***
Russians tend to live in flats and have small families, while Chechens tend to live in houses or compounds of houses and have large families. There is a fairly clear, simple logic to an apartment building or a city of them, once you are used to construction patterns. There is also a logic to a compound and a city of compounds, but it is more complex and fuzzier, and so Chechen compounds tended to be death traps for Russians.
Olivia and her security team had gone along on a snatch-and-grab of suspected foreign fighters. It was three in the bitterly cold morning and the compound, which had been under very discreet observation, was quiet. There was no movement outside and there appeared to have been no movement inside for hours. All entrances and exits were covered by fire as well as observation. She had never been on this type of operation before. Her intent, as always, was to see how it worked, until she understood the tactics intuitively and could use that understanding to improve her sensors.
They went into the compound, then into a house. They went into a large room.
This was supposed to be safe, was Olivia’s last conscious, coherent thought for a long time. The world exploded into gunfire and Simonov stepped in front of her, into a burst of fire that should have killed her. The rounds shredded his face, spattering her with his flesh and drenching her in his blood, as it poured and pumped out from beneath his helmet and vest. Nevertheless, in the way that sometimes happens, he fired back at his killer, suppressing him for a few precious seconds even as he fell back on Olivia, covering her with his body.
She rolled out from under Simonov and saw his killer, a black-bearded man, wearing a green headband with white Arabic script. Olivia felt something shift in her brain so deep, so far down, it was in her spine. No choice.
She felt hot agony trace her arm. A bullet had touched her. But there was no bone involvement, no arterial bleeding; her hand still obeyed her will. Pain joined rage within her, making its way through her like white phosphorus. Then she was possessed by the boxer’s cold, controlled fury that Malinovsky had taught her to use to her own ends, only a fury stronger and more controlled than she’d ever imagined possible. Time seemed to become very slow, like thick liquid, and she felt she was moving in an almost leisurely manner as, rising to her knees, she lifted her rifle and shot Simonov’s killer in the chest. Then, in the instant before death and gravity took him down, in the face.
She could hear the rest of her security team firing back, felt Sergeant Gumarov grab her arm to try to drag her out. She smelled the gasoline before it ignited, smelled it for the second time in her life. Fire came to them. For an instant, she was once again a being of broken bones and damaged ligaments in a wrecked and burning plane, and then she saw the terror in the sergeant’s eyes. She grabbed him and shook him, her eyes alight with pure intelligence. “Concrete and rammed earth don’t burn,” she screamed. Then the entrance behind them went up in flame. Decorative wood supports. The fire would make a mess but nothing that couldn’t be survived, especially if they stayed low, where the air was, and close to the walls. Gumarov forced himself to focus on her words and get control of himself. “I’ve been here before,” she shouted. “In fire, I mean. Don’t panic and we’ll be fine.” They could hear but not understand the Arabic shouts; they could understand a little Chechen. “They were waiting for us,” she said.
“They were. If we try to break out through that door, we’ll be cut down. If we find a way to get upstairs, they’re probably up there, too. So—” Gumarov grabbed a soldier he hadn’t seen until that day. “Radioman, get the BMD gunner to work the upper floor but have him stay off the cannon or he’ll be killing us all.”
He complied and they could hear the comforting sound of the 14.5 mm machine gun on their BMD open up as the gunner put fire into the upper story, suppressing the defenders. The screaming above them informed them of the result. There was no need to use the cannon; to do so risked killing friendlies. But now if the Russians had fire at their backs, the Chechens and the Arabs did, too. They could not stay where they were, without dying. Nor could they come down without death.
Scanning the room, Olivia fired at several points in the ceiling. Gumarov joined her, firing at several more, knocking out light bulbs and any possible observation devices that might have existed. “Let us honor our hosts.” Her smile was feral.
Olivia had a strange, detached sense of time seeming to elongate and contract as she needed it to. Meanwhile the Russians, those who survived the initial shock, organized themselves almost automatically and began clearing the compound. The Chechens and Arabs were staggered. This was not supposed to happen. The Russians were clearly doing what the Chechens and the Arabs considered unthinkable. They were moving into their fire. But not blindly. Not blindly at all. And skillfully.
It was the first time Olivia had personally ever used her work in combat, throwing a little hand-held sensor around the corner, seeing what the monitor showed her. Not enough, never enough, but the yes/no of the monitor and the reactions of enemies told her enough of what she needed to know. Her mind worked with speed and clarity. She was able to react before the Chechens and Arabs did, and it felt like she had been working with Sergeant Gumarov all her life. Sometimes the Chechens and Arabs thought the device was a grenade and fell to the floor. That gave Olivia enough time to toss in a real grenade or, with Gumarov and others in the small group that formed and reformed around her, spray the room with automatic rifle fire. Sometimes they encountered an empty room or space and called for other troops to drive the enemy toward it. When the fighters took refuge, they learned there was none only as their heads and bodies exploded.
She had a few discrete memories. One was of an Arab—the features weren’t Chechen—holding a pistol to an infant’s head, yelling Alhamdulillah, and something else that didn’t matter. Sergeant Gumarov, a Tartar, a Sufi Muslim, and a new father, shot the man in the eye. There was the pfft of penetration, then the thwat of a bullet, then nothing more worth considering. Then Olivia realized that her mind had processed the sounds backwards. Time is very strange today. She kept another memory of a woman wielding something, a hoe, a shovel, Olivia didn’t bother verifying, shielding her son, a child who couldn’t have been more than thirteen except that he was shooting at her with an AK he could not possibly control. She killed them both, the woman first because she was the closest and most dangerous, by reflex and utterly without conscious thought, with her pistol.
Then she realized that she was using her pistol. Her rifle was no longer with her. She didn’t really want to remember where or how she’d left it. But she did. She had fallen hard and probably damaged the exposed gas tube, a known weakness, because the weapon failed at what seemed like the worst possible moment. So she struck a man with the extended stock. No, struck was not the right word at all. The weapon had penetrated the man’s stomach, then remained there. For the time being, she let herself shy away from the knowledge of what she had done, and how much strength and rage it had required.
Then the firing ebbed and there was the hard silence that follows things of finality. She left securing the prisoners and searching the bodies for information to the troops. That was their job. Simonov was her responsibility. She had a profoundly detached memory of something she’d done in addition to killing his killer. She’d left the room, perhaps the house, then gone back in and dragged his ruined body out of the burning rubble. She slowly recalled briefly pausing before the body of the man who had killed him, whom she herself had killed, and looking upon the wreckage of his face. And she remembered, realizing as she photographed the scene in her mind, she knew that if she wanted to, she could remember every last detail later. And then she realized, the memory would not trouble her at all. It would gladden her.
She sat down beside Simonov’s body and, like an engineer seeking a problem in her circuitry, searched for remorse or shame or anything normal. Then she accepted—this was normal. What she felt was far beyond a mere physiological reaction to successful combat,
killing someone who had tried to kill her, then others who’d held the same intent. That had been an interesting set of problems to solve. What she felt was elation, satisfaction, and a profound sense of completion, as if all the fragmented parts of her had finally coalesced, and there was no more hiding her wholeness from herself or from the rest of the world. And what she felt was horror, not with what she had done, but with the fact that this carnage was what it had taken for her to reach this moment.
But no fear. No fear at all. Not even the tremors that ought to come when the adrenaline subsides and the muscles and the nerves collapse into exhaustion. Fear was absent. Perhaps it, too, was dead. But she was alive.
I’m…me. Olivia. At last.