Delta Green - страница 23

The river, and the brown spot on the other side of it, came up fast. Because of the dense, triple-canopied layer of jungle, an oblique camera shot of the target from ten miles away and ten miles high wouldn’t reveal much. In these cases, Conover brought the MakoShark almost directly overhead, then put her nose straight down on the target while Abrams controlled the camera. They only needed a few inches of good video tape. Pearson could always freeze it and study it for as long as she wanted.

The picture on his main screen was now almost entirely of blue sky for Abrams had centered the camera.

“Two seconds, Con Man.”

“Two.”

A couple heartbeats.

“Mark.”

Conover put the nose down and eased back the throttles. The screen flashed from blue into green into brown. The river appeared, and he neutralized his controls.

“Shit,” Abrams said.

The image steadied, then cleared a little as the magnification was backed off a few notches.

“Lumber operation,” Abrams said.

The comment clarified what he was seeing on the screen, the image fuzzed by the high magnification. A thin tributary to the Brahmaputra was jammed tight with logs chained into rafts for floating down to the coast. The rafts stretched up the river for over a mile.

The HUD read forty-eight thousand feet when Conover pulled out of his dive.

“Lot of damned wood,” he said.

“Not going to land a Mako on it,” Abrams said.

“Doubt it.”

“Let’s go south and take up the next leg”

“Why not?”

Flying search patterns could be tedious as hell, but Conover loved flying the MakoShark so much that he didn’t mind a bit. His conscience zinged him a little when he thought about poor old Dimatta and Williams chugging along in a clumsy Gates Learjet.

Aleksander Maslov did not care for either the temperature or the humidity. Both played havoc with, not only human biology and temperament, but also with the sensitive devices invented by man. Delicate electronic circuitry misbehaved and mechanical systems that were not carefully maintained and lubricated gathered rust. Those conditions were potentially life-threatening, and he thought often that lazy ground crewmen did not fully appreciate the threat. He was an ardent supervisor of ground crew operations.

The air conditioner in Maslov’s small house trailer had failed once again, and the interior was sweltering despite his opening the three windows and the single door. If it were not for the privacy he enjoyed in his tiny residence, he would have moved into the new dormitory which boasted central air-conditioning.

Maslov pushed himself off the single narrow bed and stood up. He was tall (186 centimeters) and he had to duck his head slightly to stand upright. He bent over in the tiny lavatory and used the mirror to brush his short-cropped blond hair. When he turned the tap, the cold water, which was all that was available, came out in a clear, slow dribble. He used the washcloth to swab his face, chest, and arms, then toweled off. Passing his palm over his square jaw, Maslov decided he could forego shaving, but double-checked that decision in the mirror. He had sharp green eyes, a result of some long-ago heritage that had invaded his Ukrainian ancestry. His facial skin was taut, normally fair, and now reddened by exposure to the sun. Maslov did not have much experience with southern latitudes, and the sun did not care for him.

He was already wearing khaki shorts and steel-soled shoes, and he pulled on a short-sleeved, khaki shirt as he pushed open the screen door and exited the trailer.

His trailer was one of six parked side-by-side under the jungle canopy that fringed the west side of the clearing. They were backed right up against a wall of dense foliage and thick tree trunks. Twisted clusters of liana climbed high overhead, dripping downward from the branches of trees. In some places, gatherings of exotic flowers added splashes of red and orange and blue.

Twenty meters to the north, a pathway which was more like a tunnel had been slashed into the jungle. It led to the dormitory structures that were less than a hundred meters away, but which was still invisible from his viewpoint. Still farther away was the tin-roofed, opensided structure that protected the water well pumps and the electrical generators. Even from this distance, he could hear the throaty murmur of the diesel engines that powered the five generators. It was a constant drone with which he had come to terms. The lazy calls of parrots and the angry chatter of monkeys drew more attention. There were tigers out there, too, rumored to be man-eaters, but he had not seen one. He had seen a rhinoceros and two elephants, but that had been from the air and many kilometers away.