"Valery Gorban. No one wanted to kill " - читать интересную книгу автора

Valery Gorban.

No one wanted to kill


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© Copyright Valery Gorban
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Date: 25 Feb 2004
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I would like to express my gratitude to Elena Tchirkova and Lawrence G.
Kelley for their assistance in translating my stories

NO ONE WANTED TO KILL

Around two hundred meters from the commandant's office an old woman and
a small girl walked through a wasteland scarred with ditches and littered
with smashed bricks. The old woman, dressed in typically dark village
clothing, pushed a wheelbarrow filled with rubble. The five year-old girl,
who stood scarcely taller than the wheelbarrow itself, skipped merrily
alongside. She could hardly pass by a single flower that caught her fancy
without stooping over to pick it.
"Oh, look, Grandma, a string!"
The weak-sighted old woman bent over sideways, trying to make out what
her granddaughter had seen, and at just that moment heard someone shouting
from the guard posts outside the commandant's office, nearly unseen behind
mounds of trash.
"Hey! And just where do you thing you're going? Go back!"
"Screw you!" grumbled the old woman. "What do you want me to do - cart
this stuff back home? Right, and now..." With that, she firmly shoved her
barrow forward and tilted it on its side to quickly dump the load.
Something banged. A strange dark object bounced up from the grass,
struck the side of the wheelbarrow, careened away, and exploded in a cloud
of black, fiery smoke. An OZM fragmentation mine that had long awaited its
appointed hour hurled thousands of steel fragments in all directions.
The old woman, flattened by the devastating blow to her legs, emitted a
piercing scream and crawled toward her granddaughter, leaving a bloody trail
in her wake. The girl lay on her back, gasping and gurgling pink bubbles.
Men from the commandant's office ran over via a circuitous route,
skirting the minefield. At a distance of about a hundred meters from the
wounded, some of the troops dispersed to either side. Dropping to one knee
behind various forms of cover and shouldering their automatic weapons, they
kept a tense lookout over the nearby "green area" and covered the two men
who went further. The latter started off almost on hands and knees, intently
peering into the grass and probing suspicious sectors with rods. One of the
men made his way silently, while the other, without dropping his guard for