Today Everything Changes: Quick Read by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page B

disturb its turning parts so that it destroys itself. The skill is in working out where the weak part is, getting in there to do the job and getting away again.
    A large factory or even a small town may come to a standstill if you take out an electricity sub-station.
    Many motorways and other structures are built with concrete, so we learned how to destroy it – and that did take a lot of explosives. Sometimes it wasn’t enough just to take down the spans of bridges: the piers had to be cut as well to maximise the damage. Gaps can be repaired; high sections of a motorway can be replaced in a fortnight, as Californians prove every time they have an earthquake.
    If you’re in a foreign country to blow something up, you probably won’t have arrived in your uniform and carrying all the kit you’ll need. You often go in undercover, in civilian clothes, with a cover story and cover documents.
    First, you use your navigation skills to find the target. Then you use the maths you learned in the education centre to work out where you’re going to place your explosives and in what amounts. After that, you go out and buy the ingredients to make a bomb.
    You have to go to the local equivalent of Tesco and Boots, using the language you learned in Hereford, to buy boring, everyday products that will combine to make explosives. All the mixtures need to be in your head. Every sparemoment we had was taken up with learning by heart the nine different types of high explosive. You can’t be undercover with them jotted down in a notebook in your back pocket.
    But it wasn’t only the ingredients you had to learn. It was also the complicated processes for putting them together.
    Once you’d made the explosives, you would use maths to be sure they were going to be effective. That was the only way to work out the exact amount of explosive that would be needed. Maths ensured that, when I pressed the button to blow up the device, I wouldn’t end up with a big bang and a cloud of smoke that cleared to show the target still standing.
    All that learning took three months in the education centre in Hereford. It was the first time I’d ever really got to grips with maths. I’d done a bit to pass my exam, but now I had to apply myself to it. I remembered the captain’s words: the only reason I couldn’t do it was because I hadn’t done it before. And the more I learned, the easier it got.

Chapter Twenty-Nine
    When the first Gulf War started, in 1990, I was once again a sergeant and in command of an eight-man foot patrol whose radio call sign was Bravo Two Zero. Our mission was to go to the north-west of Baghdad before the ground war started and cut a fibre-optic cable that ran from Baghdad into the Western Desert. Iraqi Scud missiles were being fired from there into Israel.
    The idea was that if we could cut the control cable that told the Scud missiles when to fire, they wouldn’t be fired into Israel, and Israel wouldn’t be drawn into the war. The mission was a failure. We didn’t find the fibre-optic cable. Out of the eight men who went into Iraq, three were killed and four were captured, including myself. Only one made it to the safety of Syria and back to British lines.
    I spent just over six weeks in Baghdad where we were interrogated by the Iraqi secret police. We were blindfolded, handcuffed, beaten, burned and whipped. I even had some teethpulled out as they tried to discover what our mission was.
    When the war ended, the four of us were exchanged for Iraqi prisoners and returned to the UK.

Chapter Thirty
    I served for another three years in the SAS, a total of eighteen years in the army, before being offered a job with a private military company. I took it, with about twelve other people who left at the same time. It was now that I was asked to write about the Bravo Two Zero mission and my experiences during the first Gulf War.
    Write a book? I thought. Why not? I knew the subject pretty well. And since the first Gulf War, I had