Oxana didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone as much as she hated the ex-SBS instructor. No one, even in the Perm orphanage or the Dobryanka remand unit, had so systematically belittled and humiliated her. Hatred became a simmering rage. She was Oxana Borisovna Vorontsova, and she lived by rules that few would even begin to understand. She would beat this angliski ublyodok, this donkey-fucker, if it killed her.
Late one afternoon in the final week they were circling each other in the incoming tide. Frank had a Gerber knife with an eight-inch blade, Oxana was unarmed. Frank moved first, swinging the oxidised blade so close to her face that she felt the breeze of its passing, and in response she ducked under his knife-arm and hammered a short-arm punch into his ribs. It stopped him for a second, and by the time the Gerber came slicing back she was out of reach. They danced back and forth, and Frank lunged for her chest. Her body outraced her brain. Half-turning she grabbed his wrist, wrenched him in the direction to which he was already committed, and booted his legs from under him. As Frank fell backwards into the water, arms flailing, she was already lifting her knee to stamp his knife-hand into the shingle—“Control the weapon, then the man” her father had always told her—and as the instructor involuntarily released the Gerber, fell forwards to pin him underwater. Straddling him, she forced his head back with the palm of her hand, and watched the agonised working of his face as he began to drown.
It was interesting—fascinating, even—but she wanted him alive to acknowledge her triumph, so she dragged him onto the shore, where he rolled onto his side and retched up gouts of seawater. When he finally opened his eyes, she was holding the point of the Gerber knife to his throat. Meeting her eyes, he nodded in submission.
A week later, Konstantin came to collect her, looking her up and down with quiet approval as she waited, rucksack slung loosely over one shoulder, on the muddy track leading to the causeway. “You look good,” he said, his flat gaze taking in her newly confident stance and windburned, salt-blistered features.
“You know she’s a fucking psycho,” said Frank.
“Nobody’s perfect,” said Konstantin.
Two days later Oxana flew to Germany for three weeks’ escape and evasion training at the mountain warfare school in Mittenwald. She was attached to a NATO Special Forces cadre, and her cover story was that she was on secondment from a Russian Interior Ministry counter-terrorism unit. On the second night, while dug into deep snow, she felt stealthy fingers at the zip of her bivvy bag. A silent but furious fight erupted in the darkness, and the following day two of the NATO soldiers were helicoptered off the mountain, one with a severed forearm tendon, the other with a stab wound through the palm of his hand. After that, no one bothered her.
Immediately after Mittenwald, she was flown to a U.S. Army facility in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she was put through an advanced Resistance to Interrogation programme. This was calculatedly nightmarish, and designed to induce maximal stress and anxiety in its subjects. Shortly after her arrival Oxana was stripped naked by her male guards and marched to a brightly lit, windowless cell, empty except for a close-circuit camera mounted high on one wall. Time passed, hour after endless hour, but she was given only water, and without toilet facilities was forced to use the floor. Before long the cell stank, and her stomach was twisting with hunger. If she tried to sleep, the cell would reverberate with white noise, or with electronic voices repeating meaningless phrases at ear-splitting volume.
At the end of the second day—or it might have been the third—she was hooded, and led to another part of the building where she was questioned, in fluent Russian and for hours on end, by unseen interrogators. Between these sessions, in which she was offered food in exchange for information, she was forced to adopt agonising and humiliating stress positions. Starved, sleep-deprived and severely disoriented, she drifted into a trance-like state, in which the boundaries between her senses blurred. She managed, nevertheless, to hang on to some vestigial sense of self, and to the knowledge that the experience would come to an end. However terrifying and degrading it turned out to be, it was preferable to life in the secure wing of a Ural Mountains penal colony. By the time the exercise was officially pronounced over, Oxana was beginning, in a deeply perverse way, to enjoy it.
Further courses followed. A month of weapons familiarisation at a camp to the south of Kiev, in Ukraine, followed by three more at a Russian sniper school. This was not the high-profile establishment outside Moscow where the Spetsnaz Alfa and Vympel detachments trained, but a much more remote facility near Ekaterinburg, run by a private security company whose instructors asked no questions. Being back in Russia felt strange to Oxana, even under the false identity provided by Konstantin. Ekaterinburg, after all, was less than two hundred miles from where she had grown up.
It wasn’t long, though, before the deception began to give her a certain heady satisfaction. “Officially, Oxana Vorontsova no longer exists,” Konstantin informed her. “A certificate issued at Perm Regional Clinical Hospital indicates that she hanged herself in her cell at the Dobryanka remand centre. District records show that she was buried at public expense in the Industrialny cemetery. Trust me, no one misses her, and no one is looking for her.”
Severka urban sniper school was built around a deserted town. In Soviet times it had been home to a thriving community
