"Alan Williams - Holy of Holies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Alan)

'How do you mean?'

'Well, let's take it step by step. This fellow Newby's setting up an operation
in which he's offering a number of freelance pilots at least fifty thousand
pounds - if, as he says, the down-payment runs into five figures and is a
fifth of the total. The only sort of operation that would justify that kind of
money is something either highly illegal or highly dangerous, and probably
both.

'But for some reason they're in a hurry, and any operation conceived in haste
is not well blessed. It sounds as though they've got a deadline to meet, and
that the whole team had been lined up ready to go, when one of them dropped
out at the last minute. Then you run into an old colleague in a pub. You both
go out to dinner and he makes a phone call to his boss. Next night you again
have dinner with him and the meeting is set up. They have a chance to look you
over and ask a few questions. Can you fly a Hercules? Can you land and take
off on rough terrain and fly solo - too low for comfort, with a full pay-load?
Three pilots so far - which means three planes, with a total pay-load of over
sixty tons - always assuming that there aren't others lined up whom you
haven't met. Sixty tons of what, Terry?'

'Actually, I did try to ask them. I forgot to mention it. Newby just told me
to relax - that it wasn't drugs, anyway. He promised me that.'

'I'm sure Mr Newby's promises are worth a lot! And we can almost certainly
rule out drugs. Christ, sixty tons of the stuff- even grass -' he waved his
hand. 'It's too big to think about. Anyway, the professionals would go about
it properly -they wouldn't go lugging the stuff around in a fleet of bloody
great C-130s. And they wouldn't, with respect to you, go recruiting in a pub
and popping the question on the second meeting.

'Guns, as you suggested, are more likely. There's also gold. Even copper. And
uranium, of course. Once you reduce it to an ordinary large-scale smuggling
operation, it could be any number of things.'

'Do you think it has to be illegal?'

Rawcliff laughed. 'You'd best go and see an international lawyer about that
one, Terry. It rather depends on what countries you're flying from and to. As
a serving member of Her Majesty's Forces, you'd be in the shit whichever way
you turn - but whether you'd be committing an offence here, I don't know.
International law is about as clear as a novel by Virginia Woolf. For
instance, Britain is one of the few countries which has no law against its
subjects enlisting as mercenaries in foreign armies, or even against them
being recruited here. And as far as our people doing naughty things abroad is
concerned, we leave that to the extradition laws, which are pretty clumsy.

'So, if you ask my opinion, for what it's worth, I'd say that if you go
through with this, you run two distinct risks. The first you take as a pilot,
and that you can only calculate when you know what the run is, and what sort