"Philip Jose Farmer - The Empire of the Nine omnibus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Five minutes later, two huge helicopters settled down on the beach. The armed
men in them got out and took their stations with the others along the edge of the
beach and the jungle. Murtagh got new radio equipment from the helicopters,
and the men of the Nine were ready to go into business.

My business was to get out as fast as I could, but I did not do so. I had been
running so hard and so long from the Nine that I could not resist the temptation to
give them even more punishment. I did, however, retreat to the north and into the
swamp. I climbed to the top of a mangrove where I could get a good view. It was
well that I did. While the men on the ground stayed on the beach, the two
helicopters flew inward and dropped six napalm bombs. Two jets came in and
shot six explosive rockets at random within a quarter-mile square area. Then
they dropped napalm bombs and returned to strafe the jungle near the burning
areas. After their ammunition was exhausted, they flew off, presumably to reload
for another trip.

If I had been hanging around close to the men on the beach, I would have been
burned to an ash. Still, they had no means of knowing that I was there, and it
seemed a very inefficient and expensive method of trying to kill me. Not that the
Nine care for expense or for inefficiency if the goal is attained.

With ten baying bloodhounds and six German shepherds, the men on the ground
split into two groups. Each went around the burning area. I did not know what
garment of mine the dogs could have sniffed at, but I was sure that the Nine had
located something in my castle at Grandrith. They weren't likely to pick up any
odour from me near the napalmed area, since the smoke would deaden the
nerves in their noses. But if they did pick up something near the edge of the
swamp, the men would suppose that I was in there, and the mangroves would
get a shower of the terrible jellied gasoline. The copters were overhead now, one
over each group, waiting for orders.

I climbed down and waded through the brownish, vegetation-sticky waters
between the massive buttress-rooted mangroves. After a mile of this, during
which I saw several mambas and a large river otter, I went south and came out
on dry ground, comparatively dry, that is. Though this was not the rainy season, it
was still raining every day, and the soil around here seldom became dry. My
footprints would have been evident if I had not been at such pains to walk only on
fallen vegetation. Even so, I was leaving a trail which the dogs could pick up
easily enough.

As I headed east toward the highlands and the rain forest, I heard the distant
whirring of an approaching chopper. It came through the smoke in the distance
and then was suddenly headed toward me. It had come at a bad time for me. I
was in a natural clearing caused by erosion of the thin soil from a sloping
sandstone mass.

The swamp was a quarter-mile to my left. The edge of the clearing on my right
was about fifty yards. Ahead was thick bush with about a mile to go before I
reached the foot of the cliff which reared up to about five hundred feet. This was
the first of the heights which, a few miles inland, became a series of plateaus