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

down with an old style ring of a bell. Lotfi bounced up to full height and
checked Hubba-Hubba was backing him. He looked down at me and we nodded in
time before they disappeared around the corner without a word. I followed,
but stayed out of the way as Lotfi pulled open the door and the TV
commentator was momentarily interrupted by a single shouted instruction and
the sort of strangulated pleas you make to two weapon-pointing Arabs in she
mags I saw a sixty-something bloke, in baggy, well-worn trousers and a
tattered brown check jacket, drop a cigarette from between his thumb and
forefinger before falling to his knees and starting to beg for his life. His
eyes were as big as saucers, his hands upturned to the sky in the hope that
Allah would sort this whole thing out.
Hubba-Hubba stuck the muzzle of his Makharov into the skin at the top
of the old boy's balding head and walked around him using the weapon as a
pivot stick. He reached for the phone and ripped it from its socket. It fell
to the floor with one final ring, the noise blending with the scrape of
plastic-soled shoes on the raised wooden floor as they dragged him over to a
folding wooden chair.
I could see that he had been watching Al Jazeera, the news network. The
TV was black and white, and the coat-hanger antenna wasn't exactly
state-of-the-art, but I could still make out the hazy nightscope pictures of
Kandahar getting the good news from the US Air Force as tracer streamed
uselessly into the air.
The old boy was getting hysterical now, and there were lots of shouts
and pistols aimed his way. I guessed they were telling him, "Don't move,
camel-breath," or whatever, but in any event it wasn't long before he was
wrapped up so well in gaffer tape he could have been a Christmas present.
The two of them walked out and closed the door behind them and we
retrieved the berg ens Things were looking good. Train hard, fight easy had
always been shoved down my neck, even as an infantry recruit in the 1970s,
and it was certainly true tonight. The other half of the mantra, Train easy,
fight hard and die', I pushed to the back of my head.
We crossed the hard crust of sand that had been splashed with fuel over
the years, and compressed by boots and tyres, heading for the tanks no more
than fifty metres away. The trucks were to my left, dirty minging old things
with rust streaks down the sides of their tanks from years of spillage. If
the sand and dust now stuck to them was washed off, they would probably fall
apart.
I clambered over the bung, feeling safe enough to pull off the shemag
as the other two got on with their tasks. After I'd extracted the four OBIs
I checked at the bottom of my bergen for the nine-inch butcher's knife and
pair of thick black rubber gloves that came up to my elbows. They were the
sort that vets use when they stick their arm up the rear end of large
animals. I knew they were there, but always liked to check such things. Next
out was the thirty-metre spool of safety fuse, looking a bit like a reel of
green washing line. All the kit we were using was in metric measures, but I
had been taught imperial. It had been a nightmare explaining things to the
boys during rehearsals.
Lotfi and his mate, God, started to play stone masons on the bung,
taking a hammer and chisel to the elevation that faced the target house,
which was hidden in darkness, no more than two hundred metres away. This was