World War III полностью

Silent. Awesome. Majestic. Everlastingly beautiful. Untouched by history. That was the description a Russian Orthodox missionary noted in his personal journal in 1794 as his impression of this section of rock and snow of what later came to be called the Brooks Range inside the Arctic Circle of Alaska’s northernmost province. They are the first-known words written about the North Slope.

What he might have written, if he’d had the chance, was that it was also unforgiving.

The missionary’s frozen body — his journal and Bible clutched together in one hand — was discovered in 1974 by a pipeline worker who’d chipped off a piece of the Russian’s knee with a pickax before he realized he wasn’t just hacking at subzero ground.

In the 160 years that the missionary rested undisturbed and surrounded by silent beauty little had changed. The Brooks Range remains for the most part unexplored and unsettled. It has been defaced infrequently by pockets of civilization, inhabited by foolish or brave souls whose very survival depends upon winning a constant battle against nature and the delivery of supplies from other souls even more foolish or brave.

The Russian Christian’s impression of awesome majesty, particularly his appreciation of everlasting beauty, is unchallengeable and will continue to be until there is no one left to record it. However, his sense of history or rather his view of geopolitics, if indeed he had one, would certainly be obsolete today. The world politics of nations has substantially changed since Catherine Romanov reigned as empress of the Russian Empire, and George Washington began his second term as president, struggling with the internal affairs of a new and arrogant republic and advocating no permanent foreign alliances.

That their two nations would one day face each other as wary antagonists across a frozen expanse of incredible beauty is no less ironic than, some predicted, inevitable.

USAF T/Sgt. Willard J. Stedman was not concerned with the consequences of geopolitical theory, inevitable or otherwise. His preoccupation with sleep, that is, longing for it, kept him awake. That, and the half dozen radar and weather-satellite screens at the console before him. Stedman stared at the computer-defined translation of the latest weather-satellite photo. The screen was a mass of electronic colors representing identifiable terrain features of the Chartosk Peninsula of the Soviet Arctic to the north, across the Bering Strait to the Seward Peninsula to the west and the Brooks Range and Philip Smith Mountains to the east. The image was laced with grid coordinates and alphanumeric data, all of which meant that the storm that raged outside the relative comfort of this Quonset hut would continue for at least several more days. It didn’t bother him that there was a storm — he wasn’t going anywhere — but his personal supply of peach preserves was nearly exhausted. T/Sgt. Stedman had a thing about peach preserves. He craved peach preserves the way others chain-smoked. He ate peach preserves on nearly anything that was edible and some things that weren’t. When there wasn’t anything to put it on he just ate it with a spoon out of the jar. He loved peach preserves. His mother made them back home in Arkansas and she sent him a carefully packed carton of two dozen jars once a month. That was the trouble. The supply chopper was late this week and if this storm delayed it another couple of days — which seemed increasingly probable — then he’d run out of peach preserves.

Stedman spread a glob of preserves on a cracker and munched as he considered one of the radar screens. A man shouldn’t have to be deprived of something as simple as his preserves, he told himself.

You’d think the United States Air Force would be sympathetic to a guy up here, especially in a place like this. Dewline Radar Station #68. It was so far out of reach they couldn’t even think of a decent name for it. Six men in two Quonset huts for four months at a time. It wasn’t that he was a complainer, but — goddamnit! — what was he going to do when he ran out?

Lt. Bradford Kennedy closed the shaving kit and tucked it under his arm. He’d been up since midnight.

He hadn’t slept well in the last two days since he’d heard from Fairbanks. They’d told him bad weather was coming and to be on the alert, Dewline #68 was a crucially important outpost. It was nice to hear that someone appreciated him inasmuch as superiors didn’t usually have much to say regarding job performance unless you’d screwed up. Not that he was a screw-up; no one got to be a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force, assigned to Dewline primary radar of NORAD’s Alaskan Defense Command, by making mistakes. Not with his job.