"Lumley, Brian - E-Branch 3 - Avengers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

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THE SURVIVOR


Three days later . . .

Gunnery Commander John Argyle was thirty-eight years old, a good six foot, two inches tall, immaculate in lightweight warm-weather order, blue-eyed, blond, and crew-cut beneath his flat-topped naval officer's cap . . . and plainly annoyed. As a man who had gone to sea at eighteen and climbed up through the ranks to his current position - in which he was a stickler for regulations and discipline in general - it was these despised 'civilians' or, in ratings' below-decks parlance, 'landlubbers' who were the cause of his considerable displeasure.

More to the point, however, it was the fact that the Captain had seen fit to detail him as escort to this polyglot party of non-nautical and apparently seriously disturbed people. Only add to this their implied VIP status . . . it did nothing to curb Argyle's feelings of resentment. For in his estimation - based on previous, mercifully infrequent contacts with such 'VIPs'- the abbreviation usually stood for Virtually Incompetent Plebs!

And as for this foursome . . .

. . . Well, what was one to make of them?

Three of them sun-browned and one pale as a ghost, three of them comparatively 'old men' and one little more than a girl or 'young woman' at best; three of them Caucasian and one as Chinese as they come - in his looks if not in his accent, which was 'pure' Eastender London - and all of them wont to converse with his or her fellows in a kind of double-talk as alien as Martian to the down-to-earth gunnery officer!

Argyle realized that he'd been scowling just a moment after the leader


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of his charges - a slightly overweight, broad-shouldered, somewhat lugubrious-looking man called Trask - gave him a much sharper sideways look and said, 'Can't we get in closer than this? I'd like to get down there, 'alongside' or whatever, and see if we can take a look in through the bridge's windows.' His voice over the headphones was tinny, but even so there was a definite bite to it.

The group of five was standing in the mid-section observation bay of a Royal Navy anti-submarine jet-copter, hooked up to a safety rail with the boarding door open. In front of them and below the oval door frame, the silvery curve of the streamlined starboard pontoon was plainly visible; to anyone suffering from vertigo, it would seem the ideal launching platform into oblivion! Trask and his colleagues had been in a great many far more dangerous places, however, and the height and frequently dizzying motion when the chopper manoeuvred were the least of their concerns.

'We can indeed get down there and "alongside or whatever",' Argyle eventually answered. 'In normal circumstances we'd even be able to land on her -God knows she's big enough! But we've already tried that, remember? And if this really is a new variant strain of the plague . . .' He let the sentence taper off, shrugged, and went on, 'Well, it isn't a good idea. It could be airborne, and this chopper's fan is disturbing an awful lot of air. You don't want to be breathing plague germs, do you?'

Now Trask looked at Argyle more closely, even penetratingly, and there was something in the older man's keen green eyes, and in his frown, that warned the gunnery officer not to appear too defiant. But if Argyle couldn't say it, he could at least think it:

Get in closer, my backside! Wbat, to a fucking plague ship? Wbat a fucking idiot! A Virtually Incompetent Pleb, indeed!

But even as Argyle smiled (albeit inwardly) at his own wit, again Trask's eyes were flashing their singular warning. And:

'So, you're an expert in these matters, are you?' He cocked his head a little on one side. 'You know all about this plague, right?'

'I know enough to stand well back from sudden death,' said Argyle, stiffening at Trask's dry tone, his deadpan expression. I know that if it's killed off an entire shipload of passengers and crew in the few days since the ship sailed from Cyprus - taking them all out before they could even tell us what was going on - and that if a chopper only has to touch down on the deck to cost the lives of a pilot, two aircrew, and the ship's doctor-'

'You know nothing!' Trask snapped, cutting him off. 'You're merely guessing, and you're being deliberately obstructive. You don't much care for me and my people, and you think that you're wasting your time with us. We're sightseers -sensation-seekers, that's all - and you'd much rather


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be back on Invincible in the officers' mess with your shipmates than looking after a gaggle of dumb boffins. And as for us: since we can't possibly achieve anything here, we'd do best to bugger off home and let the Navy handle things their own way . . . right?'