Friendly Fire (A Spider Shepherd short story)

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Comms. The usual call signs: Snipers prefix Sierra, assault troops Alpha, support groups Quebec, and all leaders are Sunray. Snipers, assault groups and the support heavy weapons, all have your own internal nets,’ the Major said. ‘Everything’s encrypted so everyone can talk in real time and the only reason to use codes would be to shorten the time, so “Fetch Sunray” will do it instead of “I want to talk to the Boss”. We’ll keep you separate to stop the net from getting clogged up with traffic, but if you need mortars or other support, tell the Head Shed and we’ll link you in with the other nets if necessary. The Head Shed on the ground will monitor and control, but we also have a link back to Bagram patched through to the UK, so they’ll be exercising tactical control from there.’

  Shepherd and Spud exchanged another world-weary glance. Signals traffic was always monitored in Bagram, where they would arrange any air-or heavy weapons support that was called for, but the army - the Green Army as SAS men dismissively termed it - would also be involved. Shepherd was far from happy about it as it smacked of too many cooks, but it was the way that wars were fought and there was no point in saying anything.

  ‘I know you guys would rather work autonomously but that’s not going to happen here,’ he said as if reading Shepherd’s mind. ‘The Americans are running things so everything has to be run by them and that’s done at a pay grade much higher than mine. So, again, you need permission to fire from Sunray. No excuses.’

  ‘What if we come under attack, boss?’ asked Spud, at the same moment it had occurred to Shepherd.

  ‘I’m not going to say no exceptions, Spud. But if you fire without authorization, you’d better have a bloody good reason because you’ll have to justify every round down the line.’

  The comms system was secure but it was increasingly complex. Anything Shepherd transmitted in the field would be immediately encrypted. It went up to one satellite, where it was encrypted again, and then a second one, where it was encrypted for a third time, before being sent down to a recipient who might be two hundred yards or two thousand miles away. The Head Shed would consist of a couple of bosses led by the Major, with two or three signallers monitoring Shepherd and the other SAS crews, and a couple more sending back to Bagram. There would also be an overview in COBRA in London, and quite possibly the White House, since politicians tended to treat special ops as a spectator sport. Even if it wasn’t patched through to the USA, since the comms system was licensed from the US and used American satellites, all the SAS troopers knew that anything they said and did could be seen and heard by the US military. So pulling a fast one on the Americans was pretty much out of the question.

  As they left the Major’s quarters, Shepherd slapped Lex on the back. ‘Got your own set of Passive Night Goggles yet?’

  Lex shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Now’s your chance. They’re very expensive but easy to acquire. If we get in a fire-fight, when we’re on our way out again, stash your PNGs in your grab bag and tell the quartermaster you lost them in the confusion; that way you’ll have your own set in future - it’s how I got mine.’

  They headed for the weapons store and armory, a small concrete bunker buried under a mound of bulldozed earth. Lex filled his bergen with ammunition for his M16, then watched as Shepherd collected his ammo. He held up a bullet for Lex to admire. ‘.50 ammo,’ he said. ‘High tech stuff. The rounds are precision-engineered with a titanium-tipped head. Plus I use two types of mass produced ammo: the ones with red bands around the business end are APTI - Armour Piercing Tracer Incendiary. The ones with yellow bands are APTP - the second “P” is for Phosphorous. I use them for target marking, you get puffs of white smoke where they strike.’

  Shepherd had a small personal radio, like a sat-phone, on his right shoulder, so he merely had to take a sideways glance to see what channel and frequency he was on. Like the other old SAS hands, he also had a voice-activated, throat-mic, keeping his hands free. The new guys, still with much to learn, mostly opted for the hand-operated switch that they had to press to talk.

  They set out in the early afternoon. All of them wore Afghan clothing and headgear. They were all fresh from tours in the Middle East and, with skin burned by the sun and at least a few days growth of beard, they could just about pass as Afghans to any villagers they passed. Shepherd, Lex, and Taj took the lead vehicle, with Spud in the next with one of the SAS rookies, and the other two-man team bringing up the rear. Taj had an AK74, the updated and smaller caliber version of the ubiquitous AK47, ammunition belts and a pack loaded with even more ammunition. Apart from the weapon and ammo he could have been dressed for a country stroll, with his rations - rice, almonds and raisins - in a small pouch around his waist. ‘Is that all the kit you’ve got, Taj?’ Shepherd said.

  The Afghan nodded. ‘It’s all I need.’

  ‘I’ve heard about traveling light, but you take the biscuit,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘I have no biscuits,’ said Taj. Shepherd couldn’t tell if the Afghan was joking or not.

  They drove out of the base and took the road to the south, soon leaving the city well behind. The road was rough and the only traffic was an occasional vividl-painted, ancient Afghan truck rumbling past in a cloud of diesel fumes.

  Signs of the country’s perpetual war were everywhere: shell-blasted and bombed buildings, wrecked trucks and rusting military equipment, much of it from the Soviet era. The people they passed paused to stare at them, their expressions neither friendly nor hostile, merely watchful, and everyone they passed carried a weapon. ‘Have you seen that, even the kids have got AK47s,’ said Lex.

  Paths at the edge of villages were marked by lines of white stones, showing cleared pathways through the minefields that covered much of the country.

  They drove by a roadside stall, roofed with torn sacking, selling sandals cut from used tyres and cooking pots made from beaten, reclaimed metal that still bore traces of camouflage paint and cyrillic lettering, and a collection of wooden limbs, perhaps harvested from the dead for re-use. The only goods that looked new were the racks of Kalashnikovs and the boxes of ammunition. The shopkeeper was an old man, his face the colour of a weathered satchel, a steel hook where his left hand had once been.

  There were brief glimpses of the rich, fertile country that had once been known as “The Crossroads of Asia”, but there were few people tilling the fields and almost all of them were old men. ‘This is what three generations of war has done to my country,’ Taj said. ‘The young men are gone either to fight for or against the Taliban or they are already dead. Only the old remain.’

  As the valley narrowed, the road passed through an abandoned village, the mud-brick houses already returning to the earth from which they were formed. The crumbling mosque still had remnants of the shimmering blue tiles that must once have covered it, but it was pocked with bullet holes and blackened by fire. The pool for ritual bathing was dry and filled with rubble, and the mulberry and walnut trees that had once shaded it had been shattered by shellfire.

  Just beyond the village, a spindly tree had been dragged across the road, and two figures stood behind it, an older man with a long grey beard and a boy who was barely as tall as the AK47 he was holding. ‘What do you think?’ Shepherd said, his hand resting on his rifle.

  ‘They’re not Taliban,’ Taj said. ‘Just a couple of villagers trying to levy a toll of a few Afghanis for crossing their land.’

  ‘Then let’s pay them,’ Shepherd said. ‘Why look for trouble before we need to? You do the talking.’

  He slowed to a halt and Taj jumped out, walked over to the makeshift barrier and exchanged a few words with the old man. Whatever the old man asked for, Taj greeted it with a roar of laughter. He shook his head, thrust a few crumpled Afghani notes into the old man’s hand, then turned his back without waiting for a reply and strode back to the vehicle. After a momentary hesitation, the two villagers dragged the tree off the road and Shepherd accelerated away.

  ‘How much did he want?’ asked
Shepherd.

  ‘A hundred dollars.’

  ‘How much did you give him?’

  Taj laughed. ‘A lot less than that.’

  The terrain grew ever more bleak and forbidding the farther they drove. The walls of the mountains rose higher around them and the soaring, jagged, snow-capped peaks were thrown into even starker relief by the low sun. Steep scree slopes were punctuated by mountain torrents and waterfalls tumbling down black cliff faces, the wind tossing the spray high into the air.

  Just beyond a perilous stone bridge, a rough side-track split from the road. It led around a rocky crag and down towards a ruined house, sheltered by a stand of cedars and larches on the banks of a rushing green river in the valley floor. ‘This is the place,’ Taj said. ‘The valley we want is beyond that ridge.’ He pointed beyond the river at the rocky, scree-strewn slopes, rising to what looked like an almost sheer, snow-covered ridge line. Shepherd checked his GPS and nodded. They swung off the road and bounced and jolted down the track, coming to a halt at a point where they were screened by the trees from the road.

  Taj got out, crouched on the banks of the stream and scooped up a few handfuls of water. Shepherd and Lex drank from their water bottles. ‘What now?’ Lex said.

  ‘We wait for the sun to go down,’ said Shepherd said. He gestured at the bleak mountainside above them, ‘We’d be sitting ducks up there in daylight.’

  They set out as soon as night had fallen. Shepherd had his sniper rifle on a sling leaving his hands free for an AK47. The sniping rifle was perfect for long distance but if the fighting got up close and personal he wanted something less fancy in his hands. Taj cradled his AK74 and Lex had the standard Para Support Group M-16.

  All of them wore PNGs, turning the night into an eerie, yellow-tinted landscape. Shepherd watched as Lex prepared himself and stopped him as he began to put his trauma dressing into one of the pockets of his jacket. ‘Word to the wise,’ he said. ‘Keep your dressing on your left chest or left arm where you can get to it straight away; even a delay of a few seconds while you fumble with your pocket could be fatal. And keep your morphine syrettes on a bit of para cord round your neck, that way you can get to it straight away if you’re hit.’

  The first obstacle was the narrow but fast-flowing river. The only way across was to get into the water and that meant taking off their clothes because wet clothes at night would be a killer. He stripped off his clothes and tied them in a bundle, gesturing for Lex to do the same. ‘I’ll cross first,’ Taj said, ‘I’ve been doing this since I was a boy.’

  ‘What about my boxers?’ asked Lex.

  ‘Everything,’ said Shepherd. ‘You can dry yourself after you’ve crossed but wet clothes will stay wet.’ He chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, Lex, you haven’t got anything we haven’t all seen before.’

  Taj pulled off his clothes revealing a back as hairy as a bear’s. ‘Give me a rope,’ he said. Shepherd handed him his tac line, a coil of nylon rope with a carabineer on one end. Taj secured one end with a quick release knot to the trunk of a larch just above the water’s edge. He put his pack back on, hoisted his bundle of clothes onto his head and, holding his rifle aloft in his other hand, slipped into the river and moved away.

  The bitterly-cold current was fierce but he never seemed to slip or stumble and soon afterwards Shepherd saw him clamber out on the far bank and secure the rope around a boulder. Shepherd sent Lex next and then began to edge across after him. He let out an involuntary gasp as he lowered himself into the icy water. It rose above his waist, lapping against the bottom of the bergen on his back, as he began to inch across, grateful for the rope, for the current tugged at him and the rocks underfoot were smooth and slippery.

  As he approached the bank, he threw his bundle of clothes onto the ground ahead of him and pulled himself out. He heard Lex’s teeth chattering and hissed to him ‘Rub yourself dry with your shirt or you’ll freeze.’ He took his own shirt from his bundle and began to do the same, his flesh burning in the cold. Taj, impassive, had already dressed, as if a stark naked crossing of a freezing river was all in a day’s work.

  Shepherd retrieved the rope and they moved off. The ground sloped steeply upwards and the cold was soon forgotten with the effort of climbing. Taj moved with a slow, relentless stride. They climbed higher, a zig-zagging ascent as the track wound its way across the face of the mountain, pausing frequently to watch and listen, waiting for the blood to cease pounding in their ears as they searched for any trace of noise or movement in the darkness above them.

  As the gradient increased, they had to use their hands to haul themselves upwards. They passed the snow line, clambering on across hard frozen snow and ice-covered rocks that made every step a gamble, and still the ridge was high above them. The Afghan winter was coming on and it was ferociously cold. The physical effort left Shepherd and Lex fighting for breath, but Taj, born and raised in the mountains, was totally unfazed by it.

  After what seemed an eternity of crawling slowly upwards, his head pounding from oxygen deprivation and with the dead weight of his bergen making every step an ordeal, Shepherd saw the crest of the ridge no more than fifty yards above them. Taj had stopped, waiting and listening once more, and he now signalled to Shepherd and Lex to get down. The two men flattened themselves to the ground, pressing their faces into the gritty snow. Taj drew his curved Afghan knife and moved up the mountainside. He paused just below the ridgeline, and then moved forward again and disappeared from their sight.

  The minutes dragged and Shepherd was about to move up the slope when a dark shape appeared on the ridge above and to their right. The next instant, it slid down the mountainside, gathering ice and stones in a miniature avalanche as it fell. A second later, another dark form followed it. As it fell, Shepherd heard Taj’s voice in his earpiece. ‘Come up, it’s clear.’

  When they reached the ridge, Taj was cleaning his knife. ‘Two,’ he said, baring his teeth in a savage smile. ‘But both were sleeping.’ He slid the knife back into its sheath.

  ‘Did they have radios?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘No, and the Taliban often sends sentries to such places for a week or more before they’re relieved, so it may be some time before their disappearance is discovered.’

  If Shepherd had had any remaining doubts about Taj’s value and trustworthiness, they were now completely resolved. He had risked his own life to clear the way for Shepherd and Lex. A few moments later, they were looking down into the upper reaches of the Tora Bora valley. The rock-strewn slopes were as bleak and featureless as the surface of the moon. There were no trees or grass, just bare ice, rock and scree. They began the descent into the valley, moving even more cautiously now, inching their way, climbing down the rock faces and crossing the open slopes from boulder to boulder, using the natural cover and avoiding the loose screes that would give them away.

  Two hours before dawn, they reached the position Shepherd had identified from the surveillance imagery and set up their OP overlooking the caves. Two huge boulders jutting from the mountainside provided cover and some shelter from the bitter wind. In front of them, a rock ledge a few metres wide, part-covered with a thin layer of gritty soil, gave them a platform from which they could observe the caves and the track leading to them.

  Shepherd wormed his way forward, feeling the ammo vest on his chest catching on small stones and projecting edges of rock. Still wearing his PNGs, Shepherd scanned the area, searching for suspiciously regular shapes or movement that would give away the presence of enemy soldiers or equipment, but the goggles didn’t have much magnification and the yellow tint blurred his vision.

  He took off his goggles and used the sniper scope to focus first on the area surrounding the caves. The sniper scope had a twenty-five fold magnification without having the same distortion as the PNGs, and it picked up a lot of ambient light. He was able to identify a series of defensive sangers just above the track and what might have been the barrels of heavy weapons in some of them, clearly outlined agains
t patches of fresh snow.

  He turned his attention to the caves and saw something. Activity. Heavily armed men, some in turbans and black robes and others in what looked like white Arab robes, entering and leaving.

  Shepherd wormed his way back to Taj and Lex in the deeper shadows at the foot of the boulders and checked his radio channel. ‘Sunray, Sierra 5. Eyes on the target. Much activity, defensive positions and heavy weapons. At least fifty men visible outside the caves.’

  He heard the other OPs checking in, adding their intelligence. There was now no doubt that, at the least, they were looking at a substantial Taliban or al Qaeda stronghold. But it was also possible - and Shepherd felt a jolt of adrenaline at the thought - that they had found Bin Laden’s lair.

  He could imagine the buzz of excitement at the Head Shed at Bagram and even more so in London and Washington. The intelligence was now not from rumour or satellite surveillance, but from eyes on the ground, and he knew that it would galvanize the Regiment into action. His earpiece crackled again. ‘Sierra 5, Sunray. Maintain Eyes On and wait out.’

  As dawn broke, he carefully removed the protective foam from his rifle, took his sniper scope from his grab bag and assembled the rifle, zeroing them to one point. He laid it down on the foam rubber, careful not to give it the least knock that might throw it off, then settled down for what experience told him would be a long wait. In theory, a Quick Reaction Force could be on its way, if not within minutes, at least within hours. In practice, days might pass before an order to attack was given, as the various arms of the forces of the two nations jostled for position, and the politicians and spin doctors in Whitehall and Capitol Hill positioned themselves to claim the credit if successful and deflect the blame if not.

  Throughout the day they watched a steady flow of arrivals and departures from the caves. Near midday, one of the Taliban’s red Toyota pick-ups pulled up at the foot of the track to the cave. The back was packed with soldier monks with kohl-rimmed eyes and the forked tails of their black turbans flying in the breeze. They looked like young boys, but each of them clutched an RPG or an AK47. While the driver painstakingly turned around, what appeared to be a delegation made their way up to the cave. They remained inside for forty minutes and then emerged and drove off again. Shepherd reported the sighting over the net, one more piece of the jigsaw in place.