"Ian Watson - Caucus Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

insurrection in America, as reported by short-wave broadcasts.

Our driver, Jock Donaldson, a freckled redheaded Scot with a hard-looking face
and alert gray eyes, belonged to the British security service. Jock had been at
Luton airport on unspecified "business," and found himself assigned to us. How
intently the three of us listened to that radio.

The right-wing militias were not resting on their laurels, merely waiting for a
paralyzed nation to capitulate. Those embittered former Green Berets and Navy
Seals, and serving officers and soldiers too, and Good Old Boy Sheriffs and
neo-nazis and survivalists and white supremacists were using their arsenals of
weaponry. They had their lists of targets. Smoke was pluming from federal
buildings. Victims, pulled from their beds, were hanging from utility poles.
Roadblocks, barricades, sabotage, ethnic cleansing, massacre...the whole wild
whale had heaved up from the depths. The militias had been busy overnight.

It was deep winter in Idaho and thereabouts, but unfortunately no blizzards were
raging. Midwinter was hardly the ideal time for an uprising. But now was when
the Motorola prototype had been ripe for the plucking, and the militias had
lucked out as regards the weather. Snow lay across CAUC-US, yet under clear
skies. The militias had copters, snowmobiles, army vehicles. Local military
bases had mutinied.

Eventually we came to Cambridge, negotiated the ring road, and arrived at the
science park, serene under shining snow.

The park housed a hundred enterprises in electronics and software and biotech
and high-tech instrument development. Designer buildings nestled amidst wide
swathes of white lawn and frozen water and leafless groves.

Matsushima U.K. was a low-slung palace of reflective bronzed glass supported by
leaning buttresses. Military Land Rovers and an armored personnel carrier stood
outside.

Incongruously in this setting, soldiers were patrolling. A big satellite dish on
the back of a truck by the main door of the palace seemed like some mobile radar
intended to warn of missile attack.

The director of Matsushima U.K., Carl Newman, was in his late forties. Urbane
yet brutal good looks. He wore an Axmani suit, and looked like some millionaire
businessman in a movie who spends time in a gym, mobile phone strapped to an
exercise bike or weight-lifting frame. He scrutinized Outi as if contemplating
treating her exotic self to champagne, ravishing her, then losing interest
utterly. He eyed me with the impartial hauteur of a lion into whose den a mouse
has crept.
In his office we met up with a computer security specialist from our London
embassy who had managed to reach Cambridge, a lanky Texan called Bill Turtle.
Also present was a dapper Japanese named Hashimoto.

"The future," Newman informed us over coffee, "is one of microcommunities linked