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

check in wasn't proof, not in the mind of a guy who d been laying her flat
while Nichols was on ice somewhere for ... how long? Long enough, that was
sure.
Nichols checked his webbing and what he'd hung on it. He could probably have
done die whole job himself, with what he was carrying. He had an Alice over
his back with a SADEM-Special Atomic Demolition Emergency Munition - that
would end any argument, except how he'd come by it He had every electronic
gizmo Welch could come up with. He had a det cord bracelet around his wrist
and a high-pressure chemical delivery system next to die survival knife in his
boot.
Recon had a tendency to turn into more than that, every now and again, and
Nichols wanted to be ready.
Crouched among bushes bending violently with the chopper's take-off (even
Achilles couldn't alter physics), Nichols checked his weapons-belt-front-line
kit was ninety rounds of 7.62 NATO in life, and that was what Nichols took
with him on a mission like this, whenever he had a choice.
Then he started scuttling through the bushes on the slope, beyond which he
could see the caravan making camp. Get in there without being seen, find
Tamara, make sure she didn't have a problem she couldn't handle, and give her
Welch's message that she was to maneuver one of the two Sumerians to the
pick-up sight and bring the OD onboard, nothing more.
Welch didn't see any reason to kill the two Old Dead, probably because
Achilles was so intent on just that. So it had become a command decision, an
internecine struggle on which command authority in the field depended.
Personally, Nichols didn't think you could teach Achilles nothin'; he didn't
even see a reason to try. Nichols could get the Huey back to New Hell, if the
one lesson Achilles might possibly understand became appropriate. Hand on his
M14, Nichols prowled, pumping himself up for a covert entry where there was no
night or cover to shield him and plenty of nervous sentries around a caravan
expecting to pick up a fortune's worth of drugs.
He had a suppressor on his customized auto-rifle, because that was the way you
did this sort of mission, and he kept checking it as he scrambled down the
rocky slope. He also had a button in his ear and a mike on his collar, so that
he could voice-actuate communications with the chopper.
The odd sky, here where Paradise seemed skewered in place among clouds too
dense and too low not to generate ground fog, threw him back in time and
place, among the lush fauna of this volcanic, mountainous shore.
Jungle it wasn't, not the real sort, but it was close enough and Nichols had
been Sniper Research, despite inter-departmental hassles, for a while when
he'd been alive.
He was trembling with chemical hype from his nervous system by the time he
reached the edge of the caravan, stopping on an overhang spawning a waterfall
that generated some serious white noise, this close. Stopping to take a
look-see, wriggling on his belly over rocks and past rocks and over lush
grass, getting closer...
"Yo, Nichols!"
The sudden sputter of Achilles' voice in his ear-piece made Nichols flinch.
His foot dislodged a rock, which hit another that tumbled down toward the
water and fell over the falls...
"Not now, droolface," Nichols muttered into his collar, where his mike was.