Hard Landing by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781844568574
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2007-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

Jason Lee was sitting at the table when he heard his door being unlocked. He frowned. It was half an hour early. Then he remembered that his cellmate was due back and twisted in his wooden chair, expecting Macdonald. He was surprised to see Eric Magowan, one of the hotplate men, standing in the doorway, holding a plastic canteen bag. A prison officer was standing just behind him but Lee couldn’t see who it was.

‘Not me, mate, I’m spent up,’ said Lee. He leaned back in his chair but he still couldn’t see the officer’s face, just a black-trousered leg and a glimpse of white shirt. He couldn’t even tell if the officer was male or female.

‘Don’t look a gift-horse in the arse,’ said Magowan, tossing the bag at him.

Lee caught it. He was about to argue with Magowan when he saw what was in it. Three Pot Noodles. Two bars of chocolate. A jar of coffee. He hadn’t ordered the treats. They were a pay-off – from Carpenter.

Magowan walked away and the prison officer slammed the door and locked it. Lee stared at the bag. He knew that Carpenter never gave anything for nothing. He would be expected to keep a close eye on his cellmate. God help him if Macdonald was up to something and Lee didn’t come up with the goods.

Shepherd woke up and rolled over, half asleep. He could smell Sue’s perfume and reached across the bed for his wife, murmuring her name, but before his hand touched the pillow he snapped back to reality. The cold emptiness returned and he curled up into a ball as the memories of everything he’d lost washed over him. Shepherd had lost people before, and he’d seen more than a handful of his friends killed, but nothing compared with the loss of the woman he loved.

He’d been splattered with the blood of an SAS captain whose head had exploded in the Afghan desert, and he’d been cradling the man in his arms when a sniper’s bullet had slammed into his own shoulder. He’d seen a young trooper die of a snakebite in the Borneo jungle on a survival training course, a stupid mistake because the medic had brought the wrong anti-venom pack with him. The trooper had died in a helicopter just ten minutes away from hospital, his spine curved like a bow, bloody froth at his lips, while Shepherd held his hand and told him to hang on, that everything would be okay. He’d watched from a cliff-top on the Welsh coast as a trooper laden with gear fell to his death during a training exercise, another stupid mistake that had cost a life. But the death of friends and colleagues at least made some sort of sense: they were fighting for their country or pushing themselves to their limits, and it was the occasional price to be paid. Like any member of the armed forces, Shepherd accepted death as a possible outcome of his career choice. And

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