Tonight we are leaving. We are sealed in, but not so tightly that we cannot find a passage out. Below, on the bank of a roaring mountain river, the enemy have placed checkpoints spaced a hundred metres from each other. Tonight we shall pass between them. The river is shallow, it only comes up to the waist. But it is a mountain river, and it flows very swiftly. In profound silence and darkness, you cross it in groups, clinging to each other to avoid being toppled and swept away by the current. During the crossing you lose two MANPADS, which the water tears from a horse that falls in, and two fighters. They are swept along the river and two days later the enemy will fish out their bodies downstream. By crossing the river at this point, you are clearly giving away your location, but you have the entire night ahead. And you will make full use of this night. Angel once again pulls off his favourite manoeuvre. You make a sudden sharp turn to one side that comes as a surprise even to you, and, going flat out all night, by the morning you find yourselves in a deep ravine far removed from where you passed through the checkpoints. Along the floor of the ravine flows a nameless little river. The morning mist allows you to roast another horse. In the daytime you ought to catch up on sleep, but it is sunny and so you spend the day washing, laundering your clothes and tidying yourselves up. You didn’t wash at all during the entire week you were on the mountainside. Neither enemy air reconnaissance nor anything else disturbs you. Nobody is expecting you to be here. So you can travel on safely even by day. But you are utterly drained by hunger and you cannot walk fast. You observe the commander. He is heaving a rucksack which holds his personal belongings plus extra supplies of ammunition and he is armed with a heavy, large-calibre RPK machine gun. He goes forward to the head of the column, puts his rucksack down and walks to the back to take a rucksack from a fighter who’s fallen behind. Day after day he moves up and down the column like this. Occasionally you slaughter a horse, but there is barely enough meat to give you a taste. Often you have to eat it raw. Now and then you manage to pick some forest fruits and berries. You pass so close to the enemy that you have to gesture to each other with signs. The enemy are oblivious to your presence here, but you can see and hear them perfectly. The fog, though, does not always come to your aid.
26
You’ve always suspected that it is only his living conditions that prevent man from going back to his roots. After all, no matter how loudly modern man might crow about his achievements in equality and humaneness, we are the sons of Cain, who murdered his own brother. Or, according to Darwin’s theory, so popular among atheists, we’re just ex-monkeys. Our distant ancestors did not stop to think when they faced the question of survival. And when modern man falls under the influence of an urge such as hunger, thirst, sexual arousal or greed, he makes a leap back to the psychology of his ancestors, triggering his instinctive survival mechanism; we term this ‘going wild’. Given the right conditions, modern man can undergo something akin to becoming ‘wild’, although he is stopped from truly returning to a wild state by a number of factors.
You have been moving slowly for several days through the dense mountain forest and gradually going wild. There isn’t so much as a crumb left from the field rations. You’ve polished off even the saccharine. You cannot use all of the horses for meat – nobody has the strength to carry the extra load of the heavy MANPADS, and discarding weapons and ammunition goes against the guerrillas’ principles. Sod’s law dictates that there is no wild fruit in this forest. And there is no chance of hunting successfully; there are too many of you and the wild animals can scent you from afar. Of course, not all of you go wild, not even most of you: only those weakest in spirit. It’s true they can’t seize anything from the others by force. There’s nothing to seize. But even if there were something, it wouldn’t happen. There is no ‘fittest’ here. Everyone is armed, and everyone knows how to shoot. Here strength means only fortitude of spirit. Everyone’s nerves are strained to the limit. But only the weak of spirit have reached nervous meltdown. No, they do not try heroically attacking the enemy singlehanded – their survival instinct is still functioning. They simply make life miserable for the rest of their comrades. They pick a fight over the slightest thing; the tiniest trifle makes them lose their temper. Their more restrained comrades, who make up the vast majority of the fighters, put up with their behaviour and do not succumb to the same temptation. You watch these people and can barely contain a fierce wave of anger welling up from somewhere deep inside. You wonder, Why exactly should we tolerate them? This use of the collective ‘we’ helps you position yourself mentally as upholder of the common interest. But then it dawns on you that you too are simply turning into one of them, and you summon up the strength to restrain yourself. Generally speaking, a man who is weak of spirit will be a danger in any abnormal situation. Whether it’s hunger, exhaustion or any serious threat to life. You once saw a soldier who found himself near a large number of enemy forces, and thus close to death, almost lost his mind with fear. Like a dog backed into a corner, he was picking fights with his comrades over the most trivial things, threatening to give them away to the enemy and get them all killed. It was only when one of his comrades-in-arms rather elegantly conveyed a genuine death threat that he pulled himself together and stopped endangering the entire group. Afterwards, when the terror of death had passed, he apologized to everyone with whom he’d been spoiling for a fight. Now, as you watch the fighters similarly afflicted, you realize that if any of them were given the chance of surviving alone, they would seize it without a second thought. But even in their present state, they can see that survival alone would be impossible. They would have nowhere to go: the enemy are all around. Their only option is to stay with the group. And so that’s what they do, while they grumble, bark at everyone and lose their temper. You draw your own conclusion from this somewhat subjective analysis, and it is clearly not in their favour.
Today one of the groups went to a nearby farm hoping to buy some animals. The watchman refused to sell them a couple of bulls and they ended up taking them by force. As the group left, they ran into some armed men who were out hunting. The men turned out to be police and FSB agents. The guerrillas proposed they hand over their weapons and leave in peace, but instead the men tried to open fire. As a result, three of them were killed and two were captured. But when it emerged that the men they’d taken prisoner were Ossetian hunting guides rather than secret-service officers, and they hadn’t tried to shoot, they were released on the spot.
As soon as the group returned with the animals, you slaughtered the two bulls but you could not cook them, for you had been discovered. You were listening in on the enemy radio channel and heard all their communications. They didn’t know the size of your group or who you were. But some modest police and army units, far too small for you to bother with, were sent out to the forest. They thought there must be a dozen of you at most. You left an ambush along their path and moved on ahead. They were about to give up and turn back when one of the fighters fell into their hands. He had not wanted to eat his chunk of meat raw, so he’d decided to grill it a little. To do this, he slipped back from the unit and began making a fire – and that’s when an enemy search team stumbled across him. Of course, there was nothing he could do and they took him. They soon got him to speak – at the first high-speed interrogation he told them everything he knew. To be fair, it was his only way to avoid an agonizing death and it would be heartless to reproach him for it. In no time they’d surrounded the forest with a huge mass of troops. Just like before, you knew how many men they’d deployed and where they were heading. To give credit where it is due, they acted with skill and professionalism. They began expertly blocking all the routes out of the forest, trying their best to cut off your route, which they had learnt of from their prisoner. But Angel would not have been Angel if he hadn’t foreseen this. Without a word, he simply adjusted the route and the unit again veered to the side. Of course, you are unlikely to find a clear path out of the sealed-off section of the forest, but the most poorly controlled sector has been identified. The enemy are zealously assisting you with the heavy use of their radios. Helicopters are circling the forest like a murder of crows on the scent of carnage – they’re disturbing you badly and so you decide to give them a fright. A shot from one of the Strela MANPADS has proved fatal for one of them. And now the others become so wary that you can continue your journey safely. You can even light campfires. They don’t dare come in close enough to fire their rockets at the smoking fires. And their artillery doesn’t work all that accurately. You come to the edge of a fairly sizeable village and stop to rest for the day. The hunger is agonizing. You eat all the old nettles growing on the bank of the brook where you’ve stopped. You’re constantly chewing on twigs. But you dispose of the chewed twigs carefully so as not to leave traces. Out of reflex. Angel calls you over. He has grown gaunt, but he’s as composed as ever.