"Dean Ing - Flying To Pieces" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

and as soon as possible.

He got out of the car, shaking his head, and muttered, "One Mayday was
enough."
"Isn't that a cry for help?"

Lovett turned and saw, over the top of the adjacent classic Porthole
Thunderbird, big brown eyes regarding him with honest interest. They
belonged to a woman who could hardly see over her little T-Bird, perky
side of fifty, and he realized he had spoken aloud. "Sometimes it is."
He smiled by reflex. "Looks like you could use some help yourself."

She let him take one of her bulging grocery sacks and, sure enough, she
was the new tenant next 'door, and by the time Lovett sat alone in his
kitchen to sort his mail he had agreed to a martini later in the
evening. He still got invitations like that because his thick graying
hair was still unruly and his dimpled killer smile apparently ageless.
He still accepted the invitations if the lady seemed mature enough to
take little disappointments in stride. All his life, one way or another,
Wade Lovett had eventually disappointed women.

He tossed the junk mail to one side and used the blade of his Swiss Army
knife, the one that would fillet a bass, to slit the single personal
letter. The return address was Irvine, California, so he figured in
advance it would be from old Elmo Benteen.

It was a single photocopied page declaring a National Emergency at the
offices of Bentwing Associates-Elmo went through associates like a dose
of salts through a fasting guru--on a Friday evening two weeks hence.
Lovett knew there would be maybe forty copies of the B.O.F. letter,
because more than half of the hundred-odd Boring Old Farts had already
cashed in their short snorters; and of that forty perhaps half of them
would be able to make it to the boozy reunion known to them all as a
National Emergency.

The B.O.F.s had no officials and only two requirements: you had flown
military missions around the Pacific or Chinaburma-India-Korea and
Southeast Asia counted, too-and in the process you'd got your
tail feathers caught in a crack by some desk dildo, maybe a general. A
court-martial helped you in, but one "no" vote by any member kept you
out, so the really bad bastards never qualified. Garden-variety bastards
were common, though; and if you didn't consume alcohol, why the hell
would you attend a National Emergency anyhow?

The B.O.F. title had emerged from a Carews booze-scented blowout in
Darwin, Australia, back in '42 when the Japanese Navy was practically in
the harbor. Some transport pilot, scheduled for the duration to fly many
tons of explosive cargo very slowly and unarmed through a sky full of
Mitsubishi Zeroes, said his only remaining ambition was to live long
enough that his war stories would qualify him as a boring old fart. That