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

“That’s your line for the trench,” he said. “It’s all marked out on the
ground. From the river to the railway. Yellow posts and green string, mind.
The red one’s for the site sewage line.”

We peered at the drawing and got this clear in our heads.

“OK,” I said.

“You better take it,” said Liam. “Don’t get it wet.”

We all laughed and Liam nodded and we headed out.

“ ‘Don’t get it wet,’ “ Euan muttered.

“Taking the piss,” I said. “But he’s polite for a boss.”

“The gentleman will have his little joke,” said Murdo.

Lack of water was what had brought us here in the first place. The
hailstorm was the usual way water falls from the sky around here. Not much
of that, and not much rain, not even much snow. The rain that does fall
comes in heavy bursts that run off in flash floods. The snow that does fall,
up on the tops, doesn’t melt near soon enough. The Highlands are drying
out. So the Hydro stations that kept the Highlands lit up in the old days don’t
get enough water to work. Wind power turned out to be a crock as soon as
the weather went wild. It’s either so calm the blades don’t turn or so stormy
the pylons get blown over.
 So here we were, climbing onto the Cat and getting ready to dig a
trench to hold a cable. One end of the cable was coiled up on the bank of
the Carron. The rest of it ran out along the riverbed and across the tidal flat
and along the bottom of the loch. All the way out to the new nuclear power
station on a wee island between the mouth of Loch Carron and the Isle of
Skye. The wee island is called Eilean Mor, which means Big Island. The
power station was built on it because nobody lives there to object, and also
because it’s easy to guard. In the Sound of Skye there’s enough military
and naval hardware to scare off the Bodach himself.

The first part of our job was to dig a trench from the Carron to the
back of the old railway station. The railway line was a ready-made route
across country to Loch Luichart. At Loch Luichart, about twenty kilometres
inland, was one of those dry Hydro power stations I told you about.
Somebody had decided that this would be just the place to plug the new
power into the grid. It had all the machinery, but it was lying idle.

The trains don’t run anymore on the Kyle line—too many
landslides—so the rails were free to carry heavy equipment. Any day now it
would come chugging down from Inverness. Then it would slowly chug
back, digging a trench alongside the railway track as it went. Same trick for
laying the cable. All we’d have to do was follow behind and shovel the dirt