"Дон Пендлтон. Blood Sport ("Палач" #46) " - читать интересную книгу автора

"Now move out."
"Right, sir!"
Then they were gone, and Bolan turned a hard eye on the frightened
private. Nudging aside Sergeant Grendal's corpse with his foot, he freed one
of the overturned chairs. He set it in the middle of the room and sat down,
his Beretta still aimed at PFC Cottonwood's chest. Cottonwood swallowed, his
Adam's apple bobbing tightly in his throat. "S-sir?"
"Yeah?"
"May I sit down please? Otherwise."
Bolan pointed his gun at the floor. "Sit." Cottonwood sat and waited
silently.
"'Are you glad to be alive, Cottonwood?"
"Y-yes, sir."
"Well, don't be too glad, because it may be a very temporary
situation."
"I see, sir."
"I'm going to give it to you straight, and then you're going to give it
to me straight."
"Yessir."
Bolan stared icily into the boy's eyes.
"You're the one who passed on the report about this location and the
meeting to the authorities. Right?"
"Yessir."
"Why? And don't waste my time with rationallations or excuses."
"No, sir, I won't." Cottonwood swallowed something thick in his throat.
"I work the VT100 computer terminal for incoming shipments of everything
from toilet paper to tanks. Sergeant Grendal approached me a couple months
ago with his idea of how to program the computer so that it kicked out
certain supply orders as duplicate shipments. Hell, CFU is the most common
explanation for anything that goes wrong over here."


"CFU..."

"Computer foul up."
Bolan nodded.
"Whenever we showed a duplicate supply of something, we had orders to
crate and store the supplies in the warehouse, because you never knew when
the CFU would go the other way and short us. That was General Wilson's idea.
Once you got something, never return it. He'd always say that. It was Billy
Tomlin's and Sergeant Grendal's job to crate the stuff and store it. Except
that they started to sell the stuff on the black market." Bolan leaned
forward, his eyes boring into the nervous private like a laser beam through
the neocortex.
"It was just small stuff at first... food mostly... then auto parts...
then..."
"Weapons." Bolan-finished the halting sentence for him.
"Yeah," the private said, uselessly.
Bolan stood up, his gun still aimed at the kid's chest. "So what
happened to you? Lose your guts and decided to fink out on your buddies?