"Black Shrike " - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

THE BLACK SHRIKE
by Alistair MacLean
Copyright 1961
Also titled THE DARK CRUSADER

This book was originally published under the pseudonym Ian Stuart.
A FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL BOOK
Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Com

From the cover:
RESEARCH SCIENTISTS needed for rocket project overseas. Top priority work, highest salaries. Box 141.
Eight famous scientists answered the ad. Eight left England for Australia. None arrived or were heard from again. The ninth who answered was Bentall, complete with a scientific cover and a girl named Marie, a secret agent like himself.
From the moment they were kidnapped at gunpoint from their Fiji hotel, they were plunged into a fantastic plot for world domination, played out on a secret missile site on a remote Polynesian island.


Other Fawcett Books by Alistair MacLean
H.M.S. ULYSSES
THE GUNS OF NAVARONE
SOUTH BY JAVA HEAD
THE SECRET WAYS
NIGHT WITHOUT END
FEAR IS THE KEY
THE SATAN BUG ICE
STATION ZEBRA
WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL
WHERE EAGLES DARE
FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE
PUPPET ON A CHAIN


To Douglas and Violet
THE BLACK SHRIKE Copyright c 1961 Gilach A. G.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Fawcett Gold Medal Book reprinted by arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons
THIS BOOK CONTAINS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL HARDCOVER EDITION.
All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-13361
Printed in the United States of America November 1970




Prologue

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its soot-stained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk: and no person, cleaner or not, was ever allowed inside unless Colonel Raine himself were there.
And no one could ever have accused the colonel of being allergic to dust.
It lay everywhere. It lay on the oak-stained polished floor surrounds that flanked the threadbare carpet. It filmed the tops of bookcases, filing cabinets, radiators, chair-arms and telephones: it lay smeared streakily across the top of the scuffed knee-hole desk, the dust-free patches marking where papers or books had recently been pushed to one side: motes danced busily in a sunbeam that slanted through an uncurtained crack in the middle of a window: and, trick of the light or not, it needed no imagination at all to see a patina of dust on the thin brushed-back hair of the man behind the desk, to see it embedded in the deeply trenched lines on the grey sunken cheeks, the high receding forehead.
And then you saw the eyes below the heavy wrinkled lids and you forgot all about the dust; eyes with the hard jewelled glitter of a peridot stone, eyes of the clear washed-out aquamarine of a Greenland glacier, but not so warm.
He rose to greet me as I crossed the room, offered me a cold hard bony hand like a gardening tool, waved me to a chair directly opposite the light-coloured veneered panel so incongruously let into the front of his mahogany desk, and seated himself, sitting very straight, hands clasped lightly on the dusty desk before him.