Free Fall. Nicolai Lilin

column is composed of sixty-three armed men,’ said one of them, with extreme precision, ‘and it’s advancing very quickly.’

      ‘We saw lots of mercenaries . . .’ another added.

      We were happy. Killing mercenaries meant taking home lots of trophies – American things and other various trinkets. The night explorers immediately started fighting over who would get to keep the hiking boots. Usually the Arabs wore boots produced in the West with high-quality materials, and every infantryman dreamed of having at least one pair.

      The column moved along at a clip because they feared direct conflict and they wanted to get out of the area as quickly as possible.

      I was positioned a little higher than the others, hidden behind a large tree, where I had established my line of fire. From that spot, the view of the valley really opened; I was able to survey almost a kilometre and a half of the area.

      About fifty metres below me was the night explorers’ sniper, a professional soldier with whom I had divided tasks – he would cut off the column from behind and I from the front; that way nobody would be able to escape.

      The strategy we used was very simple, and, as far as I knew, had been perfected during the war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban. On one side of the space where the battle unfolds, it’s open fire; on the other side, there are the mines. This way, the enemy is disorientated and he’s forced to move away from the bullets to find a comfortable position and respond to the fire, but he steps on a mine and blows up. A mine causes a lot more damage than any other heavy weapon, because it’s absolutely unexpected – a blow from a mortar or grenade launcher is very loud – and even if in the din of the gunfire it’s hard for the untrained ear to tell one sound from another, if you’re quick enough and hear the explosion, you can manage to avoid the worst.

      For us snipers, chaos was the ideal atmosphere in which to work without being discovered. As long as the surprise-effect lasted and the enemy showed fear, we would knock down every subject that looked dangerous, like the ones with grenade launchers and heavy artillery, snipers, sharpshooters armed with rifles that had optic and dioptric devices, the soldiers with equipment to communicate with the field, the expert commanders and mercenaries, easy to recognise from the superior quality of their dress, arms and ammo. Lots of Arab commanders loved the U.S. Marines’ bulletproof vests, which were easy to spot from afar since they were less heavy and bulky than Russian ones. They always had the best weapons, usually 7.62x39-calibre AKS-47s, with American-made scopes or dioptric lenses mounted on top. They were always the first to hit the ground.

      Sometimes, however, it wasn’t so easy to push men onto the mines. Lots of them tried to turn around and run or would throw themselves forward. At first you had to concentrate your fire on the first and last in line, continuing to reduce the target range but being careful not to hit the people in the middle. This way, human instinct would take over – seeing others fall dead in front of them and behind them, the men would head for the opposite side of the road, and would end up on the mines. After a while, we would also aim at those remaining in the middle, and one after the other they would all set off our fatal traps. Stepping on a mine meant blowing up on the spot.

      The mines we used were in part Russian-made, in part taken from the enemy. In the Russian army, it was hard to get anti-personnel mines for normal operations; according to regulations, it was supposed to be expert military strategists who mined an area following a specific plan, established with command. The use of mines or other explosive devices was defined as ‘tactics of terror’, and since the whole world knew that we were fighting against terrorists, we were supposed to be different from them. If any enemies blew up on a mine and command asked us for an explanation, we all said they’d been put there by the Arabs – nobody could say precisely who, when, or how it had been planted.

      To avoid potential problems at the administrative level, all the units would take some of the mines planted by the strategists and keep them for when we would need them. We often bartered with officers or the soldiers who ran the explosives depot; they would give us some of their stuff – mines, bombs, grenades and other explosive material – and in exchange we would bring them the weapons we had taken as trophies.

      Much later, when I was back home, I was watching television when I heard a correspondent talking about how the Chechen war had been fought.

      He said that the Russian soldiers had scrupulously followed the moral principles of modern war, and that in our army the use of anti-personnel mines was officially prohibited, for any military operation.

      If I think of all those mines we planted that went unexploded . . . Who knows how many people still risk stumbling onto our traps.

      Back to that morning when we had to avenge our paratrooper comrades . . .

      After we were all in position, hidden in the thick of the woods, the only thing left to do was wait. Our ambush was ready, and before long the enemy would come. The sentry had said that the column was composed of over sixty people, whereas there were only twenty-five of us, even counting the infantrymen and explorers. But we had the surprise-effect on our side, one of the most powerful weapons in military strategy.

      The first to appear was a group of five scouts; they were Arabs with long beards. They looked hastily and distractedly to the sides of the path, and continued on without stopping. We let them pass and waited for the rest of the group.

      Shortly afterward, no more than three hundred metres away, the column we’d been waiting for appeared. We gave the entire group enough time to enter the valley and then, as planned, our machine gun started shooting at the last ones in the row. Those machine guns were ‘toys’ to the night scouts – they were extremely powerful weapons, beasts that could shoot up to six rounds a second; the bullets were large calibre, capable of splitting a body as if it had been chopped in half with a giant axe. We only had a light 7.62-calibre RPK machine gun, manned by Zenith. As the Arabs began to move towards the mines, our machine gunner went to work on the rest of the group.

      I followed right after Zenith’s gun, aiming for the front of the line. In the first ten seconds, nobody responded to our fire; enemies fell to the ground one after another without having time to react.

      Through the lens I saw human bodies disintegrate with the machine gun blasts – arms flew off, faces blew up; I shot at the torso, as they teach you to do with moving targets. After I hit them they would keep running for a couple metres and then suddenly drop, as if hit by a powerful gust of wind.

      Then some of the Arabs took positions on the ground, shielding themselves behind their comrades’ bodies, and started shooting at us. The bullets went just above our heads – they were experts, they aimed towards the shells from the precision rifle my comrade in the infantry was using. He had a weapon without a silencer, whereas I had an integrated silencer and the sound produced by my rifle was no louder than a handclap. People who have grown up in war-torn areas can hear and recognise every single noise. From a mere series of blasts at several metres’ distance they can get a clear idea of the type and number of weapons, and are even able to figure out their location.

      While some enemies were shooting, others began to retreat to the other side. After a few seconds the mines began to explode – two bodies dissolved instantly, sending up a little red cloud, as if their blood had turned to mist. Someone shouted something in Arabic, and everyone else who had been running towards the mined area halted in their tracks.

      About twenty were still standing but they didn’t know what to do. The machine gunners had let up and our guys with normal rifles took down the enemy with precise, targeted shots. One of them started to zigzag; they shot at him several times, following his moves, but he seemed able to dodge all the bullets, he was so fast.

      Just then I heard Captain Nosov yell at me:

      ‘Kolima, see him? Take him down, but don’t kill him!’

      So I used the basic technique for catching a moving target; I aimed my rifle on his path. Even if he continually changed direction from right to left, there was a constant in his movements because he always passed through the middle. I calculated where he would pass about ten metres ahead and waited. When the objective came into