The Bandits break out in loud cheer when the helicopter lifts off. Compared to the stomach-knotting ascend of the Mi-24 gunships that Tarasov is used to, the giant helicopter’s take-off can barely be felt. The feeling of flying in a helicopter only sets in when the Mi-26 gains an altitude of two hundred meters and the accelerating engines make it tilt its nose slightly downwards.
Ferret is sitting not far from them. He asks a Bandit for his guitar and begins to tune it. Expecting a spirit-lifting song, everyone cheers around him.
“Freedom’s secret weapon!” Buryat snorts next to him. “He’ll kill us all with that racket!”
The others browbeat him into silence and Ferret begins to sing. He does his best to make himself heard in the noise of the engines, and the song is known well enough to make more and more Bandits join in.
“What’s that song about?” Pete asks.
“It was written when we moved out of Afghanistan.”
Tarasov looks at the singing Bandits with a bitter grin. They seem to ignore that this song with a powerful melody is actually full of pain, fittingly for a song about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; although a second thought tells him that for Bandits, who were after all loathed and hunted by every faction in the Exclusion Zone, going into the wastes of the New Zone must appear like a ride into the promised land. Probably for many Stalkers who joined them as well — some tired of a Loner’s perilous fate, others weary of the pointless and never-ending faction wars. He begins to translate the lyrics, occasionally thinking over an odd word for a heartbeat.
“From the once conquered celestial heights we are descending to earth, down the charred stairs… Through the salvos of slander and lying—we’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving! Farewell mountains, only you can see to tell who we were in that remote land, it is not up to a one-sided judge or mere bureaucrat… to judge what makes up our pain and glory.”
“Outstanding,” the Top quietly remarks.
“My friend, let’s have a toast tonight, first to those who made it through the latest raid, the second to the dead, for whom the wind is silently grieving—we’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving!”
“It sounds beautiful,” nods Nooria.
“Farewell mountains, only you can see to tell who we were in that remote land, the price we’ve paid and what sorrow, which friends we’ve had to leave behind, what enemy escaped the finishing blow, and tell how our sorrows, hopes and pain will mark and form future people’s mind.” Tarasov swallows. “Well… that’s it.”
“Truly outstanding,” Hartman says. “The guy who wrote it must have know a thing our two about that war. This song could be so much our own!”
“He did and it could.”
“And those Bandits, all singing it as if they’d understand!”
Tarasov shrugs. “Maybe they do understand, if they refer to the Zone with the we’re leaving part.”
“I’m with the Top, for once,” Pete says, though his for once sounds as if he had to force himself into saying it. “It’s beautiful… and the chorus, all that robust C major, it is… so fitting.”
“Don’t tell me you had a Fender Stratocaster once,” Tarasov says wrinkling his forehead.
“Hell no, but — great song, anyway.”
The Top appears slightly confused. “Yes, I can hardly wait to be back to our Zone. But I don’t really know what to do once we’re there—oh damn that song. I no longer know what to do about the scavengers, even if they are Bandits. I was so sure about them being just scum. Now… I just don’t know any longer.”
Tarasov turns back to face the window. By now the Jupiter Area, with all the derelict railroads and industrial buildings appears below like a scenery for model trains. To their right, another Mi-26 hovers over the dilapidated cement factory, and the third one should be about to take off from the helipads. Their own helicopter proceeds to the north, passing by the Stalker refuge of Yanov Station where abandoned trains still rust away on the tracks overgrown with grass. Then, as the helicopter turns to the west, they fly over the low hills where only heaps of rubble and brick chimneys mark the place of a village that had to be buried for the high amount of radiation it received back in 1986. The glowing anomalies among the ruins appear threatening even from far above. Then their flight continues to the west, giving a wide berth to the CNPP that looms on the far horizon.
“Yes, I’m leaving,” he murmurs to himself.
The Top notices his feelings and gives him a pat on the back. “Mikhailo, if you dare get sentimental now—I’ll throw you out of this helo!”
Tarasov is not in the mood to appreciate Hartman’s rude but well-meant remark. “You wouldn’t dare, Top… you just wouldn’t dare.”
He feels like heaving a long, sad sigh, eventually keeping it inside and only mentally sighing when he turns his head away from the Exclusion Zone where, mixed with dull rain, the first snow begins to fall from an overcast sky.
70
“Strelok, yes… I met many remarkable men in the Zone. Ashot is so funny and Yar like a wise, old brother. Major Tarasov, that mean bully. You ever met him? No? Never mind… No one was like Strelok, though.”
Mac sounds pensive as she removes the sight cover from her F2000 assault rifle as the first step of field maintenance.
“He always used to say, you’re a girl after all as if I couldn’t kill anything just like him till I had enough ammo. I hated him for that…”
“You mean he was patronizing you?”
With the barrel and optical part assembly now open, Mac begins to clean the moving parts with an oilcloth.
“Not exactly. I don’t know how to put it, actually.” She takes off the butt plate and removes the hammer assembly from the receiver part. “Partly patronizing, yes… but I wouldn’t call him chivalrous. I don’t know—he liked us making love the hard way.” The hammer makes a faint click as she releases it. She adds a few drops of weapon oil from a plastic flask onto the spring and carefully wipes it with the cloth piece. “At that time I was still a rookie with long fingernails. I used to dig my nails in his back but he just smiled, liking the violence of it—as if he wanted to assure himself that he could bear the pain.”
She starts to reassemble the weapon.
“If half of what I heard about his exploits is true, Strelok had no reason to prove that.”
“Yes, in the beginning… later on he became violent to me. First I thought, it’s because that usual Ukrainian macho thing. But it always came out of the blue, you know, one moment kind and gentle, the next one slapping my face and pulling my hair.”
“Uh-hum.”
Having finished maintenance, Mac reloads the rifle with a 30-round STANAG magazine.
“And so was his behavior too. I didn’t know any longer who I was with—the old Zone hand who has seen it all or a psychopath.”
Ahuizotl gives a shrug. “Maybe one thing doesn’t go without the other.”
“That’s what I thought, but then there are men like Uncle Yar. He is also a Zone legend but always calm, always radiating such a sense of safety. Or Shrink.”
“None of them have been through what Strelok has.”
“True. And I couldn’t help him. Jesus, brother, you have no idea how guilty I feel over leaving him…”