"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

“Yes indeed, it’ll be good for the crops,” said Murdo.

“Aye, the spring sowing needs it,” I said.

We went on with this farming talk until it stopped being funny. That
didn’t take long.

I led the way to the yellow dome of the site office. A local lassie
looked at us from behind a desk as we trooped in.

“Site engineer ?” I asked.

“He’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

Her hands were moving on the keyboard but she was watching the
news. It scrolled down a screen tacked to the wall beside a calendar. March
was a bare girl on a wet rock somewhere hot. April would be a hot girl on a
bare rock somewhere wet. On the screen the top news was a Siberian town
that had sunk two metres overnight. They’re thawing while we’re freezing.
Russian kids in army uniforms helped folk into long trucks with huge fat
wheels. The rest of the news was the usual. Truck bomb in Tehran.
Ambush in Kabul.

“The Bodach’s been busy,” said Euan.

The Bodach—the old man—is what the locals call Osama Bin Laden.
Nobody knows if he’s still alive or not. Maybe he’s getting the Reverse
treatment but he’s not in a healthy line of work. His gloating videos still
come out every now and again. But that doesn’t prove anything. You could
say the same about Mick Jagger.

A man in a suit and wellies hurried in with that look of someone who
has just been for a pee. His belt was one notch too tight for his belly and his
thinning hair had been flattened by twenty-odd years under hard hats. Red
cheeks and sandy eyebrows and sharp blue eyes.

“Liam Morrison,” he said, shaking hands.

“We’ve brought the Cat,” I said after we’d introduced ourselves.

“Good,” he said. He ambled to the desk and pawed at loose paper.
“The chart, Kelly?”

“It’s in here somewhere,” she said. “Got it.”

Over by the curved wall a printer whizzed. Kelly got up and came back
with a metre of paper. Liam looked around for somewhere to spread it, then
held it up against the wall.