Stephan Collishaw - Amber

As we wound slowly down the rutted lane to the village, which was situated on an incline, the wind began to drop. The sun appeared, bloody and heavy, sagging towards the hazy horizon. The fields and trees were white with dust. As the late rays of sun caught them they shone scarlet. We were a kilometre from the village when Kolya, sitting beside me, spotted the dark shape in the dirt a little way off the road.

‘There,’ he called.

I jumped from the back of the APC and made my way towards it.

‘Stop!’ Lieutenant Zhuralev called. I turned to him. He was perched on top of the leading APC. ‘Mines,’ he called irritably. ‘Do you want to get blown to pieces?’

A couple of sappers jumped down with their dog and began a careful reconnaissance of the area.

The body, when I got to it, was sheathed in gritty dust. It was, in fact, just the torso of a body. For some moments it was hard to recognise what I was looking at. It looked like the carcass of a sheep or a goat. The arms had been hacked clumsily from the body. The bones glistened where they poked from the flesh. The head had been hacked away too, leaving folds of flesh. The legs were gone, and the genitals.

The torso had been peeled. The skin hung off in folds of fatty flesh, tarred now with dust. I stopped a couple of paces from it. Despite the sticky heat I felt my spine turn to ice. I placed my gun on the ground beside me.

‘Is it him?’ a voice called from behind me.

I did not answer. No air was able to work its way up or down my throat. I felt my jaw clenched tight, so tight it hurt.

‘Is it Chistyakov?’

I turned to the APC, which had pulled carefully from the track, staying within the parameters of the area checked by the sappers.

‘How the fuck would I know?’ I shouted, the words tearing at my throat, the exertion causing tears to spring to my eyes. I turned back to the torso.

‘Fuck,’ I heard Kolya whisper behind me, from the top of the APC. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

The sweet stink of raw flesh drifted backwards and forwards with the eddying wind. I looked down the valley towards the mountains, towards the rise of trees, dark already, slipping quietly, unobtrusively into the oncoming night, as if guiltily sidling away from the event, wanting nothing to do with it.

I felt a surge of blinding rage swell in my chest. It caught as it rose to my throat. I turned quickly from the torso to face Sasha, who was vomiting by the side of the APC.

It was too late to launch a raid on the village that evening. We returned to the base and passed the night in silence; even the granddads were subdued. When the pre-dawn light seeped over the peaks of the mountains, we stubbed out our cigarettes and readied ourselves for the raid. I moved in a hashish dream, following my hands and feet through the necessary actions. I held the rage tight in my chest, feeding off it, not sure even against whom I raged.

The choppers rose into the cool air, turned and swooped away across the trees, down the river towards the village. The moon was up still, its large, pale face mournful and tired. As the sun edged its way up the mountains from China, across Pakistan, the western sky remained dark. White clouds plumed from the wheels of the APCs on the road beneath us. I thrust a magazine into my Kalashnikov, heard it click into place and kissed it. ‘For Chistyakov.’ The metal was cool beneath my lips.

I gazed down at the country below us, pale beneath the light of the moon and the dying night. The river glittered. The forest was dark. The village rose up before us on the swell of a hill, still slumbering. Behind us, a dark eagle, flew another chopper. There was no pause above the huddled streets. No time for thought. As we drew close, the helicopter banked sharply and dived down towards its target. Dawn was shattered with the whistle of rockets. Blue-pink flames sprayed from our guns. There was a heavy thud and a dark column of debris erupted from the village. A second rose beside it. The other chopper moved in behind us and a moment later the village was transformed into a bubbling cauldron of mud and dirt and rags and spokes of wood. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. My heart pounded. I heard a whoop beside me. Kolya gripped my shoulder. His eyes were large, his pupils dilated.

The helicopter descended. As it rocked against the earth we leapt from its belly. My feet did not feel the ground beneath them. I flew across the churned earth. Kolya let off a round and I heard the bullets thud against the crumbling walls of the village. Wooden beams pierced the broken walls, like ribs from the carcass of a long-dead animal.

As I leapt across the walls, my eyes flicked from the dark corners to the smouldering mounds of rubble, searching for signs of life that needed to be extinguished. The only movement was the slide of clay as the walls crumbled around us. The village was deserted. The air was heavy with the scent of explosives, with the acrid smoke from burning wood, with dust churned from the earth. The rotors of the helicopters throbbed, the fire crackled, and our feet crunched in the rubble. From the far side of the village there rose a pitiful wailing. We scrambled towards the sound.

Beneath the rubble we found a dog, its body twisted and crushed, its fur matted with blood and dust. Kolya raised his gun and shot it. Its small body jerked against the earth and fell silent suddenly, mid-wail. Tethered at the foot of the hill there were goats and a couple of camels and an ass. They gazed up towards the village as if astounded by the sudden destruction of their home. A granddad who had joined us by the dog raised his gun and fired. The ass dropped to its knees and keeled over on to its side. Another granddad cheered. He fired himself, but his shot went wide and the first soldier jeered at him.

I turned away from the small group gathered at the edge of the village. As I wandered back across the flattened walls and charred spine of the settlement, I heard the crack of their rifles and the frightened moan of the animals tethered below them. In the corner of what had been a house, I stooped and brushed away the dirt. On the packed earth floor was a child’s kite, broken-backed and ragged. From its tail hung a pink ribbon.

The sun rose above the jagged ridge of mountains and caressed the earth with its light. The heavy throb of the blades of the helicopters had ceased and from the trees behind the village I heard the call of a bird. I took the ribbon from the bottom of the kite and felt its synthetic smoothness between my cold fingers. Behind me the flattened village sighed and creaked as it settled once more into the dirt from which it had been raised.

Before we left, fuel was siphoned from the tank of one of the choppers and poured over the animals. Lieutenant Zhuralev tossed the burning stub of his cigarette on to the mound of corpses. As we rose into the air and circled the shattered village, the smoke curled into the pale morning sky.

Snowcapped mountains glittered in the rising sun. The river twisted and turned and rushed, white-backed, across its rocky bed. Cranes broke from the reeds as we passed, startled by the pulse of our rotors. The higher slopes of the mountains were dark with fir and cedar. Beneath them, across the foothills, the sun caught the leaves of the ash and alder and walnut trees. The sky was brilliantly clear. Deep blue. The colour of the Virgin’s gown in an icon in a church I had seen once as a child. Pure blue. What a beautiful country, I thought.

Zinotis’s thick old volume on the Jewellery of the Kushan Empire , which I had borrowed for Vassily some years before, was at the bottom of a pile of books in the back room of the workshop. My eyes fell on it almost as soon as I stepped into the room. I had returned to get some cash from the safe hidden beneath the floorboards. It was very doubtful I would get any information out of the Santariskes Clinic if Kolya was not there. It was hard enough to get information from doctors about yourself, never mind about other patients. A few dollars might extract an address from one of the badly paid orderlies.