Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man’s head.
‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs…’
The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood.
Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner’s knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth.
Our captain took a box of matches and lit one, holding it over the man.
‘If you don’t tell me where you keep the wounded I’ll burn you alive,’ he said cruelly, holding the match in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘I don’t give a shit about your fucking religion; I think you should all be killed…’
Sobbing, the man sputtered out a storm of incomprehensible words, among which we could just make out:
‘In the garden… around the back… under the tent…’
Nosov pushed the point of the pistol into the cloth of the turban hanging off the man’s head and fired; the bullet was muffled, as though he had used a silencer; a cloud of gunpowder spread all around. The man’s head had been pierced by the bullet from one side to the other; the wall he had been leaning against a moment earlier was covered in blood and bits of brain. For a few seconds the dead man’s left foot kept moving over the kitchen’s rough floor, scraping the cement with his fake leather shoe.
Nosov spat on the ground and pointed us to the exit.
‘I’ll be right there,’ he said.
As I stood by the door, I saw the captain dropping the lit match on the corpse, which immediately caught fire.
At that point Nosov looked right at me:
‘I’m really fucking sick of these Muslims…’
When we went out into the courtyard everyone was staring at us with curiosity. One of the OMON men ran up to give Nosov a report:
‘With the dogs’ help we found three hiding places,’ the man stated. ‘Crammed full of—’
‘Very good,’ Nosov cut him off. ‘There should be a tent somewhere – find it.’
Along with the explorers we scattered across the yard. Behind the mosque there was a garden that looked out to a view of the mountains. In the middle of the garden there was a wooden gazebo; it didn’t seem very sturdy. Underneath, in the shade, was a small table and chairs. An infantryman took down the structure with a shove of the shoulder, and cleared away the table and chairs. When the gazebo collapsed, we could see an iron trapdoor poking out from underneath. It was the entrance to a transport truck container. The Arabs had buried it, turning it into a refuge for the wounded.
The soldier lifted the door and then jumped back immediately – a blast of machine gun fire had come from inside. The head of an armed man with long hair peered out. We didn’t give him time to emerge – we shot him on the spot, and he fell back down. We threw two hand grenades into the container; the explosions spread scraps of human flesh, supplies and cloth everywhere. After an operation like that, the officers back at base would write in their reports: ‘A secret refuge harbouring terrorists was discovered and liquidated. Due to the nature of the injuries sustained, the bodies are not fit for identification.’
The OMON guys found many items of interest in the three hideouts: arms, ammo, money, drugs (almost a hundred kilos of heroin in brick-sized blocks, which we all called ‘Afghan bricks’; I had never seen so many drugs in one place before, and I definitely hadn’t imagined I’d be seeing them at a religious site), books on Islamic extremism, flags and other materials intended as propaganda for the holy war against the infidels, plus instructions for making explosives.
There were some videocassettes and DVDs showing torture being inflicted on our soldiers who had been taken prisoner, along with clips of attacks on Russian military convoys. They also had lots of identification papers belonging to dead or missing terrorists, and they had an entire archive (from the Chechen capital, as we later discovered) with the names of the heads of the various terrorist movements in the country.
We piled it all into our cars and then began loading the prisoners on one by one, among them the old imam and his companion, and a woman in her fifties who wouldn’t speak to any of us. To get her into the car an explorer had to hit her on the back with the barrel of a rifle. To begin with, the prisoners resisted, but after the first blows they gave in. There were three young Arabs in particular who kept on shouting, threatening us and refusing to get in the car. One of them grazed an infantryman on the neck with a kitchen knife. The cut wasn’t serious, but the act was: we had to shoot him and his two friends.
We had taken seven prisoners. We tied everyone’s hands and legs together for security, and to keep them from moving we cut the men’s trousers at the waistband. Then we left for our base.
Alerted by the shooting, the local inhabitants gathered around the three corpses. To them, the men on the ground were martyrs.
As our vehicles passed through the village, the streets filled with people, and many inhabitants peered out from behind their front doors – the eyes of the women and the old men, full of hate and a desire for vengeance, were more piercing than plated bullets. No one dared to shoot us, because they knew that if there were even one attack on representatives of the Russian Federation Army, the next day the residents would be awakened by cannon blasts from the artillery or, even worse, by the sound of helicopters, ready to generously drop their surface-to-air missiles. In just a few hours, the entire place would be swept away like the wind scatters leaves in the autumn, without even a memory left behind.
Once we left the village we took the road that led down from the mountains. Our convoy was slowly snaking through the woods along a steep, narrow path, when the terrorists showed up. Usually they would attack the head and the tail of a column, trying to trap the cars in the middle. A few bullets hit the first carrier, where the infantry explorers were; that was the car on ‘detachment’, or further ahead compared to the rest of the line.
The enemy was hiding among the trees of the forest, and by taking that path we had offered ourselves up on a silver platter to their bullets. When we heard the first shots we jumped to the ground, to the opposite side from where the shots were coming. The drivers came out of the carriers too, rolling along with us to the edge of the road, the only place where the Arabs couldn’t see us. According to military regulations, at times like these leaving the car is prohibited – the unit is supposed to defend the vehicle, using their personal weapons as well as the ones the car is equipped with. But in reality, none of us ever followed this rule. An RPG shell travels very fast and can destroy an armoured car in three seconds. In just a few minutes a marksman can torch up to five standing vehicles, and if there are three or more marksmen, the crew doesn’t stand a chance. That’s why active units led by good officers who knew what they were doing would leave the vehicle immediately, to try to organise a counterattack.
The Arabs were shooting with three light machine guns and about ten Kalashnikovs; once in a while, like cracks of a whip, the sound of two precision rifles could also be heard. The car that had been hit was in flames, but the enemy continued to fire an impressive number of projectiles into it, trying to blow it up. Usually the Arabs would shoot a grenade launcher shell under a car, between the tracks. The explosion would break the transmission and the vehicle wouldn’t be able to move; that way, after the battle, the car could quickly be repaired and used as if it were new. But it was a different story with the armoured cars that had wheels, like our BTRs – they couldn’t easily be disabled, so the enemies were forced to burn them or blow them up.