Baset: переводы

→“She…she took the Mustang.”

→“No, ma’am, but this isn’t the first time she ran away, neither.”

→“Any word on Kelley?”

→The woman looked like the Grim Reaper, black-veiled from head to feet. Maybe a hardcore Shia Islamist. These were still rare in Iraq, though less so now that fundamentalism was on the rise. Or maybe she was the woman of a mercenary from Iran or Saudi Arabia. Harlan flicked his eyes at Danny: Would she do the honors? Danny dropped down out of the Humvee, Spass-key covering her topside with the M249 SAW gun. Her eyes probed every shadow, her hands were wet on the grip of the Mossberg 12 gauge, but she strode almost casually across the dirt patch that served the house as a front yard. Just a friendly visit, neighbor, couldn’t help notice your house was on fire. You mind stepping aside so the tanks can roll through?

→“I think there’s something going on.”

→Whatever it was, gunfire was combat team business. They pulled around the burning house and in the flat distance, men were running. Requests and orders cracked around the radios. Air support on the way. But sometimes these incidents were intended to draw air support. The Black Hawks limped home with holes in them. Danny’s team was going to have to go out there and attract some attention. Tanks first, however. But there was a woman in front of the tanks. She was standing beside the house. Danny’s instincts told her it was a setup. But her instincts always told her that. Because the whole fucking war was a setup.

→“It’s the heat,” Patrick said.

→“Sheriff?” Dave said.

→Dave shook his head. Danny usually wanted the shift incident reports in detail, but now her thoughts were on her sister. Not to mention the midday ceremony. And she was late. Danny would have to make up for lost time and get her shit wired down tight. And even as Dave changed tracks in his slow-working brain, Danny was suddenly, monumentally hung over. All the moisture left her head at once and her brain was high and dry, resting on bony spines inside her skull.

→The road descending from the Adelman place into Forest Peak was a scribble of tar a lane and a half wide through the steep woods. It curled upon itself like a rattlesnake gliding through the immense trees: heavy-browed ponderosa pine, Douglas fir with their thick scored skins, young black oaks coming up in the gulleys where the big trees let a little sunlight get through. The slope of the mountain was so steep here that the crowns of the trees on the downhill side were at the same height as the roots of the trees on the uphill side. It was a beautiful place, especially with the morning sun cutting through the mist. Danny took the hairpin turns at forty miles an hour, the Explorer’s tires screaming as they skated from shoulder to shoulder. She could make town in five more minutes. One hand grasping the radio mic, one hand on the wheel, she called in an all-points bulletin on her runaway sister.

→“Dave? Kelley. Anything about Kelley.”

→“Anything, Dave?”

→Kelley took the Mustang.

→As she jumped in the cab of the Sheriff’s Department Ford Explorer, another bell rang in the back of her mind.

→Danny rushed through the house, shoving her rumpled shirt into her pants, jamming feet into boots. Hat over there. Gun belt on the chair. Gun on the table. Note from Kelley. What the hell was this? Out of the official notebook, no less! Danny shoved the gun in the holster, snatched up Kelley’s note, and ran out the door. She had been awake for no more than three minutes.

→“Sheriff Adelman, where the heck are you? Come in, Danny.”

→They found the burning mud-brick house about a mile before the appointed rendezvous. Whoever owned the house had been building a concrete addition when the war broke out, because there were three walls with rusted rebar sticking out of them, empty doorways and window sockets cast in place but without doors or windows. No roof. Just as well because the place was a write-off now. There was gunfire in the air, but they couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It didn’t seem to be headed their way, but nobody knew who was doing the shooting, or who was being shot at. Could have been some of the multinationals or a squabble between the locals and the so-called Iraqi security forces, a bunch of dangerous tribal gangbangers.

→They followed the M1A1 Abrams tank toward the MSR—the main supply route around Al Fallujah. Second Tank Battalion was rock-solid. You couldn’t relax merely because there were tanks for protection, but you knew they would pitch in fast and hard if there was a fight on. The trick was to drive straight down their tread tracks if you could, because there wouldn’t be any operational ordnance buried there. Danny hadn’t felt safe in months, but she figured she was with the best guys she could ask for on a regimental combat team. Harlan had her back, and Ramirez, too, even if all he did was give her shit. Spasskey and Duke were good men, but she didn’t really know them—they had replaced the casualties of last week.

→They should talk. Danny tried to follow events surrounding a burglary on the scanner, the Fontana cops dealing with a freaked-out woman speaking rapid Spanish in her backyard. Somewhere around the third time they tried to get a description of the perpetrator, who might have been the woman’s nephew, Danny drifted into unconsciousness.

→The summer was coming, the season for temporary jobs cleaning rental cabins, playing lifeguard at the recreational lake. Then college. Did Kelley want to go to college? She was smart. Smarter than Danny. Maybe she could get out of this one-horse shithole of a town.