Chapter 11
As she had intended, Tatyanna signed up with the army of civilian volunteers.
They fought alongside the regular army, sometimes under their orders, although they had their own commanding officers who coordinated with both the regular army and the reserves.
The commanding officers of all three branches were careful to communicate closely to avoid creating confusion on the ground, or having their own troops shooting at each other, or issuing conflicting orders.
It had worked well so far. There were women in their ranks as well, who were just as brave and efficient as the men.
Many of them had experience with firearms and weapons of all kinds, while others didn’t.
Tatyanna told them when she signed up that she had never held a gun and didn’t believe in them, but the war had changed her mind.
She had no specific skills to offer, since fifteen years of studying ballet would not help her fight the Russians.
What she had to offer was youth and courage and a bright mind to learn what they taught her.
She was as diligent about basic training as she had been with her years of studying dance.
Some of the Ukrainian civilians had served in the armed forces earlier and knew how to handle missiles, anti-tank artillery, and all the more sophisticated weapons of war, none of which were suited to Tatyanna, so she applied herself to the pistol and the automatic rifle they gave her.
She had a keen eye and a steady hand, and she could move her body with precision and flawless control.
She was slim and quick, ideally suited as a sniper when Russian soldiers infiltrated their cities.
Her instructors were impressed when she hit the bull’s-eye on the target nearly every time by the end of her first week of training.
They were giving civilian soldiers only two weeks of training now.
They needed them in the field too badly to waste time training them.
They had shaved the training period from six weeks to four to three in the past three months, and now to two.
The recruits were not all perfectly prepared or as careful as Tatyanna with their weapons, and the top echelons worried that the civilian soldiers would end up shooting each other or the regular troops if they weren’t flawlessly supervised.
So in order to prevent that possibility, the commanding officers were tough and vigilant.
But as Tatyanna commented to one of her team, not one of the officers directing them was as harsh as her old ballet master, Madame Natalya.
The men all laughed when she said it. She was in a unit with five men and two other women.
There was a spirit of warm camaraderie between them, like brothers and sisters.
They came from different cities and different walks of life, and were of varied ages, but they felt like a family, and they took good care of each other. Tatyanna was the youngest of the team.
Their mission was to go out in the field in unmarked, innocent-looking vehicles, wearing camouflage but not uniforms, and shoot Russian soldiers who were wandering around, having left their tanks to see what food or loot they could scrounge, kill Ukrainian civilians, and in some instances rape women.
There had been a horrendous suburb, Bucha, where over four hundred civilians had been tied up and executed, and many women raped and then killed.
It served as an example of the cruel crimes the Russian troops were capable of, and their complete lack of humanity.
“It will be a pleasure to shoot them,” Tatyanna said under her breath with her angelic face, and the young man standing next to her laughed at the comment. On a personal level, Tatyanna was avenging the deaths of Vlad and Yana.
On the first day of their mission, the team rode out of the city in an unmarked van with tinted windows, fully armed, to blend in with the locals and the Russian soldiers who were taking a breather from their tanks, which had been parked for months, going nowhere, choking the roads leading to Kyiv.
The soldiers were young and horsed around, letting their guard down.
The team in the van included two expert marksmen, experienced in shooting handheld anti-tank missiles.
In addition to shooting Russian soldiers they had been instructed to disable the tanks, a great number of which had already malfunctioned and were stuck on the road.
The Russian tank operators were young and inexperienced, and only slightly better trained but considerably less motivated than the civilian soldiers defending their homeland.
All the young Russian soldiers wanted was to stay alive and go home.
They looked no older than Tatyanna. She’d been given a camouflage jumpsuit, and had her own camouflage jacket, her own military boots that she’d bought in Paris, and a helmet that was regular army equipment issued to everyone.
They were each given a bulletproof flak jacket to protect them.
The locals outside the city had gotten used to the sight of the tanks that had terrorized them at first, with their ominous appearance, but so many of them had malfunctioned and been abandoned by their operators that they no longer seemed as menacing, and the local residents in the villages regularly drove past them, or rode by with horse-drawn carts with no exchange of fire between them.
Once in a while they joked with the young Russian soldiers, who let them pass.
One had the feeling that the soldiers didn’t want to be there, and the Ukrainians would have been more than happy to send them home.
They had started stealing food from the local grocery stores because they were hungry too.
The atmosphere in the heavily armed van was somewhat jovial on the way out of town.
Tatyanna was sitting in the back with two of the men.
There were two women and a man in front of them, and two men in the front seats.
Tatyanna was so glad she had come home. It felt right to be here now.
She was almost sorry she had left, but the time she had spent with Yulya and her family in Warsaw had been the only taste of family life she’d ever had and she had loved it.
But the state of the city was shocking. Buildings in rubble everywhere, whole blocks with nothing left standing, twisted metal and broken glass, shattered concrete, beautiful monuments destroyed, bodies unclaimed and unburied covered with tarps lying in the streets.
It was no longer the city she once knew.
The ballet school had been bombed and half of it was destroyed.
Hospitals, schools, infirmaries, all the places that should have been sacred had been targeted.
Once the war was over, she wanted to help rebuild the city, but it would take years.
“Someone said you’re a dancer,” the young man sitting next to her said, as they drove along.
“Yes. I never thought I’d be riding around with a gun, hoping to kill someone. I think the war has changed us all.” He nodded and looked out the window, and then back at her.
“They killed both my brothers in the first week of the war. I want to kill them all for that,” he said.
“I lost my two best friends,” Tatyanna said.
“I think everyone has lost someone. No one was untouched by this,” he said. He had dark hair and sad eyes. They had all paid a heavy price. “I’m a lawyer,” he said, “and I have a profound respect for the law. And now I want to kill people.”
“I know,” she said. “I just want them to leave.”
“Have you been here all along?” he asked her. She looked so fresh and healthy, he wondered how she had survived. Everyone in Kyiv looked beaten and exhausted.
“No, I left in the beginning. I was in Warsaw with friends, and then I went to Paris to work. I just came back. It didn’t feel right not being here.”
“You’re lucky. And brave to come back.”
The others in the van were talking too. They were supposed to work together as a unit, and the drill sergeant who had trained them had encouraged them to get to know each other, so they knew who they were working with.
The volunteer next to her, the lawyer, was named Sergei, and he had said he was thirty-two years old.
It was all she knew about him. Here history and degrees didn’t matter. Only courage.
“Are your parents here? Or did they leave too?” he asked her.
“They died when I was two. I don’t have parents or relatives.” He didn’t say anything for a while after that, and then they were driving along the tanks. The soldiers were talking to each other and ignoring them. They had been there for so long, they seemed perfectly at home.
The driver slowed down the van, and Tatyanna and the man in the seat in front of her slid the tips of their rifles out the windows as the young soldiers joked and talked, and the others shifted away from the shooters, so they could take aim and not get jostled.
The driver shouted, “Now!” They both squeezed their triggers at the same time, and two soldiers who’d been laughing fell off the tank and into the dirt below face-first, dead instantly.
They sprayed some others with bullets just before they veered sharply to the right and drove off.
The man in front of Tatyanna had killed one more.
She turned to Sergei with a look of shock, her hands shaking.
The automatic rifle had been harder to control than she expected, but she had made her shot.
They were on a back road by then, and took several more turns.
The lumbering tanks couldn’t follow them, and the attack had been completely unexpected, as planned.
Three more Russians were dead, but it wouldn’t change anything.
They wouldn’t go home because of it. And it wouldn’t restore the dead and bring them back to life.
Tatyanna looked at Sergei with disbelief.