"Steve Perry - Matador 01 - The Man Who Never Missed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

understand, even if Khadaji had hours to explain it to him.
Unlike the first, the second man wore his armorтАФand class two would
stop a spetsdod's dartтАФbut the armor wasn't perfect. Gloves and hoods were
designed to overlap but the material had to be thin in places for a man to
move; knees and elbows and shoulders had to bend or rotate. When the
soldier stretched, after two minutes, Khadaji fired. The fle-chette entered the
thin fold behind the man's left knee, a line only a few millimeters wide. It
was a difficult shot, but an expert with a spetsdod could cut a dragonfly in
half in mid-airтАФand hit both pieces as they fell. Point-shooting had been
brought to a peak higher than craft, if not art, with the invention of the
spetsdod: the word itself meant "point death." The brush came alive with the
canvas-rip sound of a Parker carbine on full automatic; bushes and trees blew
apart, explosive shells chopped them down from waist-level. Khadaji was on
the ground and crawling before the first leaves fluttered to the forest floor.
The third man had been spooked. Maybe he'd heard or sensed something,
maybe one of the others managed to trigger a com. It didn't matter. He was
shooting at shades, but he would have called for backup. Khadaji crawled at
right angles to the line of fire until he was clear, then stood and ran. Thorns
tried to dig into the tough orthoskins, but failed. He dodged trees and larger
shrubs, but ran over the small stuff. There was no time for finesse, he had to
be a long way from here when help arrived.
He cleared the forest and was among a line of warehouses in the storage
district. He stopped. Behind him, half a klick back, the scared soldier was still
cutting shrubbery with his weapon.
There were few ways to disguise a spetsdod on the back of the hand.
Khadaji loosened the plastic flesh which connected the two weapons to his
body and pulled the flechette guns free. He found a trash bin full of scrap
metal and buried the weapons deeply in it. It wouldn't matter if they were
found since he had othersтАФthe better part of a case of them from the
shipment he'd stolen. Twenty spetsdods and ten thousand rounds of Spasm
dartsтАФand that number, ten thousand, was very important.
Although he felt naked without the weapons, Khadaji stepped out onto the
street as if he owned it and started toward the Jade Flower. He would have
plenty of time to get there and collect another pair of spetsdods before his
last station was due. So far, he'd only taken out five of the Confed's finest,
and he needed at least eight more to maintain his schedule. He wanted to
average a hundred a week, but it was getting harder all the time. He'd been
at it for almost six months and the first troops would be coming out of lock
pretty soon. When that began to happen, it would be over. Even if the confed
military tried to lid it, word would eventually get out that only one man's
description kept coming up. They wouldn't believe it, of course, not at first,
but it would plant a seed. They would never admit that one man could
mimic hundredsтАФmilitary PR would smash the idea flat, that thousands of
trained troops could be downed by a single assassin. But if they knew, it
would be over fast. They were looking for guerrillas in packs, not the owner
and operator of the Jade Rower, the biggest recreational chemical pub in the
city, a man whose business depended on the military, as customers and
patrons. Soldiers needed rec-chem almost as much as they needed sex and
the Jade Flower supplied both in abundance. More than a few of the Sub-
Befals spent time there. Khadaji made certain that upranks got the best