"Дон Пендлтон. The Libya Connection ("Палач" #48) " - читать интересную книгу автора

Grimaldi was now on call aboard a U.S. carrier cruising the Med.
And April Rose was waiting, keeping vigil...
She looked at the clock anyway. 1430 hours.
With the six-hour time difference, that made it 2030 hours Libyan time.
April Rose was the person whose job was to keep the massive, complex
mechanism of Stony Man Farm functioning smoothly. She was also a woman who
happened to be very much in love with Mack Bolan.
She tried valiantly to keep her worry under wraps, the way most of the
men did who worked around her. She tried not to be a woman.
But it didn't work.
She fretted about Mack Bolan every time her man took off on a new
mission in this new war against the forces of international horror.
Hal Brognola came into the room. Stony Man Farm's DC liaison did not
directly confront April's inquiring look.
Hal sank into a swivel chair by a smaller console. He stared straight
ahead without speaking. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers, but both
the stogie and April seemed utterly forgotten.
After a minute, she quietly said, "Hal, what is it?"
He looked at her.
"I just spoke with Layton, the major who's handling this out of the
Pentagon's NCB office. Internal Affairs pushed for a briefing and called me
in."
"Do we know what it is that Jericho has?"
Brognola finally lit his cigar, but slowly, methodically, as if
concentrating on the smallest detail of the procedure.
"The bad news that Jericho has is a live virus called Strain-7. It is a
pneumonic virus that has been developed to thrive on dry viscera. Its
presence in the human body forces the body's water content to places of
maximum dehydration from the heat of body friction. This dries out the flesh
real nice for Strain-7. For the victim, it's either death from thirst in ten
to twelve minutes, or drowning, literally, from the water intake you need to
beat the dehydration fever. That takes two or three minutes.
"The worst minutes imaginable. And the stuff can infect entire
populations in days or even hours. It would be an appalling end."
"It's ours, this virus, isn't it?" April asked coldly.
"Yes, April. Well, it was. But it isn't anymore. Now it's Jericho's."
The stocky man sat stiffly in the swivel chair, turning the seat idly, in
fact nervously. "Okay, we admit it, it's government stuff, acquired from a
scientist in the NCB group. The army has been storing it mainly as a
resource to assist in the development of its antidote by the government. The
original scientist who produced the stuff, as a byproduct of his NCB work,
is dead. Died of dehydration. Took about an hour..."
"Hal, why does our country get involved in a horror like that?"
"Ask the boys in the NCB outfit," grunted the fed. "As chief of
security at the base where the virus was being stored, Thatcher was able to
divert the junk to Houston under military guard. It was loaded on a private
jet - Jericho's jet, we now know - and Jericho's merc security force was
standing by to take it over when that jet landed in Libya."
April felt a sense of terror.
"God help the Mideast if that virus falls into Libyan hands," she