***
The initial fighting for Grozny lasted into February. Russian military casualties ran into the hundreds, as did Chechen resistance casualties. Both sides committed atrocities and war crimes, the Russians far more than the Chechens. And hundreds of civilians, many of them Russian, died in the fighting. A strange and terrible place to be happy in.
And yet, Olivia was happy. She couldn’t have said why. She was cold, the food was bad, the living conditions were harsh, never mind that the filth and squalor normally associated with Russian positions were entirely absent from Suslov’s brigade. She’d forgotten what it was to be really warm or clean. Forgotten what it was to really sleep through a night. The violence precluded it.
Nighttime harassment and interdiction fire is rarely fired at anyone in particular. It’s meant to curtail the movement of enemy troops, disturb their rest, and lower their morale with the threat of casualties.
Olivia could certainly say that it worked as the first mortar round landed, a dull crump a hundred meters away. Then the second, a bit closer. She shoved her feet into her boots, grabbed her rifle and staggered off to find a bunker, colliding with Suslov on the way. “Excuse me please,” she murmured, embarrassed, as he braced her up. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing we can’t endure for a while.” He steered her into the bunker.
“But doesn’t your artillery have counter-battery radar?”
“Yes.”
“Why aren’t we firing back?”
“Perhaps the equipment is down. Perhaps the troops are untrained. Perhaps some liquid in that system can be used for intoxication. Men here sometimes drink brake fluid.”
“So that is why I have seen BTRs and BMPs slam into houses with a screech of metal.”
He nodded grimly. “It gets filtered through bread. So does mouthwash.” In the dim light, he watched her face as another mortar round detonated, this one closer. She no longer flinched at such things. It occurred to him that although she was beautiful, she was not at all pretty. For this he was grateful. It reduced the temptation to folly on the part of some of his soldiers. She was, however, the most interesting woman he’d ever met, and he was even more grateful that at the end of the day, there simply was not enough of him left even to hope he could properly entertain her.
Then he realized, with some amusement, that he knew what she was thinking. “Doctor Tolchinskaya, I appreciate your curiosity, but I do not want you to adopt some orphaned counter-battery radar unit.”
By now, more troops had filed in, leaving a prudent space between their colonel and the quiet foreign engineer who was working with them.
“You have people out looking for that mortar team?”
“Amongst other things, yes, and in time, they will find that crew. That reminds me. You are, perhaps, going out on patrols a bit too often? I do not want you captured.”
“I always know where the machine gunner’s secondary weapon is.”
“And you carry a rifle and a pistol. But save those for the enemy.”
“I reserve one round for myself. Always.”
Suslov nodded. “If such comes about and your pistol fails you…grenades are very certain. Just put the last one inside your vest against your chest and pull the pin. If it all goes to hell—” he was speaking very quietly, “there is a final way out no one can take from you, and that is to bite off your tongue as far back as you can. All you need is a hard surface against which to ram your lower jaw.”
“How do you know this?” she heard herself asking, horrified and yet also grateful for the advice.
“When my father was a young tank officer, he fought at a place we call Khalkhin Gol, and the Japanese call Nomonhan, where World War Two really started. Japanese prisoners sometimes committed suicide that way.” He paused, breathing deeply and quietly. “He never forgave himself for not telling his children that until after one was captured by the mujahidin in Afghanistan.”
They were silent for a while in the bunker, smelling strongly of unwashed bodies, dirty uniforms, oiled, used weapons, old tobacco, and hot tea. Olivia remembered his hand briefly on her shoulders, a calm, steady touch that one could bear up under. She had seen him touch his soldiers that way, especially if it had been a bad day, no matter how bad his own day had been, and she suddenly felt a great desire to touch him that way. But his words were too personal for touch in that place. “In America,” she said, “we have what is called a living will. That if you are hurt in certain ways, the doctors are forbidden to keep you alive.”
“We are expected to survive and function.”
“Some things cannot be repaired.”
“If such a thing happens to you, your brigade comrades will take care of you, not let you linger among strangers.”
“Will you do so yourself, for me, if you are available?” She knew it was a heavy burden to ask him to take up, and in exchange offered to bear another burden. “And I will do the same for you,” she said. She knew, from the way his eyes widened in the dim light of the bunker, that he knew she understood what she had asked, and offered.
“Now, this is interesting.” And, sadly, more intimate than sex, yet it was what was possible and he realized that he wanted to accept her gift. “Ira—my sister—and I have such an agreement, but only as a last resort. Such things are best handled at the tactical level, not as a family matter. I have never made such a promise with a woman in a tactical situation. But we will make this promise to each other as…friends, Doctor Tolchinskaya.”
She reached out, offered him her hand and he held it for a few seconds, feeling her strength, permitting himself to brace against her. He felt it wrong for a commander to take comfort from his soldiers; he comforted them. But he realized that as she was not one of his soldiers, he might allow himself to draw upon her strength. Satisfied, he released her hand.
Olivia was dozing intermittently between the incoming mortar rounds, when over one of the radios in the bunker there was the hard rattle of AK fire, brief screaming in Chechen and the exultant howls of Russian infantrymen, ended by the individual clarity of insurance shots. “Good,” she muttered. “That problem is solved.”
Suslov, who envied but did not begrudge his soldiers their satisfaction, permitted himself a wry smile. “For a while.”