"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 05 - The Twisted Cross UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

The pilot shook his head. "No, not really," he replied. "Just that you had some very critical information on the Canal . . ."

"Not just information" die old man said, his face creasing with worry. "A dire warning, my boy. There's trouble brewing down there that will make your latest brawl with The Circle look like a finger fight . . ."

"Tell me about it," Hunter said, leaning forward a little.

Pegg relit his pipe and through a swirl of smoke, began his strange story.

Chapter 3

Earlier that year, Pegg had been hired to pilot a medium-sized coastal freighter out of New Orleans down to the Amazon. Inside its hold were three tons of frozen shrimp -a birthday present, he had heard, for the Queen of Brasilia (the current name of Brazil) from her husband. While no self-respecting seaman like himself would ever be caught actually eating frozen shrimp, Pegg took on the job because it promised good pay for little work.

The first leg of the trip went well. The shrimp was delivered and payment received from the King of Brasilia himself. But then the monarch had a proposition for Pegg and his crew: Would they carry another load of cargo down to Buenos Aires? Being an old merchantman, Pegg knew that this was how the hauling business usually worked: one job frequently led to another. In fact, he had anticipated such a thing and thereby had leased the trawler for three months.

Pegg and his crew took on the King's cargo - heavily-sealed containers with invulnerable laser combination locks - at the Brasilia port of Macapa on the mouth of the Amazon and made Buenos Aires six days later.

"Now Buenos Aires is a very strange place these days," Pegg said to Hunter, pouring out another couple of drinks for them. "Everybody -men, women, kids and grandmothers-wears a uniform. Everybody is in the army."

The Brazilian king's cargo was off-loaded and again, Pegg was asked to take on another assignment. This one was to bring more sealed cargo to Lima, Peru. Pegg said he took

three full days to think the job over as it entailed sailing around the southern tip of South America through the treacherous waters off Cape Horn.

"I'd done it once before," Pegg said. "Vowed then I'd never do it again . . ."

But the lock-step military government of Buenos Aires promised a fortune (in gold, no less) for Pegg if he agreed to make the voyage. For despite their obvious military might, the Argentines no longer had sailable ships, much less anyone who had the skills to navigate the typhoon-like passage at the southern tip of the world.

Pegg put it to a vote to his crew. Seven men agreed to go,, four chose to jump ship in Buenos Aires. Pegg collected a' third of his payment in advance and set out, his crew supplemented by a half dozen Argentinean marines, none of whom could speak English.

The passage around the cape was predictably nightmarish, Pegg claimed. One crewman and a marine were washed overboard as the freighter was battered by hurricane-like winds and 25-foot waves. The sky was as dark as midnight even in the middle of the day. The waters were so churned up' that Pegg claimed he and his crew saw all kinds of strange creatures - giant eels, serpents and squid -riding on the surface. Sharks were jumping out of the water like flying fish. Seagulls and albatross continually smashed into the hull of the freighter, content, according to Pegg, to commit suicide rather than to drown in the hellish sea. For three straight days, Pegg and his crew did nothing but bail water, both by hand and diesel-driven pumps. Two men dropped dead of exhaustion. Another went insane and jumped overboard-Pegg said they inexplicably heard his screams for more than an hour . . .

Finally they made it to the southwestern-most islands at the tip of Chile where they docked and recovered for two days. Then they set out northward on the more placid waters of the Pacific.

"That's when the voyage started getting very strange," Pegg told Hunter.

The captain was asleep in his berth one night just as the

ship was halfway to Lima when he was awakened by an ear-splitting crash. Quickly out of bed and into his boots, Pegg ran to the bridge to find that his ship was now dead in the water. Right off its bow was no less than a battle cruiser.

"Looking back on it, if I had to guess, I would say it was of Italian design," Pegg recounted. "It might have been a Veneto-class warship. Very sleek-looking. Very modern. It looked like it was very fast for a ship of its size."

But the cruiser's crew was anything but a gang of friendly Italians. They had rammed Pegg's ship on purpose, and before Pegg had a chance to tie his boot lacings, a 50-man heavily-armed boarding party was crossing over to his small ship.

"Everyone of them looked alike," Pegg swore to Hunter. "Tall, blond, all the same age and weight. It was the strangest thing, as if they were all first cousins or something . . ."

No one in the boarding party said a word. They simply took up positions at various points on the freighter's deck after having shot the two Argentine marines who had dared to raise their guns to them. After that Pegg wisely ordered his crew not to resist.

On a given signal, the strangers commenced searching the ship. Under the light of the cruiser's powerful searchlights, they quickly hauled up the 12 sealed containers that Pegg had taken on in Buenos Aires and one man, an officer in charge of the raiding party, was able to disarm the supposedly foolproof laser locks.

To the surprise of Pegg and his crew, the 10 foot-by-10-foot boxes were filled to the brim with gold.