Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd Short Story)

by Stephen Leather

them in turn up to work as lead scout, though again he remained at their shoulder, second in line.

  When Shepherd’s turn came, he began picking his way through the tangled vegetation, following the faint, wavering trace of the animal track they were following, avoiding breaking twigs or rustling dry leaves. He had practised the technique of looking through the foliage that Pilgrim had described to him and to his surprise, he had found both that it was relatively easy to master and that it really did enable him to see through what had seemed impenetrable jungle, glimpsing any suspicious shapes that might be lurking in cover. He was hyper-alert for the first sign of danger - a movement, a sound, an unfamiliar smell - that might be the only warning before another contact with the enemy. It took ice-cool nerve, constantly alert for the least sign of danger but not so on edge that he would be startled into an overreaction by the sudden movement of a bird or animal. It was exhausting, physically and mentally.

  They travelled along the ridge tops where there were no tracks and only animals moved. The terrain was punishing, dense secondary jungle with no open ground. It took them three hours to cover the first mile, fighting their way through dense undergrowth, constantly splashing through swamp and stagnant water, climbing and descending steep, slippery mud slopes, clambering over rotting tree trunks and skirting around thickets of understory palms, their trunks bristling with spikes, and thickets of razor grass, sharp enough to cut them to ribbons if they tried to push through it.

  The air was cloudy with mosquitoes and sand-flies, and leeches lined the animal tracks, raising themselves to search for their next meal like plant-stems waving in the breeze. Every time they stopped they had to pick the leeches from the soft tissue of their armpits, necks and groins. They covered as little as five miles in the entire day, slept on the jungle floor and the next day they moved on.

  Eventually, when Pilgrim decided that they were deep enough into Guatemala, they dropped down towards the river system and then tracked the course of the river very cautiously for two more days until they reached a large village. As Pilgrim had predicted, they found that there was a military camp alongside it.

  They sat watching the camp all day from across the river and eventually, as the sky began to darken, their patience was rewarded when a group of soldiers emerged from one of the huts in the centre of the village and came down to the river bank to wash and bathe. The other ranks hung back, deferring to the officers and waiting for them to bathe first. Pilgrim held a whispered conversation with the others. Even though the Guatemalans were wearing shirts with no visible badges of rank, Pilgrim was in no doubt about which officers to target. ‘See the slightly taller guy with greying hair? And the officer next but one to him on his right? They’ve got to be the most senior. You can tell by the way the others fall silent as soon as they open their mouths to speak. I’ll take the right-hand guy, which of you will take the other one?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Shepherd whispered.

  ‘He won every marksmanship task we were set in the Paras,’ Geordie said, in case Pilgrim was harbouring any doubts.

  ‘Head shot?’ Shepherd said.

  ‘You’re sure you can do it?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘On my count then,’ Pilgrim whispered. Shepherd sighted on his target, the Guatemalan officer’s head filling the sights, as Shepherd zeroed in on the bridge of the man’s nose. He held an individual’s life in the palm of his hand but that knowledge did not faze him at all. This was his job, and the Guatemalan officer might have been a plywood cut-out on the firing range for all the emotion Shepherd felt. He heard Pilgrim start to count down from five. At ‘Three’, he took up the first pressure on the trigger, and at ‘Two’ he exhaled in a long sighing breath. He heard ‘One’ and gently squeezed the trigger home. He felt the recoil in his shoulder and heard the two shots merge in a single report. His target disappeared from the scope, but the spray of blood in the air showed that the heavy SLR round had struck home with devastating effect. He glimpsed Pilgrim’s target also slumping to the ground and saw a flock of startled birds rising into the air as the Guatemalan soldiers froze in panic for a moment, and then began running in all directions.

  The SAS men were already worming their way back from the riverbank. Shepherd heard Geordie’s whispered, ‘Tidy shooting. That’s my boy!’

  Hidden by the jungle foliage, they picked up their bergens and began to move away. Behind them they heard shouts and ragged volleys of rifle fire, though the Guatemalan soldiers were firing blind, with no real idea of where their enemies were.

  Shepherd expected Pilgrim to lead them back towards Belize immediately, but to his surprise he realised that the SAS veteran was taking them even deeper into Guatemala. He moved at an apparently unhurried pace, more concerned not to leave sign than to speed away from the contact. At their first stop to watch and listen, Pilgrim called them around him and gave a whispered briefing. ‘The Guatemalans will expect us to be heading back to Belize,’ he said. ‘They won’t expect us to be going deeper into Guatemala, so with luck their follow-up searches will be in the wrong area. However, we need to minimise consumption of our rations because if we miss the RV with the infantry on the Belize border, the next stop might have to be the coast.’

  They moved on, working their way back to the ridgelines and following animal tracks, well away from any path that the Maya or the Guatemalan army would normally use. An hour before dusk, they looped their track and lay up in ambush in case any troops were following them, then after nightfall they ate a very small meal from their rations and bedded down. Shepherd quickly realised that going without food for a while was not going to be a problem and in fact it seemed to heighten his senses. Even Liam, whose search for food was normally a constant in their daily lives, endured the hardship without complaint.

  For several days they moved on, making no more than a few miles a day, before starting a long slow turn back to the east, towards the Belize border. The following day, as Pilgrim called the usual hourly halt to watch and listen, all of them heard a faint noise in the distance, the sound of men moving as fast as the jungle vegetation would allow.

  ‘We’re being followed,’ Pilgrim said at once. ‘And the only people who can track us through the jungle are the local Maya tribes. The Guatemalans don’t like the jungle but the Maya live in it, it’s their home and they can travel through it faster than anyone, including us, so we need to send them a message not to come too close. Come on, don’t worry about leaving tracks for now, the more the better.’

  For a few hundred yards they hurried on, leaving clear evidence of their passage in the bootprints and bruised and broken plant stems in their wake. Pilgrim then chopped down a small sapling, pointed the end and set up a pig trap for the people following them, lashing the pointed stake to a whippy sapling and then tying it down to a “trip wire” - a piece of plant stem that would trigger it when a stray boot knocked against it. ‘I’ve set it at an angle to one side, so it won’t hit the front man who triggers it - he’ll be a Mayan - but it will hit one of the Army guys further back in the patrol and that will slow them down,’ Pilgrim explained.

  They moved on again at once, still taking less trouble to conceal their tracks. Pilgrim explained that however carefully they concealed their tracks, the Mayan would read it as if he was reading a book. So speed was more important. They looped their track and lay up in ambush towards nightfall but the Guatemalans did not enter the trap. None of the SAS men slept that night and they moved on again at first light. As soon as they paused, they again heard the Guatemalans pursuing them.

  By mid-afternoon, they were close to the Belizean border but were still being followed. ‘We can’t afford to lead the enemy too close to the RV with the infantry and certainly not to the LZ,’ Pilgrim said. ‘We need to buy ourselves some more time. We’ve got to frighten them but not kill them. One or two senior officers dying fifty miles from the border can be explained away as the fall-out from a dispute with the drugs traffickers ab
out bribes, but like our brave colonel almost said, too many dead soldiers on the border could start an international incident.’

  They again doubled back on their own tracks and sited themselves on a low ridge overlooking the way they had come just a few minutes earlier. They did not have to wait long before they heard movement below them. As the Guatemalans moved into the ambush area, advancing in single file behind their Mayan scout. At Pilgrim’s signal, Shepherd and the others opened up with their SLRs, laying down a barrage of fire that flashed inches above the heads of the troops and ripped the vegetation around and in front of them to shreds. The Guatemalans fled in all directions, two of them dropping their rifles as they ran.

  The SAS patrol then split up and moved away quickly in different directions. Shepherd moved through the jungle alone for an hour, paused to listen, and then began to make his way towards the RV point. Pilgrim was already there when he reached it, appearing out of the shadows like a ghost. The others arrived within a few minutes. They compared notes and since Jimbo told them he’d heard sounds of pursuit, they again split up, and came back together again, using the rendezvous system until