"Jeff Long - Year Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Jeff)

Designed by Jaime Putorti
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To my father,

who reached into my Asian midnight, and saved me.

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

тАФPercy Bysshe Shelley,

Prometheus Unbound

Prologue
False Angels
JERUSALEM

The wound was their path.

Nathan Lee Swift sat strapped in the belly of the cargo helicopter with a dozen assorted archangels,
looking down upon what little remained. The earthquake was visible mostly by what was no longer
visible. Cities and villages had simply vanished in puffs of dust. Even his ruins were gone. The map had
gone blank.

The air was hot. It was summer. There was no horizon. The sands stretched into haze. He felt chained to
the giant beside him, his former professor David Ochs. He had not wanted to leave, now he didnтАЩt want
to come back. Not like this.

Due south from the U.S. Army base in Turkey, they flew parallel to the rift system. Like an immense raft
drifting from shore, Africa was shearing loose of Eurasia. It was nothing new in the larger scheme of
things. Satellite photos barely registered the latest geological breach. Even from the helicopterтАЩs
scratched Plexiglas windows, the devastation appeared strangely faint. The earth had pulled open and
sealed shut.

Nathan Lee searched for his bearings. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been down there, somewhere,
sifting away at ancient Aleppo, homing in on the end of his field research. Now the ruins were gone, and
his dissertation with them. Only loveтАФor lustтАФhad spared him from the disaster. If not for Lydia Ochs
visiting his tent one Arabian night five months ago, he might have died in the sands. As it was, the
professorтАЩs younger sister had accidentally saved him with her fertile womb.

She had come to Aleppo with her brother, unannounced, during the winter break between semesters.
The professor was checking up on his graduate students, anchoring his grants, a day or two here, then on
to the next, and she was just along for the ride. Nathan Lee had never seen her before in his life. He was
a catch-and-release, he figured. A desert conquest. Her Himalayan climber in the sands. But then heтАЩd
gotten her letter. Back in Missouri, she was five-months pregnant. Now she was ten-days married, and
all his new in-laws were proclaiming heтАЩd been miraculously spared. Miraculous seemed a strong term
for what owed less to the hand of God than to a Wonderbra, a full moon, and a bottle of old nouveaux