"da Cruz, Daniel - Republic of Texas 02 - Texas on the Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

"I had forgotten. Count it twice, Brandon."

Castle sat in aggrieved silence, his occasional sniffles muffled by the riffle of bank notes and the steady drumbeat of rain on the roof.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand, sir," said the chauffeur.

"Drive on," Grayle instructed.

The communicating window whooshed shut, and the limousine moved off into the night. The two men sat in total darkness, the opaque windows admitting not the dimmest ray of light. It was all of a piece with Grayle's reputation for reclusive-ness. Although he had been whispering uncannily prescient advice into the ears of the mighty for more than forty years, very little was known of the man beyond a name and a number--no address-- in the telephone directory.

The tinkle of ice in a glass, the splash of liquids, and a glass was pressed into his hand. Castle, who had begun to shiver in his wet clothes, didn't care what it was so long as it was strong. He sipped it, then drank greedily.

A Bloody Mary, with Russian vodka, fresh lemon, and Tabasco, by God! In public, to preserve his image as a champion of local industry, Castle drank California wine. But in the privacy of his own study, a Bloody Mary was his evening solace, with Tabasco instead of Worcestershire. Somehow William S. Grayle knew. But then, why not? He was said to know everything worth knowing in Washington, D.C. It was for Grayle's knowledge that Castle had just paid the old man $250,000, and it was going to make him, Congressman David D. Castle, President of the United States of America.

As the dean of "public affairs consultants" in the nation's capital, William S. Grayle was believed to have retired more than a decade earlier, having molded national politics and the careers of some of the nation's leading power brokers as well as serving as special adviser to six consecutive presidents. According to gossip around the Hill, in recent years he had undertaken only the occasional "mission impossible," simply to add flavor to his declining years and to prove to himself that he had not lost his exquisite political touch.

Such a visionary project had been proposed to him by David D. Castle, congressman from California.

Castle had only one question: Did Mr. William S. Grayle think he could bring it off?

What a silly question, thought William S. Grayle. He acknowledged himself, without false modesty, the shrewdest political mind in the nation's capital, but still not quite God-on-High. Who the hell did this junior congressman, ordinarily good-looking but totally lacking in charisma, well-to-do but not excessively rich, with a sound but undistinguished record during five terms in Congress, think he was, anyway?

Yet the more he pondered the sheer magnitude of the challenge, the more irresistible it became. It could be a coup to make the history books.





2. GROWLER
23 OCTOBER 2004



HE'D SHOW THE OLD MAN.

Ripley Forte shoved the eight throttles forward until the indicator needle bit into the red. The eight powerful propfan engines answered with a banshee roar that surged out across the choppy waters of the Labrador Strait and then bounced back from the craggy blue-green sides of the million-ton iceberg.

Silent and sinister, its base-shrouded in fog, the berg loomed above Forte and his jet sled like a Matterhorn suspended in space.

The sled responded to the engines' thrust. It shot forward, the eight fourteen-foot, ten-bladed propfans clawing at the frigid morning air. Behind the sled a braided nylon cable, eleven inches in diameter, surfaced from beneath the frothing wake as the sled pulled away from the huge pinnacle iceberg. The cable drew taut, and suddenly the seasled, as big and unlovely as a Mississippi coal barge, lay dead in the water, shackled by the enormous mountain of ice.

His weathered face framed by bulbous orange ear defenders that only partially blocked out the din of the jet engines, Ripley Forte squinted through the icy spray at the inertial-navigation dial on the control panel. The readout was accurate to the hundredth of a second of arc: a little over ten inches of movement by the seasled would be discernible. But the dial didn't move.

The tension began to tighten around his sinewy neck like a strangler's hands. A wave of nausea rose from his empty stomach. He swallowed hard and choked it back.

"Move, damn you," he growled, and beat his fist against the dial with its frozen needle.

Suddenly he laughed.

Well, of course the damn berg hadn't moved. The 6,500-horsepower engines fighting the iceberg were analogous to the schoolgirl and the Queen Mary in that old physics puzzler: If she pushed long enough, would the ocean liner ease away from the pier? Of course, because the force exerted by the girl, having nowhere else to go, would be translated into motion. The same principle applied here: Those 52,000 horses straining to shift that mountain of ice were damned well going to move it.