Jock nodded. ‘The boys are recruited to fight as soldiers for the rebels. The standard practice is to make them kill their own parents. If they refuse, they’re killed themselves. Most do it. I’ve even heard of parents throwing themselves onto the knives their sons were holding, if they hesitated before killing them. Once the boys are brutalised, they’re kept high on a concoction of what they call “brown-brown” - raw, impure heroin, amphetamines and gunpowder - and given an amulet that they’re told is juju to make them invisible to their enemies and turn bullets fired at them into water, then sent into battle.’
Jimbo stared at him open-mouthed. ‘How do you know all this shit?’
‘Me?’ Jock said. ‘I read a lot and I listen more than I talk. You should try it some time.’
‘So what we can do?’ Shepherd said. ‘Are we going to just look the other way? Or shall we track them? They clearly weren’t worried about leaving sign.’ He gestured towards the route the killers had taken, marked by footprints and broken stems as they’d pushed through the scrub, and a trail of drips of blood left by some of their wounded captives.
‘We’ve a few hours to spare before the landing. Let’s see how far they’ve gone at least,’ Geordie said. ‘My guess is that, once they’re out of the immediate area, they’ll find a place to stop so they can have their fun with the girls they’ve captured.’
There were no dissenting voices and as Shepherd glanced from face to face, he saw the same cold hatred for those who had done this. They did not deserve to live, Shepherd thought, and though the task of securing the beach for the landing came first, he hoped there would be time and opportunity to avenge the murdered villagers they had found. As they moved off, they went into the familiar patrol routine, with Shepherd as lead scout, Geordie and Jimbo in the middle of the patrol watching left and right, and Jock as ‘tail end Charlie’, watching the rear.
They made their way through scrub bush and a few overgrown plantations, and worked their way around belts of elephant grass that towered above them. As Geordie had suspected, the rebels had not gone far. They had covered no more than a mile and a half when, as Shepherd inched his way forward to breast a low rise, he heard the sound of voices and smelt woodsmoke on the wind. Shepherd gently eased apart the branches of a thorn bush and through the gap he saw the rebel encampment, no more than a hundred yards away. The rebels had set up in another abandoned village. There were dark circles of charred earth in places where huts had been burned, but three still stood, their sagging roofs of palm fronds relatively intact. Groups of boys and girls were huddled together, sitting cross-legged on the ground, watched over by a couple of the rebels with AK-47s and bandoliers of ammunition across their chests. The remainder of the rebels sat or lounged in the dust, swigging from bottles, laughing and joking. Most were armed with AK-47s but a couple had RPGs.
Shepherd motioned the other members of the patrol forward to take a look, then they retreated a few yards and held a whispered discussion. ‘The mission comes first,’ said Shepherd. ‘We can’t jeopardise that by initiating contact now, with only a couple of hours to sundown, but they look like they’re settling themselves into the night. Let’s do the job, then come back here and give them payback for what they did to the village.’ There were no dissenting voices. They returned to the beach and finished their preparations for the beach landing. As the appointed time approached, Shepherd placed two infrared torches at either side of the beach, one red, one green, to denote port and starboard, and in the centre he placed a line of torches showing white, denoting the centre of the landing area. It was low tide, the perfect time for a beach landing.
At 00.53, two minutes before the H-hour, Shepherd began flashing the Morse signal for the letter S, three short dots, using a torch masked off to show only a narrow strip of light. Two minutes later, to their amazement a Landing Ship Tank of Second World War vintage, belching smoke from its stack, came clanking and rattling out of the darkness. Its ramp crashed down and a series of Russian-made armoured vehicles began emerging from the interior of the ship. They were led by a BTR-60, a Russian troop carrier. Like most Russian military vehicles it was amphibious, able to negotiate shallow seas or rivers. Several more BTR-60s and then a couple of armoured BRDM combat reconnaissance vehicles followed. What caused Shepherd’s jaw to drop even further was the fact that at the back of the column were a couple of tracked ZSU-23-4s, armoured, self-propelled and radar-guided anti-aircraft guns.
Shepherd shook his head, wondering if he was having hallucinations. It made no sense that Russian equipment was coming ashore in support of a British operation, but it was even stranger that ZSU-23-4s were arriving. They were purely of use as anti-aircraft weapons and, according to the briefing before the op, the only aircraft in Sierra Leone were British. He exchanged a questioning glance with Jock, then shrugged his shoulders; his job was to do what he was told to do and not ask too many questions.
The vehicles rumbled past them, churning up the sand and knocking aside small trees and bushes as they roared up the beach. Shepherd could see that the guys riding in the turrets of the armoured vehicles were white but the rest of the crews were black. None of the vehicle crews even acknowledged the SAS men, but Shepherd heard a couple of shouted orders and immediately recognised South African accents. Suddenly the Russian vehicles made sense – they had probably been captured in Angola during one of the many regional conflicts in which South Africa has been involved in the apartheid era.
The convoy disappeared into the scrub of Sierra Leone and that was the end of the mission for Shepherd and his team. As they reassembled, Jock was still shaking his head. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’
Geordie nodded. ‘What the hell are South African mercs doing in Sierra Leone on a British Government sponsored mission?’
‘Keeping it at arm’s length, I guess,’ Shepherd said. ‘HMG doesn’t want to be seen to be involved in the fighting here - maybe too many echoes of colonial times - so they hire some mercs to do the job instead.’
Jimbo scratched his head. ‘Which is?’
‘Who knows?’ said Shepherd. ‘Keep the government in power, overthrow the government - one of those, probably.’
‘If you ask me,’ Jock said. ‘This isn’t really about governments at all, it’s about minerals.’
‘Well we’ll have time to ponder that later,’ said Shepherd. ‘For the moment we’ve got some unfinished business.’
Wearing their NVGs, they made their way back past the still smouldering ruins of the village and along the route they had scouted that afternoon. Even though it was the early hours, the rebels were still awake, high on a cocktail of drugs, alcohol and adrenaline. The captured boys from the village were still herded together in a circle, with two rebels standing guard over them, dozing over their rifles. There was no sign of the girls, but the rebels standing around the doorways of the huts and the occasional cries and screams from inside, showed where they were and left no room for doubt about what was happening to them.
Shepherd beckoned to the other three and in whispers they identified the initial target each would take, choosing the ones who looked like leaders from the way the others deferred to them. ‘On my signal,’ Shepherd said. They spread out, took up firing positions and zeroed in on their targets. Shepherd had chosen a powerful figure standing in a hut doorway, dimly illuminated by a lamp burning inside it, though through his NVGs, Shepherd could have seen him clearly even without the light. He squinted along the sight, focusing on the bridge of the man’s nose. He took a deep breath, took up the first pressure on the trigger then gave a slow exhale and squeezed the trigger home.
The first shots from the other three came within a heartbeat and all four targets crumpled to the ground. The SAS men were already zeroing in on other targets, firing three-shot bursts, cool and unhurried, picking the rebels off one by one. The rebels panicked, firing off wild bursts in all directions, uncertain even where the SAS fire was coming from. One rebel stumbled from a hut where he’d been
raping a girl and was cut down as he tried to haul up his shorts. Another, wielding an RPG, was hit by a burst from Shepherd a fraction of a second before he pulled the trigger. Smashed backwards by the impact of the rounds, the rebel’s dying shot sent the RPG round blasting straight up into the sky, where it detonated in a ball of flame as it reached the end of its programmed four and a half second flight time.
The thunder of gunfire eased and then stopped as the remaining rebels scattered and fled, running blindly into the bush. The SAS men moved slowly and methodically forward, ensuring the rebels were dead and finishing off the wounded with a round to the head. They felt no remorse. In their eyes the rebels had already forfeited whatever rights the Geneva Convention might have given them by the slaughter of the villagers; anyone who could murder women, children and babies, and burn the bodies, deserved to die.
The village boys had remained in their huddle pressed flat to the ground their eyes wild with terror as they saw the SAS men approach. While Jock and Shepherd tried to reassure them, Jimbo and Geordie went from hut to hut, checking there were no rebel soldiers still hiding there and bringing out the girls. The clothes of all the girls were torn and their faces and bodies bloody and bruised.
Shepherd gathered the children around him. ‘Anyone here speak English?’ There was no response at first, but when he repeated the question, one of the boys raised his hand. ‘I speak a little.’ He looked no more than nine or ten years old, but the look in his eyes spoke of things that no child should ever see.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Shepherd.
The boy hesitated again. ‘I am called Baraka.’
‘I’m Dan. Can you tell the others that there’s no need to be frightened now? The rebels have gone for now, but they may come back later, so you need to leave this area. Do you have anywhere safe that you can go?’
‘Can’t we go with you?’ There was a look of such desperate longing in the boy’s eyes that Shepherd felt a lump in his throat and found himself hesitating for a moment, his mind racing as he tried to think of a way they could get the children to safety, even though he knew it was futile. They were on active service and could not encumber themselves with refugees, no matter how desperate their plight.
‘I’m sorry. We don’t know where we’ll be going next. But we’ll alert someone who may be able to help you. There are people who can help you.’
The hope in the boy’s eyes faded. ‘No one will come.’
‘You don’t know that, Baraka. I promise you that I’ll try to find help for you.’
The boy shrugged, still unconvinced.
‘Where will you go?’ asked Shepherd.
‘Back to our own village. Where else can we go?’
Shepherd fell silent, unable to answer him.
‘Come on,’ Jock said. ‘One thing’s for sure, we can’t help them by standing around here.’
They began to move off, but Shepherd couldn’t stop himself from looking back and saw the boy’s young-old face staring after them, his eyes boring into him.
Back at the beach, as the sun came up, Shepherd contacted base on the radio, and sent in a contact report - standard procedure when a patrol had been in a firefight with the enemy. ‘There is a group of kids there. Their parents have all been murdered by the rebels, the girls have been raped, the boys are just as traumatised - some of them were even forced to kill their own parents. What help can we get for them?’
‘It’s not our job to nursemaid refugees,’ was the cold-hearted response.
‘I know that,’ Shepherd said, feeling his hackles rise but trying to keep the anger out of his voice. ‘I’m just asking that you notify the authorities or a relief organisation that may be able to help them.’
‘I’ll pass that on.’
Shepherd wanted to go on with the argument but Jock, listening in, laid a warning hand on his arm. ‘Wait one, base,’ he said, then covered the mic. ‘Spider, I know where you’re coming from, but you’ve more chance of being struck by lightning than you have of persuading base to help,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Wait till we’re in Freetown and we may be able to contact one of the aid agencies ourselves. I know someone who works for Medicaid International and they may be able to do something. Okay?’
Shepherd hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. He opened the mic again. ‘OK base, job done,’ he said. ‘Request permission to leave the area. If you can get us a heli lift to Freetown, we can link up with the Operational Squadron.’
‘Negative, no air resources available. You’ll have to stay where you are until resources can be spared.’
‘We’re short of rations. We need to be lifted out.’
‘Nothing available. You’ll have to wait out.’
Shepherd broke contact and exchanged a world-weary glance with Jock. Geordie was on sentry at the edge of the beach while Jimbo was already working on his tan, sprawled on the white sand, still marked with the tank tracks from the landing the previous night. He lay back, clasping his hands behind his head with a blissful expression on his face. ‘This is the life,’ he said. ‘People back home would pay good money to stay here. Sun, sea, sand, what more could you ask for?’
‘They’d probably expect to eat occasionally though,’ Jock growled. ‘Anyone bring a bloody fishing rod?’
HOSTILE TERRITORY
SIERRA LEONE
October 1997.
Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd yawned as he watched the line of the sunrise inching down the mountains. He was standing at the edge of a palm-fringed white sand beach, listening to the ocean lapping at the shore. Jock McIntyre, Geordie Mitchell and James ‘Jimbo’ Shortt were sitting around a small campfire. Geordie was making a brew while Jimbo shared out the rations. It was meagre fare; they’d been on half-rations for the first ten days they’d been stranded on the beach and were now so short of food that they’d reduced it to one-quarter rations for the last two days. Throughout that time, Shepherd had been reporting in to base every morning, asking for a helicopter lift out, and every morning he’d received the same reply: ‘Negative, no air resources available. You’ll have to stay where you are until resources can be spared.’
‘We’re short of rations,’ Shepherd had told the man for the tenth time. ‘We need to be lifted out.’
‘Nothing available,’ the voice over the radio had said. ‘You’ll have to wait.’
That morning Shepherd had been determined not to be brushed off again. ‘Base, we need a lift-out,’ he had said as soon as he made contact. ‘I don’t think you realise the seriousness of our situation.’
The same mantra had been repeated. ‘Nothing available. You’ll have to wait.’
‘Patch Super Sunray into this,’ he’d said, using the NATO signals designation for the most senior officer involved in the operation. Super Sunray denoted the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, the most powerful Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army. Shepherd had no means of knowing where the CO was - he could be in Hereford where he should be, running the overall operation from where he could support it best, or he could be on the ground in Sierra Leone medal hunting. Until the advent of satellite communications it was understood that the CO would be in the base in Hereford fighting the political battles, but there are few medals to be won there and since the Falklands War the CO had more often than not left the running of the operation to the Ops Officer while he got as close to the front line as he could.
As soon as he had confirmation that the CO was part of the conversation, Shepherd outlined his situation. ‘Boss, we’re very short of rations and we’re short of ammunition.’ Shepherd knew that while he had to explain how precarious their situation was he mustn’t overstate his case - he had no way of knowing if other patrols were in graver situations and being truthful in operational situations was the very essence of SAS soldiering. ‘If we get into a contact with the rebels there’s every chance they’ll over-run us. If that happens you’ll be one patrol short because we gave them the good news ten days ago and if they get a chance at us,
they won’t be slow to take revenge. So if you can’t find a helicopter anywhere in Sierra Leone for a lift-out, you’d better order up four body bags instead.’
There was a long silence. ‘Wait out,’ the disembodied voice had said.
Shepherd had sipped his brew as he waited for the Head Shed to come back on the line. The CO’s voice had been impassive. ‘LZ. Grid 127704. 1200 hours local.’ Shepherd had acknowledged and the connection had been broken. ‘Hallelujah,’ Jock had said when Shepherd told them the news. ‘I was beginning to think I’d never see a Scotch pie or a deep-fried Mars Bar again.’
Jock was a Glaswegian hard man who delighted in playing up to every kilt-swirling, bagpipe-blowing, Irn Bru-drinking Scottish stereotype, but Shepherd knew that despite the lack of a formal education, Jock was one of the most intelligent men he’d ever met. Only a short fuse and a reluctance to suffer fools gladly had prevented him from reaching high rank. He’d risen as high as Sergeant twice but both times had been busted back down to the ranks after settling disagreements -first with an Admin Warrant Officer, and then a Squadron Sergeant Major - with his fists. Had he not been such a good soldier, or had either of the men he flattened been commissioned officers rather than NCOs, he would almost certainly have been RTU’d - sent back to his former unit. But even the SAS was not so well off for good men that they could dispense with a man of Jock’s qualities.
Jock was older than the other three members of the patrol, who had all gone through Selection together. The patrol medic, Geordie Mitchell, had a broad Newcastle accent and looked the least fit of all of them. He had a milk bottle complexion, watery blue eyes and thinning hair that made him seem much older than his years, but he was as tough as an old army boot and a very gifted medic. He had joined the Regiment because it offered the best opportunity to practise his skills in his chosen field - battlefield trauma.
As soon as Shepherd passed on the news they packed up their kit and began making their way along the coast towards the Landing Zone. Their route took them close to an inhabited village, evidently one that the rebels had so far not targeted and destroyed. They skirted it at some distance. A couple of gaunt figures appeared at the edge of the village, watching them pass by, there was no attempt to intercept them. Something didn’t seem right to Shepherd, and it took him a while to work out what it was. Then he had it: there were no dogs. He realised almost immediately why that was – Sierra Leone was a land where everyone was on the brink of starvation and pets and guard dogs had become just another food source.
Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1 Page 16
