For the moment we are moving towards where the enemy are waiting for us. The enemy have underestimated us and this is good. If your enemy is laughing, laugh with him. But do not laugh like him. For he is laughing at his own carelessness, while you are laughing at his weakness. Rejoice with him, only rejoice at the unexpected gift which this powerful enemy has handed you by making you stronger through his carelessness. A complacent enemy is a weak enemy. He thinks himself smarter and stronger than you, and that makes him weak. This description fits our enemy perfectly. Having masterminded a top-secret operation under the self-congratulatory name ‘Snare’ in the direction of the ‘probable enemy breakout’ and laying small ambushes in a few other areas that he knows about, our enemy has relaxed, thinking that victory will now come running to him on our legs. But alas! Once again his hopes will be bitterly dashed. We will perform our mission and grant him no such joy.
So that’s how I’ve come to be lying in a forest halfway to the top of a mountain pass. And all I need now is to sleep for at least fifteen minutes. I feel intuitively that sleep will restore my strength, and I have some time to spare. In around fifteen minutes the rear guard will arrive. But no matter how I try, I just can’t get that sleep. Every fighter thinks it his duty to wake me up to check what’s happened, offer me some water or food and try to help me walk on further. I try to explain to them that all I need is fifteen minutes’ sleep and I’ll catch up with them when the rear guard reaches here. But the men are used to seeing me in the advance guard and they’re not too impressed by my explanation. How galling to be dying from such folly and how ashamed I feel of my own body. The sensation that I’ll die if I don’t get some sleep is very real. I don’t dare move out of the way for my sleep – the rear guard might not notice me. My survival instinct is ordering me to sleep and heal myself. But I yield to the fighters and stand up with one of them. Remembering the maxim, ‘Work your hardest, then work harder,’ I walk on ahead. I conquer the mountain and make it to our overnight camp. It has been very difficult walking. The heavy rucksack has been cutting into my shoulders and something bad is going on with my feet inside the army boots. My right foot feels particularly sore. I only get a chance to examine it properly two days later, when we stop for the next break in a deep ravine. And once I’ve seen it, I have to go to great lengths to get hold of a pair of civilian mountain boots, and the front of my ankle, rubbed raw by the army boots, takes a long time to mend. The abrasion is fairly deep, and the daily wading through the many fords does not speed its recovery. So I have to tend it for quite a while before it heals. But never again! Never will I drink water while climbing a mountain.
Our journey is not without curious episodes. One day we had set up camp in the forest to rest. We needed several days to refresh ourselves. After a couple of days the guards apprehended a man heading towards the camp on a three-wheeler all-terrain motorcycle. Astonished by his answers to their questions, the guards came and reported to the commander. It turned out the man was from a nearby village. He had fitted his three-wheeler with a refrigerator and was selling ice cream from it. And this is what brought him to the forest: he wanted to sell the fighters ice cream. He knew that guerrillas were staying in this forest, and he knew the area well. But, unaware of the location of the camp, he decided to try his luck. Angel asked him why he needed to travel into the forest to sell his ice cream, and the elderly man replied bashfully, ‘See, what happened is I lost my job. Well, I have to feed myself somehow, so I took up selling ice cream. But these days I can’t shift it. Too many competitors. After all, they’ve got to eat too. So I thought maybe the fighters would buy some of my ice creams.’
Angel bought the whole lot and advised him not to sell his wares in the forest any more and to keep quiet about what he’d seen (though he only saw a few fighters standing guard). When I asked if he would indeed keep quiet and whether he wasn’t an agent, Angel replied, ‘He won’t talk. Why risk being charged with supplying us with “articles of food”? And he doesn’t look like an agent, just a man in desperate need. But even if he is an agent, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be gone from here in two days’ time.’
It’s a brutal night. And I’m frozen stiff. This is summer, but at an altitude of 3,700 metres above sea level there are constant blizzards, interspersed with occasional hail. My torso and feet aren’t freezing – I’m in a warm Gore-Tex jacket and boots – but I’m bitterly cold from the waist to the ankles. I have thin summer trousers on. Who knew we’d have to spend the night at such an altitude? And intensive walking in warm trousers is an absolute curse. A little below, at an altitude of 3,500 metres, amid the rocks and glaciers, is our camp. We’ve been camped there a week, under camouflage capes stretched across the rocks and invisible to enemy aircraft. We haven’t lit fires. In any case, there’s nothing to burn. Here, besides the glaciers all we have is the most astonishing rock formations, which are breathtakingly beautiful. The only vegetation is moss and edelweiss. These beautiful, strange flowers remind us that we’re still on earth. No mosquitoes or gadflies annoy us here, no blood-sucking insects of any sort; there aren’t even snakes. Nor is there water, but we do have glaciers. During the day they start slowly thawing in the sun and from under the ice mass water trickles out. That’s what we use for our needs. And the sun shines every day here – at least in the summer. Below is a sweeping panorama of magical beauty. Just beneath you the clouds are drifting gently, showering rain upon the earth that is ready to spring to life. And all around are mountains. My camera clicks away tirelessly. I photograph the extraordinary landscapes.
We camp here longer than usual to allow the enemy’s alarm at our sudden disappearance to subside. Here at the summit the enemy’s agents are automatically neutralized: they cannot send intelligence from here. We’re maintaining absolute radio silence, and if anyone were to turn on his radio, he’d blow his cover. The enemy have been shadowing us for a long time with their agents and air reconnaissance. At one point we drew close to the ambush laid for us (we were just an hour’s journey from the site) in order to register on their radar, that is, to flag up our presence at that location to the enemy reconnaissance, then we veered sharply to one side and walked all night in a forty-kilometre speed march before vanishing into a remote ravine. There we had to wait a few days for our battered and chafed feet to recover. After spending two more nights marching almost as fast, we find ourselves at the foothills to the glaciers. We climb up to the glaciers in a day. Along the way the guerrillas have to perform two rescue missions. A fighter falls from a precipice, catches hold of the rock and is left dangling over the abyss. They haul him up by lowering a volunteer on a rope to rescue him. And then two guerrillas get stuck on a thin ledge over an abyss. For their rescue a narrow path has to be hewed out in the rock – luckily not a long one. We hoist our pack horses up the mountain, after unloading the MANPADS, the Russian-manufactured Strela man-portable air-defence systems, which we now have to carry ourselves. The only animals in these parts are the Caucasian tur and the snow leopard. Our horses are visiting these glaciers for the first time. We’ve been surviving all this time on field rations. And we have with us a fellow member of my profession, although communication is somewhat tricky because of the language barrier. But sometimes we talk through an interpreter. This is British journalist Roderick John Scott, known simply as Roddy. Along with everyone else, he endures all the hardships of this trying journey with remarkable stoicism, which fills me with pride; my fellow journalist is a match for the seasoned partisans. He never complains and he dismisses any suggestion that he should turn back. His only complaints come when he is not allowed to film the fighters’ faces on his video camera. But he shows understanding of the rules of guerrilla warfare, where not everyone likes to give interviews with their faces on show. Whenever he is asked, ‘How are you?’ he always replies, ‘Good.’ He works unceasingly. Despite our large supply, the video camera batteries go flat. Our solar-powered chargers are effective for the radio sets, but the cameras are far more power-hungry. At one point, defying the danger of detection, I have to take several days out to travel from the camp to a friend’s house to recharge our batteries.