First off, Nosov gave him some advice on how to plan the resistance:
‘We need to concentrate forces on the sides of the building and leave the middle free.’
The lieutenant agreed, and we all took strategic positions, keeping watch over not only the building itself and the space in front, but also the three roads that led directly to the area occupied by the terrorists.
At four in the afternoon the enemy troops began moving towards us. Gunfire had become very intense in the left wing of the building, where our captain was; a young infantryman, their gunner, was dead – a bullet had gone through his skull.
Nosov recognised the enemy’s tactic. They were trying to provoke fighting in one spot in order to gain free access from the opposite side. Next door there was an abandoned house, and if we didn’t stop them they would make it a fortified position. Nosov called me to organise a sortie. In a room on the second floor with windows overlooking the courtyard – a big open space with a few trees and bushes, behind which were two of the infantry’s light tanks – we had a quick huddle. Nosov said:
‘They’re definitely going to put something in that house, maybe a heavy machine gun. And once that thing starts working on us, they’ll hit us with the grenade launchers too…’
‘We could beef up our defence with another machine gun on the third floor, and then concentrate the fire on them,’ the lieutenant proposed.
‘That won’t work, we’d only drag it out…’ Nosov retorted, serious. ‘If they have a machine gun, and I’m sure they do, after a few hours of direct fighting they’ll realise that we don’t want to attack their positions, and they’ll call reinforcements to break our defence… These people are desperate, our paras are hunting them down.’
So the young lieutenant asked:
‘What do you have in mind?’
Nosov had a half smile on his face, which we all knew very well. It meant that he’d already come up with a plan, which (as he would always say with conviction) would work one hundred per cent. In fact, he replied:
‘I’ve already come up with a plan, which will work one hundred per cent… You and your boys keep responding to the fire from the left side of the building, but don’t shoot at the house next door. Actually, act like you’ve completely given up on that position. My guys and I will cross the street, shadowing the fence at the back of the building. We’ll come through the rear, where there’s the curve that goes right to the side of the house… If they’re there like I think they are, we’ll get rid of them and go back to the main road – no doubt some of them will come after us, so your boys’ll have to cover us, otherwise we’ll lose our hides…’
The lieutenant looked at us for a second, trying to figure out if our captain was joking or not. We were already getting ready, removing all the inessentials so we could run faster, and when he saw that we were serious, the lieutenant, a spark of daring in his eyes, said:
‘Then let’s do it, boys! God bless us!’
We headed out behind our captain.
Usually in city operations we were only armed with Kalashnikovs, each of us always having a couple on him. I had two rifles: a VSS, which I kept slung at my back along with five clips for a total of fifty rounds, and my trusty AKSM, which I carried by hand. This was the paratrooper assault rifle, a model with a short barrel, reinforced compensator, folding stock and dioptric sight, the one with the red dot that we jokingly called ‘Lenin’s lamp’. This time, however, the operation was particularly dangerous, and Nosov had also brought along a loaded grenade launcher, plus a backpack with another three rounds. Two of our men had 7.62-calibre submachine guns.
We were all wearing light jackets, with jumpsuits underneath, trainers on our feet and no helmets on our heads, just regular beanies. Mine was grey with a pom-pom on top. The other units made fun of us, calling us ‘bums’ since we wore whatever we came across. Obviously it bothered them to have to wear uniforms; they would rather have been able to do as we did – when it was hot we could wear shorts. None of us shaved, we all had goatees or at least a few days’ stubble, and we often kept our hair long. By our looks we were more likely to be taken for a group of terrorists than a unit of the Russian Army. We did it on purpose, obviously, because we often ended up going behind the line and having to blend in with the enemy, even though every so often one of our own shot at us, thinking we were Arabs.
We slowly walked across the courtyard, which the infantry was watching over. The dead bodies of enemies were left on the side of the road. We sprang over to the fence. We could hear the infantry shooting as well as the Arabs, who were attacking the left side of the building. The road made a curve that would lead us to the house, our objective.
From there, however, we could see that two hundred metres ahead, right in part of the yard where our troops were, another group of enemies was hiding behind a half-charred armoured car, shooting now and then at our soldiers.
‘Let’s cross the road without firing,’ Nosov said. ‘One of you cover, everyone else run.’
I positioned myself to cover the others. My comrades hunched down and sprinted almost on all fours, and when they had all reached the opposite side of the road I followed. Together we went behind the trees, and then emerged in front of a small building, some kind of old bar, from inside which we had a clear view of the house.
We stopped in the bar to figure out whether there was movement around the house. Nothing happened for fifteen minutes; nobody came, every so often in the distance we saw enemies running over to the building occupied by the infantry. The lieutenant’s men shot a few rounds at them, a few Arabs fell to the ground lifeless. A group of enemies continued moving about in a seemingly chaotic manner: they came out into the open clearly with the intention of attracting the infantry’s attention, shooting blasts of fire at them almost randomly, without aiming, then going back to shelter.
The captain commented:
‘They think they’ve really got us – look how they’re jumping around, they look like mountain goats…’
We kept quiet, waiting. At a certain point, however, the situation around the house changed. Two blacks, Africans, came up to the building shouting. One went inside and started kicking in all the doors. More men popped out from a road carrying a heavy machine gun and a cylinder grenade launcher, an American-made weapon. Another little group followed them, carrying the cases with the cartridges, protected by men armed only with Kalashnikovs.
The two black men almost started arguing at the entrance, without being afraid of being hit; sure they were safe behind the house. One of them motioned towards the street and was saying something, the other guy was yelling.
Nosov said:
‘Boys, at my signal…’
We readied our rifles, aiming at the targets. The captain settled the grenade launcher on his shoulder and went to the window. My comrades stepped away from him so they wouldn’t get burned when the grenade exploded.
‘Fire!’
In an instant, the spot where the two black men had been arguing had become a hole in the pavement. Meanwhile we had taken down, one by one, almost the entire group. Not expecting an attack from our direction, those poor devils hadn’t even been able to make a move. Only one volley of bullets reached us, but it went too high and immediately drowned in our fire, as violent as a hurricane.