"Michener, James - The Bridges at Toko-ri" - читать интересную книгу автора (Michener James A)

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A Fawcett Crest Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright й 1953 by James A. Michener

All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

ISBN 0-449-20651-3

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Fawcett Crest Edition: April 1973
First Ballantine Books Edition: June 1982
Twenty-seventh Printing: September 1993


To MARSHALL U. BEEBE

Jet Pilot


Contents
Contents 3
SEA 3
LAND 3
SKY 3
About the Author 3



SEA
THE SEA was bitter cold. From the vast empty plains of Siberia howling winds roared down to lash the mountains of Korea, where American soldiers lost on patrol froze into stiff and awkward forms. Then with furious intensity the arctic wind swept out to sea, freezing even the salt spray that leaped into the air from crests of falling waves.
Through these turbulent seas, not far from the trenches of Korea, plowed a considerable formation of American warships. A battleship and two cruisers, accompanied by fourteen destroyers to shield against Russian submarines, held steady course as their icy decks rose and fell and shivered in the gale. They were the ships of Task Force 77 and they had been sent to destroy the communist-held bridges at Toko-ri.
Toward the center of this powerful assembly rode two fast carriers, the cause of the task force and its mighty arm. Their massive decks pitched at crazy angles, which for the present made takeoffs or landings impossible. Their planes stood useless, huddled together in the wind, lashed down by steel cables.
It was strange, and in some perverse way resolutely American, that these two carriers wallowing in the dusk bore names which memorialized not stirring victories but humiliating defeats, as if by thus publishing her indifference to catastrophe and her willingness to surmount it, the United States were defying her enemies. To the east, and farther out to sea, rode the Hornet, whose predecessor of that name had absorbed a multitude of Japanese bombs and torpedoes, going down off Guadalcanal, while the inboard carrier, the Savo, would forever remind the navy of its most shameful defeat in history, when four cruisers sank helpless at Savo Island, caught sleeping by the audacious Japanese.
Now, as night approached the freezing task force, the bull horn on the Savo rasped out, УPrepare to launch aircraft!Ф And it was obvious from the way her deck was arranged that the carrier already had some planes in the skies over Korea, and every man who watched the heaving sea wondered how those planes could possibly get back aboard.
The bull horn, ignoring such problems, roared, УPrepare to launch helicopter!Ф and although the deck pitched in abandon, rotors began to turn, slowly at first and then with lumbering speed.
Now the great carrier struck a sea trough and slid away, her deck lurching, but relentlessly the bull horn cried, УMove jets into position for launching,Ф and the catapult crew, fighting for footing on the sliding deck, sprang swiftly into action, inching two heavy Banshees onto the catapults, taking painful care not to allow the jets to get rolling, lest they plunge overboard with some sudden shifting of the deck.
УStart jet engines,Ф roared the insistent bull horn.
The doctor, who had to be on deck in case of crash, looked at the heaving sea and yelled to the crane operator, УThey may launch these jets, but theyТll never get Тem back aboard.Ф
The craneman looked down from his giant machine, which could lift a burning plane and toss it into the sea, and shouted, УMaybe theyТre planning to spend the night at some air force field in Korea. Along with the ones that are already up.Ф
But at this instant all ships of the task force swung in tight circles and headed away from the open sea, straight for the nearby cliffs of Korea, and when the turn was completed, the deck of the Savo mysteriously stabilized. The effects of wind and sea neutralized each other, and planes returning from the bombardment of Korea now had a safe place to land.
But before they could do so the bull horn cried eerily into the dusk, УLaunch helicopter!Ф and the crazy bird, its two rotors spinning so slowly the blades could be seen, stumbled into the air, and the horn cried, УLaunch jets!Ф