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

Bush didn't want to spoil his trip. Given the seven-hour time difference,
Bouteflika and his wife were probably getting ready for a night out on the
Tex Mex with Mr. and Mrs. B. He was in the States because he wanted the
Americans to see Algeria as their North African ally in this new war against
terrorism. But I was sure that political support wasn't the only item on the
agenda. Algeria also wanted to be seen as an important source of
hydrocarbons to the West. Not just oil, but gas: they had vast reserves of
it.
Only fifty or so metres to go now, and the depot was plainly visible
above us, bathed in yellow light from the fenceline,where arc lights on
poles blazed into the compound. We knew from Lotfi's recce that the two huge
tanks to the left of the compound were full of kerosene 28, a domestic
heating fuel.
On the other side of the compound, still within the fence line and
about thirty metres from the tanks, was a line of maybe a dozen tankers, all
likely to be fully laden, ready for delivery in the morning. Along the spit,
to the right of the compound as I looked at it, were the outer walls of
Zeralda's holiday house, silhouetted by the light of the depot.
Two.
The view of the target area slowly disappeared as we neared the beach
and moved into shadow. Sand rasped against rubber as we hit bottom. The
three of us jumped out, each grabbing a rope handle and dragging the Zodiac
up the beach. Water sloshed about inside my dry bag and trainers.
When Lotfi signalled that we were far enough from the waterline, we
pulled and pushed the boat so that it faced in the right direction for a
quick getaway, then started to unlash our kit using the ambient light from
the high ground.
A car zoomed along the road above us, about two hundred metres away on
the far side of the peninsula. I checked the traser on my left wrist;
instead of luminous paint, it used a gas that was constantly giving off
enough light to see the watch face. It was twenty-four minutes past
midnight; the driver could afford to put his foot down on a deserted stretch
of coast.
I unzipped my bergen from the protective rubber bag in which it had
been cocooned and pulled it out on to the sand. The backpacks were cheap and
nasty counterfeit Berghaus jobs, made in Indonesia and flogged to Lotfi in a
Cairo bazaar, but they gave us vital extra protection: if their contents got
wet we'd be out of business.
The other two did the same to theirs, and we knelt in the shadows each
checking our own kit. In my case this meant making sure that the fuse wire
and homemade OBIs hadn't been damaged, or worse still waterlogged. The
oil-burning incendiaries were basically four one-foot square Tupperware
boxes with a soft steel liner, into the bottom of which I'd drilled a number
of holes. Each device contained a mix of sodium chlorate, iron powder and
asbestos, which would have been hard to find in Europe, these days, but was
available in Egypt by the shed load The ingredients were mixed together in
two-pound lots and pressed into the Tupperware.
All four OBIs were going to be linked together in a long daisy chain by
one-metre lengths of fuse wire. Light enough to float on top of oil, they
would burn fiercely until, cumulatively, they generated enough heat to