“Last ammunition belt!” Squirrel shouts.
“Prepare the VOG-30s, Stalker!” Vasilyev bellows back.
The voices coming from the grenade launcher are desperate, just like Zlenko’s.
“Kamensky is down!”
Tarasov cocks his rifle. “Vasilyev! Give them hell! Burn the ridge!”
Fiery explosions pierce into the enemy’s line, throwing up rocks, sand and body parts in balls of fire. But before the grenades can stop them, the launcher stops firing. The first dushman appears over the wall of sandbags, aiming his rifle at Zlenko while he is reloading his rifle. A burst from Tarasov’s rifle hits the dushman, but as soon as he falls three others appear.
“Get this, cocksuckers! Svoboda, vperyod!”
Squirrel shouts a battle cry from above and the grenade launcher resumes firing. Tarasov quickly climbs up to the bunker. Vasilyev’s body lies in a pool of blood. Kravchuk is still kneeling behind the sand bags, firing his Dragunov relentlessly.
Heavy rain begins to fall. The flashes of lightning fork so close together that the thunder merges into a ceaseless din that almost drowns out the frantic rifle fire that now spews from all directions.
Oblivious to the danger, Tarasov looks over to the perimeter to assess their remaining defenses. It looks bad. The Stalkers are already retreating towards the bunker, with Ilchenko in the rear covering their route. Beyond them, Zlenko is desperately trying to hold the line with the few remaining Stalkers.
“No more grenades!”
“Grab your rifle and help the sergeant, Squirrel!”
“Incoming!” Kravchuk screams.
A huge explosion rocks the bunker, throwing Tarasov and the Stalker to the ground.
“RPGs! The bastards come up now with RPGs!”
“Let’s get off the bunker! Kravchuk, on me!”
Skinner and his Stalkers are already there when Tarasov reaches the sand bags overlooking the ridge. The wind has grown into a storm. Dust whipped up by the wind quickly mixes with the driving rain and covers the men with filth.
“The cocksuckers know what they are doing, Major,” Skinner says, rivulets of rain running down his face as he glances in Tarasov’s direction. “They pushed us back and now come against us from the rear! But you know… there was a moment when I almost thought we could actually make it.” Skinner holds his rifle over the sand bags and fires a long burst. The dushmans’ blood curdling cries are so close and their bodies so tightly packed together that he doesn’t need to aim. “Duty calls, bastards!”
Tarasov looks around, squinting into the storm. Ilchenko is still there, firing his PKM with a scream that distorts his whole face. Kravchuk has dropped his sniper rifle in favor of an AK taken from a fallen Stalker. Squirrel drags a fallen comrade into cover; a man Tarasov recognizes as the other Stalker they met in the forest.
He realizes it’s just a question of minutes before they are overrun and annihilated. Hearing their triumphant cries, he knows that the enemy is aware of this too.
“Zlenko!” Tarasov screams with all the air left in his lungs. “On me!”
The sergeant scrambles up to him. “Major?”
“Now is the time,” Tarasov says, panting. “You know what comes next if we stay in the trench. Give me that flare gun and wait for my command. Let’s die a good soldier’s death!”
A wide smile appears on the sergeant’s blood-smeared face. What Tarasov sees in those shining eyes is the one thing he would have least expected: happiness.
“Strength! Courage! Honor!” Zlenko bellows. Then he raises his hand and shouts. “Men! Fix bayonets!”
At this moment, Tarasov wishes he was a believer, not so he could pray for deliverance but so he could give his thanks. All ways to die are bad, save for that which a man chooses of his own will. Hearing the steely click as his combat knife attaches to the AKM’s barrel, he feels that his wish has been granted. He fires the flare gun.
“Are you ready?” he shouts.
“Ready,” the scattered defenders reply one by one.
Tarasov hears the attackers drawing closer through the pouring rain and darkness, appearing in the flashes of lightning like ghosts.
“Hold!” he shouts. “Keep steady… steady!”
In the moment when the flare bursts out into a bright cupola of blinding red light, he thrusts his fist towards the enemy. “Charge!”
“Forward!” Zlenko shouts. “Vperyod! Rota k boyu!”
Soldiers and Stalkers jump out of their cover and charge down the hill. No one can keep up with Tarasov, his limbs quickened by the Emerald artifact. He doesn’t need his bayonet. Wielding his AKM like a club, he smashes skulls and shatters bones adding the weight of his down-hill charge into every punch. He sees the orange tracers from Ilchenko’s machine gun form a deadly arc in front of him, the gunner’s mouth opened wide by his terrible battle cry. Skinner runs down the enemy, then falls, still firing his rifle as he hits the ground and rolls over to jump up again. The tiny group seems to break up with every man fighting for himself.
“Keep the line,” Tarasov roars over the battle noise. “Keep the line!”
He sees a Stalker firing his AKSU with one hand and a handgun from the other. A Stalker falls, either dead or wounded, and another grabs his shotgun. A soldier screams in agony. Another throws his body between his wounded comrade and the attacker, his rifle spitting a full burst as he screams like a desperate animal. He recognizes Lobov.
“They are on the run! Press on, press on!” Tarasov hears a Stalker shouting.
Where is Zlenko?
Tarasov at last sees him appearing way down the hillside and dashes after him, hitting an enemy and kicking the dushman’s head as he falls to his knees, jumping over him, tearing the pistol from his hand and shooting another enemy in the chest just as the dushman was about to smash the sergeant’s head in with his rifle. Other enemies immediately close in.
But otherwise the dushmans are routing as the storm closes in, firing as they cover their retreat.
The thunder in the sky sounds as if it is right over the battle, the sand swirling above the shaking earth, turning into mud under their heavy boots.
Someone hits his left arm. As he turns towards to his attacker, he sees no one.
Shit, I’m hit! He empties his pistol magazine blindly into the darkness. The sergeant is gone. The full fury of the storm is now only seconds away.
“Men!” Tarasov cries desperately. “Fall back! Fall back into position!”
They run uphill, jumping and trampling over dead and dying enemies. Tarasov hears someone repeating his order, fall back, fall back! It’s not Zlenko’s voice.
“Ilchenko,” he shouts, “cover our rear! Give us covering fire!”
But the machine gun’s rattle is nowhere to be heard.
Panting heavily, he jumps over the sandbags and looks back to see the last man getting back to the hilltop. He grabs a wounded Stalker’s shoulder and drags him into the bunker, not so much entering it as falling inside. The door slams. A Stalker makes sure it is closed tight.
His men are lying on the ground and over each other’s limbs, totally exhausted. He sees Bondarchuk and Kravchuk. But where is Zlenko? Where is Ilchenko?
“Where are the sergeant and the machine gunner?”
“I didn’t see them coming back,” the medic replies. His voice is trembling.
Tarasov closes his eyes in pain. “Corporal Lobov, you’re in charge while I’m gone,” he whispers.
“What? You can’t…”
The storm almost knocks Tarasov to the ground as he opens the bunker door. He can barely see, his Geiger counter doesn’t just click anymore; it bursts into a high-pitched tikitikitik. Photons dance in the radiating dust storm that is painted in an eerie green by his night vision goggles, mingling with the stars he is already seeing due to the pain behind his eyes.