest honor a simple command can convey.

A dozen Stalkers stand around one of the makeshift tables in the Antonov bar. Their faces are somber like that of men attending a funeral, but what they have fixed their eyes on is not a coffin but a single bottle of vodka.

“Me last bottle,” Ashot sadly says. “Brothers, we have a difficult choice. Either you let me water it, using only purified water of course, and then we have two bottles. Three, maybe.”

“Forget it,” Shrink says.

“Or we could give each bro a little sip and then die of dehydration.”

“De-vodkation,” a Stalker adds.

“Damn,” says another, “I can’t shoot straight unless I’ve had some vodka!”

“Is it really the last bottle or are you just trying to hike the price?” a Stalker asks, drumming his fingers on his AKS-74U assault carbine.

“I swear to God it is!” Ashot huffily replies.

”Bullshit, you’re lying!”

“Let the Zone take me if I am!”

“What about charging and breaking the siege?” another asks.

“Go ahead, Ahmed Turk,” Ashot says. “Go and charge them tribals. We gonna share your vodka ration with great pleasure!”

A sudden detonation shakes the dilapidated airplane. The concussion makes the bottle quiver.

“Shit!” Shrink shouts and grabs the bottle before it could fall. “Not those damned mortars again!”

“Still alive,” one of the Stalkers manning the defenses reports on the radio.

“They’re just playing with us,” the Stalker nicknamed Turk grumbles. “If we still had the men who went out to search for Stalker paradise, we could just run them through! This blockade is driving me insane!”

“Well, our last dose of remedy to that is here in front of us,” Shrink says. “I would offer it to the bravest Stalker but since we’re just sitting ducks here I don’t know what to do.”

Another mortar shell detonates, this time much closer to the Stalker bar. Instinctively, the Stalkers duck.

“I’m fed up with this!” Ashot yells angrily. “They gonna destroy me bar! To hell with them tribal idiots! Just because they don’t drink they want us to die of thirst! Ashot says no, fuck you!”

“Why, what can you do about it?” Ahmed Turk asks. “Blowing your big Armenian nose at them?”

“They had it coming!” Ashot shouts back at him. “If that’s not gonna make’m go away, I will just shoot’em all!”

Then something happens that only the most veteran Stalkers have ever seen, and even they only a very long time ago: Ashot grabs an AKS-74U and storms out of his bar.

“Hey!” a Stalker shouts. “That’s my rifle!”

“Is he nuts?” Ahmed Turk asks.

“Sure he is!” Shrink says. “Damn, my worst patient is loose!”

He runs after Ashot but the barkeep is already up on the container wall.

“Now listen to me you crazy tribals!” he shouts into the wilderness. “Get the fuck out of here or I will kill you all! This is me base and me bar! Why do you want ruining me business? Did me bar ever hurt you?”

“Ashot! Get the fuck down!” Shrink shouts from below. “You want to get yourself killed, you idiot?”

Ashot fires a burst into the air. “Go away or face me wrath, you cowards!”

”Shrink!” The sound of the Stalker in the lookout tower sounds anxious. “I can see dust rising. The Tribe is preparing for attack!”

“Man the machine guns,” the Stalker leader yells. “Let’s bring this to an end at last!”

A Stalker tries to drag the reckless barkeep into the safety of the sand bags lined up on the steel containers but Ashot pushes him away.

“Come and get some you bitches! I fire me rifle at you! When I run outta bullets, I blow my nose at you! Then I give you worse and fart at you! Now come and be men, and dontcha dare hide from me rage!”

“I see them moving. They are about to go around and attack us from the rear!”

Hearing this, Shrink climbs the ladder to the nearest machine gun nest on the container wall and peers through his binoculars. The lookout was right—heavy vehicles are swirling up dust all around the besieged Stalker base. But if it is an attack, it’s a strange one. No more mortars are fired, no heavy machines guns pin down the defenders on the wall where the barkeep continues to taunt the far away attackers.

“I will turn you to bloodsucker food! You don’t believe me you bitches?”

Ashot fires the assault carbine in the direction of the dust clouds. Then, still at a safe distance from the base, the vehicles take a turn to the west and accelerate.

“Wait a second… looks like they’re leaving,” the lookout reports.

Shrink frowns. “What?”

“They’ve gone around the base and… yes! They’re moving to the west, all of them! It’s over! They move away!”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Ashot shouts. “Run! Just run, you cowards! Scared of me, huh? Take this!” With the magazine in the carbine empty, he draws a pistol and fires after the Humvee column. “How about that?”

“Ashot for the win,” a bewildered Stalker says.

“This will teach them not to come to places they aren’t invited to, haha!” another laughs.

The crazed barkeep looks down from the wall at the Stalkers and grins triumphantly. “You all owe me twenty dollars!”

“Oh my goodness,” the Shrink says watching the Tribe’s siege force drive through the western forest and take the road leading to their stronghold. “I’ve never seen such a thing!”

“What? Is it true that Ashot’s ugly face scared them away?” an excited Uncle Yar asks as he comes up in a hurry.

“I don’t know how he managed that,” the Shrink says waving his head, still not entirely believing what he has just seen, “but he more than qualifies for our last bottle of vodka!”

Yar laughs. “Ashot the brave—I never believed I’d ever say those words in one breath!”

“You owe me twenty dollars too!” Ashot cheerily shouts.

The echo of the three rifle volleys fired by seven warriors rolls across the valley beyond. Nearly a hundred freshly dug graves line the runway on the top of the mountain, joining many older ones. The salutes, the Colonel’s short speech, the grim looks of the hardened faces appear to Tarasov like any military funeral; only the presence of grieving Hazara women, many of them lamenting over a fallen husband or lover, tells that this is not just any military unit burying its fallen but the Tribe.

Sadness is over Mikhailo Tarasov’s face. Seeing Sergeant Major Hartman’s body being lowered into his grave was sad enough, but when he looks at Pete at his father’s side, he knows that he is about losing, or at least being separated, from another friend as well. During the time they spent together since he and the Top found Pete in the state of a wasted junkie, he came to like him; but no bond between travelling companions, no matter how many perils they had been through together, could match that between father and son. Knowing that Pete would have never gotten his proper schooling of life in the Exclusion Zone without him is no comfort; thinking about being separated from the Zone for good only adds to his sadness, because Tarasov knows that returning to his native land would be utterly foolish.