Moving Targets_An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Of course I wasn’t yet in the Regiment when it was all taking place, but I was told it first hand by a guy who was there. And in the Sergeants Mess every Hogmanay they still raise a glass with the toast “Joe B, God Bless Him”. And that is a true story, so help me God.’

  There was a brief silence and then Shepherd burst out laughing. ‘You know what they say, Jock: never bullshit a bullshitter and you’ve got three of them surrounding you here.’

  Jock just gave an enigmatic smile, lay back and closed his eyes. ‘Next time you’re in Glasgow, I’ll show you the house.’

  ‘That’s a pretty safe offer,’ Geordie said. ‘Because you know the next time I’ll be in Glasgow is when hell freezes over.’

  CHAPTER 12

  On the fifth night, anxious to cover more ground, Shepherd took a slight risk and they moved out just before last light. There was a village on the lower slopes far below them, but the only potential obstacle in their path was an outlying, ramshackle mud-brick building just below the flank of the ridge that they were following. It was so decrepit-looking that they were more than half-convinced that it had been abandoned years before, but as they moved cautiously towards it, communicating by hand-signals, they heard a blood-curdling, high-pitched scream. Conditioned by years of training and combat, the patrol at once fanned out into a broad arc and went to ground, making them harder targets and giving them a greater field of fire.

  Shepherd caught sight of a young boy who had been herding a goat and its kids into the dry stone-walled compound next to the building. The boy was frozen in panic, staring down at a snake, which was curled in a figure of eight on the ground in front of him. Shepherd could see it coiling, its scales rubbing together with a rasping noise that sounded like water drops sizzling on a skillet. An instant later there was a blur of movement as the snake struck. The boy shrieked in fear and pain, and a moment later a man who must have been the boy’s father burst out of the building. He saw the snake coiling itself to strike again, snatched up a machete that was propped against the wall of the building and brought it down on the snake, severing its head with one stroke.

  Geordie gave Shepherd a questioning look and at his nod of approval, broke cover and, followed by Shepherd, while Jock and Jimbo covered them, ran down to where the man was cradling the boy in his arms. The man flinched as he caught sight of them - despite their beards, sunburned skin and the largely Afghan clothes they were wearing, there was no concealing that they were faranji. Shepherd saw the man’s gaze shift to the door of the building where, no doubt, he had left the rifle that all Afghan men carried. Shepherd made eye contact with him and held up one hand, palm outwards in the universal gesture of peace, though his left hand still held his own weapon. Lost in his world of pain and fear, the boy barely seemed aware of them.

  Geordie was already crouching to examine the dead snake. Its rough-looking scales seemed grey in the fading light and there was a darker zig-zag pattern on its back. Shepherd saw a fleeting grimace cross Geordie’s face. ‘Do you recognise it?’ Shepherd asked. ‘Is it poisonous?’

  ‘As poisonous as they come,’ Geordie said. He pointed to the spear-shaped mark on its head. ‘Echis carinatus - the saw-toothed viper, Afghanistan’s deadliest snake. It’s responsible for more deaths than all the other snakes put together. They’re bad-tempered, hyper-aggressive and will strike without provocation or warning - a bit like Jock, really. Most snakes will try to get away when they encounter people but I’ve seen reports of these bad boys actually chasing victims and striking them repeatedly. Their venom is a hemotoxin, which means it destroys the red blood cells and disrupts blood clotting, but it also causes general tissue damage and organ failure. It’s powerful enough to kill a grown man with a single bite, and so would obviously kill a child. We need to move fast. If he’s going to survive he needs anti-venom therapy pronto.’ He held Shepherd’s gaze. ‘I’ve got anti-venom in my med kit, but it’s the only one I’ve got. If I give it to him and any of us gets bitten by a viper, it’ll be curtains.’

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘We’ll take our chances. Give it to the boy.’

  Still cradling his son in his arms, and endlessly repeating ‘Allahu akbar’, the Afghan man’s face showed his fear and suspicion as he stared at them

  Geordie was already on his knees in the dust alongside the boy. ‘Spider, take hold of him, keep his heart higher than his legs and do what you can to keep him calm. The less agitated and excited he is, the slower the blood will be pumped around his body, driving the venom towards the heart.’

  Shepherd at once gestured to the father to allow him to hold the boy, and after a moment’s hesitation, he did so, though he still kept hold of his son’s hand. Shepherd took his place, holding the boy upright in a firm grasp with one arm. The boy’s father continued to pray loudly and Shepherd put his finger to his lips to quieten him.

  The boy’s eyes darted wildly around at first and shudders kept running through his body, but gradually he became calmer and quieter. Geordie was working fast but every movement was calm and measured. He first used his belt as a tourniquet around the boy’s thigh and jerked it tight. The boy winced but made no sound as the belt bit into his flesh. Geordie then switched his attention to the lower leg. ‘Viper bites always cause rapid swelling and his ankle’s already pretty swollen,’ he said. ‘But if we don’t deal with it at once, the blood vessels in his leg will be blocked and his tissues will necrose and that will lead to gangrene.’

  His voice was low, almost talking to himself, reminding himself of the course of action to follow. While he was talking, he began opening up the puncture marks on the boy’s ankle with the point of his razor-sharp combat knife. The boy moved slightly in Shepherd’s grip and his lips tightened, but he still made no sound or other show of pain. ‘Like fathers, like sons,’ Shepherd said. ‘Love them or hate them, you’ve got to admit these Afghans are brave bastards, even the children.’

  Geordie merely grunted in reply, entirely focused on his work. He pulled the water bottle from his belt and poured it over the puncture marks, sluicing away any residual venom. He filled the wound with antibiotic powder from his med kit and then began winding bandages around the boy’s leg as tightly as possible, working downwards from the thigh. Shepherd could see the white gauze bite into the boy’s flesh as Geordie drew it tight, compressing the veins and arteries. He was working so fast that a stream of sweat was dripping from his brow and splashing into the dust.

  While he was still bandaging the leg, he called out ‘Jock! Find me a couple of pieces of wood or something that I can use as splints.’

  Leaving Jimbo on stag, Jock ran to the side of the building and began rummaging through a stack of wood used for the shepherd’s cooking fires. He pulled out a reasonably straight branch, snapped it across his knee and gave the two pieces to Geordie, who began to splint the boy’s leg with them.

  ‘Why the splints?’ Shepherd asked.

  ‘If you keep the leg immobile, it stops muscle action driving the blood around his body.’ When he had finished splinting the leg, he pulled a series of ampoules from his med kit, cracked them open and injected the boy with them. ‘I’ve given him anti-venom, anti-histamine, hydrocortisone and antibiotics,’ he said. ‘He should have intravenous hydration as well, but we’re not going to find a drip around here, so we’ll have to do without that. Now let’s get him under cover so he can keep warm. You take his head and keep his heart well above the level of his legs.’

  With the father still walking alongside them, holding his son’s hand, they carried the boy into the building. Its disrepair and the lack of anything beyond some bedding and the most basic utensils showed it was only used in the summer grazing season and would soon be abandoned for the year as men and goats retreated to the lowlands before the onset of the ferocious Afghan winter.

  ‘And now?’ Shepherd said.

  Geordie shrugged. ‘All that’s left to do now is hope and pray.’

  Shepherd looked out of the doorway at the da
rkening sky, now pricked with stars. ‘We need to move on before long,’ he said.

  Geordie grimaced. ‘But give me time to make sure he’s stable, yeah?’

  Shepherd nodded then moved back to where the other two were covering them and brought them up to speed. ‘All right then,’ Jock rasped. ‘but if we come across any more waifs and strays, we’re going to have to leave them to fend for themselves. We’re the SAS, not Medecins Sans Frontieres.’ His Glasgow accent made the English part of the sentence almost as incomprehensible as the French one.

  Jimbo gave a mock sorrowful shake of his head. ‘Come on now, Jock. Whatever happened to Hearts and Minds?’

  ‘Well, in your case, it’s been replaced by farts and whines.’

  An hour later, Geordie made a final careful examination of his patient and then in a mixture of sign language and their few words of pidgin Pushtu, he and Shepherd managed to get the boy’s father to understand what he needed to do. Geordie gave him a blister pack of painkillers, held up two and pointed to the moon, then used his finger to trace the line of an arc across the sky to the horizon and then held up two more painkillers. The Afghan man nodded.

  ‘Will he be okay?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And do you think can we trust his father not to betray us?’

  ‘We saved his son’s life,’ said Geordie.

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

  ‘It does for me … and if not, we’ll deal with whatever or whoever comes after us. What’s the alternative. Spider? Save the son and kill the father?’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough.’

  They ruffled the boy’s hair and then said their farewells to the father in the Afghan way, touching their hands to their hearts. He did the same and then made a short speech in Pushtu, hardly any of which they understood. He stood in the doorway with his arm raised in farewell until they had disappeared into the darkness. ‘So what did he say?’ Geordie said.

  ‘I’d like to think it was “Thank you from the bottom of my heart and I promise not to dob you in to the Taliban”,’ Shepherd said. ‘But just in case, we’ll set off to the east till we’re well out of sight, and then loop around on to our previous course.’

  They linked up again with Jock and Jimbo and moved out, using the starlight to pick their way among the rocks.

  CHAPTER 13

  The following night, their sixth on E and E, the SAS men heard the faint sound of gunfire in the distance as they were moving along the flank of a ridge. There were single shots followed by short bursts, then a long gap before another few shots and another short burst. ‘That sounds like harassing fire,’ Shepherd said. ‘Let’s go take a look.’

  They made their way carefully towards the sound of firing, keeping to the high ground as much as possible. As dawn broke, they found themselves looking down from the ridge on to an army base a couple of thousand metres below them, on the floor of a valley surrounded by low hills.

  From their vantage point they could also see a couple of tribesmen, well hidden from the base, firing unaimed shots towards the troops, poking their AK 47s above the rocks that they were hiding behind and firing off a burst in the general direction of the base. Almost every time it provoked a reply, either a burst of .50 Browning fire or the occasional 81 mm mortar shot.

  ‘The locals are not trying to do much damage, are they?’ Jock said. ‘They’re just making the troops on the base stay alert, keeping them awake and playing on their nerves. Eventually it gets you down and you start to make mistakes. The same tactics have worked for centuries. They used to use fire-damp arrows the same way when they were putting castles under siege in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Always good to get a history lesson,’ said Jimbo. ‘Makes me wish I’d stayed longer at school.’

  ‘I think there is also something bigger going on here,’ Shepherd said, ignoring Jimbo’s jibe. ‘Look over there. See that cave with the sangar wall in front of it? There are four guys guarding it and there’s a faint hint of smoke over the entrance. I think there might be more people inside.’

  They stayed in cover and kept the cave under observation. About an hour later, two men in clothes that were a cut above those an Afghan farmer would be wearing, stepped outside the cave to relieve themselves, then disappeared back inside. ‘Did you see the weapons they were carrying?’ Jimbo said, putting down his binoculars. ‘Brand-new AK 74s, adapted for Russian SF use.’

  Shepherd nodded. ‘That and the guards posted outside suggest they are definitely not your average locals. I’d say they’re Taliban Head Shed.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Geordie said, ‘but the guys doing the firing are amateurs. Look, they’re still hiding behind the rocks and holding their arms above their heads before pulling the trigger. They’re shit scared of being fired at.

  ‘So the guys in the cave are Taliban heavies using conscripted local labour to stir up the squaddies in the base, trying to tempt them to come out,’ said Shepherd. ‘If and when they do, the Taliban can set up an ambush and take on a much easier target than the base itself. And from up there they can see if the squaddies start preparing a fighting patrol, and that could happen at any time because they must be as frustrated as hell,’ Shepherd said. ‘Right, here’s what we do. We haven’t any grenades or heavy weapons, so we’ll have to fall back on the good old grind. You three, take out any one outside of the cave, and provide me with covering fire while I circle round to the entrance. When I get there, it’ll just be them inside against me. It’s text book stuff, the reverse of what’s happening at the base, so we’ll see how much the Taliban like it.’ He grinned. ‘Not really a fair fight is it?’

  ‘Don’t get cocky,’ Geordie said. ‘There might be fifty blokes in that cave.’

  ‘They must have bloody strong bladders then,’ Jock said, ‘because we’ve been here a couple of hours and only those two have come out for a piss.’

  ‘Ah but not everyone’s got prostate trouble like you, Jock,’ Geordie said. ‘Believe it or not, some people can actually last all night without having to take a piss.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Shepherd said. ‘Even if there are a few more Taliban in that cave, I’d still back myself to take them down. Everything the Taliban do tends to be at long range. They don’t get to practise Close Quarter Battle and I’m betting they won’t have much appetite for it.’

  ‘What about the locals firing on the camp?’ Jimbo said.

  Jock shrugged. ‘As soon as we open up, they’ll disappear like Geordie on bath night. They’re here under duress anyway.’

  While Shepherd slipped away between the rocks and began skirting around the hillside towards the cave, Jock, Geordie and Jimbo selected their first targets. It was a straightforward system, left man took the left target, right man the right, and the third man the left hand one of the two in the middle. When their own target was down, the first to fire would switch to the remaining target with the others providing additional fire if needed and also shooting up the entrance to the cave to prevent those inside either escaping or taking up firing positions from which they could target their attackers.

  After the first few shots, the four Taliban guards outside the cave had been eliminated, with Jock putting two rounds into the fourth man even before his primary target had hit the ground, the back of his head blown off by the exit wounds from two rounds punching through his face either side of his nose. Geordie and Jimbo had already switched to firing into the cave mouth. There was a flurry of activity as the people inside tried to escape. When they found that the level and accuracy of the SAS men’s fire made that impossible without being shot, they tried to return fire but were unable to locate the firing positions of their assailants.

  Shepherd made his way undetected to the side of the cave entrance. His AK 47 was already loaded and cocked, and he had a further two magazines together, one facing up, one facing down. When he was ready, mentally and physically, he waved to the others to indicate he was going in, then took severa
l deep breaths and leapt over the wall, firing his AK as he went. As he did so the cave erupted in fresh turmoil with Taliban in all directions diving for cover or scrambling to pick up their weapons, making it impossible for him to count the number of men inside. Unsure how to react, the Taliban were split between fight and flight, and in those moments of hesitation Shepherd had no difficulty in picking his targets. The ones who reacted to his presence fastest were the first to be taken out with smart double-taps.

  All the time he was shooting, Shepherd was subconsciously counting the number of rounds he was firing, a skill learned over many hundreds of hours training in the “Killing House” at the SAS camp in Hereford. When he had taken out nine of the enemy, Shepherd did a fast roll to his right, hit the ground and did a simultaneous magazine change, before regaining his feet and repeating the manoeuvre to his left. When he had regained his feet for the second time, he was the only man left alive. He did a quick visual check of himself. A couple of rounds had nicked his belt kit and one had torn a hole in his clothing but he was unharmed. He shrugged carelessly, it had been no contest really, a professional against amateurs.

  Once Shepherd disappeared inside the cave, the rest of the patrol began sprinting across the hillside to see if they could be of any help. By the time they arrived it was all over. ‘Bit greedy of you not to leave us any,’ Jock said, surveying the carnage inside the cave.

  ‘Sorry,’ Shepherd said. ‘You can have first go next time.’

  ‘Well, now that’s all been taken care of,’ Geordie said, ‘perhaps we can make contact with the base down there and see about getting a lift back to Bagram.’