"Time’s Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur Charles, Baxter Stephen)

2. Little Bird

At the moment of Discontinuity, Bisesa Dutt was in the air.

From her position in the back of the helicopter cockpit, Bisesa’s visibility was limited—which was ironic, since the whole point of the mission was her observation of the ground. But as the Little Bird rose, and her view opened up, she could see the base’s neat rows of prefabricated hangars, all lined up with the spurious regularity of the military mind. This UN base had been here for three decades already, and these “temporary” structures had acquired a certain shabby grandeur, and the dirt roads that led away across the plain were hard-packed.

As the Bird swooped higher, the base blurred to a smear of whitewash and camouflage canvas, lost in the huge palm of the land. The ground was desolate, with here and there a splash of gray-green where a stand of trees or scrubby grass struggled for life. But in the distance mountains shouldered over the horizon, white-topped, magnificent.

The Bird lurched sideways, and Bisesa was thrown against the curving wall.

Casey Othic, the prime pilot, hauled on his stick, and soon the flight leveled out again, with the Bird swooping a little lower over the rock-strewn ground. He turned and grinned at Bisesa. “Sorry about that. Gusts like that sure weren’t in the forecasts. But what do those double domes know? You okay back there?”

His voice was overloud in Bisesa’s headset. “I feel like I’m on the back shelf of a Corvette.”

His grin widened, showing perfect teeth. “No need to shout. I can hear you on the radio.” He tapped his helmet. “Ra-di-o. You have those in the Brit army yet?”

In the seat beside Casey, Abdikadir Omar, the backup pilot, glanced at the American, shaking his head disapprovingly.

The Little Bird was a bubble-front observation chopper. It was derived from an attack helicopter that had been flying since the end of the twentieth century. In this calmer year of 2037, this Bird was dedicated to more peaceful tasks: observation, search and rescue. Its bubble cockpit had been expanded to take a crew of three, the two pilots up front and Bisesa crammed on her bench in the back.

Casey flew his veteran machine casually, one-handed. Casey Othic’s rank was chief warrant officer, and he had been seconded from the US Air and Space Force to this UN detachment. He was a squat, bulky man. His helmet was UN sky blue, but he had adorned it with a strictly nonregulation Stars and Stripes, an animated flag rippling in a simulated breeze. His HUD, head-up display, was a thick visor that covered most of his face above the nose, black to Bisesa’s view, so that she could only see his broad, chomping jaw.

“I can tell you’re checking me out, despite that stupid visor,” Bisesa said laconically.

Abdikadir, a handsome Pashtun, glanced back and grinned. “Spend enough time around apes like Casey and you’ll get used to it.”

Casey said, “I’m the perfect gentleman.” He leaned a bit so he could see her name tag. “Bisesa Dutt. What’s that, a Pakistani name?”

“Indian.”

“So you’re from India? But your accent is—what, Australian?”

She suppressed a sigh; Americans never recognized regional accents. “I’m a Mancunian. From Manchester, England. I’m British—third generation.”

Casey started to talk like Cary Grant. “Welcome aboard, Lady Dutt.”

Abdikadir punched Casey’s arm. “Man, you’re such a cliché, you just go from one stereotype to another. Bisesa, this is your first mission?”

“Second,” said Bisesa.

“I’ve flown with this asshole a dozen times and he’s always the same, whoever’s in the back. Don’t let him bug you.”

“He doesn’t,” she said equably. “He’s just bored.”

Casey laughed coarsely. “It is kind of dull here at Clavius Base. But you ought to be at home, Lady Dutt, out here on the North—West Frontier. We’ll have to see if we can find you some fuzzy-wuzzies to pick off with your elephant gun.”

Abdikadir grinned at Bisesa. “What can you expect from a jock Christian?”

“And you’re a beak-nosed mujahideen,” Casey growled back.

Abdikadir seemed to sense alarm in Bisesa’s expression. “Oh, don’t worry. I really am a mujahideen, or was, and he really is a jock. We’re the best of friends, really. We’re both Oikumens. But don’t tell anybody—”

They ran into turbulence, quite suddenly. It was as if the chopper just dropped a few meters through a hole in the air. The pilots became attentive to their instruments, and fell silent.

With the same nominal rank as Casey, Abdikadir, an Afghan citizen, was a Pashtun, a native of the area. Bisesa had got to know him a little, in her short time at the post. He had a strong, open face, a proud nose that might have been called Roman, and he wore a fringe of beard. His eyes were a surprising blue, and his hair a kind of strawberry blond. He said he inherited his coloring from the armies of Alexander the Great, which had once passed this way. A gentle man, approachable and civilized, he accepted his place in the informal pecking order here: although he was prized as one of the few Pashtuns to have come over to the UN’s side, as an Afghan he had to defer to the Americans, and he spent a lot more time copiloting than piloting. The other British troops called him “Ginger.”

The ride continued. It wasn’t comfortable. The Bird was elderly: the cabin reeked of engine oil and hydraulic fluid, every metal surface was scuffed with use, and there was actually duct tape holding together splits on the cover of Bisesa’s inadequately padded bench. And the noise of the rotors, just meters above her head, was shattering, despite her heavily padded helmet. But then, she thought, it had always been the way that governments spent more on war than peace.

When he heard the chopper approach, Moallim knew what he had to do.

Most of the adult villagers ran to ensure their stashes of weaponry and hemp were hidden. But Moallim had different ideas. He picked up his gear, and ran to the foxhole he had dug weeks ago, in preparation for a day like this.

Within seconds he was lying against the wall of the hole with the RPG tube at his shoulder. The hole had taken hours to dig, before it was deep enough for him to get his body out of the way of the back blast, and to get the elevation he needed with the RPG. But when he was in the hole and had pulled a little dirt and loose vegetation over his body, he was really quite well hidden. The grenade launcher was an antique, actually a relic of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but, well maintained and cleaned, it still worked, was still lethal. As long as the chopper came close enough to his position, he would surely succeed.

Moallim was fifteen years old.

He had been just four when he had first encountered the helicopters of the west. They had come at night, a pack of them. They flew very low over your head, black on black, like angry black crows. Their noise hammered at your ears while their wind plucked at you and tore at your clothing. Market stalls were blown over, cattle and goats were terrified, and tin roofs were torn right off the houses. Moallim heard, though he did not see it for himself, that one woman’s infant was torn right out of her arms and sent whirling up into the air, never to come down again.

And then the shooting had started.

Later, more choppers had come, dropping leaflets that explained the “purpose” of the raid: there had been an increase in arms smuggling in the area, there was some suspicion of uranium shipments passing through the village, and so on. The “necessary” strike had been “surgical,” applying “minimum force.” The leaflets had been torn up and used to wipe asses. Everybody hated the helicopters, for their remoteness and arrogance. At four, Moallim did not have a word to describe how he felt.

And still the choppers came. The latest UN helicopters were supposed to be here to enforce peace, but everybody knew that this was somebody else’s peace, and these “surveillance” ships carried plenty of weaponry.

These problems had a single solution, so Moallim had been taught.

The elders had trained Moallim to handle the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It was always hard to hit a moving target. So the detonators had been replaced with timing devices, so that they would explode in midair. As long as you fired close enough, you didn’t even need a hit to bring down an aircraft—especially a chopper, and especially if you aimed for the tail rotor, which was its most vulnerable element.

RPG launchers were big and bulky and obvious. They were difficult to handle, awkward to lift and aim—and you were finished if you showed yourself aiming one from the open or a rooftop. So you hid away, and let the chopper come to you. If they came this way the chopper crew, trained to avoid buildings for fear of traps, would see nothing more than a bit of pipe sticking out of the ground. Perhaps they would assume it was just a broken drain, from one of the many failed “humanitarian” schemes imposed on the area over the decades. Flying over open ground they would think they were safe. Moallim smiled.

The sky ahead looked odd to Bisesa. Clouds, thick and black, were boiling up out of nowhere and gathering into a dense band that striped along the horizon, masking the mountains. Even the sky looked somehow washed-out.

Discreetly she dug her phone out of a pocket of her flight suit. Holding it nestling in her hand, she whispered to it, “I don’t recall storm formations in the weather forecasts.”

“Neither do I,” said the phone. It was tuned to the civilian broadcast nets; now its little screen began to cycle through the hundreds of channels washing invisibly over this bit of the Earth, seeking updated forecasts.

The date was June 8, 2037. Or so Bisesa believed. The chopper flew on.