"Simon Hawke - Wizard 7 - The Wizard of Camelot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

apparently decided that the riot helmets were not only highly functional,
which
was debatable, but that their polarized visors had some sort of intimidating,
psychological effect, which was a joke. In any event, only the greenest
rookies
used the visors, and not for very long, at that. Most of us simply tore them
off, and many of the hardcore, swaggering, old veterans simply dispensed with
the helmets altogether. Having seen as much, if not more, action as any of
the
veteran police officers, I kept my helmet, hot and sweaty as it was, because
I'd
seen more than my share of head wounds and I had a family to think of. I did
hack off my visor; however; because I couldn't see well enough to shoot worth
a
damn with the bloody thing in place. And, sad to say, police officers expended
a
great many bullets in those days.

There is a popular program on television presently called Collapse Cops,
depicting a team of police officers (a male and female, of course) "fighting
crime during the dark days of the Collapse." There is a great deal of gunplay
and camaraderie, coupled with sexual innuendo (the beauteous Officer Storm
somehow contrives to be caught in her bra and panties at least once every
episode), the villainous perpetrators are all uniformly malevolent, and each
program ends with our heroes managing to touch the lives of several citizens
and
make their burdens easier to bean I only wish it had been so.

There were, naturally, women on the police force and in the military, but I
never encountered any who were even remotely like the leggy, pouty-lipped Ms.
Storm. The women with whom I served were all serious professionals and there
was
not a tube of lipstick or an eyebrow pencil to be found among them. Glamor
was
the very least of their concerns and romance between fellow officers was
rare.
Given the situation in the streets, I did not know of a single officer;
either
male or female, who would risk the complications of a romantic entanglement
on
the job. As to the malevolent perpetrators and the citizens whose lives we
touched, I only wish that, in reality, the lines had been so clearly drawn. I
can best illustrate with an example, one that stands out in my mind as
vividly
as if it had happened only yesterday, for it was the proverbial straw that
finally broke the camel's back.

We were called upon to suppress a sniper. The term "suppress' ' was a
euphemism
for killing the poor bastard, because with the high level of violence in the