by John Mason
“And this pistol’s cool, too,” the other scout replies studying Tarasov’s Glock. “Boxkicker will pay me well for this.”
The gunnery sergeant, who in the meantime had been giving Tarasov’s kit a thorough search, now commands a stern and disapproving glance towards the boys.
“Give me that watch, devil pup! And you, that pistol. You are not supposed to behave like scavengers!”
“Sir!”
The boys bow their heads in shame as they hand over the loot to their superior, who puts them into the exoskeleton’s rucksack with the rest of Tarasov’s gear.
“Where in the hell did he lay his hands on this?” He says examining the major’s exoskeleton. “A Russkie spy in one of our armors. Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough.”
“I am no spy,” Tarasov angrily snaps, “I am…”
“Shut the fuck up, Russkie!”
One of the boys hits Tarasov in the chest with his rifle butt. Moaning with pain, he staggers but manages to remain standing. Spitting saliva that tastes like blood, he looks defiantly at his captors. This time, the gunny remains indifferent to the boy’s action, neither does he care about Tarasov’s angry look.
“Put his handcuffs back on,” he orders the scouts. “The brothers will take care of the rest. Now go, stir up some trouble.”
He waves two soldiers over to him. “Sergeant Polak, Sergeant Hillbilly! Blindfold the prisoner and take him to the Brig!”
The sergeants are young but adult men, one with red hair and full beard and the other with a pale, Slavic face and blue eyes. Their faces are the last thing he sees before he is blindfolded and, guided in the right direction by the blows of rifle butts on his back, led through the massive gate to the inner stronghold.
The gate closes behind him, and Tarasov hears something he would have never expected in this frightful place: female chatter and laughter. Even though they are speaking a language he can’t understand, he feels the mockery directed at him. He can’t see the women due to the blindfold, but the voices are young and cheerful.
His guards stop again and he hears a heavy door opening. One of his guards takes off his blindfold and handcuffs, and shoves him into a dark, tight cavern before Tarasov has a chance to look around.
“You’ll have a rag-head for company,” the bearded guard says as he chains Tarasov by the neck to a ring in the wall.
“Driscoll was in a merciful mood and didn’t cut off his tongue,” the other adds. “If the Talib talks too much, feel free complaining to Amnesty International about psychological torture. I forgot where I’ve kept their telephone number… ask me later, will you?”
The door slams closed.
The Brig, 12:10:41 AFT
It is completely dark save for two beams of light falling through holes above. The chain leaves him barely enough room to move. Tarasov leans his back against the stone wall, emitting a long, defeated sigh.
I’m screwed. No way to escape from here.
His eyes slowly adapt to the darkness. Shapes begin to emerge in the dim light: first, the walls, made from rudely hewn stones, then a shape near the base of one of them. He makes out a pair of legs, then a man dressed in something now little more than dirty rags.
He remembers the first time he wanted to kill dushmans, way back in his childhood when he was big enough for his mother to tell him how his father had died. The fight for the Outpost had been personal enough. But now he is locked up together with the first dushman he has met outside of battle, by an ironic twist of fate bound together as they wait for death. Shuffling over, the major kicks the man’s legs.
“Hey! You still alive?”
The other prisoner looks up at him. Tarasov has seen the faces of his enemies many times distorted by pain, effort, hate, even a sort of bitter resignation – very much like how he must have looked while killing them. Now, in this man’s eyes, he is surprised to see nothing of that enmity. Even in the gloom, Tarasov can see that the dushman has been brutally beaten, but still the eyes in the round face appear calm, devoid of fear.
“I am talking to you. Do you speak English?”
The prisoner slowly shakes his head.
“Damned dushman…” Tarasov murmurs to himself.
“I am no dushman,” the prisoner replies in almost impeccable Russian.
“You speak Russian?” Tarasov asks, startled. “Where are you from?”
“Dagestan.”
“That still makes you a dushman.”
“I am no dushman.”
“Then what the hell are you, apart from being a mindless, brain-scorched, child-murdering son of a bitch?”
“I am a student of God.”
“And where is your God now?”
The prisoner lifts his hands in a gesture that could equally mean ‘here’ and ‘I don’t know’.
“Son of a bitch… anyway… who are these people?”
“Devils.”
“And what are they going to do? Kill us?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Only you will be killed. I will be martyred.”
“Good riddance, you bastard. Are we at least going to die a soldier’s death? If I can call you a soldier at all…”
The Talib stares into the beam of light.
“Come on, tell me how. A bullet in the head?”
“No.”
“Hanged?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“The women will come.”
“And then what?”
In response, the Talib takes pebbles from the ground and tosses them one by one into the dark corner of the dungeon.
“Curse on you, dagi,” Tarasov snarls. “Whatever death you die, you’ll deserve it for killing all those children in Beslan.”
“Beslan was wrong, but if I deserve to die for that, you deserve to die for what happened in Grozny. That was wrong, too.”
“That was not my fucking war! I am Ukrainian. We had nothing to do with what happened there!”
“Beslan was nothing to do with you, either, since you are Ukrainian, just as it was nothing to do with me, since I was not there and would never have been. In any case, it is not up to you or me to judge. No judgment is fair but God’s. If we die, it will be because we deserve to die. I can trust his judgment. And you? Is there anything left you can trust in?”
“Now listen up, you… ”
Tarasov’s words end in empty curses. The Talib has hit a nerve in his mind. Desperately, he refers to the only supernatural power he had experienced.
“I have bested a place worse than hell. It eats the laws of your god for breakfast. Whatever created it is far more powerful than your so-called god.”
“Really? Will this power come and save you?”
For a moment, Tarasov falls quiet. “It’s you who’s praying to get out of here. Not me.”
“I pray for strength to accept my fate, not for a chance of escape. But you are angry. You are not brave enough to face your fate. I feel pity for you, weak man, and pray to God to have mercy on you. Why are you laughing?”
“Because fate is so absurd. If I believed in God, I would have prayed each day to give me revenge. It was people like you who killed my father. People like you turned this land into a wilderness with stolen warheads…”
“Those were to be used elsewhere. The Americans came on my brothers and left them no choice but to martyr themselves.”
“You fucking bastards!”
Tarasov tries to move closer to the Talib but the chains cut into his neck. He coughs heavily before he can continue. “You deserve to die a thousand deaths. And I would gladly give them to you but I can’t reach you, and instead of smashing your head against the wall all I can do is just sit here listening to your bullshit!”
But no matter how much he shouts and shakes his fists, Tarasov knows that he is losing this war of words, as if fate wanted to prove to him how empty he is inside.
“You are a cruel man,” the Talib murmurs, “an
d even if you could kill me now, I wouldn’t accept mercy from you. Mercy from an infidel would disgrace me. But you should have mercy on yourself. These devils will not have mercy on any of us. I am prepared to die happily. And I pray to God that he gives you…”
Tarasov spits all his anger into the Talib’s face in four words.
“Shut the fuck up!”
Exhaustion and despair overcome his senses.
I will die anyway… but even if that wasn’t so, I can’t keep myself awake any longer.
16:39:00 AFT
The sound of opening doors awakes Tarasov from his uneasy sleep. Startled, the Talib moves back into the darkness but it is Tarasov the guards are after. Seeing the anger that still presses hard on his face after the argument with the Talib, the blue-eyed guard gives him a grin.
“So, Russkie, do you want to make that call to Amnesty International?” he says, removing the shackle from Tarasov’s neck. “I found their number, but now I’ve misplaced my mobile phone.”
“You are very absent-minded today, Brother Polak,” the bearded guard says, shaking his head. He grabs the major by his arm and hauls him to his feet. “Get up, Russkie. The Colonel wants to see you.”
Whether because Tarasov’s fate is sealed or for a reason only known to them, this time the guards don’t bother blindfolding him. The sun is already low and the clean, cobble-stone streets are empty save for a few fighters sitting here and there on carpets laid around small campfires, smoking hookah pipes and curiously looking at Tarasov as he passes them by.
The guards lead him through a maze of mud houses to a massive tower. Climbing up several stairs, they arrive at a wooden door guarded by two warriors, as big and frightening as the First Lieutenant who killed Squirrel. They too wear heavy exoskeletons and are armed with machine guns.
Good God. There’s more of them.
Without saying a word, they open the door and signal for him to enter.
The Man Who Would be Khan
The Colonel’s tower, 17:20:30 AFT
Tarasov finds himself in a small room with only one window, its walls covered with carpets and large maps. A paraffin lamp casts a weak light onto a chair and a simple field table, where Tarasov sees a switched-off laptop, a radio, an ashtray full of cigarette butts and several books: Napoleon’s memoirs, Sun Tzu’s Strategy, a novel by Joseph Conrad and a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories. Thinking for a moment that he is alone, Tarasov reaches for the books.
“Do you like literature, Major Tarasov?”
The tired, yet deep and dominating voice comes from a dark corner of the room. The words are spoken slowly, in the way of a Texan. Straining his eyes, Tarasov makes out a man in the shadows. A small flame flares as he lights up a cigarette, but the light is strong enough for the major to see something of the man’s face: graying hair cut short though his age could only be roughly estimated, with eyes that are sunken deep in their sockets. The Colonel – if that is who this man was – has the appearance of a hard, and hardened, military man.
“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.”
