“Here, on Russky Island, I was a newcomer: I had just accepted the post of commander of a special forces reconnaissance and sabotage group of the Pacific Fleet's intelligence department. As it should be, the company commander was happy to immediately hang any turnover on me (this is the inevitable fate of the groupers), and right off the bat I took over the company in charge …
I had to be on duty during the day. To spend time efficiently, stock up on a clever book on the specialty - “Manual on shooting. Machine gun Kalashnikov 7.62 mm”- and conveniently settled down in the office to read.
Conveniently - this is on the sofa in the office, head to the door, a table lamp - opposite, on the desk. On the right - a doorway and a wardrobe, but not pushed up to the wall at close range, but a step away from the wall and forming, as it were, a locker room with a mirror on the wall and a hanger in the wall between the wall and the closet. Such is the disposition.
About an hour passed. The dim light of a table lamp, page after page … And suddenly, in the most natural way, I felt a hard clawed paw on my neck, which is no fools, I emphasize - no fools! - in all seriousness began to choke me. Another second - and the Adam's apple will break! They didn't joke with me. Well, I didn’t joke: throwing away the textbook, I grabbed this paw with both hands and took it “to the breaking point, as our brother was taught in hand-to-hand combat classes.
Feeling: I had a very hard paw in my hands - it was the paw, not the hand - covered with large cold scales, like on the paws of a turtle, only more. Four toes with strong horny mines, although not sharp like a cat's, rather like a dog's. The paw is absolutely material! Dry, cool, but not very pleasant surface.
I twisted my paw "downward from myself" and with my right elbow pounded into something alive and muscular, felt a strong jerk to the right and out of the corner of my eye managed to notice the owner of the paw: a hunched gray-green creature about one and a half meters tall rushed into the gap between the cabinet and the wall. And disappeared into the twilight. All. what else can I say about him - he was not wearing clothes, but he had a tail and seemed to have protruding ears like a fox. That's all. Well, business!
Jurassic Park
Promotional video:
Believe it or not. but after this short fight I lit a cigarette and returned to reading the textbook as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it was a reaction to the unbelievable.
-It doesn't work like that! - ordered the left hemisphere of the brain.
- Well, well, - the right smiled crookedly.
In the morning, an hour before the divorce for classes, the “cream” of the special forces gathered in the office: Zorin, Kurochkin, Shevchenko, Galimon, Shaly - aces, sea, air and taiga wolves, who went through fire, water and copper pipes. I cautiously, from afar, started a story about my night adventure.
Amazing - no one was even surprised!
- What, and got to you? - Captain 3rd Rank Kurochkin interrupted me without much interest, wielding a toothpick melancholy.
- Well. as if yes.
Kurochkin nodded silently and did not deign to continue the conversation.
- Forget it, Seryoga. He's trying to get all the new ones here,”Senior Lieutenant Shevchenko moved his Cossack mustache. - Not you first, not you last. This is a type of local lice check. But did you even have time to light it in his ear? In our opinion, in spetsnaz style?
- I have no idea. I sort of grabbed him by the paw and managed to hit him in the ribs with my elbow. Or maybe it all seemed to me?
- Seemed? Look at yourself in the mirror!
In the mirror, I did not even see bruises - deep grooves from claws on my own throat.
- It's magical! Not an office, but a Jurassic park. So I didn't dream about it?
- Not. There is some kind of creature in the building, but it certainly won't touch you anymore. You fought her back, that's enough for her. So forget it.
And I scored.
The tragedy after the shooting
I never met this brownie again. But the fact remains: in the two-storey building of the barracks of military unit 59190 on the Russky Island something lived that was extremely aggressive towards the inhabitants of the old house. This something absolutely terribly influenced the fate of the unit's servicemen. Tragic incidents followed one another with depressing regularity. From a formal point of view, the reason each time was the "human factor", but for a tiny (less than a hundred people) military unit there was an inordinate amount of emergency! And one of them did not climb into any gate at all, even taking into account this very factor.
We are talking about a machine gun, "instruction" on how to handle which I studied on that memorable night. Unlike the Kalashnikov assault rifle, the machine gun of the same name shoots from the open bolt position. At the same time, with a ceasefire, the shutter stops in the rearmost position, as if "holding the next cartridge in its teeth", waiting for the owner to press the trigger again.
On that unfortunate day, colleagues from the third company carried out firing practice with service weapons. I must say that our units did not spare ammunition for firing, the head of the ammunition supply service would give this stuff in any quantities without talking, but with one condition: to shoot every last bullet! He did not like to bother with the registration of "return". And we were not eager to drag the unfinished cartridges from the shooting range. As a result, everything was shot.
So on the day in question, thirty fighters, having turned targets into rags, lined up to check weapons. At the command of the senior: “Unload! Weapons for inspection!"
- the machine-gunner, as expected, as already done hundreds of times, unlocked the empty box from under the tape, threw back the lid of the machine gun box and presented it to the elder. After making sure that there was no cartridge in the bolt, the elder threw: "Examined!" The machine-gunner slammed the lid and pulled the trigger, pointing the barrel up and down at an angle of 45 degrees in the usual way. This procedure does not give, it simply cannot misfire, it is specially thought out so that there is no cartridge left in the barrel. Even if both - both the machine gunner and the elder - suddenly went blind and the cartridge was missed, the control descent will fire, and the bullet will fly into the heavens, so that at the end, without harming anyone, it will fall to the ground. The shutter, as expected, snapped dryly, the shot did not happen, everything is in order. The company returned to its location and began the compulsory cleaning of the weapons.
And suddenly the barracks jumped from the roar of the shot!
The officers who ran into the cockpit saw a terrible picture: several soldiers were desperately trying to use a tourniquet to stop the blood literally gushing from the punctured femoral artery of one of the sailors in a fountain. Next to a face as white as the belly of a flounder, a machine gunner froze. In front of him on a stool lay a machine gun, still lazily blowing smoke from the barrel, and everything was spattered with blood. No effort helped, a minute later the victim died of blood loss. It is only in the movies that the main character, having received a nine-gram rifle bullet in the leg, performs feats in the name of democracy all over the world for another half hour of screen time. The reality is much sadder.
Fire
In just two years, five cases occurred in the unit, which claimed six human lives. Then I quit my job and moved to the North Caucasus. I returned there on vacation a year later, and quite by chance met Vladimir Shevchenko in a cafe. Now and then, how are you, where have you been, what have you seen …
- And how is our common tailed acquaintance doing there? - I asked in between times.
A shadow came over Shevchenko's face.
- Apparently, she's not doing well anymore. He left with fire and smoke …
It turned out that soon after I left Vladivostok, another emergency broke out in the unit. And this time a big one: in the middle of the night that very barracks flared up! They did not manage to suppress the fire in the bud, with great difficulty they managed to pull the most valuable thing out into the street - a weapon from the armory. And all would be fine, but then the duty officer remembered about the safe in the chief of the finance office: money! In hindsight, he scolded himself for this with the last words: several fighters without a command rushed inside for this damned safe, and at that moment the rafters eaten away by fire fell through. Two people found their death in a huge pyre.
I left the walls of the military school in 1990, being one hundred percent atheist materialist. I didn’t believe in sleep, chokh, or ravens. However, as if mocking me, reality again and again confronted me with phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of everyday logic. How is Stephen King doing? Why do strange things happen to ordinary people? Because they can …"
Sergey DUNAEV
"Secrets of the XX century" September 2012