Free Fall (33 page)

An assault on a building, watched by someone who doesn't know the procedure, might look insane: people running through rooms, throwing hand grenades everywhere and shooting everything that moves. But in that chaos there is also a harmony; all the participants are perfectly synchronised, and they don't need to utter a word, because each of them knows his job. While one breaks down a door, another throws a grenade and yet another already has the next one ready; then the first shoots a spray of bullets from top to bottom, right to left; behind him a comrade does the same in the opposite direction, then they jump in, and so on and so forth . . . Speed and the proper use of hand grenades is very important, since if they don't injure the enemy at least they stun him. Being able to seize those seconds to kill him is fundamental, not stopping no matter what, just keeping pushing and pushing . . . Getting into a fire fight with the enemy is pointless and dangerous, because then he has the time to organise himself, make a retreat and exploit his knowledge of the place. If anyone gets hurt, he's left where he is; nobody is allowed to stop.

Jumping over a wall, running, or generally moving with any agility is very difficult if you're wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying weapons. It's not like it is in the movies, where soldiers break windows with their heads, start kicking at doors and jump around everywhere.

Well executed assaults don't last long. An expert squad can ‘clear out' a five-storey building in less than ten minutes.

I was breathing hard; I could feel my nose was full of dust. The smell of burnt human flesh intermingled with that of fresh blood, explosives and gunpowder. I ran behind Nosov, pulling pin after pin from the hand grenades, throwing one into every room. I would shoot and jump in, passing the enemies' disembowelled bodies lying on the floor, hitting them with a few extra bullets to make sure they were dead . . .

We finally managed to reach the door to the roof, but we didn't have time to break it down before it was blasted apart from the other side when a powerful grenade hit it with a burst of flaming air. Luckily we were at each side of the door, and we immediately flung ourselves to safety into opposite corners. The room filled with black smoke; where the door used to be was now a burning hole in the wall. My ears were ringing unbearably and my eyes seemed determined to abandon me once and for all. I watched the scene as if I were outside my body; it didn't seem as if I was really there . . .

To keep the enemy from reloading the grenade launcher, Nosov threw a series of hand grenades into the newly-formed gap.

‘Out!' he yelled.

Shooting madly we leapt onto the roof and into the
fog. We hit three Arabs. One of them tried to flee by jumping down onto the street, but our explorers were waiting below to finish him off. We put a hand grenade on the anti-aircraft gun then rushed back into the building. The explosion was impressive – the flaming fragments scattered widely, like so many fireworks.

We went down the stairs, being careful to avoid any surprises at every turn. But the enemy had been totally eliminated.

Only once we were outside the house did we start inspecting one another, to see if we were all in one piece. As I mentioned, many times someone would get some kind of wound but not realise it amidst the chaos of the battle. At the end of an assault, everyone inspected everyone else's vests. A little dazed, covered in dust and debris, we were otherwise fine. Shoe had a cut on his hand. It wasn't deep but a lot of blood was coming out; we wrapped a bandage around it to stop the bleeding.

‘We can't let our guard down now,' Nosov said. ‘Let's defend the perimeter of the building and prepare ourselves for a possible counterattack.'

We had to keep that house under surveillance at all costs, waiting for our units to arrive. Moscow rushed back onto the roof and shot the three signal flares in a row. There was the risk that in the middle of the fog they wouldn't be very visible, but a few minutes later we received a green flare in response from the other side of town – that meant that our column of men would begin marching towards us.

At that point our artillery units, who were positioned
a few kilometres away, shot some illumination flares. Everything was as bright as day, yet the shadows fell to the ground strangely – the flares came from several directions, and each of us had a row of faint shadows at his feet. It was unnatural, it gave me the creeps.

The time it would take to get to our position should be a quarter of an hour at most – the problem was that we could no longer count on the surprise-effect. Now our enemies could easily spot us.

Suddenly, an RPG shell came at us from the street. No one had expected such a rapid attack. The grenade hit the facade of the building, and two of the explorers fell to the ground, killed by the shards.

‘Take positions!' Nosov shouted immediately. He too was shaken by the enemy's speed.

Moscow, Shoe and I left the school, looking for a good position from which to hit the approaching enemies. We quickly crossed a couple of yards, then settled beside a building opposite. From the noises we heard, the Arabs had only assault rifles and no machine guns. Amidst the pandemonium of the gunfire, despite the fog, I was able to pinpoint my targets and strike them by surprise. Even if what I was really looking for were their snipers. I knew they had to be somewhere around there, because I knew the enemy's tactics well – we often did the same things.

If a group wasn't strong enough or big enough, they would try to ‘provoke' the enemy by keeping a building under surveillance with a few somewhat random blasts of gunfire. Thus, when the defenders responded to the
fire, they revealed their positions, and the sniper, by observing the fired rounds' burst of flame, could pick them out and begin to work on them one by one.

Snipers could also work in teams of two or three. There was no exact rule; the Arabs often worked in pairs. Anyone who had trained in the military camps of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or other Asian countries under NATO control was used to working in groups composed of as many as six people – three pairs of snipers who communicated by radio.

These enemy groups were fought by the elusive anti-sniper squads of the FSB – high-ranking professionals, armed with foreign-made rifles, who showed up at the right place at the right time, completed their mission, and were picked up by the support units immediately.

The individual snipers were usually poorly prepared, often mercenaries, former athletes, hunters . . . hopeless men who had learned to shoot on their own. For the FSB teams, paradoxically, it was harder to spot the amateur individual than a pair of professionals, because the sniper who acted alone followed different tactics from those who were taught in military schools, and was, therefore, much more unpredictable.

I was lying on the ground, between blocks of cement that in their previous life must have been the pavement kerbs. You couldn't see much in the fog. Through the telescope, everything looked hazy, like the picture on a television
with no aerial. Moscow and Shoe stood beside me, covering my position. I shot twice at the spots where I saw the bursts of rifle fire appear until the flares disappeared, and I continued observing the situation.

Our men responded to the enemy with a few short machine gun blasts and periodical rounds from the grenade launcher, which was positioned under the rifle barrels. Through the telescope I saw a guy with an RPG-7 pop out from a corner, run down the street and get on his knees, poised to shoot. I aimed at his head. He fell immediately, as if he'd been pushed from behind. His weapon slid out of his hands, the round fired, skidding on the tarmac, hitting the chassis of an armoured car.

Someone threw a grenade in our direction. It exploded about twenty metres away; fortunately there was a stack of old tyres and a wrecked car that blocked the shards. Without waiting I stood up and signalled to Moscow that we should move; by that point our position no longer served any purpose. He loaded a grenade in the Kalashnikov and fired at the enemy, then ran over to us and along with Shoe we did a loop around the building, reaching the space where at one time the garden must have been.

From the road we could hear the sound of our tanks, but we didn't have time to identify ourselves before they immediately fired a long volley of bullets at us. Moscow quickly pushed us to the entrance to the house; the bullets flew over our heads.

‘Don't shoot, we're saboteurs!' Shoe yelled like a madman from inside the house.

‘What the fuck are you doing here? Weren't you supposed to be at the end of the street, down at the crossroads?' they replied.

We came out. Our men were standing with their rifles pointed at us. There were ten of them; part of the infantry operation units, they were explorers and privates.

On the road, meanwhile, the tanks went over the tyre barricades and burned-out cars, freeing access to the position and blowing up the explosives the Arabs had placed between the carcasses, in case anyone were crazy enough to try to move them without taking cover inside a tank.

‘There are three of us,' Moscow said. ‘We set up a lateral position, the rest of the guys are in the old nursery school . . .'

We quickly joined them. The infantry, in a lightning attack, blocked the enemy groups in the middle of the road. Some tried to escape into the fog, and our men shot them in the back. A couple of Arabs tried to launch some more grenades, but they were immediately overpowered by our numerous assault units. There were probably a hundred men, and with four tanks and five light infantry tanks they surrounded the school.

We all went inside the building and took in the massacre that had happened there. Amongst the bodies of enemies and infantrymen I also recognised their lieutenant major; his head was crushed, shrapnel from a mortar round had killed him.

One infantryman had taken a blast right in the vest, and a bullet had gone into his side; he lay next to the
dead lieutenant on an old dirty rug soaked in blood, while a medic stitched his wound with no anaesthesia. He didn't seem bothered by the pain; he was talking to a comrade who was observing the street from the window to keep up with how the battle was going.

In the meantime, more infantry arrived on board a BTR just like ours. They were equipped with a radio, and they set up an operation command post inside the building. Along with them there was a major and a lieutenant colonel, who started talking with Nosov, assessing the losses they had suffered and which strategies they should employ.

Our order, for us and for the explorers, was to join the assault units – we had to seize that town, and we wouldn't be finished any time soon. They gave us a radio and replenished our supplies. We were able to eat a quick bite; the tankers also offered us some hot coffee, a real rarity. Then we left the school with a precise objective: breaking through enemy lines.

We were immersed in the chaos of battle all night. Our units had made remarkable progress – by four in the morning they had managed to liberate almost half the town. We saw the people fleeing and tried to guide them to a predetermined area, in order to tighten the ring even more.

Our armoured cars moved down the streets looking for smaller groups of fleeing residents, while the clean-up teams passed by to check the liberated territory, blowing up the cellars and shooting grenades at suspicious places.

At seven, with the arrival of daylight, the fog disappeared
completely. The town was all ours – only one neighbourhood still resisted.

We found ourselves on the border of the area defended by the enemy; their fortified positions were fifty metres ahead. Our snipers had been trying to neutralise theirs since early that morning, receiving the same treatment in return. We were waiting for air support; the helicopters were supposed to ‘comb' the area with surface-to-air missiles, and then we would come in. But, knowing our air units' tendency to always enlarge the range of action, we shifted back a block, moving one house at a time to avoid giving the enemy the impression that we were retreating and thus letting them get away.

The helicopters arrived at the arranged hour, and, as we feared, started to drop missiles on the position we had just abandoned. We prayed that none of the missiles would fall on us . . . There were maybe five helicopters in constant motion. They swooped over the area to drop their charges, which blew everything up the moment they touched the ground, transforming the streets and the houses into one big endless fire.

When the helicopters had finished their job, we heard a weak signal on the radio. It was operations command calling us.

‘Birch, Birch, 102 here! How's the field? When is the joust set to begin?'

These spy movie codes they used in radio messages were ridiculous, and they only made communication more complicated. We knew that the enemy monitored our radio conversations as we did theirs. But command insisted on speaking
in code, and so the units would respond with simple words, often embroidering them with lots of swearing.

Nosov approached the soldier with the radio and replied personally:

‘102, 102, Birch here! Tell the air patrol to fuck off, and if those bastards shoot at us again, I'll take them down with the RPG!'

‘Birch, answer the question, forget the rest!'

‘I won't forget shit. Thank God we moved . . . In compensation, the Arabs are still waiting for us, just like before . . . Actually, now they're ready because they know we're about to attack!'

‘Birch, we order you to follow the assault units in zone B14! Confirm receipt!'

‘Receipt confirmed, 102! Zone B14, we're heading for the position now!'

‘Over and out!'

So we went back to our burned-out positions.

Everything was black and covered in ashes; a light dust lingered in the air. There was a strong smell of explosives and acid that made our noses itch and went all the way down to our lungs. Our eyes burned, as teary as if someone had sliced up a giant onion.