"Clancy, Tom - Jack Ryan 03 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

I The night had never before seemed so fine, though forЧ
I what was it?Чtwenty years there had been many such nights, Х
I then none for the past thirty. My God, he thought, we would 1
I have been married fifty years this . . . July 14th. My God. 1
I Unconsciously he dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. |
I Thirty years, however, was the number that occupied his
I mind.
I The thought boiled within his breast, and his fingers were I pale around the pen. It still surprised him that love and hate I were emotions so finely matched. Misha returned to his I diary . . .
I An hour later he rose from the desk and walked to the I bedroom closet. He donned the uniform of a colonel of tank Itroops. Technically he was on the retired list, and had been
Хso before people on the current colonel's list had been born. I But work in the Ministry of Defense carried its own perks, |and Misha was on the personal staff of the Minister. That Iwas one reason. The other three reasons were on his uniform {blouse, three gold stars that depended from claret-colored
Хribbons. Filitov was the only soldier in the history of the Soviet
ХArmy who'd won the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union
Хthree times on the field of battle, for personal bravery in the iface of the enemy. There were others with such medals, but Bo often these were political awards, the Colonel knew. He Bras aesthetically offended by that. This was not a medal to Ke granted for staff work, and certainly not for one Party member to give to another as a gaudy lapel decoration. Hero mi the Soviet Union was an award that ought to be limited la men like himself, who had risked death, who'd bledЧand 111 too often, diedЧfor the Rodina. He was reminded of this
Хvery time he put his uniform on. Beneath his undershirt pere the plastic-looking scars from his last gold star, when a fcerman 88 round had lanced through the armor of his tank,
t╗U . w.Ч
setting the ammo racks afire while he'd brought his 76mm gun around for one last shot and extinguished that Kraut gun crew while his clothing burned. The injury had left him with only fifty percent use of his right arm, but despite it, he'd lee what was left of his regiment nearly two more days in the Kursk Bulge. If he'd bailed out with the rest of his crewЧ or been evacuated from the area at once as his regimental surgeon had recommendedЧperhaps he would have recovered fully, but, no, he knew that he could not have nr fired back, could not have abandoned his men in the face < battle. And so he'd shot, and burned. But for that MisL. might have made General, perhaps even Marshal, he though! Would it have made a difference? Filitov was too much a mal of the real, practical world to dwell on that thought for long Had he fought in many more campaigns, he might have be killed. As it was, he'd been given more time with Elena th could otherwise have been the case. She'd come nearly eve day to the burn institute in Moscow; at first horrified by t. extent of his wounds, she'd later become as proud of the as Misha was. No one could question that her man had doi his duty for the Rodina.
But now, he did his duty for his Elena. <
Filitov walked out of the apartment to the elevator, a leatti
briefcase dangling from his right hand. It was about all th
side of his body was good for. The babushka who operate
the elevator greeted him as always. They were of an age, sa
the widow of a sergeant who'd been in Misha's regiment, wn
also had the gold star, pinned on his breast by this very mal
"Your new granddaughter?" the Colonel asked.
"An angel," was her reply.
Filitov smiled, partly in agreementЧwas there any thing as an ugly infant?Чand partly because terms like "ar had survived seventy years of "scientific socialism."
The car was waiting for him. The driver was a new drafta fresh from sergeant school and driving school. He saluted k Colonel severely, the door held open in his other hand. "Good morning, Comrade Colonel." "So it is, Sergeant Zhdanov," Filitov replied. Most offio would have done little more than grunt, but Filitov was! combat soldier whose success on the battlefield had result! from his devotion to the welfare of his men. A lesson tl few officers ever understood, he reminded himself. Too I
"ang
The car was comfortably warm, the heater had been turned all the way up fifteen minutes ago. Filitov was becoming ever more sensitive to cold, a sure sign of age. He'd just been hospitalized again for pneumonia, the third time in the past five years. One of these times, he knew, would be the last. Filitov dismissed the thought. He'd cheated death too many times to fear it. Life came and went at a constant rate. One brief second at a time. When the last second came, he wondered, would he notice? Would he care?
The driver pulled the car up to the Defense Ministry before the Colonel could answer that question.
Ryan was sure that he'd been in government service too long. He had come toЧwell, not actually to like flying, but at least to appreciate the convenience of it. He was only four hours from Washington, flown by an Air Force C-21 Learjet whose female pilot, a captain, had looked like a high-school sophomore.
Getting old, Jack, he told himself. The flight from the airfield to the mountaintop had been by helicopter, no easy feat at this altitude. Ryan had never been to New Mexico before. The high mountains were bare of trees, the air thin enough that he was breathing abnormally, but the sky was so clear that for a moment he imagined himself an astronaut looking at the unblinking stars on this cloudless, frigid night.
"Coffee, sir?" a sergeant asked. He handed Ryan a thermos cup, and the hot liquid steamed into the night, barely illuminated by a sliver of new moon.
"Thanks." Ryan sipped at it and looked around. There were few lights to be seen. There might have been a housing Хdevelopment behind the next set of ridges; he could see the halolike glow of Santa Fe, but there was no way to guess how far off it might be. He knew that the rock he stood on was eleven thousand feet above sea level (the nearest level sea was hundreds of miles away), and there is no way to judge distance at night. It was altogether beautiful, except for the cold. His fingers were stiff around the plastic cup. He'd mistakenly left his gloves at home.
I "Seventeen minutes," somebody announced. "AH systems >are nominal. Trackers on automatic. AOS in eight minutes." I "AOS?" Ryan asked. He realized that he sounded a little |unny. It was so cold that his cheeks were stiff.
~I\f
"Acquisition of Signal," the Major explained. "You live around here?"
"Forty miles that way." He pointed vaguely. "Practically next door by local standards." The officer's Brooklyn accent
explained the comment.
He's the one with the doctorate from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ryan reminded^himself. At only twenty-nine years old, the Major didn't look like a soldier, even less like a field-grade officer. In Switzerland he'd be called a gnome, barely over five-seven, and cadaverously thin, acne on his angular face. Right now, his deep-set eyes were locked on the sector of horizon where the space shuttle Discovery would appear. Ryan thought back to the documents he'd read on the way out and knew that this major probably couldn't tell him the color of the paint on his living-room wall. He really lived at Los Alamos National Laboratory, known locally as the Hill. Number one in his class at West Point, and a doctorate in high-energy physics only two years after that. His doctor's dissertation was classified Top Secret, Jack had read it, and didn't understand why they had botheredЧdespite a doctorate of his own, the two-hundred-page document might as well have been written in Kurdish. Alan Gregory was already being talked of in the same breath as Cambridge's Stephen Hawking, or Princeton's Freeman Dyson, Except that few people knew his name. Jack wondered i anyone had thought of classifying that.
"Major Gregory, all ready?" an Air Force lieutenant getf eral asked. Jack noted his respectful tone. Gregory was no
ordinary major.
A nervous smile. "Yes, sir." The Major wiped sweal handsЧdespite a temperature of fifteen below zeroЧon tl pants of his uniform. It was good to see that the kid hi
emotions.
"You married?" Ryan asked. The file hadn't covered that "Engaged, sir. She's a doctor in laser optics, on the Hil
We get married June the third." The kid's voice had becou
as brittle as glass. "Congratulations. Keeping it in the family, eh?" Ja
chuckled.
"Yes, sir." Major Gregory was still staring at the southw
horizon.