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I went over to him and said:

‘You don’t need to hold this like an AK. Put it in front of you. Bend your left arm, so you can use it as support. When you need to shoot, you just straighten your arm and the gun will bounce onto your shoulder by itself, like this…’ I showed him what I meant. ‘When we hear the first shots we have to be ready to move forward and set up a well-concealed position to fire from. Our bullets have to be in the background of the gunfire…’

The kid was all ears.

‘Is this your first time in Chechnya?’ I asked, in a tone of solidarity.

‘Yes… Shit, I’ve fired a few bullets at the range, but I’m not sure I can aim well here, in the middle of all these trees…’

He was being sincere; he cared about doing his part but didn’t feel confident enough of his ability. A man who finds himself in the middle of a war for the first time suddenly has the realisation that human lives depend on his actions, and every personal failing takes on the magnitude of real tragedy. These men need to be talked to, they need to be helped and kept under watch, otherwise in the middle of combat there could be a bad surprise.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, smiling. ‘When we get started, stay with me. I’ll tell you who, how and when to shoot. You just need to aim, breathe slow and stay calm…’

When he moved I couldn’t help but hear all the noise the metal hooks on his rifle sling made, or the thousand other sounds coming from various parts of his jacket, or the poorly attached ammo… This was something that we saboteurs couldn’t stand – we would rather be on our own than in the company of people who made more noise when they walked than the tracks of an armoured car. Fortunately, it was loud as hell – the enemy was shooting wildly at the last car in our convoy, so they wouldn’t have noticed if an elephant had come up behind them.

The bullets were getting closer and closer – it seemed like they were shooting right in our ears. And then I realised that we could also hear the enemy’s voices. I went down to the ground and motioned to the sniper to follow my lead.

We crawled over to an enormous tree that had grown next to a wide, jutting rock that formed a kind of terrace. I stopped a few metres below, in the bushes. My observation point had an excellent view down below. Between the trees I had a clear sight of part of the road – there was our car and the other two OMON cars which hadn’t yet been attacked. I couldn’t see the last car in the column, but it must have been hit too because black smoke was rising into the air.

I focused on a cluster of bushes that was moving strangely. Since there wasn’t much wind that day and all the animals of the forest had certainly run away already, it was obvious that there were enemies hiding in there. When our comrades shot a few rounds, further down, a young man leapt out from one of the bushes I had been watching, armed with a machine gun and an empty RPG around his shoulder. There were fewer than a hundred metres between us; I aimed at his chest and fired. He grimaced with pain and, bringing both hands to his chest, he tumbled to the ground, as if he had lost his balance. I aimed a second round at his head, and he fell backwards, vanishing into the grass.

I showed my neighbour a well-protected spot between the roots of the tree.

‘Go and lie flat over there. Hide so that you can’t see the barrel of the rifle poking out from the other side. Stay low, don’t move and observe everything carefully. I’ll cover the right side, you do the left. If you see a target, take a nice deep breath before shooting. Pull the trigger slowly, almost gently, and when you let go don’t close your eyes. Can you handle that?’

He nodded, then went over to the position I had pointed out to him.

We could hear shots and the explosions of the hand grenades below, interspersed with the shouting of our men and the enemies – the violence of the battle was increasing at light speed.

‘Down here, down here! Help!’ one of the OMON boys shouted, from the group that was the furthest down, almost at the foot of the mountain. ‘They’re pushing, trying to come out into the road!’

‘Zenith, Deer, Moscow!’ Nosov’s voice was agitated, but filled with the desire to win. ‘Get down there, stop those arseholes – don’t let them come out otherwise they’ll be right on top of us!’

As usual, even at the most difficult moments, our captain showed the gusto for danger that a pirate might have.

From somewhere behind the trees the enemy shot an RPG round.

‘Oh God, they shot my leg off, they shot my leg off!’ one of the OMON boys started screaming in desperation. His screams were so loud and high-pitched that they almost drowned out the sound of the shooting.

I tried to spot the place where the Arab with the grenade launcher was hiding, but the trees were obstructing my view. So I fired a few shots at random, near a clump of bushes that seemed to be moving. I immediately heard a bullet fly over my head – they had a sniper too.

‘Let’s go down lower,’ I told the other man.

It was an inferno down below. The soldier who’d been hit by the grenade kept screaming, while Nosov let out a string of curses, trying to call back one of the OMON boys who had gone out of formation and had started shooting uphilclass="underline"

‘Come back here, you fucking idiot, get back here now… or stop shooting! Fuck, you’re going to hit us!’

‘Reznyak, you filthy bastard, take your position or I will kill you myself!’ the OMON officer commanded. ‘Either come back here or I’ll shoot you in the face!’

We went a few metres further down. I positioned myself next to a brook and sent my comrade a little further ahead. From that position the area could be surveyed more easily – I saw a man armed with an RPG almost immediately – but I couldn’t locate their sniper.

My comrade aimed at the man with the RPG, getting him with the first shot, full in the chest. But the Arab fired as he fell, and hit a tree in front of him.

After the explosion, a young man with a Dragunov on his arm emerged from one of the nearby bushes. He was covering one of his ears and was making strange movements with his head, as if he had a bug stuck in his hair and was trying to get rid of it by shaking his head wildly. He must have taken a hit; the shell had exploded too close to him.

Without a second thought I shot a few rounds and he fell to the ground; the rifle came out of his hands and sailed through the air like a feather carried by the wind. Two other men came out behind him, one with a machine gun and the other with a Kalashnikov. I aimed at the one with the machine gun and fired, and then he leaned against a tree and responded with such a long blast in our direction that his weapon started to smoke. He was shouting like a madman, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of his own weapon. I fired again, twice, because I couldn’t tell if I had hit him. He dropped to his knees, but didn’t stop shooting, even though his bullets were going too high – he was probably wearing a bulletproof vest. I pinpointed his head in my sight; he kept shaking it like a wounded animal that senses the end is near. Without pity, I planted a bullet in his face. The tree behind him was splattered with blood; through my scope I could see a dark stain spreading over the bark like a moving, living substance.

The young sniper took out the guy with the Kalashnikov, landing two bullets in his back as he was trying to run away. The enemies hadn’t expected this kind of attack.

‘Excellent work, friend,’ I whispered.

He flashed me a big bright smile, like a little kid.