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

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 HumveesтАФ"

"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 materialsтАФhe 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.

"Ican't slow down," Crichton replied. "I need to set up a radiological station before anybody can go
outside evenafter 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 Kinko's.

"Falling debris," Crichton asked. "We don'tknow 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 the suddenly irrelevant papers on his
desk. "Send Sergeant Burell around to get everybody inside until the all clear sounds. Then get with the
rest of the platoon sergeants in the Swamp. Wolf, head over to battalion, see what's up."

"Where's the CO?" Crichton asked, looking at the closed door at the back of the room.

"At breakfast with the platoon leaders and the battalion commander," the first sergeant answered, dryly.
"We can handle this until they get back. Go."

FLASH is the highest priority communication in the military directory, superceding even Operational
Immediate. Satellites in orbit noted the explosion and computers on the ground automatically categorized
it as a nuclear explosion.

"Holy shit!" the Air Force sergeant monitoring the nuclear attack warning console muttered, his stomach
dropping. In the old days he would have picked up a phone. Now he hit three buttons and confirmed