"Mikhail Evstafiev. Two Steps From Heaven " - читать интересную книгу автора

replaced one another on the liquid crystal display of the black, quartz
watch in a plastic thick casing on the sergeant's wrist, hope faded.
"Where the hell are they, the swine!" Shouted Sharagin, but there was
nothing anyone could say. "I've got a man dying here!" He yelled into the
silent airwaves.
Titov, Prokhorov and others stared at the distant pass, hoping to catch
sight of the choppers, then looked back at Panasyuk, seeing how he was
slipping away, without a word of farewell, into another world, giving up,
cornered and unable to find anything to grasp and hold on to life. The
younger soldiers gaped at their dying comrade in terror, as though they
could no longer recognize him, so helpless and no longer in charge of them.
The men wandered around, smoking, chewing dry rations, talking in muted
voices, and each one was thinking: fuck, what lousy luck ...
Unable to do anything, the squad leader went through moments of
despair. When the sergeant opened his eyes slightly for the last time,
Sharagin thought:


... it'll be all right ... hang on, just don't die ...

Even though it was obvious that the sergeant wouldn't pull through: and
in that moment, in some distant corner of his mind, a hint of his own death
raised its head, a hint he immediately and naturally brushed aside, unable
to agree or accept such an eventuality, but at the same time, he wished that
his own end would be quick and without suffering.
Panasyuk died fifteen minutes before the choppers arrived. Lieutenant
Sharagin sat beside the dead sergeant, exhausted, drained, for the first
time in his service in Afghanistan cursing the war, cursing himself,
suffering as though he could have stopped those bullets that penetrate human
bodies, or dissipate the fog at the other end of the pass, so the
helicopters could come sooner and get the sergeant to the hospital on time.





Chapter Four. Chistyakov

He saw Yepimakhov for the first time when he returned to the regiment
after conducting the column, and was dragging his tired body to the
barracks, thinking only of two things - to have a bath and down a glass of
vodka. Zhenka had stopped in town and bought a couple of bottles. Almost as
if he knew they would be needed.
The new man with a lieutenant's shoulder boards was being escorted
toward regimental headquarters by a soldier. He was dressed in a "Union"
uniform, which nobody in Afghanistan had worn for a long time as it had been
superseded by the special so-called "experimental" uniform, supposedly
tailored to new field conditions. The soldier was lugging a suitcase,
bending under its weight, and a carrier bag. The lieutenant, natty in a
tailored military jacket with a high collar, carried a greatcoat over his