"Clancy, Tom - Op-Center 06 - State of Siege - with Steve Pieczenik" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

buffer, distributing food and offering health care were the
PKO'S top priorities. To Downer, being in the
field seemed less like a military operation than a
carnival. Come on, you warring or downtrodden
Third World peoples. Get your bread here, your
penicillin, your clean water. The circus feeling
was enhanced by tents that were topped with colorful banners
and local gawkers who weren't sure what to
make of it all. Though many of them took what was
offered, they looked like they wished it would just go away.
Violence was an expected and understood part of their
daily lives. Outsiders were not.
There was so little to do in Cambodia that Colonel
Ivan Georgiev, a high-ranking officer in the
Bulgarian People's Army, organized a
prostitution ring. They were protected
by officers of Pol Pot's renegade National
Army of Democratic Kampuchea, who needed
foreign currency to buy arms and supplies and were paid
25 percent of the take. Georgiev ran the ring from
tents erected behind his command post. Local girls
came for what were supposed to be radio UNTAC
language courses and stayed for an infusion of
foreign currency. That was where Downer first met both
Georgiev and Major Ishiro Sazanka.
Georgiev said that the soldiers of Japan and
Australia were his best customers, though the
Japanese tended to get rough with the girls and had
to be watched. "Polite sadists," the Bulgarian
had called them. Downer's uncle Thomas, who had
fought the Japanese as part of the 7th Australian
Division in the Southwest Pacific, would have
quarreled with that description. He didn't find the
Japanese at all polite.
Downer helped to recruit new "language
students" for the tents, while Georgiev's other
aides found different ways of getting girls to work
for them--including kidnapping. The Khmer Rouge
helped gather new girls whenever possible.
Except for this sideline, Downer found Cambodia
a bore. The United Nations guidelines
were too soft, too restrictive. As he'd learned
growing up on the docks of Sydney, there was only
one guideline that mattered. Did some son of a
bitch deserve a bullet in the head? If he
did, pull the trigger and go home. If
he didn't, what the hell were you doing there?
Downer took a last swallow of coffee and pushed the
heavy mug back along the vinyl-covered card table.
The coffee was good, black and bitter, the way he