Warning Order (A Spider Shepherd short story)

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Now, Mission,’ Jamie said, and at once had everyone’s attention. ‘There is a civil war raging in the country. It’s a complicated picture and the details of it aren’t strictly relevant to your operation, so suffice it to say that there are various rebel groupings, the most powerful one supported by Liberia. The rebel groups are fighting with each other and with the government forces, not so much for control of the country as for control of the diamond-producing areas. The government forces are militarily ineffective, poorly paid, poorly armed, and poorly disciplined. They have a tendency to be passive in the face of rebel forces and in some cases they actively collude with them. ECOMOG troops - don’t worry about the acronym, it just means troops from a bunch of West African states, with Nigeria having by far the largest contingent - are supporting the government but having secured the airport perimeter they haven’t shown much interest in advancing beyond it and the government’s own writ barely extends beyond the capital. The rebels run the countryside, pretty much.’

  He paused. ‘Enough background, I think. Your operation is a small support role to the Operational Squadron’s intervention in the civil war now raging in Sierra Leone. You are to make a para insertion into the sea off the coast, do a beach reconnaissance and mark the beach for a landing by friendly forces. When the landing is over, you are to remain in the area awaiting further orders, and eventually you will link up with the Operational Squadron for repatriation to UK.’ For emphasis, he read the mission statement again, so there was no excuse for anyone not understanding it.

  Jock at once asked the obvious question, ‘If we’re inserting by sea, why isn’t this op being done by the Shakies?’ he said, the Regiment’s sarcastic nickname - Shaky Boat Squadron - for the SBS.

  ‘The obvious reason: because we want it done right,’ said Jamie, and the troopers – but not the officers – chuckled.

  Jamie went on to cover Execution: how the Regiment’s hierarchy saw the operation being carried out. As always in SAS ops, it was subject to the patrol’s agreement, and they were free to amend and adjust it as they thought fit.

  The remainder of the briefing was routine, concluding with the Yeoman briefing them on technical stuff about settings on the radio, schedules and lost comms procedures.

  Just as Shepherd and the rest of the patrol thought they were done, the Ops Officer dropped one final bombshell, ‘Oh, by the way’, he said. ‘You may come across some of our friends from Six when you’re on the ground there. Treat them with the usual courtesies, won’t you?’

  Everyone’s heart sank; the last thing any of them wanted was to do anything involving MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as the SIS. The history of botched operations and screw-ups involving Six was the stuff of Regimental nightmares, dating back as far as operations in Aden and other parts of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s and continuing right up to and including the Falklands Campaign in the 1980s.

  The last person to speak, as ever, was the Major from the Army Legal Services, delivering the usual arse-covering warning to stick rigidly to their orders, coupled with dire warnings about the consequences if they did not. Everyone knew it was bullshit. There has never been an operation in the history of the SAS that had gone entirely as it was briefed, because the enemy was never obliging enough to stick to the script.

  The patrol exchanged cynical looks. ‘Why don’t you come with us to make sure we do it right?’ Jock muttered under his breath. ‘You might finally be able to get the creases out of your cammos. Now fuck off and leave us alone’.

  Once outside the briefing room, Gannon added his own final words. ‘Bollocks to all that in there. Just get the job done and get back here safely’.

  They knew the real work started now and made their way back to the isolation billets clutching their planning packs, already thinking about the permutations and changes they wanted to make to the Head Shed’s plan. They all realised that their op was just a sideshow to the Squadron’s main operation in Sierra Leone, but they prepared just as meticulously over the next few hectic days. Day and night they practised ambush drills, anti-ambush drills, and RV procedures, attended detailed comms briefings, and had a long discussion before settling on the weapon of choice for the op: the AR-15 Commando assault rifle with retractable butt. It was a robust, tried and tested weapon that could fire single shots, burst or semi-automatic, and had a mounting to launch rifle grenades. They decided against carrying any heavy weaponry, taking just the basic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, since they were not anticipating a lot of trouble in Sierra Leone. They also took some less typical kit, including a few tubs of plasticine, bought by one of their support team from a toy store in Hereford.

  Finally ready to go, they were transported to Lyneham, loaded on to a Special Forces Hercules and flown down to Gibraltar. The air crew had filed a flight plan which would take them from Gibraltar to the Cape Verde islands and then on to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, the cover story being that they were recceing a new route to the Falklands as an alternative to the normal route through Ascension Island.

  The Special Forces crew did their best to make Shepherd and his mates comfortable on the nine-hour flight from Gibraltar to Sierra Leone, They had put makeshift bunks in the back of the plane so they could at least try to sleep, and fed them as often as they wanted to be fed, fully aware that once on the ground they were likely to be short of rations.

  They began their final approach to the target area in the dead of night. They dropped the inflatable boat, and after swinging onto the reciprocal heading they jumped on the signal. As Shepherd used the risers of his chute to steer himself towards the boat, he looked down and swore. In all the practice jumps into Studland Bay in Dorset, surrounded by safety boats, everything had worked perfectly. Now on the operational jump, he could see in the phosphorescence of the night Atlantic that the boat was not inflating as it should. He could not believe his eyes; he looked incredulously at the others, then back to the water. For a second he wondered if they had somehow been sold down the river and deliberately sabotaged, but he told himself he was just being paranoid and snapped back into focus on the task.

  He hit the water close to the boat and at once saw the reason that it was not inflating: the valves on the gas cylinders were covered in frost and had frozen solid. The words of his science teacher, in a long ago lesson, came back to him: ‘gases cool as they expand’. The compressed gas from the cylinders was being forced through the valves at such a rate that it had frozen them.

  His patrol joined him. ‘Throw water over the valves, it should raise the temperature,’ shouted Shepherd. Treading water, the four of them began frantically splashing water onto the valves, even though it also filled the boat and swamped the equipment inside. It took an age, for each time one of the valves thawed and gas began to flow again, it refroze almost at once.

  All of them were exhausted and Jock in particular was getting very distressed, as he was not a strong swimmer. Eventually they managed to half-inflate the boat - enough to just bear their weight, and wallowing low in the water, they made it to the beach. They were so exhausted by their efforts that after a very quick reconnaissance of the area they crashed out on the sand.

  They woke to glorious sunshine and immediately went into operational mode. Jimbo and Geordie began a more thorough recce of the surrounding area while Shepherd and Jock surveyed the beach. They worked their way along either side of the surf-line, testing the exposed sand and prodding the sea bed under the water using sticks with balls of plasticine on the end. Each time the plasticine came up covered with a mixture of sand, fragments of shells and bits of gravel embedded in it, enabling them both to determine the composition of the ground below the water line, and to measure the gradient of the beach. They were looking for a combination of sand and gravel that would give the wheels of incoming vehicles some purchase as they hit bottom, and a shallow slope up the beach to allow them a fast exit from the area of maximum danger. While they were doing this, Shephe
rd could smell something sweet and sickly on the breeze.

  ‘Smell that?’ he asked Jock.

  Jock nodded. ‘Rotting flesh,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  When they had finished the survey and chosen the best landing site, Shepherd got on the radio and contacted base. ‘We’re ready for the landing.’

  ‘Understood. Standby for further orders.’

  Within half an hour, he received a further message, telling them that the landing would take place that night at 00:55.

  When Jimbo and Geordie eventually returned, they were excitable and almost incoherent, insisting that Jock and Shepherd went with them immediately. ‘You’ve got to see this for yourself,’ Geordie said. ‘You won’t believe it otherwise.‘

  ‘What is it?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘Come and look,’ said Geordie.

  They moved away from the beach through low-lying scrub bush. After a couple of miles they arrived at a village. Even as they approached it, Shepherd could smell blood in the air, sickly sweet with a faint metallic tang. The village had been torched and the round mud-brick huts with straw or palm roofs were still smouldering. Bodies already crawling with flies and ants, littered the ground around them and as he looked inside the smoking interiors, Shepherd could see still more charred corpses of adults and children. Even more horrifying, in the centre of the village was a large tree stump that had perhaps been used by the villagers as a seat or table, but had now been put to a far more terrible purpose. The horizontal surface of the trunk was stained with blood that had dried to a brownish red in the heat of the sun. In the dirt next to it was a pile of severed hands. Shepherd counted at least a dozen and from their size they were the hands of small children, not adults.

  ‘I’ve heard of this being done to punish adults for voting the wrong way,’ Jock said. ‘They cut off the hand that made the mark on the ballot - but here...’ He broke off, baffled. ‘Maybe it’s that without a hand, they can’t bear arms against the people who did this and seek revenge for the slaughter of their parents?’

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘Maybe. Have you noticed the lack of bodies of older children, boys and girls?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jock said. ‘You can guess why the girls have been taken. They use them as camp prostitutes and then abandon or kill them if they become pregnant. AIDS is rife here and there’s a widespread belief that the only cure is to have sex with a virgin. The rebels will even take babies - girls as young as two years old - and rape them in search of a cure.’ He shook his head. ‘Bastards.’

  ‘That means the girls get infected?’ said Shepherd.

  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.