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

They're hard enough to get to go off at all."
"So we're in a holding pattern?" the President asked.
"Yes, sir," the secretary of defense answered.
"We need to get a statement out, fast," the chief of staff said.
"Especially if we're pretty sure it wasn't a terrorist attack."
"Have one made up," the President said. "I'm going to go take a
nap. I figure this is gonna be a long one."
***
"Okay, Crichton, what do you have?"
The battalion headquarters of Second Battalion was collocated in
the armory with Charlie Company. At the moment the Battalion, which
should have had a staff sergeant and two specialists as a nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons team, was without any of the three.
Crichton had for the last year been the only trained NBC specialist in
the entire battalion. He reflected, somewhat bitterly, that while he'd
been holding down the work of a staff sergeant, a sergeant and six
other privates it hadn't been reflected in a promotion.
"None of my instruments are reading any increase in background
radiation here, sir," the specialist temporized. The meeting of the
battalion staff and company commanders was taking place in the
battalion meeting room, a small room with a large table and its walls
lined with unit insignias, awards and trophies. The question hit him as he
walked through the door. Crichton had been told only two minutes
before to "shag your ass over to battalion and report to the sergeant
major." At the time he'd been prepping his survey teams.
Radiological survey teams were taken from within standard
companies and sent out to find where the radiation was from a nuclear
attack. It was one of the many scenarios that the Army kept in its
playbook but rarely paid much attention to. The privates and one
sergeant for the company's team had been chosen months before and
should have trained in the interim. But there were always more
important things to do or train on, especially on a deployment. So he
was having to brief them at the same time as he was trying to read all
his instruments, prepare a NUCREP that was probably going to be
read by the Joint Chiefs and make sense of the readings, none of
which, in fact, made sense.
He knew all the officers in the room and, frankly, didn't like them
very much. The battalion operations officer, a major, stayed on active
duty as much as possible because his other job was as a school
teacher, elementary level, and soccer coach. As a major he made three
times as much as a civilian. He could run anybody in the battalion into
the ground but the only reason he managed to keep his head above
water in his present post was his S-3 sergeant, whose civilian job was
operations manager for a large tool and die distributor. The battalion
executive officer was a small town cop. Nice guy and, give him credit,
in good shape despite the Twinkies but not the brightest brick in the
load. How he made major was a huge question. The battalion
commander was a good manager and a decent leader but if you asked
him to "think outside the box" he'd get a box and stand outside of it
while he thought. And there was nothing, so far, that fit in any box