Spider Shepherd: SAS: #1

by Stephen Leather

  It took them several minutes before they were organised and able to start the boat’s outboard engine. As they did so, a safety boat manned by the Royal Marines from Poole loomed out of the darkness. ‘Everything okay, guys?’ called a voice.

  ‘Just hunky dory,’ Jock growled. ‘But where will you be next time, when we do it for real?’

  * * *

  The atmosphere in the briefing room was tense. Although it was large enough to seat a couple of SAS squadrons, there were only ten soldiers present, including the four members of Shepherd’s patrol. A Yeoman of Signals sat at the back of the room, a senior NCO from the dreaded ‘Scaly Back’ signals squadron who monitored the signals that the patrols sent in from the field. Scalies did not take part in operations, but if women in the bars and clubs they frequented somehow formed the impression that they were part of an operational squadron, they did little to set the record straight.

  The officers all sat on a raised dais. It wasn’t quite a stage but it was raised high enough to enable them to look down on the men sitting below them. The new OC of Shepherd’s squadron sat at one end of the platform, his watching brief to ensure fair play and that the operation was viable. The man leading the briefing was the Operations Officer, second in seniority only to the CO. He was accompanied by his Intelligence Officer, a captain in the Intelligence Corps, there to supply whatever Intel was available. Universally known and despised by the combat troops in the field, the Intelligence Corps’ nickname of ‘The Green Slime’ spoke volumes. The captain was barely out of his twenties with a crop of old acne scars across his forehead. A major from the Army Legal Services sat uncomfortably next to him. Dressed incongruously in neatly-pressed camouflage fatigues, he was there in his official capacity to ensure that what the patrol was ordered to do was legal and in accordance with the Rules of Engagement. His unofficial role, unstated but understood by everyone present, was to ensure that if any shit was attached to the operation, none of it went any higher than the Patrol Commander.

  Jock looked at the Army Legal Services Major with undisguised contempt. ‘Look at him,’ he said. ‘He’s even got creases in his fatigues.’ Shepherd couldn’t help but smile because Jock was right. Only a real idiot would iron his fatigues.

  Behind the officers was a large screen and an array of no-expense-spared, state-of-the-art electronic gadgetry. A Signals Squadron technician operated it from an adjoining room, responsible not only for the high tech equipment required for the briefing, but also the video and sound equipment used to monitor and record every word and gesture from the participants. At the end of the briefing the video and sound recordings would be sealed by the lawyer and kept in the Regimental Registry along with the rest of the SAS’s classified material. As a result, officers fell over themselves not to issue orders that might come back to bite them on the arse and anything potentially damaging was left unsaid, with briefings almost invariably concluding with the standard cop-out instruction to the patrol: ‘You must decide how the objective is to be achieved, within the Rules of Engagement’. Or as Jock preferred to say – ‘if you fuck up, you’re on your own.’

  Shepherd and his three comrades sat at a table in the centre of the room with tiered rows of empty seats behind them. On the table in front of each member of the patrol was a planning pack. Everything they were to hear in the briefing was in the pack and the real work would begin once the briefing was over. They looked pale and tense in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights.

  The Ops Officer, Jamie, tall and languid with a mop of fair hair, was an ‘Honourable’ from an old aristocratic family whose father had restored the family fortunes by marrying the only daughter of an uncouth but very wealthy biscuit manufacturer. Jamie had cut his teeth with the Scots Guards in the Falklands campaign and shortly afterwards had transferred to the SAS. He had a relative who sat on the Defence Select Committee, which had proved extremely useful when the SAS required a bit of publicity in the right quarters. Shortly after joining the Regiment he had spent time in the jungles of South America chasing down drug runners and during that time he had formed an unlikely friendship with Jock, doubling up with him in the jungle camps and sharing their meagre rations.

  Their backgrounds could not have been more different - Jock came from a crumbling tenement on the fringes of Maryhill in Glasgow. On leaving school, he’d worked in a shipyard on the Clyde for a few weeks but then joined the Army Boy Service as soon as he was old enough. Despite his lack of formal education, Jock’s highly profane vocabulary concealed a keen intelligence which he usually kept hidden from even his closest mates, but when his guard was down he could quote from Classical philosophers and poets, and it was even rumoured that he could read the Iliad in the original Greek.

  The briefing finally got under way, with a succession of formal briefings covering every phase of the op: Prelims, Ground, Situation, Mission, Execution, Service Support, Command and Signals. For the first time they discovered where the op was to take place as a large a map of Sierra Leone was projected onto the screen.

  ‘Sierra Leone?’ Geordie said. ‘Where the hell is that? Mexico?’

  ‘Remind me to make sure you never book a holiday for me,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s in West Africa. There are sixteen ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs, the two largest and most powerful being the Temne in the north of the country and the Mende in the south-east. The good news for the non-linguists is that the official language of Sierra Leone is English, the bad news is that ninety per cent of the population don’t speak it. Instead they communicate in a pidgin language called Krio.’

  A series of photographs of features along the coastline followed. There were a succession of palm-fringed, white sand beaches. ‘Not bad,’ Jimbo whispered to Shepherd. ‘I’m packing my Ambre Solaire and my Speedos, in case we get some downtime.’

  Another picture showed a huge, creeper-clad stone structure like a ruined English castle. It looked as out of place in its tropical setting as a mud hut on Salisbury Plain.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘It’s one of the slave traders’ forts, where slaves were held before being sold to the British for shipment to the New World colonies,’ Jamie said.

  Jock grinned. ‘Bet your ancestors bought a few poor bastards there then.’

  The Situation brief was more revealing. It became clear that the new buzz phrase among the military top brass was now ‘Special Forces’. No longer would the SAS work alone, Jamie said, ‘because the new world order demands more troops with the technical ability to survive in the changed circumstances in which we find ourselves.’

  ‘Or to put it another way, more men also means more rank for our beloved senior officers,’ Shepherd muttered.

  ‘Got it in one,’ Jock whispered.

  Jamie also talked vaguely about the patrol’s need to work with ‘other, more irregular forces’, which did not make a great deal of sense to any of them, but there was a collective shrugging of shoulders and they moved on.

  ‘Now, Mission,’ Jamie said, and at once had everyone’s attention. ‘There is a civil war raging in the country. It’s a complicated picture and the details of it aren’t strictly relevant to your operation, so suffice it to say that there are various rebel groupings, the most powerful one supported by Liberia. The rebel groups are fighting with each other and with the government forces, not so much for control of the country as for control of the diamond-producing areas. The government forces are militarily ineffective, poorly paid, poorly armed, and poorly disciplined. They have a tendency to be passive in the face of rebel forces and in some cases they actively collude with them. ECOMOG troops - don’t worry about the acronym, it just means troops from a bunch of West African states, with Nigeria having by far the largest contingent - are supporting the government but having secured the airport perimeter they haven’t shown much interest in advancing beyond it and the government’s own writ barely extends beyond the capital. The rebels run the countryside, pretty much.’


  He paused. ‘Enough background, I think. Your operation is a small support role to the Operational Squadron’s intervention in the civil war now raging in Sierra Leone. You are to make a para insertion into the sea off the coast, do a beach reconnaissance and mark the beach for a landing by friendly forces. When the landing is over, you are to remain in the area awaiting further orders, and eventually you will link up with the Operational Squadron for repatriation to UK.’ For emphasis, he read the mission statement again, so there was no excuse for anyone not understanding it.

  Jock at once asked the obvious question, ‘If we’re inserting by sea, why isn’t this op being done by the Shakies?’ he said, the Regiment’s sarcastic nickname - Shaky Boat Squadron - for the SBS.

  ‘The obvious reason: because we want it done right,’ said Jamie, and the troopers – but not the officers – chuckled.

  Jamie went on to cover Execution: how the Regiment’s hierarchy saw the operation being carried out. As always in SAS ops, it was subject to the patrol’s agreement, and they were free to amend and adjust it as they thought fit.

  The remainder of the briefing was routine, concluding with the Yeoman briefing them on technical stuff about settings on the radio, schedules and lost comms procedures.

  Just as Shepherd and the rest of the patrol thought they were done, the Ops Officer dropped one final bombshell, ‘Oh, by the way’, he said. ‘You may come across some of our friends from Six when you’re on the ground there. Treat them with the usual courtesies, won’t you?’

  Everyone’s heart sank; the last thing any of them wanted was to do anything involving MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as the SIS. The history of botched operations and screw-ups involving Six was the stuff of Regimental nightmares, dating back as far as operations in Aden and other parts of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s and continuing right up to and including the Falklands Campaign in the 1980s.

  The last person to speak, as ever, was the Major from the Army Legal Services, delivering the usual arse-covering warning to stick rigidly to their orders, coupled with dire warnings about the consequences if they did not. Everyone knew it was bullshit. There has never been an operation in the history of the SAS that had gone entirely as it was briefed, because the enemy was never obliging enough to stick to the script.

  The patrol exchanged cynical looks. ‘Why don’t you come with us to make sure we do it right?’ Jock muttered under his breath. ‘You might finally be able to get the creases out of your cammos. Now fuck off and leave us alone’.

  Once outside the briefing room, Gannon added his own final words. ‘Bollocks to all that in there. Just get the job done and get back here safely’.

  They knew the real work started now and made their way back to the isolation billets clutching their planning packs, already thinking about the permutations and changes they wanted to make to the Head Shed’s plan. They all realised that their op was just a sideshow to the Squadron’s main operation in Sierra Leone, but they prepared just as meticulously over the next few hectic days. Day and night they practised ambush drills, anti-ambush drills, and RV procedures, attended detailed comms briefings, and had a long discussion before settling on the weapon of choice for the op: the AR-15 Commando assault rifle with retractable butt. It was a robust, tried and tested weapon that could fire single shots, burst or semi-automatic, and had a mounting to launch rifle grenades. They decided against carrying any heavy weaponry, taking just the basic rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, since they were not anticipating a lot of trouble in Sierra Leone. They also took some less typical kit, including a few tubs of plasticine, bought by one of their support team from a toy store in Hereford.

  Finally ready to go, they were transported to Lyneham, loaded on to a Special Forces Hercules and flown down to Gibraltar. The air crew had filed a flight plan which would take them from Gibraltar to the Cape Verde islands and then on to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, the cover story being that they were recceing a new route to the Falklands as an alternative to the normal route through Ascension Island.

  The Special Forces crew did their best to make Shepherd and his mates comfortable on the nine-hour flight from Gibraltar to Sierra Leone, They had put makeshift bunks in the back of the plane so they could at least try to sleep, and fed them as often as they wanted to be fed, fully aware that once on the ground they were likely to be short of rations.

  They began their final approach to the target area in the dead of night. They dropped the inflatable boat, and after swinging onto the reciprocal heading they jumped on the signal. As Shepherd used the risers of his chute to steer himself towards the boat, he looked down and swore. In all the practice jumps into Studland Bay in Dorset, surrounded by safety boats, everything had worked perfectly. Now on the operational jump, he could see in the phosphorescence of the night Atlantic that the boat was not inflating as it should. He could not believe his eyes; he looked incredulously at the others, then back to the water. For a second he wondered if they had somehow been sold down the river and deliberately sabotaged, but he told himself he was just being paranoid and snapped back into focus on the task.

  He hit the water close to the boat and at once saw the reason that it was not inflating: the valves on the gas cylinders were covered in frost and had frozen solid. The words of his science teacher, in a long ago lesson, came back to him: ‘gases cool as they expand’. The compressed gas from the cylinders was being forced through the valves at such a rate that it had frozen them.

  His patrol joined him. ‘Throw water over the valves, it should raise the temperature,’ shouted Shepherd. Treading water, the four of them began frantically splashing water onto the valves, even though it also filled the boat and swamped the equipment inside. It took an age, for each time one of the valves thawed and gas began to flow again, it refroze almost at once.

  All of them were exhausted and Jock in particular was getting very distressed, as he was not a strong swimmer. Eventually they managed to half-inflate the boat - enough to just bear their weight, and wallowing low in the water, they made it to the beach. They were so exhausted by their efforts that after a very quick reconnaissance of the area they crashed out on the sand.

  They woke to glorious sunshine and immediately went into operational mode. Jimbo and Geordie began a more thorough recce of the surrounding area while Shepherd and Jock surveyed the beach. They worked their way along either side of the surf-line, testing the exposed sand and prodding the sea bed under the water using sticks with balls of plasticine on the end. Each time the plasticine came up covered with a mixture of sand, fragments of shells and bits of gravel embedded in it, enabling them both to determine the composition of the ground below the water line, and to measure the gradient of the beach. They were looking for a combination of sand and gravel that would give the wheels of incoming vehicles some purchase as they hit bottom, and a shallow slope up the beach to allow them a fast exit from the area of maximum danger. While they were doing this, Shepherd could smell something sweet and sickly on the breeze.

  ‘Smell that?’ he asked Jock.

  Jock nodded. ‘Rotting flesh,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  When they had finished the survey and chosen the best landing site, Shepherd got on the radio and contacted base. ‘We’re ready for the landing.’

  ‘Understood. Standby for further orders.’

  Within half an hour, he received a further message, telling them that the landing would take place that night at 00:55.

  When Jimbo and Geordie eventually returned, they were excitable and almost incoherent, insisting that Jock and Shepherd went with them immediately. ‘You’ve got to see this for yourself,’ Geordie said. ‘You won’t believe it otherwise.‘

  ‘What is it?’ asked Shepherd.

  ‘Come and look,’ said Geordie.

  They moved away from the beach through low-lying scrub bush. After a couple of miles they arrived at a village. Even as they approached
it, Shepherd could smell blood in the air, sickly sweet with a faint metallic tang. The village had been torched and the round mud-brick huts with straw or palm roofs were still smouldering. Bodies already crawling with flies and ants, littered the ground around them and as he looked inside the smoking interiors, Shepherd could see still more charred corpses of adults and children. Even more horrifying, in the centre of the village was a large tree stump that had perhaps been used by the villagers as a seat or table, but had now been put to a far more terrible purpose. The horizontal surface of the trunk was stained with blood that had dried to a brownish red in the heat of the sun. In the dirt next to it was a pile of severed hands. Shepherd counted at least a dozen and from their size they were the hands of small children, not adults.

  ‘I’ve heard of this being done to punish adults for voting the wrong way,’ Jock said. ‘They cut off the hand that made the mark on the ballot - but here...’ He broke off, baffled. ‘Maybe it’s that without a hand, they can’t bear arms against the people who did this and seek revenge for the slaughter of their parents?’

  Shepherd shrugged. ‘Maybe. Have you noticed the lack of bodies of older children, boys and girls?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jock said. ‘You can guess why the girls have been taken. They use them as camp prostitutes and then abandon or kill them if they become pregnant. AIDS is rife here and there’s a widespread belief that the only cure is to have sex with a virgin. The rebels will even take babies - girls as young as two years old - and rape them in search of a cure.’ He shook his head. ‘Bastards.’

  ‘That means the girls get infected?’ said Shepherd.