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

off, and there would be silence.
Time to ' get out.
The cold air always attacked my ears first; then my feet started to go
numb. I'd be torn between wanting to get moving to get warm and knowing that
it was going to entail a fearsome tab of eight or ten hours.
The Elan valley was as I remembered it, a godforsaken, daunting place,
full of reservoirs and big stumps of elephant grass, ranging from knee to
chest height.
The area was very boggy, and because of the reservoirs, we could move
only on the top half of the hills. We did a lot of night marches there as
well, and I spent a lot of time falling over. I hated the Elan valley.
By now we were carrying a rifle as well as a bergen, and it always had
to be in our hands. They were only drill SLRs (self-loading rifles), but it
was a bit of extra weight I could have done without.
The carrying handles had been removed; there was no putting it over the
shoulder or strapping it into the bergen. I found the SLR made life much
more difficult because I couldn't swing my arms to pump uphill.
We had to,cross a lot of fences, and if you were seen resting the
weapon on the other side before you clambered over you got a fine-and
mentally they'd got you.
Some of the tabs went on and on. Sometimes I could see the checkpoint
about ten kilometers away; I'd come off the high ground on that bearing, so
I knew it was at the end of that delta, but then I'd just seem to be going
on and on-and on. The Elan valley took a hell of a lot of people out. It
wore them down. And because it was farther away, it meant we got back later,
and we had to start earlier.
As the week went on, jock carried on pissing it up. He explained to me
that he'd just got over a bad dose of penile warts. For eighteen months he
had been "off games," and he wasn't going to let a little thing like
Selection get in the way of his rehabilitation. He opened his flies one day
and showed me the damage. The end of his cock looked like the moon.
Day after day we'd be humping over hills. The weather was horrendous.
On one of the tabs the snow came up to my waist. It was quite a long
one-thirty-five kilometers-and it was scary stuff. The mist was in,
visibility was down to about ten meters, and we all failed to find a
checkpoint. Eventually about six of us all bumped into one another, flapping
about our timings. At long last one of the blokes found the DS's biwi bag,
and we were all busy making our excuses about the weather. No need. They'd
already accounted for all this. They made the decision that we'd carry on,
but in a group until we got to the next checkpoint.
Timings-wise I was in the middle of the order of march. I was on my
chinstrap after wading through the snow for so many kilometers, but I got
lucky. There was a Canadian jock who wanted to lead from the front, and I
tucked in behind him. He was forging-through the snowdrifts like an
icebreaker and we were tabbing in his wake, grinning our faces off.
The Endurance phase culminated with Test Week. The routes were a
selection of everywhere we'd been and ranged from twenty to sixty-four
kilometers. This was where all the lnj'uries began to play on people.
There were only about forty of us left, which I thought was great; less
of a wait for food. Each day now I was feeling stronger because I knew the