"Энди Макнаб. День независимости (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

of the nylon berg ens over the chirp of the invisible crickets. My face soon
became wet and cold as I breathed against the shemag.
We got to the fence line behind the shed. There were no windows facing
us, just sunbaked wooden cladding no more than a metre away.
I could hear someone inside, shouting grumpily in French.
"Oui, oui, d'accord." At the same time there was a blast of monotone
Arabic from a TV set.
Lotfi held the red velvet over the bottom of the fence and Hubba-Hubba
got to work with his cutters. He cut the wire through the velvet, moving
upwards in a vertical line. Lotfi re-positioned the velvet each time, the
two men working like clockwork toys, not looking remotely concerned about
the world around them. That was my job, to watch and listen to the sounds
coming from the shed in case its occupant was alerted by the smothered
'ping' each time a strand of chain-link gave way.
The telephone line snaked into the compound from one of the concrete
posts that followed the road, which looked like a slab of liquorice running
left and right. There was a sign, in both Arabic and English, to be careful
of the bend. I knew that if I went to the right I would hit Oran about ten
kilometres away, and if I went left I would pass Cap Ferrat and eventually
hit Algiers, the capital, about four hundred Ks to the east.
Hubba-Hubba and Lotfi finished cutting the vertical line as the
one-sided conversation continued inside the shed, then carefully pulled the
two sides apart to create a triangle. I eased my way slowly through, so my
bergen wouldn't snag. I got my fingers through Lotfi's side of the fence to
keep it in position and he followed suit, taking hold of Hubba-Hubba's side
while he packed the cutting kit. When he was through as well, we eased the
fence back into place.
We put our berg ens on the ground behind the shed, to the accompaniment
of the monotonous Arabic TV voice, and the old guy still gob bing off in
French.
It flashed through my mind that I had no idea what had been happening
in Afghanistan this past week. Were the US still bombing? Had troops gone in
and dug the Taliban out of their caves? Having been so totally focused on
the job in the mining camp and then stuck in the submarine, I didn't have a
clue if OBL was dead or alive.
We used the light to make final adjustments to each other's she mags
Everyone carefully checked chamber for the last time. They were
becoming like me, paranoid that they were going to pull a trigger one day
and just get a dead man's click because the top slide hadn't picked the
round up due to the mag not being fully home.
Lotfi was hunched down and bouncing on the balls of his feet. He just
wanted to get on with it and hated the wait. Hubba-Hubba looked as if he was
at the starting blocks and unconsciously went to bite his thumbnail, only to
be prevented by the shemag. There was nothing we could do but wait until the
old guy had finished his call; we weren't going to burst in half-way through
a conversation. I listened to the French waffle, the TV, the buzz of the
mozzie things around the lights, and our breathing through the cotton of the
she mags There wasn't even the hint of a breeze to jumble the noises
together.
Less than a minute later, the guard stopped talking and the phone went