"Joe Haldeman - Tool of the Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

It was a stressful life, but had its advantages. Meat at least twice a
day, when most Russians were lucky to see it once a week. American
cars for learning how to drive. A library full of books, most of which
were not available to the rest of the country's school-children. Coke
and coffee, imported at some expense.
Nikola, who was now called Nicky or Nicholas, grew to dread
seeing those seven hawk-eyed American mentors. When they weren't
around, he could play his part perfectly, but as soon as one of them
looked at him, his accent would slip or he would stand too close to
someone, talking; hold his coffee cup wrong; forget to cross his legs;
cuss or not cuss in the wrong situation. All seven of these foreigners
reported directly to the MGB, and Nicky had no illusions as to what
the MGB could do to people who disappointed them. He didn't know
the seven considered him their star pupil.
He had useful talents aside from playacting and academics. One
that could have cut his espionage career short was marksmanship: he
had uncanny ability with a pistol. He was almost drafted for the 1952
Olympics, but the MGB held on to him. Linguist, pistol shot, ballroom
dancer-if he could only tell one wine from another, he could have been
a regular James Bond.
They couldn't make a mathematician out of him, though, which
frustrated the MGB's plans. They had wanted to insert him into the
United States after he'd finished Rivertown High, to excel in physics or
engineering and eventually wind up in a sensitive research position. But
calculus was a smooth unclimbable wall to him. Reluctantly they
decided to let him follow his natural leanings.
So as his eighteenth birthday approached, they assembled a
dossier that gave Nicholas Foley a complete and tragic past. Found
abandoned soon after birth, Nicky was raised in an orphanage in
Lawrence, Kansas. The orphanage is one that actually did exist, but it
burned to the ground, along with all records, in 1947. Nicky survived
and was adopted by Neil and Pamela Foley, who died together in an
automobile accident in 1952. (None of this tragedy was arranged by
Soviet intelligence, who don't make a practice of murdering innocent
foreigners; they just studied a few Kansas newspapers.) The court
appointed a guardian for Nicky, but he ran away.
A few days before his eighteenth birthday, Nick got off an Aeroflot
plane in Toronto, bluffed past customs, then wandered around the city
for a couple of days making sure he wasn't being followed. He took a
bus to Ottawa and a train back. He crossed the border at Niagara in a
Greyhound, got on the train in Buffalo, and in three days wound up in
Lawrence, Kansas, where he walked to the Selective Service office
and volunteered for the draft.
Two years in the post-Korea American army did nothing to shake
his faith in the Soviet system (a stint in the Soviet army might have); he
was possibly the best Communist ever to earn the Good Conduct
Medal and go to school on the GI Bill. And go to school he did, as
prearranged: B.A., Psychology, University of Kansas, 1959; M.A.
Linguistics, University of Iowa, 1961; Ph.D. Psychology, also Iowa,
1963. He settled in to teach in Iowa City and wait for his first