‘That’s our guys, let’s go!’
We hurried across the yard. Partly because we were used to the dark and partly because day was starting to break, we realised that the bodies of our soldiers were scattered here and there; none of them had his vest or gear. We could see that the living had pillaged the dead.
Sneaking along the walls, we peered in the windows. The building was square, with identical rooms and a wide, long hallway with high ceilings – it seemed to be a school or hospital. It was completely destroyed, and our soldiers’ bodies were in piles on the floor.
Once we reached the corner, I saw one of our positions. Next to a ground-floor window a soldier sat on the inner side of the boundary wall smoking a cigarette butt concealed under his hand. We crawled over to him and he didn’t notice a thing – he kept on sitting there, without moving, smoking calmly. Moscow approached from behind and immobilised him, like a spider clutches its victims. He put his hand over his mouth and whispered in his ear:
‘Relax, little brother, don’t worry. We’re the saboteurs, we’ve come to get you out of here…’
The soldier hadn’t had time to react; the cigarette fell to the ground and I covered it immediately. When Moscow let go he looked at us as if we were aliens.
‘How did you do it, guys?’ he said, incredulous.
‘Your sniper, the explorer, went through the sewers and showed us the way,’ Moscow summarised. ‘We have to move now, while it’s still not too light…’
The soldier grabbed an empty shell from the floor and threw it somewhere inside the building, into the darkness of one of the rooms. We heard a tired voice say:
‘What is it, Mitya?’
Our new acquaintance replied:
‘We have visitors – the saboteurs are here!’
From the other room the voice perked up instantly:
‘Fucking whore of a war, finally!’
There were sixteen infantrymen left. They had occupied a wing of the building and resigned themselves to waiting for the last attack from the enemy, who would come back at dawn to exterminate them.
While Moscow went to alert our guys, who were waiting for an update down in the sewer, I started talking to the sergeant. He was a really competent guy; he’d taken over after their lieutenant fell, planning their defence in an attempt to stretch what little time they had as much as possible. His name was Lavrov.
‘I’d been hoping that, when dawn came, some of our men would start to push onto the line of fire,’ he confessed to me. ‘That way maybe the Arabs’ attention would have been taken from us to defending themselves…’
‘Sergeant,’ I preferred to tell him the truth right away, ‘unfortunately, Command already approved an air strike…’
He looked at me in astonishment – he couldn’t believe our command had been ready to sacrifice them without trying one last time.
I told him to gather the men from his unit right away, and within a few minutes all sixteen of the surviving soldiers were there in front of me. They were tired and worn out, but alive. Poor guys, they had only two boxes of rounds for the machine gun; if things went well that would have lasted them about five minutes of combat…
So as not to carry unnecessary weight, I decided we should leave the heavy machine gun behind, but first I plugged the barrel with a misshapen Kalashnikov shell and removed the lock to make the weapon completely unusable. I slipped it into my pocket; I’d throw it into the sewer later.
I picked up a few bulletproof vests, which could turn out to be useful during retreat, and passed them out to the guys. It was good to have a few extra – we could use them to cover the holes in the windows, to cover the radio and keep it from getting broken during transport, or to protect some other thing of value.
Moscow came back in a rush, all out of breath:
‘Let’s hurry, the Arabs are coming. I heard noises in the distance…’
We headed out. I led the group, Moscow closed the line. The infantry made noise; their uniforms had tons of latches and they had some useless stuff on their vests that we hadn’t had time to tell them to take off. But we got through the yard without any problems, and at the entrance to the sewers, one by one they went down.
Moscow and I covered them from a possible enemy attack, but everything was calm – there wasn’t the slightest sign of the Arabs. Finally, when everyone had got to safety, we jumped down too. We carefully replaced the cover and off we went.
Nosov was down below, preparing some booby traps to mine the sewer entrance. He climbed up, and with some bandages from the medi-kits he affixed three grenades to the second rung of the iron ladder. Then he threaded some wire through the pins, tied two bullet-proof vests to one end of the wire to act as a counter-weight, and slipped the other end of the wire under the cover, which kept it in place and kept the vests hanging in the air. If someone moved the cover, the wire would come loose and the vests would fall and trigger the bombs.
Besides obstructing the sewer entrance, the explosion would surely kill a few enemies as well. An F1 model hand grenade had a lot of explosive power, and could shoot metal fragments up to a distance of four hundred metres. It was a real bitch, that bomb.
Nosov came down and looked at the soldiers:
‘So, you’re the only ones left?’
Sergeant Lavrov replied:
‘Yes, Comrade Captain, the others have fallen.’
It was dark and you couldn’t see anything, but from our line the Cossack’s voice emerged:
‘Does anyone have word of Private Ustinov?’
A cry came from among the infantry:
‘Papa!’ A young soldier jumped out from the group and practically threw himself on the old man. The two men embraced, and then the cousin too. They were grinning, happy as children.
‘Let’s save the family reunions for later, Cossacks!’ Our Nosov motioned for everyone to follow him.
We went fast. It really seemed like everything had gone smoothly, and I was almost happy that we had managed to conclude the operation without having to shoot a single bullet. As we passed under the grates, you could see the first rays of sunlight filtering down to the sewer floor. At those points we crept along against the wall so we couldn’t be seen from above.
The infantrymen followed the saboteurs, and Nosov ordered me and Moscow to bring up the rear. Although the group had grown, although our heads were down and we were hunched over, we moved even faster than we did on the way there.
‘I knew I was going to be okay,’ Moscow said at one point, though almost under his breath.
‘What?’ I asked, without stopping. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
‘My neighbour, the gypsy, she read my future on the cards…’ He was smiling now. ‘She said I would die an old man, in my sleep…’
He told this story every time he got through some serious trouble – that is, all the time. I was about to say something, when suddenly we heard such a strong explosion that for a few seconds our ears were plugged. It was our booby trap.
Nosov halted. We looked at one another, scared, half-deaf, feeling trapped. Our captain said:
‘We have to get out fast, now, wherever we are… I’m sure they’ve already given the signal… Now those beasts’ll be throwing bombs into every sewer in the area!’
Within a minute we found an exit, also closed by a cover. Without a word Nosov climbed up, moved the cover and went out. Then he peeked in and gestured for us to follow him.
We moved so fast that we looked like a group of navy soldiers used to going up and down the passageways of a submarine.
Coming out in broad daylight in some random place, however, would expose us to any possible attack.
We found ourselves at the end of an empty street facing a cement wall full of holes and rusty shards. Nearby there was a low building, a small power plant. There was one in every neighbourhood – they were good places for escaping heavy artillery attacks, because they had very thick walls, and sometimes even a tank had trouble knocking them down; they were kind of like little bunkers. The problem is that they were blind, without windows – they had a door and that was it. Many soldiers had lost their lives in those places, because in trying to take shelter they ended up getting trapped.