Moving Targets: An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel (Spider Shepherd: SAS Book 2)

by Stephen Leather

  She gave him a grateful smile. ‘I think so. It’s just . . . I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’ve been in plenty of firefights and seen plenty of blood and bodies, but that . . . -’ He glanced at the body on the table. ‘That was a first for me too.’

  ‘You’re very brave.’

  ‘Not really, just well trained,’ he said, with a rueful smile. He held her gaze for a moment, and then said, ‘OK, Jasmine. You take care, and I hope we meet in happier circumstances one day.’ He watched her slim figure as she made her way unsteadily towards the far end of the lobby.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Jimbo said, with an evil smile.

  ‘You know me better than that, Jimbo,’ he said. ‘Sue’s waiting for me back in Hereford and I’m strictly a one-woman guy.’

  ‘One woman at a time anyway,’ Jimbo said. He ducked under the mock haymaker that Shepherd threw at his head. ‘Anyhoo, the US cavalry is arriving in a herd of Hummers, so we’ll be good to go any minute now.’

  A dozen armoured Humvees were already pulling up outside the hotel, their heavy armour and weapons making the SAS Pinkie look even more old-fashioned and vulnerable. ‘Just like both world wars,’ Jock said. ‘The Yanks are always late to the party.’

  The Hummers disgorged a troop of US infantry who began relieving the Brits. US Army medics had also now arrived, and the SAS men waited while the American troops established a secure perimeter. Geordie talked the medics through the casualties that he and Shepherd had treated, then they headed back to the TLZ.

  They got back to their base just before dawn. Bone-weary, Shepherd stretched out on his camp bed but he lay like stone, unable to sleep, staring into the fading darkness. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that hideously disfigured corpse, blazing on the marble table.

  CHAPTER 6

  In the aftermath of the executions of his father and brothers, hiding by day and moving only at night, Sabit had walked 100 miles through the desert to reach the house of his father’s cousin, Gheni. Gheni had hidden him until Sabit had regained his strength, but he told the boy that it was not safe for him to remain there. Rebiya had been a well-known elder, a focal point for his people’s nationalist aims, and in a village where gossip was the common currency and state informers were everywhere, word that Rebiya’s youngest son had survived the massacre would inevitably reach the ears of the state government. So Gheni gave him what money he could spare, wished Allah’s blessings upon him, and then sent him west with a smuggler from the village who used the perilous trails through the high mountains to carry contraband into and out of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

  The boy eventually reached the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Despite his youth, he found work there as a builder’s labourer. The builder had strong Party connections and through a contact in the government – and a healthy bribe repaid by Sabit from his wages – secured Tajik citizenship papers for him. Tajikistan was a landlocked state, with Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, China to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and access to Pakistan through the Wakhan Corridor. A civil war in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union had left 100,000 dead and the country devastated. Sabit stayed in Dunshanbe for a year and then moved on to the Gorno-Badakhshan region. He chose it because of the large Muslim population there, but just as in his homeland, they too suffered repression from the government.

  As in post-Soviet Russia, criminal gangs controlled everything in Tajikistan. Many of the warlords and military leaders from the civil war had become the heads of gangs of organised criminals, looting millions through protection rackets, extortion, prostitution, gambling, drug dealing and arms smuggling. With a government awash in corruption and factionalism, even those officials and politicians not open to bribery and corruption were powerless to prevent it. The brand-new Mercedes and Jaguars on the streets of Dushanbe were all bought, directly or indirectly, with drug money. ‘If you’ve got a big house or a new Mercedes, you’re in the mafia,’ Sabit’s boss had told him. ‘You can’t buy those things on two dollars a month.’

  One of the ‘Big Five’ mafia gangs was based in Gorno-Badakhshan and had a flourishing drug and arms trade with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, importing opium and heroin base from them, refining it and then trafficking it north into Russia, as well as to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Although they were fighting the faranji invaders in Afghanistan, very few of al-Qaeda’s men were Afghans. A few were Chechens, but most were Arabs. They seemed to have an almost unlimited supply of funds, not just from the sale of drugs and the money they extorted in the areas they controlled, but from their Sunni Arab backers in the Middle East. Having noted that, Sabit began learning Arabic, paying an impoverished clerk in the Egyptian consulate in Dushanbe to teach him.

  Sabit had grown into a strong and handsome young man. From behind their veils, many of the town’s women cast glances in his direction, but he showed no interest in marriage, remaining a solemn, serious young man who spent his evenings studying. As well as Arabic, he learned English and Russian. All Tajiks had to serve as conscripts in the armed forces, but he did not wait to be conscripted and enlisted as soon as he was old enough. He kept himself aloof from his comrades, cool and unflappable, speaking little and listening more, and was marked out for rapid promotion. He volunteered for special forces training with the Tajik Spetsnaz, becoming a marksman and demolitions expert.

  The army was as mired in corruption as the rest of Tajik society and his commanding officer had close connections with the mafia. He used Sabit as part of his personal protection force and sent him on several private missions, selling Soviet weapons from the armoury to his mafia connections. When several of the local mafia don’s bodyguards were gunned down in an ambush after a turf war with a rival gang, Sabit’s strength, fighting skills and ruthless edge, coupled with his reputation as a man who kept his mouth shut, saw him hand-picked as part of a new bodyguard team for the don. He walked out of the gates of his army base and never returned, but was not posted as AWOL or as a deserter, and his former CO made sure that any questions about him remained unanswered.

  Sabit rose rapidly through the ranks of mafia bodyguards and enforcers. Intelligent, shrewd and calm in any situation, even when the bullets were flying, he was also an ice-cold killer when required. He became one of the mafia’s principal intermediaries with the Taliban and al-Qaeda groups who supplied them with raw heroin and bought all the weapons, ammunition and explosives they could supply. Speaking passable Arabic and sharing the al-Qaeda men’s Sunni faith made him even more valuable to his mob boss, who never had cause to doubt Sabit’s loyalty.

  One autumn evening he left on the regular run south with a shipment of weapons, explosives and ammunition to be traded for heroin. They were driving an ex-Soviet Army ZIL truck, with three other mafiosi riding shotgun. Sabit waited his moment as the truck rumbled south towards the Afghan border, knowing that it was a four-hour drive over rough and twisting back roads. Eventually he called a halt so they could relieve themselves on a deserted stretch of road passing through a sparse birch forest. Two men jumped down from the cab of the truck and strolled into the trees to urinate. The driver clambered down the other side and, like drivers the world over, began urinating against the tyre of his truck. He thought nothing of it as he heard Sabit jump down behind him, but it was to be the last sound he would ever hear, for a moment later Sabit pressed the muzzle of his silenced Makarov pistol against the back of the driver’s neck and blew his head apart with a single round.

  The other two men had heard nothing above the sound of the cold wind from the steppe whispering through the trees. Sabit waited until they returned to the truck, joking with each other as they emerged from the trees. The first one was still laughing as a round from Sabit’s pistol hit him dead centre, sending him sprawling with blood pumping from the hole in his chest. The other man had time to let out a cry of surprise and began a franti
c attempt to reach the pistol at his belt but before he could do so, there was another ‘Phtttttt!’ sound and he too was blown backwards, his arms outflung as a round drilled into his heart.

  Sabit made sure with a single shot to each man’s forehead, his face a blank mask. He returned to the truck to pull on a boiler suit from behind the seats, then dragged the bodies back to the truck and lifted them into the cab. They were, literally, dead weight, but he handled them as if they weighed no more than a bag of groceries. He climbed into the driver’s seat and drove on towards the border. His al-Qaeda contacts were already waiting at the rendezvous. They greeted him with ‘Salaam Alaikum’, touching their hands to their hearts in the traditional way, and embraced him. There were six of them in three Toyota Land Cruisers. In one of the vehicles was a captive, hooded and with his hands and feet bound.

  While four of the al-Qaeda men began to transfer the weapons and ammunition from the truck to their Land Cruisers, the other two dragged their captive out of the vehicle and dumped him on the ground at Sabit’s feet. ‘As you asked, brother,’ one said in Arabic. ‘He is a spy for the faranji kafir. Normally we would have skinned him alive, cut off his manhood and stuffed it in his treacherous mouth, but you asked us for a man who would not be missed, so we have brought him to you.’

  He ripped off the captive’s hood, dragged him to his knees and then produced a wickedly sharp sword from his belt. He held it to the man’s throat and gave Sabit a questioning look, but he shook his head. The al-Qaeda man frowned, then sheathed his sword and stepped back. The captive thought he had been saved and began to babble a stream of thanks to Sabit, calling down Allah’s blessings upon him, but the words died on his lips as Sabit grabbed him by the hair, held his pistol to the man’s head and without a flicker of emotion pulled the trigger. The round drilled a neat hole in the man’s forehead and blew a jagged exit hole in the back of his head, taking most of his brains with it.

  Sabit dragged the body over to the cab and manhandled it into position behind the steering wheel. He took off the bloodstained boiler suit and tossed it into the cab as well, then took from behind the seats his small shoulder bag containing $10,000 in cash and his only other worldly possessions: a copy of the Koran and a change of clothes. He took the jerry cans of spare fuel they carried as a necessary precaution in a territory where petrol stations were often hundreds of miles apart and doused the cab and its occupants with fuel. He emptied the remaining petrol into the back of the truck, then lit a petrol-soaked rag and tossed it into the cab. There was a momentary pause and then the fuel ignited.

  Sabit turned his back, strolled to the lead Land Cruiser and jumped into the front seat. As they drove back towards the Afghan border, a pillar of oily black smoke and flames rose high into the night sky.

  When Sabit and the others did not return, their mafia boss sent others to investigate. They found the torched truck a few miles from the border. Four blackened bodies were inside the car, each with a bullet hole in the forehead but burned beyond recognition. There was no sign of the load of weapons they had been carrying nor the heroin they were to have traded them for. The mob boss put out word of a huge reward for any information but was met only with silence. Unsure if he was the victim of a double-cross by al-Qaeda or a hijack by a rival gang, he was eventually forced to swallow the loss, which, in any event, was only a drop in the ocean of money to be made from the heroin and arms trades. Shipments of weapons going south and heroin travelling north were soon resumed, and Sabit and his dead comrades were quickly forgotten.

  CHAPTER 7

  After the frenzy of the attack on the Inter-Continental, Shepherd and his mates were back in QRF routine for the next couple of days, but it was destined to be a brief respite. On the third morning, as they were sitting outside their tents in the sunlight, recovering from a punishing workout, a Land Rover came roaring around the perimeter of the Bagram runway and pulled up at the entrance to their compound. As the dust blew away on the breeze, they saw a familiar figure emerging from the passenger seat.

  ‘Perfect,’ Jock said. ‘Here comes the CO to spoil a beautiful morning. Doesn’t that lazy bastard ever walk anywhere?’

  The CO was a portly figure with a bald spot like a monk’s tonsure and, despite his forty years, the pink, scrubbed face of an overgrown schoolboy. While his men were all in their customary mix of well-worn army kit and local Afghan gear, he was as clean and pressed as if he was conducting a parade at Sandhurst.

  ‘Good news,’ he said, lowering himself onto a spare chair. ‘We’ve got an op for you. The prime minister has demanded that British forces – which means us – be given an active and prominent role in the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So we’ve been tasked with attacking a site being used as an al-Qaeda base and major opium storage facility. It’s in the Registan Desert in Helmand Province, four hundred clicks south-west of Kandahar and fifteen from the southern border with Pakistan. It won’t be a walk in the park because it is at the foot of a mountain that screens it on two sides, there are stone buildings but also caves inside the mountain of unknown size and length, and the whole target area is heavily fortified with sangars, bunkers and strongpoints, with between eighty and one hundred al-Qaeda fighters dug in around it. We believe it’s being used as a regional HQ and a transit point for opium being shipped out to Pakistan, with weapons and ammunition making the journey in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Sir, so why aren’t the Americans using cruise missiles or bombs to flatten it from the air?’ Shepherd said.

  The CO’s lips pursed at the interruption. ‘Because our planners suspect that it will yield some high-value intelligence, and as you know, the only way to get that is to put boots on the ground and go in and get it. If the Yanks did it, as you say, they’d probably just bomb it to pieces, whereas we will have the opportunity to get our hands on some high-grade and maybe even priceless intelligence – our intel suggests that a very high-value enemy target may be based there, perhaps the highest-value one of all.’

  Shepherd had listened to him with an expression of growing disbelief and he now interrupted him again, making no effort to hide his anger. ‘With respect, sir, you’re talking absolute bullshit. If the Yanks thought for one minute that there were any high value al-Qaeda or Taliban figures there, let alone Muj 1,’ he said, using the codename for Osama bin Laden, ‘the number one man on their Most Wanted list, do you really expect us to believe that they’d let us go in and get him?’

  ‘Spider’s right there, Sir,’ Jock said. ‘We all know that the Yanks keep the prime targets for their own units and all we get is the crumbs from the rich man’s table, or the targets that are so hazardous they aren’t willing to risk their own men to attack them. So this is obviously a target that Delta Force and all the other US elite units have turned up their noses at. And that’s not surprising, because frankly, from what you’ve told us, sir, it stinks worse than Geordie’s socks after a fifty-mile forced march.’

  ‘Anyway, we know the real reason why we’ve been given this, don’t we, sir? It’s down to Tony Brown-Nose,’ Shepherd said, using the caustic SAS nickname for a prime minister already famous for his determination to be closer to the US president than a second skin. ‘He’s desperate to have UK forces involved somehow, so he can crow about it to the press and the Yanks, with the full monty to back him up: soundbites, film clips, body counts - the works.’

  ‘Aye,’ Geordie said. ‘Our great leader wants us to be there so he can show the man in the cowboy hat that he can wield a six-shooter too.’

  ‘And if it comes to cocks on-the-table time,’ Jimbo said, ‘Tony wants to be able to whip his out without the Yanks laughing at him.’

  By now the CO knew that he could not count on Shepherd and the others for support. Regimental protocol called for just one ‘sir’ or ‘boss’ at the beginning and end of any conversation. The fact he was being referred to as ‘sir’ in every sentence told him they were keeping him and his hare-brained scheme at arm’s len
gth. This would circulate on the grapevine throughout the Regiment and any respect he might once have had would be gone for ever.

  The CO held up a hand to silence them all and his voice was icy as he spoke again. ‘Nonetheless, whatever your personal opinions might be, that is the task we have been given and that is the task we shall carry out. Any further comments before we proceed?’

  Shepherd and the others exchanged glances but remained silent. The CO waited a further moment and then resumed the briefing. ‘Right. My orders are that the attack must take place as soon as possible, so it will proceed on the basis of the intelligence we already possess, without a detailed reconnaissance or close target surveillance.’ There was another rumble of anger, but he ignored it and hurried on. ‘Furthermore, in order to coordinate with the availability of US aircraft to carry out air strikes in support of the operation, the attack will be made between ten and eleven a.m.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Jock said, unable to contain himself any longer. ‘An attack on an elevated, fortified and heavily defended target in broad daylight, without any worthwhile intelligence and no humint, detailed reconnaissance or close target surveillance whatsoever, and with limited close air support? That isn’t just dangerous, it’s suicidal.’

  ‘Nonetheless, those are our orders. I hear what you say, but the timelines have been imposed by CENTCOM – US Central Command - who are only able to provide us with one hour’s on-call close air support. Two squadrons - yourselves and G Squadron – will be involved, flying in two waves in six Hercs.’

  ‘Involving two squadrons is just not sustainable,’ Shepherd said. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, there are only four SAS squadrons. Given that one is permanently deployed on counter-terrorist duty and another on QRF, if you deploy the other two together, then when you rotate the first two, the others have to replace them, so there’s no room for anyone to rest or retrain – and if we don’t keep training, our skill levels drop, and they are what separates us from the rest.’