"Watson-TheAmberRoom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

The Nazis had a fetish about mountains as last redoubts -- about Eagle's Nests,
and high eyries. Wouldn't the perfect place to hide the amber room be a mountain
range where aircraft could not easily maneuver and which advancing tanks would
avoid? My dreams imposed upon me the conviction that this was so, and that the
hiding place could only be found from the air, bird-like, Godlike, in solitary
flight. When I contemplated finding that missing room I was a boy again,
enraptured.

Thus might Amber's death be exorcised.

Naturally I didn't talk to Max about this method of coping with tragedy. He had
his own means of handling grief. Max immersed himself in design work --
especially as regards the; catastrophic failure of the airfoil which had plunged
Isabelle to her death. I 'was fairly sure that he would search in vain for the
cause. His feel for gliders -- at the edge of possibility -- was less than mine.
I'd always been able to reach that little way beyond him. Now I would reach a
long way, from England to former East Prussia.

I simply had to visit the last known location of the amber room. Surely I would
meet some aficionado of amber who knew more than I could find out in England.
Close to Kaliningrad was the seaside town of Yantarny -literally, Amberville.
That's the source of ninety percent of the world's present-day supplies of
amber. If you rub amber, it develops a static electric charge. Kaliningrad was
drawing me like a magnet.

I told Max that I was going to Germany to revisit my grandmother's roots and to
investigate the possibility of exporting hang-gliders. I wouldn't try to fool
Max that I was hoping to sell our products in those lake-strewn boggy Baltic
flatlands where the economies are bumping awkwardly along! Than ks to Gran-Annie
I was fluent in German. If English wasn't understood much in Kaliningrad, German
should be a reasonable bet. After the Second World War it's true that most of
the German population of the Kaliningrad region was either dead or expelled or
sent to Siberia, but since the demise of the Soviet Union, Kaliningrad had
became a free port to attract prosperity, and the closest source of prosperity
was. Germany.

With a sail secured on top of the Range Rover, I drove through Germany, then
Poland. In Warsaw I was obliged to garage my transport. Whatever its free port
status, the Kaliningrad region was militarily sensitive due to being the most
westerly redoubt of the rump of Russia. The Polish border wasn't open to
ordinary civilian road traffic -- and I hardly intended to emulate Matthias
Russ, or whatever his name was, by hang-gliding my way into the area.

Ach: those Baltic flatlands! The nearest mountains were the Carpathians. A tidy
way to the south, those sprawl across a thousand kilometers from Poland to
Slovakia into Romania. The amber room had to be somewhere in the Carpathians.
But without some clue even a person of special perception could spend ten years
searching: that range from the air.

I allowed myself two weeks. Continued absence would amount to a betrayal of Max,