The Rybinsk Deception

Начало книги

Fauzdarhat was the nearest thing to a beach from hell. Coburn hadn’t expected it to be a pretty sight, but he’d never imagined any beach could look like this.

He pulled off the road at the top of a rise and got out of the car, trying not to breathe in the smell of what was reputed to be one of the most dangerously polluted places anywhere on Earth.

From where he was standing, in either direction for as far as he could see, the scene was one of devastation on an almost unthinkable scale, a vast wasteland of blackened, oil-soaked sand and mud on which stood the rusting skeletons of ships that had come here to die before they were stripped and broken up for scrap. And everywhere, attended to by armies of bucket-carrying workers, were the fires — hundreds of them burning along a seven-mile stretch of foreshore — an easy way to get rid of material that was unsaleable, Coburn guessed, and an equally easy method of disposing of toxic oil and sludge that was too contaminated to be reclaimed.

Читать дальше →