"Clancy, Tom - Net Force 02 - Hidden Agendas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

Toni dropped to one knee next to him and threw a
short right elbow at his face, slapping it with her
left hand for emphasis--and to move her left hand
into position for a follow-up wipe, did she deem it
necessary.
It wasn't going to be necessary. Michaels had no
plans to punch her. He could barely breathe.
Smiling took everything he had.
Toni offered Michaels a hand, and he took it.
She stood and helped him do the same.
"You okay?"
He managed to suck in enough air to say,
"Yeah, fine."
Holding the smile was one of the hardest things he'd
done in a while, but he held it.
"Good. You see what I did?"
"I think so."
Generally, they practiced such take downs on the
nice, padded mat thoughtfully provided here by the
FBI in the smaller of the two gyms in Net Force
HQ. Now and again, however, they stepped off the mats
onto the floor. Toni, who had been practicing
this esoteric martial art since she was twelve, had
explained why such training was necessary.
"If you practice on the mats all the time, you
get used to that cushion. If you fall on the street
or a sidewalk, it won't be quite so easy. And
since a lot of fights end up on the ground, you
need to know how it feels."
Yeah. Right.
He could understand it, though he wasn't sure he was
going to ever learn the stuff so well he could hit the
concrete and bounce like a rubber ball. But after a
month of training five days a week, at least
Michaels could finally get the name of the system right:
Pukulan Pentjak Silat. Or silat, for
short. It was, Toni had told him, a
slimmed-down and simplified version of a more complex
art that had come out of the Indonesian jungles less
than a century ago. She had learned it from an
old Dutch-Indonesian woman who'd
lived across the street from the Fiorellas in the
Bronx, after she had witnessed the old woman use
the art against four gang bangers who had tried to run
the granny off her door stoop. A big
mistake, that.
Michaels had been impressed with what he'd
seen Toni do.
If this was the simple and easier stuff, he could
wait on the really nasty moves.