"MCNAB, ANDY - LIBERATION DAY" - читать интересную книгу автора (McNab Andy)

swell. We closed in on the beach. The sky was perfectly clear and
star-filled, and suddenly there wasn't a breath of wind. All I could
hear was the gentle slap of the paddles pushing through the water,
joined now and again by the scrape of boots on the wooden flooring as
one or other of us shifted position. At least the paddling had got me
warm.

Lotfi never stopped checking ahead, to make sure we were going to hit
the beach exactly where he wanted, and the Arabic for 'right' I did
know: "II al yameen, yameen."

The two of them were Egyptian, and that was about as much as I wanted to
know not that it had turned out that way. Like me, they were deniable
operators; in fact, everyone and everything about this job was deniable.
If we were compromised, the US would deny the Egyptians were false
flagging this job for them, and I guessed that was just the price Egypt
had to pay for being the second biggest recipient of US aid apart from
Israel, to the tune of about two billion dollars a year. There's no
such thing as a free falafel.

Egypt, in its turn, would deny these two, and as for me, they probably
didn't even know I was there. I didn't care; I had no cover documents,
so if I was captured I was going to get stitched up regardless. The
only bits of paper I'd been issued with were four thousand US dollar
bills in tens and fifties, with which to try to buy my way out of the
country if I got in the shit, and keep if they weren't needed. It was
much better than working for the Brits.

We kept paddling towards the clusters of light. The wetness down my
back and under my arms was now warm, but still uncomfortable. I looked
up at the other two and we nodded mutual encouragement. They were both
good lads and both had the same haircut shiny, jet black
short-back-and-sides with a left-hand parting and very neat moustaches.
I was hoping they were winners who just looked like losers. No one
would give them a second look in the street. They were both in their
mid-thirties, not tall, not small, both clear-skinned and married, with
enough kids between them to start up a football team.

"Four-four-two," Lotfi had smiled.

"I will supply the back four and goalkeeper, Hubba-Hubba the midfield
and two strikers." I'd discovered he was a Man United fan, and knew
more than I did about the Premier League, which wasn't difficult. The
only thing I knew about football was that, like Lotfi, more than
seventy-five per cent of Man United's fans didn't even live in the UK,
and most of the rest lived in Surrey.

They hadn't been supposed to talk about anything except the job during
the planning and preparation phase, in a deserted mining camp just a few
hours outside Alexandria, but they couldn't help themselves. We'd sit