"Linda Evans - Sleipnir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

across the opposite wall.
The surface was jagged, and unused to light. Even the shadows it cast were wrong. Nothing I
could put my finger on, exactly . . .
I got to thinking about the marks Bjornssen had made with his surveyor's tape, and a feeling I didn't
stop to analyze hauled me to my feet. I piled my gear in a heap and went back to verify the last marker,
which my guide had made about ten feet the other side of the chimney.
Jumping over the gaping hole gave me a case of serious sweats—which was stupid. I was too smart
—or too well trained, anyway—to let fear get the best of me like some half-brained Stone Age savage.
So I worked harder at reminding myself that I was a modern, civilized, highly trained combat soldier on
a very simple recon mission. Christ—it was only a ten-foot recon at that. In a totally empty cave. No
problem.
After two full minutes of steady hiking, I still hadn't found it. I looked back the way I'd come, and
absently scratched my elbow. Odd, I didn't think I'd walked that far from the spot where we'd spent the
night. I went back to the chimney and started again, watching both walls this time and paying closer
attention.
It still wasn't there.
Just when and where had Bjornssen made that last mark? I knew he'd put a marker along the
straight stretch here, and Bjornssen always plastered a bit of tape atevery turn. I'd watched the
"mark-the-trail ritual" too many times to doubt that. We'd come through a whole series of turns and side
tunnels fifty feet back, or so. I'd miscalculated, was all.
I started from the chimney again. Sixty-five feet of carefully measured steps later, I stopped.
Nothing. Not a trace of where we'd spent the "night." Not even a hint of old adhesive on the walls. And
while I never actually saw them change, the shadows looked different every time I glanced away and
back.
Worse, the side tunnels were missing. As far as I could see, ahead and behind, there was nothing
but unbroken grey rock wall.
At one hundred twenty feet I stopped again, breathing hard. My shirt was soaked and sweat
trickled down my skivvies (I hoped it was sweat) to run past my knees and into the tops of my socks. It
tickled like blazes—and I was too worried to scratch.
Those tunnels couldn't be gone. Theycouldn't . But they were. Suddenly I wondered what else
might disappear—
Goddamned one-eyed son-of-a-bitch!
I broke and ran like hell for my pack, leaping the chimney like a running longjumper. My gear was
still piled where I'd left it, complete with food, canteens, carbide—and the Armalite AR-180 assault rifle
strapped across it. . . .
I slid down against the wall, barely feeling the needle-sharp projections that scraped my back, and
sat swearing at the wall opposite me. Odin was playing games again.
 I scrubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tugged on my hair for a moment, and
wondered with a nagging sense of futility what would have happened if Ihadn't kept my half of that
misbegotten bargain with Odin? Surely it couldn't have been much worse than whathad happened. I
laughed aloud, and shuddered at the same time.
It was far too late, of course, but I couldn't help wishing I'd kept the knife and said the hell with
Odin and every other god ever invented. What a waste of a perfectly good blade . . . and a pile of
money, not to mention my time, and Gary's.
I even found myself wishing for Frau Brunner's company. Odin himself would've thought twice
about crossingher .

Frau Brunner—a shrewd old woman who had survived everything from the Allied Blitz to
navigating landmines at the East German border—was known throughout town as a shark.
Her standard sales-floor expression was a scowl that routinely cowed GIs, tourists, and rabid