Free Fall (36 page)

Before then, none of us would ever have dared to search a sacred site. The Russian military was capable of committing many injustices and of proving itself even crueller than the devil, but they would never dream of sending soldiers to go and fire their weapons in a place of worship.

It wasn't a question of respect, but a kind of superstition. We believed that profaning what other people venerated, such as the house of their god, would bring us nothing but misfortune. In the course of the war, many of us had become believers. To get through the more difficult moments, we often turned to God; He was a haven for our souls, the only place not regulated by military code. We all thought of our mothers, who went to
church every Sunday to light candles by the orthodox icons for their soldier sons; certainly Chechen mothers prayed in the mosques for their children's survival. Either way, we had always respected those places. Even simple people, or people with little education, can understand the importance of hope, but this is a feeling experienced only by those who fight war – although of course not by those who wage it . . . As always, however, the only voice our Command wasn't willing to listen to was ours.

And so we left our base on a mission with five armoured vehicles: one for us, one for the infantry explorers, and the other three for the OMON special teams; all together, there were forty-two of us, including drivers. We also had two dogs, German Shepherds trained to sniff out drugs and find explosives.

It was unbelievably hot, and the wheels of the cars on the dirt roads flung up a clay-like dust that stuck to our faces, mingling with our beards and our hair. That was why we saboteurs all wore sunglasses, shorts and no shirts, our bulletproof vests against our bare chests. As always, we knew we were the envy of the other units because of our freedom in dress, even if amidst the pandemonium of a counter-terrorist operation like the one that awaited us, there was really nothing to envy of anyone.

Going up the mountains, we came to the little town where we were supposed to conduct our search. There was a wonderful peace; old men sat on the benches chatting,
children ran through the streets, women were doing housework in their yards . . . It seemed impossible that there was anything threatening there. When faced with situations like this I felt uneasy; we were there to ruin the lives of people who had nothing to do with the war, or with the dirty business in which we were immersed.

My group and I hopped off the cars and marched ten metres in front of the vehicles, which advanced slowly, at walking pace. We walked in the middle of the street with our weapons in hand, prepared for the worst. As soon as they spotted us, the women grabbed the children and all the civilians ran inside. They were used to military operations; they knew they had to leave their gates and front doors open, come out into the yard, keep their hands in full view and have their papers ready. We went down the road without stopping to do any checks, but we glanced at the yards anyway. When they left a house quickly to avoid a search many terrorists would leave something behind – a clip or a grenade might fall out of their jacket – so it was necessary to look carefully at everything on the ground and search for any clue that might reveal the presence of an enemy. The terrorists had learned to comb every corner, to find out where the deeply worn foot paths led. Often civilians hid terrorists in underground pits they had dug; sometimes the entrance to a hiding spot was concealed by a kennel or a tool shed. Regulations stated that it was also necessary to inspect people's hands, to check for traces of gunpowder, calluses or unusual burns, to see if they had ever shot a gun or done so recently.

On this occasion, though, we didn't have time to look
for these things. We were headed for the mosque, a large building in the centre of town, surrounded by a white stone wall. There was a high green gate at the entrance, with yellow writing in Arabic at the top. According to the operational orders, we had to conduct a raid, which meant that one of our cars was supposed to break down the gate, bursting through at full speed, and once inside the building we were supposed to inspect every room, first with polite requests and then, if the people didn't understand or didn't want to understand, with a nice fusillade. Usually a raid lasts a few seconds – the enemy shouldn't have enough time to react. If he has the chance to organise himself and start shooting, it's common for soldiers to say ‘the ping-pong game has begun' – and it's a game that's hard to win.

Our car approached the boundary wall, and we saboteurs jumped up on it with ease. The white stones were nice and wide, and after running a few metres along it, we leapt down to the other side, into the courtyard of the mosque. Everything was calm. There were well-manicured trees, freshly varnished benches and whitewashed walls with mosaics depicting religious scenes; the human figures were disproportionate, as if they'd been drawn by a child's hand. From the spout of the fountain in the middle of the yard water dripped, a sign that someone had taken a drink not long before. There was no one around the mosque, but the doors were open.

Our captain signalled to us to position ourselves along the wall under the windows. Then he took a stone and threw it at the gate, by the road; that was the sign to
alert our men. The infantry explorers' carrier charged full speed ahead, levelling the gate and knocking down part of the wall. Behind them ran the explorers and the OMON.

At that same moment we smashed in the windows. Moscow and I were the first to enter, and in a few seconds we were all inside.

The building was even bigger than it had seemed from outside, with high ceilings and decorated rooms. On the walls hung photos of holy places, other mosques and portraits of Islamic clerics. On the floor there were some valuable rugs yet there were fake plastic flowers in the corners. Arranged among the flowers were photos of armed men; evidently these were the dead terrorists, stuck amidst that plastic green that symbolised their eternal life in Islamic heaven.

When we reached the hallway, we ran into a group of men, who were simply dressed, with long beards.

‘Lie down, on the floor,' Moscow said, curtly. ‘Arms open wide.'

They obeyed the order without opposition. We could hear the first interrogations beginning in the courtyard; it was the OMON trying to get as much information as possible.

We inspected the rest of the rooms without finding anything of interest. There was the same stuff everywhere: rugs, fake flowers and potted plants, photos and a few books in Arabic.

Nosov came out into the hallway and took an old imam aside.

‘Where is the kitchen?' he asked him politely.

The old man lifted an arm, indicating a small structure on the other side of the courtyard.

‘Kolima, Moscow,' the captain said to us, ‘come with me.'

We took a young man with us who must have been a mullah. He was wearing a tunic and he was well fed, too, with a nice round belly and jowls like a bulldog. Nosov took him by the elbow and, in a friendly voice, like a curious tourist, he asked for information about the mosque's activities, the people who attended it, and many other questions that had little to do with our operation. The man tried to respond calmly, but he was nervous. He spoke very slowly in Russian, attempting to pronounce the words in the most correct way possible – he must have been educated.

We went into the kitchen. There were foodstuffs piled along the walls: bags of cereal and sugar, tins, plastic plates and cups, and some small camp stoves. On the table there were several pots, oil lamps, and bags full of American, Turkish, Swiss and German medicines.

Nosov examined the pots, grazing them with his finger-tips; he almost seemed to be measuring them. He waited a little, as if he knew that sooner or later the man would begin to talk. But he was silent, with a slight, innocent smile stamped on his face.

Nosov looked the mullah straight in the eye and, in that tone we all knew well, the one he used when he didn't feel like playing anymore, he asked:

‘Where are your wounded?'

The man suddenly went pale, and his hands began to
tremble. Trying to keep calm, he raised his hands to the sky, as if he were asking for divine forgiveness, and addressed the captain in a humble voice:

‘What wounded, commander? Perhaps I do not understand the meaning of your words. We are only servants of God. We help the people of the village . . .'

Nosov smiled with the politeness of an English nobleman, went up to him, and without removing his gloves – he was wearing the tactical Kevlar ones, which are stiff and heavy – gave him a hard slap in the face. The man let out a cry and then crumpled to the floor, sliding down the wall as if his muscles could no longer support the weight of his body. His nose immediately swelled up and started to bleed; his eyes filled with tears.

Nosov pulled out his gun from under his vest and pointed it at the man's head.

‘I need your wounded, now. If you prefer, I can find them myself, but by that point everyone will be dead: old, young, women, cats, dogs . . .'

The man started to whimper, hugging his knees to his chest. Breathing hard, big reddish bubbles came out of his mouth, saliva mixed with blood.

Nosov took a lamp from the table, broke it apart and poured the kerosene over the man, who started to squeal like a pig at the sight of an executioner's knife, while trying desperately to unwind his kerosene-soaked turban. His dirty hair poked out from the strips of cloth.

Our captain took a box of matches and lit one, holding it over the man.

‘If you don't tell me where you keep the wounded I'll
burn you alive,' he said cruelly, holding the match in one hand and the gun in the other. ‘I don't give a shit about your fucking religion; I think you should all be killed . . .'

Sobbing, the man sputtered out a storm of incomprehensible words, among which we could just make out:

‘In the garden . . . around the back . . . under the tent . . .'

Nosov pushed the point of the pistol into the cloth of the turban hanging off the man's head and fired; the bullet was muffled, as though he had used a silencer; a cloud of gunpowder spread all around. The man's head had been pierced by the bullet from one side to the other; the wall he had been leaning against a moment earlier was covered in blood and bits of brain. For a few seconds the dead man's left foot kept moving over the kitchen's rough floor, scraping the cement with his fake leather shoe.

Nosov spat on the ground and pointed us to the exit.

‘I'll be right there,' he said.

As I stood by the door, I saw the captain dropping the lit match on the corpse, which immediately caught fire.

At that point Nosov looked right at me:

‘I'm really fucking sick of these Muslims . . .'

When we went out into the courtyard everyone was staring at us with curiosity. One of the OMON men ran up to give Nosov a report:

‘With the dogs' help we found three hiding places,' the man stated. ‘Crammed full of—'

‘Very good,' Nosov cut him off. ‘There should be a tent somewhere – find it.'

Along with the explorers we scattered across the yard. Behind the mosque there was a garden that looked out to a view of the mountains. In the middle of the garden there was a wooden gazebo; it didn't seem very sturdy. Underneath, in the shade, was a small table and chairs. An infantryman took down the structure with a shove of the shoulder, and cleared away the table and chairs. When the gazebo collapsed, we could see an iron trapdoor poking out from underneath. It was the entrance to a transport truck container. The Arabs had buried it, turning it into a refuge for the wounded.

The soldier lifted the door and then jumped back immediately – a blast of machine gun fire had come from inside. The head of an armed man with long hair peered out. We didn't give him time to emerge – we shot him on the spot, and he fell back down. We threw two hand grenades into the container; the explosions spread scraps of human flesh, supplies and cloth everywhere. After an operation like that, the officers back at base would write in their reports: ‘A secret refuge harbouring terrorists was discovered and liquidated. Due to the nature of the injuries sustained, the bodies are not fit for identification.'

The OMON guys found many items of interest in the three hideouts: arms, ammo, money, drugs (almost a hundred kilos of heroin in brick-sized blocks, which we
all called ‘Afghan bricks'; I had never seen so many drugs in one place before, and I definitely hadn't imagined I'd be seeing them at a religious site), books on Islamic extremism, flags and other materials intended as propaganda for the holy war against the infidels, plus instructions for making explosives.

There were some videocassettes and DVDs showing torture being inflicted on our soldiers who had been taken prisoner, along with clips of attacks on Russian military convoys. They also had lots of identification papers belonging to dead or missing terrorists, and they had an entire archive (from the Chechen capital, as we later discovered) with the names of the heads of the various terrorist movements in the country.

We piled it all into our cars and then began loading the prisoners on one by one, among them the old imam and his companion, and a woman in her fifties who wouldn't speak to any of us. To get her into the car an explorer had to hit her on the back with the barrel of a rifle. To begin with, the prisoners resisted, but after the first blows they gave in. There were three young Arabs in particular who kept on shouting, threatening us and refusing to get in the car. One of them grazed an infantryman on the neck with a kitchen knife. The cut wasn't serious, but the act was: we had to shoot him and his two friends.

We had taken seven prisoners. We tied everyone's hands and legs together for security, and to keep them from moving we cut the men's trousers at the waistband. Then we left for our base.

Alerted by the shooting, the local inhabitants gathered around the three corpses. To them, the men on the ground were martyrs.