There was a long silence. Shepherd looked away, not sure what to say. As much as a distraction as anything else, he gestured at a sign reading “Pazite, Snajper!”
‘What does that mean?’ he said. ‘I’ve seen quite a few of them.’
Ibro gave a weary smile. ‘It means “Beware, Sniper!”. The Serbs have so many snipers in positions overlooking in the city that you’ll see the signs in a lot of the streets. The sniper fire in the main street, Ulica Zmaja od Bosne, leading to the airport, is so constant and so dangerous that it’s known as Sniper Alley.
As if to confirm his words, there was a crack and whine as a rifle shot struck a concrete wall at the corner of the street and ricocheted away. A few moments later there was the crump of a heavy explosion as a mortar round struck a few streets away. ‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘Those bastards up in the hills have had things their own way for long enough. Let’s get this show on the road. Dan, you’re going to be operating the LTD with Gus.’
They reached the outskirts of the city and, using every scrap of cover, moved on into the rubble-strewn wilderness that surrounded Sarajevo. They crossed what once must have been crop-fields or pasture but now looked like the pictures Shepherd had seen of First World War battlefields: water-filled shell holes, mud and rubble, and the splintered trunks of shrapnel-ripped trees. Harry’s gaze was never still, continually scanning the ground for a suitable site for an OP. Finally he gave a nod of approval. ‘This will do. We’ll dig in here and wait for dawn. I’ll take the first watch, then Diesel, Spud and Dan.’
Gus fussed around, setting up and testing the LTD, then joined the others trying to snatch a little sleep while Harry stayed on watch. Shepherd had the last watch of the night and as the pre-dawn light began to strengthen, he shook the others awake and they stood-to in all-round defence for half an hour either side of the dawn. When it was light enough, Shepherd could see that Harry had chosen their location well. A low rise, studded with rubble, boulders and a couple of tree stumps gave them cover but they also had an uninterrupted view of a long section of the ridge-line and hills above them.
They ate some of their rations and drank some water, then went to work. ‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘Diesel and I will provoke a reaction, Spud, you target spot, while Dan marks those targets for our friends upstairs.’ He spoke into his radio: ‘Foxtrot Eight, Top Cat. Stand by.’
The reply was almost instantaneous: ‘Roger that.’
Harry and Diesel moved away in opposite directions, using all their field craft and every inch of cover to avoid detection by the Serbs. Shepherd caught glimpses of them from time to time as they slipped across patches of open ground. About twenty minutes later he heard Harry’s voice in his headset. ‘In position, stand by.’
‘In position,’ Diesel echoed a moment later.
‘Foxtrot Eight. Top Cat.’ Harry said
Again the reply was instantaneous: ‘Roger that.’
Shepherd heard the roar of fast-jets echoing from the hillsides above him and glimpsed black specks against the sky as he crouched over the LTD, his gaze fixed on the ridge-line. There was a whoosh and a roar from half a mile away to his right as Harry loosed off an M-79 round at the ridge. Shepherd caught a momentary glimpse of Harry haring away, moving fast towards a new location before the retaliatory fire came in. Then he focused his whole attention on the ridge. He saw the plume of smoke from where the grenade had struck and exploded, and a moment later a mortar opened up from nearby. Its first shell fell short of Harry’s firing point and there was no time for a second shell. Shepherd flashed the LTD onto the mortar position for a couple of seconds, and it was enough. Moments later there was a blinding flash and an eruption of earth and smoke from what remained of the mortar site.
Diesel was already launching another M-79 round, provoking more Serb mortars and artillery into action and they met a similar fate as Shepherd painted each target in turn with the LTD, and the F-16 pilots took their revenge for the shooting down of their comrade earlier that week, their laser-guided bombs blasting the guns and reducing their crews to bloody fragments.
The hairs rose on Shepherd’s neck as he saw the hot streak of a SAM missile flash upwards, but the F-16s’ counter-measures, pumping out chaff and flares while their ECM jammed the enemy radar, saw it fly wide of his target and detonate harmlessly. Fire was now erupting all along the ridge as more Serb mortar and artillery positions were drawn into exchanging fire, only to be blitzed almost immediately once by bombs or missiles.
Shepherd was working with relentless speed, switching the LTD from target to target, firing short identifying bursts of laser light, and then shutting it down. At his side, Gus was constantly monitoring the device, muttering to himself as its operating temperature continued to rise. Both men had to flatten themselves as a heavy machine gun opened up from the ridge, firing rounds that smashed into the stones and rubble surrounding them with a sound like a pneumatic drill. Shrapnel and sharp stone fragments flew in all directions, scything through the air like murderous hornets, but Shepherd had spotted the muzzle flashes and marked the machine gun nest for the fast jets, and it too disappeared in a searing explosion.
The Serbs eventually ceased firing back even when directly targeted, but Shepherd and the rest of the patrol remained in cover throughout the rest of the daylight hours. Soon after dark Harry and Diesel rejoined them. ‘That’s given them something to think about,’ Harry said, with a broad grin. ‘Good work everyone and well done, Dan, not bad for a Para. Right, I’ve spoken to Sunray and, as usual, now the hard work’s been done, the Yanks are coming in to take over. So we can get back to the job we were supposed to be doing in the first place. And with luck, I can then get back to Hereford and a few pints of decent beer.’
Ibro led them back through the ruined city and they said their farewells at the entrance to the tunnel. He hugged them one by one. ‘Thank you my friends,’ he said. ‘We shall not forget how you helped us.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Harry said, ‘because we’d hate to be back here fighting against you next time.’
‘There is no chance of that,’ Ibro said. ‘We kill Serbs but we do not kill our friends.’
‘Then we’ll hope it stays that way, for all our sakes.’
‘You weren’t very gracious,’ Diesel said to Harry, as they moved away along the tunnel, with Shepherd and Gus behind them again struggling under the weight of the LTD.
‘I don’t do gracious,’ Harry said. ‘I just do cautious.’
Back at their base, Harry called them together. ‘That job was just us easing the pain for the Muslims in Sarajevo. But the next op is designed to help them do a bit more themselves to even the score.’
‘Meaning what?’ Shepherd said.
Harry just smiled. ‘You’ll see. Now we’re going to be taking just a few days rations and I expect us to be back at base in five days maximum. Our primary task is to bring in airdrops at night with supplies for the Muslims, so I need to give you new boys a bit of instruction on the technique for bringing in a resupply drop. As it’s a NATO operation in Bosnia, we will be using NATO Standard Operating Procedures. They were developed during World War Two and never updated, which either means that they were so good they never needed improvement…’
‘Or?’ Shepherd said, as Harry allowed the silence to grow.
‘Or they’re hopelessly outdated but nobody’s got round to doing anything about it.’
‘Let’s hope it’s the former then, shall we?’ Shepherd said with a laugh.
They took off after dark, flying in on a Blackhawk helicopter, escorted by two F-16s. Harry explained it was easier getting a US helicopter than a Crab Air - an RAF - helicopter. ‘We give them expertise, they give us kit. End result: everybody happy.’
The skies were clear and with no moon, they flew under a star-speckled sky, with the pilot wearing PNGs. The patrol wore theirs too. It was Shepherd’s first experience of wearing them in the air and he was fascinated by the eerie view they gave of the earth b
elow them, with even the weak glow of starlight making patches of open ground flare a bright yellow in his vision.
The helicopter skimmed a last ridge-line and then dropped in the stomach-lurching plunge to the valley floor. It hovered for no more than a few seconds as the patrol tumbled out and went into all-round defence, then the Blackhawk rose into the sky and wheeled away back the way it had come.
The Muslim militiamen that the Paras had been working with had secured the landing site and Shepherd now introduced the patrol to their leader, Zlatan, whose narrow eyes and hooked nose gave him a predatory air. Shepherd spent the next hour familiarising his comrades with the ground and the other leading personalities among the Muslims. They greeted the patrol members with grins and bear-hugs, but Harry, although polite, was cool with them. ‘They’re our friends now,’ he murmured to Shepherd, ‘and the Serbs are the enemy. But a few years ago it was exactly the bleeding opposite and who knows, in another couple of years it might be the other way round again. Don’t forget this is a political war, the Germans and Russians back the Serbs, the Yanks back the Muslims and we just follow the Yanks. Keep detached and stay safe.’
Shepherd nodded and didn’t say anything. He didn’t care much for politics, or for looking for explanations. So far as he was concerned he was a soldier and his job was to follow orders.
That night found the patrol lying in a field in the bottom of the valley. They had laid out recognition markings to identify their positions. Invisible from ground-level, they would mark their positions to the supporting aircraft and - in theory at least - prevent “blue on blue” casualties.
Harry directed them as they created the Drop Zone, laying it out in the form of an inverted letter “L”.
‘The aircraft will fly along the long axis of the L,’ he said, ‘while one of the patrol stands on the short axis. When the aircraft is level with you, the patrol member will flash a Morse letter code using a torch with an infra-red filter. As soon as the aircrew sees that signal, they will release the parachute loads. And if I have got my drift calculations right, then the cargo should land smack on the position I want it to. So keep your fingers crossed.’
They had marked the drop zone with infra-red illuminating sticks and Shepherd had his masked torch ready to flash the code letter Victor: dit, dit, dit, dah. Harry and the rest of the patrol were in all round defence with the LTD deployed.
Out of the darkness they heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching C-130 Hercules and in the far distance the sound of other aircraft, fast jets, with the scream of their engines bouncing off the sides of the mountains. ‘Flash the code Dan,’ Harry said. ‘They can already see us, they’re using PNGs.’
Shepherd began flashing the Morse signal and suddenly there was the gut-churning rumble of huge engines and an enormous shadow passed almost directly overhead. All around them the hills were eerily silent. There was no reaction at all from the Serbs.
As the Hercules flew on, disappearing into the night, Shepherd could see a series of black shapes dimly outlined against the starry night sky: huge parachutes with bulky loads dangling below them. They could hear the sound of the chutes deploying behind the trees and then the thuds as the loads hit the ground. One of the chutes landed a few hundred yards from the patrol. ‘Shit,’ Harry said, ‘that one will be in the open. It will cause us problems tomorrow.’
Shepherd was scathing. ‘Bloody hell, they missed the DZ.’
‘Actually they didn’t,’ Harry said. ‘These guys are the best the US have. They are part of the Air Commando Squadron based in Piraeus in Greece. They’re the best of the best when it comes to drops. I heard the risers on the chute breaking, and that caused it to fall short. So the parachute, or at any rate the risers, might have been crap kit but that’s not the fault of the guys who are dropping it. I have been working with these guys off and on since they were flying Dakotas. They will always get to you wherever you are, on target and on time.’
‘I hear you,’ Shepherd said.
Harry shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it, just learn the lesson. In the Regiment new guys are like little girls and boys in Victorian times: seen but not heard. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth closed. Listen and learn, Dan, and you’ll do just fine. And you can learn an awful lot about soldiering from guys like Diesel.’
‘You can learn even more from Harry,’ Diesel said. ‘He practically wrote the workshop manual for SAS patrols. What Harry doesn’t know, basically isn’t worth knowing. He not only knows where the bodies are buried he also dug the graves for most of them.’
‘Just make sure I’m not digging yours, one of these days,’ Harry said with a mock scowl.
The next morning the patrol stood screened from Serb eyes by a stand of trees as they stared at the load out in the open. Behind them the Bosnians were loading the contents of the other crates on to tractors and other farm vehicles, even horse-drawn carts.
‘Bloody hell,’ Diesel said, ‘some of those tractors make the horse and carts look modern.’ He pointed at an old style, grey-painted tractor. ‘That’s a Massey Ferguson, must be one of the originals.’
Gus studied it for a moment. ‘It looks pre-war.’
‘True, but which war?’ Shepherd said. His smile faded as he saw what the Bosnian Muslims were loading. Boxes of ammunition. ‘I thought we were supposed to be on the side of the angels here, keeping the Bosnians alive, not tooling them up for a full scale war. This is supposed to be humanitarian aid, but it looks like heavy weapon ammo to me, and that would be against the UN Resolution that made it illegal to supply any of the combatants with armaments, wouldn’t it?’
‘Heavens, so it would,’ Diesel said with a wink at Harry. ‘Perhaps we’d better pack it all up and get the Hercules to come back and pick it up again.’
Harry shrugged. ‘UN Resolution, UN schmesolution. As I told you before, there are no angels here, no good guys and bad guys in this war. They are all as bad as each other and the Yanks are quite happy to give the Bosnians enough kit to blow the country back into the Dark Ages, though of course the Yanks always call it fighting for freedom and democracy.’
‘You’d think there’d be more of it around then, wouldn’t you?’ Gus said. ‘What with the number of wars and proxy wars they’ve fought over the years.’
Shepherd nodded in agreement but didn’t say anything, Harry’s words about listening and not speaking still ringing in his ears.
‘You would, wouldn’t you? But realpolitik just keeps getting in the way of all that Yankee Doodle Dandy shit. Dictators and absolute monarchs are more predictable and usually more long-lasting Allies, so they’ve become the default American clients in most parts of the globe. Especially in the Middle East, where oil barrels always weigh an awful lot heavier than ballot boxes. Anyway the Russians are supplying the Serbians, and on its own, that’s invariably enough reason for the Yanks to give whoever is opposing them, in this case the Muslims, whatever they want. It will probably all come back and bite them on the arse in a few years time, but that’s life.’
As they were speaking, a tractor and trailer suddenly drove out of the cover of the trees, heading for the load that had fallen in the open. There were three young men on the trailer and another one driving the tractor. Harry bellowed out ‘Get the fuck back into cover!’ and Zlatan shouted a rather more comprehensible warning in his own language, but there was no response. Either they didn’t hear the warnings, or chose to ignore them. Perhaps they were overtired from working all night or simply euphoric about receiving so much equipment from the airdrop, but whatever the reason they had now put themselves in mortal danger, exposed in the open and vulnerable to attack from the Serb positions on the surrounding ridges. As confirmation of that, the hills overlooking the DZ suddenly erupted with a hail of rocket and artillery fire.
Harry grabbed the handset: ‘Foxtrot Eight, Top Cat’.
As in Sarajevo, the replies came at once: ‘Roger’.
‘Grab the LTD and fire very short bursts a
t the gun positions,’ Harry said to Shepherd. ‘The F16s will be here in seconds.’
Shepherd’s mind raced as he began spotting the gun flashes and firing short bursts from the LTD. Jets roared out of the high clouds and began taking out the targets he was indicating.
‘Acquired,’ a laconic American voice said in his headset. Moments later, even as a bomb from the F-16 was obliterating a Serb artillery position, Shepherd had already switched to the next target. He fired another burst and a fraction of a second later he heard a different voice saying ‘Acquired… nootralised,’ in a Texan accent as broad as the state itself. It was all over in seconds, with the Serbian positions on the top of the ridge reduced to a series of smoking fires.
It was only then that Shepherd noticed that the tractor was running wildly around the field. ‘The throttle’s a hand operated lever on the steering column,’ Diesel said. ‘So there’s no Dead Man’s Handle. The engine will keep on running until either the tractor runs out of fuel or runs into an immovable object.’ As they watched, the tractor swerved across the field and crashed into a boulder in its path. One wheel rose into the air, paused for a moment and then the tractor toppled over on its side, span on its axis for a moment, the tyres still chewing a blizzard of mud from the Earth and then the engine coughed and died. The young driver was still lying in a bloody heap on the floor. As they ran forward to try to help him they thought at first he had been hit by an incoming shell. It was only when they turned him over to treat him that they found he had been killed by a single bullet.
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