Hostile Territory (A Spider Shepherd short story) by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page B

turned and disappeared almost at once back into the maze of streets, while Shepherd walked up the slope to the US embassy. The guards looked him over with ill-concealed disgust, but after giving a code word and unloading his weapon, they let him sit outside the guardhouse while a message was sent via the British Embassy. Ninety minutes later, Jock, Jimbo and Geordie roared up in their commandeered Landcruiser to collect him.
    ‘Thought you’d got rid of me, did you?’ Shepherd said.
    ‘No such luck,’ Jock growled. ‘We never doubted you’d survive, did we lads?  Though the jury’s out on whether you got here on your E&E skills or just on sheer bloody luck.’
     Shepherd slept most of the day. He woke in the early evening and after a shower and some food he met the others in the bar. He told them about Thomas, and about the boy soldiers he’d hadn’t been able to fire on.
    ‘I’d have pulled the trigger,’ said Jimbo.
    ‘If it was me or them, so would I,’ said Geordie. ‘But I know what you mean. Killing kids is wrong.’
    ‘Not if they’re trying to kill you,’ said Jock.
    ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ said Shepherd. ‘The adults play mind games with them and keep them high on drugs. It’s the adults that are to blame. I want to find the bastards who brutalised them and sent them into battle, and make them pay for what they did. I don’t care if I have to kill every rebel from here to the Liberian border; they don’t deserve to live.’
    ‘I’m up for that,’ said Geordie.
    ‘And you can count me in,’ said Jimbo.
    ‘Sounds like we’re going to be busy then,’ Jock said. ‘In the mean time, see if you can find another bottle of Jamesons behind the bar, Spider. It’s your round.’
    * * *
    For the continuing adventures of Spider Shepherd in Sierra Leone, read Rough Diamonds, where Spider and his mates take on a team of rogue mercenaries. Rough Diamonds is available in the UK for just 77p at - http://tinyurl.com/ob6nfc9
     
    Rough Diamonds is available in the US for 99 cents at - http://tinyurl.com/lan9lsk
     
    Spider Shepherd left the SAS at the end of 2002 and joined an elite police undercover unit. You can read the first of his undercover adventures in Hard Landing, where he goes undercover in a high security prison to unmask a drugs dealer who is killing off witnesses to his crimes. The Spider Shepherd series continues with Soft Target, Cold Kill, Hot Blood, Dead Men, Live Fire, Rough Justice, Fair Game, False Friends and True Colours.
     
    Hard Landing is available in the UK for 49p at –  http://amzn.to/xxX2YU
     
    And in the US for less than a dollar at –  http://amzn.to/xWg1E7
     
    Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful eBook authors and his eBooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. In 2011 alone he sold more than 500,000 eBooks and was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. Born in Manchester, he began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV. You can find out more from his website www.stephenleather.com and you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenleather
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