All Ghillied Up. VIR Day -9.
At this moment the General pulled a manila envelope from under his coat and handed it to me. He tells me to open it and I do. Inside is about a hundred pages of text and he tells me to go home and have a nice day. Later that night I pulled the papers out of the envelope and began reading what struck me as a work of simple fiction, but as I continued on I realized it was the General’s first person account of all of the events that happened during that mission as though he were there at that moment.
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Fifteen years ago in some god forsaken field outside of Pripyat, Ukraine, I laid prone with my rifle tucked under my body for concealment, absolutely still as to avoid detection. The ghillie suit I had made for this op was a toasty forty degrees compared to the surrounding fifteen degree air, almost like a sauna in this situation. The field is bare save for stunted trees and long dead tall grass. In the distance, the shutdown V.I. Lenin/Chernobyl nuclear power plant looms as a hazy reminder of what happens when a nuclear reactor goes meltdown.
Over my earpiece comes a familiar voice in the silence.
“Too much radiation,” Miller says,” We’ll have to go around.”
Suddenly, as if a monster had leaped out of a swamp, a ghillied up figure gets to his feet and begins to slowly jog ahead. I count to ten in my head and get to my feet as well, bringing my Walther WA2000 to the ready position as I take off after him. We stay at a large interval of about ten metres for several minutes, as we run across the open field.
“Be mindful of your surroundings, Luftennant,” Says Miller,” There’s pockets of radiation all over this area. Watch for posts marking them and keep an eye on your dosimeter patches, if you absorb too much you’re a dead man.”
Captain Marcus Karl Miller is not a man you would imagine to be the military type on first impressions. Miller is roughly two metres tall, with a medium build, and these striking blue eyes that can rip your very soul out of your nose in a heartbeat. He has been known to apologize, and in some cases warn you, before he punches you in the nose at the bar. He’s thirty-eight years old, and he is the kindest male fox I’ve ever met to this day.
I, myself, am a wolf, and interestingly enough my mother was a fox. I stand as tall as Miller, with a large build, or at least that’s what people like to tell me… I’m also sixteen years younger than Miller and I hail from Berlin. I guess you could say that I’m a military guy based on first impressions; I still have trouble sitting down freely even this long after I got out of Basic and sniper school.
The field dips down into a small gully that, at one point, might have been a stream; we turn and follow it downhill. As we go on, the field begins to narrow and the giant dead pine trees begin to close around us like a giant cocoon. The stream opens back up to what appears to be an old pasture, with three small single story buildings in the distance about forty metres ahead of us. Beyond the buildings, a grove of leafless maple trees shrouds an orthodox church; whose steeple is the only thing visible from our view point.There are numerous berms of dirt and tall grass that we use as cover until we reach the closest building, which may have held hay for the farmer’s cows once a long time ago, before the mass evacuation. Classic of these buildings there are two doors, one at each end on opposite walls, and a lean-to roof made of tin screwed on to support beams below. We stop exactly opposite of one of the doors.“Standby,” says Miller, raising his arm in the ‘halt’ fashion.
He creeps forward slowly, crouching down as he moves diligently forward to the wide open door. He stops a metre from the doorway and signals me closer. As I move, he signals me ‘all quiet’ by tapping his ear twice, I respond by tapping his shoulder once I get to him. He points through the door.From this angle, we can see through a hole in the building to the farmhouse. There is a short, wide yard enclosed by an aging picket fence. It is overgrown with tall grass and several small trees. Across it I can see another small building before the farm house; another small out building. I can also see two men standing in front of it, walking slowly toward us, about twenty metres distant. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Miller move his earpiece receiver away from his mouth.
“Contact,” he whispers, barely more audible than the wind,” enemy patrol dead ahead. Stay low and move slowly, we’ll be impossible to spot in our ghillie suits.”
With that he moves forward in his crouched position and takes out his suppressor. He doesn’t even stop as it makes a dull click on the end of his rifle’s muzzle. It doesn’t work like in the movies, where the hero or villain holds his gun up into the light and carefully, if not ominously, screws on the long, fat cylinder tightly. It is actually a lot simpler than that. It’s as easy as lifting the weapon to forty five degrees, putting the fat cylinder on the end of the muzzle, and snapping it to the right, swiftly, with an open hand. I follow suit and snap on my own suppressor.
“We’ll take them out together,” Miller whispers,” on three...”
Something that we foresaw in our briefing is the need for semi-automatic rifles during this mission.
“…One…”
The object of the sniper is not to betray his position by moving in any way, which the bolt-action rifle of many snipers past basically did. If you’re not supposed to be seen and the only way not to be seen is not to move, why would you carry around a rifle that’s mode of loading is by way of interacting with the action in a very visible manner?
“…Two…”
So we brought our very best semi-automatic rifles with us. The Walther WA2000 is sold as the Rolls-Royce of sniper weapons, and the hefty price tag affiliated with one of these rifles re-enforces that reputation heavily. Fortunately for us, and the rest of the 425th for that matter, we are seen as ‘special forces’ in the military aspect of our government; let’s just say that we can afford such niceties in our line of work.
“…Three.”
I pull the trigger all the way home in one fluid motion and set the weapon’s internal workings into beautiful, synchronous motion. I feel the subliminal tensing in my pectoral muscle in the fraction of a second differential between pulling the trigger and the actual firing of the weapon. There is a dull thud against my chest as the bolt moves back and ejects the spent .300 Winchester brass and the muffled sound of the round echoes back at me off of the building.
The shot is almost perfectly timed, both of the men falling to the ground a mere second apart. We wait for the briefest of moments before we begin to slowly creep forward into the building. I nearly fall on my face when I step into a hole in floor that is covered in thick bushy tall grass, but I regain my footing quickly and continue moving. Not quickly enough however…
“Watch your step,” says Miller, sarcasm evident in his voice.
We reach the end of the building and emerge in the shadows, our natural environment. We stand back up and make the short jog across what once was the farmhouse yard, eventually ending up with me staged by a large tree after hopping a fence and Miller by the second building. He holds up his arm in the ‘halt’ position again at the opened door.
“Hold up,” he says, peering through to the other side,” There’s more cover if we go around.”
We both turn at almost the same time and crouch into an attack position, moving to the corner of the building. As we round the corner, Miller Moves toward a window about shoulder height from the ground; I fall in behind him.
“Stand fast,” he says.
I can hear a brief murmur of activity in the house; a man speaking in Russian.
“Their talking about sports,” I say,” hockey.”
Miller snuffs,” No matter, four of them inside…”
I flip my rifle up and over my head, drawing my pistol as it falls over on to my back. My Heckler and Koch USP .45 SOCOM is fully prepped with a suppressor before I finish bringing it up.I move to stand up in the window, but Miller hauls me back down to my knees.
“Don’t even think about it,” he snarls in my ear, digging his claws into my shoulder, slightly shredding some of the ‘smock’ material.
I reluctantly put my sidearm away and pull my rifle off of my back and put it in the ready position across my crouched form. Miller points down the space between the house and the other building, waving his fingers over the hedge row ten metres distant.
“We’ll use those hedges for cover,” he whispers,” stay right behind me, and for God’s sake don’t do anything stupid.”
Miller carefully inches below the sill of the window, a precaution as not to be discovered. I follow his lead and slowly creep forward, keeping close to Miller like a wingman. We move ahead slowly, taking a whole minute to cover the ten metres to the hedge row; Miller stops abruptly.
“Stay – back,” he says with much authority and inflection in his voice,” tango by the burnt out car; round the corner. Let’s wait a bit, see if he moves on.”
Miller lies down silently. I take up a supportive position behind him, facing aft as to ward off any patrols that could come from our six o’ clock, with my rifle raised up in a firing position. I take a moment to check the status of my steed by removing the magazine and checking that all of the rounds are seated properly. After a once over glance, I slip it back into the receiver with a dull click and check my chambered round by pulling back the forward cocking leaver and flipping the weapon so I can look into the ejection port.
“Standby,” Miller says behind me,” I think he’s going back inside.”
I slowly let off on the leaver and the bolt rotates closed without a sound.
“Okay, let’s go,” says Miller,” he could come out any second.”
I hear Miller roll over and get to his feet and I break to follow after him. We pass behind the burnt out vehicle, a pathetic looking Ukrainian thing, and split past a large tree. We sprint the better part of twenty metres and hop a fence, taking cover behind another set of trees. The Orthodox Church, which had looked small from the rim of the gully, now looms ahead of us; huge.
The church is some fifty metres distant still, with trees randomly spurting up to the thirty metre mark and a hedge row riding up along its short side. About forty metres from us is a small parking lot with a lone blue vehicle in it that probably hadn’t been driven in twenty years. Next to the lot and nestled between two dead oaks is a statue of a man in full winter gear holding up an AK-47, with an inscription on its base reading ‘Thank you grandfather!!’
Miller comes back over my earpiece,” that would be good cover.”
He motions to his eyes and then to a low building directly across from the church. It’s painted white, or at least it was until it was abandoned and left to Mother Nature, with a dilapidated tin roof that had definitely seen better days. There is another hedgerow that runs behind it, leaving a three metre gap between it and the building. There are multiple gaps between areas where planks have fallen off or just rotted off of their backings, leaving multiple firing ports, turning the building into a small fortress.
“Let’s move,” says Miller, moving from behind his tree towards the building.
I begin my own trek towards the building, keeping well behind Miller as he trots from tree to tree, stopping occasionally to scope out the area ahead of us. I keep my eyes up, swinging my head from side to side as to look behind me every few steps, with my rifle up and ready. Miller is fifteen metres from the building when he drops suddenly.
“Don’t move,” he says, and I halt mid-step,” get down slowly.”
I ease my right foot all the way on line with my left and slowly ease into a forward lunge. My knee touches the ground and I lean forward carefully, rolling on to my side and then my stomach.
“We’ve got look-outs in the church towers,” says Miller,” and a patrol coming from the north.”
I look through the Nikon scope on my rifle, sighting a lone figure in each of the bell towers. From the limited light in the towers I can barely make out the shapes of old Soviet RPK light machine guns.
“We’re only a few Kilometers from Pripyat,” I say,” they must have some sort of gathering going on nearby; sentries like that?”
Miller’s voice crackles slightly in my ear,” that’s a possibility. We may have to make some changes to our route if so.”
I move my rifle to find the sentry coming from the north and find him walking by the blue car in the middle of the lot. He’s carrying an old G3A3 assault rifle, one of my favorites.
“We can wait for him to leave,” says Miller, meaning the lone man by the car,” but we’ll have to eliminate those ones in the towers to proceed on with the mission.”
“We’ll take them out together,” I say.
“Roger, that. Come to my position.”
I begin a slow low-crawl towards the last location that I had seen Miller by, which was about twenty metres from me and fifteen metres from the low building’s entrance. The crawl is long and slow, taking me almost ten minutes to reach Miller, just like it was supposed to, just like in training. I find Miller in the grass and tap him on the shoulder to let him know I’m there; he lifts his hand of his WA2000 to give me a thumbs up.
“I’ll take the one in the farthest tower,” he says,” You get the one in the closer tower, on your mark.”
I sight my target up in the closer tower; I still am unable to make out his face, ethnicity, or even his species. All the better for me… I have terrible nightmares about my job every so often; most of us do.
“Mark,” I say.
There is a sound like someone threw a thick phone book on the ground from a standing height, and then another.
“Good shot.”
Our rifles smoke briefly before we turn our attention to the lone sentry walking casually ahead of us.
“Contact approaching from the North,” I say.
“Take him out or let him be,” says Miller, crawling away now,” your call, Luftennant.”
I debate with myself over the consequences of letting the man go on or taking him out without him ever knowing that I was near him. I decide in the end to silence him for good. After the deed is done I start crawling back towards the low building, finding Miller by the back door waiting for me.
“Check this out,” he says as I stand up.
We step over the threshold of the door and into a small armory rather than an out building. There are old, faded Russian posters on the rotting, paint-chipped walls advertising a better life than the west and the safety offered by the ‘unbeatable’ Red Army. In the corners, along the walls, and in the center of the single room complex are old olive drab crates with Cyrillic alphabet lettering in faded yellow paint on them. I move to inspect one.
The black clasps are stiff and corroded with age, but they open against my hands, shedding some dust in the process. The lid opens about halfway before one of the hinges breaks off loudly and thumps on the ground. I open it and peel off the thick layer of foam off of the top revealing another foam layer with an AK47 in each of the four cut-outs. I reach in and pull one out, dusting it off.
“They’re stock-piling,” I say, moving to another crate.
This one opens easier than the last and its contents are a bit more subject to concern.
“How the hell did they get these?” I ask, brandishing the FIM-92 Stinger tube in my hands.
“Black market,” says Miller,” that and the pullout from Afghanistan. They got their hands on a few crates from the Mujahidin that they had originally over run… so much for the American’s idea to keep those tubes safe, huh?”
“We’ll be sure to report this,” I say, putting the tube back in the foam,” Right?”
“No point,” says Miller, putting back an ancient Simonov SKS,” we’ve known about this for a few years.”
I put away a few Tokarev pistols and Miller pats my shoulder.
“Time to go,” he says.
I nod my head in agreement; we’ve been in one place for too long. I make my way to the front door and follow Miller to the blue car in the middle of the parking lot. He stops and waits by the hood.“Forward area clear,” he says, and moves towards the church door.I peek over the hood and move over to Miller’s position as he opens the door. He inches in with his rifle raised into an attack position, carefully, one baby step at a time. I follow in after him, covering the aft as I walk in backwards.
As I turn around, I am greeted by a dead man hanging by his foot from a ladder… the man from the far tower. His eyes are still open in a sleepy manner; he hadn’t known we were there at all, not until he found himself in whichever afterlife he believed in. His RPK lies on its side below his out-stretched arms.
I regain my cool a second too late.
“A little jumpy,” says Miller,” eh, Luftennant?”
I ignore him and side step to avoid contact with the corpse, noting the cleanliness of the wound in the center of his forehead. The church has a single wing off to the left, where an old piano sits, surrounded by stacked pews and some more olive drab crates with the same Cyrillic lettering as the ones in the other building. The floor boards and walls are covered in mold, moss, and rot, even the smooth, white paint is almost non-existent after so many years of deprivation.
Miller slips past me, moving to an open door near the rear tower. He peeks his head around the threshold…
“Coast is clear,” he says, signaling me to move up.
I step past him and out into a cemetery that is shielded from overhead by several maple trees that can’t be more than twelve metres high. The space is enclosed by hedge rows all around, and blocked off at the end by a low concrete wall with an arched gate about thirty metres ahead.
Miller comes abreast with me, his tail twitching in its ‘smock’.
“Luftennant,” he says suddenly, his ears rotating outwards slightly,” do you hear that?”
I listen hard, twitching my own ears and sniffing the air. I can’t hear or smell anything, but I note that my own tail is going insane in the ‘smock’ material.
“I’ve got nothing, sir,” I report.
Miller nods and cautiously walks on ahead. I hesitate for a moment, still trying to listen for something, but I begin to trudge onward after no success. I make it to about five metres before the gate when Miller stops dead. Something is wrong, I can tell because of how tense his position is.
“Enemy helicopter,” he shouts in my earpiece,” get down, NOW!!”
Without even thinking I drop into the lean and rest and lower my body down to the ground. I look up from the ground, see Miller by the low wall and begin to crawl towards him.
“Are you daft?” he asks, “don’t move!!”
I stop moving all together as the thunderous sound of an attack helicopter draws nearer. The noise of the blades gives it away as military and not commercial because of its slow, loud whop-whop-whop sound rather than a much faster whip-whip-whip sound. My allegations are confirmed when I glance up from the shadows.
I see a huge helicopter slowly cross the sky over our heads, moving towards the outskirts of Pripyat. It’s a Mil Mi-28N ‘Havoc’ attack helicopter; twin engine, fast, deadly and flying at no more than twenty metres above me. Along its engine nacelle is a large yellow twenty-eight with white binding, followed by the equally large red star emblem of the Russian air force, or VVS.
The five bladed main rotor cuts through the frigged air above, stirring up a slight breeze on the ground… I shiver. One bad move and it would be game over.
“Easy now,” says Miller,” as long as we stay in the shadows we should be alright.”
The helicopter continues onward without spotting us, its ominous thunder dying off as it eases on. Miller stands up.
“Alright,” he says,” let’s go. We’ve only got a few hours of daylight left.”
I get to my feet to follow Miller, who is already through the gate; jogging to catch up to him. I barely make it out of the gate and across a small dirt road when I am thrown violently through the air and into a tree. I’m dead.
But I’m not dead because I open my eyes a moment later to find myself in a dust cloud; deaf, and having trouble breathing. I manage to roll on to my front and stand up by pulling my weight up with the tree. I do the whole cliché look at my hands thing that all the movies do without even realizing it, noting that one of them, the one I used to pull myself up with, is covered in fresh blood. My hearing comes back a second later, and I am blasted with the loud thunder of rotor blades.
“Dammit!!” shouts Miller.
I come to the conclusion that I have been hit by the main gun of the helicopter hovering above us… which is oddly enough a Mi-28N ‘Havoc’ gunship. The weapon fires again and I am dazzled by the large muzzle flash and the thirty millimeter rounds exploding around me.
“Don’t just fucking stand there!!” yells Miller, ducking back behind the concrete wall,” Grab a Stinger out of church and kill that sonuvabitch!!!”
I find my rifle in the tall grass as the helicopter hovers above me, too close to point its gun down at me and fire. I don’t remember whether or not I started running or if I just let instinct take over all of the muscles in my body. I don’t even think as I dart back towards the wall, hurtling over it as a salvo of 76mm rockets explode across the dirt track. I get under the cover of the trees when a bunch of small explosions of dust cut across my path; the sound of podded machine guns fill my ears as I run on with no hesitation.
I get into the church and find a crate labeled ‘FIM-92’ in plain English. I tear open the lid as though the clasps didn’t even exist and produce the olive drab tube, flipping open the optics system as I put it over my shoulder. I imagine that Miller must be dead by now, but I continue on past the hanging dead man and out to the parking lot.
As I turn around by the car the first bell tower erupts in a massive explosion, showering me in splintered wood and hot metal nails. The ‘Havoc’ reels backward for a better shot with its Gregsyev-Shipunov GSh-131 30mm chain-gun, revealing a big, black number thirty-six on her belly… I raise the Stinger’s sight up to my eye, aiming right at the center of the six.
A noise cuts out the whop-whop-whop of the rotor blades, a high-pitched scream from the tube telling me it has its target. I pull the trigger and feel the weight of the missile displace forward over my shoulder and then the hot blast of air from the blazing object streaking into the sky.
The pilot is smart. He skids off to the left, banking the nose of his craft sharply to gain speed rapidly, popping off flares from the craft’s tail boom as he does so. The missile follows in its own wide turn… and completely misses. I feel my heart sink in my chest and I drop the tube.
The pilot heels up the nose of his machine, slowing her down, and rapidly descends to barely ten metres off the ground. The missile begins to circle around as it is programmed to, searching for its target. Then, as if the will of some god, it latches on to the heat trail left behind by the helicopter’s engines, and descends on a similar path to catch it.
The pilot, by this time, has pushed his beast forward, almost to the point of ramming his nose into the ground, trying his best to escape the incoming demon. The missile eventually strikes its target in the base of the tail-boom. The explosion is not like the ones in movies where there is an enormous fireball and metal shards flying into the ground, it’s more or less a puff of grey smoke followed by the thick, black smoke of hydraulic fluid.
The helicopter begins to spin with its main rotor as its tail rotor begins to slow down. My confidence is restored when the tail pitches up and I can see the tail-boom bending in the opposing direction of the spiral, and then furthered when the boom brakes off entirely and flies off from the body. With the small amount of counter force provided by the tail-rotor gone, the rest of the chopper begins to spin even faster and then smashes into the ground in a heap of tangled metal and fiberglass.
The dust cloud is immense, and clogged with the thick, black smoke of jet fuel. The utter silence is deafening.
There is coughing in my ear now,” Luftennant? Are you alright? Where are you?”
The coughing continues as I run back through the remnants of the church, through the cemetery, and to the wall. Miller is standing with his rifle up to his shoulder looking down the road.
“Here, sir,” I say behind him.
He puts his rifle at his side and turns to look at me.
“You’re injured,” he says plainly,” Your ribs are broken.”
I nod, taking a shallow breath.
“Are you alright?”
“It only hurts when I breathe.”
“I meant will you be able to continue with the mission?” He asks, rolling his eyes.
“I can keep up, sir,” I say.
Miller nods. I hear a dog barking in the distance, accompanied with angry Russian that’s indistinguishable at this distance.
“Then we need to get moving, says Miller, pointing down the road.
I turn and raise the scope to my eye; look down the road. I can see a large patrol, forty strong, coming from the South side, about four-hundred metres distant, and a vehicle convoy coming from the North side, a little over eight-hundred metres away and closing fast. I turn and look out over the huge field slowly rising up and away from the road, our objective just on the other side of some distant trees. I look at Miller and nod. We’re gone before the last BMP in the convoy reaches the wreckage.
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We reach the crest of the field and it drops out from under us quite suddenly into a great big bowl. We lay prone as not to silhouette ourselves against the backdrop and peer through our scopes at the scene before us.
There are ancient BMP hulks lying about the place in a large irregular ring around a large central pond. Beyond this is a series of old shipping containers stacked at random in a large concentration of thick pine trees and random brush. Next to the pond is a Mil Mi-24D ‘Hind’ helicopter, sitting dormant at the moment, with both of her canopies open and empty.
In the near dead center of the ring of dead BMP’s, on the edge of the pond, sits a large truck that is basically the equivalent of the American ‘duce and a half.’ There is a pile of uniformed bodies at the end of the truck bed and two men are throwing them into the pond; one at a time, one every ten seconds.
“Looks like they’ve already eliminated the men that they couldn’t buy out,” I say, moving my eye from the scope and pointing in the direction of the truck.
There is a single Mi-28N hovering low over the area… with a big, yellow twenty-eight with white binding on the engine nacelle. It sits for several moments, seeming infinitely patient, then, perhaps to refuel or rearm, it hammerhead turns and heads back towards the general direction of Kiev.
“Contact,” says Miller,” two of em’ on the other side of the pond by that chopper.”
Over by the ‘Hind’, two men, one human and one badger, are talking about something, nothing I can lip read, but they are talking. The human shrugs his shoulders and raises his hands in a defensive manner; the badger laughs and says something back. Just two men bullshitting with each other on a normal day for themselves. The human resumes his talking…
“Taking them out without alerting the rest isn’t going to be easy,” Miller says,” but then again, neither is sneaking past them.”
Miller turns his head to look at me.
“Your call,” I say.
Miller reaches the conclusion that he will move up and try to find a way past them while I remain on the crest to provide support if he gets into any kind of trouble.
“Alright,” he says,” I’m going to head for the helicopter. On my go, I want you to take out the one by the gun.”
I don’t reply and sight my target. He’s still talking with the badger, and now he’s checking his AK-74 assault rifle with some diligence. Whatever he’s talking about must be pretty funny because the badger suddenly rears his head back with laughter.
“Drunkards,” Says Miller, off in the ring of BMP hulks,” I can hear them from a hundred metres. I’m in position… take the shot.”
I don’t even hesitate and pull the trigger, loosing off a single round.
“Good,” says Miller,” don’t fire on the two by that lorry; we’ll have to take them out at the same time, wait for me to get into position.”
I look back through the scope and refocus my attention from the bloodstain on the helicopter’s Gatling gun to one of the men by the truck. I pick the one whose wearing a gasmask, better for the occasional nightmare, so I don’t remember his face at night.
The weird thing about this job being for me is that I get a little bit queasy when it comes to seeing blood. I don’t know why. Here I am, a man who lays other men’s souls to waste, a man who kills for a living, a man who has just shot down a helicopter in the past half-hour, but I get sick to my stomach when I see the pink mist. It’s… complicated.
“I’m in position,” says Miller,” take the shot when you’re ready…”
I pull the trigger. Suddenly, something catches my eye. I release the slack and switch my attention to the new thing.
“Wait,” I say into the mouthpiece,” I’ve got a new contact; just slipped in.”
“Roger that.”
The contact comes into better view as it moves out of the shadows of the shipping containers. I keep my finger off the trigger until I’m sure of what I am looking at, conscience of the fact that I have two shots left before I have to reload, one in the chamber, one in the magazine.
“Do you have eyes on?” asks Miller.
“Negative,” I say,” but it seems to be headed in your direction, watch out.”
Another contact follows the first out of the shadows and runs briskly to catch up to it. They emerge from the shadows both of them female, dressed in pilot’s gear with a sidearm on their hips; one human, one wolf. They seem to be headed towards the dormant ‘Hind’ on the other side of the pond.
“Eyes on,” I say,” Pilots; both female, light armament. Threat assessment ‘low.’”
“I read you,” says Miller,” I’ll see if I can neutralize them non-lethally, or if they’ll just move on.”
“I read that.”
“Keep your eye on those two by the lorry, Luftennant. I don’t want them getting stupid on us all of a sudden.”
“Yes, sir.”
I refocus back on the two men doing the dirty work by the truck. I try to keep my mind busy by making little mental notes of their gear and various other things like their weapons or their form as they lift the bodies and toss them into the water. Anything to keep my thoughts off what may happen to the two women.
The man on the left is wearing a World War Two era gas-mask that is so old that he might as well be wearing one of those paper masks for doctors or people with bad allergies. He is wearing ancient Soviet BDU’s that are a brown color of some kind, under a thick coat that would be more concealing if he was in a thick forest in the fall. His weapon, an AK74, is slung across his chest in a manner to allow him to work and move around, but also to be able to grab it and get to a combat stance quickly. There is a pistol on his ankle, just a few centimeters above the water line.
The other man, who is turned away from me, has a bushy beard on his face that includes large sideburns, and a fairly substantial moustache that covers his upper lip entirely. He has a pair of black, fingerless gloves on his hands that match his beanie and boots. His outfit is a bit better than his counterpart’s. It includes a molted yellow-brown set of BDU’s that match the surrounding tall grass, and a faded, black vest with an olive-drab web-belt with two matching canteen pouches and a magazine dump-bag. His weapon is a diminutive Steyr PMi69 9mm sub-machine-gun which hangs from his web-belt to his thigh.
“They’re heading back towards the containers,” says Miller over my earpiece.
I move my rifle to sight in on the helicopter and see the two women carrying a large olive-drab crate between them. They move a little clumsily, with the woman in back stumbling over rocks and getting caught in unseen grass and the woman in front trying to go a little too fast for her partner. They drop the crate on either end several times, but eventually reach the shadows of the containers and disappear.
“Coast is clear,” I say to Miller, still out in the ring of metal.
“I have my target,” he replies.
I reacquire my target and say,” target sighted. Fire… fire… fire…”
The man with the beard gets hit first. He spins lazily to the ground, splitting open the remainder of his skull on the fender of the truck.
The man with the gas mask is hit right in the base of the skull as he twists around to raise his AK-74 and find the attacker. He falls forward into the pond with the rest of the bodies that he himself had probably helped to kill just a few hours before. I hear the splash from my position on the edge of the bowl, over two-hundred metres away.
I take the initiative and immediately reload my rifle with a fresh six-round box, not having to pull back the bolt as my last round from the previous magazine is now in the chamber. Miller stands up in the distance near the helicopter, waving his hands over his head. I hold up my left forearm and stand up.
“I see you, Luftennant,” he says,” fall in on me.”
I begin to run down the hill towards him, dodging all sorts of engine parts, rusting twists of metal, BMP hulks, and a large bulldozer that has sunken into the mud and now has only half of its bulk is still out of the ground. I slip between a tree and a BMP and join Miller by the helicopter’s Gatling gun. There’s fresh blood on his gloved left hand.
“I tried to clean up a bit before they got here,” he says, pointing to the red-brown streak on the helicopter’s nose,” didn’t have much time, as you can see.”
I look around on the ground for a brief second.
“Where are their bodies?” I ask in reference to the badger and the human. “Hiding in plain sight,” says Miller.
He motions to the cockpit. In each of the seats sits one of the dead men with a helmet pulled down over their eyes.
“I was in there too,” says Miller,” made it sound like they were snoring.”
He begins to walk forward.
“Let’s get moving,” he says,” no need to hang out here any longer than we have to. Those two are bound to come back for the rest of what’s in the helicopter.”
Miller jogs on toward the containers and I follow him closely. We go past one and then we crouch low into an attack position, staging ourselves on the dark side of an old, rusty white container with Chinese lettering down the side of it.
“Stay in the shadows,” says Miller.
We creep around the corner of the container, dodging a seemingly random shopping cart, and proceed onward to a small dusty path where Miller stops me… quite suddenly I might add. The path has fresh boot marks in the fine dirt at its surface. Then a man comes out of a container not more than a metre to our left, heading away from us.
He stops ahead of us about three metres away; pops open his fly, and begins to urinate.
“Hold up,” says Miller,” this idiot is mine.”
Miller moves left to come from directly behind the man and quickly moves forward. He stands up fully and rears his rifle backward…
“Oi, Suzie!!” He says.
The man doesn’t even have time to pull up his zipper. He spins around, bringing his P90SD personal defense weapon up but never gets a single chance to fire a round. Miller powers the butt of his WA2000 into the side of the man’s head, using his right arm as a leaver, and his left hand as a pivot, and the man falls to the ground unconscious. I hear the sound of his ankles crackling as he falls over in a vertical heap.
I move up and double check, putting a single round from my USP into his forehead.
“That’s how it’s done,” says Miller,” let’s move.”
We hang left and go through a short, twisted maze of containers and random garbage. Miller stops by the corner of another container, this one has a Polish inscription painted in black with a red upper binding on the side and is bent like a banana in the middle. He pokes his head around the corner and moves to a container directly adjacent to the one I am at. It’s reared up by a thick hedgerow and another container, making a sort of box shape for him to hide in.
“We should wait a bit” says Miller,” see if the guard makes another pass.”
Before I can redraw my rifle from its spot on my back Miller says, “Patrol coming this way! Stay back!”
I freeze instinctively. As I begin to hear footsteps on the ground I raise my USP to about chest height, lining up the sights on a hinge of a container diagonally across from my position. A sliver of woodland camouflage BDUs becomes visible and I begin to take the slack out of the trigger. I see Miller slowly raise his rifle out of the corner of my eye.
The man becomes fully visible just as the trigger breaks, releasing the hammer. Miller’s bullet hits the man’s head before the .45 ACP from my handgun has even left the barrel. The corpse falls to the ground in a vertical heap, half of his head missing, and a single round in his heart.
“Clear,” says Miller,” let’s move.”
We slowly creep up past the dead man in the narrow corridor that two containers make. We move the fifty-three feet indicated by one of the containers in Arabic when Miller stops me by putting his arm out, blocking the path. He points to his eyes and then to the right between a narrow space that the container on the right side of the corridor and a container that sits halfway on top of a short, box shaped truck trailer and up against a row of hedges and small trees.
There are three men standing around a group of barrels that are on fire. The two women that had brought back the crate from the helicopter are with them.
Miller nudges me,” Forward area clear. Stay low, move slowly.”
I duck-walk behind him to the open tractor-truck trailer and signal him that I’m all clear. Miller moves toward me and into the trailer.
We move through it. At the opposite side are multiple shipping containers of various lengths that are stacked haphazardly. We move into one that is open and seems to be unlocked on the other side just as the ‘Havoc’ with the big yellow twenty-eight passes over our heads. Miller posts by the door, taking a knee as he shoves open one of the double doors, revealing a flurry of activity on a twin lane road in the middle of a field.
“It’s a fucking convention out there,” says Miller as a group of men walk past a few metres ahead of us,” Standby, we’ll move on my signal.”
His ears start to twitch nervously. From my spot behind him I can see the entire column of vehicles. There is a single T-72 main battle tank at the front of the column, followed by five large trucks with canvas tops or wooden sides, a single Jeep-like vehicle, and one more large truck at the end. There are at least a hundred men scattered about along the road, some walking, some running, and more than a few just leaning up against one of the trees lining the road smoking a cigarette. The helicopter is circling above with several other birds of varying type, including a brand new, shiny, black Mil Mi-50A ‘Hokum’ fighter-helicopter.
“Standby…” says Miller, edginess in his voice.
A man with a stocking cap and RPG-7 walks by casually with a similarly dressed and armed comrade, not more than three metres from us. They don’t even notice as Miller begins to raise his rifle into a cradle carry.
“Standby…”
I ready my rifle, tightening the strap slightly to keep it from moving around too much while I run.
“Okay,” says Miller,” GO!!”
Miller shoves open the other door and we both bolt out of the container and into the open. The adrenaline kicks in a second later when we reach the T-72 with no plan set up to make it into the city, not even a hundred metres distant.
We take cover by one of the trucks behind the tank. I look Miller in the eye; what have you gotten’ us into this time, Miller.
Miller sees my concern.
“Follow me,” he says, suddenly dropping to the ground and crawling under the truck.
I drop and get under, my feet clearing the front fender just as a man with an AK walks past in the opposite direction. Everything seems to blur together now. The body is a slow sonuvabitch, clicking in the adrenaline too damn late, and overcompensating too damn much. My fingers twitch in my gloves and my tail starts to go nuts with the stuff still coursing through my veins.
We’ve managed to crawl under the fourth truck when Miller says,” There’s a truck coming, we can use it as cover. Just keep moving, and try to relax.”
The distant whine of an old, Russian gasoline engine starts to grow louder in my ears and I look towards the direction of the sound. Sure enough, the shadow of Soviet era vehicles draws closer and closer, with the engine struggling against the weight of the incoming truck, the transmission practically screaming, and a brown cloud of exhaust drifting through the winds.
I refocus quickly as it stops over Miller, who continues to move onward to stop under the vehicle’s rear axles.
“Alright,” says Miller, eyeballing a large group of men ahead of us,” we’ll just wait here a second. When they leave, we’ll crawl out and get out of this Charlie-Foxtrot.”
My legs are right under the engine, practically cooking under the bottom half of my ghillie suit. I ignore the burning and keep my eyes out for the curious eyes of anyone who just happens to want to peek under the vehicles.
“They’re dispersing,” says Miller.
I make ready to crawl out from under the truck, eyeballing a pair of nice boots that are heading back towards the engine compartment.
“Now’s our chance,” says Miller,” let’s go.”
We crawl out from under the truck, taking off towards the city, fifty metres away. It’s a good sprint, my side aches from my broken ribs, but we make it to a high wall that is the relative exit from the city into a small park, complete with a rusty swing-set.
“Welcome to Pripyat,” Says Miller, edging around the wall.
I follow him to a fire escape on a ten story building and climb up with him to the second floor. We move through a room that is totally thrashed and out over a balcony, jumping into an old, smelly dumpster.
“Don’t let your guard down;” says Miller,” we’re not there just yet.”
It’s a short jog to another tall building with a ‘tunnel’ cut through it for a wide concrete path to penetrate to the other side. There are low and high walls between most of these old buildings, coated in thick masses of dead ivy. Miller stops and raises his weapon.
“Stop.” He says, with quite an emphasis.
He stays quiet for a moment and then says,” Leave it alone. It’s a wild dog.”
We slowly move up, twisting around an axis to cover the windows above us.
Coming out the other side, Miller says,” Pooch doesn’t look too friendly. Keep your distance; no need to attract attention.”
Seeing the dog up close as I move around it, I can tell it’s a German Sheppard. Upon further inspection, I also realize that the feral animal is eating meat from the body of a dead human, or, at least, what was a human. Suddenly the dog barks at me, startling Miller and I.
“Be careful,” says Miller, returning his attention to maneuvering to the giant building ahead.“We can cut through that building,” he says,” our objective should be on the other side.”
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We come up the stairs and onto a long platform next the tall windows right as the ‘Havoc’ with the twenty-eight passes at full speed. We don’t even notice it, and it pays us no attention either. As we trot down the stairs to street-level we pass many bits of old, broken junk on the ground, posters on the walls, and some other bits of stuff that point to the possibility that this city was once inhabited.
“Look at this place,” Miller says as we exit the giant concrete structure,” fifty-thousand people used to live in this city; now it’s a ghost town. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
We jump down off of a platform and a tall building stands to our left. Miller stops,” That’s the hotel. We should be able to monitor the exchange from the top floor up there. Let’s get going.”