"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 04 - Thunder in the East UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

"Jesus, another direct hit!" Tomb's lieutenant cried out in dismay. "How the hell do these guys always hit their targets? I know they're good, but no one is that fucking good!"

"They are if they've got a laser target designator working somewhere in the city," Tomb said in disgust. He knew the enemy's Maverick strikes were so accurate because the missile was capable of following a laser beam being bounced off the prescribed target. This meant the pilots were getting inside help-some-

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one within Football City, probably atop one of its highest buildings, was shooting the laser beam at the targets, allowing the Mavericks to home in exactly every time. The Circle Army had been searching for the "trigger man" for weeks, but whoever it was, was simply too smart for them and had evaded capture every time.

"Just one more of our problems . . ." Tomb said to his subordinate as the Skyhawks streaked off to the west and disappeared unscathed over the horizon.

CHAPTER 3

Navy Lieutenant Stan Yastrewski-known as "Yaz" to his friends-stopped shoveling just long enough to clean the dirt out of his bleeding hand calluses.

His back was aching and he was filthy from head to toe. His neck was stiff, he was thirsty and the last thing he had had to eat was a small bowl of soup the night before. Now, his hands were bleeding so badly the shovel was sticking to his fingers.

Suddenly, a Circle Army guard came up behind him and poked his ribs with the barrel of his AK-47 assault rifle.

"Get back to work," the soldier told him gruffly, jabbing him again with the snout of the Soviet-made weapon.

How the hell did I get here? Yaz asked himself for the umpteenth time. In an instant he replayed the series of rather incredible events that took him from a hospital on the Mediterranean island of

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Malta to digging in the goddamn "Hole" in the middle of Football City. Shit, the last time he had been in the states, this place was called St. Louis.

During the first battles of World War III, Yaz was an officer aboard the U.S. nuclear submarine, USS Albany. The boat went down off Ireland, but many of the hands were able to make it to shore. Eventually, he and some of the survivors got organized and went over to Britain after the war cooled down, finding work as technicians. Later on, they moved to Algiers where they were hired by some British RAF officers to help tow an aircraft carrier across the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal in order to thwart an attempt by the infamous world terrorist Viktor to invade the area and revive the World War.

The valiant adventure succeeded in delaying Viktor's armies at the Suez chokepoint long enough for the European democratic forces, known as the Modern Knights, to engage and destroy most of the enemy force. In the course of the early fighting, the carrier was sunk and Yaz, blown off its deck in an explosion, was later found by friendly forces and eventually taken to Malta where he spent three months recovering from his wounds.

Mixed up in all this was an American fighter pilot named Hawk Hunter. He was well-known, both in America and around the globe, as being the best fighter pilot in the post-war world. He had been convinced by the Brits to coordinate air operations off the carrier and he had led the air battle in the canal until taking off in pursuit of Viktor. While recovering in Malta, Yaz heard that

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Hunter had caught up with the super-terrorist shortly after the battle in the canal and that the terrorist wound up dead. Exactly what happened to Hunter was unclear. Many people in the Med claimed that he too was killed along with Viktor. Others said Hunter had returned to America, where it was rumored that another great war was brewing between the democratic Western Forces and the Soviet-backed Circle Army of the east.

Those rumors proved correct-much to Yaz's dismay. . .

As soon as he recovered from his wounds, Yaz caught a flight from Malta to the near-abandoned airport at Casablanca. From there, he was given a seat on a free-lance Swedish C-130 gunship that was flying to America to look for work. But the gunship was jumped by MiGs near the coast of Cuba, and crash-landed off the beach at Guantanamo Bay. Captured by the communist Cubans, Yaz spent some time in jail and then was sold as a slave laborer to the Circle Army, who now had a tenuous hold on Football City.

It was a long, crazy story, unbelievable to him even though he had lived it. Ever since the end of the Big War, Yaz had dreamed of returning to America. Now that he was here, he longed for the hot, smelly days of Algiers . . .

Now he was part of a work crew-some 2000 strong-that was digging The Hole. Nearby were the handful of bridges that had all but been destroyed in a massive war between Football City and the Soviet-backed Family Army, out of New Chicago. These spans had suddenly become very

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important to the Circle troops occupying the city and their engineers were in the process of rebuilding most of them. Some said the Circle wanted the bridges rebuilt in order to reinforce the city against attack from the Western Forces to the west. Others said the Circle needed the bridges intact so as to insure their own escape route out of the city.