"Bova, Ben - Voyagers 03 - Star Brothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

"But you said what you're doing is not illegall" Paulmo clawed at the Frenchman as he hurried across the road

"You knew that was not true," the Frenchman snarled, twisting free of Pauhno's grasp and climbing into the truck's crowded cab

"But you told me "

Paulmo found himself staring into the muzzle of the gun

"Get away, you stupid fool, before we run you down "

The truck lurched out of its hiding place and down the street, coughing and sputtering, throwing up a little storm of dust and grit as it raced for the road that led out of the valley Paulmo stood in a daze, wondering what he should do By the time he heard the engines of the approaching government troops, he had made his decision He ran

Just as he had done when he was a child hiding from his mother's wrath, Paulmo dashed up the slope of the hillside behind the village's houses, scrambled past the terraced gardens where the women grew their kitchen vegetables and the men cultivated a few wine grapes, and hid in the secret cave beneath the lip of the moss-covered hilltop

It was no more than a low niche in the hillside, but from that hiding place he could see the entire village and all the valley As a child he had spent long hours there, flat on his belly, watching the villagers at their work while he daydreamed whole afternoons away Now he lay in the low narrow cave, trembling in the damp darkness as the soldiers entered the village in their trucks and armored cars The trucks stopped in the village's only plaza and the troops jumped to the ground These were not Peace Enforcers, they were troops from the capital Their uniforms were ugly brown battle dress and they carried automatic rifles, deadly looking with their curved magazines and flash suppressors on their muzzles

Paulmo watched as two of the armored cars sped down the

road after the Frenchman's truck Watched as a squad of troops raced straight to the old stone barn, kicked in the door, and tossed in half a dozen grenades The ancient stone walls held, but the explosions blew out the roof and started a fire that sent oily black smoke bubbling into the pristine sky

Then the soldiers went to every house and pulled out every person Truckloads of soldiers trundled out into the fields and rounded up the men working there Paulino watched in sickening shame as the fields went up in smoke, the yellow tractors were blown to pieces, and a dozen of the elder men of the village put against a wall and shot before the horrified eyes of the whole village One of the old men was Pauline's father

Then the looting began And the raping Paulino cried bitterly and clawed at the grass until his fingertips bled It was all his fault He had brought this destruction down upon the village just as his father had warned

But he did not move from the safety of his cave until long after dark night had fallen and the soldiers had left the wailing, bloody, burning, sorrowful village











CHAPTER 4






THREE months later the Brazilian ambassador to the United States gave a lavish dinner party at the embassy's newly-finished complex of buildings in suburban Bethesda

Ambassador Branco, a cousin of the president and a more distant relative of a general who had overthrown the government of Brazil half a century earlier, graciously accepted compliments from the stream of guests flowing past him in the reception line The men were in traditional black dinner clothes, the women in the most expensive gowns and jewels

they possessed The ambassador himself wore a conservatively-tailored tuxedo with the sash of his office bearing merely a few of his huge collection of medals and decorations