"Joel Rosenberg - Hidden Ways 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenberg Joel C)

had marked the Lance's descent through the wispy layer of clouds now more than a mile overhead.

Greg put the plane into what he claimed was a shallow, one-minute turn, and while the turn indicator seemed to say he was telling
the truth, Ian's stomach was sure he was lying through his teeth. It felt like he was laying the plane over on its side.

Still, through the bug-spattered windshield, it gave Ian a good view of Hardwood. What there was of it. A granary and a dozen or
so stores lining Main Street on the western side of town; the municipal swimming poolтАФwhich probably got used all of two,
maybe three, weeks of the year, given the weatherтАФand the football field and school on the other, and between them perhaps a
few hundred houses on the elm-lined streets.

"What's the population?" Greg asked. "About fifty?"

Ian chuckled. "Not quite that small. A couple of thousand." That was, maybe, a little misleading. Hardwood served the
surrounding farms and tinier towns, as well, enough people that it had its own, albeit small, high school. The new clinic next to
Doc Sherve's house had the only emergency room between Thompson and Grand Forks, staffed by overpaid doctors from a
commercial service on weekends and during Doc's increasingly frequent vacations.

But the airport, such as it was, was little more than a pair of hangars, and an asphalt landing strip about a thousand yards long,
broken in spots where weeds had pushed through.

It looked a lot shorter from the air than it had from the ground.

"How long is that?" Ian asked.

Greg glanced down at the Jeppson chart in his lap. "Twenty-three hundred feet. No problem."

"You can put it down there?" It looked awfully short.

"Down?" Greg sniffed. "Down is not a problem. I could look up in the manual what the specs are for landing this thing if you
don't have to clear a fifty-foot obstacle, but it's not going to be more man a thousand feet. Landing's not a problem. Now, taking
off's a different story... Might be a bit tight taking off on a hot day with a full load, no wind, and a full tank, but hey, it's cool out,
it'll be just me in here, there's only about forty, forty-five gallons in the tanks, and I've got about five, ten knots of headwind.
Easy."

He offered Ian an AltoidтАФIan declined with a quick headshake; they were too strong for his tastesтАФ then popped a couple of the
pill-like mints in his own mouth before closing the tin and dropping it to his lap.

"Two kinds of pilots," Greg said, as he reached forward and flipped the switch for the landing gear, nervously tapping against the
three green lights until they came on. "The kind that's made a gear-up landing, and..."

"The kind that hasn't?"

"Nah. The kind that will," he said, easing back on the throttle and reflexively pointing toward first one dial, then another. "Which
is why they charge more for the insurance on these retractable-gear jobs. Okay; looks good." He pushed the nose down, then up as
he eased back on the throttle. "And we're... down." The plane bounced once, then settled down to a bumpy roll across the asphalt.

Greg let it almost come to a stop, then turned it around and eased it off the runway before cutting the power.