"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 05 - Floating City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

Eric Van Lustbader - Nl5 Floating City

The Hunting lanterns on Mount Ogura have gone, the deer are calling for fheir mates.... How easily I might sleep, If only I didn't share their fears. — Ono no Komachi

It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory. — French management principle

The Jungle Line In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar. — Anton Chekhov

Shan Plateau, Burma Autumn 1983

It was said that they called him Wild Boy because he had seen every Tarzan film, knew every Tarzan's name from Elmo Lincoln onward. He had his favorites, of course, but he claimed to love them all.

They—that is, the mountain tribes of the Shan—had no reason to disbelieve him, since Tarzan films were the rage in the foothill towns below that were lucky enough to have a projector, and able to rent films flown in from Bangkok.

Truth to tell, the Shan who knew Rock—which is to say all of them who were involved in the growing, harvesting, refining, selling, and shipping of the tears of the poppy— called him Wild Boy because they had seen him screw together his custom-made rocket launcher, slap it over his right shoulder, and blow his enemies into kingdom come.

Over the years, one opium warlord after the other had tried to kill Rock, but Wild Boy had been, in his own words, "born and raised on rock V roll and war." He was a veteran of Vietnam, at the war's height, in charge of recruiting CIDGs, Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, from the Wa, the Lu, the Lisu, all the mountain tribes of Burma, and from the Mekong Delta-born Cambodians to fight the Viet Cong.

He was one of those rare, blood-soaked demons who

found that he could not do without the proximity of death. He loved everything about it: the smell of it, the cessation of hearts and spirits it caused, the noise of it or the stealth required to achieve it. But he loved, most of all, the contentment it brought him, the softening of the hard edges of his mind that, like diamond blades, sought to chop his reality into incomprehensible pieces.

He was not one of the casualties of the war, who returned home with their heads filled with ARVNs and helicopters and a tide of burst bodies and running blood so high they could never climb out the Pit. The Pit was Asia, and they had been in it up to their eyeballs.

So had Rock, but the difference was he reveled in it Because he emerged from the war, for the first time in his life, with a purpose. And that purpose had led him here, to the Shan Plateau, the metaphorical apex of the Golden Triangle, that area where China, Burma, and Thailand came together, where the altitude, the weather, and the soil were ideal for the growing of poppies.

Rock not only accepted the attempts on his life, he welcomed them. He rightly saw in them not merely a macho test of his skills, but a path to his acceptance up here in the rarefied air of the Shan Plateau. And he knew these people well enough to understand that without acceptance, he would be forever adrift, a kind of jungle wraith, no better than a beggar, really, making his living going from warlord to warlord, selling his own particular brand of death. Besides, in their eyes, he was a Western barbarian.

Without accepting him, the Shan would never trust him. And without their trust, Rock knew, he would never get rich. Rock wanted very badly to be rich. It was the only thing that mattered to him, save the manufacture, subtle or swift, of death.

In the end, he defeated everything they sent at him, defying General Quan's public threat that "your agony will live forever."

It was General Quan, opium warlord of the Shan Plateau, who had over the past five years systematically murdered his rival warlords—all Chinese—and who now had a monopoly on the richest and most productive poppy fields in the

world. As a Vietnamese, General Diep Nim Quan was better supplied—officially, cheerfully from Saigon—than his rivals, who were obliged to barter inferior arms from itinerant Soviet black marketeers.

A goddamn Vietnamese, Rock had thought, that's who I've got to deal with here. Who said the war was over?

Rock was on his way down the mountainside. He had been waiting for the money that had been promised him, but had never come. Now he was on his way to Rangoon to telex his partner. He had to know how long the delay was going to be.

He stumbled across Mai, who was lying along a path with a wooden cart overturned on her leg. It was the animal pulling the cart, however, whose leg was broken.

Even Rock, with his acute sense of paranoia, had to admit that Mai was irresistible, with her golden, glowing skin, her long, lithe legs, her huge eyes, and her firm, hard-nippled breasts.

Rock had righted the cart and seen to Mai, then shot the animal to put it out of its misery. He had expertly skinned it, quartered its flesh, scraped down the bones.

Wild Boy had become like every Asian; he never let anything go to waste. In fact, it was safe to say that he thought of himself as Asian. He might once have been American, but now nationality had ceased to mean anything to him. Every so often he would finger the metal dog tags that still hung around his neck, as if, like jade to the Chinese, they were a powerful talisman. But he never looked at them. He was Rock, the Wild Boy, a state, a country, a law unto himself.

He loaded everything—the meat, the skin, the bones (for soup), the girl—into the cart. When he lifted her up, her long nails gently scratched his skin. The sapphire in the lobe of her left ear sparked in the sunlight.