Moscow, Shoe and I left the school, looking for a good position from which to hit the approaching enemies. We quickly crossed a couple of yards, then settled beside a building opposite. From the noises we heard, the Arabs had only assault rifles and no machine guns. Amidst the pandemonium of the gunfire, despite the fog, I was able to pinpoint my targets and strike them by surprise. Even if what I was really looking for were their snipers. I knew they had to be somewhere around there, because I knew the enemy’s tactics well – we often did the same things.
If a group wasn’t strong enough or big enough, they would try to ‘provoke’ the enemy by keeping a building under surveillance with a few somewhat random blasts of gunfire. Thus, when the defenders responded to the fire, they revealed their positions, and the sniper, by observing the fired rounds’ burst of flame, could pick them out and begin to work on them one by one.
Snipers could also work in teams of two or three. There was no exact rule; the Arabs often worked in pairs. Anyone who had trained in the military camps of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or other Asian countries under NATO control was used to working in groups composed of as many as six people – three pairs of snipers who communicated by radio.
These enemy groups were fought by the elusive anti-sniper squads of the FSB – high-ranking professionals, armed with foreign-made rifles, who showed up at the right place at the right time, completed their mission, and were picked up by the support units immediately.
The individual snipers were usually poorly prepared, often mercenaries, former athletes, hunters… hopeless men who had learned to shoot on their own. For the FSB teams, paradoxically, it was harder to spot the amateur individual than a pair of professionals, because the sniper who acted alone followed different tactics from those who were taught in military schools, and was, therefore, much more unpredictable.
I was lying on the ground, between blocks of cement that in their previous life must have been the pavement kerbs. You couldn’t see much in the fog. Through the telescope, everything looked hazy, like the picture on a television with no aerial. Moscow and Shoe stood beside me, covering my position. I shot twice at the spots where I saw the bursts of rifle fire appear until the flares disappeared, and I continued observing the situation.
Our men responded to the enemy with a few short machine gun blasts and periodical rounds from the grenade launcher, which was positioned under the rifle barrels. Through the telescope I saw a guy with an RPG-7 pop out from a corner, run down the street and get on his knees, poised to shoot. I aimed at his head. He fell immediately, as if he’d been pushed from behind. His weapon slid out of his hands, the round fired, skidding on the tarmac, hitting the chassis of an armoured car.
Someone threw a grenade in our direction. It exploded about twenty metres away; fortunately there was a stack of old tyres and a wrecked car that blocked the shards. Without waiting I stood up and signalled to Moscow that we should move; by that point our position no longer served any purpose. He loaded a grenade in the Kalashnikov and fired at the enemy, then ran over to us and along with Shoe we did a loop around the building, reaching the space where at one time the garden must have been.
From the road we could hear the sound of our tanks, but we didn’t have time to identify ourselves before they immediately fired a long volley of bullets at us. Moscow quickly pushed us to the entrance to the house; the bullets flew over our heads.
‘Don’t shoot, we’re saboteurs!’ Shoe yelled like a madman from inside the house.
‘What the fuck are you doing here? Weren’t you supposed to be at the end of the street, down at the crossroads?’ they replied.
We came out. Our men were standing with their rifles pointed at us. There were ten of them; part of the infantry operation units, they were explorers and privates.
On the road, meanwhile, the tanks went over the tyre barricades and burned-out cars, freeing access to the position and blowing up the explosives the Arabs had placed between the carcasses, in case anyone were crazy enough to try to move them without taking cover inside a tank.
‘There are three of us,’ Moscow said. ‘We set up a lateral position, the rest of the guys are in the old nursery school…’
We quickly joined them. The infantry, in a lightning attack, blocked the enemy groups in the middle of the road. Some tried to escape into the fog, and our men shot them in the back. A couple of Arabs tried to launch some more grenades, but they were immediately overpowered by our numerous assault units. There were probably a hundred men, and with four tanks and five light infantry tanks they surrounded the school.
We all went inside the building and took in the massacre that had happened there. Amongst the bodies of enemies and infantrymen I also recognised their lieutenant major; his head was crushed, shrapnel from a mortar round had killed him.
One infantryman had taken a blast right in the vest, and a bullet had gone into his side; he lay next to the dead lieutenant on an old dirty rug soaked in blood, while a medic stitched his wound with no anaesthesia. He didn’t seem bothered by the pain; he was talking to a comrade who was observing the street from the window to keep up with how the battle was going.
In the meantime, more infantry arrived on board a BTR just like ours. They were equipped with a radio, and they set up an operation command post inside the building. Along with them there was a major and a lieutenant colonel, who started talking with Nosov, assessing the losses they had suffered and which strategies they should employ.
Our order, for us and for the explorers, was to join the assault units – we had to seize that town, and we wouldn’t be finished any time soon. They gave us a radio and replenished our supplies. We were able to eat a quick bite; the tankers also offered us some hot coffee, a real rarity. Then we left the school with a precise objective: breaking through enemy lines.
We were immersed in the chaos of battle all night. Our units had made remarkable progress – by four in the morning they had managed to liberate almost half the town. We saw the people fleeing and tried to guide them to a predetermined area, in order to tighten the ring even more.
Our armoured cars moved down the streets looking for smaller groups of fleeing residents, while the clean-up teams passed by to check the liberated territory, blowing up the cellars and shooting grenades at suspicious places.
At seven, with the arrival of daylight, the fog disappeared completely. The town was all ours – only one neighbourhood still resisted.
We found ourselves on the border of the area defended by the enemy; their fortified positions were fifty metres ahead. Our snipers had been trying to neutralise theirs since early that morning, receiving the same treatment in return. We were waiting for air support; the helicopters were supposed to ‘comb’ the area with surface-to-air missiles, and then we would come in. But, knowing our air units’ tendency to always enlarge the range of action, we shifted back a block, moving one house at a time to avoid giving the enemy the impression that we were retreating and thus letting them get away.
The helicopters arrived at the arranged hour, and, as we feared, started to drop missiles on the position we had just abandoned. We prayed that none of the missiles would fall on us… There were maybe five helicopters in constant motion. They swooped over the area to drop their charges, which blew everything up the moment they touched the ground, transforming the streets and the houses into one big endless fire.
When the helicopters had finished their job, we heard a weak signal on the radio. It was operations command calling us.
‘Birch, Birch, 102 here! How’s the field? When is the joust set to begin?’
These spy movie codes they used in radio messages were ridiculous, and they only made communication more complicated. We knew that the enemy monitored our radio conversations as we did theirs. But command insisted on speaking in code, and so the units would respond with simple words, often embroidering them with lots of swearing.