"Destroyer 034 - Chained Reaction.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

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room and a screen against the wall showed who was standing up there. Satisfied that it was the two guards who should be there, Bleech put his key back into the door and walked out. He checked his watch. He and his unit would reach Norfolk with hours to spare. His plan was to keep everyone out until the last possible moment, then make tight sweeps.
He would raid in daylight, for 9 A.M. was the optimum hour, the time when the targets would most likely be asleep in their homes.
When Bleech saw his selected units drive up in drab olive buses, his heart soared. He had planned this but seeing it made him know it would work.
They looked so real in white hats and blue uniforms with white leggings and the SP bands on their arms. They looked like two busloads of Shore Patrol, quite common in a Navy base town. Only Colonel Bleech wore the khaki.
He kept his men waiting in the hot summer sun while he went to sleeping quarters, changed, had four English muffins, and they were off.
They were at the outskirts of Norfolk by dawn and his stomach was hopping with the tension of his first mission. He ordered the two buses into the outskirts of neighboring Virginia Beach, just so they could keep moving without entering the crucial target zones.
He went through an equipment check again. Proper rounds of ammunition per man, proper weapons, the new nylon limb chains-which were far superior to the old heavy metal ones-hypodermic needles, intense sedatives. They were all there.
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The buses moved through Oceana, Ocean-bridge, and then, at 8:37 A.M., were in Norfolk and then Granby Street. They drove to the designated check points and then, at this bright morning hour when those who were going to work were at or near work, his unit struck.
The first spot was the Afro-Natural Wig Factory on Jefferson Street, R. Gonzalez, Proprietor. The crew was quickly through the plate glass, ramming it down with two sharp jabs of poles. A beautiful mulatto woman with cream brown skin but fiery black eyes stood inside the entrance of the small shop with a broom. She was brushed aside quickly.
Four men were into the upstairs and the first bedroom on the right. They were down instantly with a groggy drunken young black man.
"This is him. Positive indent, sir. Lucius Jackson."
"That his sister you pushed?" asked Bleech. He looked around. "Where'd she go?"
"That was her."
"Okay, let's go."
The unit was working the street, some groups entering through doors, others through windows. Colonel Bleech knew he could not keep track of the targets because he was too busy making sure officers and men moved as part of one great invasion of this street.
In ninety seconds they were gone, to another street for another raid. Eight seconds later, R. Gonzalez, Proprietor, appeared in the front door of the Afro-Natural Wig Factory, a .44 Magnum in her hand, and cursed when she saw the street
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was empty. She had wanted to shoot herself somebody.
Bleeeh was ecstatic. Not a single member of the unit had made a mistake. The intense sedatives worked perfectly. Practiced hands inserted the plastic tongue holders that prevented a drugged person from choking on his own tongue. The nylon chains bound wrists behind backs and feet up tight together at the chest. Like curled laundry bundles, the targets were slid into luggage compartments in the sides of the buses. Unlike the normal Greyhound or Trailways buses, these compartments had oxygen pumped into them.
In four key blocks of this area, they had fourteen men and they had used twenty-two minutes. Bleeeh made a decision. He could keep looking for the fifteenth target they wanted and expose his group to danger, or leave now with fourteen safely in hand. He decided to leave. It was the right move. He had not been made commander of this special unit because he did not think for himself. He called in all his men.
Trooper Drake, of course, was last. He had a purpose for Drake.
The two Navy buses with their human cargo hidden in the special luggage compartments drove slowly and carefully back to the main street. Every trooper was aboard.
Colonel Bleeeh gave the order. "Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel," he said to the trooper driving his bus and this order was radioed to the following bus.
So they drove into the tunnel. But the buses that emerged were not Navy buses. They were
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commercial buses with commercial signs and commercial plates. The panels that had blocked out the windows had been removed and visible inside now were a bunch of college students heading home to Maryland. The troopers had made the switch of clothes and hidden their weapons in eighteen seconds. And it had all been done in a tunnel where no one observed.
Up Route 13 they drove until they reached the outskirts of Exmore. There everyone abandoned the buses carrying bundles labeled Swarthmore State College. Inside these bundles were the shore-patrol uniforms and weapons.
Bleech himself wore a pair of green Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt reading "Swarthmore State," and a whistle around his neck. He was the coach if they were stopped.
The cargo was left in the luggage compartments, the oxygen machine keeping the bound men alive.
A mile up the dirt road, in a vast meadow, Bleech ordered everyone into the fields to sit and wait.
If Bleech didn't have a wristwatch, he would have sworn that they had waited for a full half hour. But it was only ten minutes. The second hand moved so slowly, and he fully realized in the blazing summer sun how long a minute could be. Then, from over a hill with grass parched brown, came the rackety sound of helicopters. They were on time. They were blue and white and they were beautiful.
And they were on time. He had done it.
There was a message for him when the first chopper landed.
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"Sir, fourteen triple perfect," said a pilot who did not know what the message meant. But Bleech knew.
Fourteen meant the number of captives picked up from the buses. Triple perfect meant all three phases of the operation had gone without hitch: Bleech had gotten in and out of Norfolk without any trouble; the fourteen prisoners were exactly what was wanted; and everyone else was doing their job correctly, which meant that the prisoners were already moving toward their final destination.
Bleech loaded his men into the helicopters. Trooper Drake was the last to board and he stumbled getting in.
Back at the base camp, Drake would be accused of not staying with his unit and he would be put into the hot box, a prison that got intensely hot in the summer sun, and then Bleech would march the men for a three-day drill into the woods. Drake would be dead on return and Bleech would make a little speech about how Drake had tried to leave his unit and when a man did that, Bleech just forgot he ever existed. His only problem was whether or not it would be more effective to let the troopers discover Drake dead in the hot box or call them together for a parade, and then open the box calling Drake to walk out. It always carried more terror when your men thought you killed them carelessly, without reason. It gave every potential punishment the spicy threat of fatality.
It was a good unit, Bleech realized. He was running out of men for punishment examples.
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And now his stomach craved the rich brown points of a toasted English muffin.
He had won his first battle. According to the calculations of the computer and, more importantly, according to his own, the first battle was going to be the toughest. From here on in, it would be easy.
He had done his job and now those who worked the cargo would have to do theirs. But that should be done easily, too. It had been done before. It was only recently, perhaps within the last hundred years, that it had stopped being done in most civilized places.
Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech did not have the only computer hookup with extremely limited access. There was another, even more extensive in its probes and knowledge of American life, and the access was even more limited. Only one terminal in one spot in America could call out the information, and should anyone else burrow into the computer, the entire unit would self-destruct chemically, becoming a clogged mass of wires and transistors floating in powerful acid.
This computer terminal was in an office in Eye, New York, of what appeared to the outside world as Folcroft Sanitarium. Minimally, it was a sanitarium, but its real purpose was to house the computer complex that was the heart of the secret organization CURE, which now no longer had an enforcement arm.
And what Bleech's computer had told him to do was now being analyzed by the CURE computer and by Dr. Harold W. Smith, the head of the agency, sitting in the office overlooking Long Is-
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land Sound and the ocean over which his ancestors had sailed from England to found a country intended to be based on law.