He arranged for a different paintball battlefield.
A Pioneer camp. Recognizable, typical. Shershnev was in one like that as a child—on the territory of his father’s garrison. A booth at the gate. One-story buildings for units, painted with yellow whitewash that could be scraped off, dissolved in water, and turned into a spotting liquid to splash one another from old food cans. A parade ground, overgrown with grass, and flagpoles. A bust of Lenin, covered in silver caustic paint. A low brick bath-house. Flower beds made of tires in front of the administration building. Loudspeakers on poles…
He smelled smoke—there were campfires in the distance, to create a battle atmosphere. Maxim went to the office, because he wanted to pay for the match himself, albeit with his father’s money. His friends waited by the bus. Shershnev thought that they would light up, but no one smoked. He was the only one with a cigarette, he took a drag and exhaled, chasing away a bad premonition as he looked at two layers, two periods in his memory.
Here he is, commander of the Pioneer squad. They were playing Lightning Strike, which they waited for all day; they were crawling under cover of the crookedly shorn shrubs toward the headquarters of the “Blues” in building 12, and they could hear their general, Pioneer commander Venya Valkov, giving orders. Shershnev’s team was anticipating running inside, pulling off the blue scraps sewn onto the enemy’s shirts, and the opponents would have to sit on the floor, seething with anger, right where they were “killed.”
And here—overwhelming—were the same asphalt paths, neglected shrubs, yellow buildings, and redbrick steam bath. The stands with red-and-white slogans were riddled with bullets and burned. A homemade banner with a snarling wolf hung on the flagpole. The same camp, the same sign in a tight arc over the gate: YOUNG LENINIST. The woodland was different, not sparse pine but thickly planted deciduous trees, distorted, twisted by the inner gravitation of the mountains. Nearby flowed a turbulent mountain river, and its noise was akin to the voices of the people who had taken over the camp: as if someone had gathered the most alien, piercing sounds and fused them into one.
He was the unit commander, a small group. His job now was to observe, because everything had already been predetermined; the treated prayer beads in a carved casket, the beads of roughly polished wood, for wood absorbed aromatic oils so well, covering up the faint scent of the special substance.
Shershnev was surprised when they let him see the plan the higher-ups had developed. He said carefully that it would be easier to point a rocket or strike from helicopters. He did not want to risk his men on an operation for somebody’s scientific degrees, for the sake of field tests of a prehistoric weapon that smacked of theatrical farce—they might as well ask them to shoot arrows or use daggers. But now he literally sensed the movement of beads in the casket, anticipated someone’s hands opening the box and taking out the beads strung on rough thread, the false gift; they would be running the beads between their fingers, which would be followed by a shrill scream that did not know a man’s shame.
When the man who had the same name as the boy he had tortured, his long-sought enemy, the field commander, and in the recent past, chairman of the Dawn Kolkhoz, Shershnev’s age, cried out his pain, the major raised a prayer, pagan, fierce, blasphemous, to the Maker—the maker of that imperceptible death imbued in the prayer beads.
He was awarded an order and a promotion. But after that they did not so much hold him back as set him aside, like an instrument that justified its tricky shape but was rarely needed. Others were sent on ordinary assignments and there were no more operations in that special line. In any case, in their section.
Other men slowly but surely passed him in rank, awards, and informal ratings of operatives. His career was marked by the mysterious substance about which he knew nothing, even though he had to sign a separate nondisclosure agreement along with the usual ones before the raid. Somewhere up high secret plans were conceived and orders given. Somewhere in the laboratories of their departments, thought Shershnev, chemists were still creating substances. The lieutenant colonel waited for the moment when they would be in sync: order and substance, he and the next target.
Shershnev finished his smoke, stamped out the butt. The decision came on its own: today he would let his son shoot him. Not kill but wound. It was necessary. Let Maxim see the paint blood on his father’s body and feel joy and embarrassment. That red spot, that successful shot would be their first adult story that they would later recall—how skillfully I got you, oh, yes, how you did.
Shershnev pulled on the game coveralls. The teams split up. One was to storm “base”—an old unit dorm—and the other defend it. Shershnev joined the attacking side. They would have more losses. He wanted to say something to his son, but while he was thinking of the right words, Maxim shut the visor of his helmet and gave him a two-fingered V for victory sign.
Once again Shershnev lay behind trees, looking at yellow houses. He crawled, shot, commanded his subordinates—left, right, go around. Of course, he was playing at a third, a quarter of his strength, missing on purpose or even skipping a shot. He could have shot everyone here in ten minutes, even with the clumsy paintball rifle that did not shoot accurately or far. But he played around, trying to overcome the years of training and know-how, trying to force himself to make the wrong response. Shershnev looked for Maxim, he thought he might have seen him in the window, his helmet number 1. They all had the same uniform and helmets, and he worried he would make a mistake and let one of his players “kill” or “wound” his son; he stealthily steered the game in the direction he wanted.
The defenders retreated into the building. Shershnev ran over and threw himself over a windowsill. He wanted to reach his son unharmed, reducing his team along the way, so that Maxim’s victory would be even more impressive.
But it turned out that the narrow corridors were piled with metal beds, tables, and chairs. This was hard even for him. Without noticing, Shershnev had gotten into the rhythm and rage of action. He dropped one with a precise shot right in the visor, which was then covered with red. He got another with a round across the legs. The responding shot hit the wall by his head.
As a distraction, Shershnev threw a desk into the corridor. Then he jumped out. In his peripheral vision, he saw motion in an empty room. He shot a round, at close range, knowing that the paintballs really hurt at that distance but unable to stop himself. He struck as he would in real combat, from below, vertically from groin to neck, then ran two steps to finish him off, pointed the barrel…
No shot.
The paintball rifle had fewer shells in the magazine than his habitual automatic gun.
The number one was painted on the player’s helmet. Maxim, thrown onto his back, smeared with fake blood, groaned and tried to crawl away, pushing his feet on the slippery linoleum. The paint had splashed lightly on the plastic visor. Eyes wild with pain and fear stared out at him.
Shershnev could have made it all right. He could have knelt. Embraced him, held him close. Asked forgiveness. Explained what had happened to him, that it was a bad idea to play paintball with a professional soldier. But the same evil force that directed his finger on the trigger and readily responded to a march—“Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming”—that force turned Shershnev around and away. His son couldn’t whine like that, couldn’t be so afraid. And most importantly, he could not, did not have the right to look at his father that way.