Free Fall Read online

  We knew that to survive we had to trust our comrades, but we also had someone else to lean on: Captain Nosov. He was like an older brother. We knew that whatever he did, he did it to save our skins, so that we could return home to our mothers alive and in one piece.

  Nosov belonged to the generation of those whom the old generals referred to as ‘gladiators’, so called because many soldiers from that draft had never experienced a time of peace. They had gone to the war in Afghanistan as young men, and had embarked on a long, sad life, bouncing from one war to another without rest, taking part in every bloody conflict that broke out in USSR territory before and after its fall.

  He had fought in all the post-Soviet wars; for a time he had even been stationed in the former Yugoslavia, where he was an instructor for the special units of the Serbian army. When the Chechen conflict broke out, he’d been one of the first Russians sent out there.

  He was an expert saboteur, old Ivanisch, and every time one of us mentioned his name it was evident that the soldiers in the other units knew and respected him. Our enemies knew him well too, because when he fought in the war in Afghanistan, Chechnya was still part of the USSR and many Chechens had actually done their military service under him. It was incredible to think that the same soldiers – now grown men and professional soldiers – were now fighting against us. It often happened that one of the Chechen prisoners would recognise among the Russian soldiers an old friend from military school with whom they had once fought.

  Sometimes Nosov would tell us war stories, and what struck me the most about him was the tenderness of the words he used to describe all the brutality and horror of social collapse. It was like he was talking about something very dear to him, like family. At times even the enemy seemed like a fundamental part of his existence, as though without it his life would make no sense.

  In my head, I had extremely contradictory images of our captain. Sometimes he seemed too brutish, almost inhuman, while at other times I felt that he cared more about us than he cared about himself. In time I would come to understand that for Ivanisch a single person was less important than the whole unit. Our personal histories didn’t interest him. He saw in each of us a role; we were part of a mechanism intended to carry out specific tasks. This was his way of caring about us; he couldn’t allow himself to get too attached to the individual.

  Nosov didn’t like to talk about himself or his family; we knew only that he had a sister named Rita, and that once in a while she would write to him.

  He burned those letters right after reading them, and if the circumstances allowed it he would immediately ask one of us – often me – to write a reply. He always said the same things; he told her how charming the places we found ourselves in were, how the sun went down, how beautiful the rivers that flowed high in the mountains were. He explained how hard life was for the people there, and then every so often would ask us to add something of our own, ‘for beauty’s sake’, as he would say. In every letter he would reassure his sister, telling her to ‘keep clear of the war’ – of course he didn’t write that he was actually part of an active unit on the front lines; instead, he invented little stories about us, the men who were guarding a warehouse with him, in a safe place, on some Russian air base.

  All we knew about Nosov was that he didn’t have a house, a wife or children. His relationships with women were limited to the little parties organised by his officer friends, where young nurses and cooks would go. He himself called those soirées ‘bordellos’, and after every one they had to carry him back to the unit. He’d come in very drunk, semi-unconscious and with scratch marks from a woman on his face. All the officials said that Nosov was a hit with the ladies because he had a ‘big calibre’.

  There weren’t many of us; perhaps that’s why we became close to one another so quickly.

  The first time I felt a strong sense of solidarity was during one of my first battles. We were walking close to the wall of a house when we were attacked by surprise. As we tried to cross the yard a group of enemy soldiers lying in wait on the roof of the house across the way opened fire on us. A hail of bullets came down around us, and pieces of brick flew off the wall and ricocheted. We took off running. In the chaos, however, we managed to keep calm; nobody changed direction or passed anyone else, and we moved as we always did; three covered, the others ran, then switch… We were in complete synchrony, linked parts of a single organism. As I ran with the others, that feeling gave me courage.

  Of course, living together wasn’t easy at first – each of us had led very different lives, until we found ourselves in hell alongside a bunch of complete strangers.

  My comrades came from all over Russia, and obviously each had his own story behind him, but we had all been marked by the same things: run-ins with the law, unstable families, difficult personalities…

  The oldest comrade was Moscow, who, as you can tell by the nickname, came from the nation’s capital. He’d been called to arms two years late, because as soon as he had come of age he had run away from home to avoid military duty, but ultimately even he, like me, had been caught and sent to war.

  One of our other brothers was Shoe. He had two juvenile convictions for burglary under his belt. His name was really Viktor, but he had earned his nickname because he never wanted to take off his shoes. Nosov was always yelling at him, telling him that if he didn’t wash his feet, sooner or later the smell would poison the entire unit. Shoe was always cheerful and had an athlete’s physique: he was nimble like a mouse, and he could fit through even the narrowest of spaces.

  Another was Zhenya, aka Deer, so called for his hunting skills. He came from the region of Altai, in southern Siberia. His parents were scholars; his mother was an archaeologist or anthropologist, something like that. Deer was a normal guy, but when he got mad or didn’t believe what you were telling him his eyes became two slits so narrow that they disappeared.

  Then there was Spoon, whose real name was Roman. He was physically strong, a little wild in his way of doing things. He would eat whatever he came across; he was always hungry. He was originally from a remote village in the woods at the foot of the Ural mountains. He got his nickname because of his surname, which in Russian sounded very similar to the word ‘spoon’.

  Finally, there was big, bulky Aleksandr, who was from St Petersburg. Even though he was incapable of stringing together two words that made complete sense he always talked a lot, mostly about wanting to become a footballer (his nickname, in fact, was Zenith, from his favourite football team). He was our machine gunner, and he always carried his RPK 7.62-calibre gun. Nosov would joke that Zenith was ‘Mother Russia’s last shot’.

  As for me, in Chechnya just as in Transnistria, everyone just called me Kolima. I was the sniper; I had to protect my comrades during transfers, participate in operations as a storm trooper, and find and eliminate the enemy snipers collaborating with other units.

  In short, we of the 76th division were a group of men each cut to his own cloth, and despite the differences in age, background or social class, none of us ever felt alone. In fact, if I look back on it now, the only thing that truly helped us endure the war was finding in the others friends to lean on. Friends who strived every day with all their might to do the same thing you were doing: trying to stay alive.

  We brought back trophies from every mission: the weapons and ammunition taken from the enemy. For this reason every saboteur had a couple of American and European guns, the most prized of which were the Colt .45 ACPs and their American clones. Having a weapon like that meant a lot; it meant that the person carrying it was a cutthroat, and commanded respect from the others. If a young soldier found a pistol like that, a senior soldier would swipe it from him, and thus the weapon would pass from hand to hand, until it wound up in the hands of the commanding officers.

  The Austrian Glock and its variations, however, were the weapons of choice for conscripts and contract soldiers. People also liked CZs and other German guns. Among the terrorists, besides
an unbelievable number of Russian-made firearms, like Makarov 9s, Stechkins and Tokarev 7.62s, European or American guns were always going around, generally ACP 45s, PARA 9s or 9x21s. I myself took a 9x21-calibre 98 Beretta FS from a dead man’s body, a beautiful, very handy weapon, more precise and secure than Russian pistols.

  The assault rifles, as I said, were modified. We also used drum magazines with a higher number of charges than usual, and we would tie normal magazines together so that when we ran out of shots we could replace them in a second.

  The enemy’s bayonets and knives were almost always American, and when we could we took them for ourselves. We liked those weapons a lot because they were useful and easy to handle, whereas the Russian bayonet seemed like a sort of universal tool you could use for anything – even plumbing, if you wanted – except close combat.

  From the body of the first enemy sniper I killed, I took a Canadian-made knife designed for the American army. It was an all-black bayonet, nice, light, easy to carry and to hook to your belt. A year later, when I walked into a fight with a young Arab – our group was on a mission in a small city that we were liberating – that bayonet saved my life.

  That one was a close call.

  I was on reconnaissance in the basement of a city hall building. It was too dark to see anything, but all of a sudden I heard a noise. It was clear that the other guy had noticed my presence too. Shooting blindly, we used up our entire magazines without landing a single shot.

  After that, the poor bastard threw a hand grenade, but it only made a terrible noise. With a heavy head and a constant whistling in my ears, I pulled out my bayonet and leapt into the dark where I thought my adversary was. We hit each other again and again; I hit him with the knife, while he tried to strike me with the butt of his empty gun.

  When I finally made it out from underground, and my comrades brought out the man’s body, I saw that I’d practically ripped him apart. He was missing a few fingers; his whole face was full of open bleeding wounds. I had even gouged out one of his eyes. I don’t remember how I delivered the final blows, but on one side he didn’t have a single centimetre of living tissue left.

  My muscles were frozen with emotional exhaustion, and for a good half hour I wasn’t able to open my right hand, the one that had been gripping the knife. It had been clenched so tightly it almost seemed as though an invisible hand were holding it shut.

  Even if keeping the enemy’s weapons was prohibited by Russian military law, we didn’t care. As our captain would always say:

  ‘If they want us to play their game, then they can at least let us use the toys we want!’

  After I’d been with the saboteurs for a while, I realised that Captain Nosov had his own personal theory on war. It was based on his experience in Afghanistan; he often said that it was very similar to the war we were going through in Chechnya, because in the end the enemy was the same. His interpretation of the facts, when he commented on what happened during our operations, was decidedly anti-government. In short, as any Russian soldier worthy of the name would say – always ready to defend the nation’s honour at all costs – Nosov ‘whistled like a traitor’.

  Our captain was convinced that the war in Chechnya was nothing but a farce, a performance that Russia had put on all by itself, making use of its friends in the Arabic world and even paying the mercenaries to fight against us. Since I had always kept my distance from political discussions, the captain’s claims weren’t always clear to me. His theories completely overturned my beliefs about the governing structures; Nosov often talked about the power of ex-KGB agents, asserting that somehow a group of veterans within our secret services had the Russian government under their thumb.

  I was very curious and asked many questions, because I truly wanted to know what was going on, in this place I’d been thrown into. So the captain tried to explain everything to me in the simplest way possible:

  ‘Look, to understand the reasoning behind this conflict you have to know how the “chaos-effect” works. I’ll give you an example: you have a store full of delicious chocolates and a customer wants to buy them and take them home, but the law prohibits taking them away. They have to be consumed there, without leaving the store. But this guy knows a lot of other people who, just like him, want your chocolates, and they’re all prepared to pay you any amount to be able to take them away and eat them on their own time, or maybe even sell them to someone else. However, the law against the consumption of chocolate outside the store isn’t something you like either, because you’re interested in selling as much as possible. At this point Moscow comes into play, who in our story takes on the role of a representative of the law. He’s always there in your store, watching and making sure nobody takes any chocolate home. Obviously, you don’t like Moscow either. Do you follow me so far?’

  Although it was a rhetorical question I nodded, and Nosov went on with his story:

  ‘So imagine that I come along and propose that you play a trick on Moscow. I send a couple of friends to your store, you send a few of yours, and one day our friends start a fight there. While they’re beating each other up – they break some tables, a few old chairs and maybe even one of the windows – Moscow, as a good representative of the law, steps in to calm them down and tries to reestablish order. In that instant, I take all the chocolates I want from your store, pay you how much I owe and run away. Thanks to the chaos-effect, our dear friend Moscow didn’t see a thing, and you and I got something out of it – and the next time, potentially, we can do it over again. The situation with the war in Chechnya is very similar, except that instead of you it’s the leaders of the Arab community, who control the drug trade, human trafficking, gun running, petrol and so on. The chocolates, in other words. Instead of me there’s the Russian secret service, who after the fall of the USSR took control of all illegal trafficking on national territory. Moscow, on the other hand, represents legal society, that is, the few who are still trying to somehow obey the law and have faith in institutions (this also includes the representatives of those countries that receive the traffic). And the idiot friends who come to fight in the store to trigger the chaos-effect are the Russian army and the mercenaries. The moral of the story is very sad; without realising it, we’re creating chaos to divert attention from the serious things going on in this place. The war we’re fighting is just a cover for the trafficking run by the corrupt people in the government.’

  It’s not as though I knew much about the trafficking, but, explained in this way, the situation seemed a bit clearer to me.

  Another issue was the mercenaries in Chechnya. It seemed impossible to track down the primary financial backer behind the armed terrorist groups. It was often the Islamic religious leaders themselves, the imams, who would use their places of worship as storage depots or makeshift field hospitals for their wounded. But they were just small fry, the latest cog in a complex machine.

  I remember that after one of these discussions I said to our captain, my face serious:

  ‘Ivanisch, if you know that this war is wrong, if you really think it’s a joke, then why do you keep on fighting in it?’

  He looked at me with an astonished expression and said in a playful tone:

  ‘Because I have nothing better to do. I’d be useless at home. The only thing I know how to do is war.’

  After that remark, which for Nosov was clearly in jest, I reflected at length on how stupid we’d been, we Russians, over the course of history. For centuries we had pursued various political ideas – often going against the natural laws of humanity – only because we weren’t able to get out of the system, which kept us trapped inside a constantly shrinking circle.

  Just thinking about it made me want to run. But it was physically impossible to cross the security lines that separated us from the other world, the peaceful world. And in any case, that would have been suicide – the images of military prison were still branded onto my mind.

  THE PARA-BATS

  My dear Mama, I’m writin
g you a letter:

  ‘Hi mum, I’m good,

  the sun is shining, everything’s fine,

  on the mountains as always there’s fog…’

  Mama doesn’t know what we do on those mountains,

  she don’t know a thing about our troubles.

  The years of our youth are spent

  in the Caucasus, where there’s always war…

  The sound of bombs in the background, our brigade advances,

  over there you can already hear the shots.

  The sound of bombs in the background, the tracer bullets fly,

  and the whole earth shakes from the cannons.

  The helicopter goes off, and we must go on,

  I hope you make it back, brother…

  The helicopter goes off, and we must go on,

  It’ll be hard, and some’ll never make it home…

  Too young when we came here

  to the Caucasus, where there’s always war.

  We’ll never forget these terrible years,

  and our friends left behind forever…

  When we come back we’ll sit down together,

  and before our third glass we’ll be silent.

  The fallen in battle, the ones who made it home,

  Now our souls are one…

  Russian military song from the period of the Chechen conflict

  We don’t need a soul, we’ve got blue berets instead,

  we swoop from the sky like angels, with parachutes instead of wings,

  we leap onto the ground like demons in battle,

  we don’t care about a thing, we just want victory…

  From the Russian paratrooper anthem

  There’s fog over town, the ataman’s smoking his pipe,