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

murmured. "God help us all."
"You can see why Mossad has an interest in this," said Hal. "Jesus
Christ, sometimes I wish I only knew enough to be chasing street hoods like
in the old days."
April turned back to the communications console.
"I'm going to contact Jack Grimaldi," she said, "and see if there's any
possible way to reach Mack with this."
Hal's stogie was in need of a light again, and again he forgot about
it. "We have nothing on Eve Aguilar to pass along to him, right?" he said.
"Right," replied April as she activated the sending unit. "The Traveler
was the last we know for sure that Eve was alive."

* * *

Jack Grimaldi stood at the rail along a deserted stretch of flight deck
of the aircraft carrier USS Fearless. The supercarrier was cruising
Mediterranean waters, 130 miles off Libya's Gulf of Sidra, on White House
sanctioned maneuvers. The Fearless glided as smoothly as a skater on ice.
The dark sea, far below Grimaldi, was a choppy panoply of sparkling wet
stars and moonlight that mirrored the night sky overhead.
The Fearless was a floating city. The warship was home to five thousand
sailors and airmen for months at a time. The five-deck seagoing airport was
a warren of passages, offices, shops, mess halls and crew quarters; a
numbering system had been devised to keep people from getting lost. Someone
had mentioned to Grimaldi that the Eiffel Tower, if laid on its side, would
overhang the flight deck by only five feet.
The Stony Man flyboy was smoking a cigarette, trying to relax.
The angled black flight deck was quiet at this hour. The big flattop's
two-hundred-thousand horsepower engines, turning her four shafts with their
seventy-thousand-pound propellers, could not be heard up here. The incessant
roaring, banging and hissing of steam catapult launches and the thumping and
snapping of cable-arrested landings, which had been going on since
Grimaldi's airlift to the ship from Tunis via a Sikorsky 70L shipboard
helicopter, had only minutes ago been called to a halt until more exercises
tomorrow morning.
Grimaldi experienced a momentary sense of oneness with the Med, the
alluring but historically much fought-over sea.
He could not relax.
That moon overhead, that same panoply of stars, shone down on Mack
Bolan at this moment, wherever he was.
If he was still alive.
No way could Grimaldi relax, knowing what he did.
Grimaldi was joined at the rail by an admiral named Fieldhouse. The
task force commander was the only man onboard the Fearless who knew what
Grimaldi knew.
"They told me in Communications that you had to speak with me, Mr.
Grimaldi."
Jack did not take his eyes away from the panorama of Mediterranean
night.
"What are my chances of violating Libyan airspace without detection?