Your childhood was spent close to the forest. The woods began just a hundred metres from the edge of the village and stretched for kilometres. The forest harboured many wild beasts. Now and then they wandered into your village. But you would visit the forest more often than they would come to the village. From earliest childhood you used to listen to the forest. You used to converse with the forest and its inhabitants. The forest does not frighten you. Quite the reverse. You know the forest will protect you.
2
In the forest you have to become a shadow. You must melt away, merge with the forest. Particularly if there is a war on and you are a participant in that war. You must move without snapping one dry twig underfoot, without rustling last year’s leaf fall, without disturbing the branches or grass. You need to be able to become any tree, bush, hollow or hill, you need to know how to stop smelling like a human if you are to trick the enemy. Your enemy is strong and wily. He too knows how to melt into the forest. He is dangerous. You know it, and that’s why so far you have been lucky. Today you have been lucky. It is a sunny morning in July. You need to cover at least twenty kilometres of your journey before nightfall. You’re carrying important intelligence given to you by your reconnaissance unit. And intelligence is valuable only while it is timely. You know that, and so you’re hurrying. Besides, you also have intelligence of your own – you too are a scout, and no less able than the rest. After spending many hours merging into the shadows of the bushes and gazing through the remaining eyepiece of your binoculars, you’ve discovered the presence and location of two cleverly concealed Hurricane multiple rocket launchers. The firing range of these systems would allow the Russians to attack almost any rebel position on this axis. To do so they would, of course, need competent undercover agents working among the enemy, but they have no trouble recruiting agents. They have at their service large numbers of Armed Opposition soldiers, whose hands are stained with the blood of their own people. You’ve also managed to spot a hidden approach to the Hurricanes that is within range of an RPG-7 launcher. It is quite clear that the Hurricanes need to be taken out, and to this end you have devised a plan. At night, a small group of fighters is to creep up and fire at the Hurricanes with their RPG launchers. To do this there’s no need to enter the mined zone around the Hurricanes, and the more distant approaches to them haven’t been mined – that’s already been verified. Then, without engaging the enemy, the group will escape under cover of fire from a couple of machine guns. There are two areas where there is a risk the escape routes might be blocked, so small ambush units could be left to safeguard the withdrawal of the main group. And, to be on the safe side, you’ve even managed to get the codes of the enemy light signals. You’ve encrypted all this information in a simple numerical code on some small slips of paper which you’ve rolled up and hidden in some antibiotic capsules emptied of powder. You’ve mixed them with genuine capsules and slipped them into the unbuttoned breast pocket of your shirt. You are wearing civilian clothes, which has its advantages. But the main thing compelling you to hurry is the intelligence, later discovered to be incorrect, that one of the delegates in the talks that began a week ago has arrived at headquarters. You urgently need to meet him for an interview. The truth is you are more journalist than scout.
You don’t know the route through this forest. So you ask an old childhood friend to guide you. And, to his cost, he agrees. By setting off alone on this path, you are breaking orders. You were strictly forbidden to travel alone without an armed group. That doesn’t mean you’ve been given your own guard of honour or personal security team, just that you are carrying important intelligence. But you cannot wait around for the group to arrive. Your path runs two hundred metres from the militia base, so you and your friend are at ease and you chat as you calmly walk on.
Suddenly you are overcome by a burning wave of inexplicable fear, just like after the bombing in Shatoy. Your foreboding is so powerful that for a while you cannot take a step, while your friend walks on several metres ahead. You realize your intuition is alerting you to danger; you also know that you should trust your intuition – it has never let you down. Right now the most logical action would be to drop to the ground, keep low, and crawl ahead on all fours to find out the source of this sudden foreboding. But, overcoming your fear, you shut out your intuition through an effort of will and switch on your cold reason. And according to your reason there cannot be any danger; the enemy could not have come so close unobserved. So, feeling calmer, you continue on your way. All of a sudden your friend stops and says something quietly to you. You ask him to repeat it. Again you cannot hear him; you sweep your arm through the air and walk towards to him. You imagine he must have stepped on a mine and that’s why he is acting relatively calmly. You’ve caught up with your friend, and you look over his shoulder to find a group of fighters who have stopped dead with their weapons aimed at you. They are about six or seven metres away. Bearing in mind that in the forest everyone keeps their weapons on the ready for encounters with strangers, you are not too alarmed. In any case, almost all of them are bearded, and some are wearing green headbands, the identifying mark of the resistance.
‘Why have you stopped? They’re friendlies,’ you say, taking a step forward. You are armed. Rather nicely armed. Putting your right hand on the unfastened holster containing your loaded pistol, you walk towards them, saying, ‘Don’t point your guns! They could go off by accident. We’re on your side.’ At that moment the cold barrel of a VSS silent sniper rifle presses against your temple and you hear the quiet command: ‘Hands on your head! Lie down on the ground!’ Without waiting for you to obey, they whack you behind your knees with their rifle butts and bring you expertly to the ground, face down. They’re not on your side. You realize that your war ends here. The blows from the rifle butts snap you out of the stupor of fear that in the first moments washed over you in a searing wave. Your first thought is to fight them. You wouldn’t have a hope of surviving, but you would have a hope of taking at least one of the enemy with you… But just in time a sobering chill runs through you. If you attack, they’ll take fright and gun you down. And once they’ve shot you, they’ll kill your friend. And he’s unarmed. They strip you of your weapons, tie your wrists with a belt, and one of them deals you some punches, asking how many of you there are. Then they gag you and lift you up. They go through the same process with your friend. They haven’t yet searched you properly, merely taken your ID from your trouser pocket. While they are lifting you up, you deliberately lean forward and the capsules with the codes fall out of your breast pocket, unseen by the enemy. You are relieved. But the notes – they must have taken them along with your ID. Well, you could have acquired such information legitimately, as a journalist, and so you are not hugely worried. You’re surprised at your ability to reason with such cool detachment at a moment like this, as though it was all happening to someone else.
They are now leading you some place, and you mentally run through your survival chances, concluding they are nil. What they have found on you ought to be more than enough for the firing squad. The only question is how long the torture will last. You know what awaits you there, and this knowledge doesn’t make things any easier. Your best option would be to die before arriving. Then your death would be far swifter and easier. A wild, crazy idea comes into your head: you could charge into one of your captors with your shoulder and leap with him into the gorge. As luck would have it, you are on the edge of the gorge just now. Then, even if you should survive the fall, they’d be certain to finish you off. Having made up your mind to go through with this seemingly crazy plan, you suddenly pause. You cannot seek such a way out. You are a believer, which means you cannot commit suicide outright. Suicide is the most heinous of mortal sins. Besides, fatalists – and you count yourself one – do not run away from their rendezvous with destiny. Of course, your fatalism is grounded in realism. Yet none the less at this moment it has taken control. And so you walk on. You walk on towards your terrible meeting with destiny. There are thirteen of the enemy. They are a reconnaissance and sabotage group, professionals in their field. They operate boldly and skilfully. If they weren’t courageous warriors, why would they have come so close to your base – and disguised as resistance fighters? One of them stares you in the eye and says, ‘Look at him glaring like a wolf. I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. If he’d realized who we were, he’d have killed us on the spot. I can see it in his eyes.’