Struggle. Retribution in the Twilight - стр. 3

– Looks like you were right about resource sharing....

Tikhomirov had already taken a sip of tea and felt it warming his brain. It was strong enough, though not bitter, as it was with the tea the miners brewed for themselves, calling it chifir. And it was cooked quite differently – boiled in a pot, not infused in a kettle like this one.

– Of course… What else is there to share? But I still think this division looks a little different than just "give me this and I'll give you that". – replied Tikhomirov, sipping his tea and thinking that it would be better if it were miner's chifir, to which he seemed to be accustomed.

– You mean it's easier to change the hand holding the cards rather than flip those cards between each other?

– Yeah, sort of… You have an enviable place, so to speak. And you've set it up pretty well… I'm pretty sure you've got a lot of other things besides this base. And if that's the case, then there's a lot of people to displease with your existence… And now I would think about what once happened to Khmelnitsky in his Unit-14....

– I understand that you have already taken care of such questions at the mine. – Cobra smiled, clearly pleased to have such an interlocutor with him, intelligent and not competing with him in anything. – We'll have a look at something new… Let's go.

They left the office, went to the far end of the corridor, then down the stairs to the first floor and down to the basement. It turned out to be a large parking lot, now also divided into separate rooms. Still without numbers on the doors, which were aluminum barriers. Behind the one they entered were two men looking at the severed human heads lying on the floor. There was plenty of blood, but apparently the heads themselves had not been severed here, or else it would have been stained not only inside the room, but would have leaked out.

One of the head examiners approached Cobra:

– Only two have been identified…

– As expected…" replied Cobra. – Leave us…

When Cobra's two handmaidens came out he pointed at the lying heads with his hand and continued:

– See those heads. Thirty-two to be exact… Someone interrupted the Bravo team when they were guarding the approach to the Deez sector from the industrial pipe, and then fired mortars at us. And your patron pointed out at the time that 80-millimeter mortars were too heavy for the Maquis to carry that far… But what surprised me more was not that, but that someone had gotten so stealthily close to the Bravo group that not a single shot had been fired. And during the whole time they were interrupted, too… Their heads were left for us not far from an industrial pipe with a stick buried nearby, to which a still-living snake was nailed. It's clear that it's a message to me. You can still move, but you can't do anything… Someone knew too well when they acted. Too quiet, too stealthy, too sure and too aware of everything. And then he withdrew just as quietly… While the shelling was still going on, I ordered to change the frequency, and on the spare frequency I had already told the neighboring units to go around the attackers' position from both flanks      Then I