"Энди Макнаб. Последний свет (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автораsafety. The boy disappeared though the door and others followed, but the Yes
Man still didn't help. Instead he looked up and across the river at me. It was weird. He didn't know exactly where I was in the building, but I felt as if he was looking straight into my eyes. I was going to be in a world of shit about this, and knew I had to have a really good story for him. But not today: it was time to head for Waterloo. My Eurostar left in an hour and five. The snipers would now be standing at their crossover point their exit door from a contaminated area to a decontaminated area peeling off their outer layers of clothing, throwing them into their sports bags, but leaving their gloves on until totally clear of the Portakabin. The weapons, binos and lunch-boxes remained in place, as did the hide. With speed but not haste, I leant over to the window and opened it a fraction to retrieve the antennas. The clamour from people outside was now much louder than the explosion had been. There were shouts of fear and confusion from men, women and children at embankment level. Vehicles on the bridge had braked to a halt and pedestrians were rooted to the spot as the cloud of black smoke billowed over the rooftop of the MoD building. I closed the window and left them to it, taking down the tripod for the binos and packing away all my gear as quickly as I could. I needed to get that train. Once all the kit was back in the bag, including the shaving-foam cap, I put the dirty coffee mug, Wayne's World coaster and telephone back exactly where they'd been before I'd cleared the desktop to make room for the binos and lunch-box, using the Polaroid I'd taken as a reference. I checked the wasn't exactly as it should have been, or a chair had been moved a foot or so to the right. It wasn't superstition. Details like that are important. I'd known something as simple as a mouse mat out of place leading to an operator being compromised. My brain started to bang against my skull. There was something strange about what I had seen outside. I hadn't been clever enough to notice, but my unconscious had. I had learnt the hard way that these feelings should never be ignored. I looked back out of the window and it hit me in an instant. Instead of looking at the column of smoke to my right, the crowd's attention was on the hospital to my left. They were looking towards the sniper positions, listening to the dull thud of six or seven short, sharp, single shots ... There were more screams below the window, mixed with the wail of fast approaching police sirens. I opened my window as far as it would go and pushed the net curtain aside, sticking out my head and looking left, towards the hospital. A fleet of police cars and vans with flashing lights had been abandoned along the embankment, just short of the sniper positions, their doors left open. At the same time I saw uniforms hastily organizing a cordon. This was wrong. This was very, very wrong. The event I was witnessing had been planned and prepared for. The frenzy of police activity down there was far too organized to be a spur-of-the-moment reaction to an explosion a few minutes earlier. We had been stitched up. |
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