Moving Targets: An Action-Packed Spider Shepherd SAS Novel (Spider Shepherd: SAS Book 2)

by Stephen Leather

  When Eric heard on the grapevine about the chance of a security job at the Inter-Continental hotel in Kabul, he jumped at the chance. But having acted in haste, he now had ample chance to repent at leisure, for while the work was relatively well paid, it was both tedious and perilous. The hotel guests either ignored him altogether or, if they did deign to notice him, treated him with contempt. He was much older than the majority of the other hotel staff and out of step with them, and he felt a gnawing sense of insecurity and threat in almost every interaction with ordinary Afghans. As a result, when he was off duty, his social life, such as it was, consisted mainly of drinking in the staffroom with a couple of other, older security staff. Off-duty employees were not allowed in the cocktail bar used by the hotel guests, and the streets of Kabul were too dangerous for faranji – foreigners – to wander by day, never mind at night. He had signed a twelve-month contract and had only been in Kabul for six weeks, but he was already counting down the days till he could leave.

  Tonight he was working the graveyard shift – eight in the evening till six in the morning. He shot a look across the lobby towards the receptionist, Jasmine, but she looked away as soon as she felt his gaze on her.

  The lobby was deserted apart from Eric and the other security guards, for all the guests were in the bar or at dinner in the restaurant. Jasmine stifled a yawn. A beautiful, almond-eyed Australian of Anglo-Asian descent, she had applied to work as a receptionist in Kabul partly out of curiosity to see what was left of the country her father had eulogised after taking the ‘hippy trail’ through Afghanistan in the 1960s. The other reason was that in Sydney’s overheated property market, the double pay and substantial bonus for completing twelve months in Kabul, which the hotel chain had been forced to offer to persuade staff to work there, had seemed like her only hope of ever raising the deposit on an apartment back home.

  A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention and through the glass walls at the front of the lobby she watched a line of three Toyota Land Cruisers driving up the road towards the hotel. There was nothing unusual in that, for one in every two vehicles in the country seemed to be a Land Cruiser. They slowed as they drove up to the checkpoint where the security guards halted all visitors to examine their documents before letting them approach the hotel.

  The hotel security guards were all ex-military, boosting their service pensions – or satisfying their wanderlust and thirst for the adrenaline of risk they missed – by providing security for the businessmen, wheeler-dealers and carpetbaggers who, like maggots drawn to a festering wound, flooded into war-torn countries almost as soon as the guns had stopped firing.

  After an earlier terrorist incident in which a van loaded with explosives had been rammed into the hotel and then detonated, a row of massive concrete blocks now protected the approaches. The only gap wide enough to admit a vehicle was a chicane in front of the checkpoint that forced everyone to slow to a crawl.

  A group of Afghan civilians were squatting in the dust near the checkpoint: taxi drivers hoping for fares, and people looking for work at the hotel or hoping for baksheesh from any passing Westerners, though there were precious few of them in daylight, let alone after dark. Jasmine could make out clusters of figures holding weapons in the back of each Land Cruiser and felt a momentary frisson of fear. The risk of attack on the hotel was sufficient for every staff member to know the emergency drills, escape routes and locations of safe havens by heart, and almost unaware that she was doing so, she began to move away from the counter and towards the reinforced door leading to an office that doubled as a panic room. However, as the Land Cruisers drove into the pool of bright light around the checkpoint that was powered by the hotel’s own generators, she saw that they were wearing Afghan Army uniforms and breathed a sigh of relief.

  She watched disinterestedly as the driver of the lead vehicle began to speak to the guards at the checkpoint, and then turned away to finish filing the arrival cards from today’s batch of guests. They included a Briton and an American, who, from the size of their entourages and the bowing and scraping that had preceded them, must have been very big wheels indeed.

  The next moment she heard a sound like a series of dry coughs. She looked up to see three of the four guards at the checkpoint sprawled on the ground, and the other one crouching behind one of the concrete barriers, firing his weapon as the Afghan Army soldiers – if that was really what they were – spilled from the Land Cruisers and began running towards the hotel, firing as they ran.

  There were another half-dozen security guards inside the lobby and they began to return fire as she turned to make a dash for the panic room, but a shot passed close enough for the bullet to pluck at her sleeve, and a burst of fire from an automatic weapon then shredded the mahogany counter, creating a blizzard of needle-sharp splinters that tore at her face. She threw herself down, wormed her way under the counter and huddled there, sobbing with fright, her heart beating so wildly it felt as though it was bursting out of her chest, while blood from her cuts trickled onto the marble floor.

  CHAPTER 5

  By the time the goat was cooked, Jimbo had managed to overcome his qualms and settled down to eat with the rest of his patrol mates. They stood to for an hour either side of sunset, as much out of habit as necessity. In theory, the US troops guarding the perimeter were providing security for the whole of the base, but the SAS men had learned from bitter experience never to trust their safety to less highly skilled, trained and dedicated soldiers, least of all infantry privates for whom sentry duty was a tedious, much resented quasi-punishment.

  The SAS men sat around the embers of their fire as the sky darkened into night. The stars filled the heavens above them, but Jimbo was in no mood to wax poetical. ‘God I’m bored,’ he said. ‘Three weeks on QRF and the only action we’ve seen is Jock killing that goat.’

  Barely were the words out of his mouth when the QRF alert began to sound: first the rising and falling note of the wailing siren, and then the tannoy crackled into life and a code word was repeated several times. There was a series of code words, such as ‘Topcat’ and ‘Ants Nest’, for different situations; this one was ‘Tempest’, denoting a Taliban attack.

  ‘Someone up there is obviously listening,’ Jimbo said as they scrambled for their kit.

  ‘Yeah,’ Shepherd said. ‘Probably GCHQ via a satellite.’

  ‘Know why they chose Tempest to mean a Taliban attack?’ Jock said.

  Geordie gave a weary sigh., ‘No, but I’m betting you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Cockney rhyming slang for Shakespeare scholars: “Caliban” equals “Taliban”.

  Geordie frowned. ‘What the fuck is a Caliban?’ he asked.

  Jock grinned but didn’t reply. There was nothing he enjoyed more than winding up his patrol mates.

  While they were bantering with each other, Shepherd had activated the satphone at his shoulder and was in almost instant contact with the Head Sheds in Hereford. Not for the first time he reflected on the absurdity of having to contact SAS commanders thousands of miles away to be given orders about an incident that was probably taking place almost within earshot of where he stood. Back in the day, SAS patrols were often out of comms with their officers in-country, let alone back in Hereford, for days or weeks on end, and they’d made their own decisions. The officers hadn’t liked that, of course, but there was nothing they could do about it at the time. Now the development of satellite communications meant that no SAS patrol anywhere in the world need ever be out of contact with the Head Sheds. As a result, all decisions were made in the UK, and the major ones were made in Downing Street, or occasionally at Joint Force Command Headquarters at Northwood. Everyone down the line was under the cosh, with the politicians controlling the news output through a few tame journalists.

  Shepherd spoke little, listened more and then broke the connection and turned to the others. ‘There’s an attack on the Inter-Con, here said. The Hotel Inter-Continental was the only five-star, indeed t
he only surviving hotel of any quality, in Kabul. Its concrete facade was scarred with bullet marks, two of its four public rooms were unusable and its swimming pool was full of rubble and war debris, but it was still the place where visiting Western businessmen, politicians and journalists tended to stay. It offered as secure accommodation as the city could provide – which in war-torn Kabul was still not very secure at all. It had been attacked repeatedly during the civil war and afterwards, and the American-led invasion was unlikely to alter that state of affairs.

  ‘Another attack?’ Geordie said. ‘So what’s new, that place gets targeted at least once a month.’

  ‘Not on this scale,’ Shepherd said. ‘This one has three Landcruisers worth of presumed Taliban fighters wearing Afghan Army uniforms, eighteen to twenty men in all, armed with AKs, RPGs, grenades and satchel bombs.’

  Jock frowned as he exchanged a look with Jimbo. Packed with PE – plastic explosive – satchel bombs were a crude but deadly weapon, particularly useful in confined areas where the terrorists couldn’t fire RPGs because the backblast would kill them as well as their targets. As the name suggested, a satchel bomb looked like a schoolkid’s satchel, with a pull handle on the outside to arm it as the attacker approached his target, and a time fuse usually set to five seconds. Swinging it by its long strap, the attacker could launch it in an arc thirty or forty metres over rough ground, but he could also slide it across a polished surface – like the marble floor of a hotel lobby.

  ‘They drove up to the checkpoint,’ Shepherd said. ‘Then opened fire and detonated a couple of bombs when challenged. The security guards were targeted but there was the usual cluster of Afghans, so there are several civilians down as well as the security personnel. And probably by no coincidence whatsoever, a heavy-duty delegation of Yank and Brit politicians, spooks and civil servants arrived at the hotel today.’

  ‘The Taliban’ll have been tipped off by someone,’ Jock said. ‘Afghan army or police, or one of the hotel staff, you can count on that.’

  Geordie nodded. ‘Probably all of them. This country leaks like a sieve.’

  ‘Right, let’s go!’ Shepherd said, and within seconds they had gathered the rest of their kit and were sprinting for a Chinook on the hard standing near the end of the runway just outside their base. The pilot had also been alerted and the rotors were already turning. They ran up the ramp, squeezing past a soft-skinned ‘Pinkie’ Land Rover positioned facing outwards. It was still in the desert camouflage paint that gave the Pinkies their nickname.

  Jock gave the vehicle a sour look as he squeezed past it. Pinkies were long-wheelbase vehicles, making them cumbersome and awkward to manoeuvre, and despite their V8 engines they were very underpowered. The main reason for that was the weight of the fuel they carried. The petrol tank filling the floor space behind the driver and passenger had a 100-gallon capacity, giving the Pinkie a 1000-mile range. The weight of the fuel made the vehicle even more ponderous, but the size of the tank created another problem. For entirely understandable reasons the RAF was not a fan of having petrol vapour inside its aircraft, so whenever Pinkies were transported by air, RAF rules required that either the fuel tanks had to have been emptied and washed out to remove any remaining vapour, or the tanks were brimful of liquid fuel. Since a vehicle with no fuel was not going to be much use when they landed, the patrol’s Pinkie was full of petrol, making it even more cumbersome and even less manoeuvrable.

  ‘A range of a thousand miles and we won’t be doing more than ten,’ Jock said. ‘Regulations will be the death of us one day, you can count on it.’

  ‘With all that petrol for company,’ Jimbo said, ‘if we take an armour-piercing round, we’ll all be fried like KFC.’

  Shepherd shrugged. The Pinkie was yet another piece of obsolete kit that the SAS were forced to hang on to because budget cuts and MoD dithering and procurement cock-ups meant there weren’t any replacements on order. But he knew there was no point in complaining; they had no choice other than to make the best of what they had.

  They settled themselves on the helicopter’s steel floor as the ramp was raised and the tempo of the rotors accelerated to a scream. A moment later the Chinook lurched skywards and swung around to the south, making for Kabul. The rest of the briefing took place during the few minutes’ flight. ‘The attackers are fighting their way towards the lobby,’ Shepherd said. Even though they were wearing headsets, the thunder of the Chinook’s engines and the relentless chop of its rotors made his words difficult to hear even when he shouted. ‘The security guards inside have taken some casualties but the rest are holding off the Taliban for the moment, though I doubt if they’ll be able to do that for too much longer.’

  As the Chinook swept in towards the Temporary Landing Zone – a patch of level ground on the edge of the city – the four SAS men were already filing back down the ramp and clambering into the Pinkie. Jimbo squeezed his lanky frame behind the wheel, with Shepherd alongside him in the front and the other two in the back, all sitting with weapons at the ready.

  As the pilot began counting them down – ‘One minute to landing . . . Thirty seconds . . . ’ – Jimbo started the engine and took up the pressure on the handbrake. The Chinook was pumping out a snowstorm of chaff and flares to draw off any shoulder-launched missiles, including the deadly American-made Stingers. The Taliban were known to possess a store of them, a legacy of the mujahideen’s war against the Soviets when the CIA had supplied them with hundreds. The Americans had since offered a very substantial bounty for the return of the unused missiles from that conflict, but none had appeared and the stocks were thought to be still hidden in Taliban armouries in caves and tunnels throughout Afghanistan.

  The city below them was in darkness, not through any terrorist action, just from the nightly blackouts caused by Kabul’s creaking power generation system. It worked by day when there was minimal demand, but regular as clockwork, as soon as Kabul’s citizens got home from work, turned on their lights and began preparing their evening meals, the power went off. In the capital’s wealthier districts the nightly blackout was greeted with a chorus of hundreds of Honda generators firing up and the lights flickered back on, but in the poorer districts only the glimmer of candles and kerosene lamps and the glow of open-air cooking fires pierced the darkness.

  The Chinook did not make a vertical descent but came in like a fixed-wing aircraft and made a rolling landing. As soon as its wheels touched the concrete, almost lost from sight among the dust storm stirred up by the downwash from the giant helicopter’s twin rotors, the ramp swung down, scraping along the ground in a shower of sparks. The thunder of helicopter rotors was even louder now, battering their ears and drowning out every other sound.

  Jimbo gunned the Pinkie’s engine, sped down the ramp and hit the ground with a teeth-rattling thump. They roared off towards the city as the Chinook lumbered back into the air, its track marked by the showers of chaff and flares still spilling from its dispensers, fierce white against the night sky.

  The thunder of helicopter rotors was now lost beneath the roar of the Land Rover’s engine. It was a cold, black night with not a trace of moonlight and the streets were in total darkness. There had never been many street lights in Kabul in any case, but they had all been smashed long ago and the electric cables looted. Even if they’d worked, the nightly power cuts would have blacked them out. The road surface was littered with broken glass, rocks, ashes and cinders, while an oily black patch on the ground marked the outline of a hijacked car that had been torched. The smell of smoke still hung in the air. The streets were almost deserted and the few figures that were visible hugged the walls, every one a potential enemy.

  Jimbo rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Here we go then: another perfect day in paradise.’

  The glare of headlights from an American Hummer heading in the opposite direction cast the dark rings under his eyes into even deeper shadow. ‘Bloody typical, isn’t it?’ he said, fighting the wheel as he slewed the Pinkie around a bli
nd corner and accelerated up the hill towards the Inter-Continental. ‘The Yanks go into battle in armoured Humvees and all we’ve got is a Land Rover protected by the British Army equivalent of deckchair fabric.’

  The Pinkie had fearsome armaments, with a general-purpose machine gun mounted on the bonnet in front of Shepherd and two more at the rear, but its lack of armour made it very vulnerable to RPGs and IEDs.

  ‘And you know what’s even more typical?’ Jock said with his trademark cynicism. ‘The Yanks were heading away from the scene of the action, not towards it.’

  They sped through one of the poorest districts, where almost all of the buildings were in partial or total ruins from the decades of civil war. Most were in darkness but here and there the flicker of flames or the faint glow of a lamp or candle showed where poor Afghan families were still living among the ruins. Beyond these ghettos of Kabul’s poorest citizens was a district of crumbling concrete apartment blocks, built during the Soviet era. From a distance they might have seemed no different from similar blocks in the outer districts of Volgograd, Poznań or Karl-Marx-Stadt, but close up, their disintegrating walls bore the marks of decades of warfare. During the civil war the competing factions of Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords had occupied different parts of the heights surrounding the city and, when not firing at each other, they had subjected the district to an incessant barrage of rocket attacks. The Taliban takeover and the American invasion had led to further destruction and the flats, once coveted for their running water and electricity, now had neither and were in ruins. Flapping sheets of plastic had replaced some of the shattered windows, but the rest had been left gaping, even though most of the apartments, other than the burned-out ones on the upper floors, were still occupied.