"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 2 - Wamphyri!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

derelict, decayed as rotten fangs. From the air, the Château would seem a gaunt old ruin. But it was
hardly that, even though the towers were not the only things in a state of decay.


Outside the roofed courtyard stood a canopied ten-ton Army truck, the canvas flaps at its rear
thrown back and its exhaust puffing acrid blue smoke into the frosty air. A KGB man, conspicuous
in his 'uniform' of felt hat and dark grey overcoat, stared in across the truck's lowered tailgate at its
contents and shuddered. Hands thrust deep in his pockets, he turned to a second man dressed in
the white smock of a technician and grimaced. 'Comrade Krakovitch,' he grunted, 'what the hell are
they? And what are they doing here?'


Felix Krakovitch glanced at him, shook his head, said, 'You wouldn't understand if I told you.
And if you understood, you wouldn't believe.' Like his ex-boss, Gregor Borowitz, Krakovitch
considered all KGB low life-forms. He would keep information and assistance to the barest
minimum - within certain limits of prudence and personal safety, of course. The KGB weren't much
for forgiving and forgetting.


The blocky Special Policeman shrugged, lit a stubby brown cigarette and drew deeply on its
carboard tube. 'Try me anyway,' he said. 'It's cold here but I am warm enough. See, when I go to
report to Comrade Andropov - and I am sure I need not remind you of his Politburo status - he will
want some answers, which is why I want answers from you. So we will stand out here until - '


'Zombies!' said Krakovitch abruptly. 'Mummies! Men dead for four hundred years. You can
tell that from their weapons, and - ' For the first time he heard the insistent ringing of the telephone,
turned towards the door in the corrugated iron facade of the covered courtyard.


'Where are you going?' The KGB man came alive, took his hands out of his pockets. 'Do you
expect me to tell Yuri Andropov that the - the mayhem - here was done by dead men?' He almost
choked on the last two words, coughed long and loud, finally spat on the snow.


'Stand there long enough,' Krakovitch said over his shoulder, 'in those exhaust fumes, smoking
that shredded rope, and you might as well climb in the truck with them!' He stepped through the
door, let it slam shut behind him.


'Zombies?' The agent wrinkled his nose, looked again at the truckload of cadavers. He
couldn't know it but they were Crimean Tartars, butchered en masse in 1579 by Russian
reinforcements hastening to a ravaged Moscow. They had died and gone down in blood and mire
and bog, to lie part-preserved in the peat of a low-lying field - and to come up again two nights ago
to wage war on the Château! They had won that war, the Tartars and their young English leader,
Harry Keogh, for after the fighting only five of the Château's defenders still lived. Krakovitch was
one of them. Five out of thirty-three, and the only enemy casualty Harry Keogh himself. Amazing
odds, unless one counted the Tartars. But one could hardly count them, for they had been dead
before it started...