"Destroyer 028 - Ship of Death.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"Aha. All right. You stop shooting and I'll phone the other delegations. I think we may have just gotten ourselves something."
The ensuing symphony of silence woke up the rest of the Lebanese delegation.
"What? What? What?" they said, stumbling sleepy eyed into the main chamber of their UN consulate.
"Nothing. A cease-fire," said Haloub.
"I can't sleep with all this quiet," said one of the Lebanese. "I never should have left Beirut."
Haloub, who really was a cultural attachй but had picked up a fine knowledge of firearms and street warfare just by growing up in Lebanon, unpacked his .357 Magnum, a very large pistol that made very large holes in people, and an ashtray. He opened the outer door into the corridor and threw the ashtray out onto the thick carpet. No one fired, so he stepped out into the hallway. He had seen walls like this before after intense cross fire. It looked as if someone had gone through the hallway with a McCormick reaper, whipping away chunks of the walls and ceilings, gouging out large pieces of the carpets.
"Take your hands off your triggers and everyone come out into the hallway. C'mon," he coaxed. A door opened. Someone poked out his head. Another door opened. Finally all the embassies along the broad hallway had people out in the middle of the corridor, with guns and silly grins.
"All right, everybody," said Halouh, "we're going to find the men in dark suits with bloody blades. I don't see any bodies so they must be in a room somewhere. Where's the Egyptian who saw them first? Don't be afraid. Come to the front. It's just the cease-fire of the morning. I'm sure we'll have hundreds before this cruise is over."
A dark man in a white silk bathrobe with an M-16 pointed up the hallway, behind a mass of Syrians in long nightgowns who carried Russian Kalishnikovs.
Haloub calculated what the cross fire had been and knew he had not seen a body, and therefore the only living place the intruders could be was behind some closed door.
"Find a door that's closed and don't open it."
The door was found immediately and identified as a large cleaning storage area, checked out the day before by Syrian security. The Egyptians said that was a lie; it had been checked out by Egyptian security.
A Libyan accused both of lying and said the closet had never been checked out by anyone and was probably part of a CIA, American-racist and Zionist plot. By saying it was checked out, the Egyptians and Syrians were now in collusion to sell out the revolution of the Arab peoples.
"Quiet," yelled Haloub.
"Racist," screamed the Libyan.
"We can all be killed if we don't do this right," Haloub said.
The Libyan was quiet. Haloub went to the closet door. He made everyone get on either side of the door and keep quiet. He pointed to the carpeting. There was fresh wet blood at the door. Obviously one of the intruders had been wounded.
Haloub stepped to the side of the door. With his back pressed against the wall and all the delegates out of danger, he scraped the barrel of his Magnum against the door. Often in cases like that, the occupants would start shooting. No one shot.
"All right. We know you're in there. Throw out your weapons and you'll be all right," said Haloub.
"You have the word of an Arab," yelled the Iraqi.
The Egyptian giggled.
The Iraqi said he didn't think that was funny.
"I don't think there's anyone in there," said Haloub.
"There's got to be. There's no exit," said a Syrian security man, listed as a linguist.
"I don't think so. I've been through this before. I just have a feeling."
"But I have the plans to the ship," said the Syrian.
"He's right," said the Egyptian, and everyone agreed. Everyone except Haloub, who for the last two years had lived in Lebanon, where you had to shoot your way to Sunday mass.
Someone returned to his consulate and brought back one of the eighteen volumes of the ship's plans. It was a gigantic condensed blueprint. They found the corridor and Haloub isolated the large closet. It was more like a small storage room.
"What's the material of the closet's walls and ceiling?" Haloub asked.
"Reinforced steel."
"Then there is absolutely no theoretical way in which that band is not trapped inside the closet," said Haloub.
Everyone agreed.
From a far corridor, several guards clad in United Nations blue ran up asking what had happened. Was everyone all right? Yes, they were, Haloub said. The guards told them they were lucky. Some madmen had gotten aboard the ship and were cutting off heads.
"We have them trapped in that closet," said someone.
The United Nations force asked to take over. But Haloub refused. Of all the men in the corridor, he had the most battle hours. He simply turned the handle of the closet door and opened it as everyone else ducked for cover.
The closet was empty. There was some blood on the floor but it was empty. The hallway became a din of charges and countercharges. Haloub retreated from the center of the crowd and returned to his consulate aboard the great ship.
He let the Lebanese press aide leave to join the others lest the American press run "another lopsided story about trigger-happy Arabs."
Haloub called a meeting of the Lebanese delegation. Back home, many of them would have shot each other on sight. But here, away from their homeland, each who had tasted civil war and who had learned in their grief that dead bodies solved very little and who understood better than most what killing was about listened intently to Haloub, a Maronite Christian.
"Gentlemen," said Pierre Haloub, "this ship is a coffin."
There were no charges of conspiracy, just serious listening by serious men.
"There were murders on this ship last night. It is a big ship with thousands of people. Yet these murders look like the work of terrorists. Now terrorists can strike anyplace. They do not bother me much. That is not why I call this Goliath a coffin. No. This ship is a coffin because it has secret passages not known to us, but known to the people who committed the murders."
There were questions about how Pierre Haloub knew this thing. And he explained about the cross fire and the trail of blood to the closet door, and the absence of anyone from inside the supposedly sealed closet.
"I think this ship was designed to kill many people."
"Arabs?"
"No. All. Everyone," said Pierre Haloub on the last day of his life.


In Washington, the president of the United States assured the National Security Council, two visiting ambassadors, eight United States senators and an interviewer that he had great faith in the safety of the vessel called Ship of States.
"While of course we regret the decision of the United Nations to leave New York-particularly coming, as it did, as a result of a dispute over free parking and the veto by our representative of the UN resolution demanding an additional fifty-percent income tax on Americans to help the emerging nations 'find themselves'-we still look to the UN as the hope for peace through negotiation, progress through reason, and change through love and mutual respect."
"What about the beheadings, the gun battle and the horror in the Lebanese consulate section?"