"Ringo,.John.-.Honorverse.SS.-.LET'S.GO.TO.PRAGUE" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

best to kill a sentry in the next.

Come to think of it, that was pretty much how he acted when he
was on a mission.

Gonzalvez been through a half a dozen partners before he and
Mullins met up. Nobody wanted someone who was that . . . frenetic
when they were snooping and pooping around in the Peep's back
yard. But, somehow, he and Mullins made a great pair. The hyper
aristocrat from Manticore A and the quiet farmboy from Gryphon
balanced each other. Or, perhaps, enhanced each other; there was
no question that they were both the most experienced insertion
team and the most successful. The former sort of assumed the
latter; losses in CITs ran upwards of thirty percent per mission.

Insertion teams had a variety of uses, from direct reconnaissance,
checking out Peep installations and equipment, to retrievals.
Sometimes there were defectors to be pulled out or cells to be
extracted or the occasional deep mole to be rescued. There was
one Manty intelligence agent, Covilla, who had been supplying
information for years from deep in Peep territory. That operative
was one of the survivors, but not all were so capable. Or lucky.

The People's Republic of Haven had some pretty decent
counterintelligence goons in their State Security. They were quite
good at compromising cells and rolling up lines. So all too often
some poor unsuspecting CIT would go strolling into what was
supposed to be a safe house, only to find out that "safe" is a
relative term.

Gonzalvez and Mullins had, so far, managed to avoid that fate.
Whether it was Johnny's habit of never accepting anything at face
value or Gonzo's ability to extract any information he needed at the
drop of a cred piece, the two of them had survived every mission,
despite some hairy encounters. And if nothing else worked, they
had both proven on several occasions that, stolid or wacky, they
were, in that delightful phrase, "good with their hands"; the very few
times that it had come down to violence the situation ended up in
their favor.

But he still wasn't going to Prague.

"How are we getting there?" Mullins asked, finishing the beer with a
grimace. It really wouldn't have taken that much to improve the
living conditions on Seaforth, but the fact that insertion teams were
on the base was so secret it was hard to complain to the right
people. "Minister, we need to upgrade the living conditions on
Seaforth." "Why?" "Uh . . ."

"It's not like going to Basilisk or Manticore; we can't just jump on a