We were getting along quite okay. Neither an alky nor a junky was he. It’s only that at times as if black-outed, even at the table. The eyelids wide parted and some icy glint in his fixed eyes, a kinda zombie.

‘Hey, man! Where are you?’

‘Sorry, babe, my fault, veered off to thinking’.

‘Of what?’

‘Regardless’.

O, sure, big boys, big secrets. Till you’re laid up. Tender strokes, no direct questions, no haste. He’d tell you all, night after night.

He said the hardest is to clip your first one. More so if they’re unarmed. You kinda have a fit of wanker’s cramp before his pop-out eyes. Then, in a moment, there’s no man already but a heap of meat, riddled, oozing blood. But after it goes without a hitch. Automatism. The trick is not to look into their eyes.

So he left the army and landed in the elite W Group who provide their services for no matter who, be it a private person or a state government willing to fork out MM’s to feel securely protected. Syria, Africa were his business trips’ destination, for the most part.

‘Ever fucked a black virgin?’

‘You’re mad keen on fucking. Nothing else there in your screwed up head’.

‘What’s there to secure in fucking Syria?’

‘Oil fields’.

‘And in Africa?’

‘Mines. Gold mines, diamond mines’.

‘Against who to secure?’

‘Terrorists and Americans who conspire with them against our Homeland’.

Now, who’s head was screwed the wrong way up? I couldn't help rubbing his nose in.

‘Do you really need it? You’re not in the army’.

‘A regular for a day is a regular for life. See?’.

‘Fuckin’ A,’ sez I, ‘Hard to miss an ass wider than on Ninka, my best friend. When our fucking Homeland squats to shit its ass’ shadow overcast half Africa.

‘Politically ignorant bitch!’ sez he. ‘I’ll drive it home to you the hard way!’

And he sprawled me on the rug.

When this “Special Operation” started I went to war together with him. ‘Enough,’ said I, ‘of your uncontrolled business trips. You have to stick it in every other day, cuntfucker. But now it’s right here and no visa needed. You’ll be having regular meals, well groomed and off insanitary bunker fucking.

The day before departure we went to a restaurant in a yacht moored in the Moscow-River. They do rip off their patrons there yet nothing doing, romantic things are costly. While there he proposed to me officially, like in TV serials, with a diamond ring from a small box. He told me that in the W Group HQ he’d left a memo for their big shots to consider me his widow, just in case. The Group paid a sizable compensation to the families of killed personnel.

‘Fuck the compensation,’ sez I, ‘it’s you I need, not their G’s’.

So I went there, rented a house and to the war he was going by his camouflaged Land Rover as a field commander.

War’s a fuckin’ A madhouse. They had driven there all kinds of sorts. Both Russian army and W Group, and volunteers from prisoners. No matter what was the crime and stretch, a volunteer gets pardoned and if they don’t kill him in six months he goes off, a free citizen of our great Homeland. And Caucasians too, wild bearded each of them, cackling in God knows what tongue. And Syrians, employees of W Group in their country. All the horde raised so as to free Ukraine from the cussed fascism.

What makes it worse, everybody’s uptight because it’s a fucking war. Half of them drugged or drunk, you see it in the look of their frost-bitten optics, and every mudak carries this or that firearms and there’s no telling when or what will go off in their contused brains. Yet, the dreariest of all that you start coming to terms with the fucking madhouse, kinda get used, like, become one of that crazy crew.

I used to wearing the fatigues and felt myself how rude it made me. Switched over to the army argot. Who fucking cares to watch their mouth? You put it over straight and loud for them to get it quick. Not much trouble about bugging. They did not dare, even if on high, I flashed W Group chevron on my sleeve, the merry skull, and the motherfucker switched over to eating his own shit.

In the war you live posthaste as if being late all the time. Move it! Giddy up! Even when it’s, like, nowhere to hurry to you still keep revving up. Quickly finish your meal, quickly be thru the quickie. Why hurry? Where to? Still you can’t help being on run. Constantly. Except for, maybe, a barbecue party. But even then way down your belly there sits some hard clot, nagging. At a party it kinda retreats and you relax and forget but now and then the bitch pings back, intoxication or no intoxication.

We relaxed in the house I rented, his buddies came to the parties. Cliff, Viking. They used their nom-de-guerres even at the table, that’s the W Group regulations. No names. Both Cliff and Viking got married for the current war. Took temporary wives from the local girls liberated from the fascism. One of them blonde, the other brunette. As if they had much of a choice, the chicks. A girl needs protection even in a whorehouse. A roof she could count on. Viking and Cliff were swapping their wives, one party the blonde was his squeeze, next party the brunette. Only we, the hosts, kept stable.

In war the meanest of shit hid in people pops up. I hate when they capture a prisoner, no matter who, both sides camouflaged, and start torture him making a video for some channel in the internet to frighten the hell out of their enemy. Or put him on his knees and smash the