"Энди Макнаб. Немедленная операция (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораwe should have been using as little as possible, but it did look like a very
big tree. "Sure this will be all right?" "Yeah, no problem." We moved back with our firing cable. Everybody else was doing the same; we were going to fire them all off one by one and see what happened. Raymond and Mal were by their tree. Keith, our DS, said, "Put your cable into the initiator and fire." They fired the electric current into the det, which detonated some det cord and blew up the plastic explosive. There was a boom, and we all looked up to make sure nothing was going to fall on our heads. The tree fell perfectly. "Good stuff, well done. Next one." Tom and I put our firing cable in. "Stand by. Firing!" There was a massive explosion that shook the ground. The tree went straight up in the air and disappeared from sight. "How much fucking P.E [plastic explosive] did you put in that?" the DS raged. "The correct amount," I said. "We did the formula, honest." "Bollocks!" Keith stormed over to where the P.E was stored. There was almost none left. "That's tearing the arse out of it," he said, and I waited for the bollocking that I thought would follow. But instead he said, "Oh, well, at least it ignited, I'll give you The next day I took my patrol up to an area where we were going to blow more trees. When we arrived, we found that the explosives, which were the responsibility of the DS, hadn't been delivered. "We'll have to go back down to the camp and find somebody," I said. "Otherwise we'll screw up our timings." I knew the area where the DS lived was out of bounds. We got to the edge of it, called, and didn't hear anything, so I decided to take a chance and go through. After all, it wasn't our fault that the explosives weren't where they should have been. Bad mistake. The sergeant major caught us and started to rip into me. "Why are you doing this? We've told you not to come through here." "Well, the explosives weren't there, and the timings are crucial," I said. "We're not going to get everything done unless we get hold of them. I called, and I know it's got to be there on time, so I made the decision to come through." I thought I was in the right, and possibly I was. However, I was on continuation. I should have just shut up and taken the bollocking and let it go. But like an idiot, I didn't. I just hoped that he hadn't marked my card. One of the major components of our training was jungle navigation. The first time I looked at a map of the jungle, all I could see was contour lines and rivers. We had to learn how to travel with these limitations but, more important, simply how to recognize where we were on the ground. |
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