"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

It was the Bible.
I'd turned up with big wide eyes. One of the first things I had to do
was familiarize myself with the various weapons. Over the water at that time
they were using the Heckler & Koch family and the LMG-the old Bren gun,
converted to 7.62-as well as GPMGS.
Pistols were 9MM Brownings and the Walther PPK, known as the disco gun
because it was nice and small and therefore easy to conceal.
If I didn't want to carry my Browning when I was out and about but not
working, I could slip the disco gun into my belt.
Most people would have an M16 or 203, an HK53
5.56 men or MPS, so that whatever job we were doing we could take the
relevant weapon-whatever gave the right balance between concealment and
firepower.
I was talking to Tiny in the armory. Every day the weapons had to be
checked, and Tiny, the armorer for that day, was showing me the ropes.
' "What's the score on this shoot-to-kill policy I keep on hearing
about?" I said, half expecting him to say, "Hose the lot down."
"Is there fuck such a thing?" he said. "If there was, we wouldn't still
be here. We'd be back home and they'd be dead. We know where they all are.
If someone was giving the green light, we'd just go in and take-them out."
"Very clear-cut," I said.
"And totally counterproductive. It's little things like that that bring
down governments. Of course at the same time there can't be a shoot-to-wound
policy either." Tiny went on. "It would take a laser gun that was
self-guiding to the shoulder to do that shit. People's perceptions of what
goes on are so wrong. I remember after the embassy, when we were making our
statements, there were all these questions coming up, commentators on the TV
saying, 'Why didn't they just shoot him in the leg?" How the fuck can you
shoot to wound somebody?
It's impossible. You can't say, if somebody's a hundred meters away,
'Right, I'm going to shoot him in the legs." You just see a mass of body,
and if he's shooting at you, you're going to shoot back at him. It, s not a
shoot-tokill policy; it's just reacting to the threat. The problem is, the
people who make these sort of comments have never had a gun pointed at
them."
I knew that if I was staring down a barrel, I wasn't going to be firing
at their legs. If thiqy ended up just wounded, they'd be lucky.
That wasn't a shoot-to-kill policy; that was reacting to a perceived
threat and saving your own life and the lives of those around you that you
had a responsibility for.
My roommate Steve, also an embassy and Falklands veteran, was
originally from the airborne Ordnance Corps, heavy drop, which were based in
Aldershot.
Married with a couple of kids, he was a local lad from Gloucester; the
first words I'd hear every morning were, "All roight, boy?" Steve was
slightly shorter than I was but much stockier, and he played rugby for the
army; as a result, all his front teeth were false. He was one of the
original bone shirt people, one of the four drug smugglers who'd come back
with us on the British Caledonian flight from Hong Kong. He shared the
passion of most of the troop for watching Blockbusters, but had one annoying