"Charles Stross - Red, Hot and Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

boots, not looking at the man from the GRU, whatever that was, trying to memorise his
face in case he had to --

"Don't be an idiot. We're not the fucking MVD; we're the army. What you were saying
about contact with extra-terrestrial civilisations interests us ... we just want to ask you a
few more questions, bounce some ideas about, see what you can come up with. And you
know something else?" Oleg jumped round as a hand landed on his shoulder, then froze.
A faintly familiar smell tickled at his nostrils like the memory of a forgotten sin. "I was
right," said the stranger who had stolen his identity. Then, in a language far older than that
of the russ -- "how long have you been living alone among the humans, my friend?"

Moscow: Lunch time, 20th August 1991:
Cosmology and guilt and a blind fear of the unknown blurred together in Oleg's mind as
he tried to concentrate on what he was doing. A trip to see the big military radar system
at Semipalatinsk blurred into the dog-eared files he was lifting out of the back of his
cabinet, vast banks of humming tubes meshed with the sleek Western computer chained
to his desk. Time was of the essence: panic was ...

Possible. The big old radio beside the window was tuned to Radio Free Europe, but the
MVD were jamming it again for the first time in years, the pock-pock-whirr of
microwaves blasted into the ionosphere to stop the people learning of the crimes
committed against them. Radar stations in the hands of Andrei and his dark-worshippers.
Oleg shuddered, uncertain. Just as long as he doesn't know where to point them. He
looked up, clutching a sheaf of papers about Cepheid variables. "Get me everything you
can find under Krasnoyarsk," he muttered.

"Under what?" Anatoly looked perplexed.

"Krasnoyarsk," Oleg repeated. "It's a radar installation. You know? One of the big ones
the military let us borrow."

"Oh, that. Isn't it one of the ones comrade General Secretary agreed with the Americans
to dismantle?"

Oleg sniffed, bitterly amused by the way Anatoly still referred to Gorbachev by his title.
"I see. What do you expect to find there, boss? Is that where they're holding him?"

"Not on another planet," Oleg muttered, thumbing through notes made years ago. The
pile of paper was inches thick, held together with rough string and stale lies. Some of the
documents were twenty, thirty years old: some were new, and of these a number bore
CONFIDENTIAL stamps. Oleg had removed these from his safe.

He sighed as he contemplated the documents with a mixture of fear and pride. My life's
work, and this is all there is to it? Itchy fear made the skin in the small of his back crawl;
his leg muscles twitched, aching to be elsewhere. If Andrei gets hold of these ... they
were the originals, not the precisely-faked duplicates he had filtered to the GRU Colonel
over the past years. Careful cooperation, playing the useful idiot to find out how much
Andrei knew, who his friends were, that was one thing. But this was for real; the
probable coordinates of the end of the world ... he stopped subvocalizing so suddenly
that he nearly bit his tongue. Maybe they knew where he came from, what he had done.