S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort (47 page)

“Bring the light here,” the man says, and Tarasov is about to reach for the lamp when another shadow emerges from the darkness. A young woman with a scarf draped over her head appears and places the lamp closer. For a moment, the light falls on her face and Tarasov notices a tribal tattoo on her forehead. But as she turns and the lamp casts light on the right half of her face, he sees a horrible scar – the skin looking almost molten. The sight makes him shudder, the impact of the old wound made worse by the realization that, without it, she would have possessed an exceptional beauty.

“Yes, I like literature,” he finally replies with a dry throat.

With a grunt of satisfied laughter, the Colonel steps forward. Tarasov takes a step back, stunned by the size of the man. He is a giant, maybe even surpassing the superhuman size of his exoskeleton-wearing warriors, though he wears only a loincloth. He wears the emblem of the Marine Corps tattooed on his chest, but a long, deeply cut wound runs across over it, ending right above his heart.

“So what the report said is correct. You do speak English.”

“Yes.”

“Do you like English literature?”

“I like all kinds of literature... in general.”

“That’s good, Major… Literature begins where strategy ends.”

The Colonel sits down on the chair standing next to the table. His consort starts tending to the wound above his heart. Something cold runs down Tarasov’s spine as he sees her sewing it up. Judging by the many stitches in the bronze-colored skin, she is not doing it for the first time.

“
A scrimmage in a border station, a canter down some dark defile, two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
That is my favorite quote. It sums up everything about us and them.”

Not knowing where the quote comes from, Tarasov does not reply.

“Kipling, Major. A much underrated author nowadays.”

Tarasov feels the Colonel’s eyes studying him. The urge to stand to attention comes over him, but he somehow manages to resist.

“Let’s get down to business, Major. Judging by your ID card and the obvious similarities, this must be your father here. Am I right, Mikhailo Yuryevich?” the Colonel asks, holding the photograph of Tarasov’s father.

“Yes, that was my father,” he replies.

“Your father and his comrades were brave men,” the Colonel continues. “Is it true that they were given inferior equipment because the suppliers had sold the best pieces to the enemy?”

“I heard that such things happened. But that was long ago.”

“Yet here you are – first the father, now the son, fighting the same war in the same country. Proof of what a fateful place this is. And obviously, it is now our suppliers who send our best equipment to our enemies.”

“I am not your enemy, and the armor –”

“That’s not why I want to talk to you. You were brought before me because you are a Russian officer…” the Colonel says, deeply inhaling the smoke from his cigarette. “Or Ukrainian, it doesn’t matter, because the story I want to tell begins when there was no real distinction. Because in the beginning all of you were enemies to us, and our friends were shooting at your Hind gunships with their
jezails
. I was still a young cadet back in the mid-Eighties, but like everyone else, I pulled for the mujahedin
and rejoiced in the end when I saw on TV how your army ran like a whipped dog.”

Tarasov’s eyes fall on the cigarette. The Colonel catches his eyes but doesn’t offer him a smoke, making the major wonder if this, together with the derogatory remarks about the Soviet army, is part of a subtle way to torture him. He shifts on his feet as the Colonel pauses for a moment, wondering what the warrior might be building up to.

“Yes, I was young… and utterly ignorant, just like our government who helped the mujahedin beat your father’s army.”

Hearing this, Tarasov becomes very curious about what the Colonel is going to tell him. For a minute, the battle-hardened warrior stares into the grey cloud of smoke that slowly snakes upward in the light of the lamp.

“I remember,” the Colonel continues, “while I was still commanding a recon battalion of the United States Marine Corps, we went into a village on a hearts and minds operation. We felt we were liberators, bringing freedom and justice. The locals welcomed us. There were lots of handshakes and rations shared. We left, but next morning we had to drive through the same village to another destination. We had barely left it when an IED went up, blasting one of trucks and killing five of my Marines. The same kids who we gave candy to the day before were cheering when they saw what had happened. Usually soldiers are rewarded for killing… Have you ever been rewarded for killing, Major?”

“I was only rewarded for bravery.”

“Bravery. That’s nothing, Major. Nothing. It must be the nature of a soldier, not a virtue. And we should have been rewarded for
not
killing anyone that day. It was that day, when I had to tell my Marines sad excuses for what had happened – the villagers bribed into looking the other way when the insurgents planted the IED, or being coerced into doing it themselves, whatever – that I realized our war was lost. Not because our enemy cannot be beaten, but because history proves that we have to fight them on their terms. That means: if they can’t be won as true friends, then we must treat them as true enemies. No excuses, no mercy. We lost the war because we were fighting it the on wrong terms… on the terms of those back in the States who sent us into war, but didn’t let us fight it the way a war should be fought. My spoilt and naïve country has long forgotten the true rules of warfare. Our rules were made by those crying out for the respect of the
 
human rights of an inhuman enemy, by those who let a nineteen year old sailor load a two-thousand-pound bomb onto an airplane but punished him for writing
‘HIGH JACK THIS FAGS’
on it because a bunch of faggots and dikes found it offensive, by those who let the Afghan peasants produce heroin to save their children from starvation which then poisons our own children and turns them into drug addicts... It dawned on me that the real obstacle on our way to victory was not the insurgents, but those who wanted us to fight this war with one hand tied behind our backs. A hundred years ago, a fearsome enemy called the Marines
devil dogs
out of respect. But what good is there in being devil dogs if you’re kept on a tight chain by a corrupted government? That chain had to go, and I had to take matters into my own hands.”

     
The Colonel crushes his cigarette in the ashtray lying on the table and lights up another one before continuing.

     
“One day we were ordered to secure another village. There was a nursing school for adolescent girls from the Hazara tribe. The insurgents burnt it down a few days before. Only one girl was brave enough to stand in their way. She stabbed one of them, right in the heart. They sprayed acid into her face as punishment, but not without a dozen of them raping her first. She was cast out by the elders for bringing ‘dishonor’ on her village and walked ten miles to our nearest position to alert us with half her face burning and blood running down her legs.”

The Colonel looks down at the girl bandaging his wound. “As soon as we arrived at the village, they hit us with RPGs, AKs, machine guns, everything. This time, I let my Marines fight like true warriors. It was… marvelous. After that, no shots were fired from the village anymore. It was the greatest satisfaction a soldier can feel – at last fighting a war as it should be fought. In war, there is no such thing as excessive firepower. That concept is a peacetime invention. It is pure irony that the rules of war are made in peace. But irony turns into tragedy when the rules of peacetime are forced upon soldiers fighting a war. That’s why my superiors didn’t approve. They didn’t understand what I’d come to know. Neither did my own son. I tried to explain but he didn’t get my message, or it was distorted… After what happened, he wrote me this.”

The Colonel opens the Joseph Conrad book and takes a tattered sheet of paper from its pages, then hands it to Tarasov. It is a print-out of an email, with two of its faded lines encircled with thick red ink over and over again by a shaky, maddened hand, opened and folded again a thousand times. The major reads it and, without a word, gives the note back.

“The battle was recorded by a TV team. All those people on the streets back home called us baby-killers, a shame on our country and worse. Nobody listened to our side of the story. I understood: there would be no way for me to go home. My Corps, my country, even my own son’s soul was taken from me by those who didn’t know what war means, yet dared to judge me and my unit!”

The Colonel wipes beads of sweat from his head as if he wanted to crack his own skull open in despair. Until now he has spoken slowly, without emotion, making sure that Tarasov understands and remembers every word. But now his voice trembles with suppressed rage and the major narrows his eyes. He wants to ask something, but by the time the correct English words come to his tongue, the Colonel has continued in his tired voice.

“Later on, I was thankful to them for burning the bridges behind me. It made it easier to do what I had to do. We were sent to mop up a place called Shahr-i-Gholghola. It could have been easily blasted by bombs but it’s a world heritage site, so dozens of my Marines had to die to keep its mud bricks intact. And after we fought our way into its depths, I found myself standing in a place that Genghis Khan had been the last to see before me. And then I saw his glory and his power and understood the mightiest of warriors!”

The Colonel’s eyes now smolder with obsession. His face is like that of a prophet who once experienced otherworldly bliss and tries to convey just a fraction of it to a lesser mortal.

“I bathed in his grandeur with my men and let it wash away the bonds shackling me to the past. He opened my eyes and made me invincible. Cast away that doubt from your eyes, Major! It was the fear in his enemies’ hearts that made him invincible. To be invincible, you must be feared! Kill one man, terrorize a thousand! The rules of war haven’t changed from the times of Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan. But in our war, whenever my country killed one man she apologized to ten thousand! Could such methods ever lead to victory, Major?”

“Sun Tzu also said that none can see the strategy from which comes victory.”

“Because Sun Tzu was no Marine!” The Colonel proudly exclaims. “But we understood that even if our country was not to be feared anymore since her backbone was broken, we could still be –
I
could still be feared. By the time I emerged on the surface I was filled with power and strength. The men who were with me in those catacombs were no longer simple Marines. The…
Spirit
had turned them into true warriors and they became my Lieutenants. The Spirit imparted our bodies the strength to follow the call and crush anyone in our path. The Spirit… it is powerful beyond your wildest imagination, Major. Had our willpower not been tempered and honed like fine steel by the discipline of my beloved Corps, it would have crushed us and turned us into wild animals. We detonated the tunnels after we left to prevent anyone from finding it again. I know about your scientists, Major Tarasov, and also about the people wanting to hijack their mission. They will all die, if they are not dead already.”

 
    
“Will it be the Tribe that kills them?” Tarasov cloaks all his vulnerability behind a simple question.

The Colonel looks at him like a father whose son has asked something of a futile nature. “If I am talking to you, Major, you’d better not interrupt. But to answer your question: no. They will not be so lucky. The spirit knows how to defend itself.”

The Colonel falls silent for a moment, smoking his cigarette. Tarasov doesn’t dare speak.

“After we emerged from the catacombs, there were a few grunts who still didn’t understand. My warriors were only too eager to finish them off, and a day after the battle I was finally relieved of my duties. They charged me with mutiny, with operating without any decent restraint and beyond acceptable human conduct. But the generals no longer had any power over me. They sent people after me to terminate my command, but they either joined us or died.”

The Colonel discharges his cigarette and falls quiet.

Tarasov hesitates before asking the Colonel how the Marines, supposedly the most loyal unit in
America
’s armed forces, could cope with apparent treason. But, emboldened by the thought of being executed anyway, he risks asking one tricky question without caring much about the Colonel's possible reaction to it.