‘You can’t blame them,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t think I could something like that.’
‘Depends how hungry you were,’ said Jimbo.
‘If I was that hungry, I’d take a bite out of you,’ said Liam. ‘But a grub?’ He shook his head. ‘No bloody way. I’d rather go hungry.’
Pilgrim smiled. ‘Anyway I left them to it while I went back to my base camp, roasted the insects, chopped them up and made a curry with them. I served it up that night when they were all starving hungry and they wolfed it down. They all thought it was delicious until I told them what was in it. So that was a lesson learned: the first time you feed insects to anyone, camouflage the fact.’
Shepherd’s expression had been changing throughout the latter part of Pilgrim’s story. He put down his fork, looked around and saw that the others had also stopped eating. He thought about it for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. ‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘Rhino beetle grubs?’
Pilgrim nodded. ‘And termites and ants eggs.’
Liam put his hand up to his mouth. ‘Are you serious?’
‘It’s protein,’ said Pilgrim. ‘And now you’ve eaten it, and enjoyed it, next time…’
Liam nodded. ‘Point taken,’ he said.
They made another brew and then Pilgrim began educating them on regimental policy as he saw it. Still unbadged and with nothing having been said directly, Shepherd took the way that they were now being taken into Pilgrim’s confidence as sign enough that he now no longer regarded them as candidates on Selection but as members of the Regiment. ‘A lot of the guys serving in the Regiment are happy to coast along taking promotion and career moves,’ Pilgrim said, ‘but they’re not prepared to put in the hard work and the hard yards to be a proper professional SAS soldier. With a couple of honourable exceptions, most of the trainers on the Selection course are also guys who couldn’t make it in the fighting Sabre Squadrons. They’re happy to lord it over the new recruits but will find any reason to avoid going back to a squadron.’
Shepherd nodded enthusiastically. That was exactly what he’d been thinking, even before they had arrived in Belize.
‘However, there is an inner core of like-minded guys within the Regiment who want to be the best of the best,’ Pilgrim continued. ‘You’ll never hear them bragging and big-timing about the stuff they’ve done. They don’t need to. They know and their comrades know, and that’s all that counts, but if you study them and learn from them, you might one day join their ranks. I’ve seen enough in you four to think you all have the potential to do so, but only you can decide whether you’re willing to make the necessary commitment. Green Army training and even SAS training will just give you the basics. After that, you must then put in the follow-up time if you want to become experts in what you do. It isn’t a part-time job, it’s a full time, unrelenting commitment and to become one of the inner elite you must expect to make sacrifices at the expense of family, friends and your career. Think about it, decide what you want to do and then either commit to it wholeheartedly or get the hell out of the way of the guys who do.’
There was a long silence. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Enough said, it’s up to you. Now we’re heading out of the jungle tomorrow, but we’re calling at a Mayan village on the way. We’ve been doing hearts and minds work with them for years now - medicine and hygiene, improvements to their agriculture, and simple construction projects like latrines or a clean water supply - but we’re careful about what else we give them. We don’t give the Maya chainsaws because they can already fell enough trees with axes. They’re the only tribe I’ve ever seen that don’t use nets for fishing, but we don’t supply them either because they’re catching enough fish for their needs with longlines, and if we gave them gill nets they might overfish the river. We’re also teaching the older children basic medicine, so that there will be a legacy of continuing care when we’ve gone, just like in Malaya, Borneo, Oman and a score of other regions where we’ve operated over the years. In return for our help, they give us Intelligence. They fish the rivers and hunt in the forest. They know if there are strangers - soldiers or drug-traffickers - coming across the border, so the Maya are our eyes and ears in this area.’
The following morning they followed Pilgrim through deep jungle and emerged on a well-worn path towards the Mayan village. Heliconias, flame trees and bougainvillea lined the track and they glimpsed brief slashes of even more electric colour - crimson, turquoise, violet and gold - as toucans, macaws and countless other birds flitted through the forest canopy a hundred feet above them. Clouds of butterflies danced in the columns of sunlight in the clearings and open areas.
As they walked on towards the village, the jungle gave way to patches of cleared land, planted with maize and plantain bananas. The air was drenched with scents, the musty tang of the rainforest mingling with perfume from the wild flowers covering the fallow land and the blossom of the groves of orange, lime and lemon trees at the side of the track. They came around a bend and saw huts scattered along the bank of a river. A fish eagle swooped down on the water, then struggled back into the sky with a fish impaled on its talons. There was a flash of vivid colour as a coral snake swam across the surface and disappeared back into the jungle. Fisherman stood motionless on the riverbank, fishing with long lines, while a little way downstream a group of women were washing clothes. A few shouts were exchanged as they caught sight of the SAS men and a group of children came running to see the cause of the commotion. They greeted the squadron with shy smiles and followed them as they walked in to the village.
Most of the Mayan dwellings were dirt-floored, small and poor looking, little more than shacks with walls of loosely woven sticks and a palm-thatch, but two were larger, with sugar-cane walls and attap thatched roofs, and the largest house of all was built on stilts. Pilgrim pointed to it. ‘You can always spot the police post in these villages,’ he said. ‘The police are all Caribs - coastal-dwellers - and they don’t like the heat and humidity of the jungle, so they always build their posts on stilts in the hope of getting a little extra cooling breeze.’
Geordie glanced around him. ‘Police? I can’t imagine there’s much of a crime wave round here.’
‘There isn’t, and what crime there is, the Maya usually sort out for themselves under their own traditional laws,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Last time I was here, the village elders were holding a court in the hut of the alcalde - the mayor - about a knife fight between two women. They couldn’t establish which one of them had started the fight, so they found them both guilty. Mayan law dictated that the women should be tied to a tree on the outskirts of the village and left overnight as a punishment, but since one of them was pregnant, the elders decided that their husbands should be tied to the tree instead.’
‘Sounds quite civilised to me,’ Shepherd said.
‘Better not tell your missus, Jimbo,’ Geordie said. ‘She’ll have you tied to a lamp-post before you can say “knife fight”.’
‘It’ll make a change from tying me to the bedposts, anyway.’
‘More information than we needed,’ laughed Shepherd.
Pilgrim pointed to a coffee tree and a tall breadfruit in the heart of the village, casting a deep pool of shade. ‘I need to check in with the alcalde,’ he said. ‘So why don’t you take five?’ He walked over to the alcalde’s office - a hut knocked together from used boxes and planks, with a solitary sheet of rusting corrugated iron nestling amongst its thatch - and almost had to bend double to get through the low door.
Shepherd and the others took off their bergens and squatted in the shade. The village children surrounded them, a circle of silent faces. Their mothers also stared impassively as they sat in the doorways of their huts, their hands never still, grinding the corn for the day’s tortillas. Pigs and dogs chased each other between the houses, a few chickens pecked listlessly in the dust, and Shepherd saw one chase and eat a dark green scorpion unwise enough to have strayed from the safety of the forest.
Pilgrim e
merged from the hut a few minutes later, accompanied by the alcalde. Like most Mayan men, he was little more than five feet tall and all the SAS men towered above him as Pilgrim introduced them in turn. Just then there were shouts and the children began pointing up the track on the far side of the village. A Mayan man was approaching, leading a donkey. The lower half of his face was a mask of blood and there were two blood-soaked men draped across the donkey. ‘Jesus,’ Liam said. ‘It looks like a fucking spaghetti western.’
Geordie had already sprung into action, grabbing his medical kit and using a spray to sterilise his hands. He’d been a patrol medic with the Paras and had joined the SAS partly because he wanted to improve his skills in dealing with battlefield trauma. The two wounded men were lifted from the donkey and laid on split-log benches on the open ground in front of the huts. Geordie spared the man with the bloody face no more than a cursory glance and then began examining the other two, swiftly assessing their wounds.
Liam and Shepherd ran to help him. Both bodies were riddled with deep cuts and puncture wounds. Geordie began tying off the bleeders, then sutured the muscles and packed the wounds. Shepherd watched him in awe, marvelling at the speed and precision of his work. ‘If I had saline and blood, I could save them,’ Geordie said, still working frantically, ‘but without it, they’ll be lucky to survive; they’ve both lost a lot of blood.’
‘Can we not casevac them?’ Shepherd asked Pilgrim.
Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Can’t be done. For political reasons, civilians can’t be flown in military helicopters, because if they die, there might be accusations and compensation claims. If we had a Landrover we could send him back in that, because there’s no rule against taking them in military vehicles. Apparently it’s all right for them to die in a Landrover but not in a chopper.’
‘So we just let them die?’
‘No, we do our best to save them, within the constraints under which we operate. It’s just a pity that those constraints are decided by pen-pushers, arse-coverers and staff officers rather than the men on the ground.’
Geordie had moved on to the second man, whose wounds included an ugly gash on his head, exposing part of the skull. Blood was still pouring from the wound. ‘It looks worse than it is,’ Geordie said. ‘There’s a rich blood supply to the scalp so there’s always plenty of claret from a head wound.’ He mopped up the blood and then tapped the exposed skull gently with a pair of forceps, like a piano tuner using a tuning fork on a piano. ‘Middle C,’ he said. ‘Shows the skull’s intact. If you get a dull thud that means trouble. As it is, if he survives the blood loss, he should have nothing worse than a headache to show for it.’
He sutured the scalp wound, then began treating the man who had brought the others in. The reason for his blood-stained face became obvious, because his lips had been cut off, though he looked even more frightened of the needle Geordie was using to stitch his wounds.
Pilgrim had been questioning him, speaking in Mayan with only an occasional prompt from the alcalde. The man struggled to form his replies, his words slurred by his injuries. ‘He says they were hunting monkeys in the forest,’ Pilgrim said, ‘when Guatemalan soldiers surrounded them. They used these two for bayonet practice and told the other one to take them back as a warning to the others about what’ll happen to them if they don’t get out of this region.’
‘They cut off his lips by the look of it,’ Shepherd said.
‘A traditional Guatemalan remedy for those they think are spies and informers,’ said Pilgrim. ‘They know we’ve been working with the Maya, so the military junta is obviously stepping up their terror campaign; they even treat their own Mayan population abominably. Among the villagers here are the only two survivors of a massacre that wiped out an entire village on the other side of the border. The Maya here will now have even stronger reasons to fear that they’re next in line for that treatment. It’s a mess. A bloody mess.’
Pilgrim radioed a report back to base and then moved the patrol out, following the trail of dripped blood on the ground but working their way through the jungle flanking the track, rather than using the track itself. They had been following the trail for about an hour when they saw ahead of them the place where the Mayan villagers had obviously been attacked, for the vegetation to either side of the track was splashed with blood and the ground soaked with it. Two dead monkeys lay in the dirt, still bound to the wooden pole on which the Mayan villagers had been carrying them when they were attacked.
Pilgrim took in the scene, his expression unreadable, then led the patrol back about a hundred yards and signed to them to huddle around him. ‘They may be lying up in ambush,’ he said. ‘They use monkeys as a food source so I can’t see that they would have left them behind. I’m sure Guatemalan rations aren’t so ample that they’d ignore some good protein when they had it.’ He paused. ‘Liam, Geordie, Jimbo, take the far side of the track. Dan and I will take this one. Move twenty paces, scent and listen for one minute, then another twenty paces, and so on. We need to clear the area to a hundred yards past the place where the Maya were attacked. Safety catches off - if they’re there, you’ll have no more than a fraction of a second to see them and fire. This isn’t a drill, lads, this is for real. So keep your wits about you.’
The other three crossed the track and at a signal from Pilgrim, they melted into the jungle and began to advance. ‘You’re lead scout,’ Pilgrim breathed in Shepherd’s ear. He nodded, and began to inch through the jungle, keeping the dusty track on his left just visible on the periphery of his vision. Shepherd was totally focussed, leaving no sign and making no sound, but scanning the jungle ahead and to either side at every step, tracking the path of his gaze with the barrel of his weapon, alert for any movement or sound, or the slightest thing out of place, that might give warning of an enemy. After twenty paces he paused, listening intently then, hearing nothing, he moved on. Shepherd sensed that Pilgrim was behind him, though the veteran SAS man made not a sound as he moved through the jungle.
Shepherd moved even more cautiously as they approached the scene of the ambush, raking the vegetation with his gaze, though the wall of foliage seemed as blank and impenetrable as a rock face. He paused once more, listening intently and sniffing the air and had just taken a pace forward again when there was an explosion next to his right ear. The foliage in front of him was blasted into shreds and he glimpsed a figure in camouflage fatigues toppling backwards, blood spurting from a hole punched in his chest, while his weapon stitched a line of tracer across the jungle canopy. Shepherd threw himself flat as firing erupted all round him. He targeted a muzzle flash, a speck like a firefly in the jungle gloom and saw another Guatemalan soldier crumple to the ground as the burst Shepherd had fired tore the vegetation apart. Pilgrim was firing more short staccato bursts and the others were firing too though, his ears still deafened from Pilgrim’s first shot, Shepherd registered that only by the shredding of the leaves as the rounds struck home.
The answering fire ceased almost at once with any remaining Guatemalan soldiers either dead or fleeing through the jungle. The SAS men remained in firing positions until their hearing had cleared and the jungle birds and animals that had scattered in panic began to return to the canopy. Pilgrim signed to Shepherd to follow him and began to inch his way forward again. They checked the bodies of the two Guatemalans, both stone dead, eyes rolled up into their heads, and with ants already swarming over the corpses, and then moved on, clearing the area and making sure the Guatemalans really had fled before returning to the ambush site.
‘You all right?’ Pilgrim said, his voice sounding to Shepherd’s damaged hearing like the buzzing of a wasp.
Shepherd nodded, shamefaced. ‘I never even saw the guy till you fired.’
Pilgrim nodded. ‘Another lesson learned. There’s a knack to seeing beyond the surface of the foliage. The trick is to focus on the nearest leaves and then re-focus the eye to look through them. Keep practising and it’ll suddenly click, but you need to learn it -
I won’t always be next in line on patrol.’ He winked at Shepherd, taking the sting out of his comments. ‘You did all right in the contact though.’
They RVed with Jimbo, Geordie and Liam and searched the ambush site. Among the small bare footprints of the Mayan villagers were the booted tracks made by the Guatemalan soldiers who had attacked them. Shepherd stared at them for a moment. ‘The boot treads are the same pattern as the ones we’re wearing.’
Pilgrim gave a shrug of his shoulders. ‘All supplied by the good old USA, always playing both sides against each other.’
As they looked around for further signs, Liam spotted a battered torch, lying in the dirt near the edge of the track. He was already stooping to pick it up when Pilgrim grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t touch it, it’ll be booby-trapped.’
He examined it from all angles, then led them back down the track fifty yards, sighted on the torch and fired at it. The round struck home and there was the flash of an explosion, setting the birds in the canopy to panic-stricken flight once more. Pilgrim glanced at the others. ‘Learn from this,’ he said. ‘A torch is a valuable possession here. Why would one be lying in the dirt? A month ago I had to treat a Mayan kid whose hand was blown off when he picked up a torch like this and tried to switch it on. Right, we’ve bought ourselves and the villagers a bit of time, but we need to find a more permanent way to discourage the Guatemalans.’
Liam smiled thinly and Shepherd patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. ‘Not your day, mate,’ he said.
‘Hey, I could have lost an arm there,’ said Liam. ‘I’m ahead of the game.’ He gestured at Pilgrim, who was checking his weapon. ‘He knows his stuff, doesn’t he?’
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