"Valery Gorban. No one wanted to kill " - читать интересную книгу автора

so much as a second, muttered to himself:
"That's just what we needed - the chance to crawl right into the middle
of a minefield! Thanks a lot, Granny, you lousy saboteur! Sanya, Stop!"
His partner froze, hugging the ground. Meanwhile, the talkative trooper
pulled out an imposing knife, removed some turf with precise, circular cuts,
and carefully laid it to the side. He then loosened the soil around an
unknown object and, inserting his fingers beneath it, smoothly extracted a
brown, ebonite-like cylinder from the ground.
"Apparently no surprises this time..."
"Don't mess with the rest of them, there's no time to screw around.
Just mark them with flags so we don't trip them on the way out."
It took the men about ten minutes to reach the old woman and the girl.
"They're alive and still breathing! Look - here's shrapnel from the
mine!"
"At this range it should have cut them to pieces!"
"The mine may have stuck rather than bouncing up the way it should ...
Or the wheelbarrow may have shielded them - see, it looks like a sieve."
While talking, the combat engineers performed a cursory examination of
the wounded. One of them quickly administered promedol to the old woman and
applied tourniquets to her shins. The other picked up the girl.
"She took hits in the throat and the right side of the chest. And a few
in the legs too. What do you think, can we give her promedol?"
"Don't know, Vovka. Just rush her to the doctor, he'll sort things
out!"
Vovka dashed through the corridor hastily cut across the minefield,
zigzagging gracefully between the marker flags like a downhill skier. He
knew that in their hurry, he and Sanya could easily have "overlooked" more
than one hideous surprise. But Vovka, nicknamed "Daddy-Well-Done", was
running his own race, knowing that his five-year-old sweetheart Natashka and
one-week-old twins - who had not yet even seen their father - were waiting
for him at home, far away. He hurtled across the killing field, holding the
girl to his breast, panting and whispering in her ear:
"Hang on, Little One, hang on! Don't be afraid! I'm your uncle - and a
good one! In just a minute our Doctor Aibolit will check you over and give
you some candy. It won't hurt - just hang on, Little One!"
Sanya lugged the old woman. He hoisted her onto his back, carefully
watching beneath his feet and silently listening to her wail as he went.
"She said, `Grandma, there's a string!' Oh, what an old fool I am! What
have I done to deserve such a punishment? Dear God, may I die a terrible
death, but please save our little darling!"
A Ural truck and the escorts' BTR were waiting for them on the road,
across from the site of the incident. Next to those vehicles stood "Chopin"
- the OMON commander - and the doctor from the commandant's office, whom
everyone respectfully called "Doc" to his face but "Aibolit" behind his
back. The commander's long, sensitive fingers, which he held on the forward
stock of his automatic rifle as if it were the neck of a guitar, left no
doubt about the source of his personal callsign, which had long since become
his second name. The OMON troops, having taken cover behind the armor of the
BTR and using their field glasses to observe first the "green area" and then
the wounded, were quietly discussing the event: