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

His teeth flashed white as he gave us a huge grin.
"Now we paddle."
It was obvious from the way they constantly took the piss out of each
other that Lotfi and the one whose name I still couldn't pronounce
Hubba-Hubba, something like that had worked together before.
Hubba-Hubba was still at the bow and dug his wooden paddle into the
swell. We closed in on the beach. The sky was perfectly clear and
star-filled, and suddenly there wasn't a breath of wind. All I could hear
was the gentle slap of the paddles pushing through the water, joined now and
again by the scrape of boots on the wooden flooring as one or other of us
shifted position. At least the paddling had got me warm.
Lotfi never stopped checking ahead, to make sure we were going to hit
the beach exactly where he wanted, and the Arabic for 'right' I did know:
"II al yameen, yameen."
The two of them were Egyptian, and that was about as much as I wanted
to know not that it had turned out that way. Like me, they were deniable
operators; in fact, everyone and everything about this job was deniable. If
we were compromised, the US would deny the Egyptians were false flagging
this job for them, and I guessed that was just the price Egypt had to pay
for being the second biggest recipient of US aid apart from Israel, to the
tune of about two billion dollars a year. There's no such thing as a free
falafel.
Egypt, in its turn, would deny these two, and as for me, they probably
didn't even know I was there. I didn't care; I had no cover documents, so if
I was captured I was going to get stitched up regardless. The only bits of
paper I'd been issued with were four thousand US dollar bills in tens and
fifties, with which to try to buy my way out of the country if I got in the
shit, and keep if they weren't needed. It was much better than working for
the Brits.
We kept paddling towards the clusters of light. The wetness down my
back and under my arms was now warm, but still uncomfortable. I looked up at
the other two and we nodded mutual encouragement. They were both good lads
and both had the same haircut shiny, jet black short-back-and-sides with a
left-hand parting and very neat moustaches. I was hoping they were winners
who just looked like losers. No one would give them a second look in the
street. They were both in their mid-thirties, not tall, not small, both
clear-skinned and married, with enough kids between them to start up a
football team.
"Four-four-two," Lotfi had smiled.
"I will supply the back four and goalkeeper, Hubba-Hubba the midfield
and two strikers." I'd discovered he was a Man United fan, and knew more
than I did about the Premier League, which wasn't difficult. The only thing
I knew about football was that, like Lotfi, more than seventy-five per cent
of Man United's fans didn't even live in the UK, and most of the rest lived
in Surrey.
They hadn't been supposed to talk about anything except the job during
the planning and preparation phase, in a deserted mining camp just a few
hours outside Alexandria, but they couldn't help themselves. We'd sit around
the fire after carrying out yet another rehearsal of the attack, and they'd
gob off about their time in Europe or when they'd gone on holiday to the