"Clancy, Tom - Jack Ryan 02 - Patriot Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

Cathy looked up and snapped angrily: "Open the other side, dammit, I
got a bleeder here!"
"The other door's jammed, ma'am. Let me help." Ryan heard a different
kind of siren as they bent down. The three of them moved him aside a foot
or so, and the senior officer made to open the car door. They hadn't moved
him far enough. When the door swung open, its edge caught Ryan's shoulder.
The last thing he heard before passing out was his own scream of pain.

Ryan's eyes focused slowly, his consciousness a hazy, variable thing
that reported items out of place and out of time. For a moment he was
inside a vehicle of some sort. The lateral movements of its passage
rippled agony through his chest, and there was an awful atonal sound in
the distance, though not all that far away. He thought he saw two faces he
vaguely recognized. Cathy was there, too, wasn't she -- no, there were
some people in green. Everything was soft and vague except the burning
pain in his shoulder and chest, but when he blinked his eyes all were
gone. He was someplace else again.
The ceiling was white and nearly featureless at first. Ryan knew
somehow that he was under the influence of drugs. He recognized the
feelings, but could not remember why. It required several minutes of lazy
concentration for him to determine that the ceiling was made of white
acoustical tiles on a white metal framework. Some of the tiles were
waterstained and served to give him a reference. Others were translucent
plastic for the soft fluorescent lighting. There was something tied under
his nose, and after a moment he began to feel a cool gas tracing into his
nostrils -- oxygen? His other senses began to report in one at a time.
Expanding radially down from his head, they began to explore his body and
reported reluctantly to his brain. Some unseen things were taped to his
chest. He could feel them pulling at the hairs that Cathy liked to play
with when she was drunk. His left shoulder felt . . . didn't really feel
at all. His whole body was far too heavy to move even an inch.
A hospital, he decided after several minutes. Why am I in a hospital .
. .? It took an indeterminate period of concentration for Jack to remember
why he was here. When it came to him, it was just as well that he could
contemplate the taking of a human life from within the protective fog of
drugs.
I was shot, too, wasn't I? Ryan turned his head slowly to the right. A
bottle of IV fluids was hanging on a metal stand next to the bed, its
rubber hose trailing down under the sheet where his arm was tied down. He
tried to feel the prick of the catheter that had to be inside the right
elbow, but couldn't. His mouth was cottony dry. Well, I wasn't shot on the
right side . . . Next he tried to turn his head to the left. Something
soft but very firm prevented it. Ryan wasn't able to care very much about
it. Even his curiosity for his condition was a tenuous thing. For some
reason his surroundings seemed much more interesting than his own body.
Looking directly up, he saw a TV-like instrument, along with some other
electronic stuff, none of which he could make out at the acute angle. EKG
readout? Something like that, he decided. It all figured. He was in a
surgical recovery room, wired up like an astronaut while the staff decided
if he'd live or not. The drugs helped him to consider the question with