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

they threw one of my hands against the wall, then the other, and then
started to kick my feet back so I was at an angle, resting against the wall.
Very soon I started to get pins and needles in my hands, and then they went
numb. I tried gently banging them against the wall; the guards came over,
got hold of my hands, and threw them against the wall again and kicked my
legs out even more.
The hands really started to hurt. I had to push against them to keep
the tension in my body so I didn't collapse.
Fuck this, I thought. I was in pain, I was cold; soon I would be
hungry. The only consolation was the thought that this was the last major
step. If I passed this, I was in; if I got binned, it would be my own fault.
It was just a matter of sticking in there. At the end of the day it was an
exercise; they weren't going to kill me; it was just a big test.
They grabbed me, took me somewhere else, and made me sit cross-legged
with my hands behind my head and my back straight. Every time I bent my back
to release the stress, they'd be in, grab hold of me, move me, and put me
down again.
There was no noise; nobody said a word. All I heard was the two sets of
footsteps walking along, picking me up. Sometimes they'd put me back against
the wall in another stress position. After a few hours I told myself that I
needed to switch on here. "Just keep your head," I said to myself, "and
you'll be all right." I told myself that it was more about giving us an
experience than anything else. They would hardly be putting us through it
just for the sake of fucking us about and giving us a good beating. It was
probably as much an experience for the people who were doing the
interrogating as it was for us. They needed training also. They needed to
get the experience of reacting to people who had been under pressure for
seven days on the run, not somebody who was just coming in from the canteen
and playacting the part.
As the hours ticked by in my head, there were some I people who by the
sounds of things bel'eyed it was for real. I heard two or three get into
such a state that they started blattering off and wanted no more of it.
"I've had enough," somebody shouted, and it echoed around the room. I
recognized the voice. It belonged to a signals captain in his forties who'd
come up through the ranks and had been giving little bits of advice to all
the lads on the course. He'd had his toothbrush with him all the time. "You
don't need toothpaste," he said. "I always keep my teeth clean. Look at
these teeth. twenty-four years in the army, out in the field all the
timegood teeth. And that's because I keep my toothbrush with me."
"I don't want this no more! I don't want this no more!" He screamed and
hollered, and I heard several sets of footsteps going up and dragging him
away. He was spaced out; he was gone. It made me feel really good. Number
one, because he was gabby all the time, giving us the benefit of all his
advice, and number two, because somebody had been taken off. It made me feel
better that I was still hanging on in there.
Maybe he didn't have the same incentive as the Selection blokes.
Yet, very occasionally, I had been told, Selection blokes did fail at
this late stage as well.
This 'was extremely demanding, physically and mentally. So it should
be. What they were doing was training prone-to-capture troops for a real