“Tonight, we will teach the dushmans a lesson!” he replies. “It is payback time!”
“Sure! But I hope one day we’ll also get that bastard Captain Bone by his balls!”
“Maybe, if the mission is complete. We’re a rescue team, not assassins.”
He can’t hear Zlenko’s reply over the truck’s roaring engine noise and squeaking suspension as it speeds down the uneven road, but he sees the expression on the other man’s face. It’s enough to tell him what Zlenko’s thoughts are. The major turns away and, taking his binoculars from their case, studies the hill in front of them.
The rise is slightly lower than the ridge on the other side of the road but still offers a perfect view over the area and the narrow pass where the road enters the plains leading to the ruins of Kabul. His Geiger counter, ticking at survivable values around Bagram, now climbs up to more dangerous levels. The truck rolls on, along a broken road that crosses over undulating sand riddled with vehicle wrecks and shell craters before it starts to climb up the hill, spiraling all the way to the top.
Last Men Standing
The truck eventually arrives at the small fortification perched on the hill and halts, the engine still idling. Tarasov watches his soldiers as they get off. Sergeant Zlenko, Kamensky and Bondarchuk with AKMs; Lobov the medic with an AKSU; Kravchuk with his Dragunov; Ilchenko with his PKM; Vasilyev carries only a Fort pistol, all he can manage since he is loaded down with the heavy AGS-17 grenade launcher… They are quite well equipped. Even so, he can only hope it will be enough. He jumps out of the truck and looks around.
The hilltop position looks well-fortified at first sight, but his heart sinks when he sees the two dozen rag-tag Stalkers, some of them having no better weapons than obsolete shotguns.
This will be a tough battle, he reflects with a sigh.
Tarasov had hoped that at least the truck would stay with them to give support from its massive anti-aircraft gun, but Captain Bone’s driver had barely given his men enough time to dismount before turning the vehicle heading back to towards the Stalker base.
“Looks like this place has seen many battles before,” Zlenko says surveying the hilltop.
Tarasov nods in agreement. The fire base would be easy to defend if he had more men. Surrounded to the north and south with trenches shaped in the form of two semi-circles, a bunker stands in the middle of the perimeter. Tarasov sees no windows or vents on the low concrete walls, but its top is fortified with sandbags, just like the smaller trench running between the bunker and the outer defenses.
He climbs up to its top. Looking around he can well understand how strategic this position is. The view is breathtaking: through his binoculars, Tarasov can still make out the hazy mountains around the Salang Pass to the north and the scattered ruins of Bagram. Just like after reaching the exit of the Salang tunnel where he first saw the dreadful beauty of this wilderness, its vastness fills him with awe. In his exhilaration, Tarasov even ignores the gloomy horizon to the south where flashes of lightning appear, their thunder rolling over the flat landscape like a foreboding echo under a sky turning to violent shades of red and purple. Beyond the far hills that screen the ruins of Kabul, gloomy clouds cover the sky like frozen waves of an eternal storm. The road runs below, between the hill and a higher mountain to the south-west, before it enters the sandy plains and disappears in the haze and swirling clouds of sand.
“All right, let’s get down to business,” he says, clapping his hands and turning to Zlenko. “Let the sniper and the grenade launcher set up here. Tell them to keep their heads low. I’ll be damned if we don’t receive sniper fire from that mountain beyond the road. We’ll need as many soldiers as possible in the trenches. I’ll get a Stalker to give Vasilyev a hand with the AGS.”
“Yest, komandir!” Zlenko gives a sharp whistle and waves his hand to the two soldiers to join him.
Tarasov finds Squirrel sitting on a sandbag. The Stalker guide has his face buried in his hands and looks resigned in despair.
“Hey brother,” Tarasov tells him. “Cheer up. You can whine when you’re dead.”
“I already am… I told you what this place is about. And I curse the fucking moment when I ran into you!”
“So you preferred being mutant food?”
“Whatever, man. I am a Stalker, not a soldier. I know about mutants and anomalies, but don’t have the stuff for making last stands on godforsaken hills like this!”
“Nobody says it will be a last stand,” Tarasov says, comfortingly. “I’m sorry that you’ve been punished for helping us. Listen, bro, all I can do in exchange now is to offer you a relatively safe place. Join that soldier on the bunker and help him handle the grenade launcher. Stay low and you’ll be fine.”
Zlenko appears. “Vasilyev and Kravchuk are in position.”
“Good. I want Ilchenko and the riflemen help the Stalkers in holding the line. Damn it, how I wish I had enough men to deploy into the forward trenches!”
They make their way towards the group of Stalkers who stand around what had once been a field gun, but now is almost falling apart from rust and wear. The Stalkers stop chatting and give the soldiers distrustful looks as they approach. The smell of marijuana lingers in the air around them.
“Stalkers, have any of you been to the Zone?” Tarasov asks.
Almost all of them nod.
“Yes, we have,” says a Stalker wearing an oversized trench coat made of black leather, covered with a thick layer of brown dust. His face his half-hidden by a hood. To Tarasov’s surprise, as the Stalker steps forward and his trench coat opens, he recognizes a Duty suit below it. The Stalker takes his battered AK from his shoulder, but seeing Ilchenko’s machine gun he doesn’t dare to assume a threatening stance. “That’s why we prefer that you stay away from us, stinking army pigs.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Zlenko steps forward but Tarasov halts him with a movement of his hand.
He looks at the Stalkers. Now, closer in, he can guess their origins by the half-ruined armor suits they are wearing: rookies in leather jackets reinforced by Kevlar plates; here and there the ravaged light armor with the Bundeswehr-issue Tarnfleck camouflage that is preferred by fighters of the Freedom faction. A few of them wear the more experienced Stalkers’ grey-brown protective suits. Finally, his eyes return to the Stalker wearing the dusty Duty uniform.
“Listen up, brothers,” he starts addressing the Stalkers. “I know you are here as a punishment. So are we — for all the things the army did to Stalkers back in the Zone, even if neither I nor any of my men was part of that. But I say: fighting dushmans is not a punishment. We are here to teach them a lesson they will not forget. We can’t avenge any wrongs from Chernobyl, but we do still have unfinished business with the dushmans.”
Tarasov sees a sparkle flashing up in the eyes of older Stalkers. The younger ones, too, perk up their ears to what he is saying.
“I see Loners, Freedom fighters and even a Duty soldier here. You have fought each other back in the Zone, and we have fought you all. We are all new to this place but face an old enemy. They might have beaten our father’s generation, but now it is us they will be up against. And I tell you, they will be in for a surprise.” Tarasov clears his throat. Mentioning his father turned his throat strangely dry. Looking at the Stalkers who now listen to him closely, he decides to ask them a question.
“You, rookie in that brown Kevlar jacket! Where are you from?”