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

into our heads from day one and tested us every day.
Every spare moment we had was taken up with learning it all by heart;
to a scholar like me, it felt like trying to pour ten pounds of shit into a
two-pound bag.
We earned about all the explosives used by the British Army and others,
'what explosives were commercially available, and where and how we could get
our hands on them.
Having obtained them, we had to know how to use the stuff.
Industrial sabotage nearly always involves cutting steel.
However, the explosions are not Hollywood classics: A big blast, a
massive fireball, and the bridge comes tumbling down. The hallmark of a
Regiment strike would be the minimum amount of explosives to create the
maximum damage-unlike my effort with the buttress tree on Selection-because
then there's less to carry or make and less to conceal.
Depending on the type of bridge, the aim was to do specific cuts so
that the bridge would collapse under its own weight. To demolish a building,
all you do is initiate the momentum of the building falling, and the
building itself does the rest.
We learned how to blow up everything from telecommunications lines to
power stations, trains to planes.
Everything had to be destroyed in such a manner that it couldn't be
repaired or replaced-or if it could, then it must take the maximum amount of
time.
Destroying something did not necessarily involve laking it off the face
of the earth. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an
inch with explosives into a certain piece of machinery.
That might be all that's needed to disturb the momentum of the turning
parts inside. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying
where the weak part is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.
A lot of motorways and structures are built with concrete, so we
learned how to destroy it, and that did take a lot of explosives.
Sometimes it wasn't enough just to take down the spans of bridges; the
piers had to be cut as well to maximize the damage. Gaps could be repaired;
whole elevated sections of motorway could be replaced in a fortnight, as the
Californians prove every time they have an earthquake.
A large factory or even small town can be immobilized just by taking
out an electricity substation. Obviously there are all sorts of
countermeasures, and in times of conflict key points will be protected.
Much of the time, however, the Regiment would not be doing this in a
theater of major conflict; we'd be doing it in a small guerrilla war or
revolutionary scenario. If the target was protected, that would be just
another problem we'd have to get over. We might be putting charges in to go
off the following month. In theory a charge could be placed to blow up in
five years' time. There are plenty of ways to initiate an explosion, from
anywhere in the world.
We went down to one of the local bridges around Hereford, and each did
a recce report in slow time (not covertly). We had a good look at the
bridge, measured it out, and did whatever we needed to produce the mechanics
of a recce report, wandering around the structure with tape measures and
cameras as we worked out how to destroy it. While all the rest of us were