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

Three blocks on the other side of the hotel, parked in a car that would
be abandoned once this lift kicked off, were two more of the six-man team.
Carpenter and Nightmare were armed with 9mm mini-Uzi machine guns, a very
small version of the Uzi 9mm, on harnesses under their overcoats, the same
as the BGs (bodyguards) we were going up against. They were good, reliable
weapons, if a little heavy for their size. It was ironic, but Sergei had
obtained the team's Uzis and old Spanish, semiautomatic suppressed 7mm
pistols from one of Valentin's own dealers.
Carpenter and Nightmare weren't their real names, of course;
Sergei-the only one who spoke English-had told me that was how they
translated, and that was how he referred to them. Just as well, as I
couldn't have pronounced them in Russian anyway.
Nightmare was living up to his name. He certainly wasn't the sharpest
tool in Sergei's shed. Things needed to be demonstrated twenty or thirty
times before he got the idea. There was a slight flatness to his face that,
together with his constantly shifting eyes and the fact that he didn't seem
too good at keeping food in his mouth, made him look a bit scary.
Carpenter had a heroin habit that Sergei assured me would not affect
his performance, but it certainly had during the buildup. He had lips that
were constantly at work, as though he'd swallowed something and was trying
to recapture the taste. Sergei told him that if he screwed up on the ground
he would personally kill him.
Nightmare was like a big brother to Carpenter and protected him when
Sergei gave him a hard time for messing up, but it seemed to me that
Nightmare would be lost without him, that they needed each other. Sergei
told me they'd been friends since they were teenagers. Nightmare's family
had looked after Carpenter when his mother went down for life for killing
her husband. She'd discovered he'd raped his own seventeen-year-old
daughter. As if that wasn't enough, Sergei was his uncle, his father's
brother. It was As the World Turns, Russian style, and the only thing I
liked about it was that it made my own family seem normal. Carpenter and
Nightmare would be in the hotel with me for the lift; perhaps I could keep
some control over them if I had them with me.
The last two on the team I'd christened the James brothers and they
were in a green Toyota 4x4. I wasn't so worried about them; unlike the other
two, they didn't have to be told what to do more than twice. They had the
trigger on the target's three black Mercedes, which were about a mile and a
half away from the hotel. They also had folding-stock AKs and AP
(armor-piercing) rounds in their mags, and, like Sergei, they wore enough
body armor to cripple a small horse.
The target was well protected in the hotel and his vehicles were
securely parked underground so that no device-explosive from his enemies or
listening or surveillance from law enforcement-could be placed. When they
finally moved out to pick him up from the hotel with the rest of his BGs,
the Jameses would follow. Carpenter
and Nightmare would then take up their positions in the hotel, along
with me. Sergei, Jesse, and Frank would take on the vehicles.
The Jameses were both ex-Alpha Group, too, but unlike Sergei they were
far too good-looking to be straight. They'd been together since their time
as young conscripts in Afghanistan, leaving after the previous Chechen war