"Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Left Behind Series 6 - Assassins" - читать интересную книгу автора (LaHaye Tim)

head.
“Of course I would. This lever here? I'll be in charge of this.”



TWO
Early after noon, Buck sat at his computer in the vastly enlarged shelter beneath the
safe house. He and his father-in-law and Dr. Charles had done the bulk of the
excavating work. It wasn't that Dr. Ben-Judah had been unwilling or unable. He had
proved remarkably fit for a man with his nose in scholarly works and his eyes on a
computer screen the majority of every day.
But Buck and the others encouraged him to stay at his more important work via the
Internet•teaching the masses of new believers and pleading for converts. It was clear
Tsion felt he was slacking by letting the other men do the manual labor while he
toiled at what he called soft work in an upstairs bedroom. For days all he had
wanted to do was join the others in digging, sacking, and carrying the dirt from the
cellar to the nearby fields. The others had told him they were fine without his help,
that it was too crowded with four men in the cramped space, that his ministry was
too crucial to be postponed by grunt work.
Finally, Buck recalled with a smile, Rayford had told Tsion, “You're the elder, our
pastor, our mentor, our scholar, but I have seniority and authority as ersatz head of
this band, and I'm pulling rank.”
Tsion had straightened in the dank underground and leaned back, mock fear on his
face. “Yes, sir,” he said. “And my assignment?”
“To stay out of our way, old man. You have the soft hands of the educated. Of
course, so do we, but you're in the way.”
Tsion had dragged a sleeve across his forehead. “Oh, Rayford, stop teasing me. I
just want to help.”
Buck and Doc stopped their work and joined, in essence, in ganging up on Tsion.
“Dr. Ben-Judah,” Floyd Charles said, “we all really do feel you're wasting your
time•we're wasting your time•by letting you do this. Please, for our sakes, clear our
consciences and let us finish without you.”
It was Rayford's turn to feign offense. “So much for my authority,” he said. “I just
gave an order, and now Sawbones pleads with him yet again!”
“You gentlemen are serious,” Tsion said, his Israeli accent thick as ever.
Rayford raised both hands. “Finally! The scholar gets it.”
Tsion trundled back upstairs, grumbling that it “still does not make any sense,” but
he had not again tried to insert himself into the excavation team.
Buck was impressed with how the other three had melded. Rayford was the most
technologically astute, Buck himself sometimes too analytical, and Floyd•despite
his medical degree•seemingly content to do what he was told. Buck teased him
about that, telling him he thought doctors assumed they knew everything. Floyd was
not combative, but neither did Buck find him amused. In fact, Floyd seemed to run
out of gas earlier every day, but he never slacked. He just spent a lot of time
catching his breath, running his hands through his hair, and rubbing his eyes.
Rayford mapped out each day's work with a rough sketch amalgamated from two
sources. The first came from the meticulously hen-scratched spiral notebooks of the
original owner of the place, Donny Moore, who had been crushed to death at the
church during the great wrath of the Lamb earthquake nearly eighteen months
before. Buck and Tsion had discovered Donny's wife's body in the demolished