"MacLean, Alistair - Flood Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

Copyright (D Alistair MacLean 1983

Printed in Canada

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 TO DAVID & JUDY
 Prologue

The two oddly similar incidents, although both happening on the night of
February 3rd, and both involving army ammunition storage installations, had
no discernible connection.
The occurrence at De Dooms in Holland was mysterious, spectacular and
tragic: the one at Metnitz in Germany was a good deal less mysterious,
unspectacular and faintly comic.
Three soldiers were on guard at the Dutch ammunition dump, set in a
concrete bunker one and a half kilometres north of the village of De Dooms,
when, about one-thirty in the morning, the only two citizens who were awake
in the village reported a staccato burst of machine-pistol fire - it was
later established that the guards were carrying machine-pistols -followed
immediately by the sound of a gigantic explosion, which was later found to
have blasted in the earth a crater sixty metres wide by twelve deep.
Houses in the village suffered moderately severe damage but there was no
loss of life.
It was presumed that the guards had fired at intruders and that a stray
bullet had triggered the detonation. No traces of the guards or supposed
intruders were found afterwards.
In Germany, a group calling themselves the Red Army Faction, a well7known
and well organized band of terrorists, claimed that they had easily
overcome the two-man guard at the US Nato arms dump near Metnitz. Both men,
it had been claimed, had been drinking and when the intruders had left both
were covered with blankets - it had been a bitterly cold night. The US Army
denied the drinking allegation but made no mention of the blankets. The
intruders claimed that they had acquired a quantity of offensive weapons,
some so advanced that they were still on the secret list. The US Army
denied this.
The West German press heavily favoured the intruders'

7
 account. When it came to penetrating army bases, the Red Army Faction had an
impressive record: when it came to protecting them, the US Army had an
unimpressive one.
The Red Army Faction eustomarily list the nature of their thefts in
meticulous detail. No such details of the alleged secret weapons were
published. It has been assumed that, if the Faction's account was true, the