Narrow Escape (A Spider Shepherd short story)
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Muttering under his breath, the man took out a knife, walked round behind Shepherd and sawed through the cable tie. Shepherd felt a momentary relief as the pressure on his wrists eased but that was followed by agonising pains in both hands as the blood began to flow back into them. He made a meal of it, however, bending double cursing and crying out at the pain he felt, while rubbing his hands and fingers together, trying to get feeling and movement back into them.
He kept cursing and rubbing his hands together until one of them stepped forward and gave him a punch to the head that made his ears ring. He straightened up. The four of them were watching him, tensed and ready for any move he might make. Only the leader had drawn his weapon. It was a fairly crude, old-fashioned Soviet Makarov pistol, possibly supplied by Gaddafi - not a weapon that an SAS man or a British Army soldier would carry. Shepherd could also see that the safety catch was still on. He was finally sure that the men were Provos and his life expectancy would be measured in hours or even minutes if he did not escape.
‘I can show you where the RV is,’ Shepherd said, eyes downcast, voice barely above a whisper, the picture of a broken man. ‘There’s a silk map around my waist, next to my skin.’
The leader rounded on one of the others. ‘I told you to search him, you fekking eejit,’ he said.
‘You said to search him for weapons, not maps,’ the man said, his injured tone heightening his nasal Derry accent. ‘I patted him down, so I did, and he was clean.’
He moved towards Shepherd. ‘Put your hands on your head.’ As Shepherd did as he was told, the man ripped his shirt open and pulled out the silk map. He spread it on the table and the four men crowded around, peering at it, and keeping only half an eye on Shepherd. There would be no better chance. He hunched his shoulders and let his head sink back onto his chest, offering the least threatening posture possible to them, waited a second and then launched himself. His first target was the leader, and he crumpled as Shepherd’s savage kick caught him in the balls. The man’s pistol flew out of his hands and skittered away across the floor, but Shepherd was already dropping the next man with a punch to the throat.
He head-butted the third man and felt the man’s nose splinter. He shoved him into the fourth man and sprinted for the door.
He burst outside. He already knew his escape route. There was no point in trying to outrun his pursuers across the quarry floor and up the access road. His only possible route was the one where they would not be able to follow: straight up the cliff face. He sprinted and scrambled up the sloping mound of rockfall and quarry waste at its foot, dodging from side to side as he heard the sound of running feet across the quarry floor behind him, hoping to throw off their aim if - when - they fired at him.
He reached the face of the cliff and began to climb, swarming up hand over hand, using as hand-holds the marks of picks and drills left by the quarrymen. The first shots rang out, ricocheting from the rock around him. One bullet struck the cliff so close to him that rock splinters needled his face, but he forced himself to ignore it, focusing only on the next handhold as he carried on climbing up the face of the cliff.
He knew that every foot of height he could gain swung the odds further in his favour. Even in the most skilled hands, the killing range of a pistol was remarkably short - about twenty yards maximum - and it took SAS troopers weeks and thousands of rounds on Close Quarter Battle training before they could guarantee to drop a target with a double-tap at that range. He was certain that the Provos would have had nothing like the same amount of practice, and neither they nor their weapons would be anywhere near as accurate. Just the same, all it would take would be one lucky shot, to send him tumbling back down the cliff to his death. He buried the thought, swinging himself onto a narrow rock-ledge. A ribbon of light had now appeared at the top of the cliff as the line of the sunrise began to inch down it. He heard more shooting from below him, but this time punctuating the ragged staccato fire of the Provos, there was a rhythmic sound like a double clap of hands in a confined space. He glanced down. A fifth figure had appeared in the quarry, behind the Provos. Two of them were already sprawled in the dirt and as the survivors turned to face the threat, firing as they did so, the rhythmic double-taps sounded twice more. Their shots went wide of the target, but both of them in turn were hurled backwards by the impacts, their arms thrown wide as they crashed to the ground with dark stains already spreading across their chests.
‘Unless you’re enjoying the exercise, you might want to come down again now!’
Shepherd recognised the voice at once. He scrambled back down the cliff, picked his way past the four bodies at the foot of the cliff, and stood facing The Bosun. ‘I don’t know whether to hug you or punch you,’ Shepherd said.
‘I can live without both of those options,’ said The Bosun, grinning.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Almost as long as you. Just keeping an eye on you. We found the agent you should have met in the woods, and we’ve been watching this lot since they brought you here. We were hoping that the cell leader would turn up as well, so we didn’t rush to the rescue straightaway.’ He grinned again ‘Anyway, though it’s not quite the way we would have planned your Resistance to Interrogation session, it seemed to work out all right in the end.’
‘Good thing one of them didn’t manage to put a round in me though, isn’t it?’ Shepherd said. ‘Otherwise there’d have been five bodies for you to sort out.’
‘Those IRA guys always over-estimate their ability with pistols,’ The Bosun said. ‘I was in more danger from ricochets off the rock than you were.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘You’re okay, aren’t you? Spider, if at any point it had really turned to shit, I would have moved in.’
Shepherd heard an engine note and saw a white van driving down the track into the quarry. ‘Relax, it’s one of ours,’ The Bosun said.
It pulled to a halt alongside them. Two men in green fatigues got out and with a nod to The Bosun, they began unloading demolitions kit: plastic explosive, det cord and detonators, from the back of the van.
‘So what happens now?’ Shepherd said.
The Bosun checked his watch. ‘We’ll tidy this up. These four will just disappear. Brummie F will go back to Dundalk and his masters will realise that their operation went tits up and hopefully won’t try it again.’
‘I meant about me,’ said Shepherd.
The Bosun chuckled. ‘What happens in the Regiment, stays in the Regiment, but you won’t be a member if you don’t get to the final RV in time. So you go on with your exercise, you’ve not got much time. Remember the coordinates for the emergency RV? That’s where you’re heading.’
‘Right,’ Shepherd said. ‘And Bosun? Thanks, I owe you one.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘You can buy me a beer when I see you in Hereford.’
Shepherd retrieved his map from the table in the magazine, took a quick glance at it to orient himself, and then set off up the steep ramp leading out of the quarry. He had another ten miles to cover in the remaining hours of daylight and this time he was going to OP it before going in.
Ten minutes later, as he reached the rim of the quarry, there was a warning shout and a few moments later, the dull crump of explosives, followed at once by another, deeper sound, like the rumbling of an earthquake. He felt the ground tremble beneath his feet and as he looked back, he saw the whole rock-face where he’d been climbing just minutes before was now sliding and crashing down onto the quarry floor with a thunderous roar.
A fog of dust swirled around the quarry. A breeze began to blow away the dust and Shepherd saw that the place where the bodies had been lying was now hidden beneath hundreds of tons of fallen rock. He turned away and concentrated on the rough terrain that lay ahead of him. He knew he was only hours from winning the prize that he’d set his heart on – membership of the SAS. And that once he was admitted to the ranks of the most respected Special Forces unit in the worl
d, his life would never be the same again.
THE END
Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd left the SAS at the end of 2002 and joined an elite police undercover unit. You can read the first of his undercover adventures in Hard Landing, where he goes undercover in a high security prison to unmask a drugs dealer who is killing off witnesses to his crimes. The Spider Shepherd series continues with Soft Target, Cold Kill, Hot Blood, Dead Men, Live Fire, Rough Justice, Fair Game, False Friends and True Colours.
There are also a number of Spider Shepherd: SAS short stories, including Natural Selection, Warning Order, Hostile Territory, Rough Diamonds, Personal Protection, Friendly Fire, Dead Drop and Kill Zone.
Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider’ Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as The Times, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful eBook authors and his eBooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. In 2011 alone he sold more than 500,000 eBooks and was voted by The Bookseller magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world. Born in Manchester, he began writing full time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series and two of his books, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV.
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