The air was filled with the smell of braziers, and also some household chemicals like washing powders. Somewhere a diesel generator was rattling. People's voices merged into one continuous hum - a common thing for such places.
The first rows that caught the eye were located under flimsy awnings and were hung with all sorts of rags from women's robes to work overalls and winter jackets. A little to the side were those same household chemicals that began to smell almost as soon as they entered the building - there were boxes of powders, some plastic canisters without labels, toilet cleaning kits and much more.
In the middle of the square there was a narrow square tower with a pair of wheels on top - this is what mine lifts looked like.
Flaxen-Haired moved deeper into the rows. Dragovich followed him. Further on there were phones and tablets, garage tools, woodworking tools, and more clothes. Then a counter, even several, with various electronics like radios, surveillance cameras and dosimeters. And then there were rows of animals - rabbits, geese, chickens.
Dragovich looked at the tower rising in the middle with some interest once again - that's the direction they were moving.
- What's this? - Dragovich finally pointed at the tower.
- They had some kind of tunnel here - a shaft goes down, a tunnel at the very bottom, and in the basement of the building there's an exit back up.
- Holy shit, - Dragovich was surprised by the thoroughness of the approach, - Were they training to work in mines or something?
- Something like that - surveyors measured their crap underground. Then, after the city was liberated, there were stupid rumors that there was a network of tunnels here, and from this network there was an exit to the city's utilities. And in Soviet times, by order of the KGB, communications were equipped as lines with passage tunnels, so that a saboteur could get through the entire city from here. It is not entirely clear, however, why this was built and why it was necessary to get through, and why the KGB needed a saboteur in its own city, but rumors and logic have always been at odds.
- Why from here? This is a noticeable place. If so, then through the basement of any of the houses...
- This is a separate joke, - Flaxen-Haired pointed to the building towering in the opposite part of the block, - the enemy once fortified here.
The building was covered with protective fabric along its entire height, although some scraps were sticking out from above, which definitely indicated that something was wrong with the house.
There was also something wrong with the neighboring building, in the upper corner of which, as if with a knife, a piece two stories high and fifteen meters wide was cut out of a cake. The cutout was covered with a patch roof from above. All the windows below and to the left of the cutout were sealed with metal sheets.
- Did an aerial bomb hit there? - said Dragovich, nodding towards the damaged couple of houses.
- Take it harder! - answered Flaxen-Haired cheerfully, - our guys loaded it with "Izverg".
Dragovich knew very well what the "Izverg" was - a self-propelled 230-mm howitzer 5S75, also known as RU/VPK 5S75 in the new language. The weapon was legendary, brutal in the Soviet style. With some modifications, it was still produced to this day, and was regularly noted in reports from the front.
KANAR had five howitzers at its disposal and now, as of autumn 2119, they were dispersed at a distance of about fifty kilometers from the city, forming a kind of strategic echelon in case of a sudden invasion from the right bank.
Holy shit, - Dragovich was amazed, - did they really hit the city directly? - he had heard in detail about the battles in the eastern part before, but he knew nothing about this single strike by a terrible howitzer.
- They didn't just fire regular shells, - Flaxen-Haired answered - they put a couple of guided ones in there and that's it! In general, the story was that bandits had taken up residence in that house covered with netting - now it's just a box of walls, without any insides. And they sent them to the neighboring one because they were afraid that they had crossed there through a tunnel - there was an overpass there.
Flaxen-Haired began to tell about Poroknov's gang - once it was an ordinary local business king, who at the time of the events of '14 suddenly turned into a field commander, of course, on the side of the right bank. Dragovich noted to himself that he, this Poroknov, had to be given his due - not every entrepreneur is capable of turning into a field commander. The gang, driven either to the east or to the bridge, settled in the administrative building, that is, in the technical school building, where they had entrenched themselves quite thoroughly, in a sense taking the nearby residential buildings hostage.
The problem was solved with two 230 mm caliber shells, sent along a trajectory from the suburbs, from a distance of thirty kilometers. Fortunately, drones were already hanging reliably over the block, so there was no need to worry about targeting.