– Keep going. The way we went before to pole number three hundred twenty-four, – said Petrovich. – Are you ready, Vasily? Sverzhin? Throw away your watch. I told you, the track is biased. Go. This direction.
And turning on the heels, using his stick (the broken pole) he casually showed the exact direction. Along the mound, take the left. “God, what familiar places are these. How many times I have traveled from “seventeenth” to Ten, that means Kapustin, and back. As exactly on this vehicle by exactly this railway, as along exactly this road by bus, and once by “ambulance”, and about ten times with Zhitkur and Doctor Vyatkin in a famous brand new “Willis”, released in '43.”
Vadim moved, meanwhile adjusting the backpack's belts and his rifle's strap, falling from his shoulder. It is strange that wearing a rifle on the neck is forbidden by order. But what isn't strange here… here, ahead, is the old track from the heavy machine, apparently the launcher, and probably it is five or maybe forty years old…
The steppe was disfigured. It was said that when Korolev came here with a platoon of soldiers, here were a lots of tulips, and now only red clay is seen out through the wormwood like a bald bookkeeper's head… “You have to negotiate the tracks carefully. Especially this one!” Vadim suddenly realized (sensed), sharply reducing speed.
– Well, – said Ensign Petrovich from the rear.
The track was “taken out”. For the second time that day and the second time in his life, Vadim has seen this. He expected that, as in the morning, Bashkalo would kick-start his sensible whining that here it is, taken out, that means for sure that a loot72 is firing nearby, it would be nice to look around, to comb the area, because this is a thousand, even divided into three, is falling into the pocket… But now, for some reason, Bashkalo was not whining.
Vadim could feel the look of the Senior with his backpack and did everything by the book: he stopped, lifted an open palm, stopping the group, pulled from under his belt a strip of gauze, threw it on the track and waited with bated breath, and only after stepped over, “having marked the beginning of the movement by the same gesture of an open palm, visible by the wingman”, came to the paired trail and repeated the actions exactly. More to it, it is necessary not to cross it right above the gauze. Hell knows what. The Zone knows what Mumbler said somewhere between Vadim's eyes.