"Drake, David - Redliners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

warhead's atomized fuel mixed with the air and detonated, blowing
splinters of the door in one direction and the charred fragments of
the Spook in the other.

Blohm liked to be on point. In this war the choice was to be quick
or dead, and the Spooks were plenty damn quick. Your best
chance of survival was the Spook's hesitation, and if you hesitated
you were handing him your head as well as maybe the heads of
the strikers behind you. Technically the building's ground floor
wasn't Blohm's responsibility, but this wasn't a time to stand on
ceremony.

Blohm trusted himself not to hesitate. Never. Not so much as a
heartbeat.

First Platoon's objective was to clear the garrison's three-story
barracks. The planners had nixed putting a heavy rocket into the
structure because the port command center might be either in the
barracks or in the administration building.

The command center would be hardened. Burying it in the rubble
of the upper floors wouldn't keep the Spooks in the center from
using their outlying gun and missile positions to blow the hell out of
first C41, then any Unity vessel that appeared on this hemisphere
of the planet.

Blohm and Sergeant Gabrilovitch were C41's scouts. They'd been
assigned to lead the four survivors of the platoon's understrength
First Squad through the top floor of the barracks while the
remainder of the platoon took care of the lower stories. If there
was a control room in the basement, Lieutenant Kuznetsov wanted
to be able to open it without worrying about Spooks coming down
the stairs behind her.

At the base of the wall Blohm armed his jump belt. He paused and
bent over when he heard the roaring ignition of one of Heavy
Weapons' 50-pound rockets. An instant later the transient
compound to Blohm's left disintegrated in a green flash and a
thunderclap.

The rocket warheads pulsed electricity through an osmium wire
whose resistance blew it apart with enormous force. Batteries
stored energy more efficiently than chemical high explosives. The
bursting wire propagated shockwaves at several times the rate of
HE, giving the warheads great shattering force. The blast slapped
Blohm hard, but it didn't send him tumbling as it would have done
had it hit him while he was airborne on the jump belt.

Blohm looked up the barracks' facade, then triggered his belt. The
four self-stabilizing nozzles lifted him vertically at a controllable ten