I hadn’t heard about any secret weapon before then, so I let Dago go on, just tugging on his rope now and again, because sometimes he could get quite heated and I couldn’t let him get too noisy.
‘Listen, Ilya. We’re both up this Czech end of shit creek, stuck in this war between the Eastern Empire and the West! And you know what we who are in the middle have to do, don’t you? We have to survive, understand? And that’s not gonna be easy! If the armies of the Eastern Empire use their secret weapon against the Western forces of Nato it’ll be Armageddon, an incredible battle! Do you know what Armageddon is? No? Well, you’ll find out soon enough.’
I listened to Dago, at least it helped pass the time as we drove on, and since he didn’t get too excited I didn’t even have to lash him with his rope. All the way, Dago kept asking me riddles and inventing fairy stories… I did think he might be showing off… A spy might be more than a saboteur, but if either is caught behind enemy lines, they both go to the wall, no questions asked… It says so in black and white in A Manual for Saboteurs. So why was he getting so smart with me, this midget? I’d no idea.
We were advancing on Siřem. Captain Yegorov didn’t even look at me as he tied me to the sacks that evening.
I had a dream about sea foam with a girl tied up in it, and in my dream the foam in her bath changed into the tar water that the nuns used to serve us in mugs and make us gargle painfully for lying and swearing, but through the dreamy waves of greying foam I also saw the beauty of Sister Dolores, so it was a nice dream… I woke up and immediately realized how close we were to Siřem.
I could never have guessed that our tank column would be attacked by demons, that Captain Yegorov’s good fortune would rise again, and that the Third World War would break out.
That day we travelled through blazing sunlight and the battle-scorched land of the Czechs without a shot being fired, and we casually set up camp for the night in a village that we’d flattened only a few days before. It was only a stone’s throw from Siřem, only twice the tanks’ range from Chapman Forest, and Commander Baudyš used to run his field exercises all around here. Seated next to Dago and despite the fading light, I recognized the spot where Mikušinec and I had nabbed Šklíba in a wet field smelling of raw earth and handed him over for elimination. Oh dear. The forest track up to Fell Crag started here.
In the evening, we were allowed to make bonfires, and Captain Yegorov gave the order for Siřem to be taken the following day. His orders included the declaration that once Siřem had been captured work would begin on constructing a circus township and that the ‘Happy Song’ tank column’s battlefield meanderings would come to an end, and so a joyful mood reigned in the camp.
Dago refused to climb off the tank and join us by the fire, which the two scruffs were stoking with branches from Chapman Forest, but he kept leaning over from his post on the front hull, holding out his mess tin… There was a bustle of joyful activity around our lead tank’s bonfire.
Gunner Kantariya found a harmonica somewhere and, defying the censorious look of the dour Gunner Timosha, he uncorked a demijohn of meths looted from somewhere and probably kept for just such an occasion, and the sub-machine-gunners fraternized with ‘our Bulgarian brothers’, whose meths intake led to the revelation of such talents that now even the column’s NCOs took a shine to them, and nudges and jokes and questions about the — as all the soldiers believed — peacefully sleeping mermaid came thick and fast.
‘You’re not gonna recognize Siřem, kiddo,’ Scarface told me, though I hadn’t asked him about it. ‘The whole square is full of flowers, and there’s beautiful wreathes and burning candles everywhere — like a cemetery, it is, but beautiful!’
‘Come and join us,’ the other one said, offering me a gulp from his mess tin, ‘and you can stay at Još’s place, with them other kids of yours, like.’
‘Our kids, you mean,’ Scarface corrected him. ‘And who are you exactly? You a Russki?’
That was a question I didn’t fancy answering. I’d been going over what he’d said, that Chata and Bajza and perhaps a few more from the Home from Home were living in Još’s cottage somewhere in the forest. And to the doleful strains of Kantariya’s harmonica it crossed my mind that I probably ought to make my escape then and there and find the lads. But I didn’t do it, because our camp was attacked by demons.
Before we caught sight of their vile, diabolical snouts, and before the evening calm of our forest retreat had been riven by the horrible snorting and baying of these strange creatures, and our ears deafened by the clatter of their approaching hooves, something whizzed through the air and Kantariya’s harmonica groaned and fell silent. The gunner leapt to his feet and yanked a long arrow from the instrument, its sharp tip glinting in the firelight. Obeying every instinct of a commander of saboteurs, I grabbed Scarface’s full mess tin from him and poured it on the bonfire, which blazed up with a blinding flame, me knowing nothing of the properties of meths. Unfortunately, it looked as if I’d given our attackers a signal, and they were upon us.
Fearsome animals with wailing devils’ heads spat gobbets of white foam at us. The warriors who sat astride the jagged backs of these monsters screamed deafeningly, but the sub-machine-gunners kept up their fire. With all the shooting we might have gradually killed each other. The enemy cavalry rushed past and over us, and in no time at all the thunder of hooves could be heard far away, towards Chapman Forest.
The bonfires were scattered on the instant and the darkness rang with the commands of the NCOs, and above all the smooth, perhaps slightly tense voice of Captain Yegorov. The tank commanders called in their positions, and in just a few moments the column had become a dark, silent wall of steel and armaments.
We might have held on like that until daylight, but after a short while Gunner Kantariya returned from a recce and, to the relief of all who saw him, the corners of his mouth were twitching mischievously. Gunner Timosha went along with him to report, and only when we saw his placid face and direct, proud gaze did we heave a sigh of relief.
Soon, from the obsurity over by Chapman Forest, we heard the odd clink, or possibly the sound of a pebble sent flying by a hoof, but the commands barked out in muffled voices by the NCOs kept us in the dark and silence. Snuggled up to Dago on the front tank, I listened out intently, when suddenly the night sky high above us turned bright. Dago’s cry of amazement was punctuated by a rapid pop-pop-pop… the sound of flares going off, and the darkness ahead of us burst into a myriad lights, Captain Yegorov having ordered the simultaneous deployment of all the searchlights and floodlights and signal lamps and any bright lights the tank column possessed. And we, thunderstruck, were treated to an incredible sight, because approaching across the field that in the darkness had merged into one with the rustling forest came a great, jagged, un-horselike, cavalry monstrosity, high above the beast’s wobbling humps were two heads on necks that reminded me of some fat snakes in The Catholic Book of Knowledge, but the really horrible thing was that little human heads were poking out everywhere from the monster’s body. I yelped and Dago shrieked, which wasn’t surprising, since we had no idea anything like that lived in Chapman Forest.
The privates in our column were also all agog and sort of entranced. You couldn’t hear a single shout or shot as the many-headed creature proceeded towards us in the blinding light, slowly and seemingly inescapably. I was all set to slip off the hull plate, and I would swear that for the first time during our operations on Czech soil one or two of the other men in the column were tempted to make a run for it… It came towards us… The quiet that surrounded the slow march of the multi-beast towards the tanks was suddenly broken when the dwarf Dago let out a joyful yelp, and whistled and cried ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Bravo!’ in Russian, and our scouts Kantariya and Timosha now went among the tank crews bringing calm and reassurance to the men, who were still paralysed with fear… We’d only run up against more shattered remains of the Socialist Circus Project: two riding camels and the Mongolian boys who looked after them.