"Boy soldier" - читать интересную книгу автора (McNab Andy, Rigby Robert)

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The website straplines spewed out the story in graphic and horrifying detail: SAS HERO TURNS TRAITOR… Fergus Watts, the former SAS hero…

Highly decorated SAS man, Fergus Watts…

And it got even worse:

Philby, Blunt,… Watts…

There were more. Many more.

Danny and Elena were online in the quiet room, using Elena's precious laptop. 'If what your granddad did is so terrible, we're bound to find something about it on the Internet,' she'd said to Danny. She simply typed 'Fergus Watts SAS' into Google and the details began to emerge.

They scrolled through the websites and got most of the information through old newspaper stories going back eight years. And they didn't make good reading, even though the Fergus Watts story started so well.

He'd been an excellent soldier and was eventually 'badged' into the SAS. He did tours of Northern Ireland at the height of the conflict, and in the first Gulf War was decorated for his work behind enemy lines. He rose to the rank of Warrant Officer and could have got out at the age of forty, but the Regiment was his life and he chose to stay on.

As they delved deeper into the life and history of Fergus Watts, Danny kept reminding himself that this shadowy figure was not just some anonymous stranger, but his own father's father. They were flesh and blood. Family.

Every new fact was a revelation. Fergus Watts's special skill was explosives. He had a natural flair for languages, particularly Spanish. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box cover to guide the way.

The SAS man's skills led him to Colombia and the war against the FARC drugs barons. His ongoing mission had been to lead patrols deep into the rainforest, to seek and destroy drug manufacturing plants. Danny tried to imagine the jungle, the heat, the heroic battles.

But then hero turned villain. Fergus Watts vanished and soon after it was discovered he'd gone over to FARC, purely for the money.

'It's true,' said Danny as they scrolled on to another page. 'It's exactly like the guy at my RCB said, he betrayed the Regiment and his country.'

A long in-depth article from a correspondent in Colombia said that the manufacture and export of cocaine to the USA and Europe was a multi-billion-dollar business, and that in selling his skills and taking the FARC 'blood money', Watts shared the responsibility for the deaths of thousands of young drug users.

'He's no better than a murderer,' said Danny angrily. 'A mass murderer.'

The newspaper stories revealed that the traitor had eventually been captured after a gun battle between his small band of FARC guerrillas and Colombian soldiers. Watts had taken a bullet in the thigh during the fighting and was later tried and thrown into a Colombian prison to rot.

After the trial and jail sentence, the name Fergus Watts disappeared from the newspapers for over four years, but then there was a dramatic return to the headlines: