"Robert McCammon - The Wolfs Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

satchel, and was heading directly toward the British lines. What kind of beast was it, that would steal a
case full of maps instead of scraps from the garbage heap? The damned monster had to be stopped.
Stummer’s palms were sweating, and he struggled to line the thing up in the gun’s sights, but it kept
dodging, cutting, and then picking up its speed as if it…
Yes, Stummer thought. As if it could think like a man.
“Steady!” he bellowed. But the car hit a bump, and again his aim was knocked off. He had to spray
the ground ahead of the thing and hope the beast ran into the bullets. He braced himself for the gun’s
recoil and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing. The gun was hot as the midday sun, and it had either jammed or run dry.
The wolf glanced back, marking that the machine was closing fast. And then it returned its attention to
the distance ahead—but too late. A barbed-wire fence stood just ahead, less than six feet away. The
wolf’s hind legs tensed, and its body left the ground. But the fence was too close to avoid completely; the
wolf’s chest was sliced by barbed knots, and as its body went over, its right hind leg caught in the coils.
“Now!” Stummer shouted. “Run it down!”
The wolf thrashed, muscles rippling along its body. It clawed the earth with its forelegs, to no avail.
Stummer was standing up, the wind rushing into his face, and the driver pressed the accelerator to the
floorboard. The armored car was about five seconds away from smashing the wolf beneath its stubbled
tires.
What Stummer saw in those five seconds he might never have believed, had he not witnessed it. The
wolf twisted its body, and with its front claws grasped the barbed-wire that trapped its leg. Those claws
parted the wire, and held them apart as it wrenched its leg loose. Then it was on all fours again and
darting away. The armored car ground the wire under its bulk, but the wolf was no longer there.
But the headlights still held it, and Stummer could see that the animal was bounding instead of running,
leaping right and left, sometimes touching a single hind leg to the earth before it leaped and twisted again
in another direction.
Stummer’s heart slammed in his chest.
It knows, he realized. That animal knows…
He whispered, “We’re in a mine fi—”
And then the left front tire hit a mine, and the blast blew Major Stummer out of the car like a bloody
pinwheel. The left rear tire detonated the next mine, and the shredded mass of the right front wheel hit the
third one. The armored car buckled, its gasoline ignited and tore the seams apart, and in the next second
it rolled into yet another mine and there was nothing left but a center of red fire and scorched metal flying
heavenward.
Sixty yards ahead, the wolf stopped and looked back. It watched the fire for a moment, its green
eyes aglow with destruction, and then it abruptly turned away and continued threading through the mine
field toward the safety of the east.
 2

He would soon be here. The countess felt as excited as a schoolgirl on a first date. It had been more than
a year since she’d seen him. Where he’d been in that time, and what he’d done, she didn’t know. Nor
did she care. That was not her business. All she’d been told was that he needed a sanctuary, and that the
service had been using him for a dangerous assignment. More than that, it was not safe to know. She sat
before the oval mirror in her lavender-hued dressing room, the golden lights of Cairo glittering through the
French doors that led to the terrace, and carefully applied her lipstick. On the night breeze she could
smell cinnamon and mace, and palm fronds whispered politely in the courtyard below. She realized she
was trembling, so she put her lipstick down before she made a mess of her mouth. I’m not a dewy-eyed
virgin, she told herself, with some regret. But perhaps that was part of his magic, too; he had certainly
made her feel, on his last visit here, that she was a first-grader in the school of love. Perhaps, she mused,
she was so excited because in all this time—and through a procession of so-called lovers—she had not
felt a touch such as his, and she longed for it.