Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1

by Stephen Leather

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘Dangerous places often are,’ said Pilgrim.

  A few minutes later, the Puma cleared the last ridge of the mountains and Shepherd saw another, even stranger change in the landscape. ‘Goodbye Rockies,’ Pilgrim said, ‘Hello Great Plains.’

  The plain stretching away from the foot of the mountains was classic farming country, flat arable land and pasture, with metalled roads bisecting the massive fields at right angles.

  ‘What the hell?’ Shepherd said.

  Pilgrim smiled. ‘The Mennonites. They’ve been here since the late 1950’s and they’ve turned the jungle into a close replica of Kansas.’

  ‘What’s a Mennonite? It sounds like some sort of fossil.’

  ‘You’re closer than you think. They’re mostly American but they talk ancient German that even Germans can’t understand. Their clothes look like sackcloth, they don’t use modern inventions, and they work in the fields about twenty-eight hours a day. Imagine the Amish without the sense of fun and you’re not far off.’

  Beyond the miniature Great Plains the jungle began again, stretching unbroken far to the south. Shepherd checked his watch. They had covered the sequence from city and shanty town, through swamp, scrub, jungle, pine forest, arable land, and back to secondary and then primary jungle in no more than an hour’s flight from north to south.

  Pilgrim was again pointing ahead. ‘The end of the line,’ he said. ‘Toledo is the land that time forgot. It’s bigger than Wales but there’s only thirty thousand people here. There’s only one dirt road connecting this entire region with the rest of the country. You can get around some of the other tracks with a Landrover in the dry season, but the rest of the time you can forget it; there’s about two hundred inches of rain a year down here, so there are really only two ways to travel: by boat or on foot.’

  Shepherd stared down at the jungle. At first he could see nothing but the dense, green canopy, pierced by an occasional silver glint as light reflected from the surface of a river. As the helicopter dropped lower, he caught a glimpse of a just-discernible break in the canopy, and caught sight of the Mayan village - a few huts in a small clearing on the banks of the river, like a tiny island in a huge emerald-green sea. They overflew the village and the Puma went into a hover a few miles closer to the border, above an old plantation, abandoned by the Maya but not yet reverted to jungle, that was to serve as the Landing Zone.

  Geordie and Jimbo had stirred themselves at the engine note changed and as soon as the chopper landed, the five men unloaded their gear, jumped out and ran clear. At once, the rotors thundered and the downwash whipped the jungle, sending a dust storm of leaves and broken branches spinning through the air as the Puma lifted off and swung back towards the north.

  As the noise of the rotors faded, the sounds of the rainforest resumed; the insistent cries of birds answered by the buzzing of a billion insects. Shepherd crouched by the buttress root of a strangler fig for a moment, watching and listening as they’d been trained, but also savouring the beauty, the strangeness and the silence. Then at a nod from Pilgrim, they shouldered their bergens. As they entered the jungle, they could hear behind them the chop of rotors as a succession of other helicopters began landing the local infantry company who were providing cover for the op and would form a defensive perimeter around the RV point just inside the border.

  The SAS patrol had already disappeared from sight, moving through the dense jungle, maintaining the silent patrolling routine they had practised. Pilgrim took the role of lead scout - or point man - at first, navigating and keeping the patrol heading broadly the right direction, but as they moved on, he brought each of them in turn up to work as lead scout, though again he remained at their shoulder, second in line.

  When Shepherd’s turn came, he began picking his way through the tangled vegetation, following the faint, wavering trace of the animal track they were following, avoiding breaking twigs or rustling dry leaves. He had practised the technique of looking through the foliage that Pilgrim had described to him and to his surprise, he had found both that it was relatively easy to master and that it really did enable him to see through what had seemed impenetrable jungle, glimpsing any suspicious shapes that might be lurking in cover. He was hyper-alert for the first sign of danger - a movement, a sound, an unfamiliar smell - that might be the only warning before another contact with the enemy. It took ice-cool nerve, constantly alert for the least sign of danger but not so on edge that he would be startled into an overreaction by the sudden movement of a bird or animal. It was exhausting, physically and mentally.

  They travelled along the ridge tops where there were no tracks and only animals moved. The terrain was punishing, dense secondary jungle with no open ground. It took them three hours to cover the first mile, fighting their way through dense undergrowth, constantly splashing through swamp and stagnant water, climbing and descending steep, slippery mud slopes, clambering over rotting tree trunks and skirting around thickets of understory palms, their trunks bristling with spikes, and thickets of razor grass, sharp enough to cut them to ribbons if they tried to push through it.

  The air was cloudy with mosquitoes and sand-flies, and leeches lined the animal tracks, raising themselves to search for their next meal like plant-stems waving in the breeze. Every time they stopped they had to pick the leeches from the soft tissue of their armpits, necks and groins. They covered as little as five miles in the entire day, slept on the jungle floor and the next day they moved on.

  Eventually, when Pilgrim decided that they were deep enough into Guatemala, they dropped down towards the river system and then tracked the course of the river very cautiously for two more days until they reached a large village. As Pilgrim had predicted, they found that there was a military camp alongside it.

  They sat watching the camp all day from across the river and eventually, as the sky began to darken, their patience was rewarded when a group of soldiers emerged from one of the huts in the centre of the village and came down to the river bank to wash and bathe. The other ranks hung back, deferring to the officers and waiting for them to bathe first. Pilgrim held a whispered conversation with the others. Even though the Guatemalans were wearing shirts with no visible badges of rank, Pilgrim was in no doubt about which officers to target. ‘See the slightly taller guy with greying hair? And the officer next but one to him on his right? They’ve got to be the most senior. You can tell by the way the others fall silent as soon as they open their mouths to speak. I’ll take the right-hand guy, which of you will take the other one?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Shepherd whispered.

  ‘He won every marksmanship task we were set in the Paras,’ Geordie said, in case Pilgrim was harbouring any doubts.

  ‘Head shot?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘You’re sure you can do it?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘On my count then,’ Pilgrim whispered. Shepherd sighted on his target, the Guatemalan officer’s head filling the sights, as Shepherd zeroed in on the bridge of the man’s nose. He held an individual’s life in the palm of his hand but that knowledge did not faze him at all. This was his job, and the Guatemalan officer might have been a plywood cut-out on the firing range for all the emotion Shepherd felt. He heard Pilgrim start to count down from five. At ‘Three’, he took up the first pressure on the trigger, and at ‘Two’ he exhaled in a long sighing breath. He heard ‘One’ and gently squeezed the trigger home. He felt the recoil in his shoulder and heard the two shots merge in a single report. His target disappeared from the scope, but the spray of blood in the air showed that the heavy SLR round had struck home with devastating effect. He glimpsed Pilgrim’s target also slumping to the ground and saw a flock of startled birds rising into the air as the Guatemalan soldiers froze in panic for a moment, and then began running in all directions.

  The SAS men were already worming their way back from the riverbank. Shepherd heard Geordie’s whispered, ‘Tidy shooting. That’s my
boy!’

  Hidden by the jungle foliage, they picked up their bergens and began to move away. Behind them they heard shouts and ragged volleys of rifle fire, though the Guatemalan soldiers were firing blind, with no real idea of where their enemies were.

  Shepherd expected Pilgrim to lead them back towards Belize immediately, but to his surprise he realised that the SAS veteran was taking them even deeper into Guatemala. He moved at an apparently unhurried pace, more concerned not to leave sign than to speed away from the contact. At their first stop to watch and listen, Pilgrim called them around him and gave a whispered briefing. ‘The Guatemalans will expect us to be heading back to Belize,’ he said. ‘They won’t expect us to be going deeper into Guatemala, so with luck their follow-up searches will be in the wrong area. However, we need to minimise consumption of our rations because if we miss the RV with the infantry on the Belize border, the next stop might have to be the coast.’

  They moved on, working their way back to the ridgelines and following animal tracks, well away from any path that the Maya or the Guatemalan army would normally use. An hour before dusk, they looped their track and lay up in ambush in case any troops were following them, then after nightfall they ate a very small meal from their rations and bedded down. Shepherd quickly realised that going without food for a while was not going to be a problem and in fact it seemed to heighten his senses. Even Liam, whose search for food was normally a constant in their daily lives, endured the hardship without complaint.

  For several days they moved on, making no more than a few miles a day, before starting a long slow turn back to the east, towards the Belize border. The following day, as Pilgrim called the usual hourly halt to watch and listen, all of them heard a faint noise in the distance, the sound of men moving as fast as the jungle vegetation would allow.

  ‘We’re being followed,’ Pilgrim said at once. ‘And the only people who can track us through the jungle are the local Maya tribes. The Guatemalans don’t like the jungle but the Maya live in it, it’s their home and they can travel through it faster than anyone, including us, so we need to send them a message not to come too close. Come on, don’t worry about leaving tracks for now, the more the better.’

  For a few hundred yards they hurried on, leaving clear evidence of their passage in the bootprints and bruised and broken plant stems in their wake. Pilgrim then chopped down a small sapling, pointed the end and set up a pig trap for the people following them, lashing the pointed stake to a whippy sapling and then tying it down to a “trip wire” - a piece of plant stem that would trigger it when a stray boot knocked against it. ‘I’ve set it at an angle to one side, so it won’t hit the front man who triggers it - he’ll be a Mayan - but it will hit one of the Army guys further back in the patrol and that will slow them down,’ Pilgrim explained.

  They moved on again at once, still taking less trouble to conceal their tracks. Pilgrim explained that however carefully they concealed their tracks, the Mayan would read it as if he was reading a book. So speed was more important. They looped their track and lay up in ambush towards nightfall but the Guatemalans did not enter the trap. None of the SAS men slept that night and they moved on again at first light. As soon as they paused, they again heard the Guatemalans pursuing them.

  By mid-afternoon, they were close to the Belizean border but were still being followed. ‘We can’t afford to lead the enemy too close to the RV with the infantry and certainly not to the LZ,’ Pilgrim said. ‘We need to buy ourselves some more time. We’ve got to frighten them but not kill them. One or two senior officers dying fifty miles from the border can be explained away as the fall-out from a dispute with the drugs traffickers about bribes, but like our brave colonel almost said, too many dead soldiers on the border could start an international incident.’

  They again doubled back on their own tracks and sited themselves on a low ridge overlooking the way they had come just a few minutes earlier. They did not have to wait long before they heard movement below them. As the Guatemalans moved into the ambush area, advancing in single file behind their Mayan scout. At Pilgrim’s signal, Shepherd and the others opened up with their SLRs, laying down a barrage of fire that flashed inches above the heads of the troops and ripped the vegetation around and in front of them to shreds. The Guatemalans fled in all directions, two of them dropping their rifles as they ran.

  The SAS patrol then split up and moved away quickly in different directions. Shepherd moved through the jungle alone for an hour, paused to listen, and then began to make his way towards the RV point. Pilgrim was already there when he reached it, appearing out of the shadows like a ghost. The others arrived within a few minutes. They compared notes and since Jimbo told them he’d heard sounds of pursuit, they again split up, and came back together again, using the rendezvous system until they were certain they had broken contact with their pursuers. ‘It’ll take the Guatemalans several hours to get themselves reorganised,’ Pilgrim said at last, ‘and even if they do manage to pick up our trail again, they’re very unlikely to attempt to follow us into Belize.’

  They re-crossed the border soon afterwards and in another hour were close to the RV with the local infantry. Pilgrim peered through the jungle towards the RV point about three hundred yards away. ‘You get down in cover,’ he said, ‘while I go forward and make contact with them.’ He disappeared noiselessly through the jungle and a few minutes had ticked by when there was a sudden ragged burst of firing. Shepherd and the others sprinted forward, weapons at the ready. They found Pilgrim on the ground with a gunshot wound in his leg. As they came into the view of the infantry there was another burst of fire and the SAS men flattened themselves in the dirt.

  ‘Stop firing you fucking idiots!’ Liam bellowed at the top of his voice, his face purple with fury. ‘Can’t you see the fucking yellow bands on our hats?’ He waited a moment then cautiously showed himself and this time there was no more firing.

  Geordie ran to Pilgrim and began treating him, while the others started bollocking the infantry officer who ran up to them, his face ashen with shock or fright.

  ‘Go easy on him,’ Pilgrim said, propping himself on one elbow and ignoring Geordie’s demand to ‘Lie down again you idiot, how do you expect me to treat you if you’re jumping around like a frog on a hotplate?’

  ‘Don’t blame the infantry guy,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It’s my own stupid fault. I should have realised that they’d be spooked and jittery after the small arms fire at yesterday’s ambush and would be likely to shoot first and check who it was afterwards. I should have made more noise as I went towards them.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘It just shows, you never stop learning.’ He bit his lip and fell silent as pain lanced through his leg.

  ‘Will you lie down?’ Geordie said, putting one of his huge hands on Pilgrim’s chest and forcing him flat. The infantry company signaller radioed for a casevac and when Geordie had finished working on Pilgrim, the four of them carried him to the LZ a few thousand yards away. Within half an hour they were airborne and on their way to the main hospital in Belize City.

  Once Pilgrim had been safely delivered, Shepherd and the others returned to base and had their first shower and shave in a fortnight but found they could eat almost nothing. Their stomachs had contracted to the size of a fist and Shepherd felt full after just a couple of mouthfuls.

  That evening they went to see Pilgrim in hospital. He was sitting up in bed, flirting with one of the nurses, but Shepherd was surprised, almost shocked, to see how frail he looked in the relatively normal surroundings of a hospital.

  ‘Bit of hospital food and a few days’ rest and you’ll be back out bollocking us again,’ Liam said, dropping down onto a wooden chair at the side of Pilgrim’s bed.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Pilgrim said. ‘That was my last op with the Regiment. I’m handing in my papers. I’ve got a job working for the “funny guys” instead.’

  ‘Funny guys?’ said Shepherd.

  Pilgrim tapped the side of his nose. �
��Secret squirrel,’ he said.

  ‘Mi5?’

  Pilgrim shook his head. ‘Six,’ he said. ‘Plenty of work for someone like me and the pay’s better. No mossies or leeches either, so far as I know.’

  ‘I’d never work for the intelligence agencies, either of them,’ said Shepherd. ‘From what I’ve heard you can trust them about as far as you can throw them.’

  Pilgrim took a sip from a glass of water. ‘You all did okay out here,‘ he said, and they all knew that it was high praise from him. ‘Get some experience in the Regiment, remember what I’ve taught you, and who knows, in a few years time, we might be working together again. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got something for you.’ He reached into his bedside locker and produced four beige berets, with the winged dagger badge and the famous motto. ‘A lot of good men have worn that beret,’ he said. ‘Make sure you live up to it.’

  He handed the berets to the four of them.

  ‘That’s it?’ said Shepherd. ‘We’re badged?’

  Pilgrim smiled. ‘You are indeed,’ he said. ‘For better or worse.’

  NARROW ESCAPE

  BRECON BEACONS, WALES.

  December, 1996

  Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd woke in the dead of night, instantly alert at the sound of a low voice off in the distance. He raised his head. In the faint starlight filtering through the open door of the wooden hut that served as their quarters, he could see an SAS sergeant moving along the row of sleeping men on the other side of the room. The sergeant stooped to shake a soldier by the shoulder and murmured something to him, and the man dressed hastily and gathered his kit, then made for the door. The sergeant moved on, waking three others, but passing Shepherd’s bed without a glance in his direction. He ushered the last of the men outside and closed the door quietly behind him. A few moments later, Shepherd heard a truck start-up and rumble out of the camp.