"Dean Ing - Systemic Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Little frowned. "Sunk, you say?"

"Just gone; disappeared." Ted's shrug implied, you tell me, you've got the radio.

''Get your gear together, boys,'' Little called. тАЬAsheville is the next stop." Then he hurried to his seat,
fumbled in his shirt pocket, and cupped one hand to his ear.

Ted Quantrill was wrong; a compelling mystery was unfolding in the Florida Strait sea lanes. The
tanker Cambio Justo, under Panamanian registry, had last been reported off Long Key, lumbering
north toward Hampton Roads with a quarter-million deadweight tons of Mexican crude oil in her
guts. The Cambio Justo could hardly run aground in four-hundred-fathom straits. She could not
just fly away, nor could she evade satellite surveillance while she thrummed over the surface of a
calm sea. But she could always sink.

Two hours after the Cambio Justo vanished, a sinking was everybody's best guess, and as far as it
went that guess was dead accurate. What no newsman had guessed yet was that she had not sunk
very far.

Chapter 6

The interurban coach disgorged Little's brood in Cherokee. From there to Newfound Gap they
invested an old diesel bus with their high spirits. At the Tennessee border they reached the old
Appalachian Trail, streamed off the bus, watched the vehicle drone up a switchback and out of
sight. The bright orange paint and the acrid stink of diesel exhaust bespoke a familiar world that, for
a few of them, vanished with the bus as completely as had the Cambio JustoтАФand for the same
reasons.

"Wait up," Ray Kenney puffed as the youths ambled down the trail under a canopy of oak, hemlock
and pine. He pulled a light windbreaker from his pack, zipped it over slender limbs as Ted Quantrill
sniffed the sweet tang of conifers in the mountain air.

"Move it, Kenney," a voice commanded from behind. Wayne Atkinson, the oldest of the boy s,
enjoy ed a number of advantages in Little's troop. Wayne wouldn't have said just what they were;
not couldn't, but wouldn't. His rearguard position was one of responsibility, which Wayne
accepted because it also carried great authority. Below average height for his age, he was strongly
built, fresh-faced, button-bright and sixteen. Wayne Atkinson gave the impression that he was
younger, which enhanced his image to adults. The biggest members of the troop, Joey Cameron and
Tom Schell, accepted Wayne's intellectual leadership without qualm and, because they could look
down on the top of his head, without fear. Among themselves, the smaller boys called him
'Torquemada'.

Ray was already shrugging his backpack into place when the last of the others eased past on the
narrow trail and Atkinson got within jostling distance. Lazily, self-assured: ''If your ass is on the trail
at sundown, I get to kick it.'' He followed this promise with a push and Ray, stumbling, trotted
forward.

Atkinson reached toward Ted Quantrill with a glance, let his arm drop again, motioned Ted ahead.
Ted moved off, trotting after Ray, leaving Atkinson to ponder the moment. Quantrill's part-time job
at the swimming pool had toned his body, added some muscle, subtracted some humility. Sooner or
later that kind of insolence could infect others, even little twits like Ray Kenney, unless stern