"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 3 - The Source" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

piercing, 13mm Katushev cannons, and the fourth and last loaded with a battery of diesel-powered generators. No, what was being hauled wasn't the question. The
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question was this: if the Russians were going to defend the Perchorsk Projekt, who were they defending it against?

Who ... or what?

Simonov's camera clicked away almost inaudibly; his eyes took in all that was happening below; he was aware that he mustn't stay here more than another ten or fifteen
minutes at the most, because of the high radiation count, but part of his mind was already somewhere else. It was back in London just two months short of two years ago.
Shooting the arrival of the trucks had done it, set Simonov's mind working on that other film he'd been shown by M16 and the Americans in London. A real film, however
short, and not just stills. He relaxed just a traction. He was doing all that was expected of him, could afford a little mental meandering. And actually, once you'd seen that
film, it was difficult not to keep going back to it.

The film was of something that had happened just seven weeks after the Perchorsk Incident (called 'pi') and had earned itself the acronym 'pi II' or 'Pill'. But it had been
one hell of a pill to swallow. It had come about like this.

. . . Early morning of a bright mid-October day along the eastern seaboard of the USA; but along the 'obsolete' Canadian DEW-line things have been stirring for some
three hours, since a pair of spysats with overlapping windows on the Barents and Kara seas, and from Arkhan-gel'sk across the Urals to Igarka, flashed intruder reports
down across the Pole to listeners in Canada and the USAF bases in Maine and New Hampshire. Washington has been informed, and low-key alert status has already been
notified to the missile bases in Greenland and the Foxe Peninsula base on Baffin Island. Other DEW-line subscribers have been notified; Great Britain has shown mild
interest and asked for updates, Denmark is typically nervous (because of Greenland), Iceland has shrugged and France has failed to acknowledge.

But now things begin to speed up a little. The original spies-in-the-sky have lost the intruder (an 'intruder' being any aerial object passing east to west across the Arctic
Ocean) out of their windows, but at the same time it's been picked up by DEW-line proper crossing the Arctic Circle on a somewhat irregular course but generally in the
direction of Queen Elizabeth Island. What's more, the Russians have scrambled a pair of Mig interceptors from their military airfield in Kirovsk south of Murmansk.
Norway and Sweden join Denmark in an attack of the jitters. The USA is hugely curious but not yet narrow-eyed (the object is too slow to be a serious threat) but
nevertheless an AWACS reconnaissance aircraft has been diverted from routine duties to a line of interception and two fighters are scrambled up from a strip near Fort
Fairfield, Maine.

It is now four hours since the - UFO? - was first sighted over Novaya Zemlya, and so far it has covered a little more than nine hundred miles, having passed west of Franz
Josef Land on what now seems a beeline for Ellesmere Island. Which is where the Migs draw level with it, except that doesn't quite show the whole picture.
Geographically they've caught up with it, but they're at max. headroom and the UFO is two miles higher! Then . . . apparently they see it - and at the same time it sees
them.

What happens then isn't known for a certainty, for the Kirovsk base has ordered radio silence, but on the basis of what will be seen to happen later we can take a broad stab
at it. The object descends, puts on speed, attacks! The Migs probably open fire on it in the seconds before they are reduced to so much confetti. Their debris is lost in snow
and ice some six hundred miles from the Pole and a like distance short of Ellesmere . . .

And now the intruder really is intruding! Its speed has accelerated to around three hundred and fifty miles per hour and its course is straight as an arrow. The AWACS has
reported the Migs lost from its screens, presumed down, but a hotline call from Washington to Moscow fails to produce anything but the usual ambiguities: 'What Migs?
What intruder?'

The USA is a little peeved: This aircraft came out of your airspace into ours. It has no right being there. If it sticks to its present course it will be intercepted, forced to
land. If it fails to comply or acts in any way hostile, there's a chance it will be shot down, destroyed . . .'

And unexpectedly: 'Good!' from the Russians. 'Whatever it is you have on your screens, it is nothing of ours. We renounce it utterly. Do with it as you see fit!'
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