"Ian Douglas - The Heritage Trilogy 01 - Semper Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas Ian)

II, declaring it to be unnecessary. Public opinion, however—the opinion of Americans who remembered
names like Wake, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima—had secured a place for the Corps, by law, in the National
Security Act of 1947. And that wasn’t the first time Washington politicians had tried to kill or dismember
the Corps. Congress alone had tried it on no fewer than five separate occasions between 1829 and the
1940s.

And each time, public opinion, in one way or another, had played a part in rescuing the Corps from the
budget cutters’ hatchets.

“I know that look,” the admiral said. “You’ve got something in mind, or you wouldn’t be in here waving
your arms at me.”

Warhurst bent over, picked up the briefcase he’d set on the thick-carpeted floor when he’d entered the
CJCS’s office ten minutes before, and set it on Gray’s desk. Touching the lock points, he opened it wide
and extracted his PAD, which he slid across the desk, screen up.

Gray picked the thin panel up, his touch awakening the screen. He frowned as he read the document
displayed there.

“Mars? You want the Marines to go to…Mars?”

“To safeguard American interests there, CJ. The same way the Marines have safeguarded American
interests all over this world.”

Gray touched the turn-page corner of the PAD. “How big an operation is this?”

“The logistics are laid out on page five,” Warhurst said. “I’m suggesting one platoon, twenty-three men.
Plus an HQ element. Thirty men in all.”

The admiral paged through several more screens. “Very complete.” He looked up at Warhurst, one
white eyebrow askance. “And it’s certainly topical. But you can’t be serious.”

Warhurst reached across the desk and tapped a touch-point on the Personal Access Device. There was
a moment while the PAD searched for the office’s network channels, and then the flatscreen behind the
admiral’s desk flashed to a new set of uploading images. Gray swiveled in his chair to watch the display,
which tinted the room with its ruddy glow.

Red sand and ocher stones littered an uneven, rolling ground as far as the eye could see, beneath a sky
gone eerily pink and wan. An American flag hung from a mast in front of a cluster of pressurized
domehuts, a tiny symbol of national defiance stirring listlessly in the thin wind. On the horizon, miles away
but looming large enough to seem much closer, was the mountain. It reminded Warhurst sharply of Ayers
Rock in the Australian outback, monolithic, vast, and red in the distance-chilled sunlight. The surface was
sand-polished and smooth, its original angles, planes, and swellings worn down by the wind erosion of
five hundred millennia, but the features were still discernible.

Or so some said. There were still voices—and powerful ones, at that—insisting that the so-called
Cydonian Face, the Face on Mars, was a natural feature, a kind of cosmic prank elicited by shadows,
coincidence, and the irrepressible human will to believe.

This despite the latest reports from Cydonia Base.