Read Online Immediate Action by Andy McNab - Free Book Online

wait and listen, and see what was going on. It used to be great entertainment for the squaddies; we'd watch everything from domestic rows in kitchens to young couples groping in the mother's front room.
        Dave's patrol was to the right of me, about 150 meters away, and he was in dead ground to us. There. was no need to talk on the radio. We'd been out there quite a few months already now, and we were working really well together, supporting each other.
        Once we came near the estate, we were hidden from view by a row of three or four shops-houses, basically, but with shop fronts. We turned right and went along the back of the buildings until we came to the fence line and the gate. By now the waste ground was more like disused farmland; there were old wrecked cars on it, tin cans, bags of garbage.
        There were goats and horses running around all over the place, so the ground was gungy and churned up. It was summer, but we still had rain at least once a week, and the ground was wet. There were large puddles everywhere.
        We got to the fence line, and I got lazy. If I crossed the fence, there would be all this car wreckage and rubbish in the way, and I didn't want to negotiate that. So I took the easy route.
        As I started to come through the gate, I came into view of the people in the street. I heard hollering and shouting and screaming all over the place, which was unusual. Normally there would just have been talking and lots of laughing, from groups of people smelling of Brut and hair spray, the girls in sharply ironed blouses.
        As I looked up at the crowd, I realized that everybody was shouting, grabbing hold of kids, pulling them out of the way.
        Something was up, but I didn't know what. I started to pan around to have a look. Still there was chaos; there must have been maybe 120 people there waiting for the coaches, and they all were reacting to my presence. I looked directly over the road, and as I then started to an left toward the shops, crossing the road, p again there was just the normal group of vehicles-three or four saloon cars and a cattle truck, which was not unusual in the area.
        But then, just as I passed that, I saw a group of characters with masks on and weapons. The one that I really latched on to was a,boy with his fist in the air, doing aChe Guevara with his Armalite, chanting away. I couldn't have been more than twenty meters away from him. I saw his eyes open wide with alarm inside his mask.
        He started to shout and fumbled with his weapon. I also shouted, fumbled for mine, and cocked it. His weapon was already cocked, so he just started blatting like an idiot. I blatted back, getting the rounds down at him and the other masked people. Another fellow came up from behind the wagon and started to fire down in my general direction.
        They were flapping as much as I was, in a frenzy to get into the cattle truck and get away.
        One of the boys got into the back of the wagon and started firing, and the others clambered in. I got rounds into one of them. He was screaming like a pig as he went over the other side. Then there was lots of screaming coming from inside the vehicle, where other people were also taking rounds.
        By this time Scouse, another fellow from the patrol, had come up from the dead ground but couldn't get over the fence because of the firing.
        So he was firing from that side of the fence. The other two were down in the dead ground, totally confused about what was going on.
        It had all happened so quickly.
        Lots of firing was going down. Everybody was screaming and shouting; I was kneeling and firing away.
        In my twenty-round magazines I always made sure that the top two were tracer. I worked on the theory that when we were in the cuds, I could use my tracer to identify targets for other people. I had another tracer halfway down the magazine, so when that went off, I'd know I'd