Narrow Escape (A Spider Shepherd short story)

by Stephen Leather

  Shepherd heard the hunters again perhaps twenty minutes later, heading away from his position, though the heli continued its search of the area. At one side of the sump there was a small overhang of peat with a screen of bilberry fronds and trailing mosses partly shielding it from view. Shepherd was able to haul his upper body out of the freezing water and huddle there, but he remained immersed to his waist all day, not daring to emerge from his hiding place or even glance upwards, for he knew that the white of an upturned face would be an immediate giveaway to a watcher in the heli high overhead.

  Even when the sound of the rotors at last faded and finally ceased, he remained motionless, knowing that the hunters would almost certainly have set up an OP, and would be lying up in cover not far away, watching for the movement that would betray him. There was no option but to remain where he was until dark. As he had learned to do in his early training, he retreated into himself, forcing his mind to ignore the signals from his body telling him how cold he was. Whenever his falling core temperature brought him close to shivering, he began flexing every muscle in his body in turn. He made small, imperceptible movements beginning with his fingers and toes and moving up his body until he had raised his temperature a little and then he went back into his state of semi-suspension, mind alert, but body motionless.

  Hard though he tried to still the anxiety gnawing at him, as he waited out the daylight hours, he knew that he was falling ever further behind his self-imposed schedule. He had hoped to reach the Live Letter Box that night but the brush with the hunter force and the hours lost lying up in the sump-hole made that problematic at best. He knew now that he was going to have to be less cautious if he was to have any chance of completing his task in the allotted time span.

  As soon as night fell, he emerged from his hiding place and set off. He kept moving fast over the ground but in the pitch blackness he was constantly stumbling, tripping and falling. He plunged into another sump hole, unseen in the darkness, and then found himself sliding out of control down a scree slope, with a small avalanche of dislodged rock crashing down around him. He knew the noise of the rock-fall could have been heard a mile away and he increased his speed still more.

  He was exhausted by the time he reached the Live Letter Box, a derelict barn in a field that had once been a small meadow but had now reverted to moorland. It was just before first light and he set up an OP in a copse of brambles, worming his way in underneath them, breaking the stems off at ground level where necessary and obscuring the break marks by smearing mud over the stems. By the time the cut foliage wilted and died, he would be long gone. He spent the day observing the barn, willing away the hours until nightfall, when he could go down there and obtain the details of the next RV. All the time, the clock was ticking and he did not yet know how many more stages there would be before he reached the final RV.

  He observed the barn throughout the day. No one entered or left it and he saw no trace of movement, but half an hour after nightfall that evening he saw a gleam of light from inside. He emerged from cover and moved in complete silence over the ground, every sense straining for sound or movement as he approached the barn and crept in through the doorway, fists clenched, poised either for fight or flight.

  The light source was a hurricane lamp torch in a corner, with another held by the agent, who was sitting on a pile of fallen rubble watching the doorway. The man stood up, yawned and stretched as he caught sight of Shepherd. He gave his pass code number and Shepherd responded with his. ‘That’s the formalities out of the way,’ the agent said. ‘Here, take this.’

  He gave him a piece of stale bread and then produced a hip flask, poured a shot of rum into the cap and passed it to him. Shepherd ate the bread in half a dozen bites, ignoring the blue mould speckling its crust, and then gulped down the rum. He was desperate to get the coordinates of the next RV and get moving straightaway, but the agent showed no sign of urgency and began asking him all sorts of questions about the exercise. He was particularly interested in Shepherd’s account of evading the hunter force and asked him a string of questions about it. Grinding his teeth, but realising that this was just another way of ratcheting up the tension in the runner, Shepherd masked his impatience and gave answers, albeit rather terse ones, to each question.

  At length, the agent stopped toying with him and gave him the coordinates of his next RV. ‘It’s a linear RV in a wood,’ he said. ‘The next agent will be somewhere along the track and you will recognise him because he will be whistling. You will say “The pigeons are back in the loft”, and he will reply “But my cat will chase them”. Got that?’

  Shepherd nodded, impassive. Giving runners embarrassing passwords to say was just another way of taking them out of their comfort zone. ‘That’s it?’ he said.

  The agent nodded. ‘But obviously you can’t study your map here. You have to leave the area of the RV before you can do so.’

  Shepherd turned on his heel and left the barn without another word. He made his way back up the hillside to the site of his OP and then unbuttoned his shirt and pulled out his map. The moon was in its final quarter and, unlike the previous night, there were enough cloud breaks overhead for him to read his map by its light. He stifled an inward groan at the amount of ground he still had to cover. He took a direction of march and then replaced the map next to his skin and set out. He kept moving throughout the remainder of the night and almost all the day that followed. Speed marching, and running wherever the ground allowed him to do so, he crossed several more steep-sided valleys before he at last reached the wood he was seeking just at last light.

  A rough forest track, newly marked with tyre treads, led into the wood, but he avoided that, moving around the perimeter of the wood and then making his way in through the trees. The wood was of conifers mixed with splintered mountain oak A tangle of fallen trees, uprooted in winter storms, fallen branches and dense undergrowth and brambles made his progress painfully slow.

  Had time not been an issue, he would have set up an OP as usual, remaining in cover and observing the site of the RV until he was sure it was safe. But he no longer had the luxury of time and with night falling he knew that it would take him a long while to extricate himself from the wood and get back onto the moors. He figured there was only a 24-hour window in which to reach the last RV. If he arrived there after that time, he would find the RV deserted and he would be deemed to have failed Continuation at the very last stage and would be RTUed. He had no way of knowing what might be waiting for him in the wood, but he felt that he simply had to press ahead and take his chances, even though he was abandoning all the standard operating procedures that were designed to keep him safe.

  He found the path he was seeking in the heart of the wood. As he stepped out onto it, he saw a movement, a dark figure emerging from behind a tree to his left. As he approached, to his surprise, Shepherd made out the bulky figure of Brummie F, who stopped a few yards from him. Shepherd’s anxiety and impatience made him careless. ‘Why the fuck are you not whistling?’ he said.

  Brummie F smiled and then his gaze switched to look past Shepherd’s shoulder. There was a faint sound behind him and as he turned, something hard smashed against the back of his head and he slumped to the ground, semi-conscious. He was dimly aware of a set of footsteps moving away, and his hands and feet being bound with cable ties and a hood pulled over his head. Then one of his captors gave a piercing whistle and at once Shepherd heard an engine start nearby and saw the glow of headlights through the cloth of his hood. He realised that the hood was not sacking, but a fine-woven cloth, and even in his dazed state he remembered The Bosun’s warning about water-boarding. He managed to suck a bit of the fabric into his mouth and began working it between his teeth, trying to bite a small hole through it.

  He was picked up, carried through the wood and then thrown into the back of a van. The door slammed and a moment later, the van set off. He felt it slipping and sliding, struggling for grip in the mud and leaf litter, then accelerating away
as it reached the gravel track at the edge of the wood. They drove for no more than a couple of miles before he felt the van descending a steep slope and the engine note changed as the ground became rougher. The van bounced and jolted, and he heard a scraping sound as the chassis grazed against a rock. Then it lurched to a halt and the engine was switched off.

  In the sudden silence, Shepherd could hear the faint ticking of the metal of the engine as it began to cool. He braced himself for what was to come. The van doors swung open and he was dragged out, thrown to the ground and then boots began thudding into his body. He heard the van start up and drive off again, but then all his attention was focussed on squirming around, trying to take most of the impacts on his arms and back, to protect his head, ribs and balls as much as he could. However, with four men going at him from all sides, some of the kicks and blows inevitably got through. There was a sharp stab of pain as a boot smacked into his side. It felt like a cracked rib but that was the least of his worries. Even while he was still soaking up the beating, a sense of unease filled his mind. He had been expecting to be captured and interrogated at some point, and rough treatment would inevitably be a part of that, but something about this did not feel quite right.

  The beating continued for several minutes and when the blows and kicks at last stopped, he felt himself picked up again and then thrown into a deep pool of water. Hands pressed on his shoulders, forcing him down and holding him under the surface. He held his breath as long as he could but then, lungs bursting, he took an involuntary breath and inhaled a lungful of water.

  Coughing and gagging, he was hauled out of the water, kicked and punched and then forced back under the surface again. He was held under so long this time that he blacked out and did not come to until he was lying on the ground, coughing and retching as water gushed out of his mouth. He was dragged back to his feet and he heard one of his captors mutter ‘Free his legs, we’ve carried him enough.’

  Shepherd felt a fresh chill go through him. The accent was Northern Irish - Londonderry maybe - and he had yet to meet or hear of anyone in the SAS who came from there.

  He felt the pressure on his ankles ease as one of them cut through the cable tie binding them, though they left in place the one biting viciously into his wrists. Two of the men seized his arms and dragged him over the rough ground. He stumbled on the loose rocks underfoot, half-slumping as if still barely conscious and allowing his head to loll to one side. His captors, cursing as his weight dragged on their arms, kicked at his shins to force him to keep moving.

  After stumbling a few more yards, he heard the protesting squeak of rusty hinges and the creak of an opening door, and was pushed inside a building. The next moment the hood was ripped from his head. His captors stood in a semi-circle facing him. There was no sign of the bulky figure of Brummie F; he must have been the man who are driven off in the van. Each of the remaining four men was wearing a black balaclava with crude holes cut for the eyes and mouth. There was a battered wooden table and a couple of chairs inside the small building, but no other furniture.

  Keeping up the pretence of being on the point of collapse, he let his knees buckle and his chin sink onto his chest but, looking sideways from under his eyebrows, he took in his surroundings. He was in a small, low-ceilinged and windowless building, its walls built from upended railway sleepers, with a cladding of metal sheeting. The floor was thick with fine dust - he could see the scuff marks his captors had made in it as they’d dragged him in. He realised at once what the building was; he had seen similar ones several times before. It was a disused magazine for explosives, usually found in a quarry or colliery, and the fact that the van had gone down a steep slope just before arriving here and he had heard an echo outside, suggested to him that he was being held in a quarry.

  ‘We know you have an emergency RV point,’ one of them said. Shepherd took him to be the leader from the way the others deferred to him. ‘All you have to do is tell us where it is and you’re free to go.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’m afraid I cannot tell you that.’ He was rewarded with a punch that filled his mouth with blood.

  ‘You can tell us now or later,’ the man said. ‘We have plenty of time, but you will tell us in the end. The only question is how much of a beating you want to take and how many times you want to go back under that water outside.’

  Shepherd was forced to stand in a stress position, on tiptoe, arms outstretched leaning forward against the wall. Any attempt to move or change his position resulted in another beating. As the questioning continued, it became clear that while the leader of them was relatively sophisticated, the other three were mere thugs. Each time he politely refused to answer, more blows and kicks rained in on him.

  Three more times he was hooded and dragged outside. The first time he was hung by his arms from an overhead gantry, the smell of rusting iron strong in his nostrils, and feeling an agonising pain in his arms as they took the full weight of his body. After what might have been an hour or more, he was taken down, interrogated, and then tied face down across a railway line. ‘There’s a train due down this track in a few minutes,’ the a leader said. ‘Tell us what we want to know or we’ll leave you here and you’ll be in three pieces when the train’s passed over you.’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything,’ Shepherd said. He knew that the rails digging into his chest and waist could not be from a normal railway; they were too close together for that. It had to be a narrow gauge track used by the quarry company, and if the explosives magazine was disused, the chances were long odds on that the railway was too. Even the sound of something rumbling towards him along the track, sending vibrations through the rails beneath him did not faze him. There was no other noise, no sound of an engine, suggesting it was just an old bogey wagon being pushed along the tracks.

  The thugs realised that Shepherd had called their bluff and gave him the most savage beating yet before water-boarding him again until he passed out. When he recovered, they started dragging him back inside the hut for further questioning. Whenever they took him outside he was always hooded, but in every conscious moment he had been gnawing at the cloth of the hood and had now succeeded in biting a small hole in it. He slumped down as if passing out again and let his head drop back for a few moments. Squinting through the hole in the cloth, he was able to see enough to confirm his suspicions, he was being held in an abandoned quarry. Just behind the magazine there was a rock face scarred and terraced by decades of stone extraction, and at the foot of it was a sloping mound of fallen rock and quarry waste. He didn’t manage to see any more of his surroundings before he was dragged the last few yards to the magazine and thrown inside. His hood was removed and the interrogation began again.

  The unease he had felt at the start had now hardened into something else. These men were either genuine SAS and some of the most gifted actors he had encountered, or they were not SAS at all, but something much more threatening: members of the Provisional IRA. If the former, disclosing the whereabouts of the Emergency RV would result in him being RTUed, but if they were Provos, as he suspected, then giving them the information they wanted would merely hasten his death and put more SAS men at risk.

  Even though he was still being beaten, he was thinking more rationally, and he knew that whether they were SAS or Provos, he had to get away. Even if they were well disguised SAS, if he did not escape soon, he was going to miss the final RV and with it his chance of ever joining the Regiment. If they were Provos, whether or not he gave them information that they wanted, he would be killed. Although the others were masked, if he got free, he could identify Brummie F as a Provo sleeper inside the British Army, and Brummie F didn’t look the kind of man who would stay silent too long under interrogation if the Special Branch, let alone the SAS got hold of him. The knowledge that Brummie F was a sleeper was alone enough to guarantee Shepherd’s execution, probably with the Provos’ traditional bullet to the back of the head, blowing off his face so that his funeral wou
ld have to be with a closed casket.

  There was nothing to be gained by any further delay; it would simply guarantee more beatings and water-boardings for no gain. However he needed a little light if he was going to make good his escape. Alert for the first sign of light seeping under the door of the magazine, for the first time he began to offer his interrogators a little more than the “Big Three” of number, rank and name and started trying to engage the leader in a dialogue. He waited until he was given another beating to offer a reason for the change heart, and this time he cried out with simulated pain and begged them to stop. ‘I’d tell you the RV if I knew it,’ he said. ‘But I don’t. The agent I was due to meet was going to tell me.’

  The leader smiled. ‘He won’t be telling anyone anything. But what I asked you was where the emergency RV is. And you do know that, don’t you? You were given that at the start of the exercise.’

  Shepherd hesitated, playing for time. He saw one of the thugs raise his fist and step towards him again, but the leader held up his hand, stopping him in his tracks. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear what he has got to say first.’

  ‘I can’t feel my hands at all,’ said Shepherd. ‘The tie is so tight it’s cut off my circulation. If you free my hands I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ As he saw the leader hesitate, worrying his lip between his teeth as he stared at him, weighing him up, Shepherd added ‘there are four of you, I’m hardly going to be able to escape, am I?’

  He waited, trying to keep his expression impassive and his body language cowed while the leader wrestled with the decision and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Try anything, soldier boy, and you’re fekkin dead.’ He pulled a pistol out of his shoulder holster and covered him with it, then jerked his head towards one of the others. ‘Untie him.’ As the man hesitated, giving Shepherd another suspicious look, the leader barked. ‘I said untie him, didn’t I? What are you waiting for?’