Free Fall Page 3

  ‘All right, Nicolay, you’ve earned a spot in the sniper course. Starting tomorrow you’ll be working with Comrade Sergeant Yakut!’

  From then on, every day for four hours, I would leave the main group and follow individualised training with a small detachment composed of twelve men. The sniper instructor was a sergeant of Siberian origin, like me, and so they called him Yakut, after the region he came from.[1] He was sharp and knew all there was to know about war. He’d fought in several armed conflicts and was an expert in ‘micro expeditions’, brief and highly risky engagements in special war operations. He seldom spoke, and spent most of our lessons teaching us the basics of shooting with precision rifles. He explained how to make the most of the telescope and how to pick out and hunt down other snipers. The principle wasn’t difficult; you had to move slowly without letting yourself be seen, be patient, and be extremely alert – like a hunter.

  After a month of training exercises, I’d figured out a way to escape from the base. So one night I grabbed a few of my things and crossed two fences watched by the sentry. Like a shadow, I crept along the walls, but when I finally emerged outside the base, thinking that I’d made it, there was Zabelin, eating an ice cream.

  ‘Want one?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Might as well…’

  I couldn’t imagine what he had in mind, but something told me he wouldn’t get me into trouble. I followed him to where he’d parked his car. We drove into the city, although it must have been two or three in the morning, and we stopped at the sort of diner frequented by truckers, a place where people would sneak off to their cars with prostitutes.

  We sat down at a table and, without exchanging a word, ate a meal together. He washed his meat down with long sips of vodka. He offered me some too, but I declined – I didn’t want to get drunk. After eating in perfect silence, Zabelin ordered two lemon ice creams. Once the obese, exhausted waitress had set them on the table, he finally began to talk.

  ‘Nicolay, I don’t know what kind of mess you were born into or raised in, but I can assure you that here, in the army, nobody cares who you are. You don’t exist. Here you’re a number, and if you make one mistake they erase you, just as they would erase a number. I’m certain you could become a good saboteur, and I think that this is your only chance to save yourself. You’re going to find yourself in serious trouble, but if you follow my advice you’ll thank me for it one day…’ He spoke softly, without a sign of irritation, still calmly eating his ice cream.

  I was eating my ice cream too, and I wasn’t thinking about military prison – where, if he wanted, he could have sent me without much difficulty. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was figuring out how he’d caught me, when I thought I’d been careful and invisible. He kept talking:

  ‘You running away from my unit makes me look bad. If this story got out I’d have problems with superior command, and I don’t want any problems with them, understood? You know, don’t you, that all deserters get sent to military prison? You know what that means? Well, don’t think that just because you’ve been in juvie a couple of times you’ve seen all there is to see in this world… The point, dear Nicolay, is that starting tomorrow I’m going to send you on clean-up duty for three days. You’ll help the team that runs the military prison here, not far from our base. When you return, you can decide whether to run away or stay here and do your duty like the rest of us…’

  We returned to camp. I went to sleep in the barracks and in the morning a sergeant woke me up with a taunt:

  ‘Let’s go, Count of Monte Cristo, they’re hauling you off to jail!’

  I got dressed while my comrades were still sleeping, and went out to the yard. A car was waiting for me, with three soldiers and a lieutenant. We introduced ourselves, and after the military formalities we left for the prison.

  Zabelin hadn’t exaggerated when he’d told me about the prison. In the yard, a few soldiers were walking in a circle, wearing faded old military uniforms; huddled together they looked like an indistinct dark grey blob. They had big white numbers on their backs, and they were frighteningly thin, shuffling around hopelessly, dragging their feet in imitation of a military march. It was the most horrible place I’d ever seen in my life.

  A soldier holding a baton stood in the middle of the circle and barked out commands:

  ‘Left, left, one, two, three!’ He had an iron whistle in his mouth, tied to a little strap around his neck.

  When he whistled, everyone immediately dropped to the ground, their bodies straight like logs, their hands on their heads. Yet one of them remained on his feet.

  The soldier screamed at him, his voice almost hysterical:

  ‘You! Did you not hear the whistle?’ Then, seeing that there was no reaction, he moved quickly over to him. The prisoner’s knees shook so hard you could almost hear them knocking, but he kept on his feet. ‘For fuck’s sake, are you deaf?’ the soldier said, standing right in front of him. And without warning, he unleashed a series of blows with the baton, on the man’s back, neck, head. The man fell to his knees and wet his trousers. He was crying, begging the soldier not to beat him anymore. But the soldier’s only response was to laugh in his face.

  ‘You piece of shit traitor, you pissed all over yourself! How dare you?’ He gave him another volley of blows. The prisoner was on the ground now, the soldier’s boots kicking him.

  The most chilling thing was that the whole scene had taken place in absolute silence. No one breathed, as if the yard were completely airless, without oxygen, without anything at all. It was like we were trapped inside a bubble that kept us from understanding what was going on.

  My task, along with six other men, was to do the cleaning and take the food to the blocks where the military prisoners were being held. None of them was mentally stable; it was like they were in a catatonic state. They didn’t respond to questions; they behaved like animals, scurrying from one side of the cell to the other and then freezing the moment you looked at them, as if they were afraid to be caught moving. They lived according to the simple orders dictated by the whistle; they would eat in their cells, then march out to the yard, take their blows, undergo humiliation and torture from the guards, and then go to sleep at night only to wake up the following morning and start it all over again. They couldn’t communicate with each other, and any activity that would let them think was prohibited. They were unrecoverable, so deeply traumatised that – as one of the guards later confirmed – once they left prison, they never managed to reintegrate into society again. Many of them committed suicide; some wandered the streets until winter came and the cold killed them.

  After three days in that prison, I decided not to tempt fate again, and so I returned to the routine of boot camp.

  We saboteurs had an unusual uniform; we wore civilian clothes, things from home. As we would be conducting missions behind the front lines, travelling through territory under enemy control, it was essential that we be able to pass unrecognised. ‘The most important thing,’ Zabelin always said, ‘is your shoes.’ He explained to us that in wartime many soldiers complained of foot pain because of their boots, and he made us wear trainers so we would always be comfortable and light on our feet.

  Zabelin had taught us the precious rules of ‘saboteur survival and solidarity’, as he called them. They were like commandments, and each of us had to learn them by heart. The idea was to create a sense of unity, to make us into our own clan within the army. The rules were very precise: saboteurs obey no one outside their commanding officer; under no circumstances may saboteurs be transferred to other units of the armed forces; in armed combat, saboteurs are forbidden to leave their dead on the ground. If a group suffered serious losses and was left isolated from the rest of the unit, they were not allowed to retreat from the line of operations. The only valid alternative was the most drastic: suicide. Each of us carried a personal hand grenade, which we were supposed to use to blow ourselves and the others up should the unit be surrounded by enemie
s and run out of ammunition. They were extreme rules, and I didn’t like them very much. I didn’t understand why we would have to kill ourselves, just because the saboteur strategy had no retreat plan, unlike every other unit of the Russian army.

  What’s more, unlike the rest of the Russian army, we had nothing to do with military law. Every Russian soldier is required to memorise if not the entire military code, at the very least the principal articles. But as for us, we’ve never even touched our books, just as none of us has ever learned to march or salute properly.

  Our weaponry, however, was better than the rest of the army’s. The paratroopers were equipped with Kalashnikov assault rifles, models with folding stocks and silencers which were attached in place of flash suppressors. With the silencer fitted we used ammunition with less gunpowder – the bullet would explode with less power so as not to exceed the speed of sound, and thus the weapon effectively turned out to be almost silent compared to the rifles they used in the infantry.

  In actual war, I was soon to discover, you would detach the silencers; they were cumbersome, and during a mission it was hard to get the right ammunition. The charges you could find on the front line were the usual Kalashnikov ones, whereas you had to ‘reserve’ the special stuff at the warehouses, which wasn’t very convenient. This is why everybody would replace the silencers with flash suppressors picked up from wherever, often taken from an enemy. If you were lucky, you could find nice handmade models that worked to perfection – that is, that completely concealed the burst of flame created by the shot.

  My comrades and I used two precision rifles. One was the classic Dragunov with a long barrel, useful for covering long distances. With one of these, its release modified and reload slowed down, an expert soldier – if he had the right cartridge – could shoot up to a kilometre away. It was a rifle used primarily as a field weapon, good for operations in wide-open spaces or at the foot of the mountains. The other rifle was a variation for special units: a VSS with a folding stock, a scope that detached easily for transport and an integrated silencer on the barrel. I liked that gun; it was light, precise, and it never betrayed you. The scope in particular was very sturdy and even if it slipped or hit something heavy it didn’t break. The VSS didn’t make any noise, but it only worked with a certain type of cartridge. It was able to cover a maximum range of three hundred metres, and it was useful for urban combat, where the gunfights were at very close range. You could also use it for reconnaissance, scouting and sabotage operations. The back-up groups for the assault squads often used it to keep watch over enemies without being seen.

  We learned to parachute jump; first in broad daylight, and then after some practice, only at night time.

  The idea of jumping out of a plane scared me, and I had no desire to try it. The first time, Zabelin had to force me to jump, dragging me to the side door and pushing me out into the air. The parachute opened by itself. I felt something hard yank on my shoulders and my neck went crack – whiplash, as I found out later – and in a few seconds my legs hit the ground. My left knee, which I landed on with my whole weight, blew up like a balloon. In the two weeks afterwards I did the planned jumps, even though my left leg hurt like hell every time I landed. That way, at least, I learned to land as gently as possible.

  Night jumps were very dangerous. The ground beneath us was dark, and even if we asked what altitude we were flying at – to figure out how many seconds to wait before opening the parachute – nobody ever told us the exact height, and we often hit the ground sooner than we expected and got hurt. I landed in the trees twice, and it wasn’t much fun. I didn’t like parachute jumping at all, and I never learned to handle it without anxiety.

  *

  In this way, a couple of relatively peaceful months went by. By then, we were all so used to night drills and all the other arduous aspects of the saboteur’s life that we hardly noticed them anymore.

  But I had noticed that Zabelin often brought up the subject of war. He talked a lot about Afghanistan, Afghan fighters, Islam, Muslim society and their philosophy of life, but most of all he talked about military tactics. Knowing that we were right in the middle of the Chechen-Russian conflict, I began to worry – I had a million doubts about what our commanders were really thinking, and I didn’t like it at all.

  One by one, they started to pull people from our unit, and my comrades disappeared into thin air. They asked one man to report to the colonel’s office and soon afterwards we were all told that he had been transferred to a fixed post, where he was to spend the rest of his military service.

  After three months of field training, it was my turn.

  That morning, they called me to the colonel’s office. There were two other guys from my unit with me, and we were all anxious. Where are they going to send us? our eyes asked one another.

  The office was luxurious, full of valuable antique wooden furniture and leather sofas and armchairs. A lot of military stuff hung on the walls: flags, insignias, photographs, even some antique weapons. The colonel was a nasty, beefy man who was bursting out of his uniform and had a face the colour of beetroot. He was accompanied by three officers, two of whom had a very dodgy look about them – as my dearly departed uncle would have said, ‘they were born thugs’.

  After the formal introductions, they invited us to sit down on the sofa, right in front of a big television. As we sat down, I searched the eyes of my comrades. Unlike me, they looked happy; maybe those idiots were expecting to see Cinderella. The colonel himself put on the videocassette. The first image that appeared on the screen showed the flag of the Russian Federation, which waved proudly amidst smoke and fire, riddled with holes and torn in one corner as if mice had nibbled away at it. At that instant I felt panic rise within me. I couldn’t show my desperation, but my whole body screamed silently. I knew immediately, I was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt: they were sending us to Chechnya.

  A male voice, strong and determined, and an equally determined female voice, spoke theatrically over images of war, their words snaking between the charred bodies of our soldiers, the children looking out from the rubble in the streets, the civilians marching off in rows, forced to abandon their homes… The shots documenting the chaos of battle were interspersed with clips taken by Chechens and Arabs as they decapitated one of our soldiers who’d been taken prisoner, while the tanks burned on the road in Grozny. Then Russian hostages who had been released showed the camera the stumps of their hands, fingers and ears, which had been cut off by their kidnappers in order to blackmail their families. The image of a Russian transport plane shot down by the Arabs at the base of the mountains and our soldiers’ bodies strewn all over the rocks was accompanied by the words: ‘The terrorists have no respect for the living or for the dead: an aeroplane carrying our soldiers fallen in battle was shot down by Chechen-Arab guerrillas, so our men were killed a second time.’

  Sadness came over me. I was going to a place where every human value I had ever known would be meaningless. I couldn’t turn back; I would be forced to accept the rules of the game, of which I was now a part. I thought of the stories told by my grandfather Nikolay, who had travelled all over Europe during the Second World War. I remember vividly how this strong man – who, when I was little, had always seemed so real and pure – could handle the difficulties of everyday life without batting an eye, but when the word ‘war’ came out of his mouth, he would suddenly become sad and almost seem to wilt. I thought back on the war in Transnistria, when I was still a little boy, and the only thing that came to mind was the frightening number of bodies on the streets of Bender, my hometown.

  Meanwhile, the voices on the film went on with their insane story, explaining, in the same flat tone they used in propaganda announcements for the masses, that the Chechens were the bad guys and the Russians the good guys; that truth, power and even God himself were on our side, and that the only good thing a Russian could do in this life was kill as many Chechens as possible, and exterminate all their allies, the Arab terror
ists, fundamentalist Muslims and ‘all the weak elements under the influence of their propaganda’. There was no way I wanted to get into that mess, but the reality was clear. When the film concluded, with a shot of the same flag as the beginning, I had already lost all hope.

  The three officers began to explain to us the reasons why we had to go and risk our lives, and my comrades seemed hypnotised: they were sitting on the sofa with foolish half-grins on their faces, and they punctuated the officers’ every statement with enthusiastic nods of affirmation.

  ‘So, boys,’ the portly colonel broke in, ‘the Nation is asking you to do your part! Are you ready?’

  These words cut me like a knife. I couldn’t feel anything; my head was about to blow off and shoot ahead by itself, like an old locomotive speeding downhill, detached from the rest of the train.

  All three of us leapt to our feet, and together, in perfectly idiotic unison, we yelled with all our might:

  ‘Yes, Comrade Colonel! We will serve and honour the Russian Federation!’

  ‘Good thing…’ he said ironically, switching off the television, his fat finger pushing so hard on the remote control that it went crack.

  Once we were out of that office, they didn’t allow us to return to the barracks. They led us to a room where we waited to hear our fate.

  After a few hours, Zabelin arrived. He was in good spirits, even whistling a little tune. My comrades asked him loads of questions: ‘What are they going to do with us?’ ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ He hated stupid questions, as I said, so he looked at them with a smile and said:

  ‘Did they have you watch that video? You’ll be in next year’s version…’ At which they stopped asking questions.

  Zabelin took me aside and whispered to me. ‘Nicolay, I put in a word for you with someone I know; he’s called Captain Nosov,’ he said, looking at me sternly. ‘He’s an old friend of mine, an expert saboteur. You’ll be on his independent team. Do what he says, and if you’re lucky, you’ll go home alive and in one piece.’ Then he shook my hand. Before leaving, he told us all to go to hell, an old Russian saying for good luck.