"Robert McCammon - The Night Boat" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

Author’s Note

It may be interesting to note that U-boats were referred to by both
captains
and crews as “Iron Coffins.” Rightly so; 736 German submarine crews still
lie
with their boats on the ocean floor.
R.R.M.




God how the dead men
Grin by the wall,
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.
 —Alfred Noyes,
A Victory Dance

Evil… has infinite forms.
—Blaise Pascal,
Pensees



Prologue

CLOUDS SWEPT ACROSS the yellow oval of the moon, one moment obscuring it, the
next opening chasms so that its ocher light could stream down upon the plain
of
black ocean beneath. The moon hung motionless, while around it the clouds
roiled. It was as if they possessed a life of their own, whirling upon
themselves, breaking into pieces and attaching themselves, leechlike, onto
others. They were first the maws of fantastic monsters, then men’s faces with
mouths open and screaming, then bare, bleached skulls shattered slowly into
fragments by the Caribbean winds.
There were two lights panning across the surface of the sea—one high,
over
a dark mass of land, flashing intermittently, and the other floating low,
just
above the stern of a rusty-hulled American freighter hauling eight thousand
tons
of raw sulfur.
And one hundred yards beyond the freighter’s wake was something else.
Quietly and smoothly a dark cylinder of iron rose up from the depths on
a
slender tower. The metal had been painted black to avoid reflection, the
viewing
lens sheathed in concrete—a single freezing eye.