"David Drake - Fortress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

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Prologue: - Another 1965



Sergeant Tom Kelly listened to John F. Kennedy's fifth State of the Union Address - his so-called "Buck
Rogers Speech" - at a firebase in the Shuf Mountains, watching Druse 122 mm rockets arc toward
Beirut across the night sky.

The broadcast, carried live over the Armed Forces Levantine Network, hissed and sputtered in the plug
earphone of Kelly's cheap portable radio. Inside the high-sided command track against which he leaned,
the young sergeant could have gotten a much clearer signal through some of the half million dollars worth
of communications-intercept equipment which the Radio Research vehicle carried. This was good
enough, though, for a soldier who was off duty and waiting for the attack Druse message traffic made
almost certain.

Shooooo . . . hissed the green ball of a bombardment rocket.

"Our enemies, the enemies of freedom," said the President, more distant from Kelly's reality than seven
time zones could imply, "have proven in Hungary, in Cuba, and in Lebanon that they respect nothing in
their international dealings except strength. Their armies are poised on the boundaries of Eastern Europe,
ready to hurl themselves across the remainder of the continent at the least sign of weakness among the
Western democracies."

By daylight, the berm which bulldozers had turned up around the firebase for protection was scarcely
less sterile in appearance than the crumbling rock of the hills from which it was carved. Now, in the soft
darkness, the landscape breathed. Kelly's left hand caressed the heavy wooden stock of his M14,
knowing that beyond the berm other soldiers were nervously gripping their own weapons: Mausers
abandoned by the Turks in 1917; Polish-made Kalashnikovs slipped across the Syrian border in donkey
panniers; rocket-propelled grenades stamped in Russian or Chinese . . .

"In Europe and the Middle East," continued the President in a nasal voice further attenuated by the
transmission and the radio's tinny speaker, "in Africa and Latin America - wherever the totalitarians and
their surrogates choose to test us, the free world must stand firm. Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen of
Congress, we in the United States must undertake an initiative on behalf of the free world which will
convince our enemies that we have the strength to withstand them no matter how great the forces they
gather on Earth itself.

The five tubes of howitzer battery - the sixth hog was deadlined for repair - cut loose in a ragged salvo.
The white powderflashes were a lightninglike dazzle across the firebase while the side-flung shock waves
from the muzzle brakes hammered tent roofs and raised dust from the parched ground. The
short-barreled one-five-fives were firing at high angles and with full charges. Nothing to do with the
turbaned riflemen crouching to attack, perhaps nothing to do with even the Druse rockets sailing down
toward the airport in the flat curves of basketballs shot from thirty feet out.

"We must have an impregnable line of defense and an arsenal of overwhelming magnitude in the heavens