"Peter F. Hamilton - Fallen Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

up the main street Then they'd take the ancient railway down along Barron
Valley Gorge to marvel once again, this time at the jagged rock cliffs and white
foaming waterfalls along the route.
Although tourists did still come to admire northern Queensland's natural
beauty, they were mostly corporate families that Z-B had rotated to its sprawling
spaceport base that now dominated Cairns physically and economically. They
didn't have much spare cash for authentic Aboriginal print T-shirts and
didgeridoos and hand-carved charms representing the spirit of the land, so the
shops along Kuranda's main street declined until only the hardiest and cheapest
were leftтАФthemselves a strong disincentive to visit and stay awhile. Nowadays
people got off the skycable terminus and walked straight across to the pretty
1920s-era train station a couple of hundred meters away, ignoring the town
altogether.
It left the surviving bars free for the local men to use. They were good at that.
There was nothing else for them. Z-B brought in its own technicians to run the
base, skilled overseas staff with degrees and spaceware engineering experience.
Statutory local employment initiatives were for the crappiest manual jobs. No
Kuranda man would sign up. Wrong culture.
 That made the bar just about perfect for Lawrence. He paused in the doorway
to scan its interior as a formation of TVL88 tactical support helicopters thundered
overhead on their way to the Port Douglas practice range away in the north. A
dozen or so blokes were inside, sheltering from the evil midday sun. Big fellas,
all of them, with fleshy faces red from the first round of the day's beers. A couple
were playing pool, one solitary, dedicated drinker up at the bar, the rest huddled
in small groups at tables along the rear wall. His brain in full tactical mode,
Lawrence immediately picked out potential exit points.
The men watched silently as he walked over to the counter and took off his
straw hat with its ridiculously wide brim. He ordered a tin of beer from the
middle-aged barmaid. Even though he was in civilian clothes, a pair of blue
knee-length shorts and a baggy Great Barrier Reef T-shirt, his straight back and
rigid crew-cut marked him out as a Z-B squaddie. They knew it; he knew they
knew.
He paid for the weak beer in cash, slapping the dirty Pacific Dollar notes
down on the wood. If the barmaid noticed his right hand and forearm were
larger than they should be, she kept quiet about it. He mumbled at her to keep
the change.
The man Lawrence wanted was sitting by himself, only one table away from
the back door. His hat, crumpled on the table next to his beer, had a rim as broad
as Lawrence's.
"Couldn't you have chosen somewhere more out of the way?" Staff Lieutenant
Colin Schmidt asked. The guttural Germanic tone made several of the local men
look around, eyes narrowing with instinctive suspicion.
"This place suits," Lawrence told him. He'd known Colin for all of the full
twenty years he'd spent in Z-B's strategic security division. The two of them had
been in basic training together back in Toulouse. Green nineteen-year-old kids
jumping the fence at nights to get to the town with its clubs and girls. Colin had
applied for officer training several years later, after the Quation campaign: a
careerist move that had never really worked out. He didn't have the kind of
drive the company wanted, nor the level of share ownership that most other
young officers had to put them ahead. In fifteen years he'd moved steadily