‘Got a fag?’ the scout addresses them.
‘Where are you from?’ the policeman asks, holding his pack out.
‘Kostroma,’[50] he replies, knowing perfectly well what the question is getting at.
‘What unit are you from?’ the policeman tries again. ‘Why won’t your friends come over?’
‘They’re shy.’ The scout grins. ‘You want to know our unit? Maybe you’d like us to show you our papers? Or you want our home addresses?’ he asks with undisguised sarcasm. ‘Who are you?’ His speech is thickly peppered with profanities, adding weight to the effect.
‘We’re on patrol here.’
‘Congratulations! We’re also on patrol.’
‘Well, if you’re really on patrol, no worries. It’s just, you know… There are all these guys going on night raids, and by the morning people are missing.’
‘Yeah, but they go about in armoured personnel carriers. We’re just kicking about on foot. Thanks for the smoke. Come on, guys, let’s go.’ And the scout walks off with the group. His lippy attitude, idiosyncratic accent, lively Russian rolling off the tongue, everything about his appearance has reassured the policemen and they’ve left.
A few days later the scouts run into a group of Russian soldiers in the same village. This time they can’t pull off the patrol trick because they’d probably be asked for a password. So they play the part of a group returning tired and irritable from a dangerous mission. As a rule, when you’re out on a high-risk mission you don’t carry ID. And a commander worth his salt will barely use his radio – the channel can be hacked into. But, to be on the safe side, the scouts have their radios tuned in to the FSB. They carry it off with great success and this story is the one they adopt. Every other night the scouts return to the village, until they’ve discovered the entire layout of enemy positions, their key installations and hidden approaches to them, along with a quick exit route for after the battle.
A few days before zero hour, two hundred metres from the base, a man in his fifties is detained. During the search they find a pound of marijuana on him, but no ID. In Chechnya, civilians do not venture anywhere without their passport, and certainly not into the forest, where at any moment they could run into an armed unit of Russians or guerrillas. Once they’ve found out who you are, the guerrillas would most likely let you go, but there is little chance of the Russian tactical intelligence doing that. So the appearance of this man near the camp seems a little suspicious. He answers our questions vaguely and incoherently. He gets his story mixed up. The only thing he tries consistently to lead us to believe is that he’s a drug dealer on his way to his marijuana plantation in the forest. He has not said it openly, but he keeps on softly hinting at it. But here he’s slipped up. If he was on his way to the plantation, why was he taking the end product with him? It would be more usual to take the crop from the plantation to sell it. And in any case, there is no plantation anywhere within a five-kilometre radius of the camp. The scouts would have seen it. Another cause for suspicion is the fact that he is from the village which any day now we’re planning to attack. If he is an enemy agent, then his handler was none too clever. And he probably is an agent: it can’t have escaped the notice of Russian reconnaissance that there has been increased movement of guerrilla units in recent days. Whoever has told this agent to play the part of a drug dealer hasn’t rehearsed all the possible scenarios with him. He hasn’t worked out the details of his cover story, what answers he should give and how he should give them and so on. After weighing up the factors for and against, the command of the operation conclude that he is indeed an enemy agent. But they don’t shoot him. He may have strayed from the right path, but he is still a Chechen. This argument, of course, has lost weight for both the guerrillas and their Chechen opponents, but on this occasion it plays a positive role in the fate of this man. The guerrillas simply decide to hold him at the camp until zero hour, and after the operation to let him go. At that point he can do no damage. Naturally enough, they take his dope away, but they return it to him when they release him. Why they return it remains a complete mystery to me – although the commander does explain that it is out of a desire to keep the men from temptation.
Life in the base is not particularly different from life in an army field camp anywhere in the world. The scouts return to camp each night in the early hours and they set out each afternoon. Now and then they have a day off. The rest of the men live the usual guerrilla lifestyle. They keep guard of the camp, take turns to cook, clean their weapons and replenish their ammunition stocks, dig trenches and dugouts in case there’s a sudden enemy airstrike or an unexpected fight with the enemy attacking the camp. The latter is unlikely – the scouts are hard at work – but if you don’t want to get caught out in the forest, you have to live by the principle: ‘Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.’ There is at least one hot meal a day. Life in the autumn forest with its incessant rain would be hard without hot food. We cook using an earth oven. It is well concealed; even with the help of thermal imaging, no air reconnaissance could detect its flame. The guerrillas have got camouflage down to a fine art. And of course fuel is no problem in the forest. There are various ways to maintain bodily hygiene: the more hardened men who can handle the cold bathe in the icy water of a mountain stream – even in the summer the temperature never rises above eight or nine degrees Celsius – while the less hardy heat up their water. In the usual camp setting everyone is equal. It is only during an operation or combat, or at a meeting, that the commanders emerge as leaders. The discipline is enviable. The detained man isn’t left to sit in some pit. He lives with everyone else in the camp, but any attempt to leave the camp would be abruptly terminated. He knows that very well and he doesn’t provoke the men. A few places in the camp are categorically off limits for him. During the day he is under the responsibility of the guards on duty. Living in wait is getting rather tedious, you are yearning for action, but patience is one of the key ingredients of the guerrillas’ success. And everybody understands that. The only men who don’t get bored are the scouts. The quality of their work could greatly increase our chances of avoiding losses. And then finally, zero hour arrives.