Sidney Sheldon’s Reckless. Сидни Шелдон

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СКАЧАТЬ Hunter’s guards grabbed the shoulder of his companion, shaking him awake. “Listen.”

      The other guard slowly struggled out of sleep. Like Dimitri he was only nineteen. Both boys were French. This time last year they’d been studying computer science in Paris. They’d joined Group 99 for a lark, because a lot of their friends were doing it, and because they loosely supported the idea of taking the world’s super-rich down a peg or two. Neither of them quite knew how they’d ended up in a Bratislavan forest, freezing their tits off and armed with machine guns.

      By the time they got to their feet, strobe lights filled the sky. The whole camp was bathed in blinding light. Then the first shots rang out.

      “Shit!” Dimitri started to cry. “What do we do?”

      Already the helicopters were so loud, it was hard to hear one another.

      “Run!” yelled his friend.

      Dimitri ran. He heard shots behind him and saw his friend fall to the forest floor. He kept going. His legs felt like jelly, as if all the strength had been sucked out of them.

      The camp was a horseshoe of canvas tents clustered around the cabin. There were also two breeze-block structures, one used as a weapons store, and one as a control center, complete with a generator, satellite phone and specially customized laptop. The second structure was closest. Dimitri staggered toward it. All around him, group members were emerging from their tents, bleary-eyed with panic. Some waved guns around, but others were unarmed. Atlas and Kronos, two German lads had their hands in the air. Dimitri watched in horror as they were mown down anyway in a hail of bullets, their limbs flailing grotesquely like dancing puppets as they died.

      Then something hit him from behind. Not a bullet or a stone. It was a gust of wind, so powerful it blew him off his feet. The choppers had landed. Suddenly all was chaos, light and noise. American voices were shouting. “ON THE GROUND! GET DOWN!”

      Dimitri screamed, a child’s wail of terror. Then suddenly, arms were around him, under his shoulders, dragging him into the control center.

      “You’re OK.” Apollo’s voice was firm and calm. Dimitri clung to him like a life raft.

      “They’re going to kill us!” the boy screamed.

      “No they’re not. We’re going to kill them.”

      Dimitri watched as Apollo pulled the pin out of the hand grenade with his teeth and lobbed it toward the men who had just killed his friends. As they were blown into the air, their legs came off.

      “Here.” Apollo handed him a grenade. “Aim for the choppers.”

      INSIDE THE CABIN HUNTER DREXEL COWERED under a table.

      The noise of the Chinooks was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

       They’re here! They found me!

      Even the gunfire, the all too familiar pap pap pap pap of machine guns he remembered from Iraq and Syria sounded soothing to his ears, like a lullaby, or a mother’s voice.

      Boom! The cabin door didn’t so much open as explode, shards of wood flying everywhere. Smoke filled the room in seconds, disorienting him. Hunter’s ears were ringing and his eyes stung. He heard voices, shouts, but everything was muffled, as if he were hearing them under water. He waited for someone to come in, a soldier or even one of his captors, but no one did. Crawling on his belly, Hunter began feeling his way towards the space where the cabin door used to be.

      Outside, he quickly got his bearings back. Stars up. Snow down. The Americans—presumably?—were mostly in front of him and to the right, directly facing the camp. To his left, what was left of Group 99 had taken up position in the two breeze-block buildings and were firing back. Gunshots flashed in the blackness like fireflies. Occasionally a strobe or flare would illuminate everything. Then you could see men running. Hunter watched as three of the American soldiers were gunned down just feet in front of him. His captors were clearly not giving up without a fight.

      A whimpering sound to his left, like a wounded animal made him turn around.

      “Help me!”

      Crawling towards the sound, Hunter found the English boy codenamed Perseus sprawled out in the snow. Hunter had a particular soft spot for Perseus with his skinny, chicken legs, cockney accent and thick, dorky glasses. Hunter had nicknamed him “Nerdeus.” They often played poker together. The boy was good.

      Now he lay helplessly on the cold ground, his eyes wide with shock. A deep crimson stain surrounded him. Glancing down Hunter saw that both his lower legs had been blown off.

      “Am I going to die?” he sobbed.

      “No,” Hunter lied, lying down next to him.

      “I can’t feel my legs.”

      “It’s the cold,” said Hunter. “And the shock. You’ll be fine.”

      Perseus’s eyes opened and closed. It wouldn’t be long now.

      “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never meant for … all this.”

      “I know that,” said Hunter. “It’s not your fault. What’s your name? Your real name.”

      The boy’s teeth chattered. “J-James.”

      “Where are you from, James?”

      “Hackney.”

      “Hackney. OK.” Hunter stroked his hair. “What’s it like in Hackney?”

      The boy’s eyes closed.

      “Do you have any brothers and sisters, James? James?”

      He let out one, long, fractured breath and was still.

      Hunter felt his eyes well up with tears and his body fill with anger.

      Not anger. Rage.

      James was his friend. He was just a fucking kid.

      “NO!” He started to scream, all the pent-up fear of the last few days erupting out of him in one wild, animal howl of fury and loss. In that moment he didn’t care if he died. Not at all. Stroking James’s cold, dead forehead tenderly, he stood up and ran toward the light of the Chinooks.

      That’s when it happened.

      One of the helicopters exploded, sending a fireball hundreds of feet high shooting into the air like a comet. Hunter watched it in shock. It dawned on him then that the Americans might actually lose this battle. This wasn’t the clean rescue they’d intended. It was all going wrong. Soldiers were dying. Group 99 were fighting back, fighting for their lives.

      Hunter kept running, because really, what else was there to do? He would run until something happened to stop him. Until his legs blew off like James’s, or a bullet ripped through his skull like Bob Daley’s, or until he was free to write the truth about what had happened tonight. The truth about everything.

      The lights grew brighter. Blinding. Hunter thought he was past Group 99’s control center now but he wasn’t sure. Just СКАЧАТЬ