"Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

Forbier decided to change his order. He wanted a filet. When that came he complained the knife was too dull. The waiter, white apron swinging before him, disappeared into the kitchen to get a sharper one.
"Am I the last of the Sunflower?"
"In Northern Europe? Just about."
"I guess you're pretty happy with your success," said Forbier.
"What success?" said Vassilivich, swirling a piece of veal in wine sauce and carefully balancing it up to his mouth so the dripping sauce would not mar his shirt.
"Destroying Sunflower," Forbier said. He knew what he would do. He had been trained for five years to do something and if he were the last of the weaponless Sunflower team, they would at least go out with something on the Scoreboard. He forced himself to avoid looking at Vassilivich's throat and
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looked toward the kitchen on the left rear of Le Vagabond, from which the waiter would be returning with his sharper knife. He took a bite of the bread. Vassilivich had been right. The crust was a bit too cardboardy.
"When Sunflower is destroyed, we will have our way in Western Europe and England, and then, if we are not stopped, we will be sucked into America. And then, if we are not stopped, we will ultimately all find ourselves in a nice little nuclear war. So what have we won by destroying you? A battle in Europe? A battle in America? We had a nice balance of terror going here and your idiot Congress decided to live by kindergarten rules that never applied anywhere in the world. Your country is insane."
"Nobody's forcing you to work over Western Europe," said Forbier.
"Son, you don't know how vacuums works. They suck you in. Already there are people back home plotting brilliant moves for us. And it will all look so good. Until we kill ourselves. If you had lived, you would see. Just as we must take advantage of your being weaponless, so we will take advantage of Western Europe being weaponless, so to speak."
"Your English is very good," said Forbier.
"You shouldn't have eaten the bread," said Vassilivich.
When the sharper knife came, the laughing giant, not the waiter, delivered it, and, still laughing, cut Forbier's filet for him. Forbier declined dessert.
In an alley, off a side street near St. Germaine, behind a shoe store featuring high glossy boots,
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the laughing man and three others beat in the rib cage of Walter Forbier.
Vassilivich watched in gloom.
"Now it begins," he said in his native Russian, gloom on his face like the coming of a winter storm. "Now it begins."
"Victory," said the laughing giant, wiping his huge hands. "A great victory."
"We have won nothing," said Vassilivich. A sudden shower came upon the city that spring day, feeding the roots of the trees for the new buds and washing the blood of Walter Forbier from his young face.
In Washington, a messenger arrived from Langley, Virginia, with orders to interrupt a National Security Council meeting at which the President was presiding.
The messenger got a signature from the secretary of state to whom he was assigned to deliver the small sealed package. Under the first wrapping was a white envelope, chemically treated so that if anyone touched it, a black mark from his body oils appeared. The Secretary of State, wheezing from his paunchy weight, left a trail of black marks across the envelope as his pudgy fingers tore it open. The President looked on, occasionally sucking at the pain in his right forefinger. Someone had passed a document marked "Single, Lone" around the large polished oak table in the sealed room behind the Oval Office. It had been fastened with a paper clip. It went from the Secretary of State to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, the Secretary of
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Defense, and the director of the National Defense Agency. When it got to the President, he grabbed it in such a way that the clip plunged into his index finger, drawing blood.
"It's a good thing the Secret Service isn't in the room" the President said, laughing, "or they would have wrestled that paper clip to the ground."
Everyone laughed politely. It was no accident that the three water pitchers always ended up, bunched at the far end of the long table. Whoever sat next to the President somehow found himself nudging any close pitcher away. The Security Council had accidentally discovered that some classified documents were water soluble when someone had left a water pitcher near the President's elbow. The Secretary of State read the document he had been handed, and in solemn tones, reflecting the guttural accents of his German youth, he said, "It was to be expected. We should have known."
He removed the single paper clip from the document and handed three loose sheets of gray paper to the President of the United States, who cut his thumb on their edges.
Everyone agreed that paper could be very sharp. The President asked for water for the cut. The Secretary of Defense filled one glass half full. He passed it up the table.
"Thank you," said the President, knocking the glass into the lap of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose turn it was to sit next to the President, but who complained that somehow the Secretary of the Army always missed his turn.
The Secretary of Defense poured another glass and hand-delivered it up to the head of the table
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where the President put his bleeding thumb into the glass.
"Be careful, sir," said the Secretary of State. "That document is water soluble also."
"What?" said the President, taking his thumb out of the glass and holding the papers in both hands. The right thumb went through the document like a spoon through fresh, warm oatmeal. The pages suddenly had a long thumb hole in them. "Oh," said the President of the United States.
"No matter," said the Secretary of State. "I remember what it said. Verbatim."
The Sunflower Team had been annihilated, said the Secretary of State. This team had been the counterforce to the Russian Treska which had operated so successfully in Eastern Europe. Sunflower had been destroyed when it was deweaponed. The weapons had been taken away for fear of another international incident. Now the Treska was loose, blooded, and there was nothing apparently to stop them.
"Perhaps a stern note to the Kremlin?" suggested the Secretary of Defense.
The Secretary of State shook his head. "They have their problems too. They cannot stop. We have created a vacuum they are being sucked into. They cannot not proceed. They have their hawks too. After almost thirty years of cat and mouse, they suddenly had the mouse in their mouths and they swallowed. What do we threaten them with in this note to the Kremlin? 'Be careful or you will be even more successful next time?' "
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
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explained how the Sunflower worked and that it took a man an exceptional man at least five years of training to achieve the level of competence needed for that sort of clandestine killing. What was needed now to stop the Treska was another equally good small unit. Or a nuclear war.
"Or time," said the Secretary of State. "They will kill and kill until even the American public wakes up."
"And then?" asked the President. "Then we pray that there is something left to fight them with," said the Secretary of State.
"America is not dead yet," said the president, and his voice was somehow calmer and his eyes just slightly clearer when he said this. In some manner, a decision had quietly been made, and he turned the agenda to another subject.
He canceled a meeting with a Congressional delegation that afternoon and went to his bedroom, a surprising move for a very fit President. He shut the large door behind him and personally drew the drapes. In a bureau drawer was a red telephone. He waited until 4:15 P.M. exactly, then picked up the receiver.
"I want to talk to you," he said. "I've been expecting this phone call," came a lemony Voice.
"When can you get to the White House?" "Three hours."
"Then you're not in Washington?" "No."
"Where are you?" "You don't need to know."