Distant Taps The Woodpecker
Distant Taps The Woodpecker
Part 4 - we dip in to the large forested wetlands area on the border with Belarus, and follow Nyine with the International Legion, battling the Russians back from the Kyiv area, not very far away
Niyne was now near in Sumy, in the thick of it, already having come into direct contact with advancing Russian troops repeatedly in the past week. As a sniper this was more than unusual, and showed the sintensity of the fighting. Russians tactics were crude, she said, and they suffered from a lack of supplies, or supplies that were only there on paper, typified by long columns of trucks without petrol stranded on roads leading into Kyiv.
‘Why don’t they take them out?’ I asked her on the phone.
‘Is complicated. We have teams watching them, but Western countries are begging us not to, apparently. We are told they are scared of escalation.’
‘They are? I said. Crazy.’
She was on one of the missions to observe the long column of trucks and supply vehicles. Watching, hidden, she’d thought of taking out a few tires, just for the sake of it, but a decision was taken not to do so. They did not need to, for a start, and vehicles needed to be destroyed rather than temporarily disabled, so they were sent to clean-up areas recently taken back from the Russians; woods, small towns, villages, key locations, like bridges, and towers.
‘ I met my first rape victim,’ she said.
In this permanently smoking landscape, where all was charred, blackened, marked by the terror, the ferocious terror of all that was war, where the environment, the mind, time, existence itself became utterly dystopian, where all that was once important was of no relevance, and emotions simply did not exist, and bones, windows, trees stumps were burnt, and shattered, Nyine’s unit had come across a solitary woman, barefoot, wearing her night dress, arms crossed in front of her, in front of a house that used to be one of a row, and now stood alone, without one wall. She stood composed, cold, trembling, her eyes darting left, right, escaping. When Nyine took off her webbing and offered her the military jacket she was wearing, she shook her head, once, almost imperceptively. Her colleagues walked up, a Chechyan first. He looked at the woman, sighed, and walked towards the house.
‘Take two guys with you,’ an American voice shouted out, but the Chechen kept walking alone, slowly, carefully: mines were easier to find in houses than outside, but one proceeded with caution. An experienced soldier watched each step, and looked up, down, in every corner; did not touch anything.
The woman shivered again. Her trembling had not been because of cold. Nyine saw blood smeared on the night dress. But she could do little. An examination, there? Or where? There was no red cross around, no field hospital, nothing. The only people that would come were journalists, and they too would not know how to help. But they would not want to help, either, because a story was a story after all, and they wanted the story, above all, and perhaps only.
‘Your clothes?’ Nyine asked. The woman shrugged. They were gone, looted, and what was not looted was trampled into the mud by the Russian soldiers.
There was a loud shout from inside the house. ‘Fuck,’ said a soldier standing nearby, a Lithuanian, a quiet, dependable Lithuanian, not there for the gory, for the experience, or for any of the other reasons some arrive to the war other than commitment and conviction. The Lithuanian waited a moment, then ran to the house, stopping at a wall next to the front door, looking in sideways, his K-47 ready. Two colleagues followed, slowly, carefully.
They are right, there are surely mines, thought Nyine.
The Chechen came out, tugged his black beard at the doorway. ‘They wrote on the wall, in blood, or worse,’ he said in Russian; they wrote ‘It is not easy being Chechen. It is a saying of ours, but no way a Chechen would write that like that, on the wall. Never.’
The woman looked downwards, then closed her eyes.
‘Find a blanket, someone, for goodness sake,’ Nyine said.
In a few minutes they were going to have to leave her, she knew. Leave her where? Just there, at the roadside, raped a multitude of times. Leave her for the journalists, or maybe a medic could be found, that had a few minutes. But there would be no counselling, no hospital to go to for a long while, just her ransacked house and muddy roadside in bare feet.
‘Her husband is alive, badly beaten up though,’ the Lithuanian said. His neighbour,’ he indicated with his head, ‘not so lucky. Neighbour’s wife also group raped.’
‘I see a pattern here,’ said Nyine.
‘But we are not safe until we secure the area,’ added the Lithuanian. The blackened, scorched landcape was quiet. No birds sang, and the few trees standing were no longer trees, but something else, as if they too were in shock, or what was left of them.
‘Thank you,’ the woman said quietly to Nyine.
‘Be careful with the journalists,’ Nyine said.
Each house needed to be searched, slowly, carefully, for booby traps, for left behind wounded Russian soldiers, or sniper teams. Nyine covered as her team approached what looked like an abandoned small farmhouse.
‘Clear!’ she heard a shout, and walked forward through wet grass. Then suddenly all hell errupted. She saw the tall Lithuanian pop a grenade down into a flight of stairs, and the explosion sent dirt then smoke upwards, as she dropped flat into the grass, staring at the scene through her scope, picking one figure, in her crosshairs, finger on the trigger, then another, checking the yellow armbands and movement quickly. And movement. The Russians holed up in the farmhouse could have quickly put the yellow tape of Ukrainians on, but not so quickly on their helmets, nor the exact way they put the tape on. Another grenade went off, into the basement again. She heard machine gun fire, short bursts, replied, again. Then she saw him, 30 yards or so, to her right. To swivel around would draw attention to her, and at that distance the spray from his AK47 would hit her before she could level her rifle. She rolled onto her left side, turned right from her hips, held balance for a second, keeping him in her sights, and dropped him, with one shot in the side of his face, brought her rifle back down, elbows into the dirt again, holding her Finnish Sako rifle level, with its cooling .338 barrel.
That was lucky, she thought, though she knew luck had long since packed its bags and moved far, and when relative silence reigned again, she got up onto her knees, then stood up, walked carefully up to the old farmhouse though the wet grass.
‘One man hit,’ the Lithuanian said, ‘in the arm, but ok.’
‘Medic with him?’ Nyine asked.
Yeah, Sufi, all ok, we’re asking for a medevac, and what to do now.’
‘Think we’ll have to pull back, we’re a little ahead of ourselves here,’ Nyine said.
‘Negative, we are to get to a place called Bucha, urgent,’ replied the American.
Uzhhorod was a chilly evening, but calm, without wind, and only an air raid siren had startled the birds. Lights were coming on slowly, with the air raid alert over, and the sun dipping behind the horizon gave a golden hue to the sky. Jean Mi was at the bar, chatting to the barmaid; a Frenchman abroad, and Anorak studied a wildlife book, while the two Colombians, Turbo and Machete played chess. Sqirrel sat with Bunny, but Bunny was texting someone, and Squirrel looked annoyed. After a while she got up and walked out, maybe going back to the Freedom house, where we stayed, and owned by an amical big, burly Hungarian speaker. Outside Tex, Wireman, Hot Dog and a few others sat practising being bored in dark sunglasses and newly pressed fatigues or cammos. I looked back on the A4 sheet in front of me. Raven and I sat in the one round glass table at the café, going through equipment checks, at least on paper. She licked her pencil, ready to tick each item.
‘CZ Bren 2 guns?’ I started.
‘Rifles? Yes, check, for about a third of us, no night scopes.’
‘Enough. Osprey body armour.’
‘Check, maybe enough, if not all are on patrol or recon.’
‘Ruag hg hand grenades, to arrive, illegally, from a 3rd country.’
‘Yeah, Swiss. They must be kidding. Major training for those, and we are just an observer platoon, right?’
‘Assortment of helmets.’
‘Check, on stand-by, no comment.’
‘Ballistic protection vests, if needed.’
‘To be confirmed.’
‘Leica Big 25 night goggles, with image intensififer tubes.’
‘Check, for a team of 8.’
‘Canvas jungle boots.’
‘Nope.’
‘Electronics; Panasonic CF-20 Toughpad, radio, a few Anafi/Tes thermal & Black hornet nano drones, 1 Orbiter 2B drone, that one from Israel, shh, that last one illegally from a donator.’
‘What do you mean illegally?’
‘Thus the shh.’
‘Ah, ok. Next, mobile tactical radars.’
‘Negative.’
‘Mobile phone solar energy chargers.’
‘Check, yeah.’
‘Assortment of hammocks, tarpaulins, camouflage nets, anti-mosquito nets, canoes and kayaks, buckets of dark green paint. How do you paint on fibreglass?’
‘Don’t know. We’re making the camouflage nets now. Check.’ She looked at her phone: ‘marine fibreglass paint, good.’
‘And the hammocks, tarpaulins, army issue?’
‘Still arriving, oh, hey,’ Raven said to Bunny who had come over to our table, decked in a tailored camouflage skirt, green t-shirt and jacket, and black boots.
‘I have a funding idea,’ said Bunny, breathlessly, ‘to help us get all the equipment we need.’ She took off her sunglasses.
‘Your glasses are pink,’ I said.
‘Yes, even the lenses, dark pink,’ replied Bunny.
‘Perfect.’
‘So, we will make porn films and sell them on a porn site. Everytime they are watched, money comes.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Listen, I have it planned. Films with stories. In the first one will be a woman going on holiday.’
I looked up at her from where I was sitting with my espresso, Raven on my left.
‘A holiday?’ I asked her.
‘She leaves her fiancé, arrives at an airport, filmed in taxi, watching the city, then getting changed into bikini, not showing everything, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘Then on beach, watching a guy in swim shorts playing volleyball. Then she tells her fiancé how the volleyball player is nice.’
I looked at Raven, she looked at me, blank face, then I looked at Bunny. Bunny cleared her throat.
‘Next scene she is walking in hills, in the heat, and throws off her clothes to sunbathe on the hill side. The volleyball player is walking his dog lower down the hill, and looks up, sees her. They look at each other.’
Raven sighed.
‘Next scene, she goes to buy watermelons. She sees the volleyball player she watched is the watermelon seller. She sees how he wants her, and scribbles her address and gives it.’
Bunny cleared her throat again.
‘She tells her fiancé, and when the watermelon seller comes by to her holiday flat for a coffee her financé listens on the phone, as she plunges her hands down his shorts, then when she lays back on the bed and is taken by him.’
‘Taken?’ queried Raven. I looked across at her.
‘Bunny — ’ I started.
‘Then we will do a pirate film, and after, Tarzan, with Jane and finally, a female soldier in — ‘
‘Umm,’ I said, interrupting.
‘Our brand can be Silent Owl Productions. You can be Tarzan,’ Bunny continued.
‘Bunny, I can be Tarzan’s grandfather.’
We sat in silence a moment.
‘Did ya know that it was once proposed to rename the United States Appalachia in place of America, since the latter name belonged to Latin America also?’ said Raven.
I looked at her again.
‘Appalachia is not an interesting porn location,’ Bunny said.
Raven ignored her, and continued, ‘Edgar Allan Poe later took up the idea and considered Appalachia a much better name than the United States, separate from the rest of the Americas, and he also thought it did honour to those whom the Appalachian Mountains had been named after. He also thought the magnificence of Appalachia enough to rechristen USA.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Oh, so interesting, Raven,’ said Bunny.
‘Believe me, anything is of more interest than what I had to listen to,’ Raven said to her.
And if the evening was not veering far enough back into the twilight zone, a tall, lithe middle-aged blond woman walked towards us and sat down.
‘I am Andrej’s sister,’ she said, in Hungarian. ‘ I used to be a ballet dancer. I would like to join Silent Owl. My name is Irina.’
‘Funny, you know,’ I replied in Hungarian also, ‘I wrote a book once. One of the strong characters was called Irina. She was a ballet dancer, too.’
‘Oh, that’s good!’ Irina said, frowning a little confusion.
‘We can call you Tokaj, after that golden wine.’
‘We can,’ she laughed a little: ‘by the way, I shoot well, I have been training weekly, like many women here have, if the Russians get here to West Ukraine, to minimise chances of getting raped, or at least fight back.’
From all around town the air raid sirens started up again as we sat and drank our coffee, and I scribbled in my notebook.
early blossoms are late
how thoughtless
— another haiku about war
What is war? Nyine thought, standing in front of a fork in the road leading into Bucha, lifting her helmet and wiping her hair back from her forehead. This is what the Russians did in Circassia, two hundred years ago, when they ran amok, massacring, raping. She looked at the bodies lying in the street. Many had been there a long while, and many had their hands tied behind their back. Executed. She held her rifle downwards, barrel pointed to the ground and walked forward. Trees lining the street were blackened stumps, and tank tracks had churned up the tarmac. She saw the flower beds at the crossroads had burnt, probably set alight by Russian soldiers. And more bodies, hands tied. This was a scene of utter devastation, but one done with deliberate purpose.
In one garden she saw pamphlets on the Dalai Lama. Had Buriaks carried out this brutality? she questioned silently, or had Russians thrown the pamphlets around themselves, something they were quite capable of.
What was war. It was not conflict, not diplomacy by other means. Not a failure to communicate, or a show of strength. A show of strength stopped wars. This appalling massacre had been started by just one man. As always, one man had let his dreams, his nightmares and his fantasies out of his head into the real world, where they ran amok, killing, maiming, torturing, raping, looting, carried out by all-too willing country men, starved of normalcy by the malignant dictatorship that was Russia, and relishing their first taste of freedom, to execute, in a glut of revenge for perceived injustice, jealousy, because of paved streets and functioning toilets and gluttony for clothes, make up, lingerie perfume, and anything else they could find to loot and bring back to defiant, posturing wives and mothers, or to drink.
In front of her lay a young woman in ripped coat, her body half trampled into the mud weeks before, eyes and mouth thankfully closed, almost in peace, but face cut and bruised, and patterned with shrapnel.
‘Sufi!’ called her Lithuanian colleague; Jam; ‘remember booby-traps, careful.’
He was right. She stood up, and stepped back carefully, her boot crunching on small stones, remembering that it was exactly where Russians often put mines, anticipating where people would step back to in order to have a bit of space.
In the Circassian genocide the Russian soldiers had slit open the stomachs of pregnant woman. Had they changed? Had they progressed, at all? They seemed to revel in recreating their brutal past, again and again, a past untainted by pink-coloured nostalgia. Stalin? As popular as ever, with new statues and framed portraits increasing across Russia. And admired for what? For the tens of millions murdered under his regime? Well, maybe they had it coming to them. He remained a symbol of iron discipline, and anyway, drank vodka. How could a cult of personality be built around such an incapable man? Nyine and her colleagues stood, heads bowed, facing a dismembered body against a broken wooden fence. The Russians had not humanised their genocides, and surely never would.
‘It makes me think of 1941,’ the Lithuanian said, ‘when the Russians came to the Baltics and stole tens of thousands of people, to shove into cattle cars and take them to Siberia.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nyine.
‘But here they did not bother to take them,’ he finished.
‘Oh they will have taken some,’ said Nyine, ‘maybe young women, children.’
They received an order to fan outside of town, to check all buildings, and possible holes in the ground.
‘They are counting, over 600 killed,’ said the Lithuanian, speaking very rapidly, ‘many mutilated. A torture chamber underground, young girls raped, women raped and killed, beheadings.’
‘Slow down,’ Nyine said, ‘we have a fucking job to do, and turned to another colleague, standing next to her in the cold light of day, the peculiar light after carnage, everything in focus but unreal, like some kind of strange drug trip: ‘Nice tattoo,’ Nyine told the soldier next to her, the Welshman who’d introduced himself as ‘don’t call me Taff,’ so had received the callsign Toffee. Had seemed fun at the time.
‘Yeah, International Legion logo,’ Toffee said.
‘That’s us,’ the Lithuanian said, ‘keep it in mind.’
‘Damn right.’
Other colleagues walking forward on the road churned up by tank tracks with them chimed in, keeping emotions steady, keeping thoughts intact, keeping it together, just by communicating:
‘Misfits.’
‘And mavericks.’
‘Marginals.’
‘Warriors.’
‘Yeah, that too,’ Nyine said, almost to herself.
‘Come, Sufi,’ Toffee replied, ‘we need to secure the edge of town, just in case.’
‘Yeah, we do.’
Behind them, somewhere, scattered in the street, among the innocent maimed, butchered and left in the name of the brutal invasion, one last mobile phone rang and rang, unanswered, but it rang, and rang, again and again, until they could no longer hear it ringing, but still they heard the echoes in their minds as they walked towards the shell of a house, comandeered as headquarters.
‘They’re trying to get through to Odesa,’ said the Lithuanian, as they sat in a basement eating potatoes and salt.
‘Yeah, they’re in Mykolaev,’ said the American, Crockett. ‘They’re being held back outside the city, pretty heroically.’
‘If they get to Odesa they’ll keep going to Moldova and take away any sea for Ukraine,’ Nyine said.
‘They hit a theatre in Mariupol,’ said Bear, the Finn, looking at his mobile phone. ‘Over 600 killed. 12 killed according to Amnesty International.’
‘That’s where Azov are based.’
Outside, a new barrage of rockets from anti aircraft guns was exploding about them. None moved. The accuracy was appalling, even if all it took was a lucky hit, and anyway, going outside was not an option in the middle of such bombardment. Another rocket landed nearby with a loud bang! and showering the house walls with dirt and shrapnel, and again and again thuds, cracks and bangs caused tremours in the walls, as the rockets continued to pound the area for hours.
‘My next holiday will be Switzerland,’ Crockett, the American said, to a few chuckles.
‘We’re going to have to sleep here,’ came an order.
‘Sleep, yeah, right,’ Nyine said quietly, her mind somewhere among the tall pine trees of the Carpathians. She closed her eyes.
In the forests and marshes of Polesia, facing Belarus in the north of Ukraine, the first kayaks had been launched into the river early in the morning. The crickets chirped in the grasses and some birds took flight, and circled. The black rubber dinghy was fully blown up after hours of manual pumping, and an assortment of canoes rocked wildly as soldiers heaved themselves in from the bank of the river.
Bunny slipped on her pink sunglasses and buttoned up a British army desert warfare shirt she had found at a market. She wore black bikini bottoms and black rubber shoes as supplied, and donned a tall green cap the Hungarian military wear, covering her pink-tinged curly hair, and smiled when she caught my eye. ‘Beautiful,’ she mouthed, of the forest. She reached down and grabbed one of the dinghy’s side ropes, and paused.
‘The birds do not care who listens to them, they sing when they feel like it,’ she said.
‘Bring it parallel to the bank, use your paddle, grip, get in, ‘ Raven told her.
‘Yeah, yeah, Raven,’ she said, ‘done this before, many times.’
‘In a movie?’ Raven replied, getting into a single kayak. I shared a canoe with Irina, Bunny now sat in the dinghy with Turbo and Machete and watched the small crafts take to the river, including the row boats, and about 50 self-sufficient Silent Owl troops in all to be dispersed in a wide border with Belarus almost the size of the southern German border.
‘Nobody can help you in time if you get spotted,’ I said as my last instruction, ‘so learn your forest, get to know it well. Know where to hide, where to cook and eat, which rivers go where.’
‘This is insanity,’ said Hot Dog.
‘We’ll be fine, and useful, enjoy the forest,’ I replied.
‘Slava Ukraini,’ said Raven.
‘Heroyam slava!’ came a chorus of answers.
The forest was stunning, and far from any war. Fish seemed plentiful in the river, tree branches bent to touch the water surface, and sunlight glittered through the leaves. There seemed to be plenty of areas of grassland suitable for camping, but I knew we’d be heading for marshlands as well, and hopefully not too many mosquitoes. We had netting, sprays and essential oils, but were not to use them until we had searched the area around our base, including by drone. The last thing we wanted is to be picked up due to different chemical aromas.
‘And that includes perfume,’ I’d told Bunny.
‘The journey is not the distance, but the traveler,’ she answered, ‘I have found home in such a way that everyone thought I had just gotten lost, and you are a man who never reached for the key, who trusts, here in the country of sunflowers, a country of loss and hope, and most of all of courage, where making fools of ourselves can be heroic and dignified.’
‘Indeed.’
We took a main tributary left and we were soon alone in the two-person canoe with Irina, based on the fact I was the only one who spoke a bit of Hungarian, though I soon discovered she also spoke a smattering of English. Our ramshackle crew included two row boats, both painted in somewhat camouflage design, that is to say green splotches over the grey, and the black rubber dinghy, and a number of kayaks and canoes. Raven paddled with us a while, some 50 yards in front, and Hot Dog was in a kayak too, bringing up the others in the rear. They were due to peel off in about a day or two and set up camp, and we were going further in.
It felt like I was in the Darien Gap again, where I had traversed the forest years ago, between Panama and Colombia. It was similar, the foliage, very, minus the grumbling monkeys at sunset, the alligators in Colombia and the odd jaguar, as well as the sensual Kuna Indian population who lived in the jungle. But here there was Irina, who eyed the river bank carefully, chirps of birds around us, and sudden movements in the trees as we surprised some animal or another. I fancied I saw a lynx, with a slightly spotted coat that darted away as we drifted by. The breeze at our backs lightened the load on our arms, and as I sat paddling in careful rhythm with Irina, I almost forgot about the war, and my mind went back to those wonderful weeks in the forest of El Dario, the Daren Gap, and a Panamanian Carrib I had met at the docks in Panama City, who had proposed going by banana boat to into the jungle, where we had arrived after a few days with flashes of lightning highlighting the canopy on the river banks from our dug out canoes. The atmosphere then had been thrilling, in a way I had never managed to convey in my book. In fact my whole time in the Darien rain forest had been a thrill in every way.
‘Victor, thinking of you again man,’ I said to myself, as I pushed the paddle through the water, of the Panamanian guide who had taken me through the jungle. I wondered where he was at the moment — in jail, or worse, and then a strong feeling came over me to go back, back to the Darien Gap one day, to find out. The feeling was bugging me, too much — more than those stinging ants or other bugs did in the Darien, or indeed the black jaguar. You were my guide Victor, man, in those weeks in the jungle of the Darien Gap, like a teacher, a real human being, more important than those religious leaders. Your simple life — your wooden shack, where you brought up your sons alone, in the jungle, left a real impression on me. Together we walked from El Real through to Colombia, on foot and by dug out canoe, using machetes, and paddles, staying in Paya, that Kuna Indian village, where I fixed a young girl’s toe that had been accidently sliced by a machete, and she never even whimpered once. I learnt, there in the rainforest, how few of them ever got cancer, or any heart attack in their jungle environment, with fresh, natural foods full of flavonoids, hard work, but very low stress. I never even told you how I wrote about our adventure in my book, Victor mate, and I am sorry. That was a beautiful jungle, The Darien Gap, but a very dangerous place. So I hope to see you again, Victor.
I still do not know how he managed to send that joyful postcard to me from the jungle in 1989, the day they captured Noriega during Operation Just Cause. Since then ex — highly paid CIA operative Noriega became a travelling prisoner, tried in Florida on eight counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. In a recent photograph I saw of Victor, facing the camera, sturdy, relaxed, hair greyed outside a shack in the jungle, no-one could see his missing front teeth, knocked out by a rifle butt, wielded by one of Noriega’s goons, when he took the banana boat in from the jungle to demonstrate against his vicious, corrupt dictatorship.
But problems occur when our world reaches into areas of wilderness. I discovered sad news after I left the Darien Gap that Víctor Alcázar, my guide and good friend was caught in an attack by a Colombian right wing squad, an attack that killed four Kuna Indian spiritual forest leaders and terrorised the harmonious settlement I had stayed in. Victor, who escaped suffering from bayonet wounds, was accused by police and prosecutors of being some kind of accomplice of the invaders. It is inconceivable that such a kind, gentle person, who lost previously lost his front teeth demonstrating against Noriega, the Panamanian dictator could have done anything like that to destroy his own business. I‘d not been able to get further information about what happened to him, this wonderful Carib of the Darien jungle, who had found himself under great stress and pressure, a man of great happiness and humour who harmed no-one, who I had corresponded with for a few years, with an unbelievably simple address of Víctor Alcázar, El Real, Darién jungle, Panama.
Forestbathing felt like an alternative world, like we had in our childhoods if we grew up without war, because during war our alternative world is the few moments of peace we get. Walking through forests always had the exotic feeling of exploring, and so many places in forests are testament to a pagan or native Indian past. At Lago Solodad, in Guatemala, on my way to Panama I’d walked up the sides of a volcano through lush bushes with two Mayan Indian honey collectors. The path we were on went straight up, no matter how steep the side of the volcano became. And they walked fast. Fast meant really fast, straight up the slope. It was a lesson learnt — in general, our lifestyle is worse than many in the developing world.
‘I will let you go,’ I’d said, ‘you are too fast!’
The elder of the two men had patted his midriff and smiled: ‘Have some wild forest honey!’ he said in Spanish.
He’d put his hand in the bag he had slung at his hip, and took a glass jar out, opened it, then took a tortilla out and dipping it into the jar, gave it to me. I chewed the honey-dipped bread. The forest honey on my tortilla was a dark, deep amber; real medicine, and strongly antibacterial. When honey is applied on a cut, graze or scrape, an enzyme from bees called glucose oxidase activates the release of H2O2. Forest honey, the most medicinal of all honies, can even kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA. It is also hydroscopic and pulls water away from an infected wound by osmosis. Dryer wounds heal faster, but honey also pulls lymph fluid to the wound, making balanced healing, and this honey’s low pH of between 3 and 4, makes it acidic. Bacteria cannot survive in an acidic environment.
Below me in the tinsel light of the rain, I’d seen a shining river winding its path between the volcanoes, and made my way downwards towards it. Great Mayan cities had been carved out of the jungle there, cities now so hidden that one could only stumble on them by accident. I’d taken out my notebook and waded into the river, and sat on a small smooth rock to watch the current stream pleasantly by, the clear surface of the river broken by the fast patter of raindrops, much as the rain that began to splash into the river where we were, next to the Belarus border.
‘I’m tellin’ you!’ shouted Wireman, in broad Bronx tone and head of unkempt hair. ‘That rum’s poison man, give us a whisky anyday!’
‘Nah,’ Machete replied, in Colombian lilt and big laugh, ‘there is nothing compared to rum man!’
Seeing me, they’d swivelled the rubber craft round with their wooden paddles to where I sat, pivoting the dinghy alongside us.
Bunny, with black patterned bandana, green-flowered wrap and black bikini top, sat on the opposite side of the dinghy, picking up her paddle and dipping it into the river, pushing it back, ‘well, Raven,’ she said in full swing as Raven paddled by in her kayak ‘I’d waste neither rum nor whisky disinfecting your butt from the tooth marks of that croc over there!’
We turned quickly to see a otter floating slowly in our direction, snout causing a few small bubbles to escape as it watched us guide by.
‘Hey,’ said Bunny continued to Raven, ‘the alligator that bites your butt gets a drink from me!’
‘For goodness sake,’ Raven hissed.
The forest murmured constantly with almost electric activity, but not all the noises blended in, just as the flash of colours of a startled against the background of green, so a high pitched cry or deep rumble caught the senses sharply. Large butterflies fluttered out of reach, almost in a dance, and near the riverbank on either side there was a sudden plop! As an animal quickly jumped into the water as we swept by; frogs perhaps. It was haiku country, and surely Bashō would have felt inspired among the lush, green vegetation.
‘I know some Lacandón Mayan, from Guatemala,’ Turbo, said, himself from the Darien Gap area in Colombia, ‘whenthey farm in the jungle, they farm with nature. They mix plots of land with different plants so they don’t starve mother earth. Like we do. Grow lemon, onion, pepper, corn, watermelon, all in same place. We grow banana and papaya trees to shade, so the rhythm of the forest does not change. We don’t have disease spreading on our land because we don’t grow only one kind of plant. The earth keeps strong because different plants’ needs are different.’
The forest looked untouched. To Turbo, however, the pattern of the wetlands had been modified, and soon we came up to some light undergrowth on the riverbank. He jumped quickly out of the dinghy and pulled out a jungle knife.
‘I think there’s a way in here,’ he said.
‘Do you then?’ asked Raven, pulling herself out of her kayak, ‘hold on.’
About thirty minutes later, as we pulled and chopped and cut, a passage way finally appeared, and we slithered into the entrance, an entrance that was paved with chunks of stone. There was room for one down the small rectangular corridor, and room for two in the small chamber at the end. Rough scratched on stones set around patches of earth were all that was left of etched designs. There were no cigarette butts or any other tell tale signs of recent occupation.
‘People have been here before us,’ said Turbo, ‘only the forests have stayed.’ He looked up towards the treetops.
‘We need to stay alert,’ Raven said.
‘I can do that,’ Bunny said. Raven looked at her, sharply.
‘The name Guatemala comes from Nahuatl Cuauhtēmallān, place of many trees, a translation of the Mayan K’iche, ′many trees’,’ Turbo said, ‘I think it is a great name for a country.’
On the border with Belarus in this large area of forest wetlands, we paddled silently, Raven ahead, birds chirping, and the only other sound a buzzing of bees and gurgle of water as paddles dipped in. The memories of the Guatemala, the Darien Gap and South America floated by, I took a small notebook out of a pocket and found a biro in another, and wrote a haiku.
carried to us
in the river’s flow –
stories from the past
‘Let us stop here a while,’ said Irina, turning around, paddle in hand, and I guided the canoe to a small beach of pebbles on a turn in the river, leading up to a small area of grass in the trees.
‘Looks good.’
‘We are really very close to the border, if not on it, but it is a good spot, yes.’
I decided not to send any message on milchat to Raven who’d pulled well ahead. No point advertising our presence with any electronic signals, and we set up camp, with camouflage netting, small tent, and hammock. I knew there were thermo drones, picking up body temperature, and we carried foam mattresses to place over the body to counter this, if we felt we were in danger of being observed, but here, in the pristine forest on the border, I could not imagine who would detect us. I knew Nyine was not going to contact us until I tried contacting her, but that might not be easy if she to was on mobile blackout. As I learnt later, I was right.
They stumbled through thick smoke and bad decisions, like one of those movies where the red used for fake blood is just, you know, too red. Some other things were amiss, also, like the missing limbs first of all, which meant missing bodies soon, if tourniquets were the Chinese ones, suddenly breaking, and woosh! that bright red “paint” again, but the ants seemed to like it. And if the tourniquets held, there was that countdown, that infamous golden hour, the hour within a casualty must get to the hospital where the doctors are specialist are, not lying next to a medic in a field, slowly fading. So they faced that one more tourniquet snapping, that one more hour of waiting for a vehicle to clatter through the mud and stones to pick up the waiting wounded. That one more body.
Sometimes, it was worse for the guys who had experienced war before, because they had different expectations. Nyine had not, but she knew, from whispers handed down through generations what the Russians were capable of. It may have taken a hundred years for them to eradicate Circassia from the map, but they had not stopped until they had killed nearly every Circassian. Nyine did not need expectations, and was prepared fot the worst, she hoped.
‘If we don’t make it, has been a pleasure,’ she said, through intermittent gunfire, as a rain of mortars started, and they scrambled forward and dove down into a shallow hole they had dug.
‘There will be more times like this, Sufi,’ the Lithuanian replied in a shout, above the deafening noise of increased mortars.
‘I cannot leave those guys lying their in stretchers, you know that!’ Nyine shouted back; that’s my spotter, and back-up. Can’t do it!’
‘Is not can or cannot, is must.’
Nyine got up quickly and made a run for them, leaving him behind. She jumped into another fox hole, closer to where the wounded men lay.
‘Like fuck Sufi!’ Crockett shouted lying curled in the small hole, knowing exactly what she had on her mind. The mortars hammered at the dirt around them, and they kept their heads down, and Crockett grabbed Nyine by the lapel to shout in her ear.
But Nyine pulled back and motioned that she had shell shock, and could not hear anything. She knew only one thing: her job was sniper, and her team believed in her. Her Lapua rifle still strung across her back hampered her greatly. But if she put it down she probably lost it forever. War altered every perception, rearranged priorities. She could not see clearly, everything was blurred in movement, and only one constant remained, one unmistakable, honourable constant that became more paramount than love, more exhilarating, more of an urgent need: she needed to be with her team, to die with them if that is what it took, among the burnt out elm and ash trees, only that she saw.
‘We have already lost André, the Brazilian! He went back five times!’ Crockett shouted. But Nyine shrugged her shoulders, pointed to her ear, and suddenly she was up and gone, before Crockett could grab her and hold her back. He looked around for the Afghan woman, Apricot.
‘Don’t let her go too,’ he shouted out to his colleagues, though none heard.
Apricot had arrived to Ukraine ten years before, as a refugee, and spoke fluent Ukrainian, but had elected to join the International Legion, despite a successful career with the Ukrainian police force. She matched efficiency with charm, and what some called bravery, maybe many, but what had just become a way of life on the front lines.
‘Don’t tell me we are gonna lose both of them!’ an Estonian colleague shouted, who usually barely even talked.
‘Heads down and shut up!’ Toffee said, but his voice from somewhere in the pockmarked field, as the pounding continued.
Sitting under raining shells, or mortars, is an acquired skill. Some just let it happen, some didn’t. Toffee didn’t, but pretended he did, and that seemed to work, but hours of being bombarded is a teeth-rattling, jaw-breaking, ears-ringing experience, without tea break or pretty much any kind of break, as people are trying to kill you. Drones may be watching, snipers even, and everything depends on how well you dug your hole. You usually dig it a little better the 2nd time. He had dug holes, trenches and ditches too many times. And graves. He had dug graves a few too many time also.