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

ignite the fuel. How long that would take depended on the fuel. With petrol
it would be almost instantaneous the fuse wire would do the trick. But the
combustion point of heavier fuels can be very high. Even diesel's boiling
point is higher than that of water, so it takes a lot of heat to get it
sparked up.
But first we had to get to the fuel. All fuel tanks are designed with
outer perimeter bungs', walls or dykes whose height and thickness depend on
the amount of fuel that will have to be contained in the event of a rupture.
The ones that we were going to breach were surrounded by a double-thick wall
of concrete building blocks, just over a metre in height and about four away
from the tanks.
Lotfi and Hubba-Hubba had been rehearsing their tasks so often they
would have been able to do them blindfolded -which, in fact, we had done
some of the time during rehearsals. Training blindfolded gives you
confidence if you have to carry out a job in the dark, such as dealing with
a weapon stoppage, but it also makes you quicker and more effective even
when you can see.
The attack theory was simple. Lotfi was going to start by cutting out a
section of the wall, three blocks wide and two down, facing towards the
target house. Hubba-Hubba had turned out to be quite an expert with
explosives. He would place his two frame charges, one on each tank, on the
side facing the sea and opposite where I was going to lay out and prepare my
four OBIs.
As the frame charges cut a two-foot square hole in each tank, the fuel
would spew out and be contained in the bung. The ignited OBIs would float on
top of the spillage, burning in sequence along the daisy chain, so that we
had constant heat and constant flame, which would eventually ignite the lake
of fuel beneath them. We knew that the kerosene fuel oil rising in the bung
would spark up when the second of the four OBIs ignited, which should happen
as the fuel level reached just less than half-way up the bung wall. But we
wanted to do more than just ignite the fuel within the bung: we wanted fire
everywhere.
The burning fuel would disgorge through the cut-out section in the wall
and out on to the ground like lava from a volcano. The ground sloped,
towards the target house. As soon as Lotfi had shown me the sketch maps from
his recce, I'd seen that we could cut the house off from the road with a
barrier of flame. I hoped I was right; two hundred policemen lived in
barracks just three kilometres along the road to Oran, and if they were
called to the scene we didn't want to become their new best mates.
Just as importantly, we could make what happened tonight look like a
local job an attack from one of the many fundamentalist groups that had
waged war on each other here for years. That was why we'd had to make sure
the equipment was homemade, why all our weapons were of Russian manufacture,
and our clothing of local origin. The traser might not be regular Islamic
fundamentalist issue, but if anyone got close enough to me to notice my
watch, then I really was in the shit, so what did it matter? In less than
two hours from now, Zeralda would be dead, and the finger of blame would be
pointing at Algeria's very own Islamic extremists, who were still making
this the world's most dangerous holiday venue. They didn't like anyone
unless he was one of their own. We hoped that our attack would be blamed on