"John Dalmas - The Second Coming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

between a Port of New York security force and militants of some sort. Thus their
commuter flight from Bridgeport had been diverted all the way to Dulles, the air
traffic overload at LaGuardia and Newark being extreme. At Dulles they'd lucked out.
Their tickets were business class, so they'd gotten on the second flight to Denver, a
little more than two hours later than their scheduled flight from Kennedy.


On the Denver flight, and the commuter flight to Pueblo, there'd been no
complications. American Airlines had rearranged their reservations, and informed the
charter plane that would take them from Pueblo to Henrys Hat.


Henrys Hat. A strange name for a town, Lee told herself.
***
She stared. In all her thirty-six years, Lee Shoreff had never been west of the
Mississippi. And while she'd seen mountainsтАФthe Adirondacks, Greens and
CatskillsтАФshe'd never seen anything remotely like the chain of snow peaks some
twenty miles ahead. They stretched as far north and south as she could see from the
small plane, their upper slopes white with late-September snow.


"Ben!" she murmured. "They're beautiful! I wonder how high they are."


It was Lor Lu who answered, looking back from his seat beside the pilot. "In that
range, the Sangre de Cristo, there are probably ten peaks higher than fourteen
thousand feet. See those three over there?" He pointed southwestward. "The tallest is
Blanca Peak, the highest in the range."


"Will we fly over them?"


"No, we're almost to Henrys Hat."


Scanning she asked, "Where?"


"See that creek ahead to our right? Where the trees are? That's Henrys Creek. Henrys
Hat is the village, those buildings you can see up ahead, where the road crosses the
creek."


She stared. "That'sтАФit?" She was surprised that so small a place would have a name.
As they approached, she decided it might have a dozen houses, all of frame
construction, all weatherbeaten. Plus what she recognized as garages, barns and
sheds. And what had to be a store, with a low porch and fuel pumps in front, and a
flagpole and flag at one corner. There was nothing resembling a school. A half mile
past it was a small airfield, with two parked planes and a large metal machine shed.