"Laumer, Keith - Bolo Shorts 01 - Honor of the Regiment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

high-cheeked faces. Outside the sounds of the jungle night-and the
camp-were stilled for an instant. Sound gradually returned to normal. Two
riflemen ducked inside the low cave and dragged the body away by the
ankles.

"The Glorious Way shall be victorious!" Chavez said. "We shall conquer!"

The others responded with a shout and a clenched-fist salute.

"I know," Chavez went on, "that some of our comrades are weary. They say:
The colossus of the North is reeling. The gringo troops are withdrawing.
Why not hide and wait? Let the enemy's internal contradictions win for us.
We have fought many years, against the compradore puppet regime and then
against the imperialist intervention force.

"Comrades," he went on, "this is defeatism. When the enemy retreats, we
advance. The popular masses must see that the enemy are withdrawing in
defeat. They must see that the People's Army of the Glorious Way has
chased the gringos from the soil of San Gabriel. Then they will desert the
puppet regime, which has attempted to regroup behind the shelter of the
imperialist army.

"Our first objective," he went on, "is to interdict the resupply convoy
from the coast. We will attack at-"

"Yeah, it's nothing but indigs," Martins said, keeping her voice carefully
neutral. "The indigs, and you and me. That's a major part of the problem."

Will you look at that mother, she thought.

The new tank was huge. Just standing beside it made her want to step back;
it wasn't right for a self-propelled object to be this big.

The Mark III was essentially a four-sided pyramid with the top lopped off,
but the simple outline was bent and smoothed where the armor was sloped
for maximum deflection; and jagged where sensor-arrays and weapons jutted
from the brutal massiveness of the machine. Beneath were two sets of
double tracks, each nearly six feet broad, each supported on eight
interleaved road wheels. Between them they underlay nearly half the
surface of the vehicle. She laid a hand on the flank, and the quivering,
slightly greasy feel of live machinery came through her fingerless glove,
~vibrating up her palm to the elbow.

"So we don't have much in the way of logistics," she went on. Try fucking
none. Just her and the Captain and eighty effectives, and occasionally
they got spare parts and ammo through from what was supposed to be
headquarters down here on the coast. "Believe me, up in the boonies mules
are high-tech these days. We're running our UATVs"-Utility All Terrain
Vehicles-"on kerosene from lamps cut with the local slash, when someone
doesn't drink it before we get it."