Warning Order (A Spider Shepherd short story)

by Stephen Leather

  The op was broken down into phases and each one was dealt with as a separate entity, with the operational details - the where and the when - kept from them until the last minute, ‘Need to know, and all that,’ was Jock’s only comment. Although still unaware of where the mission was to be, they soon had an idea of what it was. They were clearly preparing to secure a beach landing site for an invasion force in an as yet unspecified country. Each phase was practised until perfect and then full scale practice ops were run, combining all the phases, until the whole system was as flawless as possible.

  Over the following days and weeks they briefed and practised beach marking for assault troops - equipment required and codes; actions on meeting the enemy - weapons and explosives, immediate action drills and after action drills; actions on meeting friendly forces: recognition features, radios and codes and RV procedures; after operational tasks: finding and destroying targets of opportunity; exfiltration or RV with friendly forces.

  The only phase of the operation that they could not prepare for at the isolation camp was the means of entry. This was to be a parachute insertion into the sea off the coast of the intended target country and to prepare for this they had to transfer to the top secret RAF base at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.

  The briefing by one of their minders about the method of insertion almost provoked a riot. They were to parachute-jump into the sea off the enemy coast and make the sea-to-shore run in an inflatable recce boat. ‘Hold it right there,’ Shepherd said. ‘You’re asking us to insert using the same kind of inflatable recce boat that cost Liam his life and nearly killed the rest of us as well?’

  ‘The faults with the boat have been identified and rectified,’ the minder said. He was in his late thirties with close-cropped grey hair and a jagged scar across his left cheek. ‘You’ll be practising in the Channel not the Arctic, and rescue boats will be patrolling to ensure your safety. Any other questions?’ He closed the file with a snap and walked out.

  At 0230 on a coal black starless night a Hercules lumbered into the air from Boscombe Down, climbing to 10,000 feet as it headed west towards the Isles of Scilly. Shepherd and the rest of the patrol sat on uncomfortable canvas seats with the RAF dispatchers in the back of the aircraft. The recce boat, rigged with a 20-foot drogue parachute, was at the back of the aircraft, lashed to the tailgate and ready to be dropped when the pilot gave the signal,.

  It took several days and nights of trial and error to get to the stage where they had a workable technique. They tried dozens of different permutations of how the drop could be successfully completed, but most were either too dangerous or unworkable and were discarded. They tried high-drop, low-opening, they had dropped the patrol first and then the boat, and they had tried dropping the boat in the middle of the patrol. Nothing seemed to work.

  They used up a huge number of parachutes. Every time a parachute was immersed in sea water it had to be washed in fresh water, dried and tested for decay before it could be used on another drop. As a result, water jumps into the sea were usually made using parachutes near the end of their useful lives, which were then discarded afterwards, but the sheer numbers the patrol required meant the RAF supply chain was hard pressed to keep up with their demands.

  The crew from the Special Forces squadron at RAF Lyneham had heard about the patrol’s experiences in Norway and were sympathetic to their situation, and while everyone involved knew there was a job to be done, that did not mean that anyone should be exposed to unnecessary, life-threatening risks. Because of the lack of trust in the recce boat, the aircrew had taken to carrying a liferaft which they could drop if the recce boat malfunctioned. During the practice runs there was also such an overkill of safety boats in the drop zone, that as Geordie looked around, he exclaimed, ‘Bloody hell, it’s like Dunkirk all over again out here.’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ Shepherd said. ‘A death off the Lofoten Islands is one thing, but it’d be a lot harder to hush up something that happens in sight of the British coast.’

  Eventually they worked out a successful technique. The Hercules crew extinguished all lights on the aircraft over the Isles of Scilly, including the external strobe navigation lights. Inside the aircraft every window except the windscreen had been blacked out before takeoff. After the skipper made one last call to base to ensure that everything was in place at the drop zone, the aircraft went into a stomach-churning dive towards the sea and at the same time, turned onto an easterly heading. The Hercules was now flying at wave-top height, bouncing on the pressure wave from the ocean as it swept past the cliffs of Cornwall and Devon, visible only as a blacker mass against the moonless, cloud-covered sky.

  In the back of the plane, the deafening noise made speech impossible. The patrol and the RAF dispatchers were strapped into their seats to prevent being thrown around in the darkness. Everyone was wearing passive night goggles, ready to go into action when ordered by the skipper.

  As they neared the drop zone, everyone on board went into the clear-headed, calm mode of professionals with complete confidence in their skills. Over Lyme Bay the engines were throttled back and everyone in the cargo bay immediately unhooked themselves and started to prepare for the drop. Shepherd was already wearing his neoprene wet suit, much better for use in the more temperate waters off the UK than the cumbersome dry suit and much easier to get out of when no longer required. Around his waist he wore a web belt with a sheathed divers knife. He pulled on his main parachute harness followed by his reserve chute. Under it he wedged a pair of fins and then rested the heavy waterproof pack containing his weapon and equipment on his leg as he clipped it to the parachute harness ready for lowering when his chute had deployed. Although this was only a test run, everything had to replicate the real thing.

  As the time to the jump counted down, he felt the familiar tingle of anticipation, mixed with fear. He’d done hundreds of parachute jumps in his time in the Paras and the SAS, but even now, there was always a moment where he wondered if his nerve would fail him as he stood on the brink, looking down. It was part of the reason why they had dispatchers on board: to ‘assist’ hesitant jumpers out of the aircraft. If the dispatchers had to get physical they were backed by the full force of military law; an order to jump from the aircrew was a direct order and to refuse was a court martial offence. If it occurred in a training jump, it was punishable by a couple of years in a military prison, but if it was on an operational jump, it was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy.

  Shepherd’s nerve had never failed him yet, but he never made a jump without the thought flashing through his mind. He stood up with difficulty, trying to tense his legs against the bucking of the aircraft. He lost his balance under the weight he was carrying and he fell over. He was more embarrassed than hurt and he grinned shamefacedly as a dispatcher pulled him to his feet again and checked his equipment was safe to drop. Together they staggered towards the tailgate.

  When they were all in the area of the tailgate they hooked up their parachutes to the overhead steel wires, two on the port wire and two on the starboard wire, allowing the patrol to exit almost simultaneously. That carried a risk, but allowed them to be close together in the air. For safety reasons Paras are trained to exit an aircraft at one second intervals but at over two hundred knots aircraft flying speed that translated into a considerable distance on the ground or in the water. That wasn’t good enough for the SAS so Shepherd and the rest of the four-man team would exit together. While that made for more potential danger in the air it made things in the water much slicker, with the jumpers landing in a tight group.

  The loadmaster opened the tailgate. The noise from the slipstream became almost overwhelming. Shepherd could make out the outline of Portland in the distance and the lights of Swanage on the port side. The Hercules dipped its left wing and turned around the headland into Studland Bay, as the navigator gave a running commentary over the tannoy marking off time to drop in seconds.

  ‘Stand By’ came over the tannoy, followed q
uickly by ‘Go!’ A dispatcher dropped a small chute into the slipstream. It hung there for a fraction of a second, then filled and disappeared into the darkness. It was attached to the drogue chute on the recce boat and as the chute filled with the slipstream, the boat disappeared into the night with a massive roar.

  The Hercules immediately went into a climbing turn up to 800 feet and turned onto a reciprocal heading to the one it had just been flying. As Shepherd looked down through his PNGs, he could see the recce boat inflating on the calm sea. Another ‘Go!’ came over the tannoy and he and the rest of the team stepped over the edge of the tailgate into the darkness below.

  He rode the slipstream and felt the nylon ties in his parachute breaking in sequence. He was yanked backwards as the chute deployed and he used the chute risers to stop the pendulum motion. Checking that his chute was fully deployed, he took a quick look around him for the rest of the patrol. He could see them, close but not too close.

  With his parachute safely deployed, he lowered his equipment container on its suspension rope. The technique had the double benefit of preventing him from landing on top of his gear, while at the same time the weight kept him stable as he dropped. He took out his fins and struggled to get them on his feet before concentrating on steering the chute as close to the boat as possible.

  Like the rest of the patrol, he was using a modified free-fall parachute with two L-shaped vents in the rear of the chute, making it very manoeuvrable. By using the toggles on the harness, Shepherd made the chute side-slip steeply, picking up speed and allowing him to get down to the sea quickly. Such manoeuvres were risky as they carried the risk of collapsing the chute, but an experienced Para could cut down substantially on his time in the air by using them, and in a combat zone that might be the difference between life and death. He knew without looking that the rest of the patrol would follow his moves in formation.

  As the sea rushed towards him, he moved his hands to the cutaway mechanism on his shoulders. When he pulled them, the chute would drift away leaving him static in the water, but if he didn’t get it right he could be dragged for miles and almost certainly drowned. A few seconds later, he heard his container hit the water. He pointed his fins and hit the cutaways. He felt the chute drift away and he dropped the last few feet into the sea. He grabbed his equipment container and began to swim towards the boat. When he reached it, he hung from the side for a few moments, then pulled himself into the still-inflating boat, closely followed by the others. Normally there would have been a couple of jokes like ‘I’m getting a sinking feeling about this’, but Liam’s death was still too fresh and too raw in all their minds for even the Regiment’s trademark black humour, and they went about their work in silence.

  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 langua
ge 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.