Free Fall. Nicolai Lilin

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 video-cassette. 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 terrorists, 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: