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

came up behind him, crouching, and broke his neck by twisting his head. Before
he had fallen to the ground, I had also broken the neck of the dog. All this took
place within twelve feet of the closest man and dog, but the roaring of the flames
and the smoke swirling through the thick bush hid the noise and the sight of the
dead. It took me a minute to get the dead man's clothes off and onto me. They
fitted fairly well, since he was almost my height, six feet three inches, and he had
a large frame.

The green digger's hat and the green shirt enabled me to get close to another
man who did not have a dog, and he went down with a knife in his neck before
he realised that I was the hunted. The next two victims were another man and a
dog. I almost got caught, because a man was about ten paces behind them, but
the bush concealed us long enough for me to be ready by the time he stumbled
across the bodies.

They should have stayed back and let the helicopter saturate the area with
napalm. They would have gotten me. But as long as they made the mistake of
trying to roust me out with men and dogs in a bush in which I had lived a good
part of my eighty-one years, they were bound to suffer. I then walked up the cliff,
limping as if I'd hurt myself. I looked up twice and saw several men looking at me,
and one was shouting at me, if his wide open and writhing mouth meant any-
thing. I continued to limp and several times sat down as if I'd been badly hurt.

Halfway up the cliff, I saw two men coming down toward me. Apparently they
were sent by their officer to find out if I had been wounded by their quarry. I sat
down with my back to the descending men. The copter was circling tightly about
two hundred yards away almost on a level with me. I could see some men and
dogs two hundred feet below as they passed from bush to bush, but most of the
enemy were concealed. Two men were coming toward me, and three men were
on top of the cliff. I had to act swiftly.

My try at passing myself off as one of them failed. A man called down to me,
'Cramer?' evidently thinking I must be the man whose clothes I'd taken. One look
at my face would tell him his mistake.

I got up onto my legs as if it was painful to do so, with my face still turned away.
The rifle was hanging from a strap over my shoulder, and my hands were empty,
so that that must have lowered their guard, if indeed it was up at all.
'What the hell, Cramer,тАЩ the man said in English with a Hungarian accent. 'You
know better than to leave your station! Did that wild man get you or did you just
fall down, trip over your own feet, you clumsy lout?'

'Neither!' I said, and whirled around, the knife coming out of its sheath and
through the air and into the Hungarian's solar plexus. The other man froze just
long enough for me to pull the automatic from its open holster and shoot him in
the chest.

Then I continued to fire up at the three faces hanging over the cliff's edge, three
white faces with black O's of mouths. The Luger was a .45, the range was two
hundred feet and at a difficult angle and at small targets, so I missed. I had