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Автор Jack Higgins
A Game for Heroes
Contents
Foreword
Author’s Note
PROLOGUE: A Fine Morning to Die in
1: The King of the First Four Hundred
2: Now Destroy
3: A Man Called Steiner
4: A Fast Boat and a Passage by Night
5: On Dangerous Ground
6: And the Earth Moved
7: Alles ist Verrückt
8: A Land of Standing Corpses
9: The Road Gang
10: The Hand of God
11: Rough Justice
12: Storm Warning
13: Mutiny
14: The Wreck of the Pride of Hamburg
15: The Mill-Race
16: A Bell Tolls for Steiner
17: An End to Killing
About the Author
Also by Jack Higgins
About the Publisher
At one stage in my career, I enjoyed many family holidays on the lovely island of Alderney in the English Channel Isles. Occupied by the Nazis, it was the only place in Britain which had a concentration camp and many cruel events took place there. Fascinated by all this I created a commando raid which in the book takes place during the last few weeks of the Second World War. A strong moral theme in the book queries how useful such raids ever were in the first place and what success they ever had as regards the eventual success of the Allied forces. This is a point for the reader to decide.
Men generally die in war when they cannot help it and are defeated by a disadvantageous situation.
Wu Ch’i.
The German occupation of the Channel Islands from 1940-45 is a matter of history, but the island of St Pierre exists on no map of the area to my certain knowledge, which hardly makes it necessary for me to add that all characters and incidents in this present story are fictional. No reference is made, or intended, to any living person.
J. G.
PROLOGUE
The bodies started to come in with the tide just after dawn, clustered together, bobbing in through the surf to the beach a hundred feet below my hiding place.
The bay was called Horseshoe for obvious reasons. As a boy, I had swum down there on more occasions than I could remember and there was an excellent beach when the tide was out. An inhospitable shore now though, seeded with mines and choked by barbed wire strung between rusting steel lances. No place to be, alive or dead, on a cold April morning.
It was raining slightly and visibility was not good in the dawn mist so that even Fort Victoria on its rocky point a quarter of a mile away was barely visible.
I took a cigarette from my waterproof tin, lit it and sat there watching more bodies float in, but not from any morbid curiosity. It was impossible for me to leave the shelter of those gorse bushes before nightfall. If I attempted to move in daylight, capture was certain on such a small island, especially now that my presence was known.
