"Gordon Eklund - Falling Toward Forever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eklund Gordon)

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Falling Toward Forever
by Gordon Eklund
CHAPTER ONE
Despite the brutal, bristling heat that infected the savannah
from dawn to dusk, the nights often turned rapidly chilly. A cold
wind whipped gently across the flat, desolate plain, as Calvin
Waller patiently waited for the campfire to spring sufficiently to
life before joining the other men crouched around the orange
flames. Waller sat with his arms hugging his chest, trying not to
shake or shiver. The moon, a thin crescent, hung low in the sky,
while the stars burned with a splendor impossible to equal in any
of the supposedly civilized centers of the world. The nearest
significant human habitation was a hundred miles from here.

"Would you care for something more to eat?" asked the stout,
heavily muscled black man who crouched nearest to Waller. He
offered his tin plate.

"No, not me, thanks."

"The reason I ask," said the black man, "is because I wonder.
Does it affect you the same as it does me? Each time, before I
enter battle, my stomach grows very nervous, tense."

Waller did not recognize this man. He wore the tattered
combat fatigues and the high filthy boots of all of them. He could
just as easily have been another. "I'm not afraid, if that's what
you mean."

"Oh, no, not afraid. Just tension. I meant nothing else."
 "I'm just not hungry"

"The colonel, once when I talked to him, he says you are never
used to it."

"He may be right."

"Especially the killing. We are never used to that, are we?"

"I don't know why not." Waller felt himself growing angry.
Why wouldn't this man shut up? "Isn't it what we're here for?
Look at that gun you're wearing. What's it for? Killing, isn't it?"