"Guy N. Smith - The Wood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

only to learn his destiny; he had gone for other, more interesting reasons.
Like the other Luftwaffe pilots who had introduced him to her. No more than
thirty, long blonde hair and a shapely figure which you glimpsed through those
near-transparent garments she always wore, her fortune-telling was just a
blind. The tiny crystal ball in the front window of her dowdy house signified
other things than glimpses into the future. Not that Bertie had any proof of
that personally; perhaps you had to be a regular customer with several visits
behind you before Ingrid Bramer took you through into the other room. She had
warned him not to go on this raid. Perhaps" that was an invitation to stay
behind and visit her again. It would have meant going sick, convincingly.
There were ways, but Bertie Hass had never done anything like that in his
life. You had a duty to the Fuhrer.

He was much lower now, could make out silhouetted details of the land beneath
him. A wood, a big one bordering on a coastal marsh. His mouth went dry. He
might get caught up, break a leg, worse. If only he could make it to the
marsh; a concerted futile effort, treading air with his legs, trying to propel
himself along but all the time drifting lower. And lower. There was no doubt
in his mind that he would hit the wood.

The trees seemed to move, long thick branches outstretched like weird arms
trying to catch him. Lifting up his legs, dodging them, foliage rustling
against the soles of his heavy flying boots.

And then he was down. A soft squelching thud on boggy ground, his fall broken
by spongy marsh grass, the mud beneath it gurgling and sucking. For a few
moments Bertie Hass thought that he had made it to the marsh, had somehow
overshot the wood. He lay there in the darkness, then fought to extricate his
legs from the boggy ground, saw that he was surrounded by tall trees, macabre
caricatures with boles twisted into leering faces, lichen old men's beards.
Hissing ... it was the muddy water stirring and settling again. A patch of wan
moonlight defied the deep shadows, showed him everything he wanted to see and
a lot of things he didn't.

Miraculously he had landed in some kind of a clearing, had barely jarred his
body on impact with the ground. The big wood, somewhere to hide. Safety. He
shuddered, a sudden pang of fear for no accountable reason. That smell . . .
not just the stagnant stench of foul water. Something else . . . something
evil!

Quickly, expertly, he freed himself of his parachute, and began splashing his
way out of this tract of bog, leaving a bubbling protesting trail of disturbed
mud in his wake. He grabbed at an overhanging branch, hauled himself up on to
a patch of solid ground. The shadows seemed to have spread, enveloping him in
a black shroud as though claiming him for their own.

He was aware that he was trembling, hated himself for it. Was not he a member
of the select Luftwaffe, one of the Fuhrer's chosen bomber pilots to whom fear
was unknown? This place was the same as any other, just somewhere to hide
until he worked out a plan to get himself back to the Fatherland. The mission