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

backed by high end modeling that had taken a series of servers nearly
fifteen minutes to run, said that the FEMA estimate was low.
By nearly an order of magnitude.
***
"We just picked up some dust," Crichton yelled, cracking the door
on the helicopter and holding out the wand on his Geiger counter.
"Hold it there."
"You sure this is safe?" the Emergency Services guy shouted, his
voice muffled by his chemical suit and almost impossible to hear over
the sound from the rotors.
"No," Crichton responded. "But you want to die in bed?"
The Emergency Services guy, Crichton hadn't caught his name, was
used to responding to spills on I-4 in Orlando. He knew all about how
to contain a dumped tanker truck of carbon fluoride. He even knew
about containment and cleanup of a dumped load of radioactive
material. But responding to a nuke was pretty much outside of his
normal job description.
It was for Crichton, too. But he at least had manuals to go by. And
he'd boned up, fast, as soon as he got detailed to the mission. He knew
the sections on ground survey backwards and forwards but all he knew
about aerial survey was from the books and they assumed that the
helicopter had been fitted with external systems. No external systems
were available so, leafing to the back of the manual, he'd found the
section on "field expedient aerial survey." Which was much less detailed
than the standard methods. Get close to the destroyed zone, staying
upwind from the site, kick up some dust and get a reading. If it was
hot, back the fuck up.
His counter was reading normal.
"This isn't a nuke," he muttered.
"What?" the pilot shouted. There were internal headsets but they
wouldn't fit over his gear.
"It's clear!" he yelled back. "Go in closer."
"How close?"
"As close as you can get," Crichton said. "Or set it down and I'll
walk!"
The chopper inched forward, slowly, as Crichton kept his wand
out against the prop-wash. Still nothing.
"Set her down!" Crichton yelled. "We're still clear! I need a ground
reading."
"You sure?"
"There is no radiation!"
"I've got the same," the Emergency Services guy said, looking over
at Crichton. "This doesn't make sense!"
"No, shit," the specialist muttered.
"Wait," the copilot called back. He had been looking out to the
front as the pilot searched for a reasonably flat place to land. "You can
see something at the base of the dust cloud."
The base of the cloud was dark, obscuring the light from the sun
that still hadn't reached zenith. But near the ground there was a deeper
darkness. There was a crater as well, one that looked very much like