"Janet Morris - Crusaders In Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

revolution wasn't made in silk boxes. the misery Mao's CPR fanatics brought
with them like bayonets on the barrels of their ChiCom rifles would have been
allowed to spread unchecked, at least until it over-swept Queen Elizabeth's
domain and the entire West was Mao's if Mao could have been content with That.
Unfortunately, Chairman Mao had greater ambitions. He sought to export
revolution to every socialist crazy who could say Marghiella, and that
included Che Guevara (or what was left of his soul since Welch had called in
an air strike on Che's main Dissident camp north of New Hell). If the export
of revolution had stopped with rhetoric, perhaps AuAority could have looked
the other way.
But Mao was using drug money to fund his ideological allies - from Che on the
East Coast to the Shi'ite bloc landlocked in the Midwest. Once his
revolutionary exports reached New Hell, reached as far as the very Mortuary
itself, then something had to be done.
Narco-terrorism wasn't to be tolerated. the poppy fields of the Devil's
Triangle reached from Idi Amin's southern frontier to the Persian holdings in
the Midwest, and over to Mao's capital, the City of the Fire Dogs. From Dog
City, "China White" made its way south sad east by boat and caravan, dulling
the sensibilities of the damned.
Communism was one of the Devil's favorite inventions, and that made Welch's
assignment harder. Agency couldn't simply nuke the emerging Western ComBtoc
back to the stone age - Authority wouldn't permit it. Welch's assignment was
to stop the flow of drugs East, especially into New Hell, where the Dissidents
were attracting too much attention. So it was over-flights in this Huey,
piloted by a hot-dog Old Dead, Achilles. It was a covert crusade against drug
smugglers.
And it was going to take one hell of a long time to show any results.
Welch sat back from the computer bank in the belly of the Huey and reached
sideways for his pack of Camels and a swig of beer.
Machiavelli had done this to him: vendetta. More precisely, Machiavelli had
done it to Nichols, Welch's one-time ADC-sent Nichols out on a
search-and-destroy mission aimed at a specific caravan master who did business
out of Pompeii; seat him with an Achaean relic for a pilot and Tamara Burke,
whose sympathies in life and afterlife were questionable. (Whether she'd been
KGB or CIA, even Welch wasn't sure.)
Rather than let Nichols spend the rest of Eternity fighting Mao's considerably
greater resources, Welch had pulled every string he could think of to secure
command of this mission - even called an air strike on Che's base camp to
clear his decks in time to board Achillies' Huey.
Welch shouldn't have been here, fighting the Yellow Peril put in the boonies
when Agency had bigger fish to fry, not when be had so much unfinished
business with Julius Caesar's crew back in New Hell. But he owed Nichols This
much and more: Welch's miscalculation on their last mission had gotten Nichols
killed.
If Welch had been doing his job right - before and directly after Nichols'
death at Troy - he wouldn't have owed the soldier anything. But Welch had come
back from the Trojan Campaign with a case of something very like hysterical
amnesia. It had been Nichols who found Welch, sloppy drunk with Tanya - Tamara
Burke - in a New Hell bar and offered aid and comfort.
Aid and comfort in Hell were hard to find. Aid and comfort coming from a