F.

Myanmar

Chapter 3

Grumpy stared at the sky. He had stopped listening. Blankets of soft clouds extended to the horizon. A warm wind caressed his face. It smelled of hot tarmac, dust, and grass. K. waved a hand in front of his face.

“Grumpy, hello, you there? No snoozing. Tactical medicine isn’t complicated, just follow what I’m telling you. First, close the open wound, then apply a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. No point worrying about sterilising injuries. The human organism is a pretty hardy machine. You just stop the bleeding, and you can compensate for lost resources, blood and oxygen, later. Fifty percent of badly injured people will die immediately without emergency assistance. Thirty percent will die slowly. Your job is just to push up the survival stats.”

“Right,” he said.

“So, repeat.”

“Apply a tourniquet.”

“After closing the open wound.”

“And administer something for shock.”

“That’s right. And pain reliever if limbs are severed. But nothing for shock if it’s a head injury.”

“But pain reliever?”

“Why don’t I write you a cheat sheet.”

The ambulance was parked in the centre of Snizhne. The town was an evacuation zone. For the previous week, K. and Grumpy had been busy getting fighters wounded in the battle for Saur-Mogila—the hill they had been struggling, but failing, to capture for about three weeks already—out to Donetsk.

“Doc, you know I can do it. I can manage anything. Except for shit. Guts, fine, because when somebody is there dying, you have to do something. But shit . . .?”

His voice was drowned out by a loud engine. K. turned to see a heavy vehicle on tracks turning a corner.

It was like an iron caterpillar crawling slowly past them. An off-road van carrying some serious-looking customers in camouflage followed close behind. Asian features poked out of a hatch in the front of the larger vehicle—he might have been Buryat, maybe Yakut.

The convoy came to a halt beneath a thick canopy of trees in the park. The head scanned the scene and pulled back into the hatch. A plane flew over.

“Check out the little bird,” Grumpy pointed upward. “Off for a bombing sortie at Saur-Mogila I’m guessing.”

Ukrainian pilots were nervous to fly low and dropped their bombs inaccurately. The machine guns and grenade launchers could no longer reach them. Helicopters dropping off troops for ambushes had not shown up for two weeks. Anti-aircraft guns and ATGMs brought in from Russia were now being deployed. Planes were being shot down almost every day now.

Two entire sections of a high-rise block in Snizhne had disintegrated like a deck of cards from a direct strike. One was reduced to a heap of slabs lying one on top of the other. A kitchen on the fourth floor was half intact: the radiator, a part of the window, and a picture on the wall remained. In the neighbouring section, right in the middle of the block, a hole no larger than a metre had been punched into the roof through to the bottom, where there was only emptiness, dust and bits of furniture and rubble. Eleven people had died. Eleven more souls into the abyss. Unreachable—they would be forever cold, no matter how much you held onto them.