"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

when Austen sat on it. The room was full of books in German. There was no telephone.
Austen placed her knife pack on the desk and opened it. Inside the leather folder were two
short knives and a long knife. They were her autopsy blades. The short knives were like
fish-fillet knives. The long one was a prosector's knife. It had a straight, heavy, carbon-steel
blade. The knife was two and a half feet long. It was almost like a short sword. It had a
comfortable handle made of ash wood, the same wood used in axe handles. She kept a
diamond sharpening stone in her prosection pack and a round edging steel. In case they asked
her to participate in the autopsy, she wanted to be ready with her own knife. She wet the
stone with water under the bathroom faucet, and ground her knife on it, testing its edge on
her thumbnail. When you touch the edge of a prosector's knife to your thumbnail, you want it
to stick, to grab the nail, the way a razor grabs. If the edge slides or bounces over your
thumbnail, it is not sharp.
The long knife made a whisking sound as it passed over the diamond block. Then she
refined its edge on the steel rod -- zing, zing, zing.
 West of Babylon
Iraq, Thursday, April 23

April in Iraq is normally dry and blue, but a cool front had moved down from the north,
bringing an overcast sky. The United Nations Special Commission Biological Weapons
Inspection Team Number 247 -- UNSCOM 247, it was called -- was traveling along a narrow
paved highway at the edge of the desert to the west of the Euphrates River, with its
headlights on, moving slowly. The convoy consisted of a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles.
They were painted white, and they displayed large black letters, 'U.N.,' stenciled on their
doors. The vehicles were plastered with gluelike dust.
The convoy arrived at a crossroads and slowed to a crawl. All the vehicles' turn signals
went on at the same time, blinking to the right. Vehicle by vehicle, the UNSCOM 247 convoy
turned to the northeast. Its destination was the Habbaniyah Air Base, near the Euphrates
River, where a United Nations transport aircraft waited to fly the inspectors out of the
country to Bahrain. There they would split up and go their separate ways.
A white Nissan Pathfinder 4├Ч4 in the middle of the convoy slowed when it came to the
crossroads. Its right turn signal came on, like the others. Then, suddenly, with a roar and a
whipping whirl of tires, the Nissan broke out of line. It swung left onto a ribbon of cracked tar
heading west, and departed at high speed into the desert.
A hard voice broke over the radio: 'Snap inspection!'
It was the voice of Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., U.S. Navy (Retired). Littleberry was
in his sixties. He was a tough-looking man ('the indestructible Littleberry,' his colleagues called
him), but his age showed in the gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on his nose and in the silver
at his temples. Littleberry worked as a paid consultant to various U.S. government agencies,
most especially to the Navy. He had top security clearances. Through his Navy connections,
he had been appointed an UNSCOM biological-weapons inspector. Now he was sitting in the
passenger seat of the breakaway Nissan, with a military map of Iraq draped across his knees.
He was holding a small electronic screen in his hands.
The Iraqi minders had been traveling behind the UNSCOM convoy in a rattletrap column of
vehicles -- beatup Toyota pickup trucks, smoking dysfunctional Renaults, hubcapless
Chevrolets, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan with tinted windows and shiny mag wheels.
Most of these vehicles had been seized in Kuwait by Iraq during the Gulf War, and they had
seen constant use by the Iraqi government in the years afterward. Some of the cars had been
cannibalized from junk parts, and they had body panels of differing colors.
When the Nissan broke away and Mark Littleberry's words 'snap inspection' crackled over
the radio, it created confusion among the Iraqi minders. Their vehicles came to a grinding halt,