"John Ringo - Into the Looking Glas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

metal, probably one of the old girders that held up the roof of the
parade hall, then relative silence except for a distant screaming. He
waited a moment, catching creaking from the old building but figuring it
was as safe as it was going to get, then climbed out from under his desk
and headed for the company commander's office.
The first sergeant and the operations sergeant were just pulling
themselves out from under their own desks when Crichton burst
through the door without knocking, normally a cardinal offense but he
figured this was as good a time as any to ignore the directive.
"Nobody goes outside for at least thirty minutes, Top," he said,
bouncing from one foot to the other in the doorway. "And I need my
survey teams, that's Ramage, Guptill, Casey, Garcia and Lambert. And
as soon as it's clear I need a platoon to start filling sandbags for the
Humvees-"
"Slow down," the first sergeant said, sitting down in his chair and
then standing up to brush crumbs from the drop ceiling off of it. The
first sergeant was tall and lanky. Up until the last year he'd been the
chief investigator for the Lake County Sheriff's Department. When they
got deployed, ignoring the Soldiers and Sailors' Act, he'd given the
sheriff his okay to appoint his deputy to the job. So when they got back
he took a cut in pay and went back to work as a sergeant. Give him a
crime scene and he knew where he was at. He even was pretty good at
recovering the company from a mortar attack or a convoy ambush. He
was one of the best guys in the world at training his troops to sniff out
hidden explosives, weapons and other prohibited materials-he thought
of it as shaking down a dealer's house. But nuclear attacks were a new
one for him and it was taking him a minute to get his bearings.
"I can't slow down," Crichton replied. "I need to set up a
radiological station before anybody can go outside even after the first
thirty minutes."
"What's with the thirty minutes?" Staff Sergeant Wolf asked. The
operations sergeant was medium height and well over what the Army
considered acceptable weight for his height. And it wasn't muscle, like
the CO's driver who was a fricking tank, it was fat. But he was pretty
sharp. Not unflappable, he was clearly taking even more time to adjust
than the first sergeant, but smart. When he wasn't in one third-world
shit hole or another he was a manager of a Kinkos.
"Falling debris," Crichton asked. "We don't know it's a nuke. It
probably was but it could have been an asteroid hit. They throw chunks
of burning rock into the stratosphere and they take a while to come
down."
"Top?" Crichton heard from behind him. The chemical specialist
turned around and saw that the mortar platoon sergeant had come up
behind him while he was talking. The platoon sergeant, a staff sergeant
who was a delivery manager for UPS when he was home, showed a
physique developed from years of throwing often quite heavy boxes
through the air. It was running to fat now that he worked behind a desk
ten months out of the year, but he still was a big guy you wouldn't want
to meet in a dark alley.
"Get Crichton his survey teams," the first sergeant said, looking at