"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 05 - Ballance of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

been quiet but attentive for most of the meeting, which was
also attended by Intelligence Chief Bob Herbert,
his colleagues Naval Intelligence Chief
Donald Breen and Army Intelligence head
Phil Prince, and August's friend Air Force
Intelligence legend Pete Robinson.
Now Rodgers was simply quiet. He was poking his
chopsticks at a plate of salt-fried string
beans. His rugged face was drawn beneath the
close-cropped saltand-pepper hair and his eyes were
downtumed. Both men had recently returned from
Lebanon. Rodgers and a small party of soldiers
and civilians had been field testing the new
Regional Op-Center when they were captured and
tortured by Kurdish extremists. With the help of
an Israeli operative, August and
Striker were able to go into the Bekaa Valley and get
them out. When their ordeal was over and an attempt
to start a war between Turkey and Syria had been
averted, Gen-
26 OP-CENTER
eral Rodgers had drawn his pistol and executed
the Kurdish leader out of hand. On the flight back
to the United States, August had prevented a
distraught General Rodgers from turning the handgun
on himself.
August was using a fork to twirl up his pork lo
mein. After watching the prison guards eat while
he starved in Vietnam, if he never saw a
chopstick again it would be too soon. As he ate, his
blue eyes were on his companion. August understood
the effects of combat and captivity, and he knew
only too well what torture could do to the mind,
let alone the body. He didn't expect
Rodgers to recover quickly. Some people never recovered
at all. When the depth of their dehumanization
became apparent-both in terms of what had been done
to them and what they may have been forced to do-many former
hostages took their own lives. Liz Gordon
had put it very well in a paper she'd published in

International Amnesty Journal: A hostage is
someone who has gone from walking to crawling. To walk
again, to face even simple risks or routine
authority figures, is often more difficult than
lying down and giving up.
August picked up the metal teapot. " 'Want
some?"'"
"Yes, please."
August kept an eye on his friend as he turned the