"Энди Макнаб. Огненная стена (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

they chopped you into tiny pieces. The only reason he would never be a
leading man was his badly pockmarked skin. Either he'd steered away from the
Clearasil in his youth or he'd been burned; I couldn't tell, and I didn't
want to ask. He was a hard, reliable man, and one I felt it was okay to do
business with, but he wasn't going to be on my Christmas-card list.
I had read about Sergei Lysenkov's freelance activities in Intelligence
Service reports. He had been a member of Spetznaz's Alpha Group, an elite of
special-forces officers within the RGB, who used to be deployed wherever
Moscow's power was under threat or there were wars of expansion. When hard
line heads of the KGB led the 1991 coup in Moscow, they ordered Alpha Group
to kill Yeltsin as he held out in the Russian White House, but Sergei and
his mates decided that enough was enough and that the politicos were all as
bad as each other. They disobeyed the order, the coup failed, and when
Yeltsin learned what had nearly happened he took them under his direct
command, cutting their power by turning them into his own bodyguards. Sergei
decided to quit and make his experience and knowledge available to the
highest bidder, and today that was me. It had been easy enough to make
contact: I just went to Moscow and asked a few security companies where I
could find him.
I needed Russians on the team because I needed to know how Russians
think, how Russians do. And when I discovered that Valentin Lebed would be
in Helsinki for twenty-four hours of R and R, and not in his fortress in St.
Petersburg, Sergei was the only one
who could organize vehicles, weapons, and the bribing of border guards
in the time available.
The people who'd briefed me on the job had done their homework well.
Valentin Lebed, they were able to tell me, had been smart during the fall of
communism. Unlike some of his gaucher colleagues, he didn't keep the
designer labels on the sleeves of his new suit to show how much it had cost.
His rise was brutal and meteoric; within two years he was one of the dozen
heads of the "mafiocracy" who had made ROC so powerful around the world.
Lebed's firm employed only ex-KGB agents overseas, using their skills and
experience to run international crime like a military operation.
Coming from dirt-poor beginnings as a farmer's son in Chechnya, he'd
fought against the Russians in the mid-nineties war. His fame was sealed
after rallying his men by making them watch Braveheart time and time again
as the Russians bombed them day after day. He even painted his face half
blue when attacking. After the war he'd had other ideas, all of them
involving U.S. dollars, and the place he'd chosen to realize them was St.
Petersburg.
Much of his money came from arms dealing, extortion, and a string of
nightclubs he owned in Moscow and elsewhere, which served as fronts for
prostitution rackets. Jewelery businesses he had "acquired" in Eastern
Europe were used as a front to fence icons stolen from churches and museums.
He also had bases in the United States, and was said to have brokered a deal
to dump hundreds of tons of American toxic waste on his motherland. In the
Far East, he'd even bought an airline just so he could ship out heroin
without administrative hassle. Within just a few years, according to the
guys who'd briefed me, such activities were said to have netted him more
than $200 million.