"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 07 - The Kobra Manifesto 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

On the French Riviera a defector from behind the Iron Curtain crash lands his plane. Before he dies he utters one last word: Kobra.

At Rome Airport a fuel tanker erupts in a wall of flame after a suicidal car chase along the runways.

In Cambodia a man sips coffee under a palm tree Ч until a sniper's bullet takes off the top of his head.

By the time Quiller is ordered in, he knows only two things: his mission Ч to smash the deadliest ring of international terrorists yet -- and that he is the only agent left alive to do it...



Adam Hall


The Kobra Manifesto



Chapter One

ZARKOVIC


This year they'd added another layer of Armco on the outside of the bends and joined the two bottom rows with massive steel flitch plates to stop people forcing the rails apart and this must have saved a lot of injuries when Hans Strobel came round three laps from the finish and hit one of the uprights and bounced off it and spun twice and caught fire.

There wasn't a lot of noise from the crash itself, just a low roaring as the flames bannered back in the slipstream; but some people down there had started screaming and there was a kind of whimpering noise as the first of the emergency vehicles wheelspun on the hot tarmac as it pulled away from the pits.

'Oh God,' Marianne said and buried her face against me.

'He's all right,' I told her, but of course she knew he wasn't. He'd been hurled clear but the flames had caught him and he was rolling over and over like a small quiet fireball along the guard rails with no one to help him.

Up to now we'd all been cheering him on. This was Strobel's third year at Monaco and he'd been steadily getting the hang of the gear ratios and the characteristic front-end problem as the weight came off past the Casino, and in practice he'd notched up a diabolical 1 min. 25.35 sec. just before he came in, and for most of the time it had looked like his race and in another few minutes we would have heard the corks popping but now he was rolling along the guard rails, orange and black and flickering, le pauvre, the man next to me kept saying monotonously, oh mon Dieu, le pauvre, till he got on my nerves.

The B.R.M. wasn't in the way and the rest of the field were coming past in a strung-out line, slowing under the brakes and losing some of their traction on the hot tarmac. Rizzoli and Marks had begun shunting and one of the team Ferraris lost the back end and did a complete spin and tore off its nose aerofoil and that was about all I saw because Marianne had gone dead white and I wanted to get her away from the stands before the shoving and pushing began. People were standing on the benches to get a better view of the mess down there and that made it easier for me and we were going down. the steps to the harbour car park as the P.A. system began sending out its near-unintelligible echoes round the circuit.

They didn't mention Strobe! but just said the race was being abandoned and this wasn't surprising because even if he were still alive they couldn't bring the thing to a decent conclusion with wreckage and fire-foam all over the finishing-straight. A lot of people were already coming down from the stands, because there'd only been three laps to go and they wanted to avoid the traffic jam.

'It looked worse,' I said, 'than it really was.'

'Yes,' Marianne said, 'yes of course.'

She clung to me as far as the entrance to the harbour car park and then freed herself and walked, apart from me for a little way, as if ashamed of her behaviour. I didn't know her very well but I knew she had pride. She walked very straight but with her head down, the snakeskin bag swinging from her tanned hand, the gold bracelet sparkling in the sun. In a minute I put an arm round her and she brought her head up and we walked in step to the line of cars along the harbour's edge where I'd left the Lancia.

'Vous avez vos papiers, m'sieur?'

Two Monegasque motards, their bikes heeled over on their stands, one in front of the Lancia and one behind. I showed them my passport and driving licence and left them reading the things while I opened the door for Marianne. She looked up at me and managed a slightly lopsided smile.

'C'est la vie,' she said, and I nodded. She was talking about Hans Strobel, and she probably meant, c'est la mort. The loudspeakers were still echoing around the buildings but I couldn't make out what they were saying because the Radio Monte-Carlo helicopter was making some low passes across the circuit where the crash had been. A whole crowd of people were moving into the car park now and the traffic police were taking up stations.

'Merci, m'sieur.'