Chapter Nineteen

It all happened just as Mohamedov had said it would. Samushia danced at the sight of the burning trucks – a stamping, whooping dance. Early the previous night they’d cut and wired several trees to fall across the road where it exited a clearing, then mined and wired the entrance. When the mines exploded the trees dropped, cutting off advance and retreat, trapping the Russian fucks.

He would never admit surprise that the plan worked. The Forest Brotherhood had never planned a thing as big as this, not against Russians anyway. Flushed with excitement he looked at Nadir Mohamedov and gestured success with his fist. The Chechen smiled bleakly at the youngster’s eagerness.

‘There are a thousand more for every one you kill here,’ he said, ‘remember that.’

But Samushia’s enthusiasm, fed by thoughts of dead and violated women, was not so easily bruised.

‘Kill the bastards!' he screamed with all the power of his twenty five year-old lungs. Picking up his RPG launcher, he moved forward to get a closer view of the destruction. The rear truck was unrecognisable; its back-end dangled from burning branches several metres above the ground, its occupants scattered piecemeal over trees and bushes. He had never witnessed such comprehensive death before. The sight of his enemy reduced to strips of membrane made his heart pound faster than he’d thought possible and almost stopped his breath.

The breeze shifted, carrying burning flesh and diesel with it, but Samushia felt no urge to vomit as he feared he might. Hefting the launcher onto his shoulder he ran, keeping the trees between himself and the carnage fifty metres away. Three more trucks were already on fire. Flaming figures ran in circles, screaming at each other, setting fire to shrubs and scrubby grass as they fell, still screaming. A few of the vehicles at the end of the convoy were trying to escape back up the road, only to find heavy tree trunks blocking their retreat. He knelt, aimed at the third truck and fired. He knew immediately that he was off target, just as he always knew in the split second before his cue hit a pool ball that he was going to miss the pocket. When the missile glanced off a tree and ricocheted into the truck, he leapt up screaming and punching the air with relief and triumph.

‘Yes! I got the fuckers, I got them.’

Samushia found swearing a complex pleasure. Svani is a language without words of blasphemy and it was not always easy to translate from American when things were moving fast.

He watched admiringly as Chechen snipers picked off Russians still stumbling from the wreckage of vehicles. Then quite suddenly it was over. Samushia moved to join his comrades as the five undamaged trucks were surrounded and those men still alive and uninjured were rounded up.

‘We did it, we did it!’ Someone was slapping his shoulders and he saw the tears in his own eyes reflected in theirs. Then he walked to the corner of the clearing where sixty three singed and battered men slumped, silent or crying. None of them looked, as Samushia looked, at the spikes of bone and shreds of gut hanging red on green, from leaves and twigs. The smell of things twisted inside out was all around as he stared at each man in turn before walking away, initial pleasure turned to disappointment. The man he was looking for, the man whose face he’d seen illuminated by the light from his aunt’s kitchen, wasn’t here.